Boeing strike grinds on as latest talks fail to reach agreement

Agence France-Presse
September 28, 2024 

Workers have been picketing 24 hours a day outside Boeing factories in the Seattle area since late last week (STEPHEN BRASHEAR/GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/Getty Images via AFP)

The union for striking Boeing workers said Friday that talks with the aviation giant "broke off" without agreement, after some 33,000 US employees walked out this month.

Workers in the Pacific Northwest region walked off the job on September 13 after overwhelmingly voting down a contract offer, effectively shutting down assembly plants for the 737 MAX and 777.

"Talks broke off, and we have no further dates scheduled at this time. We remain open to talks with the company, either direct or mediated," the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) said on its website.

Boeing said it was prepared to meet again with the union.

"We remain committed to resetting our relationship with our represented employees and negotiating in good faith, and want to reach an agreement as soon as possible," the company said in a statement.

Boeing on Monday announced its "best and final offer" aimed at appeasing demands: lifting wages for striking workers by 30 percent and reinstating an annual bonus.

An end-of-day Friday deadline was put in place for striking workers to sign off the deal, but the IAM said the proposal did not go far enough.

The union said in a Friday message that it had engaged in "frank discussions" with Boeing along with mediators of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS).

"While conversations were direct, we did not make progress on the pension issue. The company remains adamant that it will not unfreeze the defined benefit plan," the IAM said, citing a key issue for some workers.

It added that the company "would not engage substantively" on other issues including higher pay, quicker wage progression and more paid time off.

'Off the charts extraordinary': Strategist heaps praise on Harris after border speech

Erik De La Garza
September 27, 2024 

Vice President Kamala Harris’ speech Friday night for her first campaign trip to the border was welcomed as a homerun by a Democratic strategist who said it “is why Kamala Harris is going to win this election on November 5.” (Screengrab via MSNBC)

Vice President Kamala Harris’ speech Friday night for her first campaign trip to the border was welcomed as a homerun by a Democratic strategist who said it “is why Kamala Harris is going to win this election on November 5.”

“That thing was off the charts extraordinary,” said Fernand Amandi, a Democratic pollster and strategist. “She gave a serious speech that didn’t sound like open borders advocacy. She said ‘I’m a responsible leader. I’m going to solve this problem.'”

Harris' speech in the border town of Douglas, Arizona, aired live on the three major cable news networks and showed how the Democratic nominee is “growing by leaps and bounds,” according to Amandi.

“Just a terrific speech by Kamala Harris,” he told MSNBC host Chris Hayes on his show "All In."

Journalist Maria Hinojosa, the founder and CEO of Futuro Media Group, pushed back on Amandi’s enthusiastic reaction by hitting Harris for "painting all immigrants as criminals," and not recognizing that crime and fentanyl overdoses have dropped.

“Why is she not saying it’s time to turn the page on that rhetoric. She herself needs to turn the page on that rhetoric,” Hinojosa said before adding that she would “give her a few points” for portions of her speech.

“You know I’m highly critical because our country should be doing better,” Hinojosa said.

Amandi concluded the segment by trying to convince Hinojosa that Harris was focusing on immigration issues “because it’s working.”


“She's taken Donald Trump’s plus 35 on this issue of immigration sliced it down to only a 14 point lead, after this speech if it resonates, it’s going to get into the low single-digits,” Amandi said.

“I don't think you could have asked for a better, more thoughtful, more sober and serious speech compared to the unseriousness and frankly the cruelty of what the trump campaign is offering."

Watch the clip below or at this link.

Harris speech was 'tough on the border without being terrible to people': CNN commentator

Daniel Hampton
September 27, 2024 

Vice President Kamala Harris' "gamble" of a border speech in Arizona earned praise from a former Obama administration adviser even as the panel's Republican strategist cast doubt on the speech's effectiveness. (Screengrab via CNN)

Vice President Kamala Harris' "gamble" of a border speech in Arizona earned praise from a former Obama administration adviser even as the panel's Republican strategist cast doubt on the speech's effectiveness.

CNN anchor Anderson Cooper noted some called Harris's speech Friday night a "gamble" that will bring attention to her and the Biden administration's record on the border.

Harris and her team clearly thought the speech was "worth it," he said, to "distance herself from what [President Joe] Biden has done, charting her own course."

Reacting to the speech, commentator Van Jones applauded Harris.

"Bravo," he said, twice. "I thought that was an extraordinary speech."

Jones said Harris' remarks that she prosecuted and put people behind bars as a prosecutor for heroin, that's "what she was known for" in California.

"You can have confidence that she will carry that forward," he added, calling her a "mature leader" who has proven she can provide "bipartisan leadership."

Jones also lauded Harris for acknowledging she can be tougher on the border, while also respecting the dignity of migrants.

"You can be tough on the border without being terrible to people," he said. "You can be tough on the border without scapegoating people. You can be tough on the border without lying about people eating cats and dogs."

Journalist Gretchen Carlson noted Harris struck a tougher tone on the border to separate herself from Biden.

"Let me be blunt about this speech, Anderson: This was for independents and undecideds. That's what this speech is about."

Carlson highlighted that Harris used buzzwords and phrases such as "reaching across the aisle," "commonsense approach" and "put politics aside." These phrases, said Carlson, help her "bridge the gap of our hyperpolitical environment."


But Republican strategist Scott Jennings poured cold water on Harris' praise, asserting that voters won't take her words in "in a vacuum, independent of everything else you know."

Voters, he said, know they don't like what the Biden administration has done thus far on immigration. To boot, Harris' stances have "favored a more permissive immigration structure."

"She wanted to decriminalize border crossings," said Jennings. "She once compared ICE agents to the KKK! She tried to scapegoat border guards by claiming they were whipping people on horseback at the border, which turned out to be false."

Jennings said immigration-focused voters who think the border is broken will likely still favor Trump.

"I don't think this speech, despite trying to separate herself from Biden is going to change that. I don't think 100 speeches would change it."


Watch the clip below or at this link.

Harris walks tightrope on migration while calling for more restrictions on asylum

Issued on: 28/09/2024 - 

Vice President Kamala Harris walked a scrubby stretch along the US-Mexico border on Friday and called for further tightening of asylum restrictions as she sought to project a tougher stance on illegal migration and address one of her biggest vulnerabilities in the November election.

Erik Estrada raises alarm over 'not very Christian' artificial intelligence

Tom Boggioni
September 28, 2024

Erik Estrada (Photo by Gabriel Bouys for AFP)

During an interview with Fox News Digital, former "CHiPS" star Erik Estrada raised alarms about the growing use of AI and expressed dismay at the un-Christian way it is being used by some of its practitioners

The 75-year-old Estrada, who hosts the reality show "Divine Renovations" that looks at home improvement with a Christian slant, noted that he is growing increasingly alarmed by the growth of on-line deep fakes created by the artificial intelligence technology because it can "destroy lives."

With Fox reporting, "While some deepfakes can be harmless, the technology can be used to carry out scams and identity theft, spread propaganda, damage careers and reputations and manipulate elections,:" Estrada added, "Let's say, for instance, they want me to — they can make up me endorsing horses, or cows, or cow pies. That they're good for you. Nutritious. Have one a day. You know, they can do that. And that's wrong and that's not right, and it's not very Christian."He added, "It's just not a good thing . They hurt people. They can hurt people. They can destroy lives. They can match me up with a donkey and say, ‘Haha, Estrada is weird.’ You know what I mean? They can do anything with AI, but they should just use the positive end of it. But they won't."

The report adds, "In 2023, Estrada began hosting the faith-based home improvement reality series "Divine Renovation." According to Divine Renovation's producers at Heartlight Entertainment, the docuseries "takes the runaway success of home improvement shows and adds a spiritual element."

You can read more here.

Comrade Trump isn’t defending capitalism — he’s defending white power

John Stoehr
September 28, 2024 8:12AM ET

Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump makes a campaign stop at manufacturer FALK Production in Walker, Michigan, U.S. September 27, 2024. REUTERS/Brian Snyder

Recently, Donald Trump had this to say about Kamala Harris:

“She's a Marxist, communist, fascist, socialist.”

On the one hand, this isn’t worth taking seriously. After all, he’s putting everything he has mentally into stringing together words, any words, in the hope of scamming us into believing his lies. Whether it’s “Marxist, communist, fascist, socialist” or “person, woman, man, camera, TV,” it’s all kinda the same to the delusional and demented.

On the other hand, we should take this seriously.

I don’t mean asking whether Harris is a “Marxist, communist, fascist, socialist.” She isn’t. I mean asking whether Trump is. Most of us understand why he’s a fascist. Too few of us understand why he’s a communist. In any conventional sense of the word, that’s what he is.

And economics can have nothing to do with it.

Just ask Ana Navarro, a former Republican who fled communist Nicaragua. At the Democratic National Convention, she said:

"Trump and his minions call Kamala a communist. I know communism. I fled communism from Nicaragua when I was 8 years old. I don’t take it lightly. And let me tell you what communist dictators do. …

"They attack the free press. They call them the enemy of the people, like Ortega does in Nicaragua. They put their unqualified relatives in cushy government jobs, so they can get rich off their positions, like the Castros do in Cuba. And they refuse to accept legitimate elections when they lose and call for violence to stay in power, like Maduro is doing right now in Venezuela.

"Now you tell me something. Do any of those things sound familiar? Is there anybody running for president who reminds you of that?"

That’s about power, but economics plays a role, too.

History is filled with communist dictators who enacted economic agendas not because their policies were based on sound principles and solid data but because they served an immediate political interest. The outcome was sometimes the ruination of their country’s populations.


Trump wants to decimate the labor supply by deporting 20 million “illegal immigrants.” He wants to impose an across-the-board tariff of 20 percent and more on all imported goods. And he wants to seize control of the Federal Reserve Bank’s power to set interest rates.

A new report by the Peterson Institute, a very conservative think tank in Washington, found that these economic policies would “not only fail to solve inflation – they would make it much worse,” according to CNN. They would moreover depress growth, spike inflation and wipe out jobs to such a degree that the carnage would be felt well into 2040.

“We find that ironically, despite his ‘make the foreigners pay’ rhetoric, this package of policies does more damage to the US economy than to any other in the world,” the Peterson Institute’s working paper said.


This is not news.

Anyone who knows anything about economics knows indiscriminate tariffs would help no one while harming everyone. Yet he keeps talking about them as if he cares about their real-world consequences. He doesn’t. He only cares about whether they work for him politically.

In that, he’s just like a communist dictator.


But there’s more to being a communist than power and economics.

There’s character, too, or lack of it.

The most important thing to Donald Trump is whether you like him.


If you do, you’re good. If you don’t, you’re bad.

It doesn’t matter that you once called yourself a “Black Nazi.” It doesn’t matter that you once said you would like slavery to return so you can own a few slaves. It doesn't matter that you once said you liked “tranny porn” and that you fantasize about peeping on women in public gyms.

You can do all the things that North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson has reportedly done and it won’t matter to Trump.


But Robinson likes him.

So he endorsed Robinson.

Former North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory warned for years that Robinson was a “ticking time bomb.” He told CNN that even the quickest glance at his record would reveal things that are disqualifying.


But McCrory is one of those RINOs (Republicans in name only). His warnings went nowhere, because if you don’t like Trump, he doesn’t like you. Due to the scandal surrounding Robinson, Trump might lose North Carolina. But defeat won’t be his fault. It will be McCrory’s.

Such are the hallmarks of communist dictator.

To be sure, my argument is a hard sell. Reasonable people may buy the idea that Donald Trump is a fascist, but not that he’s a communist. After all, he’s a billionaire. He’s on the side of the billionaire class.


How can he be a communist?

But reasonable people are overthinking it.

Trump isn’t defending capitalism. He’s defending white power. If you prefer, he’s going to war against the enemies of the white collective. He’s prepared to use every instrument of the state toward that end.

Reducing the labor supply (deportations), increasing taxes (tariffs) and seizing the power to set interest rates will hurt the country generally. But they will hurt nonwhite people more than white people. It would be a race to the bottom for everyone except the richest of Americans.

But Trump wouldn’t be to blame.

He’d find someone outside the white collective to accuse.

Just like a communist.

Inside the ‘religious separatist movement in American education’

Jon King, Michigan Advance
September 28, 2024 

Desks in an empty elementary school classroom (Shutterstock.com)

The effort to get school vouchers approved nationwide has a long and varied history, but a book released this month posits that it is essentially a Christian Nationalist attempt at undermining public education as we know it.

That’s the conclusion of “The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers,” by Josh Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University.

Cowen, whose career as an education researcher in the early 2000s began with the expectation that vouchers, which allow public tax dollars for education to be spent for private school tuition, would ultimately benefit students. However, the reality that Cowen documents in the book turned out to be almost the exact opposite.

Starting in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision which ordered an end to segregated public education, and ending with the rise of the conservative Moms for Liberty – a vocal opponent of LGBTQ+ rights – and Project 2025, an authoritarian blueprint offering detailed plans to broadly enhance executive authority during a second Trump term, Cowen describes the arc of the voucher movement as never being far removed from bigotry and intolerance, whether it be against Blacks or the LGBTQ+ community.

More importantly, however, Cowen describes in detail the academic framework, whether through universities or conservative-funded think tanks, that provides intellectual cover for the movement.

Chief among them was Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Freidman, considered by many to have “launched the modern school choice movement,” with his 1955 essay, “The Role of Government in Education.”

Friedman, who extolled the virtues of a free market system with minimal government intervention, especially in social areas such as education, wrote that while government financing of education was justified, “the administration of schools is neither required by the financing of education, nor justifiable in its own right in a predominantly free enterprise society.”

Cowen writes that in the aftermath of the Brown decision, Friedman “spoke at Southern conferences paid for by conservative donors, where his lecture notes affirmed his published work by arguing that the ‘appropriate solution’ to tensions rising from integration mandates was a ‘privately operated school system with parent choice of schools.’”

From that setting, Cowen details the decades-long battle about the role of public education, a battle that is no less fierce now than it was in 1954.

Michigan Advance had an opportunity to speak with Cowen at length about the book and its conclusions and is presenting that discussion in two parts. What follows is a conversation that has been edited for length and clarity. Advance questions are in bold, and Cowen’s responses are in regular type.

——————————

Why is understanding who Milton Friedman was so essential to understanding the modern day voucher movement?


There’s this intellectual political history debate about whether Friedman himself was a segregationist, and I sort of alluded to it in the book. It’s not really all that important. What is important is that segregation very quickly latched on to the Friedman idea. And the editors (of Friedman’s essay) understood it to be from the beginning a potential race-neutral way to avoid Brown.

He would go on to win a Nobel Prize 20 years later, worked for (President Ronald) Reagan, advised (Dictator Augusto) Pinochet in the Chilean regime. I mean, this guy was everywhere. He’s still something of a hero among the libertarians. But he’s someone whose ideas did kind of give intellectual heft to conservative public policy.

There were some Southern states in particular that jumped on this idea. Some successfully proposed small voucher systems in the ‘50s, and some didn’t quite have the votes. But you fast forward to when the first real modern voucher system gets off the ground (Milwaukee in 1990), and in a way, none of the sort of Friedman stuff was nearly as relevant at that time as it really is today, again just because of how much (voucher advocates) believe parents really should have the right to separate their kids out from what they think is going on in public schools.


In the ‘50s, it was race. And now it’s sort of race. I mean, the CRT business and the DEI business and gender ideology is in Trump 47 (the Trump campaign’s official policy proposals) and in Project 2025. So, the underlying act of vouchers is separating kids out from the public school because parents don’t like what’s going on in public school.

Starting with Milwaukee in 1990, those original voucher projects were set up so that they were going to be highly analyzed, that there would be strong data, and the expectation was that it would show student improvement, and yet, ultimately, they did not.

Exactly. The original 1990 evaluation that (Wisconsin) sort of obligated itself to when it passed the program, it just didn’t show the overwhelmingly positive results people expected, which is I think why in some sense, the conservative voucher advocates got involved in this so heavily and aggressively. What it was about was whether or not this long-time conservative pipe dream actually works or not. And then the fight sort of sustained itself for 10 years and we’re kind of back in it again.


There were some sort of gently positive results. I kind of concede that there were a handful of positive studies from that era, although at this point, they’re now almost two decades old. But what else was going on in the ‘90s and in the early 2000s was the era of more public school accountability, transparency, standards-based reform in both from the Clinton years and the George W. Bush years. No Child Left Behind was signed by George W. Bush in 2002.

They really believed in these three- to five-year long, open independent evaluations. They just have never really shown what these guys wanted. The argument of the book is not only did vouchers kind of fail to deliver in their own right, but they’ve actually had some unprecedented declines in student achievement.

That’s where you start to see these things kind of return back to. I mean, the reason I opened the book with the ‘50s stuff is this is where you really have to go back to the ‘50s to get that the language that’s used again in today’s debate, because it was not part of the ‘90s, and it was not part of the early 2000s. People like Ken Starr would sort of trump parents’ rights out there from time to time, but they still believed these things would move the needle on academics and test scores. It really wasn’t until recently where they stopped making that argument. For the most part, it’s much more about woke ideology and CRT and where people go to the bathroom and all that business.


In the book you say that as the data really turns negative, it almost cannot be dismissed any longer. It can’t be explained away. That’s where the shift in this approach comes in. Trump’s secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, who is featured prominently in your book, was involved in this long before she became the secretary of education.

Most of us, I think, are fairly well aware of Betsy DeVos and the DeVos family influence in Michigan, but it’s really hard to overstate how influential the DeVos’ have been in national conservative Republican politics for decades. It’s not just here (in Michigan). It’s the Heritage Foundation. It’s focused on the Family Research Council. There’s a DeVos Center For Religion and Family Life at Heritage. A number of the Project 2025 authors have their roots back in some of these big DeVos groups that date back to not just Betsy, but the first generation of Richard and Helen (DeVos). So, their larger goal as a family is much more sort of recentering this vision of Christianity into American life and American public policy, and I don’t think that’s a statement any of that side would disagree with.

When Betsy DeVos became the nominee for education secretary, these old comments that she’d made (reemerged) about seeing school choices advancing God’s kingdom and lamenting the fact that public schools are kind of the community centers. She wants churches to be back in the community center. The phrase Christians would would use, and I count myself among Christians, is as a mission field. I mean, the (DeVos) family has always seen public policy as a mission field for their faith. And vouchers is one area where they’ve been very, very focused of late out of Michigan, but from time to time here as well.


(Note: A request for comment was made to Betsy Devos through the Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation, but was not returned.)

But this Christian-based view of public education, it’s really Christian nationalism is it not?

Yes. That is driving this.


Is the voucher movement’s ultimate goal, as personified by people like Betsy DeVos and the Koch brothers, really just an undercover way to destroy public education?

I think that’s right. I think in the short term, and certainly in the years that I was active working as an evaluator of the space and some of the early programs I write about in the book, they were just trying to get some of the stuff off the ground. I do think there’s been much more of a scorched earth take now where they’re going much harder with this sort of Christopher Rufo era, the JD Vance era, Trump himself era. It’s much more aggressive in terms of just going right at public schools. It’s not something you saw earlier in the ‘90s and in the early 2000s when it was sort of a much more mainstream conservative policy.

But that kind of describes the entire trend right now in American politics, right? This is not the party of George W. Bush anymore. It’s not the party of Mitt Romney anymore. It’s the party of Vance and Trump, and we’re having debates about Haitian immigrants and cats in Springfield, Ohio right now. (Note: The racist, discredited lie that Haitian residents in Springfield have eaten pets has been spread by the Trump campaign despite being repeatedly debunked.) It’s just a different time. And I think the voucher movement has really just sort of hooked itself to that energy and that aggression. I mean, vouchers are two of the first three paragraphs in the education chapter of Project 2025. They need to package that with everything else that’s in that 900 pages. It’s pretty fringe and extreme stuff. And I think the quiet part out loud piece of it is, they’re much more willing to go at public schools in general now as opposed to “not representing parents’ values” or “captured by the teachers’ unions.” You’d hear this from time to time, especially the union piece 20 years ago, but it’s nothing like today. And so I think when Betsy DeVos left office, and I quote this this column of hers in the book, but in that last few months of her in office, she wrote a piece for USA Today where she basically said “What we want to do next as we leave, and that’s long term, we want a Supreme Court case that’s going to throw out all the remaining Blaine Amendments and get mandatory vouchers in every state.”


I think those of us who understand school finances, those of us who understand how public school pay budgets work, understand that would imply a substantial deconstruction of public schools. But they don’t say it that way. All they say is religious families should get funding for religious education.

You have to leave it to experts on budgets and experts on public education to say, “Wait a minute. States can’t afford to stand up two sectors of education.” So if we’re going to have mandatory vouchers in every state as a fundamental religious freedom exercise, then you are really talking about a complete redesign of what schooling in America is.

Isn’t the recent legislation in Ohio, as related in a ProPublica story, that gives taxpayer money directly to private religious schools for new buildings, the realization of that column that Betsy DeVos was writing? I mean, it’s just a direct transfer of dollars.

Yes. They (Ohio) had $16 million in grants, so they kind of just steered it over during the budget process, and it wasn’t until after the fact, it figured out what it was for. I mean, you see that kind of stuff all the time in our budget process, but not for private school construction.

For those of us who’ve been working in this space for a while, the butts in seats problem for private providers has always been an issue for them. It’s actually the reason why the voucher academic results are so dreadful when these things came to scale at a statewide level, because in the early days when all of us who are working on these research teams evaluating them for states and cities, you’d get six or seven private schools of a decent quality to participate. It’s a very normal part of the social science, including an education to get participant schools. They’ll say, okay. We’ll admit some students. We’ll study it. We’ll be partners with you with this work. But just necessarily, the schools that agree to do that kind of thing are just not necessarily representative of what a typical private school might be when you scale this thing out. You’re talking about hundreds of schools and thousands of children using these vouchers, that’s where you start to get these subprime schools, but they’re financially distressed. They’re not very good. They’re often run out of church basements or double wides on church grounds in certain areas of the community. It’s just a very different kind of environment than I think the stereotype of a private school is. And so what’s going on is the other side on this understands that at some point, there’s a capacity problem. If the goal here is really to divert lots and lots of money to Christian schools, you can put as much money in a general fund budget as you want for vouchers. But if you’re kid doesn’t have anywhere to spend it, they’ve understood this to be a design problem for a while. And so the answer is, let’s try to fund private schools directly. That’s where they run into, even now, some thorny constitutional issues. That’s why the ProPublica story is kind of a big deal. They just haven’t tried this before, and now they are.

Michigan Advance is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Michigan Advance maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Susan J. Demas for questions: info@michiganadvance.com. Follow Michigan Advance on Facebook and X.

Large majority of Americans want to end Electoral College

Jessica Corbett, Common Dreams
September 28, 2024

Vote Buttons (Shutterstock)

Polling results released Wednesday, less than six weeks away from November's Election Day, show that a majority of Americans want to ditch the Electoral College and "would instead prefer to see the winner of the presidential election be the person who wins the most votes nationally."

Pew Research Center surveyed 9,720 adults across the United States in late August and early September, and found that 63% want to abolish the process outlined in the U.S. Constitution and replace it with a popular vote approach, compared with just 35% who favor keeping the current system.

The Electoral College is made up of electors who are supposed to act on behalf of their state's voters. Each state gets the same number of electors as its members of Congress, and Washington, D.C. gets three electors, bringing the current total to 538. The candidate who secures 270 electoral votes becomes the next president.

D.C. and most states allocate all of their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote in their state, though Maine and Nebraska give two votes to the statewide winner, and the remaining votes to the most popular candidate in each congressional district.

Pew noted Wednesday that "some Republicans have been pressing to change Nebraska's rules so that the statewide winner gets all five of its electoral votes. This would likely work to former President Donald Trump's advantage, given Nebraska's consistent support of GOP presidential candidates."

Republican Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen confirmed Tuesday that he has no plans to call a special legislative session to restore a winner-takes-all approach before the November election, in which Trump is set to face Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.

There have been just five presidential contests in which the Electoral College winner did not also win the nationwide popular vote—1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, and most recently in 2016, when Trump beat Democrat Hillary Clinton by securing key "swing states."

Continuing a trend that's lasted over two decades, 8 in 10 Democrats and Democratic-leaning Independents told Pew that they prefer a popular vote system for the presidential contest, while Republicans and Independents who lean toward the GOP were more divided: 53% want to retain the Electoral College and 46% would like to replace it

.

"Reference sources indicate that over the past 200 years more than 700 proposals have been introduced in Congress to reform or eliminate the Electoral College," according to the National Archives. "There have been more proposals for Constitutional amendments on changing the Electoral College than on any other subject."

Among them is a joint resolution that Congressman Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) introduced just days after Trump incited a violent mob to disrupt the certification of his 2020 loss by storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021—for which the Republican nominee faces ongoing legal trouble.

"Americans expect and deserve the winner of the popular vote for any office to win and assume that office," Cohen said at the time. "More than a century ago, we amended our Constitution to provide for the direct election of U.S. senators. It is past time to directly elect our president and vice president. The Electoral College is a vestige of the 18th Century when voters didn't know the candidates who now appear daily on their phones and television screens."

"Last week's mayhem at the Capitol shows that attempts to manipulate the Electoral College vote by politicians employing falsehoods are a real danger," he added. "The president should always be elected by the people, not by politicians. Currently, the system allows politicians to make the ultimate decision. It is well past time to do away with this anachronistic institution and guarantee a fair and accurate vote for president."

Trump claims COVID-19 started when 'dust flew in from China'

David Edwards
September 22, 2024 

Full Measure/screen grab


Former President Donald Trump blamed COVID-19 on "dust" that "flew in from China."

In an interview that aired on Sunday, Heritage Foundation-funded journalist Sharyl Attkisson asked Trump about how well he handled the pandemic.

"In terms of overall, I think I did an amazing job with COVID," the former president insisted. "I never got the credit for it. Remember that more people died under Biden-Harris than died under Trump."

"I never got great credit on the fighting of the China virus, which is COVID, but we call it the China virus because we like to be accurate," he continued. "But if you think of what I've done, I took a disaster that came into our shores, that dust flew in from China, and we started making things like the ventilators."

Trump predicted that he would "not be given credit" for the "fantastic job" he did.

"Nobody knew what it was," he added. "Nobody knew where it came from."

Watch the video below from Full Measure or at the link.

Rare Florida fossil finally ends debate about how porcupine jaws and tails evolved

The Conversation
September 23, 2024 

A porcupine fossil recovered in Florida was the key clue in solving a paleontological mystery. Jeff Gage/Florida Museum, CC BY-ND

A rare, nearly complete fossil of an extinct North American porcupine helped me and my colleagues solve a decades-long debate about how the modern North American porcupine evolved from its ancestors.

Published in Current Biology, our paper argues that North American porcupine ancestors may well date back 10 million years, but they wouldn’t be recognizable until about 8 million years later.

By comparing the bone structure of porcupines across North America and South America, we determined that for those 8 million years, North American porcupines unexpectedly still looked like their cousins, the Neotropical porcupines, which live across tropical Central America and South America today.

Our findings detail the North American porcupine’s evolutionary path from South America – and also solve the mystery of why it’s been so difficult to find its ancestors.

I’m a paleontologist who researches the fossilized bones and teeth of extinct animals. With museum curator Jon Bloch, I created a class where we analyzed bone structure to reach the conclusions of our study.



Natasha Vitek enlisted students to study minute details of the 2 million-year-old porcupine skeleton. Jeff Gage/Florida Museum, CC BY-ND
Why it matters

The modern North American porcupine is distinctive among its spiky relatives. It has a short tail, a jaw that can scrape bark from trees and weighs between 10 and 25 pounds (4.5 and 11.3 kilograms).

While clearly related, Neotropical porcupines look different. They have long, grasping tails, weaker jaws and weigh between 1.5 and 10 pounds (0.68 and 4.5 kilograms).

DNA analyses of modern animals estimate that these two groups separated about 10 million years ago.

This is where the mystery comes in. Fossils of the North American porcupine are all younger than 1.8 million years old. In other words, roughly 8.2 million years’ worth of fossils of North American porcupine were missing.

All researchers had were bits of jaws and tails that looked like they belonged to Neotropical porcupines.


Porcupines in North America have strong jaws and can strip bark from trees. Jeff Gage/Florida Museum, CC BY-ND

Two competing hypotheses could explain the similarity.

Some scientists argued that the jaw and tail fossils of early ancestors of North American porcupines should look more like their modern descendants. Researchers who backed this idea suggested that the fossil record was incomplete for some unexplained reason, but that it was still possible that fossils that supported their hypothesis may eventually turn up.

Other scientists suggested that all early ancestral porcupines might have had jaws and tails similar to today’s Neotropical porcupines. North American porcupine ancestors might be hidden in the existing fossil record because – based on jaws and tails alone – they look identical to Neotropical porcupine ancestors. Only younger fossils would show distinctive traits because that’s when those traits appeared.


This debate went on for decades. It was impossible to solve with the available fossils.



North American, left, and South American porcupine pelts and quills. Kristen Grace/Florida Museum, CC BY-ND

How we did our work

Then researchers from the Florida Museum of Natural History unearthed a 2 million-year-old nearly complete skeleton of a porcupine in north-central Florida in 2005.

The fossil had a long tail and no bark-gnawing jaw, similar to Neotropical porcupines. But it also had dozens more bones that we could use to resolve relationships.

Collecting that evidence required combing through all the bones, looking for hundreds of minute details – like the shapes of ridges or patterns of boundaries on bones – and comparing these details with skeletons of modern North American and Neotropical porcupines. Bloch and I created a course in which students each took on one portion of the project.

Together, we came up with a list of nearly 150 informative details. Even though the specimen had a few traits similar to Neotropical porcupines, more evidence supported the idea that this fossil was a closer relative of North American porcupines.

Since this porcupine had a jaw and tail like its Neotropical cousins, it’s likely that most older relatives of the North American porcupine were also missing the distinctive traits of their modern descendants.

In other words, the solution to the mystery is that the fossil record for North American porcupines appeared young because the reinforced jaw and shorter tail evolved relatively recently. Porcupines looked different than what we expected for much of their 10 million years of ancestry.

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.

Natasha S. Vitek, Assistant Professor of Ecology and Evolution, Stony Brook University (The State University of New York)


This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

India's one-horned rhino numbers charging ahead, govt says

Agence France-Presse
September 23, 2024 


The population of India's one-horned Asian rhinos has almost tripled after decades of conservation and anti-poaching efforts (Biju BORO/AFP)

India's one-horned Asian rhino population has almost tripled in the past four decades thanks to conservation and anti-poaching efforts, according to government figures.

Data released on Sunday -- World Rhino Day -- said the number of the animals, known for their single horn and thick, armour-like skin, had surged from 1,500 four decades ago to more than 4,000 now.

There were just 600 left in India in the 1960s.

"This conservation success story is the result of relentless efforts by the forest department and local communities," a government statement said.

An adult Indian rhino, the largest of the three Asian species, can weigh up to 2,800 kilograms (6,170 pounds) and live for about 50 years.

They are found in grasslands, swamps and riverine forests in India's east and neighboring Nepal.

Kaziranga conservation park in Assam state in India's remote northeast is home to an estimated 80 percent of the world's one-horned rhinos.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature categorizes the Indian rhino as "vulnerable".

Rhino species face a precarious future globally, with populations dwindling drastically from 500,000 in the early 20th century to around 28,000 today, according to the International Rhino Foundation.

"The greater one-horned rhino in India has made a remarkable comeback," the government statement said.

Despite the success of conservation efforts, rhinos remain threatened by poaching, with their horns used in traditional medicine and prized particularly in China and Vietnam.

World's oceans near critical acidification level: report

Agence France-Presse
September 24, 2024 

Acidic waters damage corals, shellfish and the phytoplankton that feeds numerous marine species (Ernesto BENAVIDES/AFP)

The world's oceans are close to becoming too acidic to properly sustain marine life or help stabilise the climate, a new report said on Monday.

The report by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) details nine factors that are crucial for regulating the planet's ability to sustain life.

In six of these areas, the safe limit has already been exceeded in recent years as a result of human activity.

The crucial threshold for ocean acidification could soon become the seventh to be breached, according to the PIK's first Planetary Health Check.

The safe boundaries that have already been crossed concern crucial -- and related -- factors including climate change; the loss of natural species, natural habitat and freshwater; and a rise in pollutants, including plastics and chemical fertilisers used in agriculture.

The sustainable level of ocean acidification is now also set to be exceeded, largely as a result of ever-increasing emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) created by burning fossil fuels like oil, coal and gas.

"As CO2 emissions increase, more of it dissolves in sea water... making the oceans more acidic," Boris Sakschewski, one of the lead authors, told reporters.

"Even with rapid emission cuts, some level of continued acidification may be unavoidable due to the CO2 already emitted and the time it takes for the ocean system to respond," he explained.

"Therefore, breaching the ocean acidification boundary appears inevitable within the coming years."

- Tipping points -

Acidic water damages corals, shellfish and the phytoplankton that feeds a host of marine species.

This means it also disrupts food supplies for billions of people, as well as limiting the oceans' capacity to absorb more CO2 and thus help limit global warming.

The only one of the nine planetary boundaries that is not close to being crossed concerns the state of the planet's protective ozone layer.

Man-made chemicals have damaged this shield, causing acid rain, but it has started recovering since a number of these chemicals were banned in 1987.

A ninth threshold -- concerning concentrations of minute particles in the atmosphere that can cause heart and lung diseases -– is close to the danger limit.


But the researchers said the risk showed signs of receding slightly due to efforts by several countries to improve air quality, such as banning the most pollutant petrol and diesel cars.

They warned, however, that concentrations of fine particles could still soar in countries that are rapidly industrializing.

The PIK set these nine planetary danger levels to warn humans against tipping Earth's natural systems past points of no return.


"These tipping points... if crossed, would lead to irreversible and catastrophic outcomes for billions of people and many future generations on Earth," they said.

All nine planetary boundaries are "interconnected" so breaching one crucial limit can destabilise Earth's entire life system, Sakschewski said.

But that also presents an opportunity because addressing one problem -– such as preventing the Earth's average temperature rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels -- "can lead to significant benefits across different issues", the report said.