A powerful image:

Untitled, (Hell). By Dash Snow, who recently died at 27. Via here and here.

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Despite failing to mention “the words pollution, emissions,carbon, or global warming” in her Washington Post op-ed, Sarah Palin manages to attack the national media:

Unfortunately, many in the national media would rather focus on the personality-driven political gossip of the day than on the gravity of these challenges. So, at risk of disappointing the chattering class, let me make clear what is foremost on my mind and where my focus will be:

I am deeply concerned about President Obama’s cap-and-trade energy plan, and I believe it is an enormous threat to our economy. It would undermine our recovery over the short term and would inflict permanent damage.

In her sky-is-falling rhetoric, Sarah Palin claims the energy sector will dry up but fails to mention jobs created by further developing the renewable energy sector:

Job losses are so certain under this new cap-and-tax plan that it includes a provision accommodating newly unemployed workers from the resulting dried-up energy sector, to the tune of $4.2 billion over eight years. So much for creating jobs.

Senator John F. Kerry refutes Palin at the New York Times:

“Yes, she manages to write about the climate change action in Congress without ever mentioning the reason we are doing this in the first place,” Mr. Kerry wrote. “It’s like complaining about the cost of repairing a roof without factoring in the leaks destroying your home.”

Mr. Kerry outlined the threats of climate change – including those facing Ms. Palin’s own state of Alaska – and also refuted her arguments that cap-and-trade legislation will cost jobs and hurt the poorest Americans.

“Palin confidently claims job losses are ‘certain,’” Mr. Kerry wrote, but “she somehow neglects to mention that jobs in our emerging clean energy economy grew nearly two and a half times faster than overall jobs since 1998.”

Mr. Kerry was presumably referring to a recent study from the Pew Charitable Trusts.

More from the Huffington Post quoting Steven Benen:

As Steven Benen notes,

In an impressive feat, Palin managed to write an entire piece about energy policy without mentioning the words “global warming,” “climate change,” “carbon,” or “emissions.” There’s “no denying” the need to address the issue, but there’s also no explaining why. (She did, however, manage to work in the phrase “cap-and-tax” four times.)

Keith Olbermann’s critique of Sarah Palin’s Washington Post op-ed:

And from the Atlantic Online (emphasis added):

s Derek says, this is a bit like an op-ed on health care that doesn’t contain the words spending, costs, coverage, or medicine, or a high-school paper on Catcher in the Rye that doesn’t contain the words, um, Catcher in the Rye.

I find this absence sickening. Deciding how to deal with climate change is an uncertain and complicated process. It requires weighing costs in the present against benefits a hundred years in the future. It requires weighing costs in the U.S. against benefits in places like India and Bangladesh. It requires weighing concrete GDP against the moral emphemera of the world’s floral and animal diversity. And it requires sacrificing today to ward off uncertain and unquantifiable future risks. This tremendous empirical uncertainty demands reflection and humility.

And then you have Sarah Palin show up, blathering about how we’re “destroying America’s economy” while we’re “literally” sitting on mountains of oil and drill baby drill and blah blah blah. Sickening.

You can read Sarah Palin’s Washington Post op-ed here.

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There are still things out there to discover. It makes you wonder, what else is out there?

— John Maerz

More about this discovery can be found at National Geographic and the University of Georgia Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources.

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From the New York Times:

Mr. Pickens’s situation is of particular interest because he has spent much of the last year advocating an energy plan that includes increasing to 20 percent the amount of the nation’s electricity that is supplied by wind power. In his vision, that would free up natural gas now used to generate power so that it could be used in cars, reducing the nation’s dependence on foreign oil. (Currently, wind accounts for just 1 percent of U.S. electricity.)

For the huge wind farm he had planned in Texas, Mr. Pickens had already ordered 687 large wind turbines from General Electric, to be delivered starting in 2011. But transmission lines being built by the state were unlikely to reach the location he has leased until 2013, so he needed to put the turbines elsewhere. Mr. Pickens had once planned to build his own transmission lines, but difficulty in finding financing amid the credit crisis forced him to shelve that plan.

Possible locations for the 687 turbines include Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas and Alberta, Canada, Mr. Pickens said. Collectively, at a capacity of 1,000 megawatts — about the size of a nuclear plant — his project would still amount to a substantial investment in wind power. He had planned his Panhandle wind farm at 4,000 megawatts.

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More images of different animal species making use of various types of prostheses can be found at National Geographic.

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In the image below, Greenpeace sends President Barack Obama a strong message—the United States must develop an effective policy and regulations that tackle global climate change—so no more politics as usual as Alaska Governor Sarah Palin would say. From the Christian Science Monitor:

Greenpeace activists scaled Mt. Rushmore today to issue a challenge to President Obama. “”Our brave climbers rappelled down the face of Mt. Rushmore today to issue a challenge to President Obama: If he wants to get his face on this monument, he needs to be a true leader on global warming, not a politician,” said one Greenpeace member.

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Sarah Palin is certainly an opportunistic politician. In her bizarre (and unsurprisingly incoherent) resignation speech, she gave this excuse for resigning as Governor of Alaska: “But I have given my reasons… no more ‘politics as usual’ and I am taking my fight for what’s right – for Alaska – in a new direction.” Certainly, she oozes the politics as usual that she claims to abhor.

Furthermore, her petulance towards the media is as obvious as her self-victimization or her self-deception. As a result, I believe most folks are tired of Sarah Palin.

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The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has released a report on “Trends in Duck Breeding Populations, 1955-2009.” According to the report, “the total duck population,” excluding scoters, eiders, long-tailed ducks, mergansers, and wood ducks, shows an estimated “13% increase over last year’s estimate of 37.3± 0.6 million birds and was 25% above the long-term average.” Even the number of Canvasbacks are up. The report can be found here. More from The Chattanoogan:

In addition to extensive grassland cover, one of the most important elements in duck breeding success is the amount of water present in portions of prairie and parkland Canada and north-central United States. Total pond counts for the United States and Canada combined showed 6.4 million ponds, a 45 percent increase from last year’s estimate, and 31 percent above the long-term average. Habitat conditions in 2009 were mostly a good news scenario. Conditions across the southern portions of the Canadian and U.S prairies improved considerably from 2008.

However, drought remained in some parts of the traditional survey area, including western portions of the Prairie Pothole Region. Southern Alberta saw a decrease in ponds of 19 percent. This area contrasted sharply with record amounts of snow and rainfall in the Dakotas. The north-central U.S., which includes the Dakotas, saw a 108 percent increase in total ponds. Above average snowfall this winter and considerable precipitation in late spring recharged wetlands across the Dakotas and eastern Montana.

The Canadian parklands received below-normal precipitation, but waterfowl habitat in this area continued to benefit from above-normal precipitation received in 2007. In the Boreal Forest, spring break-up was delayed as much as three weeks and most large lakes across the region remained frozen in early June. Overall habitat conditions in this important region were considered good.

The FWS spring surveys provide the scientific basis for many management programs across the continent including the setting of hunting regulations. The four Flyway Councils will meet in late July to recommend and adopt the season structure and bag limits for 2009-10. Individual states will make their specific selections within a federal framework of season length, bag limit, and outside dates. Hunters should check their state’s rules for final dates.

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Photo source for attribution. The author or licensor of this image does not endorse my work or me and their image is protected under an attribution license.

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If you’re interested in following the unemployment rate for a particular country, state, or the entire United States, then the search “unemployment rate” in Google yields a useful interactive graph. You can either click on the image or search “unemployment rate” in Google to view current and historical data on unemployment from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Furthermore, searching “population trends” yields public data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

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Dina Goldstein, a Vancouver photographer, has a very interesting series called “Fallen Princesses.” Her work “takes on the subject of the fairytale juxtaposed into modern reality of adult life.” According to the artist, “In all of the images the Princess is placed in an environment that articulates her conflict. The ‘…happily ever after’ is replaced with a realistic outcome and addresses current issues.”

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