Crossposted from the Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet.

When forests are cleared in West Africa for firewood or for farmland, the Dika trees are, more often than not, left untouched. Farmers have too much to gain from harvesting the tree’s fruits and seeds to burn or discard a Dika found in the wild.

Today I was planning on a post about Quantitative Easing (QE) today, because it seemed to me that it would never work. However, today, Randy Wray beat me to it with another great post, this time at ND20, reviewing the whole situation in detail, placing it in political context, and explaining why it’s very unlikely that it will allow the economy to recover much more than it has already. Here are some key quotes from Randy’s piece.

With one exception, none of the Republicans running for the Senate — including the 20 or so with a serious chance of winning — accept the scientific consensus that humans are largely responsible for global warming.

Attorney General Holder’s promise to escalate enforcement of the marijuana laws if Proposition 19 passes is leading the country in the wrong direction. The marijuana laws will have no legitimacy if a majority of Californians vote to legalize marijuana. The U.S. needs law enforcement leadership toward a sensible marijuana policy, not more of the failed marijuana policy.

Mohammed is recovering well.

Analysis of the Sonia Sotomayor factor in the November 2010 midterm elections.

A Yale fraternity inducts pledges with a chant extolling rape culture. The problem isn’t that they repeatedly yelled something stupid. It’s that I’m no longer sure we’re shocked by people turning rape and sexual assault into some kind of a joke.

Written by Will Neville for RHRealityCheck.org – News, commentary and community for reproductive health and justice.

There is great concern and potential for action on climate change in the general public. The problem is that most people feel that it’s the government’s job to change things, or that the individual citizen is powerless in the face of such a daunting challenge. With some fresh ideas and renewed efforts at coordination, I hope we can change that.

On Friday, the Government reported its 2010 Fiscal Year results. Here are some fragments from a “news” article in WaPo by Vincent Del Giudice.

The U.S. government posted its second straight annual budget deficit in excess of $1 trillion as lingering unemployment constrained tax revenue.

The shortfall totaled $1.294 trillion in the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, second only to the $1.416 trillion deficit in 2009, the Treasury Department said today in Washington. . . .

The foreclosure fraud was intentional, repeated, systemic because the entire system relied on the documentation being prepared just as it was.