Here we have another good news story arising from work being done by Democrats. It amazes me that working-class TCPers seem so willfully ignorant that they don’t even recognize work being done to foster their wellbeing. But they don’t. They still support criminal Trump and the Trump Christofascist Party (TCP).
Peak bloom cherry blossoms frame the U.S. Capitol dome on the first full day of spring on March 20, 2024. Credit: Bill Clark / CQ-ROLL CALL / Getty
The US is the only wealthy country in the world that doesn’t guarantee time off for workers.
A group of congressional Democrats has introduced a bicameral bill this week that would establish a federal guarantee for paid time off for workers across the U.S. and end the U.S.’s status as the only wealthy country in the world that doesn’t guarantee the benefit to its workforce.
On Wednesday, a group of House Democrats led by Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-Rhode Island) introduced the Protected Time Off Act, which would guarantee full-time workers no less than two weeks of paid leave annually. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) is also introducing the proposal in the Senate.
Under the bill, workers would earn at least one hour of paid time off for every 25 hours worked, up to 80 hours guaranteed by federal law. This time off would come on top of leave that could be guaranteed by other laws, like family or sick time.
“Americans who put in an honest day’s work deserve to take time […]
Madalina Vlasceanu, Kimberly C. Doell, and Joseph B. Bak-Coleman et al., Research Scientists - Science Advances
Stephan:
One would think that the leadership of all the nations of the world understood by now that the only way to successfully address the challenge of climate change would be for all governments to agree to a plan and each pass national policies to implement that plan. Obviously, this is not happening in any effective way. Why not? Here is an. enormous international study by several hundred scientists involving 59,440 participants from 63 countries. What that means is that this study should be taken very seriously. Unfortunately, it is not a happy report. What that tells us is we each need to begin thinking about what is going to happen to our local area, and what can we do to prepare ourselves. I am setting it up for you to click through and read the entire scientific article because I think this issue is so important. Once again the November election makes the choice very clear: the Democrats are far from perfect but they are planning to take serious steps to prepare for climate change, The TCPs (formerly the Republican Party, as a party doesn’t even accept the reality of climate change.) If you are planning for you and your children, and their children to survive in anything like the present quality of life you better vote only for Democrats.
Figure 1 Credit: Science Advances
Abstract
Effectively reducing climate change requires marked, global behavior change. However, it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and an effortful tree-planting behavioral task. Across 59,440 participants from 63 countries, the interventions’ effectiveness was small, largely limited to nonclimate skeptics, and differed across outcomes: Beliefs were strengthened mostly by decreasing psychological distance (by 2.3%), policy support by writing a letter to a future-generation member (2.6%), information sharing by negative emotion induction (12.1%), and no intervention increased the more effortful behavior—several interventions even reduced tree planting. Last, the effects of each intervention differed depending on people’s initial climate beliefs. These findings suggest that the impact of behavioral climate interventions varies across audiences and target behaviors.
INTRODUCTION
The climate crisis is one of humanity’s most consequential and challenging problems (1). Successfully rising to the challenge depends on both “top-down” structural changes (e.g., regulation and investment) and “bottom-up” changes (e.g., individuals’ and collectives’ beliefs and behaviors). These bottom-up processes require widespread belief in climate change, […]
This report, in my view, is important for three reasons: First, the livestock industry has been proven to be a major reason climate change is occurring, and nothing is being done. Second, this report shows how vulnerable to corruption the science community has become, and how weak its ethical standards now are. Third, it confirms once again, if yet another confirmation was required, that the United States is a deeply corrupt country, where you can corrupt any institution in our society if you have enough money because greed and profit are the only things that matter in American culture.
Credit: Adobe
This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here.
When researchers at the United Nations published a bombshell report in 2006 called “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” the livestock industry soon realized it had a major public relations challenge on its hands.
Media outlets around the world covered the report and its main findings: Livestock are a major source of greenhouse gas emissions that need to be reined in, and cutting emissions from the industry should become a focus of public policy, on par with cutting emissions from fossil fuels. It was the first time such a high-level report had come to this conclusion.
In the following 17 years, the report has been scrutinized by researchers, attacked from every angle, and referenced again and again, held up as a clarion call for worldwide veganism on one side, and on the other, a symbol of the climate-hysterical global nanny state bent on stealing everyone’s cheeseburgers.
But as the public has been whipsawed over its findings, new research says it […]
I think Max Tani makes some very good points about what is happening in journalism in the U.S. and I thought it notable that he also cites people who don’t agree with him. Personally, I think his assessments are quite accurate.
There’s too much to read and watch, too many places to read and watch it. It’s enough to distract you from the biggest news in journalism right now: In 2024, it’s harder than ever to get a tough story out in the United States of America.
A landscape of gleefully revelatory magazine exposés, aggressive newspaper investigations, feral online confrontations, and painstaking television investigations has been eroded by a confluence of factors — from rising risks of litigation and costs of insurance, which strapped media companies can hardly afford, to social media, which has given public figures growing leverage over the journalists who now increasingly carry their water.
The result is a thousand stories you’ll never read, and a shrinking number of publications with the resources and guts to confront power.
One recent example illustrates the difficulty of getting even a modestly negative revelation about a popular public figure into print. Last year, freelance reporter John McDermott discovered that Jay Shetty, a massively popular lifestyle podcaster who recently interviewed President Joe Biden, had fudged biographical details about his life. But months after he began his reporting for Esquire, he wondered: Would any outlet publish it?
Esquire lost interest as the piece took on a critical […]
One sees a lot of commentary on the difference between the way men and women see politics. but I think it’s more complicated than most commentators make it seem. Here is a data-based assessment that, in my opinion, makes the right point. “It’s frustrating to say “we don’t know” about something as important as the future of gender politics. But sometimes, “we don’t know” is the only honest answer.”
Credit: Getty
When I was growing up in the 1990s, couples counselor John Gray penned a book on gender relations with an instantly memorable title: Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. The book argued that men and women have fundamentally different communication styles, which can be major sources of tension in heterosexual relationships. To call it a hit is a massive understatement: Gray’s book has sold 15 million copies worldwide, and was even adapted into a Broadway show (starring Gray) in the late 1990s.
Yet Men Are From Mars’s broad generalizations — “Men are motivated when they feel needed while women are motivated when they feel cherished” — haven’t held up. Feminist critics who challenged the book’s simplistic narrative at the time have largelybeenvalidated by subsequent scientific research, which finds that men and women don’t act nearly as differently as stereotypes suggest.
The lesson here is that gender-divide stories are intuitively appealing but awfully easy to overstate. Any new claims that men and women are behaving differently should be approached with caution — a maxim that’s as true in the political world as anywhere else.
