Thursday, January 24th, 2019
Paul Voosen, Staff Writer - Science
Stephan: Donald Trump and the Republicans are literally destroying the United States and crippling even the small efforts being made to understand what is happening with climate change.
Meanwhile, most Americans are watching their favorite series, talking about football, and looking the other way. This awful shutdown should have produced a national work stoppage with hundreds of thousands of people out on the streets of every city in the country. But it didn't; it's just the new "normal." Democracy doesn't work when citizens fail to stand up for what is right.
Delayed maintenance work means NASA’s P-3 Orion will miss at least half of its IceBridge campaign to measure Arctic sea ice.
Credit: CHRISTY HANSEN/NASA
The spreading effects of the partial U.S. government shutdown have reached Earth’s melting poles. IceBridge, a decadelong NASA aerial campaign meant to secure a seamless record of ice loss, has had to sacrifice at least half of what was supposed to be its final spring deployment, its scientists say. The shortened mission threatens a crucial plan to collect overlapping data with a new ice-monitoring satellite called the Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2).
The nearly monthlong spending impasse between Congress and President Donald Trump, “throws a giant wrench into that long-developed plan,” says John Sonntag, an IceBridge mission scientist at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
NASA, among the many research agencies mostly closed by the shutdown, launched IceBridge in 2009 after the failure of ICESat-1, the agency’s first laser-based ice-monitoring satellite. To fill the gap until ICESat-2 was launched, the agency funded annual aircraft flights over the Arctic and Antarctica. IceBridge […]
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Thursday, January 24th, 2019
, - NBC News/Associated Press
Stephan: Poor Americans are increasingly unable to even bury their dead. Here's the story.
Funeral home in Detroit
Credit: AP
DETROIT — Darlene Hardison would have loved to have a funeral for her father and uncle and bury them in marked graves at a Michigan cemetery. But she and her family could come up with only enough money to have Hoover Heags and Arthur Hardison cremated, then they left the remains to a Detroit funeral home to bury.
Authorities later discovered Heags’ and Hardison’s cremated remains among nearly 300 others in bags, boxes and other containers inside Cantrell Funeral Home, one of two Detroit funeral homes police and state licensing officials are investigating for allegedly improperly storing remains. Heags had died about a year earlier; Hardison had been dead for about two years.
“The funds were limited … to paying house bills and we just didn’t have the money to cover everything we needed,” Darlene Hardison said at a cemetery where a memorial service was held for some of the people whose cremains authorities found in the now-closed Cantrell Funeral Home on […]
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Wednesday, January 23rd, 2019
Larry Elliott, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: Twenty-six men and women have as much wealth as 3.8 billion of their fellow human beings, half of the human race. In that one sentence, we have the definition of Neo-feudalism. That is how deeply distorted our values have become. Here are the two other statements that stood out for me in this report from Oxfam: "The 12% increase in the wealth of the very richest contrasted with a fall of 11% in the wealth of the poorest half of the world’s population." And, specific to the British (the Guardian is a British newspaper), "The poorest 10% of Britons are paying a higher effective tax rate than the richest 10% (49% compared with 34%) once taxes on consumption such as VAT are taken into account."
Human civilization is in crisis and in the United States most of us are watching Netflix, listening to prosperity preachers, or talking about football.
The Oxfam report says that between 2017 and 2018 a new billionaire was created every two days.
Credit: Bloomberg/Getty
The growing concentration of the world’s wealth has been highlighted by a report showing that the 26 richest billionaires own as many assets as the 3.8 billion people who make up the poorest half of the planet’s population.
In an annual wealth check released to mark the start of the World Economic Forum in Davos, the development charity Oxfam said 2018 had been a year in which the rich had grown richer and the poor poorer.
It said the widening gap was hindering the fight against poverty, adding that a 1% wealth tax would raise an estimated $418bn (£325bn) a year – enough to educate every child not in school and provide healthcare that would prevent 3 million deaths.
As of 01/20/19, the richest six American tech leaders (Bezos, Gates, Zuckerberg, Ellison, Page, Brin) averaged over 
