Climate Change is Killing the Desert (audio)

Xochitl, Amber Larson, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; A Martinez, Alex Cohen (Take Two/SCPR)

Sunset, Joshua Tree Nat'l Park, Boy Scout Trail head, 5-29-14 (Richard Lui/The Desert Sun)

The future of California and the American Southwest unless we stop corporate radiers

    

It's not getting hotter just less cool, more chaotic

Nearly all of the Joshua trees in Joshua Tree National Forest could disappear in a few decades because of climate change.

 

It's hard to imagine that in the deserts of the American Southwest, a few degrees hotter can drastically affect a place that's already very dry.

Many predictions of rising worldwide temperatures [most of them conservative underestimates] often conjure up images of swelling shorelines flooding beachfront homes and towns like Manhattan and Malibu because of shrinking polar ice caps.

The high Buddhist desert of Ladakh, India in the Himalayas, behind Mt. Everest, here overlooking the lamasery of Tsemo Gompa in the capital of Leh (SylvainBrajeul/flickr.com)

 

(Geoengineeringwatch.org) "Climate engineering" is weather modifcation/warfare that means the collapse of civilization. Look up. Those lines and ugly haze come from "chemtrails."

 

Himalayan desert behind Everest, Zanskar river

But Ian James, environment reporter for The Desert Sun, wrote a three-part investigation on how climate change could drastically affect the flora (plants), fauna (animals), and people (humans and other humanoids like the earthbound-devas or nature spirits and the dreaded djinn) of this arid wilderness.

 

Desert mesa, American Southwest drying up

"Basically in the desert there's very little humidity in the air," said James on Take Two.

"That lack of humidity in the air, in the soil, in the whole region makes it so the hotter temperatures don't have that one other element to bump up against that would make it a little less intense." LISTEN: AUDIO (9:20)

  

Berkeley may use gas pump warnings about global warming

[Increase] awareness. "Chances are a consumer dismissive of climate change won’t notice the label," Brooks said. "The person concerned about climate change will read the label...It acts as a reinforcement...

 

How the insurance industry sees climate change

...America, on the threat climate change posed to the $2-trillion... Climate change: A June 17 Op-Ed... steps to prevent losses related to climate change. Farmers has withdrawn the lawsuits...

 

Tale of passenger pigeon extinction may have had natural twist

(Geoffrey Mohan) The authors wondered how climate and food might have affected the passenger pigeon... it also revealed sharp year-to-year changes in acorn production that could have affected... over the last million years, based on climate, food, and other factors, the authors...

• DVD: Climate Engineering
• Desert Sun: "Joshua trees losing ground"
• Desert Sun: "Struggle for survival"
• Desert Sun: "Vanishing Water" (desertsun.com)
• Island nation bans commercial fishing in part of Pacific

• The US-planned ISIS insurgency continues in Iraq
• SoCal vets express frustration with unrest in Iraq
• Close Calls: Hikers survive Grand Canyon rock slide
• Vast reservoir of water deep below Earth's surface
• Man charged with molesting 5 kids may have other victims
• Searching for Sasquatch in Virginia (southwesttimes.com)
• No worries. We'll just leave California and get On The Road

Ask the Sexpert (audio)

Maya, CC Liu, Amber Larson, Wisdom Quarterly; Ameen Kader, Ashley Byrne (PRI.org)

Should I be touching my own breasts?

A retired doctor has become a popular figure in India after answering hundreds of questions a week about sex.

Dr. Mahinder Watsa, 90, gives males and females of all ages the chance to get answers to personal questions with his column in a popular Indian tabloid newspaper.
 
He practiced for many years as a gynaecologist and trained as a sex therapist in the United States. He first became an advice columnist for an Indian women’s magazine and then in 2005 began writing for Bombay's Mumbai Mirror.

 

Since then he’s answered tens of thousands of questions.

He doesn't need to know, and he'll still be happy

"People ask me, 'Are you making up the questions?' because some of them are really weird," says Dr. Watsa. "And I said, 'No, I don't. What comes in, I answer" [which is mostly about masturbation, rumors, naive ponderings, embarrassment, and unknown consequences].
 
The things people ask about range from questions around the practicalities of sex to issues around sexuality as well as relationships and physical looks.
 

Wait, Indians masturbate to my pornos?

It has caused some controversy in a country that still struggles with prudish attitudes towards sex, but Dr. Watsa’s no-nonsense approach and sense of humor have garnered him quite a following among readers of the paper and online.
 
"The column I think is popular because there are very few people who really attend to this area of their physiology or of their bodies," he adds.

He often finds himself dealing with myths and old wives tales about sex as well as questions relating specifically to the Indian way of life around things like arranged marriages [and the need for virginity or the appearance of it].
 
Dr. Watsa says people are becoming more open about sex, but the dissemination of information in India can be a barrier.

"Unfortunately, sex became a very political subject about four or five years ago, and suddenly there was a lot of hubbub about it, as a result of which sex education was banned in the schools, almost in all states in the country," says Dr. Watsa.

• AUDIO: LISTEN NOW (pri.org)

Don't think about sex, don't think about sex

At one time most of the questions that came in were from men, but more and more women are now writing to him.
 
"They talk about their breasts being small or big, or one recently thought her buttocks were very large," he says.
 
Many women get worried that their husband looking at porn means they’re not interested in sex with them.
 

Prefer the "good ol' days" of colonialism?

"The women are becoming more open and asking how to deal with these problems," he adds. India’s own "Dr. Ruth" answers questions that come in daily. And even though he’s just turned 90 he shows no sign of retiring.
 
"I tell people my head and feet are working and all the other parts are in order, so I suppose I will go on," he says. More

 

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"I want to kill!" - This American Life (audio)

Wisdom Quarterly; "Adam," Sarah Koenig, Ira Glass, ThisAmericanLife.com,  Jan. 10, 2014

"No apparent motive, just kill and kill again/Survive my brutal thrashing, I'll hunt you to the end. My life's a constant battle, the rage of many men. Homicidal maniac!" - Slayer "Kill Again"

 

Adam is a killer, and he knows it. He went to kill in Afghanistan -- with bloodlust inculcated in him by American military training during bootcamp. He is the first person to honestly speak about it. Fortunately, he did it on public radio.
 

SHOW 515: Good Guys

Lots of men think of themselves as "good guys." But what does it actually take to be one, to be a truly good guy?

Act Four: Deep Dark Open Secret

In 2009, a U.S. soldier ("Adam") contacted "This American Life." He offered to send audio dispatches from his military deployment in Afghanistan.
 

He wanted to do a story about what it is really like to go to war and to kill. What he learned when he was over there as a soldier [in the service of America's military-industrial complex] was way more personal and honest than anyone expected.
 

Even Adam had not planned to say as much as he did about how he was trained in bootcamp to WANT and look forward to killing people. He began as an older liberal among young, closed minded, gung ho killers.
 

War crimes, dishonor, moral injury, suicide

Although Sarah Koenig claims Adam never did get to kill anyone, it is clear he did: He killed by shooting humans he was invading, violating, and terrorizing. He shot alongside other Americans and saw targeted victims die but without being able to be sure that it was due to his gunfire.

• PLAY AUDIO
• WARNING: Story may not be appropriate for children.

More than gang killings, Adam called in airstrikes that got many people killed. He lusted after killing unarmed prisoners in his custody. He thought of executing them and shooting noncombatant civilians for no reason other than he had the power to. But he resisted like most other soldiers because he and they feared repercussions if they were caught killing without justification. It was fear of reprisal rather than respect for life that kept him and his fellow soldiers from killing more men, women, and children.

 

Now that he is back in America, he looks forward to being given an excuse to kill someone stateside. He needs a kill under his belt, which is not anything he discusses with VA doctors. He does not consider himself exceptional or psychopathic. In fact, he is sure other veterans kill and like it. Like other soldiers, he has discussed these facts with them. But they ordinarily never talk about it outside of the military. Producer Sarah Koenig explains (20 mins). WAR

COMEDY: "Saturnalia" by Jimmy Dore (audio)

Wisdom Quarterly; Jimmy Dore (jimmydorecomedy.com), Wikipedia edit

Greco-Roman: Ruins of Temple of Saturn (eight columns to the far right), with three columns from the Temple of Vespasian and Titus (left) and the Arch of Septimius Severus (center)

• AUDIO: The Jimmy Dore Show (12-27-13)
• True origins of Xmas: Pagan  "Saturnalia"  orgy

In Roman mythology, Saturn was an agricultural deity who was said to have reigned over the world in the Golden Age, when humans enjoyed the spontaneous bounty of the earth without labor in a state of social egalitarianism. 

 

The sexual revelries of Saturnalia (held around the winter solstice and the famous date of Dec. 25th) were supposed to reflect the conditions of the lost mythical age, not all of them desirable. The Greek equivalent was the Kronia, an Athenian festival held in honor of Cronus (Greek Kronos. More

 

In the most classic and well known version of Greek mythology, Cronus or Kronos (Greek Κρόνος) -- not to be confused with Chronos (the personification of time) -- was the leader and the youngest of the first generation of Titans (Buddhist asuras), divine (deva) descendants of Gaia (Mother Earth or Bhūmi), and Uranus, the sky (space). He overthrew his father and ruled during the mythological Golden Age, until he was overthrown by his own son Zeus and imprisoned in Tartarus.