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Issues and events that stink to high heaven
August 9, 2019
From fatbergs to microplastics, here’s why what you flush down the toilet matters — and why you should NEVER flush wet wipes 🚽(via NowThis Future)
What You Should & Should Not Flush Down the Toilet
From fatbergs to microplastics, here’s why what you flush down the toilet matters — and why you should NEVER flush wet wipes 🚽(via NowThis Future)
Posted by NowThis Politics on Thursday, August 8, 2019
August 8, 2019
More than 100 intense wildfires have ravaged the Arctic since June and scientists believe that climate change is one of the factors fueling the flames. We head into Siberia, one of the coldest inhabited places on Earth, where temperatures are significantly warmer than usual. While the surface of eastern Russia is on fire, its foundation is literally melting away.
One of the coldest places on Earth is melting away
More than 100 intense wildfires have ravaged the Arctic since June and scientists believe that climate change is one of the factors fueling the flames. We head into Siberia, one of the coldest inhabited places on Earth, where temperatures are significantly warmer than usual. While the surface of eastern Russia is on fire, its foundation is literally melting away.
Posted by CNN on Thursday, August 8, 2019
A pair of mass shootings rocked the nation over the weekend, leaving more than 30 dead and dozens more injured in two cities across the country.
A suspect opened fire inside a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, on Saturday morning, leaving 22 people dead and injuring dozens more in the Mexican border city. Just hours later across the country, another shooter opened fire at a bar in Dayton, Ohio. Nine people died, including the alleged shooter’s sister, and 27 were injured.
The El Paso shooting marked the deadliest of the year, and the Dayton shooting marked the 251st mass shooting this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive. Sunday was just the 216th day in the calendar year.
Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr, one of the most outspoken coaches in the NBA, spoke about the mass shootings on Monday at USA Basketball training camp in Las Vegas. Kerr, one of coach Gregg Popovich’s assistants for the upcoming FIBA World Cup, is a longtime advocate for gun control in the United States and is constantly using his platform to raise awareness on the issue.
Gun control, he said, is always in the front of his mind.
“Somebody could walk in the door in the gym right now and start spraying us with an AR-15,” Kerr said, “They could. It might happen because we’re all vulnerable, whether we go to a concert, a church, the mall or go to the movie theater or a school.
“It’s up to us as Americans to demand change from the gutless leadership that continues to allow this to happen and continues to somehow claim the second amendment is doing its job. The Second Amendment is about the right to defend yourself. The only thing that Second Amendment is doing is leading to mass murder right now. This is all just insanity.”
Kerr’s Twitter feed has been full of posts and reposts calling for stricter gun control, criticizing Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) since the shootings.
Though he’s clearly frustrated with the lack of action in Congress, Kerr does think change is just around the corner.
“It’s going to happen. The momentum is building,” Kerr said, “People are more and more frustrated in our country. I think at this point, the vast majority of people in this country have had it. Now it’s a matter of taking action.”
Kerr did make it clear that he doesn’t have an issue with guns as a whole. It’s the assault-style weapons that he feels, like so many others in the United States, don’t belong in the hands of the public.
“A lot of my friends have had guns. They’ve had them in gun lockers. It was kept safely away. They weren’t carrying around AR-15’s,” Kerr said, “They had hunting rifles. This is not what it’s about. This is not about someone’s ability to own a gun.
“It’s about someone’s ability to have a military style assault rifle with huge magazines. The cops got there in Dayton in one minute after the shooting started. In one minute, the shooter was killed from what I gather. But he killed nine people in one minute because of the gun and the weapon he had. We’re really going to say as Americans we should allow him to carry an AR-15? It’s ridiculous.”
Kerr will be by Popovich’s side when USA Basketball heads to China for the FIBA World Cup later this month. Popovich, who is just as outspoken as Kerr, was asked Tuesday if he thought the team could be a welcome distraction for the country in the wake of the latest shootings.
While he didn’t discredit that idea, he had a much more blunt request of lawmakers instead.
“I think that, you know, the situation we’re all living in now, everybody looks for a little bit of distraction in some way, shape or form,” Popovich said, via Eric Woodyard of the Desert News.
“It’d be a lot better if people in power got off their asses and got something done.”
Though he knows USA Basketball can’t realistically solve any problems in the United States with its performance in the FIBA World Cup — regardless of how they do in the tournament, which kicks off on August 31 and runs through September 15 — Popovich at least hopes they can be a model for the country to build off of.
“We can’t fix the divisiveness in our country,” Popovich said Monday, “But what we can do is be a great example of how people can come together for a common goal and achieve it.
“It’s our responsibility to not only become the best team we can be, but it’s the way we conduct ourselves with USA on our shirts. We’re representing a lot of people.”
August 3, 2019
Moscow has 12 million people, and no system to recycle.
That’s created a garbage crisis not just for the city, but the entire country.
Moscow has No System to Recycle and it's Starting to Poison People
Moscow has 12 million people, and no system to recycle.That’s created a garbage crisis not just for the city, but the entire country.
Posted by VICE News on Friday, August 2, 2019
By Karen Dolan July 31, 2019
SNAP program reduces poverty better than anything else, with very little fraud
Getty ImagesUnder new changes proposed by the Trump administration, over 3 million struggling parents, children, people living with disabilities, and older American may lose access to food stamps, also known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Children in families who are slated to lose their SNAP benefits will also lose critical school-lunch assistance.
The Trump administration wants to eliminate an eligibility criterion known as broad-based categorical eligibility (BBCE), which enables states to expand access to those in need of food assistance based on other programs they qualify for.
By eliminating it, the administration is effectively creating a benefits cliff, where a parent’s small raise at work — or a modest amount of savings — could end up disqualifying a family from SNAP entirely. That leaves them poorer for getting a raise or saving money, or else puts them at risk of their food aid falling through the bureaucratic cracks.
Trump and the Republicans attempted to get this reduction in the nation’s most effective social safety-net program rammed through Congress last year — and failed. They also failed in their attempt to significantly defund the program. So now Trump is attempting to reduce food access to families in need via executive fiat.
SNAP reduces poverty more simply and directly than nearly any other program. Because it’s responsive to the overall economy, it expands during economic downturns and contracts when poverty levels fall. This enables people to weather temporary economic hardship, stay above the official poverty level, and gets money more quickly into the economy.
It also literally puts food into children’s mouths, while their parents work and save.
Why would the administration want to take critical food assistance away from children and families who need it? The administration has claimed ineligible people are using the program, perhaps fraudulently. But that’s unlikely.
Looking at figures through 2016, Forbes contributor Simon Constable calculated potentially fraudulent SNAP expenditures at under 1% of the cost of the program — a minuscule amount compared to behemoth agencies like the Pentagon, which can’t even pass an audit, and which nonetheless keeps getting budget increases.
SNAP, by contrast, “has some of the most rigorous program integrity standards and systems of any federal program,” adds Robert Greenstein of the Center of Budget and Policy Priorities, including for recipients who qualify by their participation in other programs.
According to the center, SNAP is one of the most effective economic stimulators per federal dollar spent of any program. During the economic downturn of 2009, for example, Moody’s Analytics estimated that for every dollar increase in SNAP benefits that year, $1.70 economic activity was generated.
Further, the administration has repeatedly claimed — also falsely — that poverty is all but solved.
According to research by the Poor People’s Campaign and the Institute for Policy Studies, 140 million Americans are either poor or low-income. In this wealthiest nation on the planet, even as more wealth concentrates at the top, some 43% of us struggle to make ends meet — a number that far outpaces the official poverty measure, not to mention Trump’s mis-characterization of it.
Our social safety net, which includes assistance for basic needs such as housing, health, and nutrition, is insufficient and under attack.
The impact of this neglect on the health and well being of our children, in particular, reverberates through our entire economy.
Our report compiles reams of data on the enormous economic costs of child poverty, such as the Children’s Defense Fund’s estimation that the economic cost of lost productivity, worsened health, and increased crime rates that stem from child poverty total roughly $700 billion per year — 3.5% of GDP.
Strengthening SNAP is key to reducing this damage. So on economic grounds alone, the Trump proposed rule change to kick millions struggling children, families — and not to mention people living with disabilities and older people — off critical food assistance makes no sense. On moral grounds, it’s indefensible.
As the Rev. Dr. William Barber and the Poor People’s Campaign often says, “Everybody’s got the right to live.” That right belongs to America’s 140 million poor and low-income people, including the 3.1 million children and families experiencing hardship that rely on the nutritional assistance provided by the SNAP program.
Karen Dolan directs the Criminalization of Race and Poverty Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. She’s a co-author of the IPS-Poor People’s Campaign Report, “A Poor People’s Moral Budget: Everybody Has the Right to Live.” The IPS is funded by private foundations and individual donors.
Farmer: We’re tired of being ‘jerked’ back and forth by rhetoric on both sides
The White House recently announced that it would be providing an additional $16 billion in aid to American farmers affected by the trade war between the U.S. and China.
But the problem for American farmers has becomes bigger than something a bailout can fix.
“This trade thing is what’s brought on by the president and it’s really frustrating because he took away all of our markets,” Bob Nuylen, a farmer from North Dakota who grows spring wheat and sunflowers, told Yahoo Finance. “We live in an area where we’re kind of in the middle of nowhere. It costs us a lot of money — over $1 a bushel to get our grain to markets.”
Since trade tensions began in 2018, farmers have faced major financial challenges, since China was once a major U.S. agriculture buyer.
And losing customers has become a major issue. Soybean farmers have been dealing with this, as China has turned to other countries like Brazil for soybeans. Nuylen said this is also happening for wheat farmers, as China has begun importing wheat from Russian regions.
“All these countries went to different countries to get their grain,” Nuylen said. “How are we going to get the relations back with them to buy our grain again and be our customers?”
Between 2016-2017, China was the fourth-largest wheat buyer in the world, importing more than 61 million U.S. bushels. In 2019, the top U.S. export destinations for wheat include Mexico, the Philippines, Japan, and Nigeria — China is not even among the top 10.
“Our prices are probably as low as I’ve seen them in a long time,” he told Yahoo Finance. “We were losing just about $70 an acre just by putting our crop in [the ground] this spring.”
While a deal between the U.S. and China would take months to be reached, farmers are remaining “cautiously optimistic,” Glenn Brunkow, a Kansas-based corn and soybean farmer said.
“Our hope is that the playing field is leveled up and these tariffs on the other side are taken away,” Brunkow said. “We feel like with the technology we have, the advantages we have, we can produce the crops as economically as anyone else in the whole world.”
This isn’t the first time that the USDA has doled out aid to struggling farmers. The Trump administration pledged two installments of a farmer bailout program. The first round of payments totaling $4.7 billion was paid in September 2018, while the second round was distributed in December. By February 2019, the total aid payments reached $7.7 billion.
“Payments are a welcome help for the bottom line of Missouri farmers,” Blake Hurst, president of the Missouri Farm Bureau, told Yahoo Finance in an email statement. “Although the trade payments vary widely from county to county, they’ll keep more than a few farmers in business for another year. …
“Having said all that,” the statement added, “farmers are profoundly wary of the trade war, embarrassed that ad hoc government subsidies are all that stands between many of us and financial ruin, and ready for the return of more normal times.”
The Wall Street Journal reported in February that farm bankruptcies in three major farm regions reached its highest level in at least 10 years. Much of this is because crop prices have been dragged down dramatically because of a decrease in consumers. Overall, U.S. farm debt soared over $409 billion in 2017, which is “the largest sum in nearly four decades and a level not seen since the 1980’s,” WSJ wrote.
And it doesn’t help that farmers are facing unprecedented severe weather. Flooding has damaged crops across the Midwest. When combining that with bankruptcies, lower prices, and trade war struggles, mental health problems among rural America is becoming more prevalent than ever before.
“People think that farmers are just loaded with money but … just about every dollar a farmer makes, he puts back into the economy and their state and in the nation, because our inputs are so high,” Nuylen said. “We spend just about all the money we make back into the communities. If we’re struggling, everybody’s struggling.”
He added: “We kind of get a bad picture that we’re all big money and drive all this big equipment. In reality … these are record low incomes for farmers in the last couple of years. It’s getting tough out there. We’re going to start seeing a lot of suicide and a lot of farmers going out of business. So, that’s not a good thing.”
The concern is that farmers may reach a breaking point as things drag on.
“It’s going to be a scary situation if it doesn’t turn around pretty soon,” Nuylen said.
Adriana is an associate editor for Yahoo Finance.
A man who advocates selling off US public land for mining has been appointed by the trump administration to oversee some 250 million acres of government-owned wilderness.
Interior Secretary David Bernhardt signed the order making William Pendley the acting head of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM).
The office manages a huge swathe of mostly wild federal land and the natural resources it contains, in the western US.
Mr Pendley welcomed Trump administration plans to open more federal land to mining, fossil fuel development and other private use, in tweets earlier this year.
He has called the oil and gas extraction technique known as fracking ”an energy, economic, AND environmental miracle!”
A former official in the interior department under Ronald Reagan, Mr Pendley has long backed ranchers and business owners in standoffs with the federal government over grazing and other uses of public lands.
The Wyoming native has accused environmental campaigners and the government of “tyranny” and “waging war on the west.”
He argued in 2016 that the “founding fathers intended all lands owned by the federal government to be sold”.
Conservationist Phil Hanceford, of The Wilderness Society, claimed Mr Pendley’s new role at BLM “strongly suggests the administration is positioning itself to liquidate our shared public lands”.
A spokeswoman for the interior department denied the allegation.
She said that the Trump administration had “been clear that we are not interested in transferring public lands”.
Jon Tester, the senator for Montana – the home state of former Trump interior secretary Ryan Zinke – said in a statement: “William Pendley has built a career advocating for the sale of public lands to the highest bidder. His leadership of the agency tasked with protecting the very entities he’d like to sell is a grave threat to the future of public lands.”
BLM manages one of every 10 acres in the US and 30 per cent of the country’s minerals.
Additional reporting by AP
July 27, 2019
Most restaurants generate huge amounts of waste that go straight to landfills. So the owners of Lighthouse in New York decided to take a different approach.
“It’s our responsibility, it’s our job to… take control over how we behave with our environment.”
This New York restaurant dramatically reduced its waste, and wants others to follow
Most restaurants generate huge amounts of waste that go straight to landfills. So the owners of Lighthouse in New York decided to take a different approach.“It’s our responsibility, it’s our job to… take control over how we behave with our environment.”
Posted by CNN on Friday, July 26, 2019
Bernie Sanders is heading across the border to Canada with type 1 diabetics this weekend to buy cheap insulin this weekend.
We met with people who cross into Mexico to buy the life-saving drug — and tried to find out why it’s so expensive.
Inside The Factory Where Most Of The World’s Insulin Is Made
Bernie Sanders is heading across the border to Canada with type 1 diabetics this weekend to buy cheap insulin this weekend.We met with people who cross into Mexico to buy the life-saving drug — and tried to find out why it’s so expensive.
Posted by VICE News on Friday, July 26, 2019
This doesn’t mean he’s a spy, but neither is it a flip accusation. Russia attacked our country in 2016. It is attacking us today. Its attacks will intensify in 2020. Yet each time we try to raise our defenses to repel the attack, McConnell, the Senate majority leader, blocks us from defending ourselves.
Let’s call this what it is: unpatriotic. The Kentucky Republican is, arguably more than any other American, doing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s bidding.
Robert Mueller sat before Congress this week warning that the Russia threat “deserves the attention of every American.” He said “the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in our election is among the most serious” challenges to American democracy he has ever seen. “They are doing it as we sit here, and they expect to do it during the next campaign,” he warned, adding that “much more needs to be done in order to protect against these intrusions, not just by the Russians but others as well.”
Not three hours after Mueller finished testifying, Mark Warner (D-Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, went to the senate floor to request unanimous consent to pass legislation requiring presidential campaigns to report to the FBI any offers of assistance from agents of foreign governments.
Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.) was there to represent her leader’s interests. “I object,” she said.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) attempted to move the bill that would require campaigns to report to the FBI contributions by foreign nationals.
“I object,” said Hyde-Smith.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) tried to force action on bipartisan legislation, written with Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and supported by Sens. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.), protecting lawmakers from foreign cyber-attacks. “The majority leader, our colleague from Kentucky, must stop blocking this common-sense legislation and allow this body to better defend itself against foreign hackers,” he said.
“I object,” repeated Hyde-Smith.
The next day, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), the minority leader, asked for the Senate to pass the Securing America’s Federal Elections Act, already passed by the house, that would direct $600 million in election assistance to states and require back-up paper ballots.
McConnell himself responded this time, reading from a statement, his chin melting into his chest, his trademark thin smile on his lips. “It’s just a highly partisan bill from the same folks who spent two years hyping up a conspiracy theory about President Trump and Russia,” he said. “Therefore, I object.” McConnell also objected to another attempt by Blumenthal to pass his bill.
Pleaded Schumer: “I would suggest to my friend the majority leader: If he doesn’t like this bill, let’s put another bill on the floor and debate it.”
But McConnell has blocked all such attempts, including:
A bipartisan bill requiring Facebook, Google and other Internet companies to disclose purchasers of political ads, to identify foreign influence.
A bipartisan bill to ease cooperation between state election officials and federal intelligence agencies.
A bipartisan bill imposing sanctions on any entity that attacks a U.S. election.
A bipartisan bill with severe new sanctions on Russia for its cyber-crimes.
McConnell has prevented them all from being considered — over and over again. This is the same McConnell who, in the summer of 2016, when briefed by the CIA along with other congressional leaders on Russia’s electoral attacks, questioned the validity of the intelligence and forced a watering down of a warning letter to state officials about the threat, omitting any mention of Russia.
No amount of alarms sounded by U.S. authorities — even Republicans, even Trump appointees — moves McConnell.
On Tuesday, FBI Director Christopher Wray — Trump’s FBI director — told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the Russians “haven’t been deterred enough” and are “absolutely intent on trying to interfere with our elections.”
This year, National Intelligence Director Dan Coats — Trump’s intelligence director — told the Senate Intelligence Committee that “foreign actors will view the 2020 U.S. elections as an opportunity to advance their interests. We expect them to refine their capabilities and add new tactics.”
And on Thursday, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a bipartisan report finding that “Russian activities demand renewed attention to vulnerabilities in U.S. voting infrastructure.”
The committee concluded that “urgent steps” are needed “to replace outdated and vulnerable voting systems.” (The $380 million offered since 2016 is a pittance compared with the need.) “Despite the expense, cyber-security needs to become a higher priority for election-related infrastructure,” the report concluded.
But one man blocks it all — while offering no alternative of his own.
Presumably he thinks whatever influence Russia exerts over U.S. elections will benefit him (he’s up for reelection in 2020) and his party.
“Shame on him,” Schumer said on the Senate floor this week.
But McConnell has no shame. He is aiding and abetting Putin’s dismantling of Americans’ self-governance. A leader who won’t protect our country from attack is no patriot.
Dana Milbank is an op-ed columnist. He sketches the foolish, the fallacious and the felonious in politics.