Scott Waldman, Science Reporter - Science
Stephan: The Trump administration thinks the American public are too ignorant to pay much attention to climate change, and they don't want to talk about it, because it complicates the greed of their corporate masters. Everything now being done in the U.S. government is for short-term profit.
Meanwhile in China they are planning 50 years out. Which country do you think will be the world leader by then?
Under Director James Reilly, the U.S. Geological Survey has drawn criticism for deemphasizing concerns about climate change.
Credit: NASA
A March news release from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) touted a new study that could be useful for infrastructure planning along the California coastline. At least that’s how President Donald Trump’s administration conveyed it.
The news release hardly stood out. It focused on the methodology of the study rather than its major findings, which showed that climate change could have a withering effect on California’s economy by inundating real estate over the next few decades.
An earlier draft of the news release, written by researchers, was sanitized by Trump administration officials, who removed references to the dire effects of climate change after delaying its release for several months, according to three federal officials who saw it. The study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, showed that California, the world’s fifth-largest economy, would face more than $100 billion in damages related to climate change and sea-level rise by the end of the century. It found that three to seven […]
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Darren Samuelsohn, White House Reporter - Politico
Stephan: The incompetence, the corruption, the failure of both the Democratic and Republican Congressional Parties to effectively address what Trump is doing to America is of an historical nature. Their motives may differ, their justifications are not the same, but the effect is. And nowhere has it been made clearer than in the fact that a large percentage of Congress members, in both the Senate and the House, have never bothered to read the Mueller report. They have other personal agendas that take precedence over the interests of the country.
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s report has hardly been ignored — but getting lawmakers to read beyond its executive summary, media reports or their own staffers’ notes is no simple task.
Credita: Tasos Katopodis/Getty
Time for a Mueller report reality check: Only a small segment of America’s most powerful have read it.
President Donald Trump can’t give a straight answer about the subject. More than a dozen members of Congress readily admitted to POLITICO that they too have skipped around rather than studying every one of the special counsel report’s 448 pages. And despite the report technically ranking as a best-seller, only a tiny fraction of the American public has actually cracked the cover and really dived in.
“What’s the point?” said Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), who like many other lawmakers recently interviewed in the Capitol acknowledged they hadn’t completed their own comprehensive read.
The result, say lawmakers, historians and cultural critics, is a giant literacy gap in the country when it comes to the most authoritative examination into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential […]
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Saturday, July 13th, 2019
Daphne Rousseau, - PHYS.ORG
Stephan: As this report describes, in Germany, the total insect biomass has reduced by over three-quarters. It is a staggering statement that should chill anyone. And we are the cause. And we are going to pay a terrible price.
Insects, which comprise two thirds of all terrestrial species, have been dying off at alarming rates, with disastrous impacts on food chains and habitats, amateur German researchers have found
For almost 30 years they passed as quirky eccentrics, diligently setting up their insect traps in the Rhine countryside to collect tens of millions of bugs and creepy crawlers.
Now the group of German entomology enthusiasts can boast a world-class scientific treasure: evidence of what is described as one of Earth’s worst extinction phases since the dinosaurs vanished.
Insects, which comprise two thirds of all terrestrial species, have been dying off at alarming rates, with disastrous impacts on food chains and habitats, researchers say.
The home of the Amateur Entomology Society of Krefeld on the Dutch border is a former school building where thick curtains block out the sunlight.
Inside in glass cabinets are stored thousands of butterflies, their wings bleached by time, along with exotic fist-sized beetles and dragonflies, brought back from around the world by amateur collectors.
Treasure trove
Traditionally “entomology was mainly about drying […]
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Saturday, July 13th, 2019
Katherine Schaeffer, - Pew Research Center
Stephan: Schools and childcare are very important to me, as you may have guessed given the stories I do in SR. As a human it is a matter of compassion and wellbeing; as a researcher my ongoing study of the Theorem of Wellbeing; as a futurist, the nation's future.
On the basis of data, I know that fostering wellbeing is more efficient, more productive, nicer to live under, more enduring, easier to implement, and much much cheaper. The poverty, and poor outcome data of American public schools is the well-known antipode. Far less well known is the reality of life for public school teachers. I say all this as background to my outrage about this story.
A teacher helps a student review for her geometry final at Northridge High School in Greeley, Colorado.
Credit: Melanie Stetson Freeman/The Christian Science Monitor/Getty
Classes have ended for the summer at public schools across the United States, but a sizable share of teachers are still hard at work at second jobs outside the classroom.
Among all public elementary and secondary school teachers in the U.S., 16% worked non-school summer jobs in the break before the 2015-16 school year. Notably, about the same share of teachers (18%) had second jobs during the 2015-16 school year, too, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). This makes teachers about three times as likely as U.S. workers overall to balance multiple jobs, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. (Multiple jobholders have made up a small but steady portion of the U.S. labor force since 1970.)
On average, a teacher’s summer job earnings account for 7% of their total annual income, according to the NCES data. Earnings from a second job during the school year make up an average of 9% […]
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Saturday, July 13th, 2019
Max Siegelbaum , - The Guardian
Stephan: Private corporations are being paid $752 a night to keep children in concentration camps, without proper bathrooms, showers, or even cooked warm food. Did you ever think a sentence like that could or would be written about the United States of America? These children are financially little taps sunk into the public treasury, which means you and I are paying to torture children, and emotionally damage them for life. Don't you just feel all warm and fuzzy about that? No? me neither, it makes me want to puke.
Some of the largest investments, which are by pension funds for public sector workers such as teachers and firefighters, come from states with “sanctuary” policies, such as New York, California and Oregon.
Nationwide, at least 20 pension funds and plans have invested in Geo Group or CoreCivic, the two biggest private prison operators, according to a Guardian/Documented analysis of US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings.
These funds range from big organizations like the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPers), which manages $81bn in stock holdings, to the more modestly sized funds like the New Mexico Educational Retirement Board, which manages about $2.3bn.
Public worker funds across the US have at least $67m currently invested in the two companies, according to filings from the first quarter of 2019, which probably show just a […]
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Millions of US taxpayer dollars are being invested into private prison operators involved in the detention of thousands of migrants across the United States, an investigation shows.
