Archive
I’m A Michigan Girl
Raised in the shade of the white pine….
Great Lakes Ice Coverage Down 71%
You don’t have to tell me because I have seen it with my own eyes but Great Lakes Ice Coverage is down 71% over the last 40 years.
Great Lakes ice coverage declined an average of 71 percent over the past 40 years, according to a report from the American Meteorological Society.
What does this effect besides ice fishing, snowmobile races and ice festivals like Tip Up Town?
Wang told WBEZ-FM in Chicago that diminished ice coverage speeds wintertime evaporation, reducing the lakes’ water levels, which can spur increased and early algae blooms, damage water quality, and accelerate erosion as more shoreline is exposed to waves.
Yep, water levels are very startlingly lower than when I was a kid and our beaches have lost quality due to algae blooms. Condos once build right at the shore with a sea wall to protect them are now a football length from the water with fields of dry lake bed covered in cattails where the water once was. Boat launches that fisherman once used to go perch fishing on the Saginaw Bay are no longer usable because the water levels have dropped so much.
Texas Toast in Michigan YUM!
Rick Perry needs to hang up his boots, it’s over Rickie so just let go. Video from the Ed Show on MSNBC about the CNBC Michigan Debate above. I can now officially laugh at Texans that were warning that Rick Perry could be President. HA HA HA! More on Rick Perry’s disqualifications here: http://www.afroarticles.com/article-dashboard/Article/Richard-Cohen–Rick-Perry-is-Intellectually-Unqualified-To-Be-President/222154 & here: http://www.thepoliticalguide.com/rep_bios.php?category=scandals&rep_id=56615334 This guy is no threat, more of an embarassment to the GOP. I’m still betting Mittens Romney wins the GOP nomination and President Obama wins in the general election with a landslide.
Australia Already Feeling Climate Change
A good article from October but still relavant about how Australia is already experiencing the effects of climate change and why it is one of the first places to do so.
I have come to Australia to see what a global-warming future holds for this
most vulnerable of nations, and Mother Nature has been happy to oblige: Over the
course of just a few weeks, the continent has been hit by a record heat wave, a
crippling drought, bush fires, floods that swamped an area the size of France
and Germany combined, even a plague of locusts. “In many ways, it is a disaster
of biblical proportions,” Andrew Fraser, the Queensland state treasurer, told
reporters. He was talking about the floods in his region, but the sense that
Australia – which maintains one of the highest per-capita carbon footprints on
the planet – has summoned up the wrath of the climate gods is everywhere.
“Australia is the canary in the coal mine,” says David Karoly, a top climate
researcher at the University of Melbourne. “What is happening in Australia now
is similar to what we can expect to see in other places in the
future.”
I know I have seen the effects locally as in less snow, shorter winters and fallen levels of Lake Huron. Everyone used to have snowmobiles in the garage as you needed them every winter, not so now. Condos built at the shoreline now are far from the water. Places we launched boats when I was a kid are now too far inland to do so. Beaches I swam at you can either no longer do so or they are now farther inland and shallow to the point you can sit down in the water but only a toddler could actually swim. There have been too many changes just over decades to ignore or blame entirely on Nestle for stealing Great Lakes water and bottling it to send all over. What changes have you observed?
GOP Education in Michigan
Via Electablog at the Daily Kos:
THIS is obscene:
City fire marshal investigators plan to inspect every Detroit Public Schools classroom after receiving complaints this week about overcrowded classes with more than 50 students.Detroit Fire Department representatives met Thursday with district officials to determine the maximum number of students for every classroom in the district, said Assistant Fire Marshal Osric Wilson.
The fire marshal issued a violation this week at Nolan Elementary-Middle School after receiving a tip that a kindergarten class had 55 students. […]
A Detroit Federation of Teachers’ survey of teachers conducted this month concluded that more than 25% of DPS schools have classrooms that exceed the limits allowed by the union contract, which calls for a maximum of 25 students in kindergarten through third grades, 30 in fourth and fifth grades and 35 in sixth through 12th.
The survey concluded that 437 classes of the district’s nearly 3,500 classes are over the contract limit.
For example, Emerson Elementary’s two sixth-grade classes had 53 and 54 students as of Oct. 18. Farwell Leadership Academy had a seventh-grade class with 50 students as of Oct. 12, according to the survey.
Seriously, can you imagine 55 kindergarteners in ONE classroom? Or 54 sixth-graders?
This is a direct result of the GOP cutting funding to schools to pay for an 86% tax cut to businesses. This is what they think will improve Michigan’s economy. If anyone thinks that decimating our public school system in this way and demonizing teachers is the way to bring our state out of its crisis, they are completely out of touch with what brings businesses to a state.
Shameful.
This is what happens in Michigan when Republicans are elected for public office and yet another fine example of why that Emergency Manager Law has to go. You know I used to say the conservatives in Indiana were far more right wing then the conservatives in Michigan are. No more of that. It’s like they are trying to out do each other as far as which can destroy their states and country faster. A contest the rest of us don’t need.
Bluff collapse at power plant sends dirt, coal ash into Lake Michigan
Oak Creek, WI – A large section of bluff collapsed Monday next to the We Energies Oak Creek Power Plant, sending dirt, coal ash and mud cascading into the shoreline next to Lake Michigan and dumping a pickup truck, dredging equipment, soil and other debris into the lake.
There were no injuries, and the incident did not affect power output from the plant.
When the section of bluff collapsed and slid from a terraced area at the top of a hill down to the lake, Oak Creek Acting Fire Chief Tom Rosandich said, it left behind a debris field that stretched 120 yards long and 50 to 80 yards wide at the bottom.
Aerial images show a trailer and storage units holding construction equipment tumbled like Tonka toy trucks and were swept along with the falling bluff in a river of dirt that ended in the water.
I know I am chiming in on this story a bit late, I’ve known about it far longer ( since Oct 31) but had such an emotional response to the story I thought it better to calm down a bit before talking about it. My first thoughts were will this affect Lola’s drinking water. Certainly, I don’t want my hostess in Inworldz drinking mercury so wanted to contact her first to make sure she was safe. Second response was anger, lots of anger at the lack of regulations that allow this sort of thing to happen. Third, what about my salmon that swim through Lake Michigan on their way to the Michigan rivers where they are caught.
Although some components of coal ash can be recycled into useful products…if it is recycled but what is dangerous about this stuff is that it also contains one or more of the following elements or substances in quantities from trace amounts to several percent: arsenic, beryllium, boron, cadmium, chromium, chromium VI, cobalt, lead, manganese, mercury, molybdenum, selenium, strontium, thallium, and vanadium, along with dioxins and PAH compounds. That’s the stuff you don’t want in drinking water. At this particular plant that had the accident, already some local wells were poisoned enough that they had to provide the people living there with bottled water, now we have this crap in Lake Michigan as well.
It really bothers me that 22% of the world’s freshwater is contained in the Great Lakes yet we treat this important resource so casually like it’s no big deal. We got the sweetheart trash deals that former Republican Governor Engler made using Michigan, that is surrounded by fresh water, as Canada’s trash dump. Coal Ash is also being buried there too that will just leach into the water table in time. Mercury levels in Great Lakes fish and animals are increasing again instead of decreasing. Companies like Nestle are bottling up Great Lakes water under such names as “Ice Mountain” and shipping it nationwide and overseas as well, with high power pumps that they hide in the woods. It’s all so insane.
Yes, all this stuff has to go somewhere but why be so stupid as to locate it where it can do the maximum amount of damage to our water supply? Wouldn’t it be smarter to bury it in some inhabitable desert where there is far less water to contaminate? It would be far easier to keep the coal ash from the water table in desert conditions yet they want to put it in Michigan instead. Just makes me sick and angry just thinking about it.
GM to invest $200 million in Saginaw plant, add 250 jobs
Good news for a change!
General Motors plans to announce an investment on Friday in Saginaw worth more than 250 jobs at the casting plant there, people familiar with the situation said.
The automaker will put more than $200 million into the plant to add the jobs, one of the people said. The new positions are part of the hiring commitments in GM’s new contract with the UAW, in which the automaker said it planned to create or retain about 6,400 U.S. jobs.
The UAW had said Saginaw would get 255 jobs after an investment of $215 million toward casting for a new engine. The work was originally slated for Mexico, the UAW said last month when it was promoting the new labor agreement with GM.
That would be at Saginaw Grey Iron I would assume. Great news but a drop in the bucket compared to the jobs lost there since the 1970s. Yet a step in the right direction. My grandfathers both worked there, all my uncles, my father, brother and many cousins…for my generation we missed out for the most part as that plant was shedding jobs at an alarming rate rather than adding any at that time. My brother was lucky to get in but then took a buyout and moved to Florida as his job was being eliminated.
http://www.freep.com/article/20111026/BUSINESS0101/111026059/
Micheal Moore to Occupy Oakland Tomorrow
Yes, Michigan’s Micheal Moore will be at the Occupy Oakland Demonstration tomorrow. In a post on the Daily Kos he explains why and revisits his life before his first movie, “Roger & Me” and what he has done since. It shows a side of him that not everyone knows about because he hasn’t really publicized that part of his work. Sure those of us on the east side of Michigan know about the turkeys and the Toys for Tots but not many others do. He’s our own regular working guy who made it big taking on issues others in the media either didn’t care or didn’t dare cover. Check it out!
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/10/27/1030542/-Life-Among-the-1?detail=hide
Until that point I had been barely getting by on unemployment, collecting $98 a week. Welfare. The dole. My car had died back in April so I had gone seven months with no vehicle. Friends would take me out to dinner, always coming up with an excuse to celebrate or commemorate something and then picking up the check so I would not have to feel the shame of not being able to afford it.
And now, all of a sudden, I had three million bucks! What would I do with it? There were men in suits making many suggestions to me, and I could see how those without a strong moral sense of social responsibility could be easily lead down the “ME” path and quickly forget about the “WE.”
Occupy Michigan Events
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/10/14/1026389/-Occupy-Michigan:-STATE-WIDE-LINKS?detail=hide
List of Occupy Michigan Events. The Lansing one is my favorite! Micheal Moore often stops by the Traverse City events, as that is local for him now.
Homelessness in Michigan About to Become an Even Bigger Issue
Electablog just posted an update on the issue of Michigan families being cut off from welfare due to new GOP law in the state.
Welfare cuts are back on after U.S. District Judge Paul Borman ruled late today that the new notices sent out this week by the Michigan Department of Human Services provided enough warning and information to 11,162 families scheduled to lose their cash assistance benefits this month.
The revised notices “satisfy the due process concerns,” Borman wrote in his ruling.
~SNIP~
The 11,162 families represent about 40,000 people, two-thirds of whom are teenagers and children. The families had been receiving benefits for at least 48 months, and some had been getting benefits for as long as 10 years.
Can they just get jobs? Not in this economy and with winter coming very soon this decision could be a death sentence for some. One Job for every 16 resumes in Michigan now. Is it any wonder our food banks are running empty?
The Julianna Michigan Show 