End of July Weekend Links

Some interesting stories to check out as this unseasonably nice July wraps up:

The Best Twitter Feed in Congress Belongs to Its Longest Serving Member - National Journal

Guy Walks Into a Bar - The New Yorker.  From last year, but highlighted in Friday's links at naked capitalism, and an entertaining expansion of a very familiar old joke.

Hall of Fame Weekend: Roger Angell's Baseball Writing - The New Yorker.  Eight stories from the archive in honor of Roger Angell's induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame this weekend.

Why Poor Schools Can't Win at Standardized Testing - The Atlantic

The Gray Light of Morning - The Archdruid Report.  "Most of the people who have ever lived, it bears remembering, had no expectation that the future would be any better than the world that they saw around them. The majority of them assumed as a matter of course that the future would be much like the present, while quite a few of them believed instead that it would be worse. Down through the generations, they faced the normal human condition of poverty, sickness, toil, grief, injustice, and the inevitability of their own deaths, and still found life sufficiently worth living to meet the challenges of making a living, raising families, and facing each day as it came.
That’s normal for our species."

The Existential Battle for the Soul of the GOP - Norm Ornstein.  The GOP has no soul.  Plenty of fools and idiots, very few brains, but no soul.

Alternative Fusion Technologies Heat Up - Scientific American.  Sure they do.  I think the venture capital folks are feeling invincible.  I think they'll find out they aren't.

The strange relationship between global warming denial...and speaking English - The Guardian

Cash Crops With Dividends: Financiers Transforming Strawberries Into Securities - NYT.  What could go wrong? 

California Water Prices Soar for Farmers as Drought Grows - Bloomberg.

Satellite Study Reveals Parched U.S. West Using Up Underground Water - NASA. "The research team used data from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite mission to track changes in the mass of the Colorado River Basin, which are related to changes in water amount on and below the surface. Monthly measurements of the change in water mass from December 2004 to November 2013 revealed the basin lost nearly 53 million acre feet (65 cubic kilometers) of freshwater, almost double the volume of the nation's largest reservoir, Nevada's Lake Mead. More than three-quarters of the total -- about 41 million acre feet (50 cubic kilometers) -- was from groundwater." That ain't getting recharged.

The Colorado River Basin (black outline) supplies water to about 40 million people in seven states. Major cities outside the basin (red shading) also use water from the Colorado River.
Image Credit:
U.S. Bureau of Reclamation