Tag Archives: control

There Are Likely Twice as Many Transgender Americans as We Thought

by mtibkz48 Posted on June 30, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The number of transgender Americans may be twice as big as we thought. According to a new analysis of state and federal data, an estimated 1.4 million adults in the United States, or 0.6 percent of the total population, do not identify with the gender they were assigned at birth.

The analysis by the Williams Institute at UCLA comes as policymakers increasingly consider questions of transgender rights in schools, workplaces, and the military.

Previously, the most widely accepted estimate suggested 0.3 percent of American adults were transgender. That figure came from a smaller analysis by the Williams Institute in 2011, based on a health survey in Massachusetts and a survey about tobacco use among LGBT people in California. The new analysis draws on a much bigger set of data from 19 states that have since started asking about gender identity in questionnaires about health risk behaviors run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The researchers also used Census Bureau data to estimate the transgender populations in the 31 other states.

Williams Institute

The study’s authors say their analysis is the first in the United States to estimate the transgender population in each state. Hawaii, California, Georgia, and New Mexico had the biggest percentages of adults who identified as transgender, at 0.8 percent each. North Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, Montana, and South Dakota had the smallest percentages, at about 0.3 percent each. Young adults between the ages of 18 and 24 were most likely to identify as transgender (0.7 percent), compared with 0.6 percent of those between the ages of 25 and 64 and 0.6 percent of adults older than 64.

The District of Columbia had a far higher rate of transgender identity than any state in the study, at an estimated 2.8 percent of adults.

The Census Bureau does not ask about gender identity in its population count, so we still don’t know exactly how many Americans identify as transgender. In May, Rep. Raúl Grijalva of Arizona introduced a bill that would require federal agencies to include questions about gender identity in national demographic surveys.

“The findings from this study are critical to current policy discussions that impact transgender people,” says Jody Herman, one of the study’s authors. “Policy debates on access to bathrooms, discrimination, and a host of other issues should rely on the best data available to assess potential impacts, including how many people may be affected.”

Read the article – 

There Are Likely Twice as Many Transgender Americans as We Thought

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on There Are Likely Twice as Many Transgender Americans as We Thought

Republicans in Congress passed a law giving EPA more power

by LadonnaCuriel Posted on June 22, 2016

The Chemical Bothers

Republicans in Congress passed a law giving EPA more power

By on Jun 22, 2016 11:27 amShare

Congress has done something that’s practically unheard of. It handed the Environmental Protection Agency broad new powers. On Wednesday, President Barack Obama is signing the legislation into law.

In early June, the Senate passed a sweeping bill that revamps how federal regulators handle chemical safety, after Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) lifted a last-minute hold on a vote. Because the House already passed the same reconciled version, the bill is headed to President Obama’s desk, where he is expected sign it into law.

Which means a Republican-controlled Congress managed to do something that no Congress since 1976 had been able to do: Overhaul the Toxic Substances Control Act, a flawed, unenforceable law that gave the EPA just 90 days to study whether a new chemical was dangerous. It didn’t even allow the EPA to regulate asbestos-containing products, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled in 1989.

The new bill means the EPA can finally evaluate cancer-linked substances like BPA and styrene used in plastics and formaldehyde found in fabrics and cars. It establishes uniform standards for evaluating about 20 chemicals at a time, and means more funding can be directed toward studying high-priority problem chemicals, especially those used near drinking water.

In extreme cases, the law might lead to a ban on certain chemicals. In others, it might mean more warning labels or limited use.

For a little perspective on just how great a task the EPA now has ahead, there are some 64,000 unregulated chemicals on the market.

No law, much less one coming from a conservative Congress, is perfect. And the industry won at least one key fight: States won’t be able to restrict or ban chemicals if they’re under review by the EPA. That’s why the Environmental Working Group opposed the bill, and why New York’s attorney general said he was disappointed in it. But most health and green groups accepted the compromise bill as an overall win.

This was a rare instance in which the manufacturers and chemical industries were on the same side as environmental and public health advocates: Everyone knew the current system was broken and needed to be fixed, and still it took many years to reach a compromise. Even the Senate’s resident science denier James Inhofe (R-Okla.) endorsed the bill.

But don’t expect to see this kind of cooperation on other public health issues, from lead-poisoned water to any of the threats posed by climate change. For that, we’ll need a very different Congress — and we can’t afford to wait another 40 years to get it.

Share

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work.

Get Grist in your inbox

Continue reading here:

Republicans in Congress passed a law giving EPA more power

Posted in alo, Anchor, Everyone, FF, GE, ONA, solar, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Republicans in Congress passed a law giving EPA more power

Donald Trump Has Another White Power-Loving Delegate

by RoyalEqhaamb Posted on May 20, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Donald Trump has another delegate with controversial views on matters of race. Meet Chicago mortgage banker Lori Gayne:

“With all the racism going on today, I’m very proud to be white. Just like black people are proud to be black and now, as white people, whenever we say something critical we’re punished as if we’re racists. I’m tired of it. I’m very proud,” Gayne said.

“I’m so angry I don’t even feel like I live in America. You can call me a racist. Black Lives Matter? Those people are out of control,” she said.

Gayne’s Twitter account, which is only accessible to her followers, is called “whitepride”:

Lori Gayne/Twitter

Gayne isn’t the first Trump delegate to embrace white power. William Johnson, a Trump delegate in California, resigned last week after Mother Jones revealed that he was the leader of the white nationalist American Freedom Party. And the anti-Muslim pastor Guy St-Onge resigned as a Trump delegate after being questioned about his views by the Guardian. The AFP now claims that it has other members who are Trump delegates but has declined to release their names.

Follow this link:

Donald Trump Has Another White Power-Loving Delegate

Posted in Anker, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Donald Trump Has Another White Power-Loving Delegate

Climate deniers are smart enough not to bet against Bill Nye

by Alisa97Gjk Posted on May 16, 2016

Climate deniers are smart enough not to bet against Bill Nye

By on May 16, 2016Share

No one’s surprised that last month was the hottest April on record. And, it turns out, not even climate change deniers would bet against it.

In April, Bill Nye bet two prominent climate change deniers $20,000 each that this year will be among the top 10 warmest years recorded and our current decade will be the warmest on record. Neither Marc Morano, the director of the denier film Climate Hustle, nor Joe Bastardi, a climate-denying meteorologist, agreed to the bet.

Smart of them, because last month’s heat record is by no means an isolated incident. The Guardian points out that April is the seventh month in a row to break global temperature records, and it’s the third consecutive month to break the monthly heat record by the largest margin ever, according to NASA figures.

Like the rest of us, climate change deniers can recognize the pattern of global temperatures spiraling out of control. Deep down, beneath quibbles about satellite measurements, skewed graphs, and scientific conspiracies, they understand that betting against climate change is looking more and more like a sure loss.

So why do they deny it so often? Oh, right: money. Morano currently serves as executive director of Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), a pro-fossil fuel, anti-regulation lobbying organization. And Nye points out in a video that Bastardi has given many paid speeches for coal and gas companies.

Denying climate change can be lucrative — but betting against it is another story entirely. It looks like climate deniers aren’t comfortable defending their counter-science views by taking a gamble they’re sure to lose.

ICYMI, here’s Nye’s challenge from last month:

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work.

Get Grist in your inbox

See the original article here:  

Climate deniers are smart enough not to bet against Bill Nye

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, ONA, OXO, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Climate deniers are smart enough not to bet against Bill Nye

Does Donald Trump Really Have a 30% Chance of Winning?

by IonaMackinolty Posted on May 15, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Sam Wang, my go-to presidential forecaster, says Hillary Clinton would have a 99 percent chance of winning if the election were held today. But the election isn’t being held today:

Historically from 1952 to 2012, the likely range of movement in two-candidate margin from this time until Election Day has been 10 percentage points, which is the standard deviation from the 16 past elections. Therefore, even though Clinton currently leads by a median margin of 7 percent (12 national surveys) and would certainly win an election held today, she could still lose the lead, and from a purely poll-based standpoint, is only narrowly favored to be elected President in November (probability: 70%).

It is also the case that Clinton is the only candidate who is poised for a blowout. Her “plus-one-sigma” outcome (current polls plus one standard deviation) is a popular vote win of 58.5%-41.5%. Trump’s plus-one-sigma outcome is a narrower win, 51.5%-48.5%.

In chart form it looks something like this: two bell curves centered 7 points away from each other, each with a standard deviation of 10 points.

The blue span from 48.5 to 51.5 is Trump’s 30 percent chance of winning—though it’s worth noting that Wang says the standard deviation in recent elections has been more like 4 points, which would give Trump virtually no chance of winning. Nonetheless, he also says this: “But considering the upheaval in the Republican Party, a little voice tells me to open my mind to a wider range of possibilities… including a Trump win.”

James Wimberley isn’t convinced. He takes a look at various upsides and downsides of the two candidates (gaffes, oppo dumps, unusual outside events, etc.) and concludes that virtually all of them favor Hillary:

Adding these pseudo-numbers up, I get the total risks to Clinton 39, to Trump 352. Really the only more than marginally possible future events in my categories that he has going for him are ISIS pulling off a big atrocity and economic collapse in China, both at long odds. I don’t claim credibility for my particular numbers, just that overall we have to put a very fat thumb on the probability scales in Clinton’s favour. So her chances to a sensible bettor are more than Wang’s 70%, a lot more.

Comments? I’m pretty astounded that after locking up the nomination Trump has actually gotten more out of control, not more restrained. Everybody sort of assumed that when it came time to widen his appeal beyond the Republican base, he’d be smart enough to dial things back a notch, but he seems to have taken this as some kind of schoolyard challenge. The last couple of weeks he’s been crazier than ever. If this keeps up, I’d be hard put to give him more than a 1 percent chance of winning.

Jump to original: 

Does Donald Trump Really Have a 30% Chance of Winning?

Posted in Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Does Donald Trump Really Have a 30% Chance of Winning?

Teenagers Are Having Fewer Kids—Here’s Why

by StephanHedgepeth Posted on April 29, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The number of teenage women having children has hit an all-time low, thanks in large part to increased contraceptive access and use among Hispanic and African American teenagers, according to a new report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

For decades, the United States has had higher rates of teen pregnancy than most other developed countries. But recent increases in access to contraception, particularly to long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs) such as IUDs and implants, have helped women of all ages reduce the chances of unintended pregnancy. Since 2002, LARC use has increased five-fold, with most of that change being due to greater use of IUDs.

Though the CDC stopped short of completely attributing the drop in teen births to contraceptives like LARCs, according to the report “preliminary data” suggests that the use of evidence-based reproductive health services, including contraceptives, is what has led to the huge drop in childbirth among young women over the last ten years.

The drop was particularly notable among Hispanic and African American teenagers. Birth rates for young Hispanic women fell 51 percent since 2006, and for black teenagers 44 percent. That’s a big deal, because Hispanic and African American teenagers have historically had much higher rates of teen pregnancies than their white counterparts. Ten years ago, the birth rate for Hispanic teens was nearly 80 births per 1,000 women, but the rate for white teens was around 25. Now, the rate for Hispanic women is closer to 40.

Still, even though the number of white teens having children has also decreased, black and Hispanic teens still have twice as many pregnancies as their white peers. According to the report, that’s because social inequalities, like income and education, and employment opportunities, remain low in communities of color and influence rates of teen pregnancy.

“The United States has made remarkable progress in reducing both teen pregnancy and racial and ethnic differences,” CDC Director Tom Frieden told the Washington Post. “But the reality is, too many American teens are still having babies.”

Read More:

Teenagers Are Having Fewer Kids—Here’s Why

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Teenagers Are Having Fewer Kids—Here’s Why

Congress passed around the blame for Flint’s lead crisis. John Oliver gives it right back to them.

by ArethaTrott1085 Posted on April 18, 2016

Congress passed around the blame for Flint’s lead crisis. John Oliver gives it right back to them.

By on 18 Apr 2016commentsShare

America’s best Brit John Oliver took a brief pause from skewering presidential candidates Sunday to skewer Congress’ response to the Flint lead-poisoned water crisis. As Oliver points out, the crisis is hardly Flint’s alone: 2,000 municipal water systems in all 50 states show elevated levels of lead, which can contribute to brain damage, developmental difficulties, and lower IQs in children.

In response to this disaster, Congressional Republicans Rep. Mark Meadows (NC), Rep. Tim Walberg (MI), and Rep. Jason Chaffetz (UT) all have said that is it shocking — just shocking — that federal regulators could let something like this happen in the United States.

How does something like this happen in the United States?

As Oliver explains, it happens in part because of representatives like Meadows, Walberg, and Chaffetz, who voted to cut funding for government programs dedicated to cleaning up lead pollution.“You would think that our members of Congress would be onboard with doing more to fight lead poisoning.” Oliver said. Well, they aren’t, and Congress has only done its best to cut funding to other organizations that protect public health, like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Watch Oliver explain above.

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work.

Get Grist in your inbox

This article is from: 

Congress passed around the blame for Flint’s lead crisis. John Oliver gives it right back to them.

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, hydroponics, Jason, Keurig, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Congress passed around the blame for Flint’s lead crisis. John Oliver gives it right back to them.

Pigeons with tiny backpacks test the air in London

by Soon9014mxz Posted on March 15, 2016

Pigeons with tiny backpacks test the air in London

By on 14 Mar 2016commentsShare

Shielding your picnic lunch from London’s plentiful pigeon population is almost as much of a tourist tradition as taking a selfie with Big Ben. But one group of pigeons have a job quite different than stealing your sandwich: measuring the city’s air pollution.

Equipped with air quality sensors and GPS trackers in small, feather-light backpacks, six racing pigeons from the Pigeon Air Control project are flying around London to get on-the-ground (or in-the-air?) readings of nitrogen dioxide and other toxic compounds.

Today, the birds started tweeting. And no, that’s not the chirps of a long-awaited springtime you hear — it’s the pigeons’ Twitter account, which promises to provide air quality readings for Londoners who tweet at the handle @PigeonAir.

The three-day campaign from Pigeon Air Control, from March 14 to 16, is mainly a publicity stunt to draw attention to dirty air in London (aka “The Old Smoke”). In 2015, The Guardian reported that 9,500 Londoners die each year from long-term exposure to their city’s noxious cloud.

According the The Guardian, Pierre Duquesnoy, the pigeon project’s visionary, said “he was inspired by the use of pigeons in the first and second world wars to deliver information and save lives, but they were also a practical way of taking mobile air quality readings and beating London’s congested roads.”

It’s become surprisingly popular to strap equipment onto our feathered friends and send them out to gather data in the world’s major cities. First, there were garbage-detecting vultures in Lima — and now, this. What’s next? Strapping laser technology onto the world’s seagulls to measure sea-level rise?

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work.

Get Grist in your inbox

Read More: 

Pigeons with tiny backpacks test the air in London

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Pigeons with tiny backpacks test the air in London

Clarence Thomas Just Did Something He Hasn’t Done in a Decade

by WilmerGalvez Posted on February 29, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

For years, critics alleged that Justice Clarence Thomas was hiding behind his conservative compatriot, the late Justice Antonin Scalia, as a way of disguising a lack of intellectual heft or qualifications to be on the bench. Exhibit A has been the fact that it’s been a decade since Thomas asked a question during oral arguments. But today, in a courtroom still draped in black to honor Scalia, Thomas came out of that shadow to prove those critics wrong.

Thomas didn’t just ask one question—he asked many questions this morning and, in doing so, completely changed the direction of the oral arguments. In Voisine v. US, a somewhat obscure criminal case involving domestic violence and gun rights, the court is considering a case that could make it easier for people convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence offenses to keep their gun rights.

In 1996, Congress passed the Lautenberg Amendment to the Gun Control Act, which instituted a lifetime ban on gun possession for people convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence offenses. During most of the oral arguments this morning, lawyers and justices alike focused on the minutia of the definition of “battery,” as Congress might have intended it under the law. Then Thomas stepped in and raised a much larger constitutional question that might once have been asked by Scalia.

Continue Reading »

See the original article here: 

Clarence Thomas Just Did Something He Hasn’t Done in a Decade

Posted in Accent, Anchor, Citizen, FF, Gandhi, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Clarence Thomas Just Did Something He Hasn’t Done in a Decade

The American State of Teenage Sex, in 3 Charts

by ValentiBernstei Posted on February 14, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Back in 2002, the government funded a study that showed there was no evidence that abstinence programs increased a kid’s likelihood of abstaining from sex. In fact, no studies have found evidence that teaching abstinence works to prevent teenage pregnancies. And yet this year, the federal government will fund abstinence-only education to the tune of $85 million.

Last week, for the third year in a row, President Barack Obama’s budget proposal included cuts to some $10 million of that abstinence-only education funding. Obama has consistently taken an anti-abstinence-education stance over the course of his political career. Back on the campaign trail in 2008, he said he believes contraception should be part of sex education curricula. He wasn’t alone: In 2010, the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) took a poll and found that 88 percent of parents of junior high school students and 85 percent of parents of high school students believe information about how to use and where to get contraceptives is an appropriate topic for sexuality education. Even Obama’s first budget as president aimed to make similar cuts to abstinence education funding. GOP members of Congress fought it, and the attempt ultimately failed. The same happened in 2010 and is pretty likely to happen this time, too.

All this means that over the past two decades, more than $1.8 billion in federal dollars have been funneled into abstinence-only education.

The Obama administration has had some victories. In 2010 and 2011, Obama and Congress agreed to eliminate two-thirds of funding for previously existing abstinence programs, and then allocated almost $190 million in new funding to initiatives aimed at preventing unintended teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

Meanwhile, as the various wings of the government have been fighting over what dollars go where, teen pregnancy rates have plummeted to record lows over the past three years. What’s more, rates fell 51 percent between 1990 and 2010. The reasons for the decline are complicated and hard to pinpoint; some studies give credit to better contraception and more precise use of it.

But when it comes to American teens and sex, we still have a lot of problems to fix: According to a report by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, 41 percent of 18- and 19-year-olds admit to knowing little or nothing about condoms. And more young people than ever—aged 15 to 24—are getting sexually transmitted diseases. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 65 percent of chlamydia cases in 2014 were in 15- to 24-years-olds, as were 53 percent of gonorrhea cases. We don’t know which kids sat through abstinence classes, but this is the age group that received the most federal funding for abstinence education. (Although perhaps it’s fair to note that abstinence groups would attribute the increase in STDs to the rise of hookup culture and media representations of sex.)

From 2000 to 2014, the number of schools that required kids to learn about STD prevention dropped by 10 percent. To combat the rising rates of STDs and the lack of education, different states are taking different approaches. A Utah lawmaker is trying to persuade his colleagues to pass a law that allows kids to learn comprehensive sex education in schools—a tall order, considering the moral code of the state. To the west, California passed a law last year that requires comprehensive sex education in schools for 2016. San Francisco schools are considering making condoms available to students as early as sixth grade. They would not be the first California schools to do so; Oakland Unified schools implemented a similar policy in 2014. On the opposite end of the spectrum, last year Texas took $3 million from its state budget for HIV and STD prevention and reallocated it to abstinence education.

For a quick look at where the United States stands on abstinence education and teen sex, here are three charts from an upcoming Mother Jones feature story on abstinence education:

From:  

The American State of Teenage Sex, in 3 Charts

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The American State of Teenage Sex, in 3 Charts