Where did it go??

You may have scene an older post written about a guy named 'Hot Rod' who built a plywood boat a few years ago. He and his son designed and built a catamaran out of 2 x 4's and plywood from the local home builders supply store and launched it into San Francisco Bay.

Well the 'boat' sat for almost 2 years in a derelict boat anchorage, half the time sitting on mud, and basically never moving. The boat, and I am being nice by calling it that, is so poorly designed that it can not sail and has no engines that are sized for the size of the craft.

For many months it has been the butt of jokes and ridicule as too it's state of construction, but this week things changed....

The 'Rod' as he is called has taken his pride and joy out of the backwater resting place and head to..... Who knows... Really, who knows???? No one has scene the boat and only sporadic sightings from days ago have given some people cause to think that he actually is trying to take the boat to Southern California...

Well this is thought to put the Rod in real danger and the boat is in danger of  breaking up in the Pacific Ocean. It is assumed there is no life boat or equipment on board that would aid in rescue and that there is no communication equipment to be used in the event of disaster...

If I hear more over the coming days I will post, but in the meantime, if you see a lot of floating plywood or a big ugly hulk on a beach in central California, it could be the Flying Hawaiian...

The rich don't understand this...

Rural America's Silent Housing Crisis

Accounting for only 20 percent of the population, residents of more isolated areas struggle to find a safe, affordable place to live—and to make anyone else care.

By Gillian B. White

Conversations about affordable housing are often dominated with the question of how to get lower-income residents in expensive cities—like New York, Los Angeles, or San Francisco (and their surrounding areas)—safe, affordable places to live. That makes sense: Often urban hubs are a good bet for jobs and economic vitality, but they’re also prohibitively expensive for many—creating well-known housing problems. But cities aren’t the only places that are lacking when it comes to adequate housing at affordable prices. In rural America, it's both prices and the terrible condition of existing homes that are problematic.

Few people think about rural communities—not only when it comes to housing issues, but at all. It’s mostly a numbers game. According to data from the Housing Assistance Council (HAC), in 2012 only about 21 percent of Americans lived in rural areas, which means that not many people outside those areas—or about 80 percent of Americans—probably feel much association with rural issues. And that can make it difficult to shed light on the problems that happen there. Making the case to divert funds and attention to parts of the country that house a mere 20 percent of the total population can be an uphill battle, especially in difficult economic times.

It can be hard to understand how finding affordable housing could be an issue in areas where housing is substantially cheaper than it would be in the nearest city or suburb. But the fact of the matter is, despite lower costs of living, income for many in rural areas is also significantly lower thanks to limited economic opportunities and struggling industries, like coal.

“When we are looking at areas that are most challenged economically we're also finding some of the most challenging housing conditions,” says David Dangler, the director of Rural Initiatives at NeighborWorks America, an organization that advocates for affordable housing and acts as a network for nonprofit housing groups. Poverty is high in rural areas, with about 17.2 percent of rural residents living below the poverty line in 2012 versus 14.9 percent nationwide, according to 2012 data from the HAC. “Much of the affordable-housing stock in rural housing areas is old and in need of repair. Many of the people who live there don't have the resources that they need in order to keep the houses in good repair,” says Sheila Crowley, president of the National Low-Income Housing Coalition.

For example, take Lynne Bouknight, who moved back to her childhood home in Elk Creek, Virginia, after her mother moved away for a job. When she was younger, Bouknight says that her father was able to take care of the upkeep of the place—a two-story, grey brick house—tinkering with things and fixing them as they broke. But by the time she was living in it, the house—built in 1949 by her grandfather—began to show its age. “The water went first,” Bouknight remembers. At first it wasn’t so bad she says, she was in good health then, and she could haul water inside after the pump broke, and pick up kindling and timber from her property to make fires on her wood-burning stove. “I could build a fire in about a minute. The colder it is the faster I could build one,” she said chuckling. She had a friend who’d swing by to help her with small maintenance issues and she could visit neighbors and friends for showers and laundry. But then things took a turn for the worse.

The wind began to tear away at the roof, and rip tin off the house. And some of the windows started to give way, too. Her friend, who would help her out with household maintenance, was killed in a hate crime she said. And Bouknight had a stroke. “As the house came apart, my health deteriorated with the house,” she said tearfully. With the extensive damage, it was easy for the elements to take even more of a toll on the property. Bouknight found herself relegated to a small section of her home—living upstairs in her childhood bedroom—the one place where it was dry and where the roof remained in tact.

She tried to get help from the USDA, the group that is largely responsible for administering housing aid to rural communities, but they said they couldn’t do anything to help her rehab her property, she said. Then help came from somewhere else. A woman who worked for a human-service organization called HOPE Inc., agreed to take a look at her situation to see if they might be able to assist. “One day she came out to the house, I wasn’t at home. She looked around and I suppose her heart was touched. She couldn’t believe someone could live in those conditions,” Bouknight said.

With the help of HOPE Inc., which provides housing aid and support for those living in rural areas, Bouknight’s home was salvaged and she received access to what many might consider basic necessities, like running water. The help came just in time, too. Bouknight says with her depleted health, there’s no way she could have carried on with the house in the state it was prior to the intervention.

Bouknight’s hardships might sound extreme, but dangerous or unhealthy housing conditions aren’t an anomaly in many rural areas. Residents who aren’t able to save their homes, or find new homes that they can afford are often forced to double up with family members, or they become homeless, says Crowley. “It's not visible because people aren't on the streets: They're living in cars and they're living in campgrounds." According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, on average there are 14 homeless individuals per every 10,000 people in rural areas versus 29 homeless people per every 10,000 in urban areas.

When it comes to creating new homes, interest is often thin and those that do opt in, face many unique hurdles. “Developers can't count on any kind of municipal infrastructure to help them,” says Dangler. When it comes to building, things that are often taken for granted in more urban areas, like water, sewers, and even access to quality roads, aren’t guaranteed, which can make building a quality house much more challenging."

Aid is somewhat sparse too, for both building and rehabilitating properties. “There's a handful of programs that serve people in rural communities. They tend to be much smaller in scale in terms of the amount of money than the HUD programs. They also tend to be lost in the bureaucracy,” says Crowley. That’s particularly problematic because “rural areas have been traditionally more dependent upon public subsidies and publicly-funded programs than their urban counterparts,” according to Dangler. “There can be a disproportionate pain in rural areas as we attempt to right our financial books by cutting back on federal-housing programs.”

And in fact, funds for rural housing provided by the USDA via the 502 Direct Loan program—one of the government-aid programs for purchasing or rehabilitating homes in rural areas, cited by several people as a resource for very-low-income residents—have decreased over the past few years, dropping from about $2.1 billion in 2010 to around $828 million in 2013.* Some still say that there isn't enough money, and some even point to the current administration specifically. Jim King, the president of Fahe, a nonprofit housing organization that serves Appalachia, says that the problem is more indicative of the lower prioritization of rural issues overall than it is about one administration in particular. “In light of all the other issues, this is just one that lays further down for almost everybody,” says King. And finding funds from other agencies for rural projects can be difficult and highly competitive, he says, leaving rural residents in a tough spot.

That may be why many rural communities are taking the task of rural revitalization into their own hands with the help of rural-focused nonprofits that help provide everything from advocacy to actual loans. More work done by these groups is cropping up all over the country: In Appalachia Knox Housing Partners built an affordable senior-housing complex. And NeighborWorks of West Vermont successfully helped rehab hundreds of homes for increased energy efficiency, a cause that's particularly important for low-income, rural residents. Some nonprofits are also leveraging what they call sweat-equity, which calls for community members to actively participate in the manual labor of creating and repairing not only their own homes, but the homes of those who live around them as well—decreasing the financial burden of building while, hopefully, forging strong community ties.

Rural housing advocates are also urging residents to consider a type of middle ground between homeownership and renting—manufactured housing. These, prefabricated homes, commonly referred to as trailer homes, are smaller than traditional homes, but offer most of the amenities of a house at a lower price. Rural areas typically have a higher rate of homeownership than the national average, about 72 percent versus 66 percent in 2012, according to HAC. And the desire to own, rather than rent is a hard one to shake, especially when few rental properties exist in these communities. “Because there's such a lack of rental housing, manufactured housing in some aspects fills that void. That is a foot in both worlds,” says Lance George, director of research at HAC. That is, if people can manage to get over the stigma once associated with these properties.

Many housing experts agreed that often the case for investing in rural housing on a large scale feels like a difficult one to make. In a way, it seems counterintuitive: funneling money into communities where population numbers are stagnant, if not declining, as more young residents head to cities and suburbs in search of jobs. And some wonder: Why don’t others just leave, too? But some residents don’t have the means, and others feel tied to their homes, communities, and lifestyles. Many are also older. The population of rural America is aging more rapidly than the nation as a whole, thanks in part to the exodus of young people. That means rural residents are less likely to pick up and move, but they will also require updated homes, facilities, and new infrastructure that can allow them to live safely and access services, like hospitals, which they will probably use more frequently as they age.
Rural housing advocates admit that the task of revitalizing rural communities isn’t a small or simple one. But that doesn’t mean that organizations should shy away, give up, or turn a blind eye says King. “The stakes are very high in rural places if we don't figure some stuff out. People and places shouldn't be disposable.”

What are the poor people doing???

Romney built expensive homes after 2012 loss

By Matt Viser

On a recent weekday, a half-dozen construction workers crowded onto a small plot of land in this pricey community, banging away on an 11,000-square-foot house with expansive oceanfront views that will soon replace one a fraction of the size.

There’s a large master suite, a room for all the beach gear — and a car elevator. Outside, scrawled in graffiti on a wall separating the property from the beach, was a message touting Mitt Romney for president.

Two years ago, Mitt Romney didn’t think he would run for political office again. And in the aftermath of his bitter defeat in the presidential campaign, he embarked on something of a real estate spree. He simultaneously began building two multimillion-dollar homes, one here on the Pacific Ocean and another outside Salt Lake City. He also bought a third, a slopeside ski chalet in Park City, Utah.

For the first time in more than a decade, unencumbered by political considerations, the two-time presidential candidate and former private equity executive was free to spend his many millions without concern of how it might look. But now that he’s considering a third presidential bid, the monuments of his wealth could become a political inconvenience, particularly as one of his key themes has been America’s growing income divide.

Romney is traveling on Wednesday to Mississippi State University, a campus in the country’s poorest state, where aides say he will outline his vision for a better America.

Romney, whose last presidential bid was hampered by his image of excessive privilege and insensitivity, may recognize the trouble his real estate holdings could cause in another campaign.

He is taking steps to shed some of his property, including retaining a broker who is currently showing the La Jolla home to potential buyers, according to a Romney aide. The aide would not disclose the asking price or explain why the former Massachusetts governor and his wife, Ann, want to sell the home after more than four years of city permitting, hearings, and construction.

In all, Romney has four homes. All of them are at least twice as large as the average home in the United States. They contain spas and hot tubs, and garages to hold up to four cars. They’ve built kitchens and dining rooms large enough to accommodate their large, sprawling family (5 sons, 5 daughters-in-law, and 23 grandchildren and counting).

“He wants to be close to his family,” said Ron Kaufman, a longtime Romney confidant. “There’s nothing more important to him than his kids and grandkids. . . . And if you could afford a house, and you’re as close as the Romneys are to their kids, that’s what you do.”

Romney’s plans to tear down and rebuilt his home in La Jolla were already underway during his last campaign. But since he lost the 2012 election, Romney has also purchased a six-bedroom home that was listed for $8.9 million in Park City, Utah, and he’s built another 5,900-square-foot home 30 miles away near Salt Lake City.

He still has his New Hampshire vacation home on Lake Winnipesaukee, but last year sold his condominium in Belmont for $1.2 million, cutting his remaining ties to Massachusetts and raising questions about whether his 2016 campaign would again be headquartered in Boston.

“During the campaign neither Ann nor I had any time to think about home projects,” Romney said in an interview a year after the 2012 election. “But now that the campaign is over, we have a little more time.”

The new home in California includes an infamous “car elevator,” first reported in 2012 by Politico and used by Romney’s opponents to cast him as out of touch. A May 2013 planning document described it this way: “The proposed garage will have the appearance of a two-car garage, but will include a lift inside that will rotate two cars below grade to the basement area.”

Building the home was the culmination of a long battle, which at times became heated with neighbors who said Romney’s new home — much larger than his former one — was out of character with the neighborhood. Some neighbors also complained that he was incorporating square footage from a beach long believed to be public in order to build a larger home. Romney’s home is on a street where houses are clumped together on small lots, with cherished views of the Pacific Ocean.

“It was contentious,” said Anthony A. Ciani, a local architect and the chief opponent of Romney’s expansion. “The issue was the bulk of it compared to the houses right next to it. It’s not compatible with the gingerbread houses that are immediately adjacent. It’s two, three times bigger than those.”

A group of neighbors appealed to the state, but local and state officials ruled in the Romneys’ favor, a process followed by the Los Angeles Times. Their former 3,000-square-foot home has been demolished — except for a swimming pool and spa — and a new one is under construction.

Planning documents call for a first floor that includes a library, and a large combined living room and dining room. The basement includes an exercise room, recreation room, and a room to hold the beach gear. Outside there will be a wraparound porch, as well as several palm trees, and a mixture of shrubs — boxwoods, coffeeberry, and California blue sage — to cover the property.

The work is expected to be completed by the end of the year, although it is unclear whether the Romneys will move in or find a buyer.

“Mitt and Ann’s plans are firm,” Matthew Peterson, the Romneys’ San Diego-based attorney, said in an e-mail. “They will be completing the construction of the home by the end of the year, but no decision has been made at this time whether to keep it, or sell it.”

He said that the home has been shown to potential buyers already, but “it is the Romneys’ expectation that if the home were to be sold, it would best be sold after it is completed.”

Romney’s wealth defined him in 2012, with a mixture of inadvertent comments, a reluctance to talk about his successful business career, and a video showing him disparaging 47 percent of Americans who rely on government assistance.

In a Washington Post-ABC News poll taken shortly before the 2012 election, 53 percent of likely voters said that Romney’s policies would favor the wealthy, with only 34 percent saying he would favor the middle class. Romney often seemed more comfortable talking with donors than he did in diners.


But those close to Romney have long described him as far more frugal than the caricature of him suggests. He frequently flies in coach, carrying his own bags. He repairs winter gloves with duct tape, refuses to spend money on apps for his iPad, and has a go-to meal that consists of a home-made peanut butter and honey sandwich.

Romney is donating his $50,000 honorarium from Wednesday’s speech to charity, a contrast with Hillary Rodham Clinton, who collects fees that are five times higher. Clinton, too, has struggled in talking about her wealth, saying she was once “dead broke” while in her $5 million home.

“It’s going to be hard for Hillary Clinton to make Mitt Romney’s wealth a fruitful line of attack, with her multimillion dollar mansions in Georgetown and Chappaqua and her jet-setting lifestyle of the rich and famous,” said a Romney aide, who declined to be identified.


But even if he is modest in some of his personal spending decisions, one area Romneydoes splurge on is real estate. His properties are all close to where his five sons are living. Every summer, they all gather at the home in Wolfeboro, N.H., and they spent last Christmas at the home in Deer Valley, where the massive stone fireplace was large enough to hold stockings for nearly two dozen grandchildren.

In August 2013, a holding company managed by Ann Romney purchased the home in Park City that had been listed at $8.9 million. The 8,730 square-foot home — which has six bedrooms, eight bathrooms, an outdoor hot tub and a sauna — was once featured in Architectural Digest, showcasing blond wood, two-story windows, and a chandelier made from antlers.

A Romney aide said that he co-owned the home with L.E. Simmons, a prominent Romney donor who runs a Houston-based private equity firm.

The Romneys also bought property in Holladay, Utah, where they tore down a smaller home and built a 5,900-square-foot house that features a fountain, terraces, a gazebo, a fire pit, and a spa, according to plans reviewed by the Salt Lake Tribune.

The plans also called for a hidden room, an 11-foot-long area masked by a bookshelf that swings open. But Romney told the Globe that it was much less mysterious than initial news reports suggested.

“It’s a closet where we plan on keeping the copying machine, and the printer, and paper,” he said, laughing. “Not even a lock on the door. It’s hardly a secret room.”

Climate denial

Climate denial gets a billion-dollar boost: Why the Kocks’ 2016 spending spree could mean planetary disaster 

The Kocks' major campaign financing push could undermine climate action right when we need it the most 

By Lindsay Abrams

The news that the Kock brothers’ plan to funnel nearly a billion dollars into the 2016 elections is bad news for anyone who cares about the outsized role of money in politics, for anyone who doesn’t want to see an American dominated by Republicans, and definitely for anyone who plans to keep living on this planet.

It’s what Joe Romm at Climate Progress calls ”a declaration of dependence on fossil fuels, a figurative declaration of war on a livable climate and the health and well-being of countless future generations” and my colleague Elias Isquith describes as an effort to “design a right-wing machine to dominate American politics in the near- and medium-term future” — which, if successful, will be more than enough time to set Earth on an irreversible path to catastrophic climate change.

This is not really an exaggeration. The yearlong project of hundreds of scientists to assess the current state of climate change concluded that its impacts are already being felt “on all continents and across the oceans,” and that we’re increasing our chances of experiencing “severe, pervasive and irreversible” consequences the more we continue to emit greenhouse gases. The absolute best-case scenario would be for us to reach peak emissions by the end of this decade, and abandon them entirely by the end of the century. That’s going to require the kind of effort that should have started decades ago, and, at this late hour, a near-Herculean push for major reform. We’ve literally run out of time for climate denial.

And yet climate denial is one of the many products of Kock Industries, which a 2010 Greenpeace report identified as a ”financial kingpin of climate science denial and clean energy opposition.” Since at least 2005, both the company, its foundations and the Kock family itself have spent millions quietly influencing the climate debate, often in insidious ways: a typical example has the Charles G. Kock foundation funding a climate denying scientist to write a flawed study undermining previous studies about the risks climate change poses to polar bears, which was then broadcast on the websites of other Kock-affiliated groups. The entire “ClimateGate” non-scandal, as another, was hyped by at least 20 different Kock-funded groups as a coordinated attempt to cast doubt on climate scientists. At a time when the majority of moderate Republicans say they believe that climate change is happening, and Republican leaders struggle to find a way to deny basic science without being mocked, the Kock billion could help make denial acceptable again.

As Romm points out, the Kocks’ mission goes well beyond preventing future action on climate change — they’re dead-set on reversing every modicum of progress we’ve made so far. That extends to renewable energy policies of the sort that are climate friendly but also solidly bipartisan — the sort of thing even Iowa’s Tea Party Senator Joni Ernst can get behind. Yet what Kock-affiliated groups like ALEC and the American Energy Alliance manage to do is take policies that save jobs and strengthen (clean) energy security and make them all about President Obama’s agenda: any show of support for clean energy, goes their pro-fossil fuel line of reasoning, is a direct endorsement of climate action/the existence of climate change, and thus cannot be tolerated.

That viewpoint contradicts the 46 percent of Tea Party Republicans told the Yale Project on Climate Communication that they support tax rebates for people who purchase energy-efficient vehicles and solar panels. And it goes against the majority of Americans that surveys show support government regulation of carbon emissions — yet another thing that the Kocks have dedicated their money to preventing. The Kock way forward only has room for that which serves the Kocks’ fossil fuel-powered self-interest, and, if we let it, their new spending push is going to go far toward ensuring that we’ll keep on denying that climate change is a problem, until it grows so big that no amount of money will be able to convince us it’s all a hoax. By that point, of course, it’ll also be too late.

Becoming A Police Target

The Prosecutor Who Filed Murder Charges Against The Cops Is Becoming A Police Target

by Nicole Flatow

At least professionally, the Bernalillo County District Attorney’s office has already paid for filing murder charges against two cops who shot and killed a homeless man in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Just a day after DA Kari Brandenburg announced for the first time in recent memory that she would pursue criminal charges against cops for an on-duty deadly shooting, there was another police shooting in the city, which has seen a spate of fatal police shootings since 2010 at eight times the rate of New York City.

And when a prosecutor from Brandenburg’s office went to the scene and sought to attend an investigative briefing, as prosecutors had been doing for years as part of their collection of evidence, police wouldn’t let her in. They claimed that now that the DA’s office had filed criminal charges against a cop, they had a “conflict of interest” and should be excluded.

“Clearly, this could compromise the integrity of the investigation of this shooting,” an outraged Brandenburg told KRQE of the police department’s behavior.

But this isn’t the only way Brandenburg may have paid for her decision to file murder charges. Buried deep in an expansive New Yorker report on Albuquerque’s investigation of police shootings, reporter Rachel Aviv lays out how Brandenburg may have faced other personal pressures aimed at intimidating her out of using her enforcement powers.

As the nation grapples to figure out why cops are so rarely punished for using deadly force, the story of Albuquerque is a window into what can happen when local officials do try to punish their own police for perceived wrongdoing.

Last October, Brandenburg told an attorney for the police union that she was considering filing charges against the cops who killed James Boyd, a homeless schizophrenic man approached by the officers for sleeping in the Albuquerque foothills. “Within weeks, Brandenburg found herself the target of an investigation by the Albuquerque Police Department,” Aviv explains.

The investigation related to theft by Brandenburg’s son, who had stolen money from friends to feed his heroin addiction. Brandenburg had offered to pay back the victims of the theft, and somewhere along the way, police developed a claim that Brandenburg had bribed witnesses related to the case.
A detective working on the case admitted in a recording that the claims were “super-weak — it’s probably not gonna go anywhere,” but “it’s gonna destroy her career.” Aviv writes:

A week after the investigation became public, Brandenburg told me that she would continue as district attorney, despite calls for her to leave the office. When I asked her if she saw the investigation as a form of intimidation, a way to prevent her from indicting the officers who shot Boyd, she said, “I think right now it’s best if other people connect the dots.” 

On January 12th, Brandenburg filed counts of murder against the two officers who shot Boyd. The case will now go before a district judge, who will determine if there is probable cause to send the officers to trial. At a press conference announcing the charges, Brandenburg said, “I am not going to be intimidated.”

Despite this perceived intimidation, Brandenburg has some reason to feel more empowered than most prosecutors most of the time who are mulling filing charges against their own police departments. Albuquerque has faced a rash of police shootings that has garnered national attention. The 37 police shootings that have rocked the small city since 2010 engendered a 10-hour protest months before events unfolded in Ferguson, Missouri. The cops involved in many of these shootings were hardly punished at all, with officers in some cases merely suspended for three days. And in the wake of all of this, a scathing U.S. Department of Justice report found rampant constitutional violations in police use of force.

The city is now in the final stages of entering into an agreement with the Justice Department to improve some of its police practices. And part of what will become a court-enforceable agreement if approved by a judge is a mandate that “charges be filed against a shooting officer if they are warranted,” according to KRQE’s Jeff Proctor.

Nonetheless, while in most cities like Ferguson it has been the community members who have called for a special prosecutor to investigate police shootings to avoid the bias of working with police on a regular basis, it is now the local police in Albuquerque who are asking for a special prosecutor to replace Brandenburg. And they only started asking after she filed charges against a police officer for the very first time.

“Given recent incidents,” Chief Administrative Officer Robert Perry wrote in a letter to Brandenburg, “it is imperative the Community have confidence in the Police Department, prosecution, and justice system.”

On the Verge

The Oceans Are on the Verge of Mass Extinction. Here’s How to Avoid It.

by Tom Philpott

We land-based creatures live in the midst of a massive extinction crisis, just the sixth one over the past half billion years. What about the oceans? A much-discussed, wide-ranging recent Science study (paywalled) has good news: Sea critters are currently faring much better than their land counterparts, which are going extinct at a rate 36 times higher. (That number is likely exaggerated, the authors note, because scientists have done a much better job of cataloging land critters than sea critters.)

Tackling the over-fishing problem will be no mean feat, given the expected rise of the human population to 9 billion by 2050, but it’s probably doable.

But the report also brings horrible news: Between over-fishing and habitat destruction (think acidification, coastal development, warming, coral destruction, dead zones from fertilizer runoff, etc.), the oceans may be on the brink of their own extinction catastrophe. (The New York Times’ Carl Zimmer has more details here; Vox’s Brad Plumer has a good analysis here.) Today’s marine extinction rates look eerily similar to the “moderate” land-based ones just before the Industrial Revolution, the authors warn. “Rates of extinction on land increased dramatically after this period, and we may now be sitting at the precipice of a similar extinction transition in the oceans.”

What to do? Tackling the over-fishing problem will be no mean feat, given the expected rise of the human population to 9 billion by 2050, but it’s probably doable. One place to start is smarter fish farming. Globally, about half of seafood consumed comes from farms, but much of it actually harms the oceans. Salmon farms, for example, rely on sucking up mass quantities of wild fish for feed — it takes at least three pounds of anchovies, sardines, menhaden, and other “forage fish” to deliver a pound of farmed salmon (not to mention the waste problem created when you confine thousands of big fish loose together).

And Asian shrimp farms — source of nearly 90 percent of the shrimp consumed in the US — have been plunked down atop what had been highly productive coastal ecosystems called mangrove forests. According to the United Nations, as much as a third of the globe’s mangroves have been destroyed since 1980 — and shrimp and other forms of aquaculture account for more than half that loss.

But there are ways to improve fish farming. Filter-feeding species like oysters and clams — which get their nutrients by filtering out plankton and other stuff suspended in the water — require no feed and can enhance coastal ecosystems. And there are farming systems (both ancient and new-fangled) that combine several species and even land-based crops to generate lots of high-quality food with few inputs and little waste. Finally, my colleagues Maddie Oatman and Brent Brownell have documented a successful effort to farm top-quality trout — normally a fish-eating fish — with vegetarian feed made mainly of (non-gross) food waste.

Then there’s that oft-repeated, little-heeded advice to choose seafood low on the trophic scare — that is, fish and other sea critters that eat plants and plankton, not other fish. Oysters, clams, and mussels are all good examples. And instead of choosing farmed salmon, go with the little fish that gets fed to them. To that end, here are two recipes for sardines — trust me, they’re delicious.

Now, as tricky as it will be to cut back on overfishing by convincing fish farmers to mend their ways and consumers to change their habits, the even bigger challenge will be to stop trashing the place all of these critters call home. Habitat degradation, according to the Science authors, is the main trigger for the extinction wave we’re now seeing on land, and is probably the biggest threat to cause a similar catastrophe at sea. “If you cranked up the aquarium heater and dumped some acid in the water, your fish would not be very happy,” Malin L. Pinsky, a marine biologist at Rutgers University and an author of the report, told The Times’ Zimmer. “In effect, that’s what we’re doing to the oceans.” Of course, both warming and acidification are the direct result of our fossil fuel habit — the same force that’s generating potentially catastrophic climate change up here on land. There’s no saving the oceans without solving that problem.

Poverty Is Rising

Poverty Is Rising Much Faster in Suburbs Than in Cities

by Katie Rose Quandt

Years into an economic recovery, millions of Americans continue to struggle to make ends meet. In 2013, 48.7 million people — 15.5 percent of the population — lived in poverty, according to a report from the US Census Bureau. And a Brookings Institute analysis of 68 large US metro areas found the poor population increased significantly from 2007-2013 in all but one of them.

But the location of the struggling households within these metro areas goes against our ingrained notions about poverty and the inner-city. So far this century, more than two-thirds of the poverty increase occurred in households located in the suburbs, not the cities proper. In fact, in 2013, suburban poverty levels exceeded those of urban areas: 56 percent of people living in poverty in major metro areas lived in the suburbs.

Suburban communities are not equipped to deal with their rapidly rising poverty rates. As Elizabeth Kneebone, co-author of the Brookings report, told The Atlantic, “Many of these communities lack the infrastructure, safety-net supports, and resources to address the needs of a growing poor population, which can make it that much harder for poor residents to connect to the kinds of opportunities that can help them get out of poverty in the long run.” Suburbs generally have poorer access to public transit and fewer social services than neighboring cities.

In a recent post in The New York Times’ Motherlode blog, Jennifer Swartvagher describes the constant stress and anxiety of suburban poverty. She pieces together freelance assignments that “barely earn enough to fill my gas tank” and worries that her children lack the birthday presents, clothes and gadgets of their middle-class classmates:

It is amazing how life can be turned upside down in such a short period of time. We were confident in our decision to have a large family. We never expected my husband’s six-figure salary to disappear. Instead, quicker than you can say the word “downsizing,” it was gone. A long year of unemployment depleted all our savings, as well as the money put away for retirement. My husband took a new position with a huge pay cut, and freelance writing doesn’t pay the bills. Sure, most families can get through this scenario once. It is much harder when unemployment strikes three times in a short period of time…

…My husband and I walk a tightrope in a constant balancing act trying to figure out if we should pay the phone bill or put gas in the car. Surely, we are not the only ones trying to stay afloat in the current economy, but I cannot tell who is walking a path similar to ours. Suburban poverty does not jump out and slap you in the face. It is the silent stigma we carry with us.

Little Bright Spot

A bright spot can be seen on the left side of Rhea in this image. The spot is the crater Inktomi, named for a Lakota spider spirit.

Inktomi is believed to be the youngest feature on Rhea (949 miles or 1527 kilometers across). The relative youth of the feature is evident by its brightness. Material that is newly excavated from below the moon's surface and tossed across the surface by a cratering event appears bright. But as the newly exposed surface is subjected to the harsh space environment, it darkens. This is one technique scientists use to date features on surfaces.

This view looks toward the trailing hemisphere of Rhea. North on Rhea is up and rotated 21 degrees to the left. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 29, 2013.

The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.0 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Rhea. Image scale is 6 miles (10 kilometers) per pixel.      

Contemplative Janus

Janus (111 miles or 179 kilometers across) seems to almost stare off into the distance, contemplating deep, moonish thoughts as the F ring stands by at the bottom of this image.


From this image, it is easy to distinguish Janus' shape from that of a sphere. Many of Saturn's smaller moons have similarly irregular shapes that scientists believe may give clues to their origins and internal structure. Models combining the dynamics of this moon with its shape imply the existence of mass inhomogeneities within Janus. This would be a surprising result for a body the size of Janus. By studying more images of Janus, scientists may be able confirm this finding and determine just how complicated the internal structure of this small body is.


This image is roughly centered on the side of Janus which faces away from Saturn. North on Janus is up and rotated 3 degrees to the right. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 28, 2012.


The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 54,000 miles (87,000 kilometers) from Janus. Image scale is 1,700 feet (520 meters) per pixel.

Death on the water?

Rio official says there's 'no plan B' for Olympic sailing

By JENNY BARCHFIELD

Rio de Janeiro Olympic organizers said Tuesday they have "no plan B" for the 2016 games' sailing competitions, despite a recent admission by the state's top environment official that it will be impossible to meet pledges to clean up the raw sewage- and trash-filled waters where the events are to be staged.

Mario Andrade, spokesman of the Rio 2016 organizing committee insisted the sailing competitions "will be held in the Guanabara Bay, under the best possible Olympic conditions."

Guanabara Bay has become a hot-button issue ahead of the 2016 games. It stinks of raw sewage and is dotted with abandoned couches, refrigerators and animal carcasses as well as, at low tide, with islands of human waste. Athletes have described the bay as an "open sewer" and raised concerns about hepatitis and other illnesses, as well as the possibility of potentially catastrophic high-speed collisions with floating detritus.

Brazil's most respected health research institute said late last year it had found a drug-resistant super-bacteria on a beach near where the sailing competitions will get underway.

While Rio officials have maintained that cleanup efforts were on track, Rio's new environment secretary, Andre Correa, acknowledged Friday there was no way to meet promises to slash by 80 percent the amount of sewage and trash that flow into the bay daily by the time the games are held.

"Removing 80 percent of the pollutants? It's not going to happen. It's not going to happen," Correa told reporters at a news conference on Friday. He said that a nearly $4 billion investment would be needed to ensure full basic sanitation in all the communities that surround the bay, adding that there was no timetable for such a project.

Andrade, on the other hand, insisted authorities are on target and suggested the apparently contradictory positions might be the result of semantics. Andrade said the initial promise was to boost sewage treatment in the cities that surround the bay to 80 percent — not to reduce by 80 percent the amount of pollution entering the waters.

"They are technical differences that in some case can appear big but are in fact subtle," he said, adding that when the Olympic bid was formulated in 2007, just 11 percent of total sewage produced in the cities that hug the bay was treated. Now it stands at around 50 percent, he said.

The official Olympic sustainability management plan calls for the construction of eight so-called river treatment units which would filter out "between 80 and 85 percent of the pollution that reaches the bay." With only 18 months before the Olympics start, only two such units have been built.

"As far as the Guanabara Bay is concerned, what I wanted to say here today is that everything's on track, everything's is progressing," Andrade said. "There is no plan B... There will not be any televisions floating in the sailing events."

Biologist Mario Moscatelli, who has been campaigning for a clean-up of the bay and other Rio waterways for decades, said he's seen "zero progress" on the ground.

"What was unthinkable is happening," said Moscatelli, who oversees projects to bring back mangrove forests along the bay and who flies over bay on a monthly basis. "Once we got the Olympics, I thought the authorities here would be shamed into action.

"I dreamed of seeing the bay, if not clean, then on the way to being cleaned up," he said. "I'm now seeing that dream transformed into my worst nightmare."