Stephan: We are a nation of immigrants. Everyone, including those we call Native Americans, originally came from somewhere else. The Revolution for our independence was fought by immigrants and the children or grandchildren of immigrants. We could not be America were it not for immigrants.
SAN FRANCISCO — More than one-third of U.S. Nobel prize winners in chemistry, medicine and physics are immigrants, a new report shows.
The report, released Thursday by the National Foundation for American Policy, a conservative research group, shows that since 2000, two dozen immigrants won Nobels in those fields, out of 68 U.S. prizewinners in chemistry, medicine and physics.
The NFAP hopes the research shows the contributions of immigrants in important fields will bolster the chances for the passage of immigration reform, which has been mired in Congress this term.
While the U.S. Senate passed an immigration bill last year, the measure has stalled in the House of Representatives where Republicans remain deeply split over what to do about the more than 11 million undocumented U.S. residents. Many Republicans want to await the outcome of November’s elections before revisiting the issue.
Opponents of the reform say immigration is holding down pay, stealing jobs from Americans, and in the case of undocumented workers, potentially rewarding those who didn’t immigrate through legal channels.
Legislation dating from 1965 that lifted quotas on national origin, a key driver of Asian immigration to the United States, coupled with 1995 legislation that increased employment-based immigration, have helped build the surge of […]
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Stephan: This is a really good essay on what has happened to our higher education system. It is part of the profit cancer that is ravaging the body of society.
The price of a year at college has increased by more than 1,200 percent over the last 30 years, far outpacing any other price the government tracks: food, housing, cars, gasoline, TVs, you name it. Tuition has increased at a rate double that of medical care, usually considered the most expensive of human necessities. It has outstripped any reasonable expectation people might have had for investments over the period. And, as we all know, it has crushed a generation of college grads with debt. Today, thanks to those enormous tuition prices, young Americans routinely start adult life with a burden unknown to any previous cohort and whose ruinous effects we can only guess at.
On the assumption that anyone in that generation still has a taste for irony, I offer the following quotation on the subject, drawn from one of the earliest news stories about the problem of soaring tuition. The newspaper was the Washington Post; the speaker was an assistant dean at a college that had just announced a tuition hike of 19 percent; and the question before him was how much farther tuition increases could go. ‘Maybe all of a sudden this bubble is going to burst,” he was […]
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JAMES WILLIAM GIBSON, - Earth Island Journal/Reader Supported News
Stephan: This is also climate change in action, and it is going to completely restructure the way and where Americans live. And the same will be true in every other country on the planet. Water is destiny as this reports spells out, and the process is ruthless.
ary Cheatwood grew up near the town of Cuthand, in far northeast Texas, and he always found peace along the wooded banks of Little Mustang Creek. His grandfather had bought 100 acres in 1917 and now Gary’s family owns 600 acres of bottomland near where the creek’s clear waters meet the Sulphur River. He especially loves the woods around the creek-some 70 species of hardwood trees, including a massive Texas honey locust that ranks as official state champion. ‘This forest is not making money,” says Cheatwood, a retired surveyor and construction manager. ‘But a lot of things are more important than money. The trees give me pleasure.”
Everything about the land pleases Cheatwood. Still wiry and lean at 75, he walks it every week, always wearing his standard outfit of lace-up work boots, jeans, plaid flannel shirt, and baseball cap. He collects finely crafted Caddo and Cherokee Indian arrowheads. In the spring, blue and yellow wildflowers bloom. He takes pleasure, too, in looking for rare creatures-the American burying beetle, a certain obscure shrew, even the eastern timber rattlesnake.
Yet as he stood on the creek bank this January, he knew his family could have their homestead taken by the state of Texas. […]
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Stephan: As SR has been predicting for years it is the insurance companies -- not issues like human wellness, or protecting the planet -- that are going to force governments to deal with climate change. Here is the latest in this trend.
o insurance companies, there’s no doubt that climate change is here: They are beginning to file lawsuits against small towns and cities who they say haven’t prepared for the floods and storms that will cost the companies billions in payments.
Earlier this week, the U.S. arm of a major global insurance company backed away from an unprecedented lawsuit against Chicago and its suburbs for failing to prepare for heavy rains and associated flooding it claimed were fueled by global warming. While legal experts said the case was a longshot, its withdrawal didn’t alter the message it contained for governments: prepare now for climate change or pay the price.
After several days of ground-saturating rain last April, an early-morning train of intense storm cells passed over the greater Chicago area and overwhelmed the region’s stormwater and sewage systems. Water gushed out of sewer inlets and backed up into basements.
“There was just nowhere for this water to go,” Marilyn Sucoe, the stormwater administrator for the Village of Lisle, a ring suburb west of Chicago that was affected by the flooding, told NBC News.
What’s causing our weather extremes?
TODAY
The village was among about 200 municipalities named in the nine class-action lawsuits filed in March by […]
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DAVID OUTTEN and TED BAEHR, Production Editor and Publisher - Movieguide
Stephan: The ignorance of the population is also what makes the disinformation machine of the Theocratic Right so successful. Here is a representative argument purveyed by that machine, in this case the leading Theocratic Right movie review site.
Reports have come out that a 2010 Pentagon directive details how United States military forces can be deployed against United States citizens in the case of emergencies – as authorized by the President.
This scenario is in many movies, including the top two movies so far this year, THE LEGO MOVIE and CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER. It’s only logical that some of the horrible disasters presented in Science Fiction and Fantasy movies (the two most popular movie genres today) would require every possible form of military, police and superhero involvement to restore a civil society. The interventions are not always against some alien invader. Viruses and domestic superthugs have been used as reasons for intervention.
Conservatives mad that such a Pentagon directive exists aren’t being realistic. Nearly $18 trillion of federal debt and 151 million Americans receiving some form of government assistance is a recipe for financial collapse of epic proportions.
American lifestyles are sustained by the free enterprise system. Make the dollar worthless or end all government payments, and it’s predictable that families will have to do bizarre things to survive – even for just one week. The possibility of chaos is very real. If local police are unable to […]
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