The Midnight Club

liberalsarecool:

justinspoliticalcorner:

AP via The Guardian:

A federal judge in New York has ruled that the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Chad Wolf, assumed his position unlawfully and has invalidated Wolf’s suspension of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) program, which shields young people from deportation.

“DHS failed to follow the order of succession as it was lawfully designated,” the US District Judge Nicholas Garaufis wrote.

“Therefore the actions taken by purported acting secretaries, who were not properly in their roles according to the lawful order of succession, were taken without legal authority.”

About 650,000 people are part of Daca, which allows young immigrants who were brought to the country as children to legally work and shields them from deportation.

Karen Tumlin, an attorney who represented a plaintiff in one of two lawsuits that challenged Wolf’s authority, called the ruling “another win for Daca recipients and those who have been waiting years to apply for the program for the first time”.

Wolf issued a memorandum in July effectively suspending Daca pending review by DHS. A month earlier the US supreme court had ruled that Donald Trump failed to follow rule-making procedures when he tried to end the program, but the justices kept a window open for him to try again.

In August the Government Accountability Office, a bipartisan congressional watchdog, said Wolf and his acting deputy, Ken Cuccinelli, were improperly serving and ineligible to run the agency under the Vacancies Reform Act. The two have been at the forefront of administration initiatives on immigration and law enforcement.

Wolf is the fifth person to serve as homeland security secretary under Trump in an acting or confirmed capacity, while George W Bush and Barack Obama each had three people in the job over the course of their two presidential terms. Wolf was named to the post only after two of the president’s preferred candidates were ruled ineligible to take up the job.

Judge Nicholas Garaufis rules that Chad Wolf’s taking up of acting DHS head was unlawful, and as a result, his decision to suspend DACA is invalidated. 

The baddie’s name is Chad Wolf?

scavengedluxury:

scavengedluxury:

Today, in “white privilege isn’t real”. 

(via wilwheaton)

rjzimmerman:

O’odham standing together at Quitobaquito before the wall was built. (Photo by Conor Varela Handley)

Excerpt from this essay from Medium:

Growing up as a Tohono O’odham woman on my ancestral homelands taught me one thing above all: Take care of the land and the land will take care of you.

When the federal government ramped up border-wall construction in Arizona, I knew I had to fight for my homelands, which are split in half by the U.S-Mexico border. I knew that meant activating my community, facing construction workers and opposing the U.S. Border Patrol and its long history of brutalizing O’odham tribal members.

Border-wall construction has brought devastation to the land, the wildlife, the water and the people. It’s wiping out entire species of animals, taking millions of gallons of water from fragile desert aquifers, butchering protected ceremonial plants like the saguaro and organ pipe cactus, and blasting and bulldozing our ancestors’ graves.

Wall construction rips away our freedom as O’odham. It erases our traditions, culture, language, songs, ceremonies and stories. Border wall construction continues 500 years of violent colonialism.

It means we lose everything that makes us O’odham. Colonial borders have always and will always violate indigenous rights and sovereignty.

rjzimmerman:

Excerpt from this story from Deutsche Welle/EcoWatch:

Normally, we respond to danger quickly; we put out fires, run away when we feel at risk, and protect our children in every way we can. So why are people so slow to react to the existential threat of global warming?

“In evolutionary terms, we are not built for this kind of danger,” explains Andreas Ernst, Professor of Environmental Systems Analysis and Environmental Psychology at the University of Kassel. “We react to a rustling in the bushes with lightning speed. But the threat posed by climate change is abstract.”

The earth’s warming is not immediate, but gradual, and without a direct or immediate impact on our everyday actions, Ernst says the complex correlations are hard for us to grasp.

Although the findings of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports are unambiguous, many laypeople, as well as politicians, find their details hard to understand. This can impact the implementation of recommendations. Such, at least, is the conclusion reached by an international team of researchers who analyzed the IPCC reports.

Many struggle to picture a ton of the greenhouse gas CO2. Such figures “don’t really reach the human psyche,” Ernst said.

Christoph Nikendei, psychotraumatology expert at University Hospital in the southern German city of Heidelberg says it’s important to use easy-to-understand figures, and to address the emotional brain so that climate change can become a real and tangible part of life.

To stay with that example: One ton of CO2 is produced, for example, by burning 422 liters (111 gallons) of gasoline, which would allow a car to travel an average of 5,400 kilometers (3,355 miles).

Conversely, plants absorb CO2 from the atmosphere. This enables them to grow. A beech tree, for example, takes in around 12.5 kg of CO2 per year. That means a single ton of CO2 corresponds to the annual growth of 80 beech trees.

If we compare the CO2 emitted and absorbed, we can calculate how many trees are needed to compensate for a certain distance traveled by car, and which means of transport “consumes” the least amount of tree growth.

For example, 20 beech trees would have to grow for one year to offset a 1,000-kilometer (621-mile) journey with a combustion engine. For 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) of air travel, it would take 33 beech trees per person. The same distance traveled by train would equate to the growth of just one beech tree.

rjzimmerman:

Excerpt from this story from National Geographic:

Voters in the state narrowly approved a ballot initiative, Proposition 114, paving the way for gray wolves to be reintroduced into Colorado, where they were hunted to extinction by the1940s. This is the first time a state has voted to reintroduce an animal to the ecosystem.

The Colorado Parks and Wildlife department will lead the effort to establish a sustainable population of the animals in the western part of the state beginning in 2022 or 2023. The Southern Rocky Mountains contain millions of acres of suitable habitat—where wolves once thrived—land that could support several hundred wolves or more, biologists say.

Opponents of the initiative conceded they had lost on November 5, but the vote was close: As of Thursday afternoon, with 90 percent of the votes in, there were 1,495,523 votes for and 1,475,235 against. But most of the remaining uncounted votes come from urban areas that strongly support reintroduction.

“Reintroducing wolves will restore Colorado’s natural balance,” says Jonathan Proctor, a conservationist with the group Defenders of Wildlife, which assisted the Rocky Mountain Wolf Action Fund in passing the measure.

Supporters say it’s especially timely, since the federal government removed Endangered Species Act protections for the animals in the contiguous U.S. in late October. (Learn more: Gray wolves taken off U.S. endangered species list in controversial move.)

The Colorado reintroduction initiative was opposed by many in rural areas, including ranchers, who worry that wolves will kill their cattle.