Gregory Korte , - USA TODAY
Stephan: Some of the most important times of my life have been spent hiking, backpacking, and canoeing in national parks, forests, and monuments. This is a move to allow a small group of people to profit from this land, at the expense of generations of Americans. Greed. Very simple.
Only a national outcry is going to block this. Speak up. This is the heritage we pass on to our children and grandchildren, and they to theirs.
WASHINGTON — President Trump signed an executive order Wednesday calling into question the future of more than two dozen national monuments proclaimed by the last three presidents to set aside millions of acres from development.
In asking Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke for an unprecedented review of national monuments, Trump may force a question never before tested in the 111-year history of the Antiquities Act: Whether one president can nullify a previous president’s proclamation establishing a national monument.
Signing the executive order at the Department of the Interior Wednesday, Trump called President Barack Obama’s creation of national monuments an “egregious abuse use of power.”
“And it’s gotten worse and worse and worse, and now we’re going to free it up,” he said. “This should never have happened.”
Trump’s executive order takes aim at 21 years of proclamations beginning in 1996. That time frame encompasses the “bookends” of two of the most controversial national monument designations in recent history: President Clinton’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in 1996 to President Obama’s Bears Ears National Monument in 2016. Both are in Utah, and faced opposition from the congressional […]
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Jenny Rowland, - Think Progress
Stephan: Trump's immigration antics have, as SR has already reported, had a large negative effect on the tourism industry. To that we must now add threats to National Monuments. Here is data from the employment side of the damage his policies are doing to the American economy.
We are watching the work of generations be unraveled in months.
Skiers in Inyo National Forest near Bishop, California.
Credit: AP/Brian Melley)
A trade group representing the outdoor industry’s manufacturers, suppliers, and sales representatives released a report Tuesday that found the industry generates $887 billion in consumer spending each year.
“This report makes clear that the outdoor recreation economy is not only thriving, but a powerful economic force that embodies the American spirit,” Amy Roberts, executive director of The Outdoor Industry Association (OIA), said in a statement.
She credited the country’s vast store of protected public lands as a critical piece of the industry’s success. “Public lands and waters are the foundation of this powerful economic force. By investing in and protecting America’s public lands and waters, we invest in our future and the continued well-being of America,” Roberts said.
But the group’s report came just a day before Donald Trump’s
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Thursday, April 27th, 2017
Feargus O'Sullivan, contributing writer - Citylab
Stephan: Here is some well done social outcome data that sheds factually light on what is happening with the middle class not only in the U.S., but in comparison with Europe. There are some surprises.
The reason I think the middle class is generally shrinking is because the transfer of power from nation states to corporate states. Look at the change that has occurred since Citizens United was decided on January 21, 2010, and legalized political bribery. In a little over six years the American political process has been fundamentally transformed.
We are entering a period of Neo-feudalism. In Medieval terms there is going to be an economic nobility, perhaps 4-6 thousand, an aristocracy of about 3-400,000 thousand. A small professional class, lawyers, physicians, accountants, engineers, and a huge economic peasantry. The Trump tax memo released today is designed to augment this process. Under his plan Trump personally would profit about $30 million.
American pundits and politicians love to contemplate the state of the American middle class, but we rarely get a sense of how it compares to the middle classes in other countries. A new report from the Pew Research Center sheds some light on this, revealing an American middle class that is notably smaller—but richer—than its equivalents across Western Europe.
Using data from Luxembourg’s Cross-National Data Center, the report paints a surprisingly complex picture of the progress of U.S. and EU middle-income earners from 1991 to 2010.
Yes, this swath of the American population has shrunk while lower and higher income tiers have grown. By contrast, Western Europe performance is decidedly mixed. The middle class is shrinking in Germany, Italy, and Spain—but growing in Ireland, the U.K., and the Netherlands.
First some qualifiers. The report has some necessary limitations: The only data available across all countries is on disposable income after tax and social security contributions. This means that housing costs, which can vary greatly, are not factored into final figures. Specifically, the report looks at people who fall in the middle income bracket, with disposable income between 66 percent and 200 percent of the country’s median income. This provides valuable information about […]
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Thursday, April 27th, 2017
Stephan: Suddenly the flood gates, pun intended, are opening on sea rise. I can hardly keep up with all the papers. And it is all getting more and more granular. We are now down to measurements in individual cities, as well as a total. The research tells us that 2.5 million people will be displaced because of sea rise. And their internal immigration will disrupt the lives of millions more where they are going. Here's the data.
This is going to produce massive social stresses.
Should a newly published sea level rise scenario come to pass, hundreds of American landmarks, neighborhoods, towns and cities would be submerged this century, at least in the absence of engineering massive, costly and unprecedented defenses and relocating major infrastructure. Ocean waters would cover land currently home to more than 12 million Americans and $2 trillion in property.
This extreme rise scenario, considered unlikely but increasingly plausible, was published together with other projections in a technical report by the National and Oceanic Atmospheric Administration in January. NOAA added “extreme” as a new sea level category in the publication, supplementing high, intermediate and low categories that have also been used in past reports. The new term reflects recent research suggesting that some parts of the Antarctic ice sheet may begin to collapse much sooner than scientists had previously anticipated, particularly if ongoing emissions of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide and methane remain high.
The extreme scenario would mean roughly 10 to 12 feet of sea level rise by 2100, depending on location, for all coastal states but Alaska — a significant departure above the global average projection (just over 8 feet). Detailed local projections are available from NOAA.
The impacts of this […]
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Thursday, April 27th, 2017
B Grace Bullock, - MIndful
Stephan: Here is some lovely good news. Yet another study describing the health benefits of daily meditation. There are literally over a thousand papers in the medical literature describing the psychophysical benefits and now we see that it can literally take years off the life of your brain.
It is not the technique of meditation that is the important part, it is the discipline of focusing intentioned awareness for at least 20 minutes every day.
If you will go to my essay
Meditation The Psychophysical Self-Regulations Process That Works you can get my paper on a science-based meditation technique that requires no religious affiliation. It will take your through the steps. If you would like my CD or online program which will guide you through the process go to:
Meditation for Modern Minds
Credit: Maria Kazanova/Adobe Stock
We’ve long known that normal aging is accompanied by a decrease in brain size. This decrease in brain size is due to age-related loss of connective tissue in the brain, often referred to as brain shrinkage, and affects memory, emotional regulation, and executive function. New research from the UCLA School of Medicine’s Department of Neurology shows that long-term meditators have younger brains, with higher concentrations of tissue in the brain regions most depleted by aging. In other words, the study found that meditation practice may help to minimize brain age and protect against age-related decline.
Using brain imaging data from a previous investigation of the impact of meditation on cortical thickness, this new study examined whether the estimated brain composition of meditators aged 50 and beyond differed from that of non-meditators. To answer this question, researchers compared brain images of a matched sample of 50 meditators and 50 non-meditating controls ranging in age from 24 […]
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