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Now wait a second. The Sahara Desert is brimming with sand. Why can’t we use that?
Desert sand grains are too smooth to be useful, and most of the angular sand that is suitable for industry comes from rivers (less than 1% of the world’s land). This extraction of sand and gravel has far-reaching impacts on ecology, infrastructure and the livelihoods of the 3 billion people who live along rivers.
Huh. How about that?
Current estimates of global sand mining are unreliable and undoubtedly too low….There are few long-term, basin-wide programmes monitoring sediment. It is technically hard to quantify how sand moves or is deposited along rivers….In many countries, sand mining is unregulated and might involve local ‘sand mafias’….In the Mekong delta, the Vietnamese government estimates that nearly 500,000 people will need to be moved away from river banks that are collapsing as a result of sand mining in the channel.
Click the link if you want to read more about what we can do to support a sustainable, eco-friendly sand industry.
Last week, Gallup released its annual public-opinion poll on abortion policy, and its results contain some good news for abortion opponents. According to the survey, a plurality of Americans now identify as pro-life, with 49 percent of respondents calling themselves “pro-life,” and 46 percent calling themselves “pro-choice.” This is the first Gallup poll since 2013 in which a higher percentage of respondents identified as “pro-life” rather than “pro-choice.”
….This gain in public support for the pro-life position is more significant than many observers realize.
Needless to say, this violates Kevin’s Law, which states that opinions on abortion never change, and anyone who says otherwise is engaged in special pleading. So without further ado, here is Gallup’s own conclusion:
Little has changed over the past year, or even over the past 10 years, in Americans’ basic outlook on abortion.
And here’s the main chart:
Since 1975, the number of people who think abortion should be illegal under all circumstances has surged from 22 percent to . . . 21 percent.
Give it up, folks. Nothing is changing, and there’s no special reason to think it ever will. Whatever happens, the chart above describes the basic state of public opinion that we all have to deal with. So deal with it.
After shipping the shoes to retailers, Nike asked for them to be returned without explaining why, the people said. The shoes aren’t available on Nike’s own apps and websites. “Nike has chosen not to release the Air Max 1 Quick Strike Fourth of July as it featured the old version of the American flag,” a Nike spokeswoman said.
After images of the shoe were posted online, Mr. Kaepernick, a Nike endorser, reached out to company officials saying that he and others felt the Betsy Ross flag is an offensive symbol because of its connection to an era of slavery, the people said. Some users on social media responded to posts about the shoe with similar concerns. Mr. Kaepernick declined to comment.
This sure seems like a mighty broad complaint category. Everything from Plymouth Rock to Appomattox Courthouse is connected to our era of slavery. I wonder how widely held Kaepernick’s view of Betsy Ross is?
“The back-to-the-city trend has reversed,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, citing last year’s census data. Millennials, the generation now ages 23 to 38, are no longer as rooted as they were after the economic downturn. Many are belatedly getting married and heading to the suburbs, just as their parents and grandparents did.
Is this true? Let’s look at the data:
The figures from 1910-2000 are from the Census Bureau. The figures from 2010-17 are derived from a Brookings estimate of urban and suburban population growth.
If you click on the Brookings link, it shows that the growth of central cities did spike a bit from 2008-14. But the spike was modest, and even at its height the suburbs were still growing faster.
In other words, there never really was much of a back-to-the-city trend in the first place. The central city share of the population rose to about 30 percent by 1940 and has stayed there ever since. Suburbs have been growing since the ’50s and that growth has also continued steadily ever since. With only tiny variances, the suburbs have been gaining population for 70 years relative to cities (and rural areas), and that relative growth has slowed down only slightly in the past few decades—and only because the suburban share was so big that it couldn’t really get much bigger without taking over the entire country.
The myth of the urban millennial has been driven by two things. First, there really was a smallish relative increase in urban population for a few years. But that increase was barely visible in the long-term statistics. The bigger reason by far is that on Twitter and other social media sites used by journalists, millennials are represented almost exclusively by the highly verbal and highly educated. And guess what? These folks lean heavily liberal; they like living in big cities; and they complain endlessly about not being able to afford it. This has naturally left a strong impression that most millennials prefer the urban life and has given life to an entire genre of stories suggesting that the cost of city living has gotten out of control—something that’s true only for a very small slice of American cities.
But overall, millennials don’t prefer cities any more than any previous generation. Nor have they given up cars, which they own at about the same rate as every generation has since the ’70s. When they grow up and have kids they’ve mostly moved into the suburbs and bought SUVs and minivans, just like their parents and grandparents did.
New model Sherman tank, serial number 000001 with special solid gold barrel, for Trump to ride around in on the White House lawn.Department of Defense
Everybody is making fun of Donald Trump for saying this today:
Trump tells pool in Oval Office there will be tanks at July 4 celebration, as we reported this morning. “And we’re gonna have some tanks stationed outside… So we have to put them in certain areas but we have the brand new Sherman tanks and we have the brand new Abram tanks.”
What you all are missing is that our July 4th celebration in DC really will have brand new Sherman tanks. Trump has a well-known fondness for things from the good old days, and on his first day in office he secretly ordered the Army to resurrect the Sherman. It was supposed to be a surprise, but you know Trump. He just can’t keep a secret.
Julián Castro also did well. The 538 report includes a fabulous looking chart that shows whose supporters switched following the debates and who they switched to. Unfortunately, it’s so complex that I couldn’t really figure it out. Maybe you’ll have better luck.
This is another lantana plant blooming next to the 405 freeway near my house. It’s my favorite lantana photo, but I’ve got a bunch of other good ones too. At the end of the year maybe I’ll collect them all in one place and you can decide for yourself.
Last year I wrote a piece for the magazine laying out the evidence that race anxiety had increased while Obama was in the White House and then started easing down when he left, despite Donald Trump’s best efforts to keep it going. As a result, I figured that it was perfectly safe for Democrats to talk about social justice generally and racial issues in particular. But I admit this wasn’t what I had in mind:
.@KamalaHarris: “I support busing. Listen, the schools of America are as segregated, if not more segregated, today than when I was in [school]…need to put every effort, including busing, into play to de-segregate the schools…fed govt has a role & a responsibility to step up.” pic.twitter.com/a7ujueP0Bu
Let me just make a few points. First, forced busing during the ’70s prompted one of the biggest political backlashes of the past half century. By the end of it, Ronald Reagan was president and Reaganomics dominated America for the next 40 years. This was bad for everyone who wasn’t already rich, and it was especially bad for ethnic minorities.
Second, when Kamala Harris was a child she was bused . . . three miles. In lots of big cities, the bus rides were upwards of an hour each way. And it didn’t work. Virtually every city abandoned busing during the ’80s, and even Berkeley’s busing program was deep-sixed more than 20 years ago.
Third, what’s the point of pretending to be for it now? It’s not good politics and it’s mostly impossible policy anyway. In cities like New York and Los Angeles, African American and Latinx kids make up 80 percent of the population. You could spider web the city with Elon Musk’s hyperloops and you still wouldn’t be able to racially integrate the schools.
Harris needs a little more self-discipline. Her attack on Biden was effective, but why overdo it? Why not just say that demographic change has made busing an ineffective idea in most places so she favors other things now? Why not stop waffling on Medicare for All and tell us what she really believes? Why not ditch the pandering Green New Deal stuff and instead tell us what kind of serious action she supports?
George Will was all over this. It was proof that global warming was just a big hoax. The denier sites trumpeted it constantly. The folks who styled themselves “scientists” explained why this was no mere anomaly, but the way things were going to be forever thanks to . . . um, sunspot cycles and satellite errors and “tricks” from the climate shysters. What they didn’t tell you was that this was no big deal. It was just the latest cycle that was typical of global temperature increases over the past century:
On average, it’s now nearly 4°F hotter than it was when your grandmother was born. At the rate things are going, by 2060 it will be 7°F hotter.
A decade ago, the con artists were all trying to pretend that global warming had stopped forever. But now that we’re a decade close to planetary suicide, maybe it doesn’t seem so funny anymore. Then again, IBGYBG, amirite?
For weeks before the meeting, which started as a Twitter offer by the president for Mr. Kim to drop by at the Demilitarized Zone and “say hello,” a real idea has been taking shape inside the Trump administration that officials hope might create a foundation for a new round of negotiations. The concept would amount to a nuclear freeze, one that essentially enshrines the status quo, and tacitly accepts the North as a nuclear power, something administration officials have often said they would never stand for.
It falls far short of Mr. Trump’s initial vow 30 months ago to solve the North Korea nuclear problem, but it might provide him with a retort to campaign-season critics who say the North Korean dictator has been playing the American president brilliantly by giving him the visuals he craves while holding back on real concessions.
Sure, this is a deal that any president for the past three decades could have gotten. And they have! And North Korea has repeatedly broken agreements for a freeze. And Trump said he’d never, ever agree to such a stupid thing because he, and he alone, knows how to stay tough and get good agreements. But c’mon, there’s a campaign coming up.
In related news, Iran has broken the uranium limit on the 2015 nuclear deal, which Trump promised he’d replace with a tougher one. And Trump has caved in on imposing more tariffs on China because China agreed to buy more food from us, which is hardly a concession since they’ve wanted to do this all along. And NAFTA 2.0, which does hardly anything in the first place, can’t even get congressional approval.
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