US Politics Mega-thread - Page 8289

On August 03 2017 12:10 Karis Vas Ryaar wrote:
Also



I never got the whole Jesus wants strong boarders right wing argument. Technically aren't we all under the kingdom of heaven? and wasn't pretty much everywhere Rome when Jesus lived?

On August 03 2017 15:06 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:
You too Slaughter? You want to kill my dream? This is my American Dream. How dare you kill it with Karis!

On August 03 2017 16:47 LegalLord wrote:

Incidentally this is the exact kind of dream exploitation that gives hucksters like Elon Musk prominence: the desire to dream even as people who know better tell you that you ain't getting it because science is a cockblocker. Wouldn't surprise me if people started some biotech companies to cash in on those dreams.

Who am I kidding, they already do.

It's become a rite of summer. Every year, a "dead zone" appears in the Gulf of Mexico. It's an area where water doesn't have enough oxygen for fish to survive. And every year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) commissions scientists to venture out into the Gulf to measure it.

This week, NOAA announced that this year's dead zone is the biggest one ever measured. It covers 8,776 square miles — an area the size of New Jersey. And it's adding fuel to a debate over whether state and federal governments are doing enough to cut pollution that comes from farms.

The debate actually goes back many years, at least to 1985, when Don Scavia was a top scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He and his colleagues asked some scientists, for the first time, to go look for a dead zone in the Gulf.

"We expected it to be there," Scavia recalls. They expected to find it because they knew that the Mississippi River delivers a heavy load of nutrient pollution, specifically nitrogen and phosphorus, into the Gulf.

"Most of the nitrogen and phosphorus that drives this problem comes from the upper Midwest," Scavia says. "It's coming from agriculture."

Farmers use it on their fields as fertilizer. Rain washes it into nearby streams and rivers. And when it reaches the Gulf of Mexico, those nutrients unleash blooms of algae, which then die and decompose. That is what uses up the oxygen in a thick layer of water at the bottom of the Gulf, in a band that follows the coastline.

"Fish that can swim will move out of the way. Organisms that are living on the bottom, that the fish feed on, can't move, and they often die," says Scavia, who now is a professor of environment and sustainability at the University of Michigan.

The record-breaking dead zone this year is the result of unusually heavy rains in the Midwest, which flushed a lot of nutrients into the Gulf.

The dead zone is invisible from the surface of the ocean. Scientists lower instruments into the water to measure oxygen levels near the bottom. But Scavia describes it as a kind of hidden environmental disaster. "You know, it's 8,000 square miles of no oxygen. That can't be good!," he says. Potentially, it could have huge economic costs as well, because it imperils Louisiana's shrimp industry.

Federal and state agencies have promised to take action against the dead zone. As part of their "action plan" to shrink it, they're encouraging Midwestern farmers to try to keep nutrients from washing away by doing such things as planting wide grassy strips along streams to trap fertilizer runoff.

Scavia, however, recently published a blog post calling these voluntary measures inadequate. In a separate scientific paper, he also calculated that meeting the government's goal for a smaller dead zone will require dramatic cuts in nutrient pollution from farms.

Scavia argues that the Gulf should get the same kind of protection as the Chesapeake Bay, on the East Coast. The Chesapeake has had a similar dead zone problem. In 2010, though, despite fierce objections from farmers, the federal government set mandatory limits on nutrient pollution entering the bay. State governments spent billions of dollars to meet those targets. Now pollution in the bay is down, and some wildlife in the Chesapeake is starting to recover.

On August 03 2017 17:35 Biff The Understudy wrote:

Ah, if Isabella of Spain had been so optimistic when she was asked to finance a hasardous expedition to find the West Indies, native american would still smoke their weird pipes on the virgin lands of the new world and there would be not alt right nor orange batman villain to lead the free world. More of that please.

Bernie Sanders has attacked Nissan for doing “everything it can” to stop workers unionizing at its Mississippi plant while making “obscene” profits.

In an editorial for the Guardian, the former presidential hopeful weighs in as Nissan workers prepare to vote on joining the United Auto Workers (UAW) union.

Echoing union officials and their supporters, Sanders says Nissan’s campaign against unionization “could go down as one of the most vicious, and illegal, anti-union crusades in decades.”

Nissan is being investigated by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the independent US government agency responsible for enforcing US labor law, after warning workers they could lose wages and benefits if they back the union vote.

Other workers have been told they will receive increased benefits and pay if they come out against the vote. “Workers should never have to endure this type of threatening campaign or walk through a minefield just to vote for a union,” Sanders writes. “The truth is Nissan is an all-too-familiar story of how greedy corporations divide and conquer working people.”

The Nissan vote is the latest in a series of attempts by unions to grow membership in the south, where many manufacturers have moved to take advantage of low wages and non-union workforces. Unions have faced similarly hard-fought battles to gain recognition at plants run by Boeing and Volkswagen and lost.

Sanders, actor Danny Glover and leading labor officials have all campaigned in support of the UAW’s attempts to unionise the 800-strong plant.

Nissan has union representation in 42 of 45 of its plants throughout the world, writes Sanders. “But the company does not want unions in the US south, because unions mean higher wages, safer working conditions, decent healthcare, and a secure retirement.

“Corporations like Nissan know that if they stop workers in Mississippi from forming a union, wages will continue to be abysmally low in this state.”

Sanders says Nissan had made $6.6bn in profits last year and paid chief executive officer Carlos Ghosn more than $9.5m last year.

“Those kinds of obscene profits are a direct result of corporations’ decades-long assault on workers and their unions,” he writes. “The American middle class, once the envy of the world, is disappearing while income and wealth inequality is soaring. We have got to turn that around.”

On August 03 2017 21:28 Simberto wrote:


Wait, that asshole still has a show?

Anyways, go rightwing alternate reality. It was obvious that Muellers trustworthyness is inversely related to how dangerous he is to Trump, that seems to be how things are working nowadays. You can be bipartisanly accepted without reproach, only to be a completely corrupt democratic partisan two months later. Basically, it looks like 1984 if everyone involved was horribly incompetent, and half the people would STILL believe it.

I am getting tired of the post-factual society very quickly. I hope you can get rid of that bullshit again. It is a lot more fun and fruitful to argue about interpretations of facts and ideas rather than the facts themselves. But if you can't agree on facts first, you can't do that. And it is not like it is hard. Just stop believing the obviously corrupt assholes, or listening to any obviously unfalsifiable bullshit that isn't linked to anything but an endless rabbithole of bullshit sources. Usually you can tell which sources are bullshit just by looking at their name, or, if you want to put in the extra effort, googling the name. You might not get all of the bullshit, but you will manage to get most.

Getting a consensus on facts shouldn't be this hard.