The Pentagon

A new analysis by Brown University finds that the Pentagon is the single largest producer of greenhouse gases in the world and emits more pollution than some small countries of comparable size, for example Sweden. (emphasis added)

Published on June 12, the report uses the Costs of War Project to look at the years following the 2001 September 11th attacks to get a snapshot of the US military’s emissions. The report looks at the cost of America’s huge military, its operations and its wider defense program. It finds that between 2001 and 2017 the military’s output of CO2 was around 766 million metric tons. That is a huge figure.

To give more a basis for comparison, the researchers then zeroed in on specific years.

In 2017 alone, the US military emitted approximately 59 million metric tons of greenhouse gases. That doesn’t just dwarf business output. It actually adds up to more than the annual output of small countries like, Sweden, Portugal or Denmark. Were the US military a country it would sit […]

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The “Big Money” wallet lost in some countries, containing nearly $100 in cash.
Credit: Christian Lukas Zünd/ Science

Plenty of people around the world, it turns out, are willing to return a stranger’s lost wallet—especially if it’s filled with cash, according to a counterintuitive study.

The study, published in the journal Science on Thursday, was a meticulous social experiment that took three years and over half a million dollars to complete.

A group of 13 research assistants (11 men and 2 women) were recruited for a trip around the world. They traveled to 355 major cities across 40 countries. In each city, they visited banks, theaters, hotels, police stations, and other public spaces and turned in a “lost wallet,” which they claimed to have found on the street, to a nearby employee.

The wallets were all see-through and contained a grocery list written in the country’s primary language, a key, and business cards with a male name and email address where the finder could presumably reach the owner. Some of the wallets also contained […]

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American concentration camp

The words “Holocaust” and “concentration camp” were trending on Twitter on Tuesday. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had referred to the prison camps that migrant children are being kept in as “concentration camps,” and a virtual war erupted. The feigned outrage of conservatives was loud. Some argued that the Holocaust was a singular event, to which no parallel should be claimed. Meanwhile, many historians and people personally connected to the Holocaust insisted that the comparison was valid.

As a Native writer and a Jewish writer, respectively, whose ancestors and cultures were subject to attempted state-sanctioned annihilation, we are not opposed to people using the words “concentration camps” to describe the camps in which migrant children, teens and adults are being caged. The words accurately apply, and we should not hesitate to use Holocaust comparisons in appropriate situations like this one. However, if we stop at analogies that are suggestive of a faraway time and place, we are disregarding a wide web of interconnected atrocities that impact millions of people right […]

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Credit: Washington Examiner

The first major study on the nation’s first Medicaid work requirements finds that people fell off of the Medicaid rolls but didn’t seem to find more work.

Since Arkansas implemented the nation’s first Medicaid work requirements last year, a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine has found, Medicaid enrollment has fallen for working-age adults, the uninsured rate has been rising, and there has been little discernible effect on employment.

The research appears to confirm some of the warnings from Medicaid advocates who opposed the Trump administration’s approval of work requirements in Arkansas and other states. People are losing Medicaid coverage, often as a result of confusion rather than failure to meet the work requirements, but they aren’t finding jobs and getting insurance that way. They are simply becoming uninsured.

One paragraph succinctly summarizes the new study from a team of Harvard researchers led by Ben Sommers:

Using a timely survey of low-income adults, we find that Arkansas’s implementation of the nation’s first work requirements […]

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