The start of 2012 brings with it a new year of skywatching, and lunar enthusiasts are gearing up for a stunning lineup of full moons. But, where does the tradition of full moon names come from?Tonight's full moon is the Full Wolf Moon which will reach maximum on January 9th (technically tomorrow) at 2:30 a.m. EST. The association of wolf with a full moon has cross-cultural connotations, particularly with superstitions about what else happens involving wolves, people, and full moons. Everyone, enjoy the light show and sing along with Warren Zevon. A-hoo!
Full moon names date back to Native Americans of a few hundred years ago, of what is now the northern and eastern United States. To keep track of the changing seasons, these tribes gave distinctive names to each recurring full moon. Their names were applied to the entire month in which each occurred.
There were some variations in the moon names, but in general, the same ones were used throughout the Algonquin tribes from New England, continuing west to Lake Superior.
European settlers followed their own customs and created some of their own names. Here is a list of all of the full moon names, as well as the dates and times for 2012: (Unless otherwise noted, all times are given in Eastern Standard Time.)
Gov. Rick Snyder and Detroit Mayor Dave Bing insisted Friday that a light-rail line for Detroit is still possible, backtracking on their decision last month to pull passenger trains out of the mix of modernized transit options for the city.So it's not a definite yes, but the project has the status of "not dead yet." That's cause for hope.
Snyder and Bing said they're supporting a plan for a shorter rail line from downtown to New Center that would be built as part of an upgraded system of rapid-transit buses crisscrossing the city and suburbs.
"We see light rail as a part of regional transportation, so light rail is not dead," Bing said at a news conference at his office with Snyder and U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. "It's back on the table."
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The mayor and governor said a less-ambitious rail system, about 3.4 miles long, could still be built, largely with private funding through the M-1 Rail group of investors.
In order to secure federal funding, the group was given 90 days to produce a study showing it could make the line work.
The City Council on Monday is expected to vote on a scaled-back proposal for the Troy Transit Center weeks after the panel failed to award a contract to begin the federally funded project.The way this article is written, it seems that it might pass by one vote. That would be enough.
The resolution released late Friday reduces expenditures by about $2 million and was proposed by Councilman Dane Slater. "The integrity of the project is still there," said Slater, adding the new plan is based on a smaller facility with fewer features.
"It's my hope that through these concessions we can get a majority vote on this project and move it forward."
The Republican candidates are a bunch of clowns. Rick Perry is so dumb, a zombie was walking down the street in Des Moines the other day, saw Governor Goodhair, and turned away to look elsewhere for brains. Newt Gingrich doesn't even have the organization to get his name on the ballot in the state where he now lives, Virginia. Bachmann is exactly the kind of maniac that would promise cheap gas to keep suburbia alive. Ron Paul is stopped clock who is right twice a day, namely at 4:20. Rick Santorum is famous because his surname is a synonym for froth. Romney is a corporate robot who will do whatever his programmers tell him to do. Poor Huntsman had to sign on to climate denial in order to stay viable. Finally, when I tell people about Buddy Roemer, who has the closest thing to James's "My Tea Party" platform, the response is "who?"Other than Huntsman and Roemer, neither of whom competed in Iowa, these candidates make me glad that I haven't been a Republican or conservative since 2000.
This post takes care of your daily dose of DOOM! Expect repeats at irregular intervals at least until December 21, 2012.It's that time again.
There's a lot to be nervous about, even if you don't subscribe to the undercooked Mayan apocalypse lore moving through the gut of the Internet like a Staphylococcus-infected tamale.Count me out as one of those people who thinks there is anything either supernatural or cosmological coming to end the world as we know it by this year's Winter Solstice. I still hold to what I wrote last May and repeated in October.
No supernatural causes will be needed to bring about the collapse of civilization; the interaction of human behavior with limited resources can do that all by themselves. That end will be completely natural, not supernatural.That written, I would be remiss if I didn't at least acknowledge the non-event on a blog that began as an examination of the collapse of civilization and evolved into an examination of sustainability from a science-fiction perspective.
The flip side is that anything that could also postpone or even prevent that collapse will also be the result of exploiting human psychology and the available resources. It may look like a miracle, but it will be completely natural as well.
PASADENA (KTLA) -- Bystanders hoping to catch a glimpse of the brightly decorated floats at Monday's Tournament of Roses Parade might notice something a bit unusual if they stick around to the end.If you were wondering when Matt Taibbi's "vampire squid" would make an appearance in an Occupy protest, wait no longer. It will make its debut in a few hours.
Occupy activists this weekend are putting the finishing touches on Occupy Octopus, a 70-foot squid puppet that will be paraded alongside thousands of protesters.
The so-called "Octupy Rose Parade" float is made entirely of recycled plastic bags and powered by 36 humans, with tens of people carrying the arms and a smaller group of people holding up the central body.
"We're calling it 'The People's Parade' to contrast against the corporate parade that the Rose Parade has become," an organizer said.
"It will represent Wall Street, the financial sectors [as] vampires, [with a] squidlike stranglehold," one organizer said.
Demonstrators, flanked by a 250-foot recreation of the U.S. Constitution, will be gathering at 7 a.m. at Singer Park and are set to begin marching near the parades end at 9:30 a.m.Those times are Pacific, thus three hours behind the time zone here in Detroit. You have time to watch the end of the parade and catch the Occupy Octopus.
Protesters will march the parade route after the floats and marching bands have passed. The group has been working with Pasadena police and Tournament of Roses officials on how not to disrupt the parade.The organizers expect there will be no trouble with police and that thousands will show up. I believe the first, but am sceptical about the second.
"Our goal is to put Occupy's best foot forward," Thottam said, adding that activists expect more than 1,000 participants. "We recognize that this is a historic, iconic event geared toward middle America and the family."
The group says the protest will be "G-rated" and will stick to nonviolence in expressing Occupy's messages against income inequality and corporate power.
One of the last astronauts to ride on a space shuttle will be riding a totally different vehicle on Monday: a flower-bedecked float in the 2012 Rose Parade.I told you this blog was about sustainability with a science-fiction slant!
Say what?
The 5.5-mile journey down the parade route in Pasadena, Calif., doesn't hold a candle in distance or danger to the 5.3 million-mile journey that NASA astronaut Rex Walheim made in July during STS-135, Atlantis' program-ending mission. But it's a perfect follow-up for several reasons:
"If you think about it, that's one of the things we need to develop on our long-term vehicles," he told me this week. "We need to have a self-supporting ecosystem, environmental control systems for recycling air and water, and you have to grow your own food. We're doing that in space. ... These skills that any astronaut has as a young child when they work in the garden and help their parents, well, those turn out to be important on the most advanced vehicles ever made, and on the most complex exploration missions."
- Walheim will be riding on the "Garden of Imagination" float with his brother, Lance, a horticulturist who wrote the book "Roses for Dummies." Lance is the go-to garden guy for Bayer Advanced, an arm of the chemical conglomerate that makes lawn and garden prducts.
- With Lance's encouragement, Rex carried up a dried rose as one of his personal items during a 2008 mission on Atlantis. That rose was featured on Bayer Advanced's trophy-winning Rose Parade float in 2009.
- This Rose Parade appearance gives Rex a chance to smell the roses, literally, after a high-pressure spaceflight. It also gives him an opportunity to reflect on how a little gardening could come in handy for future generations of space explorers.
Across the country, Tea Party activists have been storming planning meetings of all kinds, opposing various plans by local and regional government having anything to do with density, smart growth, sustainability or urbanism. In California, Tea Party activists gained enough signatures for a ballot measure repealing the state’s baseline environmental regulations, while also targeting the Senate Bill 375, the 2008 law that seeks to combat climate change by promoting density and regional planning.Read the rest of the article, including the 325 comments, which the Tea Partiers are swarming.
Florida’s growth management legislation was recently undone, and activists in Tampa helped turn away funding for rail projects there. A planning agency in Virginia had to move to a larger auditorium and ban applause, after Tea Party activists sought to derail a five-year comprehensive plan and force withdrawal from the U.S. Mayors Agreement on Climate Change.
What’s prompting the ire is anything from a proposed master plan to a new water treatment plant, rules governing septic tanks, or a bike-sharing program. What’s driving the rebellion is a view that government should have no role in planning or shaping the built environment that in any way interferes with private property rights. And in almost all instances, the Tea Partiers link local planning efforts to the United Nations’ Agenda 21, a nearly two-decade old document that addresses sustainable development in the world’s cities – read as herding humanity into compulsory habitation zones.
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It may not be time to panic. In some cases there are very few vocal activists leading the charge, but the Tea Party has been so well publicized, and their tactics are often so sophisticated, that their powers of intimidation appear outsized. This is also in part a case of everything old being new again. Property rights activists have always been well organized, and were energized by the Kelo Supreme Court case affirming the use of eminent domain. The sprawl lobby – the fanciful label from my first book, This Land – circles the wagons for corporate home-builders, road-builders and even the lawn-care industry invested in far-flung conventional suburban development. The anti-smart growth American Dream Coalition dovetails with the Tea Party view, giving some familiar contrarian voices new visibility. Wendell Cox and Ron Utt co-authored a grave warning against “radical environmentalists,” driven by, yes, the UN’s Agenda 21, in a recent fact-contorting essay for the Heritage Foundation.
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Yet, as in national politics, the Tea Party view doesn’t leave room for compromise. Even the most open-minded and free-speech supporting planner can’t operate when the framework for the dialogue itself has been invalidated. Where does one go from there? The skirmishes at town halls around the country over the past year or so means that planners will have to try even harder to make their case. But in the mean time, the chairman of that sleepy planning board hearing might be eying the exits, looking for a black helicopter, to make a run for it.
There will be a great battle to preserve the supposed entitlements to suburbia and it will be an epochal act of futility, a huge waste of effort and resources that might have been much better spent in finding new ways to carry on an American civilization.Prophetic, wasn't he?
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Americans will elect maniacs who promise to allow them to keep their McMansions and their commutes and that’s going to produce a lot of political friction, probably a lot of violence, probably a threat to our democratic institutions.
The Tea Party people are the corn-pone Nazis I have been warning you about.There is a reason why I use the "corn pone fascists" tag for posts about the Tea Party and the politicians they support.
So what is the NaBloPoMo theme of the month?I have no problem popping off a post a day, as blogging about sustainability and politics in Detroit means never running out of material, so I'm signing up again. As for what this theme inspires in me, it's music. Ladies and gentlemen, I present Chicago and Earth, Wind & Fire playing "Beginnings."
BEGINNINGS
January 1st is a blank slate, and you can make the year anything you want it to be? Leave your job and embark on a new career. Open that blank document and start that novel you always wanted to write. Join that online dating site, signup for a new class, or close your eyes and point to a place on a globe to plan your next vacation.
Beginnings can be scary, but as the adage by Lao-tzu goes, "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." You can take a single step, right? And after that, it's just putting foot before foot, taking your new journey slowly and letting it unfold at its own pace. Along the way, blog about your experience, not only so readers can follow along, but so that you have a record of how far you've come any time you feel yourself falter.
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So what are you beginning this year? If you can name at least five things, it means you have at least five blog posts inside of you. And if you can do five posts, you can certainly expand that and do an extra 25 or so.
