Dumbing us Down

"The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantitive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites(now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance."
-Carl Sagan

Extinction?

When you think “ocean life,” you may picture the iconic blue whale, frolicking dolphins, or even majestic sea turtles gliding through the water. North Atlantic right whales don’t get a lot of notice — probably because there are so few of them. They’re one of the most endangered large whales in the world.

These critically endangered whales live right off our shores in the Atlantic Ocean, with habitats stretching from Florida, along the Southeast U.S. coast, up through the Gulf of Maine — exactly where fossil fuel corporations are intent on drilling for oil.

What's worse, before drilling comes the seismic airgun blasting used to find oil deposits beneath the ocean floor. These ear-splitting blasts are so loud they can be heard from 2,500 miles away, and by government estimates, could deafen or kill up to 138,000 dolphins, whales, and other marine life — including nine critically endangered right whales.

For the North Atlantic right whale, this could mean extinction.

Wildlife

Anti-wildlife interests in the House and Senate moved one step closer to passing legislation that contains some of the most serious threats ever posed to imperiled wildlife—and to the bedrock law that protects them.

The Purpose of Art

We should always have art around us! It’s good for us, it lifts our spirits and inspires us to be a better person! Furthermore, ugly, square brick houses are built on purpose to suppress us. Modern architecture teaches and funds only those projects that are square. These buildings push us inwards into the space, in order to keep our energy down. Instead circular, curvy, rounded buildings made of wood, with high ceilings, domes and spirals would be much better, since they are powerful energy enhancers that raise our consciousness.

Dirty Banks

As fossil fuel cronies and an anti-science agenda erode our federal government, it's clear we need to flex our consumer power in the fight for climate justice.
Big banks like Wells Fargo fund the companies behind dangerous pipelines -- like Keystone XL, Line 3, and Dakota Access -- that threaten Indigenous rights, our climate, and our communities.
Keystone XL poses a grave and immediate threat to our climate and to every community it cuts through. It would carry 830,000 barrels of the world's dirtiest oil -- tar sands -- every day from Alberta, Canada, to the U.S. Gulf Coast. It would be responsible for annual greenhouse gas emissions each year equal to 37.7 million cars -- a disaster for our climate.

The pipeline would cut directly through Sioux treaty lands and near several other tribal reservations and the Ponca Trail of Tears, yet Tribal Nations in Nebraska and South Dakota have not been properly consulted.
But the movement of citizens and stakeholders calling on big banks like Wells Fargo to divest from pipelines is growing and working.
Earlier this year the city of Seattle became the first major city to divest from Wells Fargo because of the company's involvement with pipelines. After public pressure, U.S. Bank formally excluded gas and oil pipelines from their project financing. And it's becoming clear that Keystone XL is a risky investment, as companies like Shell and Exxon sell off their tar sands instead of making plans to ship them through the pipeline.

Being taken to the cleaners

We see many examples of the negative effects of monopoly power with little effective oversight, the Equifax debacle just to cite one. Even worse, however, is monopoly power that has captured the regulatory oversight that monitors it. That appears to be the case in Florida with Florida Power and Light (FPL).
A Miami New Times article points out the billions in dollars that FPL gained through rate increases in order to be more prepared for hurricanes was apparently totally ineffective, as 90% of FPL’s customers lost power when Irma hit. That includes areas on the east coast of the state where winds only reached the strength of a Category 1 hurricane. Despite supposedly spending $2 billion to reinforce more than 500 critical power lines and trimming trees near power lines, a major cause of power loss, the damage to the power grid was substantially more extensive than the Category 2 hurricane, Wilma, that struck the state in 2005. Now, obviously, there were differences between the two hurricanes, especially as Irma’s more destructive side hit Florida. But the billions of dollars spent by FPL preparing for a storm just like this does not seem to have had much effect.

Lessons to be learned

Thoughts to consider in Florida:
The cycles of storms and droughts are an inevitable fact of life in Texas. But as he will also tell you — even if you could make the case that climate played no role whatsoever in Hurricane Harvey’s fury or that we weren’t to blame at least in part for the severity of the last drought or the next — those storms and droughts are still more destructive than they ever were before, simply because there is more to destroy.
In the 16 years since Tropical Storm Allison deluged Houston, that city, which famously balks at any kind of zoning regulation, and the surrounding region, which encompasses all or parts of 15 counties, have undergone a period of explosive growth, from 4.8 million people in 2000 to more than 7 million today. Harris County alone, which includes the city of Houston, has grown to 4.6 million, up from 3.4 million.
You can almost feel it, that wave of development, of strip malls and gated communities, of big-box stores with bigger parking lots, rising up from the outskirts of faraway Austin, ebbing toward Houston and gaining strength as it rolls south toward that very spot.
A century’s worth of unchecked growth, has brought prosperity to many. But it also has altered the landscape in ways that have made both the droughts and the floods more destructive and made that prosperity fleeting. Much of the region sits atop the overtaxed Gulf Coast Aquifer, and though efforts have made over the last 40 years to limit withdrawals from it, enough water has been sucked out of it that the ground still subsides in some places, altering runoff patterns and allowing flood waters to gather.
What’s more, those more than 2 million newcomers to the region are living in houses and driving on roads and shopping in stores built atop what once was prairie that could have absorbed at least some of the fury of this flood and the next. What once was land that might have softened the storm’s blow is now, in many cases, collateral damage in what could turn out to be a $40 billion disaster.
It will take months before the full weight of Hurricane Harvey’s ruinous rampage along the Gulf is realized, and it will be years before a full recovery. And in the space between those two points, there might just be a moment to consider how best to rebuild, to pause and rethink how and where we build, to reflect not just on whether we’re altering the weather, but whether there is a way to make ourselves less vulnerable to it. Perhaps we could build differently, or set aside land that would both help recharge the dwindling water supplies in times of drought and slow the floods when they come.