Jilly_in_VA
Jilly_in_VA's JournalEcologists say federal wildfire plans are dangerously out of step with climate change
The federal Government Accountability Office (GAO) is launching an investigation after U.S. Forest Service-controlled burns that escaped caused the largest wildfire ever recorded in New Mexico.
The GAO is examining controlled burn policies at the Forest Service and other federal land agencies.
On May 20, USFS Chief Randy Moore halted all so-called prescribed fires on its land for a 90-day safety review. The New Mexico fire has burned more than 340,000 acres and is still not fully contained.
But many fire ecologists and forestry experts are concerned that this "pause" is only worsening the wildfire risk. Critics say it's merely masking the agency's dangerously incremental, outdated and problematic approach to intentional burns and fire mitigation, a policy that has failed to adapt to climate change and megadrought.
"A lot of the planning tools that fire managers rely upon for planning prescribed burns were built under a climate that no longer exists," says biologist and professor Matthew Hurteau, who studies the intersection of climate change, wildfire and forest ecosystems at the University of New Mexico. "That's a systemic problem," he says.
https://www.npr.org/2022/07/03/1108748259/ecologists-wildfire-plans-climate-change
Some of Iowa's queer farmers are taking a different approach to agriculture
Shae Pesek and Anna Hankins’s farm is off a gravel road in Coggon, north of Cedar Rapids. Pens for chickens, ducks, and turkeys are woven through yard space, in between a farmhouse, buildings, and sheds. After a rainy morning, the chickens are coming out of the greenhouse and starting to sunbathe in the yard.
Pesek’s life now is one she didn’t exactly envision for herself as a kid. Growing up here on her family’s farm, she didn’t know any queer people in agriculture.
"I really didn't feel like that was an option for me," Pesek said. "So, I thought for me, to be out and have a wife and have this out relationship, or like, to even find and date someone, that I needed to move to a city. So that's what I did. I left, and I moved away for eight years."
But agriculture called her back to Iowa from San Diego. A while after returning, she met Anna Hankins, who had moved from the East Coast to work on a farm. Together, they started Over the Moon Farm and Flowers in 2019. It's a direct-to-consumer farm with livestock and flowers.
Pesek said now she and Hankins are the examples, especially for people who can’t or don’t want to leave, that you can live in rural Iowa, farm, and be queer. They’ve done that by making a big effort to be connected in their rural community.
https://www.iowapublicradio.org/agriculture/2022-06-30/some-of-iowas-queer-farmers-are-taking-a-different-approach-to-agriculture
Four Cops Showed Up at a Texas Woman's Home Over Her Angry Tweet About Abortion Rights
attie Walker, 24, was asleep when the knocks on her door began—but “once I heard how they were knocking, I figured it was the cops,” she told Jezebel.
Law enforcement officers had shown up to her home in the Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas, area, bearing a letter from the Department of Homeland Security, Walker says, due to a tweet she posted in the aftermath of the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade.
It all began on June 24th—not June 4th, as the letter states—the day that the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was announced. In reaction to the decision, Walker posted an angry quote-tweet in response to a clip of President Biden urging pro-abortion protestors to “keep all protests peaceful.”
“Burn every fucking government building down right the fuck now,” she wrote in a now-deleted tweet.. “Slaughter them all. Fuck you god damn pigs.”
Six days later, Walker says, officers arrived at her door. One of the questions they asked, she says, was, “Do you still plan on burning any government buildings down?”
“I said, ‘No, sir. That wasn’t my plan in the first place,’” Walker told me in a phone interview. “I was like, I honestly haven’t even been able to make it to any protests yet.”
https://jezebel.com/four-cops-showed-up-at-a-texas-womans-home-over-her-ang-1849135781
Read further to find out what the other side is saying and NOT being visited by cops for....
Voter fraud claims are heating up a battle for political control in an oil-rich Texas county
One of the worst-kept secrets in Loving County sits along the shoulder of a desolate stretch of state highway in the heart of the Permian Basin.
It’s a sprawling ranch with a sunbaked adobe home that the Pecos River flooded out years ago, nestled near a trailer and a mobile home on stilts, all behind a padlocked gate.
Eleven people are registered to vote at this address. One of them is Loving County Commissioner Ysidro Renteria, who has been in office since 2011 and listed this property in December as his permanent address on his application to run for re-election, signed under oath. He and at least three relatives used the address to vote in the March primaries.
The secret?
“No one lives there,” Loving County Sheriff Chris Busse, who also serves as the registrar of voters, said in May. “I can attest that I’ve been here since 2008 and there has never, ever, ever been any of the Renterias — not even Ysidro — occupying it.”
The old Renteria farmhouse is hardly the only open secret in this county, the least populated in the continental U.S. Voter registration has been suspiciously high for generations, driven by bitter feuds among a handful of prominent families fighting for control of the local government. The voter registration roll is 97 people long, according to the Texas secretary of state, but the U.S. Census Bureau estimates only 57 people live here.
Elections often come down to tiny margins, but the stakes are high: Winners are awarded sway over an outsized budget. This roughly 670-square-mile patch of desert sits atop some of the richest oil and gas reserves in the U.S., generating a tax base that has hovered around $7 billion to $9 billion. Salaries for top elected officials are in the six figures. They steer an annual budget of more than $28 million.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/loving-county-texas-voter-fraud-claims-rcna35791
Texas, continuing its race to the bottom. Bet they are all RepubliQans
Gov. Lee's education advisor: Teachers come from 'dumbest parts of dumbest colleges'
A new report from CBS affiliate WTVF claimed that Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee’s education advisor has been mocking the state’s public education teachers and questioning their roles in the classroom.
WTVF reported that they managed to obtain hidden-camera footage of a closed-door reception between the governor and Dr. Larry Arnn, president of Michigan’s ultra-conservative Hillsdale College. In the video, Arnn reportedly belittled diversity efforts in higher education and claimed that people have education degrees because they are “easy” and you “don’t have to know anything.”
The report also said that, throughout the nearly two-hour video, Lee never once stood up in defense of Tennessee’s teachers and only offered praise for Arnn, who Lee has in charge of setting up Tennessee charter schools across the state. Additionally, Lee did not mention his own wife, Maria Lee, who has a degree in elementary education and worked as a teacher for 14 years.
WTVF also listed examples Arnn’s remarks:
“The teachers are trained in the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges in the country.”
“They are taught that they are going to go and do something to those kids.... Do they ever talk about anything except what they are going to do to these kids?”
https://www.wvlt.tv/2022/06/30/gov-lees-education-advisor-teachers-come-dumbest-parts-dumbest-colleges/
Go to the link for the rest of it. It's appalling.
Gov. Lee's education advisor: Teachers come from 'dumbest parts of dumbest colleges'
A new report from CBS affiliate WTVF claimed that Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee’s education advisor has been mocking the state’s public education teachers and questioning their roles in the classroom.
WTVF reported that they managed to obtain hidden-camera footage of a closed-door reception between the governor and Dr. Larry Arnn, president of Michigan’s ultra-conservative Hillsdale College. In the video, Arnn reportedly belittled diversity efforts in higher education and claimed that people have education degrees because they are “easy” and you “don’t have to know anything.”
The report also said that, throughout the nearly two-hour video, Lee never once stood up in defense of Tennessee’s teachers and only offered praise for Arnn, who Lee has in charge of setting up Tennessee charter schools across the state. Additionally, Lee did not mention his own wife, Maria Lee, who has a degree in elementary education and worked as a teacher for 14 years.
WTVF also listed examples Arnn’s remarks:
“The teachers are trained in the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges in the country.”
“They are taught that they are going to go and do something to those kids.... Do they ever talk about anything except what they are going to do to these kids?”
https://www.wvlt.tv/2022/06/30/gov-lees-education-advisor-teachers-come-dumbest-parts-dumbest-colleges/
Go to the link for the rest of it. It's appalling.
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Gender: Do not displayCurrent location: Virginia
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