Tag Archives: professor

Evil Cannibal Squirrels Could Make California’s Drought Less Terrible

by CharmaiMcNess Posted on January 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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

This story originally appeared at Grist and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Among alfalfa farmers in Northern California, Public Enemy No. 1 is a promiscuous, photogenic fur ball that weighs only half a pound and spends most of its life asleep. But with the critter helping the state weather its worst drought in 1,200 years, that perception may soon be a thing of the past.

The diminutive Belding’s ground squirrel, an important link in the food chain for coyotes, bobcats, foxes, weasels, and raptors, has a long and troubled history as a major agricultural pest.

Blame the squirrel’s voracious appetite for alfalfa. Blame its fleas, which can carry plague. Above all, blame the complex network of burrows it digs, which trip up livestock and damage farm machinery.

All told, there are few animals in greater need of an image makeover than the rodent known to biologists as Urocitellus beldingi, and to detractors as pot gut, sage rat, and picket pin.

But now, courtesy of climate change and California’s record-setting drought, Belding’s ground squirrels may be on the brink of a reversal of fortune. The same rodents responsible for millions of dollars’ worth of lost crops and damaged equipment might just turn out to be highly valuable ecosystem engineers, a designation reserved for organisms that modify their habitats, improving ecosystem stability and health.

In this case, the same burrowing behavior that wreaks havoc on cultivated land can be of enormous benefit to the high-altitude meadows that are the Belding’s ground squirrels’ natural habitat. These meadows play a key role in storing and filtering the parched Golden State’s water supply.

“Belding’s are beneficial to the meadows if, as we suspect, they act as ecosystem engineers and help aerate and otherwise affect the soils of the meadows they specialize in,” says Toni Lyn Morelli, adjunct assistant professor and program manager with the Department of Interior Northeast Climate Science Center based at the University of Massachusetts.

“These meadows are then more effective at filtering and holding the water that eventually trickles down, so to speak, to be the water that is drunk and used by the majority of the state of California,” says Morelli.

Unfortunately, the prospect of newfound favor comes at a time when Belding’s ground squirrels may be scampering toward extinction. While few farmers would mourn their demise, scientists see it as part of a disturbing pattern clearly driven by climate change.

When biologist Joseph Grinnell set out a century ago to document it, California’s natural diversity was already diminishing. The founding director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California at Berkeley believed human activity—irrigation, cultivation, and deforestation—was to blame.

Along with setting the standard for modern biological field work, Grinnell’s detailed field journals, photographs, and specimens provide an unrivaled basis for modern biological comparison.

A research team led by Morelli revisited some of the sites documented by Grinnell in search of the Belding’s ground squirrel. Their findings were most unexpected: The animal had disappeared from nearly half of the sites where Grinnell had reported them.

“We were surprised to see such a dramatic decline in this species, which is well-known to Sierran hikers and was thought to be fairly common,” Morelli says. “In fact, the rate of decline is much greater than that seen in the same region for the pika, a small mountain-dwelling cousin of the rabbit that has become the poster child for the effects of global warming in the contiguous United States.”

Morelli saw a clear connection between the Belding’s disappearance and climate change. The areas where the squirrels could no longer be found were the ones that had gotten hotter. They were also the areas where precipitation patterns had markedly changed.

There was one exception, however: The squirrels had made themselves at home on lower-lying cultivated land such as alfalfa fields and other irrigated areas that serve as an oasis amid hotter, drier conditions.

In some of these human-modified habitats, the squirrels have not only survived, but thrived. To the chagrin of farmers, Belding’s have achieved a density of more than 100 per acre while feasting on crops of alfalfa, rye, wheat, barley, and oats.

Besides California, Belding’s ground squirrels can be found in parts of Oregon, Utah, Idaho, and Nevada. Like the much larger prairie dogs they resemble, they’re highly social creatures that depend on their numbers for survival and their burrows for safety.

They’re among few species that engage in altruistic behavior, standing upright and whistling to alert others to impending danger even as the whistle-blower becomes an easy target for predators.

While a single squirrel will sacrifice itself to warn others of danger, the disappearance of the species is a warning humanity would be wise to heed. The Sierra Nevada’s approximately 17,000 high altitude meadows are drying out, which exacerbates California’s ongoing water crisis while making survival harder for the Belding’s squirrel.

Normally, the annual winter snowpack protects the soil from degradation caused by fluctuations in temperature and precipitation. But after years of excessive variations in both, the soil is becoming less porous. This makes it less able to trap moisture and slowly release it into the streams.

The Belding’s ground squirrel also relies on an insulating blanket of snow to protect it during a hibernation that can last up to nine months, the longest of any mammal. Without consistent snow cover, Morelli suspects, the squirrels froze in their burrows. Others likely drowned, she says, since rain and snow that fall on dry soil are poorly absorbed and therefore more apt to cause flooding.

Early thaws followed by more winter weather can be equally deadly, as researchers discovered in the 1970s when a Sierra Nevada snowstorm hit eight days after the Belding’s ground squirrels had begun to emerge from hibernation.

The squirrels stopped mating, their weight dropped sharply, and they became more susceptible to predators. Some depleted their fat reserves and starved. Similar scenarios may have played out in other sites from which the squirrels have vanished. With climate change expected to bring greater swings in temperature and extreme weather, these patterns are likely to continue.

Even apart from the challenges of extreme weather and shrinking habitat, Belding’s ground squirrels face precarious odds in their struggle for survival. Hibernation takes an enormous toll. Biologists who tracked a population of Belding’s ground squirrels in the central Sierra Nevada for 11 consecutive seasons found that more than one-third of adults and two-thirds of young never re-emerge from their long winter’s nap.

Those that do can live four or five years, relatively long for a rodent. But on average, males live only half as long as females, partly because they severely injure one another fighting for the right to mate on the one day a year when the female is fertile. On that day, the female mates with multiple males, producing an average litter of eight a month later.

During their active period in the summer, they gorge on leaves, stems, bulbs, fruits, and occasionally each other, doubling their body weight. In the cultivated fields where squirrels have taken up residence, “there are areas that have been chewed to the soil,” Morelli says. “They look like crop circles, like aliens have landed.”

In one study by the University of California Statewide Integrated Pest Management Program, an estimated 123 squirrels removed 1,800 pounds of crop per acre in 44 days.

By treating farm fields as a free buffet, the squirrels have curried no favor with their human landlords who rely on those fields for their livelihoods.

“I’ve talked to locals and been told, ‘I hire high school kids, give them a box of 22’s, and a dollar a tail for their efforts,'” says James Patton, emeritus professor of integrative biology at UC Berkeley, and curator of mammals at the museum founded by Joseph Grinnell.

“Burrowing animals provide tremendous positive benefit that is completely ignored by everyone,” says Patton, who places soil restoration at the top of the list. “In addition, they eat grasses, which keeps grass on the landscape. Because of that, they keep more water in the landscape. And that also prevents erosion.”

With climate change and the California drought throwing its ecosystem services into sharp relief, the crop-eating pest may be recast from reviled rodent to high elevation hero—provided the species survives.

View original:

Evil Cannibal Squirrels Could Make California’s Drought Less Terrible

Posted in alo, Anchor, Casio, Citizen, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, Oster, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Evil Cannibal Squirrels Could Make California’s Drought Less Terrible

Yep, Gasoline Lead Explains the Crime Decline in Canada Too

by JacelynSUN Posted on January 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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

Erik Eckholm of the New York Times writes that violent crime has plunged dramatically over the past two decades. But the reasons remain elusive:

There are some areas of consensus. The closing of open-air drug markets….revolution in urban policing….increases in drug and gun sentences….Various experts have also linked the fall in violence to the aging of the population, low inflation rates and even the decline in early-childhood lead exposure. But in the end, none of these factors fully explain a drop that occurred, in tandem, in much of the world.

“Canada, with practically none of the policy changes we point to here, had a comparable decline in crime over the same period,” said Franklin E. Zimring, a law professor and an expert in criminal justice at the University of California, Berkeley. He described the quest for an explanation as “criminological astrology.”

I’m happy to see lead at least get a shout out. Unless I’ve missed something, this might actually be the first time the New York Times has ever mentioned childhood lead exposure as a possible explanation for the decline in violent crime. Progress!

But while Eckholm is right to say that none of the other factors he mentions can explain a decline in violent crime that happened all over the world, he’s wrong to include lead in that list. It’s the one explanation that does have the potential to explain a worldwide drop in crime levels. In particular, the chart on the right shows the use of gasoline lead in Canada, which peaked in the mid-70s and then began dropping as catalytic converters became more common. Leaded gasoline was banned for good in 1990, and is now virtually gone with a few minor exceptions for specialized vehicles.

So what happened? As Zimring says, Canada saw a substantial decrease in violent crime that started about 20 years after lead emissions began to drop, which is exactly what you’d expect. I calculated the numbers for Canada’s biggest cities back when I was researching my lead-crime piece, and crime was down from its peak values everywhere: 31 percent in Montreal, 36 percent in Edmonton, 40 percent in Toronto and Vancouver, and 53 percent in Ottawa. CompStat and broken windows and American drug laws can’t explain that.

“Criminological astrology” is a good phrase to describe the relentless effort of US criminologists to explain a worldwide phenomenon using only parochial US data. But there is one explanation that really does work pretty well everywhere: the reduction in gasoline lead, which happened all over the world, but happened at different times in different places. And everywhere it happened, crime started to decline about 20 years later. No explanation is ever perfect, but this one comes closer than most.

See more here: 

Yep, Gasoline Lead Explains the Crime Decline in Canada Too

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Yep, Gasoline Lead Explains the Crime Decline in Canada Too

We have to build much smarter cities if we want to fight climate change

by ChanceKunkle Posted on January 13, 2015

We have to build much smarter cities if we want to fight climate change

By on 13 Jan 2015commentsShare

If we can develop better cities, we can make a big dent in future greenhouse gas emissions. That’s the gist of a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The 274 cities researchers looked at are going to need more energy as they grow — a lot more, especially if we continue on our current track. The cities’ energy needs are poised to triple between 2005 and 2050 — but, with forward-thinking urban and transportation planning, we could limit those energy needs so they’ll only double.

The type of city determines how best to proceed. And in the world’s many developing countries, the study finds, keeping cities compact and carefully structuring their transportation systems is crucial. At Climate Central, John Upton explains:

Of the overall opportunity to reduce projected urban energy use by 2050, which the researchers called the urbanization mitigation wedge, 57 percent was found to be in Asia. Another 29 percent was in Africa and the Middle East.

Improving urban and transportation planning in countries where the very concepts are often foreign would, experts agreed, be challenging. It’s common in developing countries for rickety homes and businesses to be built on underused land without obtaining permits or permission, resulting in sprawl that’s underserviced by sewer lines, roads and other infrastructure.

“In India, there is no urban form,” said Anshuman Khare, a sustainable development professor at Canada’s Athabasca University who grew up in India and has also worked and studied in Japan and Germany. “You look at Asia and say, ‘OK, what has to change there?’ I can’t say what has to change, because everything has to change.”

Evidence from China, where some cities, such as Shanghai, have been working to introduce Western-style transportation plans, suggest that the challenges could be surmountable, said Michael Replogle, the policy director at the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, which helps cities around the world with transportation planning. Overcoming those challenges may require intensive assistance from foreign countries and cities where urban planning and building codes are taken for granted.

For cities in developed countries, the study says high gas prices could nudge future development in the right direction. Too bad those are gone now, yesterday’s news, from back when you were chuckling at Gangnam Style and, like, Doge.

And even if high gas prices return, the study’s authors suggest there’s little remedy for the most sprawling cities, many of which are here in America, where cars are more or less a necessity. The hope is that cities in developing countries will avoid making the same mistakes.

Share

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work.

sponsored post

In 2015, make a New Year’s resolution that will actually change the world

How the power of positive energy turns you into a climate superhero.

Get stories like this in your inbox

AdvertisementAdvertisement

See original: 

We have to build much smarter cities if we want to fight climate change

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on We have to build much smarter cities if we want to fight climate change

Federal diet guidelines won’t mention food’s environment connection. Ugh.

by KlaraGuzm Posted on January 8, 2015

Federal diet guidelines won’t mention food’s environment connection. Ugh.

By on 8 Jan 2015commentsShare

Well, shoot. Looks like the Department of Agriculture’s new Dietary Guidelines for Americans won’t mention anything about the environment, after all.

USDA nutritionist Eve Essery Stoody told Vice News that the federal food recommendations will be, as always, based on how diet affects human health, not the health of the planet.

In case you haven’t been following: The Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, the group charged with writing new eating instructions for the U.S. every five years, wanted to acknowledge that yes, food is produced on Earth and what we choose to eat plays a role in determining what food is produced and how. A few months back, Tufts University professor Miriam Nelson, a member of the committee, said to her colleagues, “In general, a dietary pattern that is higher in plant-based foods and lower in animal-based foods is more health-promoting and is associated with less environmental impact.” That language was included in the draft report that the DGAC voted to submit at its Dec. 15 meeting. 

Predictably, Big Meat wasn’t cool with mixing advice on what’s good for eaters with facts about what’s good for ecosystems, since large quantities of animal products are unhealthy for both. So the meat industry’s lobbyists saw to it that congressmembers attached some directives to a spending bill imploring that the new guidelines make clear that food has nothing (nothing!) to do with that thing out there called the environment.

Earlier this week, though, it still seemed possible that the USDA might include some remarks on our food choices’ impact beyond personal nutrition. John Light, who wrote for Grist about how the new guidelines might tell Americans to eat less beef for the sake of the environment, points out that taking earthly issues into account would go against the corporate-influenced history of the federal guidelines:

The beef industry has long held sway over the guidelines the USDA puts out, with unfortunate results for the environment — University of Michigan researchers found last year that if all Americans followed the USDA dietary guidelines, we’d see a 12 percent increase in dietary-related greenhouse gas emissions.

Once again, the ag department appears to have caved under intense political pressure. Now no Americans will ever know that what’s salubrious for them is also generally unhealthy for the climate, since everyone gets all their dietary advice from the government food pyramid!

Maybe they’ll sneak some green talk in the guidelines next time around, in 2020. Unless by then our laboratory-made food really is effectively disconnected from the biosphere.

Share

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work.

sponsored post

In 2015, make a New Year’s resolution that will actually change the world

How the power of positive energy turns you into a climate superhero.

Get stories like this in your inbox

AdvertisementAdvertisement

More here: 

Federal diet guidelines won’t mention food’s environment connection. Ugh.

Posted in Anchor, Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Wiley | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Federal diet guidelines won’t mention food’s environment connection. Ugh.

How Science Can Help You Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions

by RozellaMccune Posted on January 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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

We’ve all heard this advice before. We might have even passed it on to encourage a struggling friend or to mentor a younger person: Follow your dreams. Imagine the future that you want, and it will come to pass. And yet, we still struggle to lose that weight, or finish that project, or improve that relationship. When we make resolutions at the start of each new year, it’s easy to feel optimistic that this time it will be different. But deep down we know that if it didn’t work in the past, it’s unlikely to work in the future.

Believe it or not, there’s substantial scientific evidence that fantasizing about a bright future can actually make us less likely to achieve our goals. “We have found that the more positively people daydream about the future, the less well they do over time,” explains Gabriele Oettingen on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast. Oettingen, a professor of psychology at New York University and the University of Hamburg, has been studying the science of motivation for more than 20 years. And her new book, Rethinking Positive Thinking, challenges the conventional wisdom about optimism.

In one early study, for example, Oettingen and her colleagues tracked the progress that a group of obese women made as they attempted to lose weight. The researchers recorded the extent to which these women fantasized about their svelte future selves. The results were surprising: It turned out that women who had frequent positive daydreams about being thin were actually less likely to lose weight.

And in a more recent study, Oettingen and her colleagues asked undergraduates to daydream about a future in which they had positive, negative, or neutral experiences. Once again, the results were striking—positive fantasizing led to poorer achievement outcomes. “And the more positively they fantasized about an easy transition into work life, the less well they did in the future,” says Oettingen. Why was this the case? The study suggested one possible mechanism by which positive daydreams can affect productivity: Using physiological instruments and behavioral indicators, the researchers found that these types of thoughts actually sap a person’s energy. (Exactly why that happens remains a mystery.)

So is the link between positive thinking and achieving one’s goals completely spurious? Can we finally just agree that you can’t dream your way to success? Well, not so fast.

As scientists disentangle the different ways in which we can engage in positive thinking, an interesting distinction between positive expectations and positive fantasies has emerged. Positive expectations based on past experience are generally a good thing. For example, “you expect that you do well in a meeting because, in past meetings, you did well, especially in this specific context,” explains Oettingen. But daydreams about the future, in which we indulge in optimistic fantasizing that isn’t based on solid evidence, can be counterproductive.

Remember the women in Oettingen’s early study who wanted to lose weight? It turns out that if they had a positive expectation of success, but realistic or negative daydreams (perhaps imagining what it would be like to bulge out of a favorite pair of jeans), they were more likely to shed pounds.

What’s more, Oettingen has found that a specific method of positive thinking can lead to better outcomes. She calls it mental contrasting. “It starts with identifying a wish,” she explains. The wish can be big or small—a major life change or just a task that needs to be completed today. “And then,” she says, “you identify the best outcome if you fulfill that wish.” That’s where the daydreaming comes in. You fantasize about what your future will be like if you attain your wish.

But don’t stop there, even though it’s enjoyable. Instead, make a serious effort to think about the obstacles that stand in your way. “Now what is it in me that holds me back?” Oettingen says. “What is it actually that stops me from fulfilling that wish and experiencing that outcome?” This is the “contrasting” portion of mental contrasting. Once you identify the obstacle, you go back to fantasy land and imagine what you need to do to overcome that barrier. The last step is to lay out a plan—either by writing it down or simply by thinking about it—that includes both your desired outcome and the ways in which you can overcome the obstacles that have thwarted you in the past.

“We have plenty of experiments which show that this mental contrasting is effective,” says Oettingen. And not just in one domain—mental contrasting works for problems related to your work, your family life, and even your interpersonal relationships.

But careful! Oettingen says the order of your directed thinking matters. For example, she points to one study in which her participants hoped to become more physically fit. She divided them up into two groups: Both groups fantasized about a future in which they were more fit, and both thought about the obstacles that stood in their way. But one group used mental contrasting—that is, they first imagined their future accomplishments, and then they thought about the obstacles they needed to overcome. The other group reversed the process: They imagined the obstacles first and then fantasized about the future.

After this exercise, Oettingen asked participants to go from the ground floor of the building to the fourth floor, where they would meet to discuss the experiment. Then she counted how many of them rode the elevator to get there. And sure enough, the people who used mental contrasting in the correct order were more likely to take the stairs.

Click below to listen to the full interview with Oettingen:

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook.

Continue reading:

How Science Can Help You Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Ringer, Springer, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on How Science Can Help You Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions

Today’s Math You Can Use: Marijuana + Big Corporations = A Lot More Marijuana

by QGZEdwinagft Posted on November 18, 2014

Mother Jones

Here’s a good example of how cavalier snark can get the better of you. This is Kevin Williamson writing at National Review:

From the annals of issues that only intellectuals are capable of misunderstanding: Mark A. R. Kleiman, a professor of public policy at UCLA, is worried that the drug trade might end up being dominated by people who care about making money. My experience with drug dealers suggests very strongly that they are a profit-seeking, entrepreneurial lot as it is.

Har har. Mark is a friend of mine, so I guess I’d be expected to defend him, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t mean his short piece about the commercialization of pot to be an attack on the free market. Quite the contrary. In fact, he has a powerful appreciation of the efficiency of the market, and knows very well that drug gangs are actually pitifully incompetent at the basics of modern distribution and logistics. Put them in competition with Philip Morris or RJ Reynolds and they’d go out of business in a few months. At the same time, with a truly modern, efficient multinational corporation at the helm, sales and consumption of marijuana would most likely skyrocket.

Remember what happened to all those mom-and-pop stores when Walmart came into town? It would be about like that.

I don’t even know that I agree with Mark about trying to keep pot away from the commercial sector. My guess is that it’s not really workable. Still, his argument is simple: The free market is powerful. Big corporations are far, far more efficient than a bunch of hoodlums. So if big corporations start selling drugs, then drug use (and abuse) is going to increase. Maybe a lot. You might still favor complete legalization, and that’s fine. But you should at least recognize that it comes with a likely cost, just as it did with cigarettes and alcohol.

Excerpt from: 

Today’s Math You Can Use: Marijuana + Big Corporations = A Lot More Marijuana

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Today’s Math You Can Use: Marijuana + Big Corporations = A Lot More Marijuana

Catholic Church Argues It Doesn’t Have to Show Up in Court Because Religious Freedom

by ManiePrescott Posted on November 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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

When Emily Herx first took time off work for in vitro fertilization treatment, her boss offered what sounded like words of support: “You are in my prayers.” Soon those words took on a more sinister meaning. The Indiana grade school where Herx was teaching English was Catholic. And after church officials were alerted that Herx was undergoing IVF—making her, in the words of one monsignor, “a grave, immoral sinner”—it took them less than two weeks to fire her.

Herx filed a discrimination lawsuit in 2012. In response, St. Vincent de Paul School and the Fort Wayne-South Bend Diocese, her former employers, countered with an argument used by a growing number of religious groups to justify firings related to IVF treatment or pregnancies outside of marriage: Freedom of religion gives them the right to hire (or fire) whomever they choose. But the diocese took one big step further. It is arguing that, in this instance, its religious liberty rights protect the school from having to go to court at all.

“I’ve never seen this before, and I couldn’t find any other cases like it,” says Brian Hauss, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union Center for Liberty. The group is not directly involved in the lawsuit but has filed amicus briefs supporting Herx. “What the diocese is saying is, ‘We can fire anybody, and we have absolute immunity from even going to trial, as long as we think they’re violating our religion. And to have civil authorities even look into what we’re doing is a violation.’…It’s astonishing.”

The key legal question in Herx’s case is whether she was fired for religious reasons or her firing was an illegal act of sex discriminations.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act bans employers from discriminating on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. An exemption in that law allows religious institutions to favor members of their own faith during the hiring process. But there’s no religious exemption for sex discrimination—which is how Herx is framing her dismissal. As proof, she showed that the diocese had never fired a male teacher for using any type of infertility treatment. In response, the diocese asserted that it would fire a male teacher who underwent fertility treatments against church teachings—it just hasn’t done so yet. In early September, a federal judge ruled that there was enough evidence on both sides of the dispute for a jury trial.

That’s when the diocese launched its radical new legal strategy.

The diocese argued that a trial on this question would violate its freedom of religion and appealed the judge’s decision to a three-judge panel on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. “If the diocese is required to go through a trial,” attorneys for the diocese and school argued, it would “irrevocably” deny Fort Wayne-South Bend the benefits of religious protection. Herx’s attorneys are fighting the appeal.

A spokesman for the diocese and an attorney and for the diocese and school both declined to comment.

“Employers try to appeal these decisions all the time. But this is unusual because of the incredibly broad claim to a religious exemption they’re making,” says Susan Deller Ross, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center who has written about Title VII and worked on sex discrimination cases. Thomas Brejcha, the president of the Thomas More Society, a conservative religious liberty legal group, called the move “creative, venturesome, and unusual.” He adds, “I’m very interested to see what happens.”

Louise Melling, a deputy legal director at the ACLU, was more critical: “It’s an unusual and extreme argument, to be saying the court doesn’t even have the legal authority to ask whether this was, in fact, sex discrimination. I can’t imagine they would prevail on that. It’s too extreme.”

Than again, Melling says she never would have predicted the recent wave of cases in which religious institutions asserted that they have an expansive right to discriminate. One of those cases was Burwell v. Hobby Lobby—the Supreme Court case that struck down the contraception mandate in the Affordable Care Act. The ACLU has also seen a climb in the number of Christian schools arguing that Title VII allows them to fire women who undergo IVF or become pregnant outside of marriage, or to fire employees who engage in same-sex relationships. “Hobby Lobby was just one case in this wave,” Melling says.

Douglas Laycock, a professor at the University of Virginia Law School, says the diocese’s assertion is a “perfectly sensible argument.” Laycock, who has successfully argued numerous religious liberty cases before the Supreme Court, notes there is precedent for immunizing certain organizations from trial, although not necessarily under Title VII’s religious protections. “I think it’s going to be a hard sell,” he says. “But I don’t know that it’s ‘extreme.'”

Eventually, a case like Herx’s could reach the Supreme Court. There are at least four other high-profile lawsuits like Herx’s under way at the federal level. Four women—Jennifer Maudlin, a former cook at an Ohio religious community center; Teri James, a former financial-aid specialist for San Diego Christian College; Shaela Evenson, a former Catholic school teacher with the Helena Diocese in Montana; and Shanna Daly, a former teacher with St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Catholic School in Florida—are suing their former employers for firing them because they became pregnant outside of marriage. Daly claims she was fired because she refused to get married until the church annulled her previous marriage. Each of these women filed their cases within the last two years.

“It’s striking that this is still an issue, that people are still firing women for getting IVF and being pregnant and unmarried,” Melling says. “It all feels so medieval.”

It is also hypocritical, according to Herx. Other teachers in the diocese, she claims, have undergone hysterectomies, vasectomies, and tubal ligations without any employment consequences, even though the church teaches that deliberate sterilization is immoral. Herx and her doctor made sure that none of the embryos created for her infertility treatment were intentionally destroyed. Herx’s school principal approved sick days for her IVF treatment. And the diocese’s health insurance plan, which the diocese directly administers without the help of a third party, paid for Herx’s visits to the fertility doctor and the anesthesia she required.

Ross agrees that the appeals court is unlikely to buy into the diocese’s argument. “That would have an extreme impact,” she says. “But with law you can never say never.”

View original post here – 

Catholic Church Argues It Doesn’t Have to Show Up in Court Because Religious Freedom

Posted in Anchor, Bunn, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Catholic Church Argues It Doesn’t Have to Show Up in Court Because Religious Freedom

Republicans Are Far More Critical of American Schools Than Democrats

by LeilaniOgden Posted on October 13, 2014

Mother Jones

Over at Vox, Libby Nelson interviews Jack Schneider, a history professor at College of the Holy Cross, about why Americans think schools are in decline despite the evidence that they’re actually better than they used to be. Here’s Schneider:

The first reason that people think schools are in decline is because they hear it all the time. If you hear something often enough, it becomes received wisdom, even if you can’t identify the source. That rhetoric is coming from a policy machine where savvy policy leaders have figured out that the way that you get momentum is to scare the hell out of people. So reformers have gotten really good at this sky is falling rhetoric….The rhetoric there is the schools are in crisis, we are competing against nations that are going to somehow destroy us if our test scores aren’t high enough, and lo and behold, policymakers have a solution.

Schneider points to a couple of pieces of evidence to back up his contention that schools today are better than in the past. The first is NAEP test scores, which have been generally rising, not falling, over the past few decades. The second is the well-known fact that people tend to think their own neighborhood schools are fine but that schools nationally are terrible. A Gallup/PDK poll confirms this perception gap.

But here’s an interesting thing. Although it’s true that this gap in perceptions is widespread, it’s far more widespread among Republicans than Democrats. Take a look at the chart on the right, constructed from the poll numbers. When it comes to rating local schools, there’s barely any difference between Democrats and Republicans. Only a small number give their local schools a poor grade. But nationally it’s a whole different story. Republicans are far more likely to rate schools as disaster areas nationally.

I’m reluctant to draw too many conclusions about this without giving it some serious thought. Still, there’s at least one thing we can say. This difference doesn’t seem to arise from different personal perceptions of education. Both groups have similar perceptions of their own schools.1 So why are Republicans so much more likely to think that other schools are terrible? If it doesn’t come from personal experience, then the most likely culprit is the media, which suggests that conservative media does far more scaremongering about education than liberal or mainstream media. That’s pretty unsettling given the fact that, as near as I can tell, the mainstream media is almost unrelentingly hostile toward education.

But the truth is that I don’t watch enough Fox or listen to enough Limbaugh to really know how they treat education. Is this where the partisan divide comes from? Or is it from Christian Right newsletter circuit? Or the home school lobby? Or what?

In any case, there’s more interesting stuff at the link, and Neerav Kingsland has a response here, including the basic NAEP data that shows steadily positive trends in American education since 1971.

1Or so it seems. One other possibility is that far more Republicans than Democrats send their kids to private schools. They rate these schools highly when Gallup asks, but rate other schools poorly because those are the schools they pulled their kids out of. A more detailed dive into the poll numbers might shed some light on this.

Jump to original:

Republicans Are Far More Critical of American Schools Than Democrats

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Republicans Are Far More Critical of American Schools Than Democrats

Coordinates: A Mountain to Honor Thoreau

by Myrna Posted on October 6, 2014

A group of writers recently made the trek to the summit of an unnamed mountain for a minor act of civil disobedience: a ceremony to name it for Thoreau. Read original article:  Coordinates: A Mountain to Honor Thoreau ; ; ;

From:

Coordinates: A Mountain to Honor Thoreau

Posted in alo, eco-friendly, FF, G & F, GE, Jason, Monterey, ONA, oven, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Coordinates: A Mountain to Honor Thoreau

Friday Cat Blogging – 3 October 2014

by Gina72Ebzwtxbe Posted on October 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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

We have names! They have not, ahem, been met with universal acclaim, but we’re sticking with them. Our little gray-and-white girl is:

Hopper aka Gracie aka The Admiral

And our little black-and-white boy is:

Hilbert aka Davie aka The Professor aka The 24th Problem

For those of you too lazy to google things, Hopper is named after Admiral Grace Hopper, “the mother of COBOL.” Hilbert is named after David Hilbert, a famous German mathematician who has some personal resonance for me and also happens to have a name that begins with H, which makes him a nicely alliterative companion for Hopper. Among other things, Hilbert is famous for a speech in 1900 in which he laid out 23 fundamental mathematical problems, some of which remain unsolved to this day.

It turns out, by the way, that the fastest way to get Hilbert’s attention is to pay attention to Hopper. All we have to do is scratch Hopper’s chin and Hilbert, somehow, becomes aware of it and comes bounding into the room demanding that we scratch his chin. It’s really quite remarkable. He not only has a jealous streak, he apparently has ESP too.

Continue at source:

Friday Cat Blogging – 3 October 2014

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Friday Cat Blogging – 3 October 2014