Thursday, September 6th, 2018
Stephan: Here is some excellent news about the world ocean, and it is reported in the conservative corporate press.
A close-up computer rendering of The Ocean Cleanup system.
Credit: Erwin Zwart/ Ocean Cleanup
A massive cleanup of plastic in the seas will begin in the Pacific Ocean, by way of Alameda, California. The Ocean Cleanup, an effort that’s been five years in the making, plans to launch its beta cleanup system, a 600-meter (almost 2,000-foot) long floater that can collect about five tons of ocean plastic per month.
It’s a start. The launch date is September 8, and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch being targeted is more than 1,000 nautical miles from the launch point and on the move.
The Ocean Cleanup plans to monitor the performance of the beta, called System 001, and have an improved fleet of 60 more units skimming the ocean for plastics in about a year a half. The ultimate goal of the project, founded by Dutch inventor Boyan Slat when he was 18, is to clean up 50% of the patch in five […]
2 Comments
Wednesday, September 5th, 2018
Stephan: I read the most egregious nonsense in the rightwing press about what a government that was committed to fostering wellbeing would look like. The arguments are so shabby, so shallow, so ill-conceived that it is hard to believe anyone would take them seriously, but of course many do because they do not have a fact-based worldview. Anyway, what would America look like. Here's one take on that question.
Credit: Charles Krupa/AP
Just a decade ago, “socialism” was a dirty word in American politics. Debates over its merits were mostly limited to obscure blogs, niche magazines and political parties on the other side of the Atlantic. But more recently Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and a handful of other politicians have breathed new life into the label, injecting a radical alternate vision for the U.S. economy into the mainstream political debate. Ahead of the midterms, politicians like Ocasio-Cortez, Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib, and Kansas’ James Thompson have proudly held up their endorsements from Democratic Socialists of America, the country’s largest socialist group, whose numbers have swelled since Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign.
For Fox News viewers, it’s the stuff of nightmares—not to mention that skittish Democrats fear alienating swing voters more comfortable with their party’s post-Lyndon B. Johnson incrementalism. According to a pollfrom August, however, for the first time since Gallup has asked the question, more Democrats approve of socialism than of capitalism. Could socialism really come to America—and what would it look like? Politico Magazine […]
1 Comment
Wednesday, September 5th, 2018
IAN MILLHISER, - Think Progress
Stephan: Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch here, in this article, you see what we could face in the future as a result of the Republican appointment of justices who are more ideologues than jurists. If there were five such men on the court our lives would all be profoundly affected in a negative way. That's why this current nomination of Brett Kavanaugh is potentially so dangerous.
Supreme Court Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch
Credit: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call
Three members of the Supreme Court announced on Thursday that they would literally force orphan children to live in a group home or similar setting, rather than allow those children to be placed in foster care with a same-sex couple. Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch did not explain their reasoning in a brief order handed down by the Court, but the plaintiffs in this case made familiar arguments claiming that their religious liberty and free speech were violated.
The case is Fulton v. Philadelphia. Because only three members of the Court voted to stay a lower court decision rejecting the plaintiffs’ arguments, that lower court decision will remain in effect, and foster children will continue to be placed with same-sex couples.
Fulton involves the city of Philadelphia’s process for placing children in foster homes. The city contracts with 30 private agencies which help screen potential foster families and place children in suitable homes. Under the terms of their contract […]
2 Comments
Wednesday, September 5th, 2018
Curtis A. Deutsch1, Joshua J. Tewksbury, Michelle Tigchelaar, David S. Battisti, Scott C. Merrill, Raymond B. Huey, Rosamond L. , - Science
Stephan: Yet another unconsidered negative effect of climate change. The more that comes out the clearer it becomes that failure to properly deal with climate change is going to have catastrophic consequences.
Warming, crops, and insect pests
Crop responses to climate warming suggest that yields will decrease as growing-season temperatures increase. Deutsch et al. show that this effect may be exacerbated by insect pests (see the Perspective by Riegler). Insects already consume 5 to 20% of major grain crops. The authors’ models show that for the three most important grain crops—wheat, rice, and maize—yield lost to insects will increase by 10 to 25% per degree Celsius of warming, hitting hardest in the temperate zone. These findings provide an estimate of further potential climate impacts on global food supply and a benchmark for future regional and field-specific studies of crop-pest-climate interactions.
Abstract
Insect pests substantially reduce yields of three staple grains—rice, maize, and wheat—but models assessing the agricultural impacts of global warming rarely consider crop losses to insects. We use established relationships between temperature and the population growth and metabolic rates of insects to estimate how and where climate warming will augment losses of rice, maize, and wheat to insects. Global yield losses of these grains are projected to increase […]
No Comments
Wednesday, September 5th, 2018
Kyle Mantyla, - Right Wing Watch
Stephan: Did you know that Hillary Clinton could cast spells? I run these pieces about the right wing media because I think it is important that my readers really understand just how deranged these people are.
Liz Crokin rightwing commentator
Last week, right-wing “journalist” and fringe conspiracy theorist Liz Crokin lost the tips of two of her fingers in a surfing accident which she is blaming on a spell that may have been cast on her by Hillary Clinton.
Last night, Crokin posted a video on YouTube recounting her accident, which happened when the surfboard that she was holding by a rope was forcefully pulled away by a crashing wave, severing parts of two fingers. While she realizes that it was probably “just a freak accident,” that didn’t stop her from also asserting that it may have been the result of a curse that had been placed on her by Hillary Clinton or artist Marina Abramović or some other “witch” that is targeting her due to her effortsto expose the secret satanic cannibalistic pedophile cult that supposedly runs the world.
“These people that I expose engage in witchcraft,” Crokin said. “You know, the people like Marina Abramović, the people like Hillary Clinton, [the people] from the deep state articles that are getting ready to write a […]
1 Comment
