Category Archives: Free Press

The Science of God – Gerald L. Schroeder

by Myrna Posted on April 23, 2019

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

The Science of God

The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom

Gerald L. Schroeder

Genre: Physics

Price: $11.99

Publish Date: June 16, 2009

Publisher: Free Press

Seller: SIMON AND SCHUSTER DIGITAL SALES INC

For the readers of The Language of God, another instant classic from "a sophisticated and original scholar" ( Kirkus Reviews ) that disputes the idea that science is contrary to religion. In The Science of God , distinguished physicist and Biblical scholar Gerald L. Schroeder demonstrates the surprising parallels between a variety of Biblical teachings and the findings of biochemists, paleontologists, astrophysicists, and quantum physicists. In a brilliant and wide-ranging discussion of key topics that have divided science and religion—free will, the development of the universe, the origin of life, and the origin of man—Schroeder argues that the latest science and a close reading of the Bible are not just compatible but interdependent. This timely reissue of The Science of God features a brand-new preface by Schroeder and a compelling appendix that addresses the highly publicized experiment in 2008 in which scientists attempted to re-create the chemical composition of the cosmos immediately after the Big Bang. It also details Schroeder’s lucid explanations of complex scientific and religious concepts, such as the theory of relativity, the passage of time, and the definitions of crucial Hebrew words in the Bible. Religious skeptics, Biblical literalists, scientists, students, and physicists alike will be riveted by Schroeder’s remarkable contribution to the raging debate between science and religion.

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The Science of God – Gerald L. Schroeder

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, Free Press, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, oven, PUR, Ultima, Uncategorized | Tagged gerald, lai, language, life, Ona, publisher, science, theory | Comments Off

Sportsmen flex their political muscles

by MonteCarreno Posted on January 13, 2019

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This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

On December 2, 2017, onstage in a cavernous auditorium at Boise State University, two of the three Republican hopefuls for Idaho governor, Lieutenant Governor Brad Little and businessman Tommy Ahlquist, discussed their views on public lands in front of a crowd of hunters and anglers. The forum, sponsored by the Idaho Wildlife Federation, Trout Unlimited, and 16 other sportsmen’s groups, was a pivotal one in a state where public lands are a defining issue. The third candidate was conspicuously absent: Representative Raúl Labrador, whose voting record in the House already proved him a staunch public-lands critic.

In a political climate marked by public-land threats, Labrador’s absence spoke volumes, and he lost the primary to Little by five points. “In not coming to a sportsmen’s forum, you allow everyone to fill in the blanks,” said Michael Gibson, Idaho field coordinator for Trout Unlimited. “Governor-Elect Little was willing to come in front of hunters and anglers and say he supports public lands.” In a state where only 12 percent of voters are registered Democrats, that primary victory all but handed Little the governorship.

Republicans were once instrumental in passing laws like the 1964 Wilderness Act and the 1968 Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. In recent decades, however, the party has developed a reputation as the enemy of public lands, a stance further solidified by the Trump administration’s rapid rollback of protections. But in Idaho and Wyoming, two of the West’s most conservative states, hunters and anglers threw down the gauntlet, demanding state policies that protect access and voting down gubernatorial candidates who threaten public lands. As state legislatures shift in 2019, sportsmen’s groups are positioning themselves to fight the administration’s erosion of public-land protections.

In the early 20th century, conservation became a political issue in America, fueled largely by Theodore Roosevelt’s desire to protect rich hunting and fishing grounds. Republicans carried on that legacy until the early 1990s, when the GOP began opposing environmental initiatives. Once President Donald Trump took office in 2016, his administration slashed national monuments and put increasing amounts of public land up for resource extraction. In Congress, Republicans refused to renew the Land and Water Conservation Fund, a popular program that safeguards natural areas.

In the West, the Utah, Montana, and Nevada state legislatures have introduced resolutions urging the transfer of federal lands to state ownership. Sportsmen’s groups generally oppose such transfers, as they would likely limit public access. In Wyoming, for example, state parks ban camping, preventing multi-day backcountry hunting and fishing trips. In addition, state land is managed to fund schools, which means potentially cutting off public access in favor of gravel pits, increased logging, and land sales.

More than half of Idaho is federal public land, including the Frank Church-River of No Return, the biggest contiguous wilderness in the Lower 48, and 891 miles of wild and scenic rivers, including the Salmon, Owyhee, and Snake. But the state has no national parks. That’s partly because Idaho is a sportsmen’s state, and hunting is not allowed in national parks. In 1972, for example, state leaders from both parties ended a decades-long fight over making the Sawtooths a national park by designating the region a national recreation area, thereby protecting its status as popular hunting grounds.

In 2016, tensions boiled over when Texas billionaire brothers Dan and Farris Wilks purchased vast chunks of old timber company land that recreationists had long used to access adjacent public lands. Gates appeared on roads, cutting off hunters, anglers, and off-road vehicles. As the Wilkses bought increasing tracts, people’s frustrations grew, marked by enraged comments on news articles and letters to the editor.

A confrontation at a property line between an armed security guard and a recreationist helped push Idaho lawmakers to update trespassing law, which sowed further unrest. “Critics sought the entire session to pin the bill on Dan and Farris Wilks, the Texas billionaires who have angered hunters, ATV riders, campers and local officials in central Idaho after they closed off 172,000 acres of forest they bought in 2016,” the Idaho Statesman reported.

Voters like Jerry and Terry Myers, who manage a ranch and run guided fishing trips on the Salmon River, made public lands protections a central issue in the Republican gubernatorial primary. “We live here because we love this lifestyle, and we’re always continually working to keep that lifestyle as part of Idaho,” said Terry Myers, who is also president of the local chapter of Trout Unlimited. “Even if leadership isn’t coming from the top down, it’s coming from the bottom up, with the idea that those things built locally will build into the political arena.”

Labrador’s lackluster reputation on public lands galvanized the Myerses and other sportsmen. Opinion pieces in local media like Idaho County Free Press, Idaho State Journal, and Idaho Press denounced the representative as a public-lands-transfer activist, while groups like Idaho Wildlife Federation and League of Conservation Voters highlighted his voting record on public lands. His subsequent refusal to attend the candidate forum at Boise State confirmed voters’ suspicions. Little — the establishment candidate, who was seen as likely to continue outgoing Governor Butch Otter’s opposition to the land-transfer movement — prevailed.

In Wyoming, public lands proved one of the defining issues in the race for governor. As in Idaho, sportsmen are a powerful force: 30 percent of the state’s 600,000 residents applied for a hunting permit in the last five years, and 18 percent bought fishing licenses. “If you look at the voting public, which is 50 percent, I’m going to bet every one of those guys who hunt, vote,” said Dwayne Meadows, executive director of the Wyoming Wildlife Federation. “And if you look at the fact that roughly two-thirds of the state are registered Republicans, that’s a lot of voting Republicans who are hunters.”

In August 2018, at a candidate forum hosted by the Wildlife Federation in the crowded Republican primary, three candidates, Harriet Hageman, Taylor Haynes, and Rex Rammell, expressed support for public-lands transfer, with Hageman going so far as to suggest a 1-million-acre pilot program of land transfer to the state.

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Hunting groups picked up on the issue immediately. Right to Roam, the most listened-to hunting podcast in the state, made it the focus of an episode on the candidates. The Wyoming Hunters and Anglers Alliance endorsed Mark Gordon — a multiple-use public lands advocate who frequently hunts on Wyoming’s public lands — because of the forum, citing his stance on issues related to hunting, and his opponents’ stances on land transfer (Full disclosure: Both Gordon and Little formerly served on the board of High Country News.) Gordon won the primary with 33 percent of the vote, while Foster Friess, who received Trump’s endorsement but “provided a mix of positive, negative, and neutral stances on sportsmen’s issues,” according to the alliance, got 26 percent. Hageman, who had been polling well before the forum, came in with only 21 percent.

“I think all the public-lands transfer conversation has done is galvanize the sportsmen,” Meadows said. “You can see it in the growth of organizations like mine over the last few years, and it’s powerful.”

Public-land issues also had an impact in other Western states. In the New Mexico race for governor, Republican Representative Steve Pearce went on the record as supporting the Land and Water Conservation Fund despite previously voting against it in Congress. Pearce lost the race to Democratic Representative Michelle Lujan Grisham, who supported public-land protections and is also an avid fly-fisher. “Our community is a staunch supporter of public lands,” said Kerrie Romero, executive director of the New Mexico Guides and Outfitters Association.

“Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona are all moving more toward the Democrats, and that’s in part because of the GOP being tone-deaf as to why people of all political stripes value public lands,” said David Jenkins, executive director of Conservatives for Responsible Stewardship. “I’ve always said that if you’re trying to change the political right on environment, you have to show how that aligns with their values — and in the West, people’s affinity for public lands is part of who they are.”

In 2019, sportsmen’s groups plan to continue the advocacy that helped Little and Gordon win their governorships. In rural states like Idaho and Wyoming, it can be hard to track what the legislature is voting on day to day. Even if citizens have a subscription to a Cheyenne or Casper newspaper, those papers won’t always list individual legislators’ decisions.

That is one reason the Wyoming Wildlife Federation is launching bill tracking with real-time alerts to follow specific legislators, so that citizens can let their elected representatives know how to vote. The group is also stepping up recruitment of local ambassadors in rural communities, to help explain how public-lands transfer and the administration’s removal of protections could limit public access.

Groups like Trout Unlimited and Artemis, a new sportswomen’s advocacy organization, plan to ramp up trainings that teach people how to testify in hearings, call their elected officials and generally engage in local politics, all tactics intended to remind state politicians of the groundswell of local support that helped put public-land proponents in office.

Sportsmen’s groups are already taking action in the federal arena as well: On the first day of the 116th Congress, House lawmakers reversed a 2017 measure that made it easier to sell off or transfer public lands — a measure that had been widely criticized by hunters and anglers.

“The overarching thing that every sportsman can agree on is public-lands defense,” said Gibson. “Over beers or at meetings, we might argue about regulations or season length. But whether the season is a week or a month, or you keep two fish or four fish, you have to have access to them.”

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Sportsmen flex their political muscles

Posted in Accent, alo, Anchor, Citizen, Everyone, FF, Free Press, G & F, GE, LAI, ONA, Oster, Paradise, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged idaho, king, lai, Oster, president, pur, radius, republican, trout, trout-unlimited, unlimited | Comments Off

Detroit is about to cut off water for thousands of people

by EtsukoBaracchi Posted on April 20, 2018

This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In the next few weeks, Detroit is set to start shutting off water to thousands of residents with unpaid bills. Since the shutoffs began four years ago, tens of thousands of Detroiters have had their water cut off, drawing sharp criticism from local anti-poverty activists as well as the United Nations.

Households are slated for shutoff once their water bill is 60 days or $150 past due. While more than 17,000 households are at risk, Gary Brown, director of the Detroit Water and Sewage Department, told the Detroit Free Press that roughly 2,000 will actually be shut off as more residents enroll in repayment and assistance plans. The city’s Water Residential Assistance Program (WRAP), for instance, offers up to $1,000 a year to help customers catch up on their accounts.

According to Brown, the average home slated for shutoff this year is $663 past due, and most water connections are restored within 48 hours of being turned off. City records obtained by Bridge Magazine show that the number of yearly shutoffs went from 33,000 in 2014 to 17,500 last year. Overall, there have been more than 101,000 shutoffs in the past four years.

In late March, Mayor Mike Duggan’s office touted the $7 million that has been spent in the last two years to help Detroiters facing shutoffs. Just the week before, the city council approved a $7.8 million contract to Homrich Wrecking for conducting water shutoffs.

Advocates who work with the poor black and brown Detroiters who are most vulnerable to losing their water say the city’s financial assistance programs are inadequate. They are little more than “a marketing plan being framed as a compassionate solution,” says Monica Lewis Patrick, president and CEO of We the People of Detroit, a grassroots group fighting the water shutoffs. Many Detroiters who enroll in payment plans are at risk of falling back into cycles of nonpayment, says Mark Fancher, staff attorney for the Racial Justice Project of the ACLU of Michigan. “Not because they’re lazy or just choosing to be poor,” but because “there are a whole lot of reasons why people are poor and there are lots of poor people in Detroit.”

Brown told the Free Press that the tricky part of conducting shutoffs is “separating the truly needy from those who are just not paying.” That line of thinking, says Fancher, presumes that those who aren’t paying are “deadbeats that have the money, but have chosen not to pay. This is completely contrary to the reality of most people who are dealing with these shutoffs.”

In a city that’s 80 percent black, more than 35 percent of residents live in poverty, the highest rate among the nation’s 20 largest cities. Unemployment hovers around 9 percent and the median income is around $28,000. Yet water rates have climbed as much as 400 percent in the last 20 years.

Large-scale water shutoffs began in 2014, just as the city was crawling out from the wreckage of the country’s largest-ever municipal bankruptcy, pegged at $18 billion. The shutoffs have been advertised as an unavoidable, if painful, treatment for restoring the city’s fiscal health. In 2014, the office of then-Emergency Manager Kevin Orr referred to the shutoffs as “a necessary part of Detroit’s restructuring.” Patrick isn’t buying it: “You can’t convince me that while you’re smiling at me and shutting my water off that this is good for me and you represent my interests. As my grandmother would say, ‘You can’t piss on me and tell me it’s raining.’”

In 2014, two United Nations special rapporteurs declared the shutoff policy a “violation of the most basic human rights.” “I heard testimonies from poor African American residents of Detroit who were forced to make impossible choices — to pay the water bill or to pay their rent,” Catarina de Albuquerque, the special rapporteur on the human right to water and sanitation, said after visiting the city. Among the findings she recounted:

Ms. de Albuquerque cited the case of a woman whose water had been cut and whose teenage daughters had to wash themselves with a bottle of water during menstruation. In other instances, she continued, she heard mothers who feared losing their children because their water was shut off; heads of household who feared losing access to water without any prior notice; others who feared receiving unaffordable and arbitrary water bills.

Activists and researchers have pointed out that the Detroit Water and Sewage Department’s financial woes can’t be blamed entirely on the city, since it stretches far beyond the city itself, serving 40 percent of Michigan’s population. The progressive think tank Demos has described the decision to include the department’s $6 billion debt in the city’s bankruptcy filing as an accounting trick used to negotiate more favorable terms with lenders.

We the People of Detroit and other grassroots groups have been organizing to not only stop the shutoffs, but make water more affordable. Cities like Philadelphia are experimenting with tying residents’ water bills to their incomes to ensure that families don’t become trapped in a cycle of missed payments. We the People recommends that no family living at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty line ($25,100 for a family of four) pays more than roughly 3 percent of their income for water, the rate considered affordable under UN guidelines. (The Environmental Protection Agency pegs affordability at 4.5 percent of median household income.) In 2017, Michigan State University researchers found that the median household spends about $1,620 on water bills annually, roughly 6.5 percent of a poverty-line income. More alarmingly, they found that by 2022, water rates would climb to unaffordable levels for 35 percent of households nationally.

Under an income-based plan, Fancher says, many Detroiters would not be paying market rate for water, but they would be paying something, leaving the city in better financial shape than it is under the status quo: “You replace a whole lot of people who are paying nothing with a whole lot of people who are paying something. In the long run, the utility is far better off than it would be.”

However, the city has refused to alter water rates, insisting that its hands are tied by a state constitutional amendment that requires new taxes to be approved by voters. An affordability fee, Fancher argues, would not legally be a tax. The constitutional argument, he says, has been “a convenient excuse for not doing something that makes a whole lot of sense.”

Some water rights activists see the city’s intransigence as more evidence of a quiet campaign to push poor people of color out of the city. In a recent study, We the People found that many home foreclosures concentrated in Detroit’s black communities were driven in part by overdue water bills. “It’s about using water to displace residents in order bring in a younger, whiter population to dilute black political power in Detroit,” Patrick says. They are “weaponizing water as a tool of gentrification.”

Continued:

Detroit is about to cut off water for thousands of people

Posted in alo, Anchor, Everyone, FF, Free Press, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged alo, free press, justice, news, patrick, people, president, water crisis | Comments Off

Trump’s new executive order spells disaster for our air quality.

by JaiLongwell7 Posted on April 13, 2018

In a statement about the decision, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder said that the city’s water has tested below the federal action level for lead and copper for the last two years. But Mayor Karen Weaver doesn’t agree that the free bottled water should stop, and many Flint residents aren’t so sure their tap water is OK to use.

“My water stinks. It still burns to take a shower,” Melissa Mays, a Flint activist and plaintiff in a lawsuit that forced the replacement of water lines, told the Associated Press. “There’s no way they can say it’s safe.”

Resident Ariana Hawk doesn’t trust the water, either. “Everything that me and my kids do from cooking to boiling their water for a bath, we’re using bottled water,” she told the local ABC-affiliate news station.

The New York Times reports that about 6,000 of Flint’s lead or galvanized steel pipes have been replaced, but there could be 12,000 more lines to go. According to the World Health Organization, there is no known safe level of lead exposure.

“This is wrong,” tweeted Mona Hanna-Attisha, a Flint doctor whose research exposed lead poisoning in the city. “Until all lead pipes are replaced, [the] state should make available bottled water and filters to Flint residents.”