Welcome! "What's Happenin'?" is a casual community diary (a daily series, 8:30 AM Eastern on weekdays, 10 AM on weekends and holidays) where we hang out and talk about the goings on here and everywhere.
We welcome links to your writings here on dkos or elsewhere, posts of pictures, music, news, etc.
Just about anything goes, but meta and pie fights are not welcome here. This is a community diary and a friendly, peaceful, supportive place for people to interact.
Everyone who wants to join in peaceful interaction is very welcome here.
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Good Morning!
"Kind of Blue"
If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme. Silent nameless men with unadorned hearts. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It's the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and a daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act. Don DeLillo
Drop in any time day or night to say hello.
News
What is the value of this?
-65,000 acres of land, 46,000 in Plumas and Lassen National Forests
-15,million trees on pubilc land alone, some trees were 400 years old
-critical habitat reserved for California spotted owl, the Northern goshawk, the American martin
-among many other species.
would this be enough?
$55 million cash and a conveyance of 22,500 acres of land in California owned by Sierra Pacific.
U.S. Attorney's office reaches $122.5 million settlement for the 2007 Moonlight Fire
The Moonlight Fire ignited on the 2007 Labor Day holiday as a result of logging operations by industry giant Sierra Pacific Industries and its contractor. Two employees operated bulldozers in a remote area on a red flag warning day — a condition of high fire danger declared by the National Weather Service. The fire ignited when the track or blade of one of the bulldozers struck a rock and created sparks that ignited the surrounding dry ground fuels. [...] the designated fire watch left the work area and drove 30 minutes away to get a soda. When he returned over an hour later, there was a 100-foot wall of smoke billowing from the work area.
Research backs up claims of medical marijuana's benefits
Over a dozen years, California's historic experiment in medical marijuana research brought new science to the debate on marijuana's place in medicine. State-funded studies - costing $8.7 million - found pot may offer broad benefits for pain from nerve damage from injuries, HIV, strokes and other conditions.
From the U.S. with love - burrowing owls go to Canada
The program is helping. In 2008 there were just four known pairs of the burrowing owls left from the species that had flourished there decades earlier.
But this year, 65 known pairs have been counted on the depot's sage and grass lands
Landmark Family Farmers Lawsuit Grows
Prominent Allies Join Effort to Reinstate Challenge to Monsanto Patents
WASHINGTON - July 18 - Eleven prominent law professors and fourteen renowned organic, Biodynamic®, food safety and consumer non-profit organizations have filed separate briefs with the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit arguing farmers have the right to protect themselves from being accused of patent infringement by agricultural giant Monsanto. The brief by the law professors and the brief by the non-profit organizations were filed in support of the seventy-five family farmers, seed businesses, and agricultural organizations representing over 300,000 individuals and 4,500 farms that last year brought a protective legal action seeking a ruling that Monsanto could never sue them for patent infringement if they became contaminated by Monsanto's genetically modified seed.
Drone News
US Families of Drone Victims, Rights Groups File Lawsuit
"Illegal, out of control, and must end”
The lawsuit contends that the authorization of drone strikes which lead to the death of the three US citizens violated the US Constitution and international law.
The ACLU and the CCR contend that the drone strikes were part of a broader practice of extrajudicial “targeted killing” by the US and an assault on constitutional rights and due process.
ACLU to Obama: You Can't Just Vaporize Americans Without Judicial Process
"This suit is an effort to enforce the Constitution's most fundamental guarantee, the guarantee of due process," said Jamil Jaffer, Deputy Legal Director of the ACLU on a conference call with reporters. "Ten years ago extrajudicial killing by the United States was exceptional. Now it's routine."
Arts & Culture
It's becoming difficult to separate arts and culture news from environmental issues.
Yale's 360 has an article on
Maya Lin designer of the Vietnam Memorial
Maya Lin: A Memorial to a Vanishing Natural World
The designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is now focused on the mass extinction of species,
a threat she is highlighting on an interactive Web site. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, Maya Lin talks about her “What is Missing” project, which she calls her “last memorial.”
By Diane Toomey
Culture Monster
ALL ARTS ALL THE TIME
Artists against Fracking
WHY IS FRACKING DANGEROUS?
Minimalist Photography 101
Minimalist, Contemporary and Experimental Photography by stevej
Blogs of Interest
It kills 5 million people per year: 'comparable to smoking or obesity'+
by xxdr zombiexx
This will wake you up like a strong cup of coffee.
Envision… a cyber home with a bold vision of a better world, and a determination to create it.
Another world is possible.
We will investigate strategies for building personal and community empowerment as a means of lessening the influence of corporate power and increasing equality.
"There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why... I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?"
~ Robert F. Kennedy
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