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The name change was initiated by Republican strategist Frank Luntz over a decade ago in a memo to the Bush administration:

"It’s time for us to start talking about “climate change” instead of global warming and “conservation” instead of preservation.

'Climate change' is less frightening than 'global warming'. As one focus group participant noted, climate change 'sounds like you’re going from Pittsburgh to Fort Lauderdale.' While global warming has catastrophic connotations attached to it, climate change suggests a more controllable and less emotional challenge."

Background link:
https://www.skepticalscience.c...

Direct link to memo pdf:
http://www.motherjones.com/fil...

(Btw, apologies in advance. Although your comment was clearly tongue-in-cheek I figured it was worth posting in case others didn't know the background.)

With that said, the storage problem for solar and wind is absolutely not solved, nor will it be cheap.

It's been solvable with technology from the 70's - or even the 1870's - and still be cheaper than either coal or nuclear, if all of the latter's costs are counted rather than externalized. You even mentioned part of the solution:

We can easily transmit power 1000-2000 km today. Some day we'll be able to transmit it 3000 km and in the distant future 4000 km and 5000 km, which will be enough that we'll barely need storage.

It might be overcast and windless in Jerkwater, Kansas, but that's not going to be the case all over a 2000 km radius. It's going to be sunny or windy somewhere. As for storing the energy, get some molten salt batteries - or just build more water towers into your grid and use excess energy to pump up water. If you need power, just let it out into a tank or retaining pond and use gravity to generate electricity. It's going to have some up-front costs, but it's still going to be cheaper than coal or nuclear, and the infrastructure should last a long time - we have hydro plants that are over 100 years old that are still producing electricity. For the rare areas where neither wind or solar would never work - build a plant that burns ethanol (cane or switch grass based, not that corn corporate pork) or wood, and you'd still be carbon-neutral.

The nice ting about nuclear power is that we can build it now. You can call GE and order a plant on Monday, assuming you have the $5 billion (or $10 billion after the usual cost overrun) that they want for one of those and in 10-15 years you, your kids, grandkids and great-grandkids will have a clean and safe power plant.

You can build a lot of green energy for $5 billion (more when you include all the costs, not just the up-front government subsidies) over 10-15 years. Take the $1 trillion plus imperial budget - most of which is focused around guarding the world's gas station, the middle east - and spend it on green energy, and not only could you have us carbon-free within a decade. You'd have an economic boom that would make the post-WWII era look like a recession, from the number of jobs created.

If you are concerned about what future generations will do with your nuclear waste storage sites, you should probably be more concerned about what they will do (or rather what they will fail to do) with your hydro dams.

Every hydro dam in the world could collapse tomorrow, and the loss of life would be huge. But rebuilding could start as soon as the floodwaters receded, and it would be a historical footnote hundreds of years from now - as opposed to the nuclear waste facilities that will still need to be maintained in 2515, A.D.

Yeah, an Illiberal web-site running an op-ed aiming to convince populace into obediently surrendering their rights. Surprise...

They fail, though. The only thing they even claim is "not a single case includes evidence that the killer chose to target a place because it banned guns". But they all (or most) did happen in a gun-free location. How do I know? Simple, if it weren't so, MotherJones would've highlighted this fact in the very title. They did a commendable job putting the 62 mass-shotings incidents over 30 years together, but, curiously, do not have a boolean column "Gun free zone Y/N" in it...

But the shooter picking a place because it is gun-free is only part of the problem. There is no one there to stop him — whether he was cunning enough to count on that or not.

You think a product the government invents out of nothing that the government forces you to buy through a market the government forces you to use at prices the government sets... is a free market?

You mean....like health care reform based around a mandate to buy for-profit insurance, which was the cornerstone of right wing health care plans for 25 years until y'all lost your shit the second it was proposed by a Democrat?

You're a moron. No really. You're actually stupid. Kill yourself.

Awww, did wiidle baby wingnut have his mind blown by an epiphany? You're as much of a brain dead partisan troll as an Obamabot. The centrist way would be to phase out coal over ten years while building nuclear. The leftist way would be to take a cool trillion dollars out of the annual imperial budget, and spend it on wind, solar and mass transit. Which, by the way, would only lead to the greatest economic boom this country has ever seen due to the number of jobs created.

Carbon trading is a conservative, capitalist "solution" to climate change, and that's just a fact you're going to have fucking deal with.

Or maybe note your American Exceptionalist ass uses 30 times the resources of some poor shlub in a developing country.

So what? Even if that were true, there's plenty of resources to go around even at seven billion people.

Infinite resources only exists in the minds of conservatives, randians, and fools. I apologize for the redundancy of that statement.

Or that the United States produces a quarter of the world's pollution while having 4% of the worlds population

Even if that were true, (and it's not because you are counting mass of CO2 as equivalent to mass of mercury,particulate soot, etc, which is ridiculously dishonest), that's still only a factor of six which isn't that bad.

The only losers are stockholders in coal, oil, and the military-industrial-complex.

Ridiculous American Exceptionalism. If scientists could only invent a power plant to run off that sense of entitlement.

and that's not including all the coal plants in China producing cheap crap in offshored factories for sale in Wal-Mart.

Which is a smart consideration since that is Chinese pollution not US pollution!

It is when it's producing your shit. Co-ownership at it's finest.

Oh noes! All those jobs lost in the manufacture of asbestos, lead paint, and DDT! Will no one think of the poor beleaguered capitalist cock!

Again, my point is not to completely eliminate regulation but to make it so that it isn't a society-destroying burden.

Exactly, society destroying regulations, like those that banned asbestos, lead paint, and DDT.

And let's face it, if your false dichotomy were actually true that the US would have to forgo regulation altogether or continue with the current suicidal regime, then the US would be face with increasing pollution at some point.

Look, this isn't hard. Wind and solar are already cost-competitive with coal, and that's if you let coal externalize much of its costs. Hybrids take less gas - and maintenance - than cars driven only by combustion engines. Mass transit is cheaper, and leads to less gridlock, than highways.

Take away the real subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, spend it on mitigating climate change....and you'll have the biggest economic boom since WWII.

Good News: Small Town democracy trumps some-dumb-guy at DHS. (Who is that masked man, anyway?)

Bad News: The good news behind the research correlating the drop in violent crime to the successful regulation of lead in the environment is always under threat from conservative, 'free market' ideologues who cling to the tired, defrauded notion that regulation is bad and all marginal tax reductions to the wealthy result in 'job creation' and therefore trickle upon the less fortunate.

Good News: Trump is thumping mainstream Republicans with their own ridiculousness.

Bad News: The vast majority of political reporting in the U.S. lacks the substantive perspective necessary to inform an inqusitive electorate, should one ever spontaneously develop.

When "guns" made of pop-tarts, cardboard and legos can get a kid in trouble, is it ANY surprise that a pencil box containing a circuit board, batteries and 7-seg displays causes a similar freak-out?

http://www.motherjones.com/pol...

A friend of mine and I (white kids) once got sent to the principal's office just for talking to the chemistry teacher. You can't buy nitric acid just anywhere and we knew we couldn't distill it with an apparatus made of metal pipes and containers. We were wondering if the acid would eat through that clear flexible plastic tubing that you can get at the hardware store and thinking maybe he'd give us a few drops to experiment. He didn't believe our story that we were polishing silver coins (even though that was EXACTLY what we wanted to do!)

This was before Columbine or 9/11, so a chat with the teacher & principal and a note to our parents (tell your kids not to f*** around with chemicals in your basement) was the extent of the discipline.
Imagine what could happen today for cris'sakes! I can easily imagine the police arresting kids like us for conspiracy to make explosives or some such nonsense.

Funny you should suggest this. From Microsoft "Bait and Switch" Could Mean a Huge Increase in Foreign Tech Workers: "The company proposed a novel workaround: If the federal government would raise the H1-B cap by 20,000 additional visas and make available an equal number of additional green cards, Microsoft said it would be willing to pay nearly four times the usual fees, handing over $10,000 per H-1B visa and $15,000 per green card. It called its proposal the National Talent Strategy because the additional revenue-more than $500 million annually-would be used to fund STEM education programs around the country...With the coalition in its corner, Microsoft approached a bipartisan group of senators to craft what would become the Immigration Innovation, or "I-Squared" Act. And that's where the alleged "lobbying malpractice" came in. The act, as promised, would boost the caps on visas and green cards and use the fees to pay for STEM education. But in a crucial difference that has angered some of Microsoft's would-be allies, the bill would nearly quintuple the number of available visas-raising the cap to 300,000-and charge companies far less for them: as little as $1,825 apiece. Microsoft, which helped draft the bill, appeared pleased with the end result. "Today's introduction in the Senate of the bipartisan Immigration Innovation Act is a major step forward," Brad Smith, the company's general counsel and executive vice president said in a January press release issued by Compete America, a coalition of tech companies such as Microsoft and outsourcing firms such as Deloitte. "Microsoft strongly supports this legislation and urges Congress to send broader immigration reform that includes these solutions to the President's desk this year."

The costs are enormous either way.

Except they're not. Not even close. Wind and solar are already cost-competitive with coal, and that's ignoring the coal industry externalizing much of their costs. Mass transit is cheaper than highways and gridlock. Maglev trains move goods and people much faster than interstates and more efficiently than by air.

It's not the cost of moving to renewable energy standing in the way, when renewable energy costs the same or less. It's the profits of the fossil fuel industry and the military-industrial-complex, which is primarily focused on regions and countries with fossil fuels to exploit.

You are aware that for the first time in history there are 3 major hurricanes in the Pacific at the same time? I mean I guess it could be coincidence... but to me it sounds like "more" and "intense" hurricanes... http://www.motherjones.com/blu...

he next version of Appleâ(TM)s mobile-operating system, due out as early as next month, will let users install apps that prevent ads from appearing in its Safari browser. ....Apple says it wonâ(TM)t allow ad blocking within apps, because ads inside apps donâ(TM)t compromise performance as they do on the browser. That distinction serves Appleâ(TM)s interests. It takes a 30% cut on money generated from apps, and has a business serving ads inside apps. Whatâ(TM)s more, iOS 9 will include an Apple News app, which will host articles from major news publishers. Apple may receive a share of the revenue from ads that accompany those articles.

If you give money to Apple, you're funding douchebaggery. But by all means, if that's the world you want to live in, then go ahead and live in it. Just don't pretend like everyone should be grateful for the opportunity to be Apple's bitch.

Go on.... suck Google cock, douchebag.

he next version of Appleâ(TM)s mobile-operating system, due out as early as next month, will let users install apps that prevent ads from appearing in its Safari browser. ....Apple says it wonâ(TM)t allow ad blocking within apps, because ads inside apps donâ(TM)t compromise performance as they do on the browser. That distinction serves Appleâ(TM)s interests. It takes a 30% cut on money generated from apps, and has a business serving ads inside apps. Whatâ(TM)s more, iOS 9 will include an Apple News app, which will host articles from major news publishers. Apple may receive a share of the revenue from ads that accompany those articles.

If you give money to Apple, you're funding douchebaggery. But by all means, if that's the world you want to live in, then go ahead and live in it. Just don't pretend like everyone should be grateful for the opportunity to be Apple's bitch.

who was MLK? i am not allowed to find out because his estate has kept a deathgrip on all his speaches.

His children seem more interested in making an easy buck than spreading his message, whatever that was about...

In 2014, the state's economy grew 27 percent faster than the country's economy as a whole...

If a tornado damages your house and you have to rebuild it, GDP will grow as a result. GDP measures economic activity but it does not tell you anything about what that activity is achieving or where that investment is flowing through.

California is experiencing an economic boom when it comes to drilling wells, for example. Farmers have to dig deeper and deeper in order to find water. That leaves some farmers out of cash and unable to compete. Guess what? Another economic boom. There is less farmers supplying crops such as pistachios and other water intensive crops. The supply of these crops is down so the prices go up. If you are a farmer and you have a well that is deep enough, what is the smart thing to do right now? Switch to these very water intensive crops because the prices have gone up. There is so much money to be made on those crops that hedge funds are moving in and they have the cash required to dig those wells: http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/01/california-drought-almonds-water-use

So talking about GDP growth can be incredibly misleading.

Hackers go to jail for insider trading because it rips off punters without access to the inside information.

So what about High-frequency trading? Investment bankers pay a premium to the stock exchange to connect their computers closer than everyone elses. They get inside information microseconds before those same punters, and milk them for it, and it's all legit. Isn't High-frequency trading just another kind of insider trading?

http://www.motherjones.com/pol...
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04...
http://www.wsj.com/articles/re...
http://faculty.chicagobooth.ed...

Now if only getting a warrant were an obstacle...

The point of getting a warrant is for judicial review. Review... not obstruction.

Now if only getting a warrant were an obstacle...

Answer me this. If Planned parenthood is much more than abortion and gets most of its revenue from other places other than abortion, then why did several Planned Parenthood clinics close when Texas' new stricter abortion laws took into effect?

Not that you give a fuck about facts or that you would allow facts to change your already-made-up-mind (else you would've taken the 30 seconds to Google the question and answer it), or that how a private organization conducts it's business is any of your business but...

The clinics didn't close because of the abortion restrictions. The clinics closed because the state cut 30 million of family planning funding from the budget.

Was Hollywood ruined by Star Wars and Jaws?

Did ‘Jaws’ and ‘Star Wars’ Ruin Hollywood?

The Decline and Fall of Adult Movies

How The Blockbuster Ruined Hollywood

Show me someone from the open source community who has helped and donated more towards charities than Bill Gates. Uh huh, that's what I thought.

Bill - is that you? Don't forget to lodge your claims for charitable donations - we filed it under "the spit shield fund".

the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (foundation) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust. Both entities are tax-exempt private foundations that are structured as a charitable.

One good thing Bill Gates has done. Though not everyone agrees.

According to the headlines, Mother Nature disagrees with you.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-17/california-plagued-by-dry-wells-as-drought-makes-water-elusive

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/03/california-pumping-water-fell-earth-20000-years-ago

Please educate yourself. Your ignorance of this issue is shameful.

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/04/real-problem-almonds

California farmers have in the past, and continue to, wreak havoc on California. Read a bit about this asshole and his environmental catastophe: J.G. Boswell. His wikipedia page has been sanitized by his minions, but Amazon has a fairly good book on his rape and pillage of the state. http://www.amazon.com/The-King... Now the farmers are sucking the underground water table so dry the state is sinking at an unprecedented rate. http://www.motherjones.com/env... California wasn't such a desert until we "improved" the farming environment.

No one who has ever read the Bible believes that God is going to personally intervene to prevent you from screwing up in your current life

That's too much bullshit to cope with. I had to sacrifice my mod-points to tell you that you are terribly, terribly wrong. I have family in the midwest and the east coast.
My Uncle literally believes that humans can't possibly alter the climate, as God says that the Earth is unchanging. He's not a... stupid man. He retired recently from a life-long career as a network engineer at the Census Bureau; he just really believes his cultural interpretation of the vague writings in that damned book.
He absolutely believes that God does intervene to help him with his fuckups.

I know anecdotes are general pretty poor data, but he's not alone. http://www.motherjones.com/env...

I think where you went awry, is that people who do believe in Jehovah the bipolar micromanager are actually the majority, not whatever minority you belong to.

Bible Belt states have some of the highest AND the lowest vaccination rates.

http://www.motherjones.com/pol...

And as usual, it is probably a combination of factors which influence the anti-vaccination attitudes.
Though one factor does seem to be common - clustering.
I.e. It's social. Where there's one anti-vaxxer, there's more anti-vaxxer.

Overall, national vaccination rates seem high: The median rate of coverage for the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine, administered to most before entry into kindergarten, was 94.7 percent for the 2013-14 school year. But, as Schuchat points out, the rate is lower in communities where unvaccinated families tend to cluster. In some areas, low rates might have more to do with access to clinics than with beliefs about vaccinations.

"The national estimates hide what's going on state to state. The state estimates hide what's going on community to community. And within communities there may be pockets," Schuchat said. "It's one thing if you have a year where a number of people are not vaccinating, but year after year in terms of the kids that are exempting, you do start to accumulate."

I can't believe that I haven't seen a single comment pointing out Elon Musk's hypocrisy and denial that his success was largely based (or at least enabled) by public support.

One of many available articles on the topic: http://www.motherjones.com/pol...

A few gems:

1. as soon at Tesla paid off their $465M loan, he stated that he thought the government should no longer loan money to companies like that. How convenient...

2. SolarCity basically lives or dies off of tax credits - *income* tax credits. But he has come out against income tax and in favor of use taxes - a very regressive tax policy that overly burdens the poor while letting the rich keep building their fortunes at an ever increasing rate.

3. he claimed he "got rich" from his earlier companies (Zip2 and Paypal) and "got zero government anything" to do so. He did make a total of ~$180M (before taxes) from those companies , but is worth $13B now - due mostly to Tesla and SolarCity IPOs. He seems good at math, so he really doesn't notice that almost 99% of his fortune was from his highly-government subsidized ventures?

Honestly I really want to like Musk, but the most I hear from him the more he is giving off a real Steve Jobs vibe - business genius, douchebag human. If he'd just drop some of the hypocritical libertarian "self made billionaire" attitude I might change my mind.

Ya...no direct evidence...except for:
-Fossils
-DNA, aka the universal genetic code
-Common traits and stages of life across species
-antibiotic/herbicide/pesticide resistance in bacteria plants
-ability to change the characteristics of living things through breeding
-long term evolutionary experiments, such as Lenski's E Coli experiment

http://www.scientificamerican....
http://humanorigins.si.edu/evi...
http://www.motherjones.com/pol...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
http://myxo.css.msu.edu/ecoli/

The right doesn't "want stuff" taken from other people. They want to earn it.

Right. That's why most "red" states take more money from the federal government than they contribute and the top 10 states receiving federal assistance are "red" and the bottom 10 are "blue":
http://www.politifact.com/trut...
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the...
http://www.motherjones.com/pol...
http://taxfoundation.org/blog/...

That 96% figure is a lie. It's 40% when environmental allocations are counted.
Sure, you could do without almonds...and 99 percent of the world's artichokes, 99 percent of walnuts, 97 percent of kiwis, 97 percent of plums, 95 percent of celery, 95 percent of garlic, 89 percent of cauliflower, 71 percent of spinach, and so on and so forth.

Blatant bullshit myth.

62 mass shootings over the past 30+ years, and not one location was chosen because it banned guns.

These shooters aren't choosing locations based on whether guns are or aren't allowed.
Most are choosing locations because it's where they got pissed off, such as 20 workplace shootings.
Even at the schools where shootings occurred, only in 1 of the 12 school incidents did the shoot not have personal ties to the school.

Also let's consider that most of these shootings weren't just rampages, but Murder-Suicides.
These shooters were not people picking locations based on their chance of survival or retaliation.

Some reading so that you might become better informed: http://www.motherjones.com/pol...

If they need a warrant (from the FISA court) to access the data (just like previously)

Well, if you put the "just like previously" part into your own post, then we aren't disagreeing, that this is not much of an improvement — and that was my premise.

That agreement now established, let's move on to what's wrong with the existing Act — and what's likely to remain wrong even after the proposed amendments are passed...

And the problem with FISA-court is that — unlike all other courts — it does not hear both sides . They may deny the rubber-stamp allegations, but they have only rejected 11 surveillance requests out of 33900 submitted since the court's inception to 2013...

how is it not abiding by the fourth amendment?

I said nothing about the Forth Amendment, actually. Whether it even applies to one's communications is no immediately obvious. No, my claim is not whether Patriot Act violates the Constitution, but whether or not the upcoming changes to it constitute a discernible improvement.

Would you prefer that law enforcement/spy agencies had to be fully tied and unable to conduct investigations?

I would prefer, that the government had no way to force private companies to preemptively record data about me just in case it may be needed by some future investigation.

Without being so forced, some companies may still prefer to do it seeking your business and others may choose not to seeking that of libertines. The existing regulatory mandate — cooperate with the FBI or else — troubles me greatly, and should trouble everyone...

I'm not about to wade into the abortion debate but plenty of abortions are performed in third trimester in the US. The common meaning of a late term abortion is any time after 20 weeks.

20 weeks still has nearly two months of second trimester remaining. Third trimester abortions are extremely rare, with only four practitioners performing them in the US. Often described as "partial birth abortions," they generally include a specific procedure to kill the fetus prior to removing it from the womb, where earlier in pregnancy, the fetus terminates as a consequence of removal/expulsion.

Where are you getting this world view of liberals running around rampant calling conservative women sluts inbetween feminist protests?

Where indeed?

Why It's Not Smart to Call Women Conservatives 'Whores'

When Alan Grayson called a female corporate lobbyist a "K-Street whore" -- and was attacked as crude and sexist at the same time that he was lauded as gutsy and honest -- he played a role in a familiar script: hero of the left (MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, Bill Maher) attacks female villain (Hillary Rodham Clinton, Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin) using sexist language. Progressive feminists soul-search about liberal misogyny. Mainstream media talk about sexism for 5 seconds. Then the media move on, and no one learns a thing. Repeat.

It happened again just two weeks ago, when Olbermann called Malkin a "big mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it" during the "Worst Person in the World" segment of Countdown. The creepily fleshy insult followed Olbermann's rendition of Malkin's e-mails....

So there's obvious problem No. 1 with leftist firebrands dipping into sexist imagery and language to bash conservative women: nothing's more fun than highlighting the hypocrisy of your opponents.

The war on conservative women

If I had a dollar for every time libs have called me a "Manila whore" and "Subic Bay bar girl," Iâ(TM)d be able to pay for a ticket to a Hollywood-for-Obama fundraiser. To the HuffPo left, whore is my middle name.

Self-serving opponents argue that such attacks do not represent "respectable," "mainstream" liberal opinion about their conservative female counterparts. But it was feminist godmother Gloria Steinem who called Texas Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison a "female impersonator." It was NOW leader Patricia Ireland who commanded her flock to only vote for "authentic" female political candidates. It was Al Gore consultant Naomi Wolf who accused the late Jeane Kirkpatrick of being "uninflected by the experiences of the female body."

It was Matt Taibbi, now of Rolling Stone magazine, who mocked my early championing of the tea party movement by jibing: "Now when I read her stuff, I imagine her narrating her text, book-on-tape style, with a big, hairy set of (redacted) in her mouth. It vastly improves her prose."

It was Keith Olbermann, then at MSNBC and now at Al Goreâ(TM)s Current TV, who wrote on Twitter that columnist S.E. Cupp was "a perfect demonstration of the necessity of the work Planned Parenthood does" and who called me a "mashed up bag of meat with lipstick on it." He stands by those remarks. Olbermann has been a special guest at the White House.

Some of us have not forgotten when liberal Wisconsin radio host John "Sly" Sylvester outrageously accused GOP Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch of performing "fellatio on all the talk-show hosts in Milwaukee" and sneered that she had "pulled a train" (a crude phrase for gang sex). (Earlier, he called former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice a "black trophy" and "Aunt Jemima.")

Or when MSNBC misogynist Ed Schultz called talk show host Laura Ingraham a "talk slut" for criticizing Obamaâ(TM)s petty beer summit. Or when Playboy published a list of the top 10 conservative women who deserved to be "hate-f**ked." The article, which was promoted by Anne Schroeder Mullins at Politico.com, included Ingraham, "The View's" Elisabeth Hasselbeck, former Bush spokeswoman Dana Perino, GOP Rep. Michele Bachmann and others. Yours truly topped the list with the following description: a "highly f**kable Filipina" and âoea regular on Fox News, where her tight body and get-off-my-lawn stare just scream, 'Do me!'"

And then thereâ(TM)s the leftâ(TM)s war on Sarah Palin, which would require an entire national forest of trees to publish.

You've got me curious as to how it is that you miss this kind of stuff?

"And no security theater?"

The TSA is at Amtrak. They've already had their hands on buses, ferries, etc.

Silly boy, Not only does the Colorado rarely reach the sea, most of the water from the Colorado used by California is used by agriculture.

That was my actual point. Sarcasm or hidden irony doesn't translate well to the web.

As soon as someone who didn't know that California already sucked that river dry, and checked my statement out, they might start to understand just why other states might not care to give all of their own water to California.

Bottled water...watering lawns...even almonds...they're not the problem. It's livestock. They consume around 50% of all water use in CA.

Here, let's just compare dairy products: http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/03/california-water-suck

Keep in mind that around 80% of people regularly consume these, and the non-dairy products are a tiny portion of sales..

Here's a collection of articles and stats for those really interested in learning about what's using up California's water: veganstart.org/almonds

Get your water where the Colorado river reaches the sea.

Silly boy, Not only does the Colorado rarely reach the sea, most of the water from the Colorado used by California is used by agriculture.

Hey, just a little FYI, over 60% of the United States produce comes from California. They also produce a lot of milk and a lot of the nuts we eat (not just almonds). They feed all of us.

Here's some sobering data.

yes, he's a nonviolent person, but we don't know that

Of course we knew that. If he had nefarious intentions, he wouldn't have warned your beloved authorities in advance or flown a 200 lbs capacity gyrocopter.

It's time to put away the plastic sheets and stop wetting the bed on command for the national insecurity state, the greatest pork project in the history of the world. Your couch is more likely to kill you than a terrorist, so stop hiding under the bed and throwing your rights away anytime someone knocks on the door.

http://www.motherjones.com/env...

California produces 99% of the US' walnuts and almonds, at 5 gallons apiece and 1 gallon apiece, respectively, in addition to a number of other fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Let me repeat that: five gallons of water for a single walnut. Enough water to sustain a person for 5-10 days in an area that is having its most severe drought in decades...in exchange for a single nut. Ridiculous.

They didn't mention it in that article, but a few months back I saw a number related to all of this: 10% of California's water is going to almonds. Whether it's correct or if I'm recalling correctly, I can't say with certainty, but I remember being blown away by the research when I found it. Don't get me wrong, I love almonds as much as the next guy, but when your state is continuing practices that will be unsustainable in the immediate short-term, it's time to make some changes. We can live without our almond milk. They can't live without water.

FWD.US is a conspiracy created by Mark Zuckerberg to help drive down IT wages in America.

I have no problem with talented immigrants, but American corporations are LYING about the need for those H1B immigrants due to so-called "shortages" of STEM workers in America, and in the offing they are displacing QUALIFIED American workers with those immigrants (in clear violation of the law). Here are some FACTS to counter Zuckerberg's SPIN around his company's (and others, like MSFT, Cisco, Facebook, Google, etc.) cynical attempt to drive down wages. Just look at the recent policy decision to permit H1B spouses to seek work permits in May, 2015 something; that's 150,000 new workers (most of them professionals - and many with IT skills) into an already challenged IT economy. FWD.US is part of a legal conspiracy to drive down tech wages, under cover of the lie that America does not have sufficient STEM talent. Zuckerberg is shilling for his pals, and working against the American IT worker.

FACTS: One of the most respected technology pundits in Silicon Valley has this to say about the H1-B worker problem http://www.cringely.com/2012/1...

Here's an attorney and his consultants teaching corporations how to manipulate foreign-worker immigration law to replace qualified American workers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

H1-B abuse if accompanied by other worker-visa abuse L-1 Visa (H1-B's are only the tip of the iceberg). There are more than 20 categories of foreign worker visas. http://economyincrisis.org/con...

Professor Norman Matloff's extremely well documented studies on this problem. http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/...

Federal offshoring of healthcare.gov website http://www.economicpopulist.or...

How H1-B visa abuse is hurting American tech workers http://www.motherjones.com/pol...

There is no stem worker crisis in America http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-wo...

Marc Zuckerberg and wealthy tech scions continue to perpetuate this trend http://programmersguild.org/do...

Yahoo http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs...

Unemployment is a problem in America, and so are our sticky problems with immigration. Undercover of helping those immigrants who have so long labored in our agricultural sector, the American IT sector has seen fit to use the sentiment to help agricultural workers to create a Landslide of advantage for itself. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

H1Bs in Sacramento http://www.news10.net/story/ne...

Recall that Germany, at the same latitude as Maine, USA, had one day where 52% of the electricity was supplied by renewable energy sources.

Yes, but Germany doesn't have desert tortoises.

Though I agree with you on the matter of Michael Brown, your attempt to conflate him with Miriam Carey needs to be countered.

Unlike Mr. Brown, who attacked the sole officer present. Although her (successful) attempt to drive through a fence-segment placed in front of her car may be considered an attack on the man, who placed it there, the multiple officers shooting her later had no reasons to fear for their lives, when they opened fire — and that's important.

Officer Wilson acted in self-defense shooting Mr. Brown. There was no reason for Secret Service et al. to kill Ms. Carey — though they did have ample reasons to want to arrest her...

That said, I find it strange, that her race was not immediately known — and that her death did not cause any "Black lives matter" protests. In fact, I didn't know, she was Black until I opened the above-posted link. I guess, there just was no need at the time to trump-up the police's supposed "racism" — or, maybe, the Federal officers reporting to Barack Obama and Eric Holder just can not be "racist" no matter who they kill any why...

Being dressed as women has nothing to do with putting 'penetration' in quotes, unless there is some sort of joke I'm missing. Why is it in quotes?

Because it's not clear from the statement what exactly took place. Did they bump a barricade lightly while trying to peacefully leave the checkpoint, and in turn get pursued by the guards and shot to death despite being unarmed and showing no actual malice? We will have to wait for more details to emerge.

Obligatory: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave

That no one has died yet as a result of swatting suggests that they're largely doing their jobs.

"No one"? Do the minorities they mistakenly kill count, or does it have to be some white middle-class dude with a twitch channel?

That no one has died yet as a result of swatting suggests that they're largely doing their jobs.

http://www.cato.org/raidmap
http://www.sott.net/article/266876-Swat-team-shoots-innocent-man-22-times-in-front-of-his-family-case-settled-in-the-millions
http://www.policestateusa.com/2013/misidentified-man-killed-when-swat-team-started-his-house-on-fire/
http://www.businessinsider.com/9-horrifying-botched-police-raids-2012-2?op=1
http://www.mintpressnews.com/video-swat-team-kills-innocent-man-drug-raid-found-just-2-marijuana/200738/
http://www.ctpost.com/local/article/A-costly-SWAT-raid-gone-wrong-4303215.php
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/10/swat-raid-casualties

The Wikipedia activity brewing at 1 Police Plaza took a distinctly more bizarre turn with edits to the pages "Ice Cream Soda," "Who Moved My Cheese?" "Chumbawamba," and "Stone Cold Steve Austin."

I will never trust for-profit educational institutions:

For-Profit Colleges Under Investigation

Corinthian Colleges Employee: âoeWe Work For The Biggest Scam Company In The World"

Screw U: How For-Profit Colleges Rip You Off

How For-Profit Colleges Target Military Veterans (and Your Tax Dollars)

to wit :

Rep. Barry Loudermilk, a Georgia Republican who recently became the chair of a key congressional subcommittee on science and technology, didn't vaccinate most of his children, he told a crowd at his first town hall meeting last week.

Loudermilk was responding to a woman who asked whether he'd be looking into (discredited) allegations that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had covered up information linking vaccines to autism. He responded with a rather unscientific personal anecdote: "I believe it's the parents' decision whether to immunize or not...Most of our children, we didn't immunize. They're healthy."

The anti science, only the wealthy deserve money crowd just got voted in by the low information voters.. & the Science Community that the world once looked up to is being dismantled.

Newton may seem (may be) insignificant, but mirror.anl.gov/pub was big. Very Big. And, as we (the U.S. taxpayer) paid for it, taking it away can be seen as at the least, theft.

wasf