Shimrra Jamaane posted:

poo poo is hosed but it can be helped in 2020. You guys are acting like Trump is now our eternal dictator.

FactsAreUseless posted:

America, and other first-world nations, will work very, very hard to watch them drown. Trump's anti-refugee positions are only the beginning. The world will harden itself to large numbers of deaths, because the human population is not sustainable over the next couple centuries.

Shimrra Jamaane posted:

poo poo is hosed but it can be helped in 2020. You guys are acting like Trump is now our eternal dictator.

A Wizard of Goatse posted:

The world was pre-hardened, we had like a sixty year stretch there where the idea that there might hypothetically be some kind of reciprocity or community of equals between the subaltern and the hegemony was even floated as something desirable in theory, and now we're going back to the way things were before. This time the imperial powers are just killing people indirectly with CO2 and methane instead of the old-fashioned way with guns and knives.

FactsAreUseless posted:

America, and other first-world nations, will work very, very hard to watch them drown. Trump's anti-refugee positions are only the beginning. The world will harden itself to large numbers of deaths, because the human population is not sustainable over the next couple centuries.

quote:

APD has released videos in the past that have heavily blurred spots, including one video that shows an officer running down a fleeing suspect with his truck.

Inspector Hound posted:

What the gently caress.

Shimrra Jamaane posted:

poo poo is hosed but it can be helped in 2020. You guys are acting like Trump is now our eternal dictator.

override367 posted:

Maybe? Maybe not

Things look bad but I'd caution against making sweeping predictions like this, we couldn't even predict a goddamned presidential election the day before despite tens of millions of dollars in polling

There have been coming calamities in the past that we've muddled through, sometimes with huge amounts of deaths, sometimes without. I tend to agree in the medium term (this century), but beyond that? Who the gently caress knows, if the human race is still progressing technologically at all in a hundred years it's impossible to predict anything

A Wizard of Goatse posted:

It's actually extremely easy to predict that there will still be humans, and technological innovation, in a hundred years, or if there aren't it won't be because of climate change; all you have to do to get an analysis that good is spend a couple hours boning up on history or climatology instead of watching anime.

MacheteZombie posted:

this is his plan to bring jobs back.

TheScott2K posted:

Oh my God gently caress Harold Ford forever

Shimrra Jamaane posted:

I know it is the least consoling thing possible but Trump cutting the climate change research is something that any by the book establishment Republican in his position would have done also. It's not uniqely him.

TheBigAristotle posted:

Harold Ford, Jr.: smirking sociopath

icantfindaname posted:

the only case of a party losing the presidency after one term since FDR was carter. parties almost always get 2 terms

FactsAreUseless posted:

America, and other first-world nations, will work very, very hard to watch them drown. Trump's anti-refugee positions are only the beginning. The world will harden itself to large numbers of deaths, because the human population is not sustainable over the next couple centuries.

TheScott2K posted:

Oh my God gently caress Harold Ford forever

override367 posted:

Not if there's a nuclear war or something, still I think you're probably right, and as such I think trying to predict things will be for humans re: climate change is dicey

Predicting climate effects is super important for economic planning though

TheBigAristotle posted:

Harold Ford, Jr.: smirking sociopath

Monaghan posted:

well at least China's putting a ton of money into green energy and stuff, so hopefully the reds will save the Americans from their own goddamn stupidity.

A Wizard of Goatse posted:

if anything Trumpism is a positive development on that front vs. more at heart Cold War-era empire builders like Clinton (if on no other fronts).

quote:

Donald Trump is poised to eliminate all climate change research conducted by Nasa as part of a crackdown on “politicized science”, his senior adviser on issues relating to the space agency has said.

Nasa’s Earth science division is set to be stripped of funding in favor of exploration of deep space, with the president-elect having set a goal during the campaign to explore the entire solar system by the end of the century.

zegermans posted:

lmao wasn't he the guy whose opponent ran an attack ad of white women asking him to call them?

Huzanko posted:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/nov/22/nasa-earth-donald-trump-eliminate-climate-change-research

TheBigAristotle posted:

Harold Ford, Jr.: smirking sociopath

FlamingLiberal posted:

This article is misleading as hell because in it they say that deep space exploration is also getting a cut

FactsAreUseless posted:

Earth is fine. America is fine. People in poor countries that are going to be systematically stripped of their resources are pretty hosed though.

WhiskeyJuvenile posted:

miami tho

the black husserl posted:

Bullshit! A typical Republican would have cut the budget by 30% and installed a favorable director. To cut the two billion dollar program completely is outrageously hostile. This isn't a rollback or a cut, this is a permanent shutdown of the US's ability to effectively study the climate.

Motto posted:

infinitely more likely than the presidency getting torn from trump: dems handing over NC.

TheBigAristotle posted:

Shimrra Jamaane posted:

poo poo is hosed but it can be helped in 2020. You guys are acting like Trump is now our eternal dictator.

Jonas Albrecht posted:

This recount poo poo has me on edge and I don't even know why.

theblackw0lf posted:

Amway is now running our education department

https://twitter.com/jenniferjjacobs/status/801484474877931520

Jonas Albrecht posted:

This recount poo poo has me on edge and I don't even know why.

theblackw0lf posted:

Amway is now running our education department

(I'm partly joking. The DeVos family runs Amway but I don't think Betsy is that involved)

https://twitter.com/jenniferjjacobs/status/801484474877931520

quote:

What a Betsy DeVos appointment tells us about Trump’s education plans

1. He intends to go through with his sweeping voucher plan.

On the campaign trail, Trump vowed to use federal funds to encourage states to make school choice available to all poor students, including through vouchers that allow families to take public funding to private schools.

That’s exactly what DeVos has zealously worked to make happen on a state-by-state basis for decades. In 2000, she helped get a ballot measure before Michigan voters that would have enshrined a right to vouchers in the state’s Constitution. After the measure failed, she and her husband formed a political action committee to support pro-voucher candidates nationally. Less than a decade later, the group counted a 121-60 win-loss record.

One recipient of its support: former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, who created the voucher program that Trump’s vice president-elect, Mike Pence, later expanded. Indeed, DeVos’s vision puts her more in line with Pence, who has supported private school vouchers for both low- and middle-income families, than with Trump, whose plan extends only to poor families.

Trump also vowed to promote publicly funded but privately managed charter schools. But DeVos, whose husband founded an aviation-themed charter school in their hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan, has expressed reservations about them.

“Charter schools take a while to start up and get operating,” she told Philanthropy Roundtable in 2013. “Meanwhile, there are very good non-public schools, hanging on by a shoestring, that can begin taking students today.”

2. School oversight might not be the department’s top concern.

DeVos and her husband played a role in getting Michigan’s charter school law passed in 1993, and ever since have worked to protect charters from additional regulation. When Michigan lawmakers this year were considering a measure that would have added oversight for charter schools in Detroit, members of the DeVos family poured $1.45 million into legislators’ campaign coffers — an average of $25,000 a day for seven weeks. Oversight was not included in the final legislation.

The DeVos influence is one reason that Michigan’s charter sector is among the least regulated in the country. Roughly 80 percent of charters in Michigan are run by private companies, far more than in any other state. And state authorities have done little up to now to ensure that charter schools are effectively serving students, eliciting concern from current federal authorities.

“There are a lot of schools that are doing poorly and charter authorizers do not seem to be taking the necessary actions to either improve performance or close those underperforming charters,” current U.S. Secretary of Education John King told Chalkbeat about Michigan last month.

3. The Common Core would remain a question mark.

DeVos hasn’t been outspoken about the Common Core, the shared learning standards adopted by most states in recent years. But some of her ties would suggest that she supports the effort to raise and standardize expectations of what students should learn in each grade. She’s on the board of Foundation for Excellence in Education, the group that former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush founded to promote school choice and the Common Core.

On the campaign trail, Trump routinely denounced the standards — despite his having no authority to “repeal” them — in statements that won applause from conservatives and liberal parents and teachers alike. But his transition team said the meeting with DeVos “focused on the Common Core mission, and setting higher national standards and promoting the growth of school choice across the nation.”

The statement suggests a possible effort to achieve the standards’ goals without promoting the Common Core brand — exactly the middle path that many states have chosen as they revise the standards, often only lightly, and rename them.

4. The education secretary won’t be a counterweight to Republican officials.

Trump’s consideration of Moskowitz and Rhee, both self-identified Democrats, raised the hopes of some that the federal education department’s leader could counterbalance some more hard-right administration officials. (It also prompted one prominent education lobbying group to issue a statement calling on Democrats not to take a position in Trump’s administration.)

That hope would evaporate if DeVos is the choice, though there is some evidence that she is less extreme than some of the voices gaining prominence in Trump’s administration so far. For one, she did not support Trump even once he became the presumptive Republican nominee, throwing her vote as a party delegate instead behind Ohio Gov. John Kasich. Two years ago, she also publicly called for a Republican leader in Michigan to step down after he made anti-gay and anti-Muslim comments on social media.

But she is a dyed-in-the-wool Republican party leader who has been more conservative on education issues than some of her colleagues. In fact, DeVos stepped down as chair of Michigan’s Republican party in 2000 after the Republican governor declined to support vouchers. (She later took the position back.) Outside of education, her family gave heavily to efforts to ban same sex-marriage in Michigan.

5. DeVos would have to operate outside of most of the world she has known.

Many of DeVos’ successes have resulted from using her family’s considerable financial resources. DeVos family foundations reported lifetime charitable giving of more than $1.2 billion earlier this year to institutions ranging from hospitals to arts organizations. Political donations — to oppose gay marriage, support vouchers, and sway lawmakers from increasing oversight to charter schools — came on top of that. As education secretary, she would not be able to rely on her personal wealth and approach to get things done.

Instead, she would have to operate within a complicated web of interests and priorities, including with education officials in states that did not support Trump. Her work up to now has been largely within the Republican Party, but she has expressed confidence in the past about being able to cross party lines.

“What we’ve tried to do is engage with Democrats, to make it politically safe for them to do what they know in their heart of hearts is the right thing,” DeVos said in 2013. “Education should be non-partisan.”