#i can’t handle how much the global climate on this topic seems to have changed in a year

[rotzaprachim]

i don’t think Jews should have to extend grace to people who engage in Holocaust denial. I don’t think people should engage in Holocaust denial no matter their politics. I think Jews have a right to be angry and cut off contact with those who do engage in Holocaust denial, no matter their politics. I’m so fucking angry we’re at this line I’m the goddamn sand and antisemitism is this rampant

[canyouhearthelight]

The Miys, Ch. 33

This was a very difficult chapter to write, mostly because of the discussion of the death penalty involved.  I know it is a controversial topic, and trying to handle it in a way that worked was challenging.

Another panic attack in this chapter, so be on the lookout for that. Also, content warning for blood in a non-violent situation, along with discussion of injuries previously sustained.

The corridor was an uproar, and I wasn’t hesitating to contribute to it.  Conor’s voice was booming his objections as my sister tried to calm him down.  Xiomara looked both apologetic and harried as I argued with her.  Execution?  Earth had abolished the death penalty decades ago, with the establishment of the Global Parliament; how could the rest of the Council even consider this?  

She must have realized that there was no way to quiet us down until we said our piece, because Xiomara finally ushered us into the Council Chamber to stop the scene we were causing.  Once the door closed behind us, she took a deep breath and ran her hand over her hair. “Mr. Mac Maoilir,” she pointed to a chair. “I will hear you out next, if you have any questions.  No shouting, or you will be escorted from the room, immediately, do you understand me? You shouldn’t even be in here to begin with, so consider yourself extremely lucky.” Conor gave a tight nod and took the seat she indicated. She turned to me and her face softened slightly. “Sophia, please understand. ��We had no idea that Galactic Law uses this kind of penalty, not when we felt so enlightened for stopping the practice on Earth.”

“Then why are we going along with this?” I demanded.  “I’m the person she tried to kill, and I’m the on objecting.  Doesn’t that tell you something?”

“Give us a better solution,” Xiomara begged. I was taken aback; Xiomara Kalloe was a strong, proud warrior.  She didn’t plead with anyone. “Talk through it all, pros and cons.  If you find a solution, we will try to convince Miys to consider it.”

I exhaled, trying to gather my thoughts. “Can we imprison her?” Solitary confinement for life was the maximum penalty back on Earth, Before.

“If it was just her, yes,” Xiomara nodded. “But there is a total of fifteen people involved, and we don’t have the space to lock all of them up.”

“I can’t imagine how we would isolate them, anyway,” I muttered. “Making them share space would be dangerous, because then they could work together.  Keep them sedated until we reach the colony?” I asked hopefully.

“And then what?” my sister spoke up. “Then they would be alive, able to sabotage our efforts to start over.”

“Ugh,” I groaned.  “We can try to rehabilitate them, don’t you see that?  Everyone deserves a chance to do this right.  We’re supposed to be the ones worth saving!  ‘Orderly, decisive, direct, practical’. That’s Arantxa. That’s why she’s here.”

“Yes, Sophia, that’s why she’s here,” Xiomara sighed and gestured to the room.  “According to the testimony of the others involved, she was a Baconist. High-ranking.”

Baconist. The people who triggered the End, and turned our shining achievement of FTL travel into weapons of a slow apocalypse. Today seemed to be the day for my breath to desert me.  “How high-ranking?” I whispered.  When she didn’t respond, my temper had all it could take. “How high-ranking, Xiomara!?” I shouted, making everyone in the room flinch.  I must have looked like a lunatic, and in that moment, I could not have possibly cared less.  “She came in my home, worked by my side for months, heard all of our stories about surviving the world her fucking people created, and never even looked guilty. How high-ranking was that heartless bitch?” I spat. Any sympathy I ever had for Arantxa was gone with this new information.

“We only have hearsay from the others,” a calm voice interjected.  Turning, I saw Grey approaching. “Sophia, I can understand that you are furious, and rightfully so.  However, the stress is not good for your recovery.” They pointed at my nose and held out a cloth.  I took it, only to discover that my nose was pouring blood.  “Please, take a seat.  Tyche, can you bring her some tea?  I would, but I am not sure how she takes it and I trust you to know.” Gently, they maneuvered me into an empty seat.  “To answer your question, the testimony of the others involved indicates that Ms. Bidarte is the highest-ranking member of their group on the Ark.  If that information is correct, it is immaterial what power she held on Earth.  Here and now, she is said to be their leader.”  Tyche arrived with a mug of steaming tea, setting it on the table and rubbing my arm comfortingly.  Grey handed me the mug as I moved the cloth away from my face.  “The bleeding has slowed, that is good,” they smiled thinly. Their calm demeanor and matter-of-fact tone were working magic on my anger.

I grudgingly took a sip of the tea, before trying to get back to the original argument. “Execution, Grey?  Are we really considering this?”

“She and the others tried to kill our hosts, and kill everyone on the Ark,” Grey stated. “She, personally, tried to kill you and came closer than I think you realize. Even with all the technology available, Miys was not entirely certain you would ever wake up.”

“Several people on board have killed,” I argued. “If we execute them all, I’m probably on that list.”

They only shook their head. “That was in self-defense, this was not in any way the same thing.  We were trying to survive.  They were trying to bring a complete end to humanity, the exact opposite of what the Ark is for.”

“We’ve had people in our history try the same thing,” I begged, a Hail-Mary if there ever was one. “We didn’t execute them.”

“Those people attacked ethnic groups, not the entirety of human kind,” Grey told me. “I’m certainly not saying one is worse than the other, but it excuses much in the eyes of history. Additionally, those who were imprisoned were old men, at the end of their lives.  The majority were actually executed, whether it was in the attempts to stop them, apprehend them, or by their own hands.  I believe, deep down, you know this makes logical sense, but you do not want to admit that.”

Dammit, they were right.  Part of me wanted her dead, but not for her crimes.  I wanted to see her punished for betraying me, my sister…Conor, especially.  “We are supposed to be better than this,” I whispered, mostly referring to myself.

“The Hujylsogox will not fault us for following the same laws as they do,” Grey told me.  “We will still go to our new home.  Miys has been very worried about you, as much as they tried to hide it.  They have also expressed feeling guilty for what has taken place, since they were the ones who approved everyone brought on board.  We have been over the data they had on each person involved, and there is nothing to indicate that they had extremist views.  In addition, only two are shown in the files to have even known each other Before.”

“I thought Noah vetted everyone before we were brought on board,” Conor ventured as he scooted over. Grey opened their mouth to say something, but he raised both hands defensively. “Tyche sedated me, cheeky thing, so no more yelling.” He pointed to a patch on his neck.  Grey nodded, apparently satisfied. He continued, taking the gesture as permission. “If we were all vetted, including them, how did they manage to get on board the Ark?”

“No one believes they’re the bad guy,” I answered mournfully.  “Think about it.  Before everything happened, a lot of people agreed with what the Baconists were saying: why should a bunch of rich people who refused to stop climate change allowed to be the first people to run away from it?  Hell, even I agreed with that part.  That doesn’t mean I agreed with the methods, especially not what ended up happening.  And we have pretty much no way to track what happened in the After, other than written records, and those are definitely not the most reliable sources.  Noah definitely isn’t at fault on this one.” I rubbed my temples, feeling a headache coming on from all the emotional swings of the past few hours.  “Okay, when does this trial actually start?  The sooner it starts, the sooner it will be over with.”

“That’s it? You’re just going to go along with this?” Conor asked skeptically.

“The trial is happening, regardless of the punishment if she’s convicted,” I sighed.  “Do I like the idea of executing them? No.  And I honestly don’t think anyone in this room likes the idea.  Xiomara definitely didn’t look she was on board.  Eino comes from a country that hasn’t had a death penalty in over two hundred years, so I’m pretty sure he’s not on board with it either. Unfortunately, I can’t argue with Grey on the logical sense of it: those fifteen people tried to kill all of humanity.  Not even for the first time, it turns out.”  I blinked a few times as my eyes starting stinging. “This all just sucks.” I managed to choke out in a whisper.

He scooped me out of my chair and into his lap before I could protest, wrapping his arms around me like he had the night before.  “Yeah, it does,” he agreed. “But if you say this makes sense, even if you don’t like it, I won’t make this harder on you.  It’s bad enough as it is.”

I nodded weakly and sniffed several times before taking a few deep breaths to calm myself down.  I couldn’t even muster the energy to be embarrassed by the display we were making.  Finally, I calmed down enough to stand.  Glancing over at Xiomara, I nodded.  She gave me a weak smile and nodded back, understanding that I was ready to face this.

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[generationsocial]

Canadian Election: A Youth Perspective

So it’s officially been over a week since the 2021 Canadian Federal Election was called, and not much has changed. Sure, the left won a few extra seats through the Liberals and NDP, even the Bloc gained a seat, and Trudeau secured himself at least an extra four years in office, but essentially we’re left in the same place we were after the 2019 election. Pretty uneventful for the last election I’ll watch as a minor. Next term I’ll be voting, and I sincerely hope the social climate changes by then. Fair warning, I’ll do a lot of shameless Trudeau-bashing in this article, but please do not mistake that for any support of the right, I’ll judge them even more harshly.

Overall, I think we can all agree this was a pointless, and frankly selfish, vanity grab by Trudeau and we’re lucky the consequences weren’t catastrophic. To call an election just to prove you can still win, in the middle of a deadly pandemic with rising case numbers and an ever growing party of idiocy to rival Trump’s (yes, the PPC) was quite possibly the most dangerous thing Trudeau has done for Canadians during his time as PM. This election could have very easily gone to the Conservatives, a party who would no doubt give in to their far-right supporters and loosen up pandemic measures, putting us all at risk. I shudder to think of the thousands of lives that would have been lost to a government who cares more for made up “rights” and economic gains than the health of its citizens. So while I could never imagine supporting Trudeau myself, and in a perfect world I would have basked in an NDP win, I’m still glad he won. (Shoutout to the PPC’s insanity for splitting the Conservative vote).

I also know that a lot of left-leaning voters were put off the NDP because of Singh’s criticism of Trudeau. Personally, I fully support judging moral wrongs wherever you can even without having all the answers (after all, pointing fingers may not be a solution, but you can’t find the answer without identifying the problem). Let he who is with sin throw as many stones as he pleases. But, I don’t think that’s the case with the NDP. In fairness, I have taken the time that many haven’t to research the Liberal’s downfalls and the NDP positions and plans that weren’t shared during debates, so I know Singh’s criticisms aren’t baseless. Nonetheless, there’s nothing more frustrating than someone who wants to appear to make strong statements but cannot back them up, so let me share my reasoning for where I fall on the political spectrum.

Firstly, I won’t validate the PPC enough to even share my reasons to not support them, although the list is long. They shouldn’t even be considered a party, and if you vote PPC I unapologetically have zero respect for you. As for the conservatives, I’ll give a little leniency. Growing up in the era right before this generation’s social justice boom, my parents were realtors so I heard a lot about conservative views on the economy, from housing markets to inflation, and I won’t discount them all, not when small businesses are suffering through the pandemic. I can understand the draw to their economic push. That being said, I still prefer the leftist economic policies, such as higher taxes for the rich, more investment in social programs, and fairer wages, and there is no scenario in which I could ignore the flip-flopping human rights beliefs of the Conservatives. Especially not when they push to create a country more like our gun-ridden, anti-choice, American neighbours.

Now for the hot-topic Liberals. I used to like Trudeau, after all, I was only 10 when he was first elected. I obviously wasn’t doing any research beyond hearing adult’s opinions. As a little native kid, it sounded great to have a Prime Minister who made all these grand promises to end water advisories on reserves and focus on reconciliation. He was quite literally born and raised to be in office and handled himself on the global stage with such confidence that my young brain couldn’t imagine how anyone wouldn’t respect him. Now, I’m almost finished high school, and I can’t stand Trudeau. He has failed on every promise to Indigenous peoples and continuously dismissed any criticism of his broken promises during the election by attempting to guilt-trip us with the “hard work” of his task force. I’m not falling for it, sorry not sorry if he doesn’t feel validated in giving my people clean water if he isn’t being praised for it. Frankly, while it’s great that they’ve ended some advisories, it’s not enough, as long as there are children who have spent their entire lives on reserves where they can’t drink water without boiling it, it will never be enough. It is especially not enough while he actively fights residential school survivors in court. Even further, I cannot comprehend - never mind support - the level of arrogance it takes to call a pointless election during a pandemic. So, liberals are out of the question for me as long as Trudeau and his in-crowd lead them.

While I admire the persistence of the Green party on environmental issues, they don’t seem to have strong enough opinions on other issues and, just like the Bloc, they are too much of a fringe party with not enough of a chance to ever win to earn my support. They mainly just succeed in splitting much-needed left votes.

As for the only party I would vote for if I could, the NDP. Canada is in desperate need of a leader who, to put it quite plainly, isn’t an old white man. While he himself is quite privileged, Singh is a person of colour who would understand the trials of POC in this country better than the other main parties. I’d hope that a personal understanding of these issues would lead to a far greater push from the NDP to solve humanitarian problems than parties led by white men pretending to care for anything other than votes. Additionally, while some POC feel that Singh is just as out of touch because of his wealth, I think that might actually draw some of the less progressive left supporters (who like NDP policies but are still internally racist enough that they wouldn’t support a poor person of colour in politics) to support him.

In the end though, my opinions don’t matter to the federal government yet. I’m only seventeen and until I can win them a vote, I’m just another voice in the crowd. Still, I encourage any young followers I have to start using your voice now, even without voting. Breakthrough the crowd, put a crack in their façade. This will be our country, our opinions matter too.

[deniscollins]

As Floods Keep Coming, Cities Pay Residents to Move

Flooding has increased around Nashville. If you were a Nashville city manager, would you offer to purchase the homes of owners in high flooding areas and use the land as an absorbent buffer rather than having to pay other expenses to continually bring city service standards back to normal: (1) yes, (2) no? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision? 

Jonna Laidlaw was terrorized by rain. Her house, with its lovely screened-in back porch, had flooded some 20 times since 2001, from a few inches to six feet. She and her husband would do their repairs with help from their flood insurance, but before long it would flood again.

“Every time it sprinkled I got terrified,” she said.

When city officials offered to buy the house last year, she and her husband gladly said yes. They have since moved to higher ground.

Nashville is trying to move people like the Laidlaws away from flood-prone areas. The voluntary program uses a combination of federal, state and local funds to offer market value for their homes. If the owners accept the offer, they move out, the city razes the house and prohibits future development. The acquired land becomes an absorbent creekside buffer, much of it serving as parks with playgrounds and walking paths.

Climate change is increasing the program’s urgency. While a number of cities around the country have similar relocation projects to address increased flooding, disaster mitigation experts consider Nashville’s a model that other communities would be wise to learn from: The United States spends far more on helping people rebuild after disasters than preventing problems. 

David Maurstad, who heads the National Flood Insurance Program, said buyouts were the most permanent way to mitigate against future flood hazards. “Rebuilding out of harm’s way can help avoid future devastation in a way that flood insurance cannot,” he said.

Flooding is a complex phenomenon with many causes, including land development and ground conditions. Climate change, which is already causing heavier rainfall in many storms, is an important part of the mix. Warmer atmosphere holds, and releases, more water.

Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd:, our email newsletter.

“We’re starting to see evidence that the number of extreme events will increase,” said Barbara Mayes Boustead, a climate scientist and an author of the latest installment of the National Climate Assessment, a report written by 13 federal agencies that explores both the current and future impacts of climate change. An area’s average annual rainfall might increase by what seems to be a relatively small amount — from 40 inches a year to 42, for example — and “in your head, you might say ‘big whoop,’” she said. “But how it falls is the critical piece of the story,” with the extra amount concentrated in extreme events.

And while Nashville hasn’t seen the kind of repeated, extreme flooding that a city like Houston has, the effect is being felt, said G. Dodd Galbreath, the founding director of Lipscomb University’s Institute for Sustainable Practice and a member of the city’s storm water management committee. “It’s a new weather pattern,” he said. “You can no longer rely on statistical reliability and statistical measurement as your sole measurements of risk.”

The costs of flooding continue to climb, but only 20 percent of the money that the Federal Emergency Management Agency distributes in disaster grants is earmarked for pre-disaster work, even though research shows that a dollar spent on mitigation before a disaster strikes results in at least six dollars in savings.

There are many reasons more people end up rebuilding in place than moving away. Reimbursement is relatively quick, while FEMA’s buyout programs tend to be slow and difficult to navigate. “A lot of people give up midway through the process,” said Craig Fugate, a former FEMA head.

Around the nation, relocations are showing results. Despite this year’s floods that inundated many communities in Nebraska and the upper Midwest, in Beatrice, Neb., the waters filled a park that included 40 acres of cleared lots and no homes or businesses in town were damaged. FEMA has estimated the town’s program prevented $13 million in damage in 2015 alone. “People got tired of rebuilding all the time,” said Tobias J. Tempelmeyer, the city administrator.

Paul Osman, the chief of statewide floodplain programs for the Illinois office of water resources, said his state’s program, which has bought some 6,000 structures and properties, made all the difference in this year’s floods. Instead of working out of an emergency operations center, dealing with sandbagging, community shelters, debris cleanup, policing and more, he said, “It’s a nonevent.”

How did Nashville create its own successful program? The city had gained some experience even before the 2010 flood, which caused $2 billion in damage. Starting in 1998, it bought 93 homes in hazardous areas, which helped city officials navigate the complex jumble of programs involved.

They understood that the FEMA programs didn’t put money up front, and that the federal government will reimburse 75 percent of the money in most cases, with the rest split between state and local sources. That meant the city ultimately spends $12,500 of its money for every $100,000 it uses to buy a house. It has used this leverage to build funding, bit by bit, to buy more than 400 homes and vacant lots, spending more than $43 million in total so far.

If people don’t sell after a flood, they are likelier to sell after the next one, said Tom Palko, assistant director of the city’s storm water division. “You have to be patient,” he said, “not go in guns blazing and say, ‘we’re going to solve everybody’s problems! We’re going to save the world!’”

One topic officials do not bring up in the public meetings about buyouts: the possible role of global warming. “I don’t want to get to a public meeting and debate climate change,” Mr. Palko said. Instead, they cite the numbers: “We have had four of these events in 10 years, when in the past 25 years there may have been only one of those events of that magnitude.”

Ms. Laidlaw said she was pleased with the program, and with canceling flood insurance that had climbed from $300 a year to $700 each month. When they first bought the house, “they were talking like 500-year floodplain — what chance was there that we’d be there in 500 years? But it happened.” (““500-year floodplain” is shorthand for a 0.2 percent chance of flooding in any given year. )

“The idea of not having to clean, not having to show the house” was also attractive. Ms. Laidlaw said. And besides, “I didn’t really think with the flood history we’d be able to sell it.” She said she still gets anxious when it rains, but “I can calm down pretty well now.”

Faye Sesler is another happy seller. A realtor, it had been her idea to purchase a home in 2012 as a rental unit. She and her husband soon discovered that the lovely creek behind the house could end up in the house. And while her husband, a contractor, could handle repairs, neither of them was happy about it.

“My husband, every time it rained, he’d say, ‘You better hope it won’t flood.” The city’s program, she said, “was a marriage saver.”

They sold in 2016 after attending a community meeting, where “I was amazed that so many people didn’t want to sell. What I wanted to do was get them and shake them and say ‘listen to this — it’s going to flood again.” Carol Mayes has tried to stay. She moved back to Nashville from Washington, D.C., in 2008 to take care of her mother, who died four years later. She now lives in her home, which flooded in 2010. She refused the city’s offer, but many neighbors took it.

Mr. Osman, the Illinois floodplain manager, said it could also be hard to get older people to accept buyouts, as well as people in poorer neighborhoods. “Nobody wants to start a mortgage again when they’re retired,” Mr. Osman said. In poorer Illinois communities, fair market value for a home might turn out to be just $10,000, and “you can’t buy a mobile home for that,” he said. “It’s a struggle, and I don’t have a good answer.”

Nicholas Pinter, the associate director of the center for watershed sciences at the University of California, Davis, said the challenges to “overcoming social inertia” are so high because of “the intense sense of place that people have.”

Still, even though moving people can be expensive and contentious, he said, “it looks like we’re going to have to look at a lot more flood relocations in the future.”

[biofunmy]

As Floods Keep Coming, Cities Pay Residents to Move

NASHVILLE — Jonna Laidlaw was terrorized by rain. Her house, with its lovely screened-in back porch, had flooded some 20 times since 2001, from a few inches to six feet. She and her husband would do their repairs with help from their flood insurance, but before long it would flood again.

“Every time it sprinkled I got terrified,” she said.

When city officials offered to buy the house last year, she and her husband gladly said yes. They have since moved to higher ground.

Nashville is trying to move people like the Laidlaws away from flood-prone areas. The voluntary program uses a combination of federal, state and local funds to offer market value for their homes. If the owners accept the offer, they move out, the city razes the house and prohibits future development. The acquired land becomes an absorbent creekside buffer, much of it serving as parks with playgrounds and walking paths.

Climate change is increasing the program’s urgency. While a number of cities around the country have similar relocation projects to address increased flooding, disaster mitigation experts consider Nashville’s a model that other communities would be wise to learn from: The United States spends far more on helping people rebuild after disasters than preventing problems.

David Maurstad, who heads the National Flood Insurance Program, said buyouts were the most permanent way to mitigate against future flood hazards. “Rebuilding out of harm’s way can help avoid future devastation in a way that flood insurance cannot,” he said.

Flooding is a complex phenomenon with many causes, including land development and ground conditions. Climate change, which is already causing heavier rainfall in many storms, is an important part of the mix. Warmer atmosphere holds, and releases, more water.

Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd:, our email newsletter.

“We’re starting to see evidence that the number of extreme events will increase,” said Barbara Mayes Boustead, a climate scientist and an author of the latest installment of the National Climate Assessment, a report written by 13 federal agencies that explores both the current and future impacts of climate change. An area’s average annual rainfall might increase by what seems to be a relatively small amount — from 40 inches a year to 42, for example — and “in your head, you might say ‘big whoop,’” she said. “But how it falls is the critical piece of the story,” with the extra amount concentrated in extreme events.

And while Nashville hasn’t seen the kind of repeated, extreme flooding that a city like Houston has, the effect is being felt, said G. Dodd Galbreath, the founding director of Lipscomb University’s Institute for Sustainable Practice and a member of the city’s storm water management committee. “It’s a new weather pattern,” he said. “You can no longer rely on statistical reliability and statistical measurement as your sole measurements of risk.”

The costs of flooding continue to climb, but only 20 percent of the money that the Federal Emergency Management Agency distributes in disaster grants is earmarked for pre-disaster work, even though research shows that a dollar spent on mitigation before a disaster strikes results in at least six dollars in savings.

There are many reasons more people end up rebuilding in place than moving away. Reimbursement is relatively quick, while FEMA’s buyout programs tend to be slow and difficult to navigate. “A lot of people give up midway through the process,” said Craig Fugate, a former FEMA head.

Around the nation, relocations are showing results. Despite this year’s floods that inundated many communities in Nebraska and the upper Midwest, in Beatrice, Neb., the waters filled a park that included 40 acres of cleared lots and no homes or businesses in town were damaged. FEMA has estimated the town’s program prevented $13 million in damage in 2015 alone. “People got tired of rebuilding all the time,” said Tobias J. Tempelmeyer, the city administrator.

Paul Osman, the chief of statewide floodplain programs for the Illinois office of water resources, said his state’s program, which has bought some 6,000 structures and properties, made all the difference in this year’s floods. Instead of working out of an emergency operations center, dealing with sandbagging, community shelters, debris cleanup, policing and more, he said, “It’s a nonevent.”

How did Nashville create its own successful program? The city had gained some experience even before the 2010 flood, which caused $2 billion in damage. Starting in 1998, it bought 93 homes in hazardous areas, which helped city officials navigate the complex jumble of programs involved.

They understood that the FEMA programs didn’t put money up front, and that the federal government will reimburse 75 percent of the money in most cases, with the rest split between state and local sources. That meant the city ultimately spends $12,500 of its money for every $100,000 it uses to buy a house. It has used this leverage to build funding, bit by bit, to buy more than 400 homes and vacant lots, spending more than $43 million in total so far.

If people don’t sell after a flood, they are likelier to sell after the next one, said Tom Palko, assistant director of the city’s storm water division. “You have to be patient,” he said, “not go in guns blazing and say, ‘we’re going to solve everybody’s problems! We’re going to save the world!’”

One topic officials do not bring up in the public meetings about buyouts: the possible role of global warming. “I don’t want to get to a public meeting and debate climate change,” Mr. Palko said. Instead, they cite the numbers: “We have had four of these events in 10 years, when in the past 25 years there may have been only one of those events of that magnitude.”

Ms. Laidlaw said she was pleased with the program, and with canceling flood insurance that had climbed from $300 a year to $700 each month. When they first bought the house, “they were talking like 500-year floodplain — what chance was there that we’d be there in 500 years? But it happened.” (““500-year floodplain” is shorthand for a 0.2 percent chance of flooding in any given year. )

“The idea of not having to clean, not having to show the house” was also attractive. Ms. Laidlaw said. And besides, “I didn’t really think with the flood history we’d be able to sell it.” She said she still gets anxious when it rains, but “I can calm down pretty well now.”

Faye Sesler is another happy seller. A realtor, it had been her idea to purchase a home in 2012 as a rental unit. She and her husband soon discovered that the lovely creek behind the house could end up in the house. And while her husband, a contractor, could handle repairs, neither of them was happy about it.

“My husband, every time it rained, he’d say, ‘You better hope it won’t flood.” The city’s program, she said, “was a marriage saver.”

They sold in 2016 after attending a community meeting, where “I was amazed that so many people didn’t want to sell. What I wanted to do was get them and shake them and say ‘listen to this — it’s going to flood again.” Carol Mayes has tried to stay. She moved back to Nashville from Washington, D.C., in 2008 to take care of her mother, who died four years later. She now lives in her home, which flooded in 2010. She refused the city’s offer, but many neighbors took it.

Mr. Osman, the Illinois floodplain manager, said it could also be hard to get older people to accept buyouts, as well as people in poorer neighborhoods. “Nobody wants to start a mortgage again when they’re retired,” Mr. Osman said. In poorer Illinois communities, fair market value for a home might turn out to be just $10,000, and “you can’t buy a mobile home for that,” he said. “It’s a struggle, and I don’t have a good answer.”

Nicholas Pinter, the associate director of the center for watershed sciences at the University of California, Davis, said the challenges to “overcoming social inertia” are so high because of “the intense sense of place that people have.”

Still, even though moving people can be expensive and contentious, he said, “it looks like we’re going to have to look at a lot more flood relocations in the future.”

Sahred From Source link Science

from WordPress http://bit.ly/2NE4770 via IFTTT

[jerryadler-blog]

The hallelujah cure: Trump campaign adviser says pray away the flu

Photo: Yahoo News photo illustration; photos: AP, Getty Images

Brethren, our topic for this week’s column is the flu, because I have it.

I followed the advice of the Centers for Disease Control and got a vaccination, which may or may not have lessened my symptoms. But then I discovered I had neglected the most important prophylaxis of all: prayer.

This advice came from the evangelist Gloria Copeland, who with her husband, Kenneth, runs a religious empire based largely on faith healing. Copeland posted a video last week that argued, passionately if incoherently, either that the flu doesn’t actually exist (“We got a duck season, a deer season, but we don’t have a flu season”) or that faith can protect you from it (“inoculate yourself with the word of God”).

At a time when the CDC was warning that this year’s flu outbreak appears to be the worst in almost a decade, Copeland’s remarks went, uhh, viral. They also attracted unwanted attention to her connection to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, on whose “evangelical advisory board” she and her husband served, alongside prominent Christian and Republican figures including Jerry Falwell Jr., Michele Bachmann and James Dobson. Apparently in response, a clarification went up on the Copeland Ministries website, insisting that “Gloria did not say or imply that you shouldn’t get a flu shot or see a doctor. Gloria and Kenneth Copeland Ministries value medicine and doctors and would never counsel someone not to seek medical care.”

That disclaimer would be more convincing if there weren’t copious evidence that Copeland actually does not value medicine, at least in comparison with the kind of healing that goes on in her church and at revivals. Her statement on the website was followed by pages of testimonials like this one, from “Terri”: “Tests showed I had a growth on my gallbladder and the doctor recommended surgery.  We prayed and received healing by faith. Hands were laid on me and I never had another symptom.”  As Copeland once preached: “We know what’s wrong with you. You’ve got cancer. The bad news is we don’t know what to do about it — except give you some poison that will make you sicker. Now, which do you want to do? Do you want to do that, or do you want to sit in here on a Saturday morning, hear the word of God and let faith come into your heart and be healed?”

At least since the time of Jesus, Christians have prayed for health. But Kurt Andersen, in his indispensable guide to American irrationality, Fantasyland, traces contemporary faith healing to the advent of the charismatic, ecstatic form of Christian worship known as Pentecostalism. After its heyday in the early decades of the 20th century, it was banished to the fringes of society for decades, only to reemerge in recent years under the guise of “prosperity gospel.” As preached by the Copelands, Oral Roberts, Joel Osteen and many others, one can think of prosperity gospel as a form of “applied religion,” by analogy to, say, “applied science,” that involves trying to obtain concrete rewards in the here and now,  including financial success, personal happiness and overcoming adversity.

Such as the flu.

Andersen notes that this is not a practice confined to right-wing Christians. Seeking to cure cancer by praying is not more or less implausible than using crystals for the purpose. Oprah, that great font of national gullibility, was an early exponent of “The Secret,” a best-selling book by Rhonda Byrnes that repackaged prosperity gospel in secular form as “the law of attraction,” the idea that “the universe” would provide whatever you sought if you just thought about it long and hard enough.

Morally, this is deplorable. Byrne’s book never so much as raised the possibility that the awesome power she had discovered could be used for the benefit of anyone else — a hungry child, say — rather than grabbing jewelry, toys, lovers or a good parking spot. It’s also common knowledge that the “prosperity” in prosperity gospel mostly accrues to the people who preach it.

Metaphysically, it’s a muddle. Prayer doesn’t work all the time, obviously, so why does God heal some people and not others? How does he do it? The Bible verses that Copeland cites in support of her practice were written at a time when the human body was a black box, and there was no inherent reason to doubt that Jesus could raise someone from the dead. By 1987, though, when Oral Roberts made the same claim for himself, it was understood that restoring a corpse to life requires reversing a whole cascade of cellular processes for which there is no known, or even conceivable, mechanism. Does God go through each of the trillions of cells in a human body and jump-start the mitochondria?

Still, between coughing fits last week, I wondered: Could Copeland be on to something? I had relied on medical science to ward off the flu, and I got sick anyway. (Full disclosure: this is a self-diagnosis, based on my feeling the way Trump reportedly described the nations of Africa). What does science have to say about prayer as a form of medical prophylaxis?

It is part of the greatness of the scientific method that this question can be asked, and, within the limits of our present-day knowledge, answered. The first statistical study of so-called intercessory prayer was published in 1872 by the eminent Victorian scientist Sir Francis Galton, who noted that, notwithstanding the millions of prayers regularly offered in European countries for the health of their respective royal families, on average royals actually died younger — 64 years — than clergymen, lawyers, military officers, or members of all other genteel professions, excluding deaths by accident or violence.

I rest my case.

No, actually, I don’t, because scientists have continued to study the question — not by calculating the lifespan of kings, but with controlled experiments enlisting hundreds of subjects and modern statistical analysis. You can read an analysis by David R. Hodge of Arizona State University here, and another here. What seemed to Galton like a straightforward question of statistics turns out to pose all kinds of research conundrums. What kinds of prayer should be studied, and by whom? For what kinds of disease? Should the people prayed for be told in advance, and is their informed consent required? What measures should be used to determine if the prayers worked?

Each researcher answered those questions differently. A few studies, less than half, indicated a beneficial effect of intercessory prayer, but the effects were small. Often the outcomes involved obscure markers of recovery such as the incidence of certain specific surgical complications. God works in mysterious ways, but that’s a long way from being raised from the dead.

At least one researcher treated the whole question as a joke, and did an experiment to show that praying for patients years after they were sick — and in some cases, after they were already dead — was correlated with shorter hospital stays. (The paper was published in a peer-reviewed journal — the data was real, if nonsensical — and it has been cited by other researchers, leading to some professional angst about the ethics of scientific satire.)

The bottom line is that while we can’t prove that prayer works or doesn’t work, if it were a drug up for approval by the FDA, it likely wouldn’t qualify. Hodge says it would be classified as an “experimental” intervention.

Still, there’s no harm in it, is there? When people are sick, their families and friends want to feel they’re doing something, and praying for them, if nothing else, keeps them in mind. Last month White House press secretary Sarah Sanders asked people to pray for 9-year-old Sophia Marie Campa-Peters, who was about to undergo life-saving brain surgery. Those who responded undoubtedly felt good about themselves, Sophia and her parents took courage from the response, and Trump himself, at the National Prayer Breakfast last week, cited her recovery after “millions of people lifted Sophia up in their prayers.”  Who could be against that — given, of course, that the prayers were viewed, properly, as supplemental to the surgery, rather than a substitute for it?

But that’s the catch: Some people do substitute faith for medical treatment. The Copelands’ own church was at the center of a measles outbreak in 2013, spread by children whose parents had failed to vaccinate them. The church denied that it discourages vaccination, but as one former member explained, “To get a vaccine would have been viewed by me and my friends and my peers as an act of fear — that you doubted God would keep you safe. … We simply didn’t do it.”

As public health officials have said repeatedly, an unvaccinated child isn’t just a risk to herself, but even to those who did receive a shot; the operative concept is “community [aka ‘herd’] immunity.” More broadly, the belief that we can turn our problems over to Jesus — or the “law of attraction” — can distract us from other urgent problems that require human solutions. And environmental problems in particular require those human solutions. This is a mindset that is compounded by the fact that many of the same people who turn to God to keep them from getting the flu also believe in the imminence of the End Times, which would render the melting of the polar ice caps an irrelevant inconvenience.

James Inhofe, the chair of the Senate Environmental Committee, has been especially forceful in this regard. His view is to let God handle global warming, since it’s out of humanity’s hands anyway. “God’s still up there,” he has said. “The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous.”

All I can say about that is, for Inhofe’s sake I hope he doesn’t take the same attitude toward his own health as he does toward the health of the Earth.

And as for me, I need a nap.

Read more from Yahoo News:

Skullduggery, Episode 5: The FBI under siege

The neo-Nazi has no clothes: In search of Matt Heimbach’s bogus ‘white ethnostate’

The man who hid in a church, and the church that hid him: An immigrant story with an uncertain ending

In wake of church shootings, pastors and worshipers arm themselves to shoot back

Photos: Carnival celebrations in Brazil

[sciwriteblog-blog]

                                     CHRISTMAS 2016 LETTER

I just read over last year’s Christmas missive, the letter at least one of you didn’t receive in the mail until March.  When I first got word that some of you hadn’t gotten your letter, I walked to the Berkeley Post Office, one of the few U.S. Postal Service offices with a permanent street-person encampment reminiscent of the Occupy Wall Street camp ins of 2011.  The so encamped were protesting the planned closure of the Central Berkeley Post Office even though most of the protesters have no permanent address so don’t the don’t get mail and can’t afford a post office box either.  

Once I got past the encampment and into the lobby, I talked to a certified U.S. Postal Service clerk, who said he and his fellow staff have one billion mail pieces to deliver before Christmas and can’t be expected to get all of them right.  I considered switching my voter registration to Republican, but held off.

Think of it, there are 324 million souls in the U.S.  That’s only three pieces of mail for every man, woman, and child in the country. Surely, the Postal Service can do better than that; with 617,254 employees in 2015 according to Wikipedia, that’s 1,620 pieces of mail per employee.  Seems like a lot, but machines do some of the work, is the post office forbidden from using labor-saving devices?

So this letter is something of a crap shoot.  Might get there might not.

In 2015, after wasting most of a year writing a proposal for which the data in hand would not support the envisioned analyses, I decided to try my hand at writing.  I had already written about drought in the West, and 40,000 words of a memoir mostly about my epic medical problems.  Publishers limit a first memoir to 80,000-90,000 words, and I was going to exceed that.  But I didn’t really like what I had written and didn’t like writing it.  Maybe some day, but not now, and done much differently. I was looking over the courses UC Berkeley Extension offered in Spring last year and ran across Science Writing, mostly by accident.  I signed up. Like most UC extension courses, it was a lot of work, but worth it.  Jennifer Huber, a physics Ph.D, taught the course.  She had worked at UCSF in imaging; probably living in the soft money world of grant-to-grant funding where I worked for 18 years.  She has been writing for 10 or more years now and has it all up on a web site.  She was a tough grader and superb editor.  I had to shed my technical writing style for something more compelling to the educated lay reader.

 She liked my final project, “Climate Change, Climate Cycles and the Syrian Civil War,” and suggesting “pitching” it to a publisher.  That was in the first week of June.  I thought I needed to establish that climate is in fact related to civil war before writing about a single example of climate actually causing civil strife.  That was a big mistake.  Six months later, I’m still polishing the article, having stumbled into an academic controversy that got into the press.  Does climate cause civil war?  Not climate change, though the topic has obvious relevance for that inevitability, but just normal variation, which can at times be extreme; think of the 1930s Dust Bowl.  A group of UC, Berkeley economists says, “yes;” a group of European political scientists says, “no.” I’m still undecided despite plowing through many journal articles.

I’ve spent more time on this than on any writing task since my dissertation, often going far astray into topics like Bayesian statistics.  Lesson: Keep it simple.  It’s already complicated enough and the average intelligent reader isn’t interested in esoterica.  Most science articles for the non-specialist are about one journal article; I’ve read scores plus additional textbook material for this article, enough to write a book, though I never intended to do that.  I have one set of notes that’s 76 single-spaced pages long, mostly copy and paste material from various articles, but also my “ideas.”  I never looked at it again after building the thing up.  There are other sets of notes not so epically long.  Didn’t look at those either.  Regardless of the notes, at some point, I’ll try to market what I have. Selling is not my strong suit.  Tune in again next year.

A little more substantively, let’s see if I can discuss this earth-shattering election without stepping on toes.  

Almost every pollster, forecaster, and pundit got it wrong.  Probably no one was more surprised by this than Donald Trump.  Maureen Dowd in the Times had it right:  Trump never really wanted to be president.  At one point Trump seemed more interested in a media enterprise involving himself, Steve Bannon of Breitbart News, and Roger Ailes, late of Fox News until scandalized from his lofty perch there.  Hilary was a professional politician: first lady, senator, 2008 presidential candidate, Secretary of State, no media ambitions.  

I often thought last summer, this lady can’t give us one good reason why she wants to be president other than to just have the job.  In the California primary, I voted for Sanders to register a protest.  If Joe Biden didn’t have a bad case of foot-in-mouth disease, and wasn’t 76 years old, I think he would have won because he had blue collar appeal.  How good at handling the presidency, I don’t know.

Maureen Dowd, a Times columnist, had the following to say about Hilary and her flaws as a candidate:

“Hillary’s campaign message boiled down to “’It’s my turn, dammit.’”

“Hillary should have spent less time collecting money on Wall Street and more time collecting votes in Wisconsin.”

“As she cuddled up to Wall Street, Hillary forgot about the forgotten man — and woman.”

FDR coined the phrase the “forgotten man” in the 30s, championed their cause, and made them loyal Democrats.  Nixon stole them from the Democrats, largely over race and campus protest, and called them the “Silent Majority.”  Under Reagan, the media called them “Reagan Democrats.”  In elections going back to Reagan, the forgotten man voted against their own working class interests by supporting Republicans who then enacted policies favoring the upper classes every time despite their base of solid blue-collar support; think “trickle down,” that is, tax cuts for those who need the money least, the rich.

The Democrats either forgot about the forgotten man or ignored him.  Bill Clinton told his wife to campaign for working class white voters, but she wasn’t interested in “The Deplorables.”  Hilary blames her loss on Putin’s meddling and FBI Director Comey’s pseudo-revelations about her private server two weeks before election day.  This is small ball and misses the larger point of the Brexit vote and Trump’s win: Many people have been hurt by globalization, they are just out of sight to the rich and powerful beneficiaries of the global economy.  These are mostly big city dwellers on either coast, New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, etc., and includes the Wall Street bankers Dowd notes above and whom Hilary charged a quarter million per speech to hear about the glowing future the global economy has in store for them.  The forgotten man was forgotten until November 8th.

But it should be kept in mind amidst all the talk of white backlash, populism, the Alt-Right, etc., that only once since WW II have voters stayed with one party for three terms. That was the first Bush (G. H. W. Bush) who served Reagan’s third term; Bill Clinton turned him out after a single term.  People want a change after eight years of one party rule, and if you’ve lost your high-wage manufacturing job under the Democrats, you’re going to vote Republican even if the corporation that off-shored your job to China or Mexico is run by Republicans.  

Given that automation took most of those jobs, or as Thomas Friedman put it, “You didn’t lose your job to a Mexican, but to a micro-chip,” Trump can’t deliver on his promise to bring back manufacturing jobs, the Carrier deal notwithstanding.  But he might deliver on infrastructure, and this would be a good thing if done right. The country’s roads, bridges, ports and grid are in bad shape.

The nation needs to spend at least $3.6 trillion according to the American Society of Civil Engineers.  Rebuilding America would bring back jobs to some, but not all.  Tax cuts of any kind will be more fiscal stimulus; no wonder the stock market has reversed its view on Trump and set off the recent upward spike. With the stimulus will come inflation, higher interest rates, and eventually some sort of crash or cool down. But it might get Trump re-elected if he doesn’t blow up the world in a Twitter-feed temper tantrum.  

Stay tuned.  It promises to be a wild ride.

Happy New Year,

Fred

 One thing you must know: There will be a total eclipse of the sun on August 21.  Here is a website with many maps for all to consider:

 http://www.eclipse2017.org/2017/maps.htm

 For those of you in Washington and Oregon, the arc of totality will cross I-5 just south of Salem, Oregon. For those in Idaho, Idaho Falls is near the center of the band of totality, which then clips the southern bulge of Grand Teton National Park.   If I lived nearer, I wouldn’t miss it, but my present state doesn’t permit getting much closer than downtown Berkeley.

[studentworldchange]

Global Warming: Signs of Harsh Reality Caused by Pollution

By Ryan Westmoreland                                              12-1-17

My world change product is over the awful and harming pollution that causes global warming today. Global warming is a controversial topic. For some, it is quite a simple concept but for other they either do not understand or refuse to understand. With all the scientific data concerning global warming, how could humans be so ignorant? Whether it is greed, low knowledge of the topic, or simply they just don’t care, these are all reasons why trying to control pollution is nearly impossible.

First off, the number of people that do not know enough about pollution and the affects it has on our world is incredibly too high. Though we cannot blame them for not knowing, we can blame ourselves as humans for not education other enough on this seriously life threatening topic. Countries other than the United States like, Saudi Arabia don’t make pollution a big matter in their government. On the grand scheme of things this one country not taking pollution seriously doesn’t seem like a big deal. It is all the other countries like this combined that make our world so over polluted. Don’t get me wrong America is also by far one of the worst countries in producing pollution but at least steps are being made towards keeping a clean earth. 

The first step towards a clean world is educating others. This is by far the most important step in becoming a less polluted world. The only way we could ever get the whole world on board to try and cut down pollution is if we got them to understand what it has and will continue to do to our world. Humans don’t realize that the fate of the world is in our hands. Whether it be nuclear war or pollution that’s ends this earth I strongly believe that humans will be the ultimate demise of this planet. Humans fail to realize this that is why it is up to us, the ones that care for humanity and want it to thrive for as long as possible, to spread the word about pollution and how if we do not stop we will die. I know it sounds so simple, but it really isn’t. The pollution that goes into our air slowly erodes at the o-zone in our earth’s atmosphere and allows more UV rays from the sun to penetrate earth. This rise in UV Ray reception is what causes the rise in global temperature. This is where global warming gets its name, duh. As the world lets in more UV rays the average temperature rises, pretty straight forward you would think. As these temperatures rise it affects more than is what is on the surface.

The effects global warming has on the ocean is horrific. Not to mention that the entire species of Japanese orange-spotted filefish have gone completely extinct due to the warming waters. Also, just a little bit more than half of the entire Great Barrier Reef has died in the past 18 months. Once one of the most beautiful and monumental landmarks on this Earth is now announced completely dead. The sad part is this is thanks to humans and humans only. The ocean is polluted by a a lot of things not just trash or oil spills. The scary part is the ones you can visually see are most likely less harmful than the things you cannot. If you look at the Earth from space, what do you mainly see? Oceans, right? With that being said, it is no question that our Earth is an “ocean planet”. This means, the earth’s make up is solely based around the ocean. Without the ocean we wouldn’t have any of the wild life or plantation that we do right now. The ocean plays the most important roll in controlling the Earth’s climate. While the Earth heats up and cools down the ocean is there to be the mediator. The first 10 feet of oceans covering the Earth hold more heat than entire atmosphere. It disperses the heat to different areas of the world. There is a series of some-what underwater rivers that disperse certain amounts of heat to certain areas. For instance, the Gulf Stream a warmer of the systems, creates a nice warm, wet, tropical climate. 

For the colder places of the world this is because these systems don’t transport as much heat to the area. This is where the glaciers melting all comes together and make sense. The pollutants in the air created by humans causes more UV Rays to penetrate Earth. This heat has to be dispersed effectively and the ocean does just that. With the more UV rays entering the earth’s atmosphere the ocean currents must do even more work to separate the heat. Also, it is not just about separating the heat, with the Earths heat rising that means that the oceans disperse the heat to places it usually wouldn’t. Therefore, we are seeing glaciers and ice caps shrinking annually. The ocean is also a habitat for the majority of species in this world and an enormous supplier in food. Without a healthy ocean we will not have a healthy earth. For instance, look at any of the other planets in our solar system, they do not contain a vast ocean and they are dry, dead, and inhabitable. (as of now). This is because there is nothing to control the climate on these planets. Without the oceans our climate would experience hot and cold extremes that most organisms like humans cannot handle and we would perish. After all, the oceans will thrive without humans or land animals but without the oceans we would be doomed.

Overall, I think that global warming is in full effect and will only continue to intensify. It is our time as humans, not as a country or nation, but as a species to act. Humans are killing this beautiful planet that has given us sustainable life as if we deserved such a planet. My solution to this problem is a simple concept but on a whole world scale it is seemingly impossible. The solution to this problem is emphasizing the toll it takes on the world and not giving up. If we want to someday save the planet from our own demise, we must educate others about pollution.

 My solution to this problem is the creation of an organization called the International Pollution Awareness Association, IPAA for short. While there are organizations that specialize in pollution they are searching for ways to solve this worldwide problem, there are no organizations that make educating and spreading the word about pollution their whole purpose. That is where IPAA will come in. We will travel the world educating humans about the life-threatening effects of the pollutants we put in the air every single day. We will also push for worldwide laws regarding pollution. Keep in mind, this is a work in progress and is not a real organization, yet. There are some already in place but not strict enough to save us from the damage we continue to do. For example, by 2030 china is expecting to ban non-electric cars for the sake of this world. It is this progress that gives us hope as humans. No one ever thought we would have electric cars, now we are having laws based around the benefits of electric cars that could potentially save the planet.

 I believe that it will be this generation of students to change the world because, if you ask someone younger than 18 if global warming is a real problem, they will tell you that no doubt it is a problem and it is growing. On the other hand, if you ask an older man or woman some may say that they don’t believe in it or that is a myth. This isn’t true for everybody, but it is more likely for older generations to deny the fact of global warming like they have for many years. You hear much more about it now because the bad stuff they said would come from pollution is now happening. I guess it is safe to say that a sense of panic is what has opened the eyes to many. Pollution is slowly and surely taking its toll on the Earth and one day these effects will be irreversible. It is up to humans as a species to stop pollution in order to save the planet that has given us life. Instead of working on potentially inhabiting a new planet, why don’t we apply that same amount of effort into saving the planet that has given us life for years on end. After all, the world will never stop working to provide us with life meanwhile humans slowly kill what allows them to live.

Works Cited

Handwerk, Brian. “Sustainable Earth: Oceans.” National Geographic, National Geographic Partners, environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/sustainable-earth/oceans/.

Nuwer, Rachel. “Without Oceans, Earth-Like Life Probably Can't Evolve on Other Planets.”Smithsonian.com, Smithsonian Institution, 22 July 2014, www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/without-oceans-earth-life-probably-cant-evolve-other-planets-180952106/.

Stone, Gregory. “We Cannot Survive without Our Oceans. We Must Act to Save Them - Now.”World Economic Forum, World Economic Forum, 9 Nov. 2016, www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/an-ocean-renaissance-is-key-to-our-survival/

[ulyssessklein]

7 things every musician should do before releasing a single

In our current world of short attention spans, releasing music more frequently can play a significant factor in your success.

Platforms like Spotify and YouTube reward artists who put out songs and videos on a regular basis. Obviously you can’t (and shouldn’t) bang out a full album every two or three months, so instead: singles!

Whether you’re releasing singles as a means of building towards an EP or LP which includes those same songs or you’re stockpiling tracks and putting out standalone singles as a way of maintaining momentum between bigger projects, you have the opportunity to turn each single into an event…

It’s a moment to reconnect with or grow your audience.

It’s a low-risk chance to experiment with promotion strategies and learn what works (and doesn’t).

And best of all, putting out singles is fun.

I recently released a new single and had a blast planning the various elements of the launch.

I can’t say my newest single yielded fame and fortune, but I applied marketing concepts that I’m pretty sure will improve your campaign no matter what the state of your career or size of your fanbase. It’s “scalable” wisdom.

Lots of people messaged me saying they loved various aspects of the launch (and the song, thankfully), and one person even wrote saying “Wow, your whole marketing strategy for this song is dialed in!”

So I’ve got that going for me. Which is nice ; )

As you’re getting ready to release a new song, I think it’ll help to keep the following concepts in mind too.

The key to promoting your newest single

1. Set a timeline and be patient

Yes, part of the benefit of singles is that they’re low pressure and you can drop them quickly. But don’t be in TOO much of a rush. Plan ahead. Do it right. You won’t be able to launch this song again.

Depending on the scope of your campaign, you might even need three months of preparation.

Here are just some of the things you’ll need time to arrange:

Global distribution

Spotify pre-saves

Music video and lyric video production

Song premiere

Video premieres

Press

Cover artwork

Communicating with reps from your distributor, licensing agency, etc.

Show.co page to feature your video

2. Don’t promote until your fans can take action

There’s no point in sharing a picture of your cover artwork a month before the single is available if no one can click to access, save, buy, or share the tune. Before you go crazy trying to create anticipation, set up your pre-saves or pre-orders! Get the link, then share that link when you post updates about the release ahead of its drop date.

3. Find the hook and make everything swirl around it

Everywhere all the time, the world buzzes. It takes a lot to get us to pay attention, so repeated messaging is crucial. And as you’re blasting us with news about your latest single, your message will be amplified when there’s a hook beyond just “new song coming soon.”

What’s the story? The hook? The thing that makes people say “I GOTTA CHECK THIS OUT!?” If you have that, the rest of your promotion will fall into place.

For me, there was a loose connection between the lyrics of my song “Irretrievable Beauty” and Climate Change. A single Public Domain image of an old iceberg stood at the core of my marketing, and it would become the cover artwork, the background of my lyric video, and an important element in more than a dozen Instagram posts. The image was one of the first instances of supernatural photography, purporting to capture an iceberg in 1905 where a crystalline Virgin Mary rose from the water.

The mystery of that image and how it was doctored to propel a hoax all seemed to speak to the song title “Irretrievable Beauty,” as did the very nature of both icebergs and photography. So,… there was the kernel of my marketing. From there it was just a matter of expressing it in soundbites.

4. Find different ways to repeat the message

You’ve got your hook; now how are you going to cast it into the same waters over and over again without the fish getting bored of that same bobbing lure?

Switch the tone. You can communicate through:

hints and teases

direct requests (“Please listen on Spotify”)

images

videos

facts and backstory about the song

and more

The first thing I did was set up my Spotify pre-save campaign. Once I had the link, I started to slowly tease the cover artwork by splitting it up into nine smaller images for Instagram. When a viewer looked at my profile at the end of the week, all nine of the smaller images formed a grid revealing the full artwork. Every time I posted I would share the pre-save link.

I then shifted to a more direct approach for the pre-save campaign, but with a focus on an emotional appeal…

Once the song was released I put out a lyric video (on YouTube and Facebook) with tons of buried text — posing as a letter from the 22nd-Century — referring back to the origins of the photograph, and I placed it inside a Show.co video feature page to drive conversions outside of YouTube:

I also repeated that little hook “In 1905, the people saw something so mysterious you might say that it almost wasn’t there…” in a number of ways throughout the campaign: emails, tweets, etc.

Then I did the obvious things, like adding a Spotify player to my website announcement about the song:

The next thing I did was to take a bunch of phrases from the letter portion of the lyric video and place them over the cover art for more Instagram posts, like so…

New music video now live at http://bit.ly/2j7S2rZ (link in profile too) for my song “Irretrievable Beauty”. #chrisrobleymusic #singersongwriter #photography #mainemusic #iceberg #hoax #miracle #musicvideo #lyricvideo

A post shared by Chris Robley (@chrisrobley) on Nov 7, 2017 at 9:06pm PST

Lastly, I posted the complete text of the letter on Facebook.

In addition to changing up the tone of the message, it’s important to remember that you have many channels through which to communicate: social, website, email, live shows, etc.

There’s also print and online music media, blog premieres for your song or video, reviews, playlist placements, and more out-of-the-box options such as publicizing your music to any relevant corporations, non-profit organizations, or hobby groups that might resonate with your music or the topic of the song.

5. Get all your ducks in a row before the release

Again, there’s a lot of options for creatively communicating the message that you have a new song out. But it always amazes me how long it takes to compose an email newsletter or write a Facebook post. I think, oh, that’s just a couple minutes, and then suddenly an hour has gone by. For that reason, you’ll want to prepare all assets well ahead of the launch date so you can focus on promotion once the song is out (not worrying about video editing, Photoshop, copy-writing, etc.).

And as I mentioned above, be sure to notify your distributor, publicist, any industry contacts, licensing experts, and so forth, way in advance.

This also means you’ll need to have an easy way to share a private link to your single: SoundCloud, Bandcamp, etc.

6. Consider another angle to entice beyond the primary hook

The song might be enough. The story and hook might be enough. But there could be some casual fans who won’t make the leap and check out your song unless there’s some additional benefit (like a prize, a free t-shirt, etc.).

When I ran my Spotify pre-save campaign, I made it a contest too. I would choose two winners at random from the list of people who pre-saved the song and send them a t-shirt. In addition to sending this out through the usual means, I also ran a Facebook ad to a targeted group of people who like similar artists as me.

Think of what extras might make someone push the save, buy, or play button.

7. Be ready to do the grunt work

We dream of easy solutions — the service that will handle everything for you, the dream manager who will do all the work, the industry contact who holds the keys to your success — but there’s often no substitute for digging in, doing research, writing a trillion emails, bracing for rejection, and building upon the small relative percentage of wins we get.

This applies when you’re doing your own PR, radio promotion, or launching singles. It’s work. Staying up until 3am to promote a single might not be why you got into music, but it’s work that will lead some listeners TO your music — which IS the reason you got into this crazy game in the first place.

Any advice to add? How do you think about releasing singles? Let me know in the comments below.

The post 7 things every musician should do before releasing a single appeared first on DIY Musician Blog.

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Can Environmentalists Eat Steak? Is Grass-fed, Free-range Better?

Healthy animals mean a healthy environment, right? What about concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs)? These “factory farms” must be cancerous to the environment.

This all seems like common sense, but our common sense can sometimes lead us in the wrong direction.

Gassy Cows and Global Warming

Many studies point to the fact that the production of beef pollutes the atmosphere with more greenhouse gases than the production of any other food. This is because cows are ruminants — a type of animal that acquires nutrients from plant-based food by fermenting their food in a specialized stomach. Because of this fermentation process, cows burp, fart, pee, and poop persistently throughout the day, which adds more greenhouse gases — like methane gas and nitrous oxide — to the environment.

Although fluorinated gases that are commonly used as refrigerants and aerosol propellants are the most potent and longest lasting greenhouse gasses, methane gas and nitrous oxide still have a 25 and 300 times greater impact respectively on global warming than carbon dioxide. Cows and other ruminants also eat plenty of oxygen-producing, carbon-dioxide-absorbing plants.

The Case Against Raising Healthy and Happy Cows

At this point, you may be thinking that cows that live long and healthy lives on pasture are bad for the environment, and you are not alone. Dr. Bill Ripple is a prominent ecologist known for his work researching the roles of large carnivores in ecological systems around the world, and he agrees with you.

Ripple took his expertise to climate change and found that pastured cattle contributed two to four times more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than cows raised in CAFOs.

This isn’t even the worst of it. Cattle have also been found to destroy ecosystems with their grazing. In 1990, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service banished grazing cattle from a 278,000-acre refuge called Hart Mountain to try to restore the ecosystem that was presumably destroyed by grazing cattle. After two decades, trees, shrubs, and flowers flourished providing a beautiful environment for birds, antelopes, and other species to thrive.

This suggests that healthy and happy cows destroy the environment in multiple ways. They produce potent greenhouses gases with their inefficient digestive system and make it hard for ecosystems to thrive. But what do you do if you want to have a big juicy steak and stop global warming?

Bill Ripple’s findings suggest that you should get that steak from a sick and diseased cow that is confined to a jail cell and has a shorter lifespan. Or just give up steak all together and become a vegetarian or vegan. Problem solved!

Hold on, what about all of the cattle? Even if we don’t eat them they will still be grazing, burping, and farting. Should we — dare I say — kill them?

The Bigger Picture: Joel Salatin and Sustainable Farming Practices

The amount of methane emitted by fermentation is the same whether it occurs in the cow or outside.” – Joel Salatin

That’s a brief excerpt from Joel’s rebuttal to the assertion that sustainable grass-fed beef is bad for the environment.

Joel Salatin is the owner of Polyface Farms in Virginia — a farm that produces pasture-raised, beyond organic beef, pork, poultry, eggs, and rabbits.

In his rebuttal, Joel continues by explaining that “…wetlands emit some 95% of all methane in the world.” If you were to fact-check his statement you’d find it to be true, which suggests that if you are going to blame happy and healthy livestock for global warming, you should blame nature as well. Better yet, blame your trash, too — it should know by now not to produce methane gas.

But still, according to Dr. Ripples, findings at Hart Mountain, Salatin’s farm should be struggling to maintain lush green pastures. Although this may be true for other farms that Salatin claims are under “neanderthal management”, Polyface farms uses many different methods like rotational grazing to get the most out of the land while keeping it lush and fertile.

Regardless of what Joel Salatin says, CAFOs are still known to be a much more efficient use of land, and the animals they produce add much less greenhouse gas to the atmosphere due to their shorter lifespans.

Should we just give up on raising happy and healthy livestock?

CAFOs are a NONO

It is a fact that CAFO beef produces less greenhouse gas emissions than grass-fed beef, but this reductionist approach to climate change leaves out many other factors.

For example, animals raised in CAFOs are usually fed GMO soybean, GMO corn, and GMO grain feed. GMOs themselves may not be an issue for the animal (which is debatable), but these GMO crops are covered in pesticides. These pesticides contaminate the meat, the soil, and the water, while the synthetic fertilizers that are used contribute a substantial amount of nitrous oxide — the second most potent greenhouse gas — to the atmosphere.

These growing practices deplete the soil of its nutrients and mycorrhiza ( soil probiotics), which causes us to use more pesticides and fertilizers to yield the same amount of food. These poor farming practices contribute 75% of all the nitrous oxide found in the atmosphere.

The way that animal waste is handled in CAFOs is also a problem that contributes excess nitrous oxide and methane gas to the atmosphere. The manure and urine often accumulate into a “poo lagoon” that contaminates the soil and water with pesticide and antibiotic residues, methane, and nitrous oxide.

When we consider all of the evidence, both Bill Ripple and Joel Salatin are right. Pasture-raised cattle — without a doubt — produce more greenhouse gases than any other animal. But — at the same time — livestock can be raised in a way that is much better for the environment (as a whole) than CAFO-raised livestock.

The beyond organic farming practices that farms like Polyface and White Oak Pastures use are making it possible for this to happen — making it possible to have healthy meat, healthy humans, and a healthy environment at the same time.

Must Read: Understanding and Detoxifying Genetically Modified Foods

The Future of Food Production

Joel Salatin is ahead of his time when it comes to farming. He uses ingenious methods that work together with nature to create healthy meat and a healthy ecosystem.

For example, instead of letting the manure and urine sit in “poo lagoons” and contaminate the water, it is used as a natural soil fertilizer. The bugs and pests that are attracted to the manure and urine are then eaten by the chickens, who act as natural “pesticides”. This helps maintain the health of the soil and foliage while reducing the amount of methane gas and nitrous oxide that is released into the atmosphere. Joel also moves the animals to different pastures so they do not overgraze specific plots of land. By doing things in this way, he maximizes efficiency and maintains a healthy ecosystem.

As Joel Salatin’s methods — and the methods of many other farmers like Will Harris at White Oak Pastures — continue to evolve, we will be able to ensure a happy and healthy life for us, the animals, and the environment without the need for CAFOs and mono-cropping.

But we still didn’t figure out how to stop global warming, and the solution is not to keep cows from burping, farting, pooping, and peeing.

Related: Permaculture Agriculture – The Transition to a Sustainable Future

The Real Cause of Global Warming

Although this article focuses heavily on the effects that meat production has on the environment — here’s the punchline — agriculture (including livestock) only contributes 9% to the total greenhouse gas emissions.

This is why you can’t blame the cow for burping and farting so much — the problem is us.

We dug out fossil fuels that weren’t a part of the environment anymore and added them back to the atmosphere at such rapid rates that we are causing the planet to change just as rapidly. Even 7.5 billion cows burping and farting at the same time couldn’t do that.

The solution to global warming doesn’t solely rely on our meat consumption. Saving our planet requires a multi-faceted approach.

How To Stop Global Warming

It all starts with using less electricity and gas and using more energy from renewable resources. Rather than driving to the gym to get your exercise, combine exercise with other activities you will do anyway. To conserve electricity, use natural light or lights that are powered by a hand crank or the sun.

When it comes to food, buy the highest quality food that is as local as possible. High-quality, bio-dynamic, or beyond-organic foods are much better for your health and the health of the environment, and eating local ensures that less gas will be used to get the food to your house. But what about meat?

When it comes to eating meat, moderation is key. Meat — without a doubt — is packed with nutrition, but most of us consume much more meat than is necessary.

An NPR article from 2012 found that the United States had the second highest meat consumption in the world — consuming 270.7 pounds per person every year. This works out to 3/4 of a pound of meat per day. But how do we know how much meat is enough?

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations — “…to effectively combat malnutrition and under-nourishment…” — they suggest consuming 20g of animal protein per person per day.

This means that eating around 1/4 pound of lean meat or fish or 3 eggs a day is just enough to prevent some vitamin and mineral deficiencies. It would be even better for the environment, however, to limit your consumption of beef and replace it with other animal proteins that have the lowest environmental impact like eggs, mussels, and oysters.

A Better Lifestyle for You and the Environment

Let’s make the complex topic of climate change simple. Here are some practical steps you can use to build a life that is healthy for you and the environment:

Source all of your foods from local organic farms

Combine your daily exercise with practical tasks to cut down on gas and electricity

Get all of your fruits and vegetables from beyond organic and/or bio-dynamic farms

Get all of your animal products from sustainable farms like Polyface or White Oak Pastures

Limit your animal protein servings to a quarter pound of meat a day

Eat most of your animal proteins from animals that have the lowest environmental impact like eggs, mussels, and oysters.

Reuse, repurpose, and recycle as many food scraps as possible to limit the amount of methane produced by landfills. To find out how, read our article on how to reduce food waste.

Limit your use of air conditioners (especially in cars) and aerosol sprays to reduce the amount of fluorinated gas that accumulates in the atmosphere.

When cooking your food, follow the suggestions here, Does Meat Cause Cancer? Yes and No…

By making as many of these adjustments as we can, we will improve our health, animal health, and environmental health — so that we can clean up the mess that we created.

Recommended Reading:

Is Wheat Poison? What’s Behind the Rise of Celiac Disease and Gluten Intolerance

How to Cure Lyme Disease and Virtually Any Other Bacterial Infection, Naturally

Textile Industry’s Health and Environmental Impacts – What Are You Wearing?

Can Progressive, Cutting-edge Organic Agriculture Feed Everyone?

My Journey into Organic Farming

Sources:

Joel Salatin responds to New York Times’ ‘Myth of Sustainable Meat’ — Grist

No, Grass-Fed Beef is Not Better for the Planet — Forks Over Knives

Why Go Organic, Grass-Fed and Pasture-Raised? — EWG

Meat Consumption — FAO

Understanding Global Warming Potentials — EPA

Overview of Greenhouse Gases — EPA

Ruminants, climate change and climate policy — Climate & Clean Air Coalition

A Nation Of Meat Eaters: See How It All Adds Up — NPR

Meatifest destiny: How Big Meat is taking over the Midwest — Grist

How much does animal agriculture and eating meat contribute to global warming? — Skeptical Science

Main sources of fluorinated gas emissions — What’s Your Impact

Can Environmentalists Eat Steak? Is Grass-fed, Free-range Better? was originally published on Organic Lifestyle Magazine

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i don’t think Jews should have to extend grace to people who engage in Holocaust denial. I don’t think people should engage in Holocaust denial no matter their politics. I think Jews have a right to be angry and cut off contact with those who do engage in Holocaust denial, no matter their politics. I’m so fucking angry we’re at this line I’m the goddamn sand and antisemitism is this rampant