Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Usually wrong but never in doubt.

Our job is not to persuade Republicans but to defeat them.

Hot Air and Ill Informed Banter

No one could have predicted…

The revolution will be supervised.

Women: They Get Shit Done

We still have time to mess this up!

Lighten up, Francis.

Just a few bad apples.

All your base are belong to Tunch.

I showered with Rahm and all I got was this shitty blog.

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

I personally stopped the public option…

We Survived Breitbartpocalypse!

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

Consistently wrong since 2002

Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack!

We can agree to disagree, but I’m right.

Saul Alinsky is my co-pilot

We are aware of all internet traditions.

Almost as fun as hiking the Appalachian Trail.

Shock troops for the Unitarian Jihad.

On The Road – Albatrossity – Summertime in Scotland – #2

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Albatrossity in Scotland

We spent a couple of days poking around on Uist, both at the Balranald reserve and wider afield. Per usual, we had some sunny intervals, but generally the weather was either overcast or actively raining. The locals seem to ignore that kind of weather, so we adjusted accordingly. We did see the bird that Balranald is most noted for, the rare and endangered Corncrake, but it was a brief sighting as the bird scooted across the trail in a brief downpour. So no pics of that one!

On The Road - Albatrossity - Summertime in Scotland - #2 7
UistJuly 22, 2008

One of the sites that Elizabeth wanted to see was a 5000 year-old tomb known as Barpa Langass. One of the amazing things about stone structures in this part of the world is both how ancient they are, and how much access you have to clamber around them and even crawl around inside. My 6’4″ frame was not going to be happy inside this one, but Elizabeth was eager to explore it. So here is a picture of the tomb and entrance, and a picture of how to exit from an ancient chambered tomb, using Elizabeth as a model.

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COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: Sunday/Monday, September 27-28

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Wrap Up the Weekend Open Thread: Another Endorsement for Biden!

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(Side note: Both Mr. Johnson and his wife are coronavirus survivors.)

Professional Warren/Biden hatestalker journamalist checks her notes:

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Climate Solutions: Soil Regeneration and Carbon Sequestration

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Climate Solutions: Soil Regeneration and Carbon Sequestration (stockpile)

I’m going through my resources, and as I sort, I thought I’d share. This group of links is about carbon sequestration solutions.

A friend of mine likes me to stay in the loop, so he sends me a lot of fresh info. He recently sent me this article about cattle and climate change. I’ve been very interested in what is often called holistic farming to regenerate soil and sequester carbon. Ruminants can play a vital role in this. This has some solid science behind it.

CATTLE ARE PART OF THE CLIMATE SOLUTION

A conversation with rangeland ecologist Richard Teague, PhD, analyzing the role that adaptive multi-paddock cattle grazing plays in sequestering carbon.

They put it into permanent pasture and managed it using regenerative multi-paddock grazing with dairy cattle. Within three or four years they recorded substantial improvements. After five years they had enormous increases in soil carbon—up to eight tons of carbon per hectare per year. In areas where you can grow crops throughout the year, like in the southern half of the States, if you make sure there’s vegetative cover of the soil, a living root in the ground year-round and you practice regenerative grazing using multiple paddocks with adequate recovery, you will get extraordinarily rapid results. In our more arid areas in Texas, we find we need about 10 years to get substantive soil functional improvement. When we went up to Canada, we worked with people who had started 20 or 30 years ago, and they had moved ahead remarkably. Over those long time periods, the soil had been measured every second or third year, and in the best cases, within four or five years, there was a noticeable increase in soil carbon and surface water infiltration. In those northern areas, after 14 years now, there is still no decrease in the upward trajectory of the soil carbon.

 

Climate Solutions: Soil Regeneration and Carbon Sequestration

…They put it into permanent pasture and managed it using regenerative multi-paddock grazing with dairy cattle. Within three or four years they recorded substantial improvements. After five years they had enormous increases in soil carbon—up to eight tons of carbon per hectare per year. In areas where you can grow crops throughout the year, like in the southern half of the States, if you make sure there’s vegetative cover of the soil, a living root in the ground year-round and you practice regenerative grazing using multiple paddocks with adequate recovery, you will get extraordinarily rapid results. In our more arid areas in Texas, we find we need about 10 years to get substantive soil functional improvement. When we went up to Canada, we worked with people who had started 20 or 30 years ago, and they had moved ahead remarkably. Over those long time periods, the soil had been measured every second or third year, and in the best cases, within four or five years, there was a noticeable increase in soil carbon and surface water infiltration. In those northern areas, after 14 years now, there is still no decrease in the upward trajectory of the soil carbon.

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That’s a pertinent question. The people who practice regenerative grazing get rid of all the bad things and graze for a short period of time, allowing adequate plant recovery, which improves rooting depth, the fungal to bacterial ratio, soil texture and infiltration. As soil carbon increases in these systems, the fertility of the soil, the cation exchange capacity, increases because organic matter hangs on to so many more nutrients. Regenerative AMP grazing quickly improves soil biology and plant diversity, and the more productive, healthier plants naturally come back.

There is much more at the link with links to all the scientific data and discussion of the facts and myths of cows and methane.

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Prairie grass restoration is another solution I’ve been tracking. Probably because I spent a few years living in a prairie state.

Scientists say the world needs to cut greenhouse gas emissions nearly in half by mid-century to avert catastrophic effects from global warming. Carbon dioxide is the most prevalent greenhouse gas; the amount in the atmosphere has been rising as humans burn fossil fuels. Not only must the world stop releasing more carbon, some CO2 already in the air also must be removed, experts say.

That’s where the prairie comes in.

As part of photosynthesis, plants pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it in their stems, leaves and roots. Unlike trees, grasslands store most of their carbon underground, in their roots and the soil.

And that makes them more reliable “carbon sinks” than forests, according to a 2018 University of California at Davis study. Because carbon is stored in the soil, it is not released back into the atmosphere when grasslands burn, as it is when trees go up in flames.

 

And finally, this has been my obsession since I learned of it years ago: Bringing back the Woolly Mammoth to save the permafrost:

Next week I’ll put together some links to resources that I think are focused on climate solutions. I think we are all well past, what is the climate crisis and what’s caused it, amirite?

x-posted LivingLightlyTV.com

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Sunday Evening Open Thread: Handicapping The First Debate

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Oh, Wow! Turns Out Trump is Not a Genius Businessman

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I know you are all shocked:

Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750.

He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.

As the president wages a re-election campaign that polls say he is in danger of losing, his finances are under stress, beset by losses and hundreds of millions of dollars in debt coming due that he has personally guaranteed. Also hanging over him is a decade-long audit battle with the Internal Revenue Service over the legitimacy of a $72.9 million tax refund that he claimed, and received, after declaring huge losses. An adverse ruling could cost him more than $100 million.

The tax returns that Mr. Trump has long fought to keep private tell a story fundamentally different from the one he has sold to the American public. His reports to the I.R.S. portray a businessman who takes in hundreds of millions of dollars a year yet racks up chronic losses that he aggressively employs to avoid paying taxes. Now, with his financial challenges mounting, the records show that he depends more and more on making money from businesses that put him in potential and often direct conflict of interest with his job as president.

The New York Times has obtained tax-return data extending over more than two decades for Mr. Trump and the hundreds of companies that make up his business organization, including detailed information from his first two years in office. It does not include his personal returns for 2018 or 2019. This article offers an overview of The Times’s findings; additional articles will be published in the coming weeks.

Biden should be able to provoke a meltdown in the debates over this.

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Washington State Referendum, Amendment, etc: Let’s Talk

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This is the a post for anyone who wants to talk Washington State Initiatives Referendum, Consitutional Amendment, etc.

The intention is to provide a jumping off point for discussion, and a place for BJ folks to share their views, not to suggest to anyone how they should vote.

Yutsano graciously agreed to share his views to get us started.

Washington State Initiatives: Let's Talk

This post has been added in the sidebar under Election Action! for easy reference later.

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