New federal rule will remove medical debt from credit reports
Elizabeth Schultz – January 7, 2025
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In a major change that could affect millions of Americans’ credit scores, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Tuesday finalized a rule to remove medical debt from consumer credit reports.
The rule would erase an estimated $49 billion in unpaid medical bills from the credit reports of roughly 15 million Americans, the CFPB said.
That could help boost those borrowers’ credit scores by an average of 20 points, helping them qualify for mortgages and other loans.
PHOTO: Vice President Kamala Harris waits in the Old Senate Chamber before swearing in new senators at the U.S. Capitol, Dec. 9, 2024, in Washington. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
“No one should be denied economic opportunity because they got sick or experienced a medical emergency,” Vice President Kamala Harris said in a statement touting the new rule.
“This will be life-changing for millions of families, making it easier for them to be approved for a car loan, a home loan or a small-business loan,” Harris added.U.S. & World NewsLatest national and global stories
Major credit reporting agencies have already announced voluntary steps to remove medical debt from their reports.
The final rule is set to take effect in March – but that timeline could be delayed by legal challenges.
Debt collection industry groups like the Association of Credit and Collection Professionals have opposed the change, saying it would result in “reduced consequences for not paying your bills, which in turn will reduce access to credit and health care for those that need it most.”
A Charlotte bankruptcy attorney says although that debt won’t show up on those reports anymore, he believes creditors will find a new way to make sure those debts are paid.
“So it is a really important thing,” explained Ruth Lande, vice president of Provider Relations at Undue Medical Debt. “Most people know that medical debt is not like other debts. It’s not the same kind of a debt of choice. And so to have those kinds of repercussions on a credit report affecting your ability to get housing or get a car or different things, that is really not what the credit system should be about.”
It’s a national nonprofit using donations to buy large bundles of unpaid medical bills to help Americans out of debt. Lande says clients say those debts stress customers — and deter them from seeking medical care.
Charlotte bankruptcy attorney Rashad Blossom.
“Patients want to pay their bills, and studies from Kaiser Family Foundation show that four-in-10 adults have these kinds of debts and that it’s affected their willingness to go and seek care or family members seeking care because they’re afraid of the cost. So, fear and anxiety and depression are really a big issue around medical debt.”
Charlotte bankruptcy attorney Rashad Blossom says more than 50 percent of his clients have unpaid medical debt. But, he says it may be too early to tell how much the new rule will really help.
“On one hand, the concern is, are creditors going to get aggressive in other areas, or will they start suing people?” Blossom said. “Will they start harassing them because that credit reporting debt collected tool has been taken away? So, it could be the case that drives more bankruptcies as creditors get more aggressive in other areas. On the other hand, it’s good for the consumer that this is not being reported because now, that’s one less concern about them being able to buy a home.”
The final rule is set to take effect in March – but that timeline could be delayed by legal challenges.
“So, the bottom line is it is just too early,” Blossom said. “We don’t know yet, but the concerns are there that it could be counterproductive.”
FBI finds 150 homemade bombs at Virginia home in one of the largest such seizures, prosecutors say
Sean C. Davis – January 1, 2025
FBI finds 150 homemade bombs at Virginia home in one of the largest such seizures, prosecutors say
SMITHFIELD, Virginia (WAVY) — Residents worried about the large FBI presence and numerous explosions heard in Virginia’s Isle of Wight County in mid-December finally have answers.
According to federal court documents, agents had just uncovered a massive trove of pipe bombs, and deemed them too unstable to transport — so they blew them up. The FBI said it believes it’s the largest amount of homemade explosives it has encountered in its history.
“FBI bomb technicians, who X-rayed the devices on scene, assessed them as pipe bombs,” the newly-filed document reads. “The majority were found in a detached garage, organized by color. … Some were hand-labeled “lethal.”
“Some were preloaded into an apparent wearable vest,” it continued. “In the garage were also found numerous tools and materials for manufacturing explosives, a home-made mortar, and riot gear.”
The filing also describes how the the pipe bombs were made — with two layers of plastic tubes.
“[I]n between the tubes were metal spheres which ‘would enhance the fragmentation effect of the device upon its explosion.’ it quotes an FBI analysis of one bomb. “The lab concluded that the device was ‘capable of causing property damage, personal injury and/or death.’”
Spafford was released on $25,000 bond earlier this week. The new details in this case come from new filings from the defense, arguing to block his release.
Defense attorneys argued in a motion Tuesday that authorities haven’t produced evidence that he was planning violence, also noting that he has no criminal record. Further, they question whether the explosive devices were usable because “professionally trained explosive technicians had to rig the devices to explode them.”
“There is not a shred of evidence in the record that Mr. Spafford ever threatened anyone and the contention that someone might be in danger because of their political views and comments is nonsensical,” the defense lawyers wrote.
Spafford’s original, and so far only charge, is for violating the National Firearms Act — for possessing a rifle with a barrel shorter than 16 inches. His Dec. 30 preliminary hearing found enough evidence to allow the case to move forward.
Most of the evidence prosecutors relied on for the firearms charge came from a person Spafford apparently believed he was friends with. Spafford showed the man his illegal rifle and the two went shooting together.
“[The source] also noted that the defendant was using pictures of the president for target practice at shooting at a local range, stated that he believed political assassinations should be brought back, and that missing children in the news had been taken by the federal government to be trained as school shooter,” the prosecution’s filing reads.
Prosecutors reiterated why they believe Spafford is dangerous, writing that “while he is not known to have engaged in any apparent violence, he has certainly expressed interest in the same, through his manufacture of pope bombs marked ‘lethal,’ his possession of riot gear and a vest loaded with pipe bombs, his support for political assassinations and use of the pictures of the President for target practice.”
Spafford also allegedly joked about someone assassinating then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris. The document describes a casual meeting at his newly-purchased farm.
“He also discussed fortifying the property with a 360-degree turret for a 50-caliber firearm on the roof, and noted how he could block the driveway with a vehicle so no other vehicles could access,” the filing reads.
Why brain rot and bed rotting aren’t all bad — and the reasons why Gen Z and millennials are so drawn to this form of escape
Elena Sheppard – December 30, 2024
Why people – particularly Gen Z-ers and millennials — are so drawn to “rotting.” (Getty Creative)
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Oxford University Press’s word of 2024 was “brain rot.” The year also gave us a flurry of TikToks documenting “bed rotting.” What’s with all this rotting — and is it a trend we should be taking into 2025?
But first: What do these terms, generally used by Gen Z-ers and millennials, even mean?
“‘Brain rotting’ typically refers to the idea of engaging in mindless content consumption, like scrolling social media or binge-watching TV shows, which over time, feels like numbing or dulling your brain,” explains mental health therapist Brittany Cilento Kopycienski, who owns Glow Counseling Solutions. “‘Bed rotting’ involves spending excessive time lying in bed, contributing to physical and mental stagnation.”
Both activities, it seems, are about checking out of whatever your reality is at the moment — and checking into the often good feeling of doing nothing. Is that good for our mental health? Here’s what experts say.
Why are we so drawn to ‘rotting’?
“Let’s face it—bed rotting or brain rotting is not a style of lazy living. It’s about escape,” psychologist Caitlin Slavens tells Yahoo Life. “The world is noisy, chaotic and often overwhelming. ‘Rotting’ is like pressing a giant snooze button on life. When you’re inundated with expectations (of work, family or even yourself), shutting down might seem your only option.”
She adds, “These trends are a response to a world that’s made us feel like we must be performing in every moment of our lives — for work, for social media, for each other’s expectations. The rise of rotting says we’re burnt out, together.”
That may be especially true for younger adults. “Our brains are experiencing unprecedented levels of stimulation through constant notifications, social media and digital engagement,” Sophia Spencer, a social psychology and mental health therapist, tells Yahoo Life. “For Gen Z and millennials in particular, they are the first generations to live like this from a young age and for this to be their norm. Essentially, their brains are subject to a level of information that was once unthinkable, and not what our brains are designed for.”
But others argue that this urge to disassociate from life isn’t new, but rather something past generations have also felt as they settle into adulthood.
“Do you remember the ‘adulting’ movement?” Slavens points out. “People began to celebrate even the most basic life tasks, like doing laundry or paying bills, as if they were a win in a world so large it felt overwhelming. Or hygge — the Scandinavian midcentury concept of warm living — where we all collectively agreed that it was candles and blankets we needed to feel better when burned out. “All of these trends speak to the same need: to ease up, to take a breath, to feel fine about not doing it all.”
Is rotting a bad thing?
It really depends on the intention behind it — and how much time is being spent staring at screens in lieu of actually resting. Many people see bed rotting as a particular form of self-care: a day spent in bed, with a sole focus on recharging. “Our brains are not meant to be on overdrive all the time. Intentional breaks, time away from screens and the permission to veg out can be restorative,” says Slavens. “The issue is when rotting turns into avoidance, when we’re evading responsibilities or feelings we’re afraid to confront. So yes, a little rotting? Great. Full-blown decay? Probably not ideal.”
As for “brain rot,” who among us hasn’t mindlessly scrolled on our phone? “‘Rotting’ in moderation can be seen as a chance to mentally reset,” says Kopycienski. “It can allow for a break from constant stimulation where emotional recovery can occur.”
How do we move forward?
Thinking all this rotting through, the long and short of it seems to be that it’s about burnout. And burnout isn’t best handled by festering, or rotting; it’s best handled via intentional rest, experts say.
“The best thing we can do is redefine what rest looks like in a digital age,” says Spencer. “Rather than reactively rotting, [we should be] having a system of proactive healthy habits.” That might involve proactively setting better work-life boundaries, scaling back our commitments or being less online to minimize burnout in the first place. Spencer doesn’t rule out more radical change.
“When our ancestors went through significant social change, such as during the Industrial Revolution, people moved from agricultural rhythms that followed daylight to the factory 9–5 schedule,” she notes. “I think we need to take the digital age as a significant change to our life … and adapt our lives ourselves as appropriate.”
So I’m sure those forgotten men and women are thrilled to know Trump has stocked his upcoming administration with enough billionaires and multimillionaires to, as The Guardian put it recently, “form a soccer team.”
I’m sure these down-to-earth billionaires care deeply about the forgotten men and women who put Trump in office. Surely they are in no way “elite,” aside from perhaps owning an island, or maybe occasionally hunting poor people for sport on said island.
Trump is surrounding himself with non-elite billionaires who care
The Guardian puts the net worth of Trump’s gang thus far at more than $300 billion. If you believe in math, it’s a staggering sum, about 2,000 times the wealth of those in the Biden administration.
Elon Musk, holding his son, and Vivek Ramaswamy, in blue tie, visit Capitol Hill to meet with members of Congress on Dec. 5, 2024.
So, you know … regular folks, the kind who undoubtedly can relate to the day-to-day needs of Americans. The sort who regularly go to grocery stores, which they refer to as “commoner slop-distribution centers.” The kind who would never want to harvest the blood of young people in a narcissistic quest for eternal life.
Musk, Ramaswamy may come after VA health care, but it’s fine
There’s no way billionaire businessmen like Musk and Ramaswamy would do anything that helps the rich at the expense of hardworking Americans. They wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal that they will be “taking aim at the $500 billion plus in annual federal expenditures that are unauthorized by Congress.”
Huzzah! Take that, elites! Now please stand back while regular-guy-billionaire Donald Trump installs a phalanx of other billionaires who will, in a totally non-elite way, lower their own taxes while taking away government services that many forgotten men and women rely on for little things like continuing to live.
Economists ‒ probably elites ‒ say the cost of tariffs will get passed along to American consumers. They say that because it’s exactly what will happen. But Trump, the everyman, has long denied that reality, convincing the forgotten men and women of the middle class he’s an economic wizard and this will all work out great for them.
Fruit could be impacted by Trump’s proposed tariffs, particularly avocados, melons and citrus fruits.
Put your future in the hands of Trump’s caring billionaires
You see? Trump cares about American families to not guarantee anything.
So don’t worry, forgotten men and women. Be confident that Trump and Musk and Ramaswamy and McMahon and Lutnick and all the other totally trustworthy and altruistic non-elite billionaires know what’s good for you.
After many more pleasant family vacations to the state, we left our hometown in Missouri and moved to Florida in early 2013.
We thought Jacksonville would be a good place to settle, as it was close to many Florida hot spots and great vacation cities in neighboring states.
It turns out, I’m much happier visiting Florida than living there full time. Here are a few things that led me to move back home to the Midwest after 11 years.
I didn’t like driving in our county, and I often worried about my family’s safety on the roads
I didn’t really enjoy driving in Jacksonville.peeterv/Getty Images
Witnessing high-speed chases on the interstate, cars failing to yield, and trucks running red lights were part of our daily life in Jax.
I worried about my young daughter daily as she commuted to work on I-95. Though I trusted her as a driver, I was concerned about everyone else on the interstates and roads.
She’d often tell me about cars going well over the already-high speed limit and how drivers would regularly speed up instead of letting her over for her exit or lane merge.
A few months ago, she moved to a much smaller city in the Midwest, and I stopped worrying so much about her daily commute. I figured if she could manage in a place like Jax, she could drive anywhere.
Insurance felt like a huge part of my budget in Florida
No one likes to pay a monthly insurance premium, but the cost felt especially tough to stomach while I lived in Florida.
A MarketWatch analysis found that the average full-coverage car insurance cost in Florida was 42% higher than the national average.
The big kicker was finding out that I’d moved into a no-fault state. This means that no matter who’s at fault in a collision, each driver has to rely on their own insurance to cover medical expenses and other financial losses.
Florida is also dealing with a home-insurance crisis. Homeowners in many parts of the state struggle to keep up with sky-high premiums, especially after the recent hurricanes.
I’d often have to cut spending in other parts of my life just to cover my high monthly insurance costs. Now that I’m out of Florida, my monthly insurance expenses are lower, giving me breathing room to spend my money on more fun stuff.
I didn’t love the high temperatures and humidity during the day
Many love Florida’s seemingly endless sunshine, but I found I got tired of it.Laura Sliva Collier/Getty Images
With sunlight beaming down most of the year, it’s clear why Florida is known as the Sunshine State. During some summer months, Florida’s average highs were above 90 degrees Fahrenheit.
I struggled to deal with the heat. Some may love it, but I found it could feel draining. With high humidity, the heat felt even worse. Jacksonville’s average annual percentage of humidity can be a sweaty 72% or higher.
Unfortunately, the heat and humidity kept me from fully enjoying all the beautiful outdoor activities and attractions throughout Florida.
My naturally curly hair turned into a pile of frizz each time I stepped out of the front door — sometimes, I’d feel so self-conscious about it I’d just stay home.
Instead of participating in outdoor adventures throughout the area, I often chose to stay home in the air conditioning.
Lastly, I missed experiencing the variety of the seasons and the temperature drops that come with some of them. The Midwest’s changing weather is a much better fit for me.
Mosquitoes were a huge nuisance to me at night
I also struggled to deal with mosquitoes when I lived in the Sunshine State. Though the pesky insects can be found in every state, Florida has more than most and over 80 species of them.
I seemed to be allergic to their bites, which would stay swollen on my body for days. Because of this, I didn’t journey outside too much without first coating myself in bug repellent.
The repellent wasn’t always super effective, so I eventually stopped going outside in the evenings to avoid getting bit.
Overall, I’m happier in the Midwest
I get why so many spring breakers and snowbirds are drawn to Florida. It has a lot of sunshine, natural beauty, and fun outdoor activities.
Still, for many reasons, I found it tough to fully enjoy the state and its beauty.
The Midwest is a better fit for me, and I’m glad I moved back. These days, I enjoy my slower-paced life in a state where I can feel the seasons change — and I no longer mind going outside so much.
The Lesson of This Election: We Must Stop Inflation Before It Starts
By Isabella Weber – November 12, 2024
Dr. Weber is an associate professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Credit…Guillem Casasús
Unemployment weakens governments. Inflation kills them. That’s what a government official from Brazil once told me. But in rich countries including the United States, the politically destructive power of inflation had been forgotten. Standard policy tools left us unprepared and the Biden administration was slow to fight back. The re-election of Donald Trump should serve as a warning to democratic governments.
In this age of overlapping emergencies — hurricanes, an Avian flu outbreak, two regional wars — threats to supply chains are becoming commonplace. Each threat brings the risk of inflation and its power to destabilize governments, including our own. With such emergencies being the new normal, if we learned anything from last week’s earthquake election result, it’s that we need new means of protecting our society and democracy.
Among the biggest problems that need fixing: Many business sectors today are dominated by large corporations that can profit from these one-time events.
Using A.I. and natural language processing in an upcoming paper, several co-authors and I analyzed more than 130,000 earnings calls of publicly listed U.S. companies and found that businesses can coordinate price hikes around cost shocks. This enabled companies, by and large, to pass on or amplify the impact of the initial cost increase in response to shocks in the wake of Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine.
In other words, the sudden news of cost shocks, like the onset of a pandemic and war, grants companies more freedom to coordinate price hikes across sectors because they realize that their rivals are very likely going to do the same.
Skeptics of this idea often counter that corporate concentration was already high before the pandemic, yet those same powerful businesses kept prices stable for many years, despite close-to-zero interest rates. That’s because under normal circumstances, a company that decides to increase prices without knowing that its competitors would follow suit risks losing business to rivals. This was the world we were living in before the pandemic. Globalization had created the most efficient, just-in-time production networks the world has seen and, for the most part, even giant companies kept prices stable under the pressure of competition.
But when supply bottlenecks occur, the clockwork stops. Every producer is naturally limited in how many products it can produce. This means that even if a company increases prices, competitors cannot easily ramp up their supply to take its business. Plus, everyone in the business sector understands the natural reaction to a shock is to raise prices. Jacking up prices is now a safe choice and has become the rational thing to do for profit-maximizing businesses.
In the wake of Covid, most companies managed to pass on their higher costs to the consumer and defend their margins, while some even increased them. But even if they simply keep their profit margins in response to a cost shock, their profits increase. Think of how the broker’s fee is higher for a more expensive house even if the percentage terms are the same. Corporate leaders know this to be the case. That’s why we found that when cost shocks are large and hit the whole economy, executives sound quite upbeat about them.
Massive shocks can be even better news for the sectors directly hit. Take oil. When demand collapsed overnight because people stayed home during the shutdowns, fossil fuel companies, suddenly faced with an unprecedented collapse in demand, closed some of their highest-cost oil fields and refineries. When demand recovered, the result was a shortage that led to record-high margins. In another forthcoming paper, my co-authors and I estimate that in 2022, U.S. shareholders in publicly listed oil and gas companies had claims on $301 billion in net income, a more than sixfold increase compared to the average of the four years before the pandemic. Oil and gas profits also exceeded the U.S. investments of $267 billion in the low-carbon economy that year.
Oil is inherently a boom-bust sector, but we cannot afford such extraordinary profit spikes in times of emergency. They prop up a sector that needs to be phased out to mitigate climate change. They also exacerbate inequality. As our new research shows, at the peak of the fossil fuel price spike in 2022, the wealthiest 1 percent claimed through shareholdings and private company ownership 51 percent of oil and gas profits. The less affluent faced higher inflation and only got a small slice of the oversized oil and gas profits pie.
Working people suffer through no fault of their own. Even if their wages eventually catch up, they are squeezed and feel cheated in the first place. This is why sellers’ inflation deepens economic inequality and political polarization, which are already threatening democracy.
President Biden mobilized a few unconventional measures to fight inflation, including an antitrust renewal to address outsize corporate power and increasing oil supply by drawing down the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. These actions were an important departure from old orthodoxies, but were ad hoc and retroactive. The main policy tool remained increasing interest rates. Sharp rate increases deepened the housing crisis, exacerbated the debt crisis for developing countries and increased the costs of investments urgently needed to address the climate crisis.
Economic stabilization used to be part of the disaster preparedness toolbox. It is time we add it back in. Just as it was recognized that some banks were too big to fail after the global financial crisis, we have to recognize that some other sectors are “too essential to fail.” In essential sectors, we need to move from a pure efficiency logic to strategic redundancies. This requires policy interventions.
Ports and other critical infrastructure should have spare capacity and a well-paid work force large enough to ramp up activity when needed. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a publicly owned buffer stock of oil, should be employed systematically to buy when prices collapse and sell when prices explode to avoid price extremes. It should buy oil on the open market when demand is falling short, thus preventing prices from collapsing, and sell oil when there is a threat of short supply, thus preventing prices from exploding. Such countercyclical purchases and sales by buffer stocks in commodity markets operate on the same logic as central banks’ open market operations in money markets.
It is not enough to release oil when prices spiral upward. As we have learned during the pandemic, a collapse in prices can create a sudden reduction in production capacity that breeds price spikes when demand picks back up.
Another lesson is that where markets are global, it is a good idea to coordinate stabilizing measures internationally — as the International Energy Agency did for its member states. And where futures markets exist, buffer stocks can buy futures when prices fall and sell when they rise for stabilization.
Countercyclical price stabilization through buffer stocks is important beyond oil. We also need it for critical minerals to encourage investments in the green supply chain and for food staples like grains, to avoid violent commodity price fluctuations in the wake of extreme weather events.
In addition to buffering essentials, we need policies that align public and private interests with resilience. As long as corporations see profits go up thanks to threats of shortages in times of disaster, we cannot assume that they prepare for emergencies in the best interest of the public. Price-gouging laws and windfall-profit taxes are relevant policy tools here.
Of course, the main task remains tackling the root causes of the emergencies. But this is a momentous task, especially in our climate change era, and in the interim a systemic set of buffers, regulations and emergency legislation is necessary. Without this economic disaster preparedness, people’s livelihoods and the outcome of elections remain at the whim of the next shock.
Isabella Weber is an associate professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Climate change around the world: In “Postcards From a World on Fire,” 193 stories from individual countries show how climate change is reshaping reality everywhere, from dying coral reefs in Fiji to disappearing oases in Morocco and far, far beyond.
The role of our leaders: Writing at the end of 2020, Al Gore, the 45th vice president of the United States, found reasons for optimism in the Biden presidency, a feeling perhaps borne out by the passing of major climate legislation. That doesn’t mean there haven’t been criticisms. For example, Charles Harvey and Kurt House argue that subsidies for climate capture technology will ultimately be a waste.
The worst climate risks, mapped: In this feature, select a country, and we’ll break down the climate hazards it faces. In the case of America, our maps, developed with experts, show where extreme heat is causing the most deaths.
Maddow Blog | Rachel Maddow: Trump’s first Cabinet was rocked by scandal. His second could suffer the same fate.
Rachel Maddow and Allison Detzel – November 12, 2024
This is an adapted excerpt from the Nov. 11 episode of “The Rachel Maddow Show.”
The last time Donald Trump was president, his Interior secretary was embroiled in a corruption scandal and ended up referred to the Department of Justice for a potential criminal investigation. His Transportation secretary was also embroiled in her own corruption scandal and also was referred to the Justice Department for a potential criminal investigation.
It used to be if you had one Cabinet official involved in a big ethics and/or corruption scandal that forced them out of the job or led to them being referred for criminal investigations, that would be enough to brand your whole presidency a disgraced and scandal-ridden mistake.
Just consider Warren G. Harding — what’s remembered about his presidency? Maybe that he died in office? Or that he had an affair? No, it’s the Teapot Dome corruption scandal, which resulted in a Cabinet official being criminally charged. A century later, that one scandal involving one Cabinet official is basically all we remember about Harding’s presidency.
The first Trump term had so many Cabinet officials forced out of office in disgrace and referred to the Justice Department for criminal charges that it’s actually hard to remember them all. However, despite an unprecedented number of Cabinet officials being referred for criminal investigations, the supposedly independent DOJ decided to bring charges against precisely none of them.
One of the more memorable ethical disasters along these lines from the first Trump term was a situation involving his secretary of Veterans Affairs, Robert Wilkie. This might be the most memorable scandal because it happened right at the end of his administration, Dec. 10, 2020 — after Trump lost re-election to Joe Biden but before the Jan. 6 attack.
MaddowBlog’s headline at the time, by Steve Benen, read, “Yet another Trump Cabinet secretary caught up in scandal: As Donald Trump’s presidency comes to an ignominious end, it’s apparently not too late for one more Cabinet controversy.”
The Justice Department didn’t charge Wilkie, just like they didn’t charge any of these guys. But more than 20 different veterans groups rose up in outrage against him. Disparate veterans groups with very different takes on the world banded together — everyone from the American Legion to Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America to the Veterans of Foreign Wars – all demanding that Wilkie resign or be fired.
It was just a disaster, and it was a sign that even right up to the very bitter and ultimately violent end of Trump’s first term, things weren’t merely bad. It’s not normal to have a half-dozen members of the Cabinet referred for investigations into potential crimes committed while they were serving in the Cabinet.
Now, as the nation marked Veteran’s Day, a day to honor and celebrate our veterans, we learned Trump has decided to bring Wilkie back, tapping him to lead the transition efforts for the entire Defense Department. At a time when the country is looking to the U.S. military for assurances that they won’t deploy against American civilians the way Trump has threatened, the guy charged with staffing up the Defense Department leadership for the military is same guy who left office last time while his “possible criminal conduct” was under investigation by federal prosecutors.
Wilkie is not the only one who’s been tapped for the second Trump administration in recent days. NBC News has learned Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who once memorably cast aspersions on the size of Trump’s genitals in a presidential debate, is expected to be the president-elect’s choice for secretary of state.
Trump has also chosen Rep. Mike Waltz of Florida to be his national security adviser. Walz helped in the effort to try to overthrow the government and keep Trump in power after he lost re-election in 2020. Waltz has distinguished himself by claiming that Trump was not responsible for Jan. 6 and that Dulles Airport should be renamed the “Donald J. Trump International Airport.” So clearly, he’s checked all the boxes he needs to be national security adviser.
We learned Tom Homan, the former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during Trump’s first term, will be his administration’s “border czar.” Remember when Republicans used to maintain with a straight face that it was a huge scandal and evidence of communism to call anyone the czar of anything?
Trump has put the other architect of family separation, Stephen Miller, in charge of all policy planning for the transition. A source tells NBC News that Miller will also serve as deputy chief of staff for policy in the second Trump White House.
So anyone telling you that a second Trump administration is going to be at all moderate or normal in terms of what they’re going to do, that person is living on a nice planet that I’d like to visit sometime, but it’s not our planet.
Any expectation that the most extreme things Trump talked about were just talk and that normal people would come into his administration to do normal things, well, that wishful thinking hasn’t survived one week after the election.
Scientists warn that a key Atlantic current could collapse, among other climate tipping points
Evan Bush – November 12, 2024
Icebergs drift by in Disko Bay at Ilulissat, Greenland, on July 16.
The Summary
A new report describes the dire state of Earth’s snow and ice.
Among other findings, it warns that several key climate tipping points appear more likely to be reached than previously thought.
They include ice melt that could cause severe sea-level rise and the collapse of a crucial ocean current that governs how heat cycles in the Atlantic Ocean.
Venezuela lost its final glacier this year. The Greenland Ice Sheet is losing, on average, 30 million tons of ice per hour. Ice loss from the Thwaites Glacier, also known as the “Doomsday” glacier because its collapse could precipitate rapid Antarctic ice loss, may be unstoppable.
These are just a few of the stark findings from more than 50 leading snow and ice scientists, which are detailed in a new report from the International Cryosphere Climate Initiative.
The report summarizes the state of snow and ice in 2024: In short, experts agree, it’s been a horrible year for the frozen parts of Earth, an expected result of global warming. What’s more, top cryosphere scientists are growing increasingly worried that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a key ocean current that governs how heat cycles in the Atlantic Ocean, is on a path toward collapse.
A rapid halt to the current would cause rapid cooling in the North Atlantic, warming in the Southern Hemisphere and extreme changes in precipitation. If that happens, the new report suggests, northern Europe could cool by about 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit in a decade.
The report highlights a shift in consensus: Scientists once thought tipping points — like the collapse of AMOC — were distant or remote possibilities. Now, some of those thresholds are appearing more likely to be crossed, and with less runway to turn the situation around.
“The latest science is not telling us that things are any different to what we knew before, necessarily, but it’s telling us with more confidence and more certainty that these things are more likely to happen,” said Helen Findlay, an author of the report and a professor and biological oceanographer at Plymouth Marine Laboratory in England. “The longer we record these things, and the longer we’re able to observe them and start to understand and monitor them, there’s more certainty in the system and we start to really understand how these tipping points are working.”
The Thwaites glacier seen by the European Space Agency’s Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite.
Last month, 44 leading scientists wrote in an open letter to leaders of Nordic countries that the collapse of AMOC remained “highly uncertain” but that evidence in favor of such a collapse was mounting, and risks have been underestimated. Dramatic changes to the AMOC, they warned, would “likely lead to unprecedented extreme weather” and “potentially threaten the viability of agriculture in northwestern Europe.”
The new report similarly draws attention to the risk of AMOC collapse.
Additionally, it projects that roughly two-thirds of glacier ice in the European Alps will be lost by 2050 if global greenhouse gas emissions keep their pace. Already, an estimated 10 million people are at risk of glacial outburst floods in Iceland, Alaska and Asia — a phenomenon already occurring as meltwater collapses ice dams and rapidly floods downstream. If high emissions continue, the report adds, models suggest that sea level could rise by roughly 10 feet in the 2100s, imperiling parts of many coastal cities.
The report was released as world leaders gathered Monday in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, for the United Nations’ COP29 climate conference.
“Timing is everything,” said Julie Brigham-Grette, a geosciences professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an author of the new report.
She said the group hopes to rattle world leaders to attention: “The sense of urgency couldn’t be higher. We’ve been talking about urgency for a decade. It almost starts to feel like a useless word. What’s more than ‘urgent?’ ‘Catastrophic?’ We’ve run out of ways to describe it.”
To date, the report says, world governments are falling short on the pledges they made to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as part of the Paris Agreement.
Even if they were on track, those commitments are insufficient to reach global climate goals, the authors say. On paper, the world’s pledges would limit the rise in global temperatures to about 2.3 degrees Celsius (4.1 degrees Fahrenheit) this century. That’s well short of the goal to cap warming at 1.5 degrees C.
Global temperatures are currently on pace to rise more than 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit), on average.
Melting icebergs crowd the Ilulissat Icefjord near Ilulissat, Greenland, on July 16.
“I feel quite frustrated,” Findlay said. “I don’t really understand how they’re missing the severity of the issue.”
In Baku on Monday, world leaders did agree to new rules for a global market to trade carbon credits. In a news release, COP29 President Mukhtar Babayev, who has been Azerbaijan’s minister of ecology and natural resources since 2018, said the agreement was a “game-changing” tool to direct climate financing to the developing world.
But he also acknowledged, in a speech to delegates, that the world is “on a road to ruin” under current climate policies.
That warning and the new report both come amid fears the U.S. will backslide on its climate commitments and pull out of the Paris Agreement after Donald Trump takes office in January. Trump wants to remove the U.S. from the international treaty, and he began that process during his first presidential administration. President Joe Biden reversed the move in 2021.
Peter Neff, a glaciologist and climate scientist at the University of Minnesota who was not involved in the new report, said its authors clearly communicated the scientific consensus.
“It’s nothing surprising for a glaciologist. Across the board, there’s not good news with respect to ice on Earth. It’s all, for the most part, going in one direction,” Neff said.
But he added that he still found the report’s findings to be staggering: “These documents can hit you like a ton of bricks, and that’s intentional.”
What Do Trump Voters Know About the Future He Has Planned for Them?
By Jamelle Bouie, Opinion Columnist – November 9, 2024
People watch as election results come in, Times Square, New York, Nov. 5, 2024.Credit…Tanyth Berkeley for The New York Times
On Tuesday, Donald Trump became the first Republican in 20 years to win the national popular vote and the Electoral College.
The people — or at least, a bare majority of the voting people — spoke, and they said to “make America great again.”
What they bought, however, isn’t necessarily what they’ll get.
The voters who put Trump in the White House a second time expect lower prices — cheaper gas, cheaper groceries and cheaper homes.
But nothing in the former president’s policy portfolio would deliver any of the above. His tariffs would probably raise prices of consumer goods, and his deportation plans would almost certainly raise the costs of food and housing construction. Taken together, the two policies could cause a recession, putting millions of Americans — millions of his voters — out of work.
And then there is the rest of the agenda. Do Trump voters know that they voted for a Food and Drug Administration that might try to restrict birth control and effectively ban abortion? Do they know that they voted for a Justice Department that would effectively stop enforcement of civil and voting rights laws? Do they know they voted for a National Labor Relations Board that would side with employers or an Environmental Protection Agency that would turn a blind eye to pollution and environmental degradation? Do they know they voted to gut or repeal the Affordable Care Act? Do they know that they voted for cuts to Medicaid, and possible cuts Medicare and Social Security if Trump cuts taxes down to the bone?
Do they know that they voted for a Supreme Court that would side with the powerful at every opportunity against their needs and interests?
I’m going to guess that they don’t know. But they’ll find out soon enough.
What I Wrote
I wrote about the stakes of the 2024 presidential election. We’ll see if I was right; I hope I had it wrong.
Should the United States take this path on Election Day, then we can expect the America we have to fade into the past, to be supplanted by an American Republic that is far more exclusive — and far more resistant to change. A majority of Americans may not want it, and they may not even expect it, but they’ll be on the way to living in a United States that treats the rights revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, to say nothing of the New Deal, as a legal and political mistake.
