Robby Berman, - big think
Stephan: It is not just bees, and we are running out of time, As this report says, "The United Nations
raised the alarm in February 2016. It reported that two out of five invertebrate pollinator species—among which are bees, butterflies, wasps, and beetles—are heading for extinction. Vertebrate pollinators—hummingbirds, bats, and the like—are doing only a little better, with one in six species disappearing. The UN report says that the 20,000 or so pollinating species are responsible for hundreds of billions of dollars in crops each year." (emphasis added) Here's is the latest assessment of pollinators. You can't say we haven't been warned.
On May 10, Bee Informed and Apiary Inspectors of America released their report on the health of the US honeybee population. The annual study was funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and surveyed both small-and large-scale beekeepers to learn about the health and survival rates for their bees in the period from April 2015 to March 2016. The news is not good.
Terrifying, really, when you consider how important honeybees and the other 4,000 bee species are to the earth’s 250,000 types of flowering plants. Bees pollinate 75% of the fruits, nuts, and vegetables we eat.
Mike Liu
They’re the secret stars of the produce aisle, and an absolutely critical link in the food chain. As Dennis vanEngelsdorp, a University of Maryland bee expert recently told the Associated Press, “Everything falls apart if you take pollinators out of the game. If we want to say we can feed the world in 2050, pollinators are going to be part of that.”
But out of the game […]
2 Comments
Sarah Lazare, Staff Writer - Alternet (U.S.)
Stephan: Here is the latest on the American Gulag. This is what moral scum do with their money.
The largest private prison companies in the United States are assuring their shareholders that profits are up, thanks in part to the windfall from locking up women and children in controversial “family detention centers.”
“We are pleased with our first quarter financial performance, which exceeded our first quarter guidance despite incremental startup expenses incurred during the operational ramp of our Trousdale Turner Correctional Center,” said Damon Hininger, chief executive officer of the private prison behemoth Corrections Corporation of America, in a press statement issued earlier this month. “Our financial performance was driven primarily by stronger than anticipated demand from our federal partners, most notably Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”
According to the company’s assessment, the spike in revenue was “primarily attributable to a contract at the South Texas Family Residential Center,” which brought in over $70 million during the first quarter of 2016 alone—roughly double levels seen in the first quarter of 2015.
The prison-like facility is located in Dilley, Texas and holds up to 2,400 women and children. Atlanticmagazine writer J. Weston Phippen reports that more than half of the people incarcerated there are children whose average age is nine.
Remarkably, the company’s statement came the same day a judge imposed a […]
No Comments
Natasha Geiling, - Climate Progress
Stephan: The American media is hypnotized by Trump mania. Except for looking for controversy about Hillary Clinton and mostly ignoring Bernie Sanders, little else gets covered. Here's something you ought to know about: the Gulf is under assault again, this time by Shell.
The ultimate solution to offshore wells is the collapse of the oil market as we move out of the carbon era. And it is going to happen.
Solar certainly is accelerating, but I think the adaptation of EV vehicles is going to go much faster than most realize.
A Shell oil facility has leaked nearly 90,000 gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, according to federal authorities. The spill has left a two-mile by thirteen-mile sheen in the Gulf, approximately 165 miles southwest of New Orleans. A helicopter first noticed the spill near Shell’s Brutus platform on Thursday morning, according to Shell spokeswoman Kimberly Windon.
“There are no drilling activities at Brutus, and this is not a well control incident,” Windon told the Associated Press. Instead, authorities believe the leak came from a release of oil from subsea infrastructure, from a line connecting four wells. According to the Wall Street Journal, Shell had dispatched boats Friday to begin cleaning up the spill.
“We are working with the United States Coast Guard and the National Oceanic Atmospheric Association to define the best approach to contain and clean up the sheen,” Windon said.
According to the United States Coast Guard, the leak has been secured, and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement is reporting no injuries from the spill.
Local activists, however, are unconvinced by reports that the spill is over. The spill occurred a little less than 100 miles due south […]
No Comments
Martin Lukacs, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: I take this as good news; it tells me that others are realizing that wellness has to be a society's first priority.
View of smoke plumes emitted from the Syncrude upgrader plant north of Fort McMurray, northern Alberta, Canada.
Credit: Jiri Rezac
It would be hard to invent a more destructive ritual of national self-punishment. Year after year, we hand oil companies gigantic tracts of pristine land. They skin them of entire ecosystems. They vacuum billions of dollars out of the country. Their oversized power, sunk into lobbying and litigation, upends government law-making.
And Canada’s return? The exploitation of the tar sands provides just two percent of our GDP. It has gutted manufacturing jobs and made a mockery of our emissions targets. And now that oil prices are crashing – as resource commodities predictably do – it is putting a vicious squeeze on government spending.
Faced with similar recklessness, people in other countries are setting out to take back control of their energy. As Naomi Klein documents in […]
No Comments
Stephan: This essay was written by a conservative from the Cato Institute, which is what made it particularly interesting to me. My accountant, who used to be a partner in one of the Big 3 firms, tells me that he has never met anyone who fully commanded all 75,000 pages of the tax code, and he certainly didn't claim to. It was his view no one could.
I spent a couple of hours a few years ago trying to check something in the code and found it denser and harder to understand than a paper on physics. What you do come away with is the conviction that the entire structure of the code has only two fundamental purposes: first, to permit rich people, and the richer the greater the benefit, to hang on to their money, and to pass it on. Second, to allow corporations to pay little or nothing.
As we listen to Donald Trump tell us it is "none of your business" what he pays or doesn't pay in taxes (and my guess is first that he isn't as rich as he wants you to believe, and second that he pays a tax rate way below yours), perhaps it is time to clean out the Aegean stables that is the American tax code. As a country we will be much richer if we do.
US tax forms
The best solution would be to rip out the individual income tax and replace it with a flat tax that has no deductions or credits’
On the presidential campaign trail, the candidates seem far apart on tax policy. The Democrats favor tax hikes on high earners, and the Republicans favor tax cuts all around. But with voters currently struggling with tax-return filing, all the candidates should be addressing the tax code’s appalling complexity.
Donald Trump did complain that his tax return “would literally probably be 10 feet high if I put them together, it is so complicated and so terrible.” Most people have smaller returns, but federal tax-code compliance overall consumes more than 6 billion hours of time each year, which is like having a “tax army” of 3 million people just filling out tax returns year-round.
The problem is getting worse. Federal tax rules span about 75,000 pages today, which is three times more than when President Jimmy Carter called […]
No Comments
