Today’s comic by Jen Sorensen is Oregon militants: Patriots or Owl Qaeda?
• L.A.’s storm infrastructure designed to send precious El Niño water to the sea:
In California, we get essentially all of our water in the winter – typically, nearly all of it in just a few big winter storms, each passing through the state in just a few days. Most of that precipitation is stored as snow in the Sierra Nevada until it melts in the spring. Over the past century, the state was plumbed with these basic facts in mind. The “hazardous metropolis” of Los Angeles, as historian Jared Orsi dubbed the city, was made safe for millions of residents by diverting dangerous stormwater runoff directly to the ocean in order to avoid flooding and by importing water for actual use from the Sierra Nevada and the Colorado River.
Now climate change threatens to disrupt this system, which is already overtaxed, especially during a drought.
• See what Stephen Colbert chooses for punctuation since Jeb Bush let his copyright on campaign moniker Jeb! expire in November. But where’s the interrobang?
• Endless war in Afghanistan claims life of another U.S. soldier. The troops remaining are supposedly only in an advisory role, but the line between advisor and combatant is fuzzy, to say the least.
• Our reliance on technology is making us easier to scam.
• Lack of Rey action figures spurs Star Wars: The Force Awakens fans to improvise: The outcry over the lack of Rey action figures—critics use the hashtag #WheresRey to register their disapproval—led some fans to take the paint off the faces of some Bratz dolls, cut and dye their hair, sew them new clothes and repaint their faces to create homemade Rey dolls.
• Twitter plans to announce new feature with 10,000-character limit.
• 2016 earthquakes push Oklahoma officials to issue teensy bit of fracking controls:
After the Oklahoma City area was hit by at least a dozen earthquakes in less than a week, the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, which regulates the state’s oil and gas industry, ordered Monday that several injection well operators reduce wastewater disposal volumes. [...]
Oklahoma’s uptick in tremors in just the past few years is staggering. Prior to the state’s fracking boom, it averaged 1 to 2 earthquakes of a magnitude 3 or higher per year. By 2009, that number rose to 20. By 2013, it jumped to 585. Oklahoma closed 2015 with an estimated 900 earthquakes of a magnitude 3 or higher—that’s an average of nearly three per day.
• On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin rounds up 2016 horse race news, the new executive orders on guns, and notes the Malheur/Mormonism connection. The banal beginnings of some ISIS recruits: the British “bouncy castle” salesman, and the “hacktivist” who crossed over.
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