Although there’s been some huge efforts to reduce the amount of CO2 produced through human activity, the amount of the gas pumped into the atmosphere has still increased by an average of 2 parts per million (about 4 gigatons of carbon) annually, in recent years. But 2015 and 2016 broke the trend with the largest spikes on record: up to 3 parts per million, amounting to 6.3 gigatons of carbon. Emissions from human activity stayed roughly […]
Friday, October 20th, 2017
Ruan Grim and Aida Chavez, - The Intercept
Stephan: Republicans are wild to privatize what were formerly public institutions, schools, prisons, hospitals, child care. Why? The political blather they put forward is how improved everything will be. But that is not the real reason.
We now have the evidence, and it is clear and universal. Privatization makes a small group of owners richer but social outcome data always shows that privatization degrades the wellbeing of everyone served by those privatized, formerly public, institutions.
This story confirms yet again a nasty truth no one likes to talk about: The United States of America does not care much about the wellbeing of its children. I find the behavior of religious "pro-lifers" particularly despicable. They are obsessed with fetuses but once you are born, they have no time for you, and you are on your own.
Children in the for-profit foster care system are dying at alarming rates, but the deaths are not being investigated, and autopsies are not even being attached to the now-closed case files, a two-year investigation has found.
The investigation, conducted and released in rare bipartisan fashion by the Senate Finance Committee, looked closely at one of the largest private providers of foster care services, the MENTOR Network.
The companies and agencies charged with keeping foster children safe often failed to provide the most basic protections or take steps to prevent tragedies, the investigation found.
In the wake of the report, shares of the MENTOR Network’s parent company, Civitas Solutions, traded sharply downward, but quickly rebounded amid a lack of press coverage.
By pushing the report to colleagues, Sen. Ron Wyden, the committee’s top-ranking Democratic member, said he and panel chair Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, are trying to “light a big fire around” how important it is to fix the child welfare system’s flaws.
The report was prompted in part by a BuzzFeed investigation into the company two years ago. The committee found that 86 children had died in the company’s care over a 10-year […]
1 Comment
Friday, October 20th, 2017
Stephan: Yesterday I did a piece on the radical and precipitous decline in insect populations. And we all know about the bees. Today we have a report on what is happening in American forests.
We are in trouble folks. Whether we are paying attention or not, whether we believe or don't believe in climate change doesn't matter. Massive change and a civilization threatening crisis is coming.
Credit: Pexel
Need more evidence that the world is getting really weird? Trees on the East Coast of the U.S. might be migrating west.
Songlin Fei, an ecologist at Purdue University, compared U.S. Forest Service data on tree ranges from 1980-1995 against more recent data from 2013-2015. According to the study published in the journal Science Advances, trees on the East Coast might be shifting their ranges westward right underneath our noses.
Nearly half of the tree species they examined were making a break for it.
Of the 86 different tree species, 47% had a significant westward shift, including quaking aspens, several types of oak, and plum and cherry trees.
The trees weren’t physically moving, of course. Nor were they necessarily disappearing in the east. Instead, the trees, especially saplings, were spreading more along the species’ western edges.
So why are the trees moving? Fei’s team thinks they’re following the water. Over the past century, the southeast has gotten drier while the Midwest and Great Lakes have gotten wetter. The trees are […]
No Comments
