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Donald Trump Plans to Parachute Criminals Into Other Countries Whether They Like It Or Not

by LandonHotham1 Posted on September 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump’s big immigration speech contained few surprises. He spent a lot of time on illegal immigrants who are criminals, but his solution was pretty simple: Get rid of them. Period. End of story. And not just over the border, either. Way over the border so they can’t come back. And if their home countries don’t want them back, tough. Apparently planes full of murderous illegal immigrants are going to be landing all over the world whether anyone likes it or not.

But how about everyone else? Are we going to deport all 11 million illegal immigrants in the country, even the “good” ones? Here’s what he said:

Importantly, in several years when we have accomplished all of our enforcement and deportation goals and truly ended illegal immigration for good, including the construction of a great wall…and the establishment of our new lawful immigration system, then and only then will we be in a position to consider the appropriate disposition of those individuals who remain.

That discussion can take place only in an atmosphere in which illegal immigration is a memory of the past, no longer with us, allowing us to weigh the different options available based on the new circumstances at the time.

But no amnesty! So no amnesty and no legal status, but we’ll weigh all the other options someday in the far future. I’m not sure what other options there are, but I guess that’s an issue for our grandkids. Aside from this, the waffling Trump was gone, replaced by the hardline Trump we’ve all come to love over the past year.

Anyway, if you’re curious, here’s the nickel version of Trump’s 10-point immigration plan:

  1. Build a wall. Mexico will pay for it. It will be a physical wall, with drones and sensors as supplements.
  2. No more catch and release. If you cross the border, we’ll send you back. Way, way back.
  3. Triple the ICE deportation force. Deport all criminals instantly. The police know who they are. We’ll round them up and deport them on Day 1.
  4. Defund sanctuary cities.
  5. Cancel all of Obama’s executive orders.
  6. Suspend visas for visitors from undesirable countries. Send ’em to safe zones in their own countries instead and make the Gulf states pay for it.
  7. Force other countries to take back deported immigrants whether they like it or not.
  8. Complete the biometric entry-exit visa tracking system.
  9. Strengthen E-Verify and end all welfare benefits. “Those who abuse our welfare system will be priorities for immediate removal.”
  10. Reform legal immigration.

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Donald Trump Plans to Parachute Criminals Into Other Countries Whether They Like It Or Not

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The Horrifying Reason Why Your Fruit Is Unblemished

by FaithAEHxvuqw Posted on December 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Back in 2010, I visited a labor camp that houses some of the migrant workers who grow America’s fruit and vegetables. I found people living densely in shanty-like structures made of scrap metal and cinder block, surrounded by vast fields and long rows of greenhouses. Strangers in a strange land who didn’t speak the language, hundreds of miles from home, they lived at the mercy of labor contractors who, they claimed, made false promises and paid rock-bottom wages. Like all Big Ag-dominated areas, the place had a feeling of desolation: all monocropped fields, mostly devoid of people, and lots of billboards hawking the products of agrichemical giants Monsanto and Syngenta.

You might think I had made my way to Florida’s infamous tomato fields, or somewhere in the depths of the California’s migrant-dependent Central Valley. Those places remain obscure to most Americans, but the gross human exploitation they represent has at least been documented in a spate of excellent recent books, like Barry Estabrook’s Tomatoland, Tracy McMillan’s The American Way of Eating, and Seth Holmes Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies. But I was somewhere yet more remote and less well-known: Sinaloa, a largely rural state in Mexico’s northwestern hinterland.

If most Americans have heard of Sinaloa at all, it’s because of the state’s well-earned reputation as a center of Mexico’s bloody drug trade. But in addition to the eponymous drug cartel, Sinaloa also houses vast-scale, export-oriented agriculture: farms that churn out the tomatoes, melons, peppers, and other fresh produce that help fill US supermarket shelves. And the people who do the planting, tending, and harvesting tend to be from the indigenous regions of Mexico’s southern states, Oaxaca and Chiapas, where smallholder farming has been ground down by decades of free-trade policies pursued by the Mexican government, which left millions in search of gainful work to the north.

In my brief time there, I found Sinaloa overwhelming: a scary cauldron of labor exploitation, industrial agriculture, and drug violence. Now, Los Angeles Times reporter Richard Marosi and photographer Don Bartletti have documented the grim conditions faced by workers on Mexico’s export-focused mega farms in a long-form investigation, after 18 months of reporting in nine Mexican states, including, most prominently, Sinaloa. The Times plans to publish it in four parts; the first, here, is stunning.

Marosi found that Mexico’s mega-farms adhere to the strictest standards when it comes to food safety and cleanliness, driven by the demands of big US buyers. “In immaculate greenhouses, laborers are ordered to use hand sanitizers and schooled in how to pamper the produce,” Marosi writes. “They’re required to keep their fingernails carefully trimmed so the fruit will arrive unblemished in US supermarkets.”

While the produce is coddled, the workers face a different reality. Pay languishes at the equivalent of $8 to $12 a day. Marosi summarizes conditions that often approach slavery:

• Many farm laborers are essentially trapped for months at a time in rat-infested camps, often without beds and sometimes without functioning toilets or a reliable water supply.

• Some camp bosses illegally withhold wages to prevent workers from leaving during peak harvest periods.

• Laborers often go deep in debt paying inflated prices for necessities at company stores. Some are reduced to scavenging for food when their credit is cut off. It’s common for laborers to head home penniless at the end of a harvest.

• Those who seek to escape their debts and miserable living conditions have to contend with guards, barbed-wire fences and sometimes threats of violence from camp supervisors.

• Major US companies have done little to enforce social responsibility guidelines that call for basic worker protections such as clean housing and fair pay practices.

The piece includes excellent photography and is chockfull of stories straight from the mouths of farm workers. And it shines a bright light on a hugely important source of our food. The US now imports nearly a third of the fruit and vegetables we consume, and Mexico accounts for 36 percent of that foreign-grown cornucopia, far more than any other country. And we’re only growing more reliant on our southern neighbor—imports of Mexico-grown fresh produce have increased by an average of 11 percent per year between 2001 and 2011, the USDA reports, and now amount to around $8 billion. The Times investigations demonstrates, with an accumulation of detail that can’t be denied or ignored, that our easy bounty bobs on a sea of misery and exploitation.

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The Horrifying Reason Why Your Fruit Is Unblemished

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This Poet From a Tiny Island Nation Just Shamed The World’s Leaders

by BufordWillshire Posted on September 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Presidents and diplomats aren’t the only ones calling for climate action at the United Nations. During the opening ceremony of today’s climate summit, â&#128;&#139;Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner—a 26-year-old poet from the Marshall Islands—spoke eloquently about the threat that rising seas pose to her country.

Jetnil-Kijiner warned delegates of the high price of inaction and described the current challenge as a “race to save humanity.”

“Those of us from Oceania are already experiencing it first hand,” she said. “We’ve seen waves crashing into our homes…We look at our children and wonder how they will know themselves or their culture should we lose our islands.”

“We need a radical change of course,” she added. “It means ending carbon pollution within my lifetime. It means supporting those of us most affected to prepare for unavoidable climate impacts. And it means taking responsibility for irreversible loss and damage caused by greenhouse gas emissions.”

You can read more about Jetnil-Kijiner here.

Video via TckTckTck.

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This Poet From a Tiny Island Nation Just Shamed The World’s Leaders

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The Case Against Chlorinated Tap Water

by IDSMoisesjfofrr Posted on August 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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The chlorination of municipal tap water is considered one of the 20th century’s best public health ideas. The American Water Works Association credits the practice with increasing life expectancy by 50 percent over the past century by virtually eliminating water-borne diseases such as typhoid fever and cholera. But chlorine in drinking water can cause health risks of its own. And while some of the of those risks, such as reactions with organic compounds that can yield toxic byproducts, are relatively well understood and managed, at least one has been largely overlooked: The effect of chlorinated drinking water on the beneficial bacteria in our guts.

The notion that our bodies’ 100 trillion bacteria act as a crucial internal ecosystem, a sort of sixth human organ, has only recently gained currency among mainstream scientists. Researchers now believe a lack of beneficial bacteria in the gut can trigger certain autoimmune diseases, among them diabetes, asthma, and even neurological conditions such as autism. Those conditions have spread in step with Western society’s war on germs, which has scorched our good bacteria along with the bad, throwing our bodies’ microbiomes off balance in the same way that a slashed and burned rainforest becomes susceptible to invasive weeds.

Jeff Leach is a leading microbiome researcher and founder of the American Gut Project, which aims to sequence the microbiomes of tens of thousands of Americans. Leach suspects that several factors may impede bacterial diversity in Americans, among them the profligate use of antibiotics, over-consumption of processed foods, and, at least to some extent, consumption of chlorine in tap water. “It’s something I’ve discussed with a number of other microbiologists,” he replied when I asked about the possibility. “In short, nobody has done the research, but we are certain that there is an impact.”

Based on studies of chlorine’s effects on human cells, the Environmental Protection Agency sets the safe level in drinking water at no more than four parts per million. Even that dilute level can wipe out lots other life forms, however, as anyone knows who has filled a goldfish bowl from the tap.

There’s no debate that chlorinating our water kills off a wide array of malignant bacteria—just try drinking the tap water in countries that don’t fully disinfect it. Much less is known, however, about chlorine’s effect on good bacteria that help preserve healthy digestive systems. We simply don’t know enough about the microbial ecosystem in the human gut to identify every type of bacteria that’s important, much less how well those bacteria survive when we guzzle mildly chlorinated tap water.

Still, some tangential research suggests cause for concern. A 1987 Toxicology study found that consumption of water with even fairly low levels of monochloramine, a commonly used disinfectant that persists in drinking water longer than chlorine, disrupted the immune systems of rats—a finding that’s notable given the strong link between the human immune system and gut microbes.

Chlorine in tap water is also known to kill microbes in soil—watch out, home gardeners!—though it doesn’t penetrate deep into the ground, and microbial populations typically bounce back quickly after watering.

Though the risks of chlorine in tap water might justify purchasing a low-cost home water filter that can remove it, it’s definitely premature to back off of requirements to chlorinate or otherwise disinfect municipal drinking water, as some Wisconsin state legislators proposed a few years ago.

“Chlorination has done tremendous good, so the default is to continue as is,” Martin Blaser, the director of the Human Microbiome Project, told me, “but whether or not there are subtler effects needs to be studied.”

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The Case Against Chlorinated Tap Water

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Facebook Just Admitted It Tinkered With People’s News Feeds to Manipulate Their Emotions

by DoreenLeHunte Posted on June 28, 2014

Mother Jones

Emotional contagion is when people subconsciously take on the emotions of those around them. It’s when happy people are around sad people and then feel rather down themselves. Or when sad people are in happy crowds and suddenly just want to dance. Like so many things in real life, this happens on the internet as well. Your emotional state converges with the general feeling of your Twitter feed or your Facebook friends. This is how humans work, it’s how we’re wired, and it’s nothing to lose sleep over.

What may in fact be worth losing sleep over is that Facebook just admitted to intentionally manipulating people’s emotions by selectively choosing which type of their friends’ posts—positive or negative—appeared in their News Feed.

Take it away, Next Web:

The company has revealed in a research paper that it carried out a week-long experiment that affected nearly 700,000 users to test the effects of transferring emotion online.

The News Feeds belonging to 689,003 users of the English language version were altered to see “whether exposure to emotions led people to change their own posting behaviors,” Facebook says. There was one track for those receiving more positive posts, and another for those who were exposed to more emotionally negative content from their friends. Posts themselves were not affected and could still be viewed from friends’ profiles, the trial instead edited what the guinea pig users saw in their News Feed, which itself is governed by a selective algorithm, as brands frustrated by the system can attest to.

Facebook found that the emotion in posts is contagious. Those who saw positive content were, on average, more positive and less negative with their Facebook activity in the days that followed. The reverse was true for those who were tested with more negative postings in their News Feed.

Ok, let’s break some stuff down:

Can they do this?

Yes. You agree to let the company use its information about you for “data analysis, testing, research and service improvement” when you agree to without reading the terms of service. It’s the “research” bit that’s relevant.

Should they?

I don’t know! There are clearly some ethical questions about it. A lot of people are pretty outraged. Even the editor of the study thought it was a creepy.

Should I quit Facebook?

You’re not going to quit Facebook.

No, really. I might.

You’re not going to quit Facebook.

You don’t even know me. I really might quit. No joke. I have my finger on button. I saw an ad for a little house out in the country. No internet. No cell service. I could sell everything and go there and live a quite, deliberate life by a pond. I could be happy there in that stillness.

Cool, so, I personally am not going to quit Facebook. That seems to me to be an overreaction. But I do not presume to know you well enough to advise you on this matter.

(You’re not going to quit Facebook.)

Anything else?

Yes, actually!

Earlier this year there was a minor brouhaha over the news that USAID had introduced a fake Twitter into Cuba in an attempt to foment democracy. It didn’t work and they pulled the plug. Let’s dress up and play the game pretend: If Facebook has the power to make people arbitrarily happy or sad, it could be quite the force politically in countries where it has a high penetration rate. (Cuba isn’t actually one of those countries. According to Freedom House, only 5% of the population has access to the World Wide Web.)

Economic confidence is one of the biggest factors people consider when going to vote. What if for the week before the election your News Feed became filled with posts from your unemployed friends looking for work? Not that Mark Zuckerburg and co. would ever do that, but they could!

Have fun, conspiracy theorists!

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Facebook Just Admitted It Tinkered With People’s News Feeds to Manipulate Their Emotions

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Design Lampshades for Solar Lanterns to Help People in Need

by kastijoo8753 Posted on January 17, 2014

During Panasonic’s Cut Out the Darkness project, visitors to the company’s website can design lampshades for solar lanterns that will be donated to regions without electricity. Photo: Panasonic

Want to light up the life of someone who needs it? Now you can. Panasonic’s Cut Out the Darkness project allows visitors to the company’s website to design lampshades that could be sent along with solar lanterns to those who live in areas without access to electricity.

Worldwide, one in five people lives without electricity. Those people face a number of economic and health problems, according to Panasonic, since they can’t perform basic tasks like studying in the evening or receive medical treatment at night. Additionally, many people in these regions use kerosene lamps, which pose fire risks and cause health issues from the smoke.

Panasonic first became involved with this issue through its 100 Thousand Solar Lanterns initiative, which aims to donate 100,000 solar lanterns to those without electricity by 2018, the company’s 100th anniversary. These solar lanterns charge during the day and provide light at night. They also reduce CO2 emissions, according to a company press release. In 2013, Panasonic kicked off the project by donating 8,000 solar lanterns to nonprofits, humanitarian groups and refugee camps in Asia and Africa.

In 2013, Panasonic donated 8,000 solar LED lanterns throughout Asia and Africa. Photo: Panasonic

Now, to raise awareness about the difficulties faced by residents of regions without electricity and to involve people with the company’s work, Panasonic is asking its website visitors to get creative and design images for lampshades using paper-cut techniques. You don’t necessarily have to be handy with scissors, since the designs are made virtually using a Web application — all folding, drawing and cutting are done with the click of a button.

A Web application allows users to easily make their own cutout designs. Photo: Panasonic

In February, people can vote for their favorite designs, and the top 100 will be turned into lampshades and donated with the solar lanterns. Panasonic plans to transport the donated solar lanterns and shades to recipients in March.

Eleven recognized paper-cut artists from around the world have also contributed designs to support the project — check out their work for inspiration.

To participate by creating a design or voting, visit the Cut Out the Darkness project’s home page.

earth911

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Design Lampshades for Solar Lanterns to Help People in Need

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The Noticer Returns – Andy Andrews

by Myrna Posted on October 1, 2013

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

The Noticer Returns

Sometimes You Find Perspective and Sometimes Perspective Finds You

Andy Andrews

Genre: Self-Improvement

Price: $9.99

Publish Date: October 1, 2013

Publisher: Thomas Nelson

Seller: HarperCollins


Perspective is a powerful thing. Andy Andrews has spent the past five years doing a double take at every white-haired old man he sees, hoping to have just one more conversation with the person to whom he owes his life. Through a chance encounter at a local bookstore, Andy is reunited with the man who changed everything for him – Jones, also known as “The Noticer.” As the story unfolds, Jones uses his unique talent of noticing little things that make a big difference. And these “little things” grant the people of Fairhope, Alabama, a life-changing gift – perspective. Along the way, families will be united, financial opportunities will be created, and readers will be left with powerfully simple solutions to the everyday problems we all face. Through the lens of a parenting class at the Grand Hotel in Point Clear, Alabama, Jones guides a seemingly random group to ask specific questions inspired by his curious advice that “You can’t believe everything you think.” Those questions lead to answers for which people have been searching for centuries: How do we begin to change the culture in which we live? What is the key to creating a life of success and value? What if what we think is the end…is only the beginning? What starts as a story of one person's everyday reality unfolds into the extraordinary principles available to anyone looking to create the life for which they were intended.

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The Noticer Returns – Andy Andrews

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In his first major address as secretary of state, Kerry nods at climate change

by 1LymSlagter473 Posted on February 20, 2013

In his first major address as secretary of state, Kerry nods at climate change

By Philip Bump

Secretary of State John Kerry, the man ostensibly charged with yaying or naying the Keystone XL pipeline permit, gave his first major speech in his new position this morning at the University of Virginia. I say “ostensibly” because any final decision on Keystone will come from the president, of course. And if you didn’t know the speech was coming from John Kerry, you’d be forgiven for thinking that it was coming from the president, too.

State Dept

The sign language interpreter offers her critique of Kerry’s speech.

As indicated in his prepared remarks [PDF], Kerry articulated what he sees as America’s core diplomatic values: security and stability, human rights, health and nutrition, gender equality, education. He then noted the biggest challenge facing the world at large:

We as a nation must have the foresight and courage to make the investments necessary to safeguard the most sacred trust we keep for our children and grandchildren: an environment not ravaged by rising seas, deadly superstorms, devastating droughts, and the other hallmarks of a dramatically changing climate.

And let’s face it — we are all in this one together. No nation can stand alone. We share nothing so completely as our planet.

When we work with others — large and small — to develop and deploy the clean technologies that will power a new world, we’re also helping create new markets and new opportunities for America’s second-to-none innovators and entrepreneurs to succeed in the next great revolution.

So let’s commit ourselves to doing the smart thing and the right thing and truly commit to tackling this challenge.

Because if we don’t rise to meet it, rising temperatures and rising sea levels will surely lead to rising costs down the road. If we waste this opportunity, it may be the only thing our generations are remembered for. We need to find the courage to leave a far different legacy.

This is a slightly different spin on climate and energy than what Kerry said during his confirmation hearing, when he forcefully argued that America was being left behind in the expanding renewable and clean energy marketplace. Here, Kerry seems to call not just for investing in business ventures but in infrastructure upgrades that would help us function in a warmer world.

Kerry is certainly aware that people like myself will be sifting his words for evidence of how “he” might decide on the pipeline. Which is a futile exercise — even if he’d dropped an unintentional clue, the State Department and White House would swiftly deny giving any such suggestion.

What we learn from Kerry’s words then isn’t much. He remains committed to climate change; he values public investment to ameliorate its effects. Kerry’s first speech in many ways follows naturally from one of former Secretary Clinton’s last. Her determination that the U.S. recognize the role of energy in international diplomacy syncs nicely with Kerry’s call that we advocate for clean solutions.

The Hill suggested that Kerry “came out swinging on climate change.” Not really. It would have been impossible for him not to broach the subject given his boss’s recent advocacy. So he noted its significance, without suggesting much about how it might be addressed. Those looking for him to check that box will be pleased. Those looking for signs of independent boldness will not.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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In his first major address as secretary of state, Kerry nods at climate change

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