Dharna Noor at The Guardian:
Climate experts fear Donald Trump will follow a blueprint created by his allies to gut the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), disbanding its work on climate science and tailoring its operations to business interests.
Joe Biden’s presidency has increased the profile of the science-based federal agency but its future has been put in doubt if Trump wins a second term and at a time when climate impacts continue to worsen.
The plan to “break up Noaa is laid out in the Project 2025 document written by more than 350 rightwingers and helmed by the Heritage Foundation. Called the Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, it is meant to guide the first 180 days of presidency for an incoming Republican president.
The document bears the fingerprints of Trump allies, including Johnny McEntee, who was one of Trump’s closest aides and is a senior adviser to Project 2025. “The National Oceanographic [sic] and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories,” the proposal says.
That’s a sign that the far right has “no interest in climate truth”, said Chris Gloninger, who last year left his job as a meteorologist in Iowa after receiving death threats over his spotlighting of global warming.
The guidebook chapter detailing the strategy, which was recently spotlighted by E&E News, describes Noaa as a “colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future US prosperity”. It was written by Thomas Gilman, a former Chrysler executive who during Trump’s presidency was chief financial officer for Noaa’s parent body, the commerce department.
Gilman writes that one of Noaa’s six main offices, the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, should be “disbanded” because it issues “theoretical” science and is “the source of much of Noaa’s climate alarmism”. Though he admits it serves “important public safety and business functions as well as academic functions”, Gilman says data from the National Hurricane Center must be “presented neutrally, without adjustments intended to support any one side in the climate debate”.
[...]
Noaa also houses the National Weather Service (NWS), which provides weather and climate forecasts and warnings. Gilman calls for the service to “fully commercialize its forecasting operations”.
He goes on to say that Americans are already reliant on private weather forecasters, specifically naming AccuWeather and citing a PR release issued by the company to claim that “studies have found that the forecasts and warnings provided by the private companies are more reliable” than the public sector’s. (The mention is noteworthy as Trump once tapped the former CEO of AccuWeather to lead Noaa, though his nomination was soon withdrawn.)
The claims come amid years of attempts from US conservatives to help private companies enter the forecasting arena – proposals that are “nonsense”, said Rosenberg.
Right now, all people can access high-quality forecasts for free through the NWS. But if forecasts were conducted only by private companies that have a profit motive, crucial programming might no longer be available to those in whom business executives don’t see value, said Rosenberg.
[...]
Fully privatizing forecasting could also threaten the accuracy of forecasts, said Gloninger, who pointed to AccuWeather’s well-known 30- and 60-day forecasts as one example. Analysts have found that these forecasts are only right about half the time, since peer-reviewed research has found that there is an eight- to 10-day limit on the accuracy of forecasts.
The Trump Administration is delivering a big gift to climate crisis denialism as part of Project 2025 by proposing the dismantling and privatizing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and National Weather Service (NWS) in his potential 2nd term.
This should frighten people to vote Democratic up and down the ballot if you want the NOAA and NWS to stay intact.
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When I was attending university just last Fall working towards a bachelor's degree and a diploma, I was miserable and stressed out of my mind. I remember every Fall I would have a breakdown and my Winter Break would be spent recovering my sanity instead of enjoying time with loved ones.
I had convinced myself that because I had put so many years into this degree I needed to continue to pursue it: this is Sunk Cost Fallacy. Last Fall was when I finally saw some clarity and decided to take a break from university and instead work. My goal was to figure out what I wanted to do for a career before returning to school.
By January, my bf's mom told me about a government program providing full scholarships for a few programs at a local private college and sent me the link. I applied and worked to manifest my acceptance. I was denied from the first program, a diploma in Digital Health Administration, but the school encouraged me to apply for a similar program beginning in May: a diploma in Digital Office Administration. This time I was accepted.
Here I am this Fall feeling almost no stress during my finals, feeling confident in where I am going, and feeling as if I can take on this career without hesitation. I have classmates who are so stressed out right now and they are working so hard I can't help but remind myself to recognize how far I have come. I didn't know school could be so enjoyable even when it is challenging (and I have loved school since I was a child.)
I feel free.
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GUSGUYSGUSY I was just rewatching the administration and it got me thinking (dangerous)
so jay works in the department of reassignment right. whose main job description is finding/dealing with people lost in space bubbles riiiight.
so he must have been a field agent at some point to have been promoted to a management position !! so what i f !! hear me out !!!! what if he started working at the administration in the hopes of finding his friends !!
and - okay stick with me. their teleportation technology probably isn't that old. sure there's a possibility that the realm of madness had been developing it before but their realm wasn't that big what would they have needed it for? even excluding that it's the realm of *madness*!! there's a good chance it isn't safe tech.
They almost certainly haven't done too much testing on it. And teleportation is serious business. Scrambling all your particles could have any number of unintended consequences, especially if you're doing it regularly.
Consequences like... memory loss?
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In March, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s colleagues laughed as the California Republican mocked President Joe Biden’s age, saying he would bring Biden “soft food” so they could negotiate over the debt ceiling.
But McCarthy apparently did not bring Biden anything to eat during their talks, and the President chewed up the GOP’s debt limit proposal instead. Republicans aren’t laughing anymore.
“Republicans got outsmarted by a President who can’t find his pants,” Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) tweeted on Tuesday, making clear she opposed the compromise legislation that came out of Biden and McCarthy’s negotiations.
Biden, 80, is the oldest person to serve as President of the U.S., and his age and alleged senility have been a constant focus of Republicans and right-wing commentators, despite assurances from his doctors that there’s nothing wrong with his mind. Polls have also shown that voters have concerns about Biden’s age.
During the debt limit standoff, McCarthy repeatedly said that by refusing to negotiate with Republicans, Biden was “bumbling” the U.S. toward a potentially catastrophic default. Even some Democrats criticized the President for not publicly engaging as much as McCarthy has in recent weeks. But as of Wednesday, default seemed unlikely, and the outlines of the deal appeared favorable to Democrats.
Asked if Biden had gotten the better of McCarthy, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), replied, “Yeah, I think that’s a fair assumption.”
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), meanwhile, said he believed McCarthy had simply been “misled.” He didn’t say by whom.
Even McCarthy conceded that he had been impressed with Biden’s negotiating team during the talks, calling them “very professional, very smart” and “very tough at the same time.”
But the Speaker has denied that he was outsmarted, touting the bill’s reductions to government spending and stricter “work requirements” for federal food benefits that Democrats opposed. The legislation would reduce the deficit by $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years, in large part due to cuts to non-defense programs, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
“How were we outsmarted? The largest cut in the history of Congress. The biggest ability to pull money back,” McCarthy told ABC News on Tuesday. “We’ve got work requirements for welfare where the Democrats said was a red line.”
Still, Biden got plenty of wins in the bill, which cuts federal spending far less than Republicans initially hoped. And in a twist, the CBO said the work requirements won’t reduce spending or enrollment in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
The program supports 20 million households and already limits benefits for unemployed adults without children or disabilities who are between the ages of 18 and 49, unless they work or perform some other qualifying activity for 20 hours a week. Republicans proposed expanding the work requirement to people in their early 50s, as well as restricting states’ discretion to exempt some recipients. The CBO estimated the Republican proposal would have saved $11 billion and reduced SNAP enrollment by 275,000.
Biden signaled early on that he was open to stricter work requirements for SNAP, just not “anything of any consequence” — a statement that drew mocking laughter from McCarthy and his colleagues as someone, apparently a lawmaker behind the Speaker, shouted, “Loser!”
Sure enough, Biden agreed to expand SNAP’s work rules to people as old as 54 — but the White House also won changes that render the net impact of the bill inconsequential, at least from a budget perspective. The CBO said that, thanks to brand-new work requirement exemptions for veterans and homeless people, the bill would actually increase SNAP enrollment by a small amount and boost federal spending by $2 billion.
The analysis was not a surprise to the White House; a senior administration official said Sunday that “we expect that the number of people subject to SNAP work requirements will stay roughly the same under this agreement.”
The deal also preserves key Democratic priorities like student loan debt relief, climate change funding, and the bulk of investments aimed at making sure the wealthy pay their taxes.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) likened the bill to a “shit sandwich” that Republicans would have to eat — a sentiment shared by other Republicans planning to support the bill in a vote on Wednesday.
That doesn’t mean Democrats don’t have concerns about the legislation. Progressives, in particular, are furious that Biden was forced to negotiate over the debt limit at all, warning that he set a precedent Republicans will exploit time and time again if the debt limit isn’t abolished.
“It rewards the hostage-taking that the Republicans have gotten so damn good at,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said Tuesday.
Still, Democrats maintain the GOP has underestimated Biden at every turn, pointing to his many legislative accomplishments in the last Congress, including bipartisan investments in infrastructure and semiconductor research, and his signing of a historic climate change bill.
“If you haven’t figured out by now that our president is in the top 1% of negotiators, you haven’t been paying attention the last two and a half years,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) told HuffPost.
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