Oh, internet. There's not a single thing you won't either make porn of or mash up with Nicki Minaj, and the screaming goats are no exception. Apparently "goat editions" of popular songs are the new YouTube meme, and Buzzfeed has rounded up a bunch for you.

This one is my favorite, hands down:

But that's probably because I'm old and am like "what's a One Direction?"

Late-night menus are basically for one kind of person, and where I come from (Massachusetts), we call that kind of person "wicked fucken hammahd." When you are wicked fucken hammahd, you want to stuff your face with things, things like this seven-patty burger that Steak 'n Shake has just begun selling as part of its "late night" (i.e., for wicked fucken hammahd people) menu.

I'm strapped into my backward-facing seat on a COD, or “carrier onboard delivery” plane, the U.S. Navy workhorse that ferries people, supplies, and mail to and from its aircraft carriers at sea. I cinch the four-point harness holding me in place. Then I cinch it some more. When it’s as tight as it can go, an aircrewman walks by and yanks it so hard it squeezes the breath out of me. The hatch closes. Steam rises from the floor. Shit. I've watched the YouTube videos. I know what’s coming. Takeoff, a 30-minute flight, then landing on the USS Nimitz, decks pitching, plane wings waggling, tailhook dangling from the underside of the aircraft to catch one of four arresting cables stretched across the flight deck. Since it’s not hard to miss them all, the pilot will gun the engines at landing to enable an immediate relaunch. Which means that if he succeeds at trapping a cable we’ll decelerate from 180 nautical miles per hour to zero in about one second.

To get to the Nimitz, 100 miles off Honolulu, our turboprop is flying a 50-50 blend of biofuel and standard JP-5 shipboard aviation fuel. The biofuel is made from algae plus waste cooking oil. This makes us part of history, my aircrewman says, players in what the Navy calls the Great Green Fleet demonstration of July 2012. It’s paired with a three-year, $510 million energy reform effort in conjunction with the departments of Agriculture and Energy as part of a larger push to change the way the U.S. military sails, flies, marches, and thinks. “As a nation and as a Navy and Marine Corps, we simply rely too much on a finite and depleting stock of fossil fuels that will most likely continue to rise in cost over the next decades,” announced Navy Secretary Ray Mabus at the launch of the program back in 2009. “This creates an obvious vulnerability to our energy security and to our national security and to our future on this planet.”

The Navy has set five ambitious goals to reduce energy consumption, decrease reliance on foreign oil, and significantly increase the use of alternative energy. Part of one target is to demonstrate a Great Green Fleet by 2012, and that’s what’s sailing this July day in Hawaii’s cobalt-blue waters: a carrier strike group comprising an aircraft carrier, two guided-missile destroyers, a guided-missile cruiser, and an oiler. All are running at least partially on alternatives to fossil fuels: the Nimitz on nuclear power, the other ships on that biofuel-diesel blend. The 71 aircraft aboard -- Super Hornets, Hornets, Prowlers, Growlers, Hawkeyes, Greyhounds, Knighthawks, and Seahawks -- are burning the same cocktail as my COD. All of today’s biofuels are drop-in replacements for marine diesel or aviation fuel and are designed to run without any changes to the existing hardware of ships or planes. “No [nation] can afford to re-engineer their navies to accept a different kind of fuel,” Vice Adm. Philip Cullom, deputy chief of naval operations for fleet readiness and logistics, tells me.

The Great Green Fleet is debuting at the 2012 RIMPAC (Rim of the Pacific) exercise, the largest ever international maritime war games, engaging 40 surface ships, six submarines, more than 200 aircraft, and 25,000 personnel from 22 nations. For the first time Russian ships are playing alongside U.S. ships, and naval personnel from India are attending. Many fleets here are sharpening their focus on alternative fuels and working to assure the formulations are co-developed with their allies. “ We've had dialogue with the Australians, the French, the British, other European nations, and many others in the Pacific,” and they all want to take “the petroleum off-ramp,” Cullom tells me. “We don’t want to run out of fuel.”

You can’t live off the land at sea, which is why the Navy has always looked far into the future to fuel its supply lines; the job description of admirals requires them to assess risk and solve intractable problems that stymie the rest of us. Peak oil, foreign oil, greenhouse emissions, climate change? Just another bunch of enemies. So when the Department of Defense set a goal to meet 25 percent of its energy needs with renewables by 2025, the Navy found itself fighting on familiar ground. Four times in history it has overhauled old transportation paradigms -- from sail to coal to gasoline to diesel to nuclear -- carrying commercial shipping with it in the process. “We are a better Navy and a better Marine Corps for innovation,” Mabus says. “We have led the world in the adoption of new energy strategies in the past. This is our legacy.”

It goes beyond supply lines. Rising sea levels lapping at naval bases? A melting and increasingly militarized Arctic? The Navy is tackling problems that freeze Congress solid. What it learns, what it implements, and how it adapts and innovates will drive market changes that could alter the course of the world.

But not without a fight.

With mounting school loans and the uncertainty of finding a job after graduation, 26-year-old Jenny Monfore decided to leave college early and look for alternative education. At the Driftless Folk School in Wisconsin, the Bozeman, Mont., native and massage therapist studied organic food preparation, blacksmithing, and mushroom identification -- skills she hopes will augment her income and allow her to live a more independent lifestyle.

“We no longer have practical skills, we don’t know how to feed ourselves, and we’ve basically become lost,” Monfore says. “So we’re slowly building new, thoughtful communities.”

Folk school: The phrase calls to mind cloggers, birch bark hats, and strains of “If I Had a Hammer.” But these craft schools of yore are experiencing a resurgence of late, drawing young do-it-yourself homesteaders and restless baby boomers to the woods to learn about everything from organic farming to electric cars.

From Tesco to Burger King to IKEA, the horse-meat saga has gripped the western world for the past month. Horse hasn't even made it into stateside meaty meals, but you wouldn't know it from our outsize horror at the idea of chowing down on lovable ponies.

As someone who hasn't eaten animals in a really long time, I've been kind of confused about all this. Why the moral panic about this four-legged mammal and not all the other ones that end up in sandwiches? This isn't a modest proposal -- I'm genuinely trying to understand.

"The unfolding drama around Europe's horse-meat scandal is a case study in food politics and the politics of cultural identity," Marion Nestle wrote at Food Politics. "They (other people) eat horse meat. We don't. Most Americans say they won't eat horse meat, are appalled by the very idea, and oppose raising horses for food, selling their meat, and slaughtering horses for any reason."

Raising horses for meat was re-legalized in the U.S. in late 2011, against the wishes of the Humane Society, which argued that horses shouldn't be eaten because they're considered "companions." But since then, no horse slaughterhouses have actually managed to open their doors in the U.S.; one would-be horse-meat purveyor recently sued the government for moving too slowly on inspections.

As Cord Jefferson points out at Gawker in a post entitled "You should eat horse," horse meat is cheaper than beef, comparable in terms of calories and protein, and has way more omega-3 fatty acids. But he notes that there's some legit cause for concern:

As I've argued several times, the battle over coal-export terminals in the Pacific Northwest is the key U.S. climate fight of the next few years. Coal-port expansion is the fifth most carbon-intensive project currently planned in the world, bigger than anything else over which American politicians have control.

In other words, it's a defining issue for climate hawks. No ambiguity about it.

So imagine my surprise when I read in The Seattle Times that several purportedly "green" Seattle consultants and strategists are working for the coal companies, trying to bribe and cajole Seattle towns into accepting these polluting monstrosities.

Can you imagine? I mean, how much of a cash-grubbing mercenary do you have to be to throw your "green" reputation overboard for coal money, the dirtiest money on the planet?

I wasn't going to write anything about this, because "consultants sell out" is not exactly world-shaking news, but then I read this, from sellout Bruce Gryniewski: "I don't believe in this eco-McCarthyism view that if you work for coal, you can't do anything good in the world."

That's right: He doesn't just want to sell out his principles and work for one of the scummiest industries on the planet on behalf of one of the most carbon-intensive projects on the planet, he wants to do it and be free from criticism. If his bewildered ex-allies in the green movement disapprove -- not use the force of government against him, mind you, just speak out in disapproval -- it's "McCarthyism."

So he's not just a planet-fucking, money-grubbing sellout, he's a whiner with a victim complex too. Wonderful fellow, that Bruce Gryniewski.

And then there's this:

The Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority has come a long way, baby. Back in the '90s, it was mired in $75 million in debt and under investigation by the FBI. Now it's being honored [PDF] as one of the top transit agencies in the nation.

The Philadelphia Daily News has the story of how SEPTA was turned around over the last two decades, in large part thanks to board chair Pat Deon. After years of operating in the red, Philly's transit systems added revenue-generating advertisements, balanced its budget, and drove right into the black.

SEPTA's chief financial officer, Richard Burnfield, said the Deon-era board's commitment to running SEPTA like a business with balanced budgets has attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in government funding that riders enjoy through new Silverliner V regional-rail cars ($330 million), 440 new hybrid buses ($232 million) and beautifully rebuilt subway stations such as Spring Garden and Girard ($30 million).

There were also some notable cultural shifts at the agency.

A big accomplishment during Deon's tenure has been the cessation of hostilities between the 15-member board's 13 suburban members and two city members.

Q: How are burrowing owls like honeybees?

A: Both are being inadvertently slaughtered by massive applications of pesticides.

OK, so that wasn’t a funny joke, although it might have been nuanced enough to land me a job at The Onion. And truth be told, it wasn’t actually a joke.

A study published in the online journal PLOS ONE finds that the use of pesticides is the leading cause of a decline in grassland bird species in North America. From the Twin Cities Pioneer Press outdoors blog:

They may have located our ideal bliss points, but multinational food companies are far from hitting the mark when it comes to treating workers and the environment decently.

A new "Behind the Brands" report from Oxfam rates "10 of the world's most powerful food and beverage companies" on their ethics: Coca-Cola, Mars, Nestle, Kellogg's, General Mills, Associated British Foods, PepsiCo, Unilever, Danone, and Mondelez International (previously known as Kraft). Surprise: They didn't do very well. The highest grade was a 38 out of 70.

From the report:

Western states fighting for each other's water may be missing the big picture. As climate change continues, many regions of the U.S. will get hotter and drier, so much so that some of the nation's most important reservoirs could dry up, according to a new study by researchers at Colorado State University, Princeton, and the U.S. Forest Service. From the study:

Although precipitation is projected to increase in much of the United States with future climate change, in most locations that additional precipitation will merely accommodate rising evapotranspiration demand in response to temperature increases. Where the effect of rising evapotranspiration exceeds the effect of increasing precipitation, and where precipitation actually declines, as is likely in parts of the Southwest, water yields are projected to decline. For the United States as a whole, the declines are substantial, exceeding 30% of current levels by 2080 for some scenarios examined.

The study includes a number of maps showing how water might dry up under different scenarios. Here are ones showing projected changes in water yields in 2020, 2040, 2060, and 2080 under a somewhat middle-of-the-road scenario:

More dramatic scenarios see reservoirs such as Lake Mead and Lake Powell drying up completely.