Free Republic

Synopsis: 6 Southern states will gain seats in the US House of Reps after 2010 census. Texas will gain the most. Link below

This is a video of a half a million birds swarming over Sacramento California. I just want to know who estimated that there is a half a million. Are they sure there are not a million, or maybe only 100,000 instead? Well either way it is pretty cool, and reminds me of the movie by Alfred Hitchcock, "The Birds".Check out the video of the Birds over Sacrament here These following two paragraphs are from an article at "The Independent", and it is about the phenomenon called a murmuration; Winter must must be coming... because the starlings are flocking. Here are...

Migration: Geographies In Conflict by Aaron M. Renn 11/23/2009 It's an interesting puzzle. The “cool cities”, the ones that are supposedly doing the best, the ones with the hottest downtowns, the biggest buzz, leading-edge new companies, smart shops, swank restaurants and hip hotels – the ones that are supposed to be magnets for talent – are often among those with the highest levels of net domestic outmigration. New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Miami and Chicago – all were big losers in the 2000s. Seattle, Denver, and Minneapolis more or less broke even. Portland is the only proverbially...

If all the adults worldwide who Gallup surveys show would like to migrate actually picked up and moved where they wanted, Gallup's Potential Net Migration Index (PNMI) suggests many developed countries could be overwhelmed and many developing countries could sit relatively empty. The Potential Net Migration Index is the estimated number of adults who would like to move permanently out of a country subtracted from the estimated number who would like to move into it, as a proportion of the total adult population. The results are based on nationally representative surveys of more than 260,000 adults worldwide. The higher the...

We always have some of the various sandpipers around, but now the winter migrants are starting to trickle in. These are Greater Yellowlegs, Tringa melanoleuca

[[Page 6115]] Presidential Determination No. 2009-15 of January 27, 2009 Unexpected Urgent Refugee and Migration Needs Related To Gaza Memorandum for the Secretary of State By the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, including section 2(c)(1) of the Migration and Refugee Assistance Act of 1962 (the ``Act''), as amended (22 U.S.C. 2601), I hereby determine, pursuant to section 2(c)(1) of the Act, that it is important to the national interest to furnish assistance under the Act in an amount not to exceed $20.3 million from the United States Emergency Refugee and Migration...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. – The poor are more likely to leave California than the rich, despite concerns that the state's relatively high income tax rate is driving away the wealthy, a new study shows. The report released Friday by the Public Policy Institute of California determined the poorest 20 percent California residents are twice as likely to leave the state as the richest 20 percent. Factors such as cheaper rent and home prices outside the Golden State seem to edge out income taxes when people of all incomes decide whether to stay or go, said institute researcher Jed Kolko, who authored...

About 40% of registered voters citywide told a Los Angeles Times poll that in the last two years they had “seriously thought about moving out of Los Angeles.” As The Times previously reported, the most commonly cited reason, by a large margin, was the cost of housing, cited by 46% of those who said they had thought about going.

BONN, Germany (AP) — Global warming is uprooting people from their homes and, left unchecked, could lead to the greatest human migration in history, said a report released Wednesday.

Demographic factors could be behind diverse aspects of social evolution. Did wars make us the species we are today?Wikimedia Commons Explanations of the evolution of human behaviour often invoke crucial biological changes and revolutionary cultural innovations. Now two papers in Science instead put demography — the size, density and distribution of populations — centre stage.Samuel Bowles, a behavioural scientist at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, tackles the puzzle of how humans acquired such unrivalled altruistic behaviour towards unrelated individuals — tendencies that allowed humans to cooperate as groups and, ultimately, to colonize the planet. The answer, paradoxically, could...

Migrating peoples were sophisticated in sea harvesting, Jon Erlandson says The Pacific Coast of the Americas was settled starting about 15,000 years ago during the last glacial retreat by seafaring peoples following a "kelp highway" rich in marine resources, a noted professor of anthropology theorized Wednesday. Jon Erlandson, director of the Museum of Natural and Cultural History at the University of Oregon, suggested that especially productive "sweet spots," such as the estuaries of B.C.'s Fraser and Stikine rivers, served as corridors by which people settled the Interior of the province. Erlandson said in an interview these migrating peoples were already...

Imagine a group of Homo erectus, the earliest members of our family genus, living near a coastline on an Indonesia island and well aware of a lush island that is visible only a few miles offshore. One day while on the coast, a herd of elephants emerges from the nearby forest and crosses the beach. They enter the ocean and swim successfully to the offshore island. Could this be the experience that triggers a creative process in our ancestors who are watching nearby? Does their imagination and thinking include not only a desire to reach that island, but ideas about...

AMERICAN.COM A Magazine of Ideas The Luxury City vs. the Middle Class By Joel KotkinWednesday, May 13, 2009 Filed under: Big Ideas, Culture, Lifestyle, Public Square The sustainable city of the future will rest on the revival of traditional institutions that have faded in many of today’s cities. Ellen Moncure and Joe Wong first met in school and then fell in love while living in the same dorm at the College of William and Mary. After graduation, they got married and, in 1999, moved to Washington, D.C., where they worked amid a large community of single and childless people.Like many...

If John Steinbeck were alive today and had yet to pen "The Grapes of Wrath," it's not too hard to imagine the novelist telling the story of a family making its departure from California. Released 70 years ago today, Steinbeck's novel of the Great Depression told of the hardships endured by the Joads, an Oklahoma family that braved Route 66 in an ultimately fruitless search for prosperity in the Central Valley. Steinbeck's novel isn't the only story of those who have moved to California. Students learn of the Spanish missions and the Gold Rush. The nostalgia of Route 66 is...

Demography: The great British broadcaster Sir David Attenborough has become the latest in a long line of illustrious people to say we need to cut population growth sharply or face a grim future. Is he right?We have nothing against Attenborough, but in supporting Britain's Optimum Population Trust, a group that advocates reducing human numbers, he's put himself on the wrong side of one of the great questions of our time. Today's world population is about 6.8 billion, give or take a hundred million or so. By 2050, most estimates show the population will be about 9 billion — roughly a...

In a meeting with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, President Barack Obama called on congress to enact legislation that would lead to citizenship status for heretofore illegal immigrants, calling it “simple common sense.” “They won’t be illegals if we make them citizens,” Obama argued. “The problem of substandard wages would be ended. Employers wouldn’t be able to abuse these undocumented workers like they do now. Human rights would be protected.” The President also cited other benefits as an unappreciated gain. “Many of these migrants perish in difficult treks under harsh climatic conditions,” Obama said. “If we open the borders, those wanting...

For the first time, scientists have tracked entire migration routes of individual songbirds, following them thousands of miles further than in earlier studies and revealing the birds fly two to three times faster than previously known. The new information will aid future conservation efforts. The researchers equipped 14 wood thrushes and 20 purple martins with tiny geolocators—the first tracking devices small and light enough for songbirds to carry—to map their round trip between North America and the tropics with unprecedented accuracy.

California has apparently turned itself into Pennsylvania. It's still our biggest, wealthiest state with 38 million people -- one in eight Americans. It still has the sunshine, the beaches and the magnificent natural beauty that for 150 years have attracted and captured millions of migrants from New York and Pittsburgh to Des Moines and Mexico City. So why, for the fourth straight year, has the number of people moving from California to states like Florida and Arizona exceeded the number moving into California from other states? And why was the annual net-exodus rate even higher in the 1990s? Immigrants, legal...

Evidence keeps accumulating that the tide of immigration is ebbing. Tough enforcement laws passed by states like Arizona and Oklahoma and localities like Prince William County, Va., have reportedly spurred Latino immigrants to move elsewhere. Tougher enforcement of federal immigration laws may be having the same effect. Classrooms in Orange County, Calif., are suddenly half-empty. Latino day laborers seem to be less thick on the ground at their morning gathering places. Remittances to Mexico and other Latin countries are down, and men are returning to some villages from the United States. Latinos appear to account for a disproportionate share of...

The remarkable journey of a green turtle from Indonesia into Australian waters is helping conservationists to track the migratory route of this species to the Kimberley-Pilbara coast - one of the few relatively pristine coastal areas left on Earth. Ana, a female green turtle, was tagged in Indonesia in November as part of a turtle tracking project by WWF and Udayana University in Bali, Indonesia, and has slowly made her way from a nesting beach in East Java, across the Indian Ocean, and is on track for the beaches of the Kimberley in Western Australia. Her journey, monitored online by...