10 Numbers That Show How Much Farmland We’re Losing to Development

Dan Nosowitz  -  modern farmer

This image, courtesy of American Farmland Trust, shows the conversion of agricultural land to urban and low-density residential development between 1992 and 2012.
Credit: AFT

American Farmland Trust, which since 1980 has been attempting to save agricultural land in the U.S., has compiled a huge assessment of the movement of farmland between 1992 and 2012 (the latter date being the last that the data required was available).

The organization’s findings, which they are calling “the most comprehensive ever undertaken of America’s agricultural lands,” aren’t hugely shocking, at least at the surface: American farmland is being vacuumed up by development. What’s new, though, is the discovery that the development isn’t coming only from urban areas expanding outwards—rural areas are also losing farmland rapidly. “The fact is that we have this sort of insidious development that no one’s been paying attention to, and we really need to start paying attention,” says Julia Freedgood, the assistant VP of programs at the AFT.

Why is this happening? There’s no simple answer. One major reason, which has spiraling effects, is that farming is an incredibly difficult and not a very lucrative career path. The average age of the American farmer was nearly 60 in 2012…

The U.S. Government Has Spent More Than 4 Times the Cost of Mueller’s Investigation to Let Trump Play Golf

Mark Sumner  -  Alternet

Trump golfing at one of his courses

The Justice Department has released a reporting showing the cost of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into foreign entanglements of the Trump campaign. Through just over a year, the total comes in at $16.7 million.

Naturally, this resulted in a morning tweet from Donald Trump. Trump had previously pegged the cost of the investigation at $20 million, an exaggeration modest enough that he likely had someone at the DOJ check the books for him. And while Trump may be wishing he had that cash so he could grab some Florida real estate for a Russian oligarch, the cost of the ongoing investigation does seem … perfectly reasonable.

Compared to the estimated $67 million the government has providing Trump with trips to Mar-a-lago to play golf, Mueller’s investigation. Or the $3.5 million that the EPA spent on a single year of Scott Pruitt’s personal SWAT team.

It would probably be possible to pay for the Mueller investigation either out of first class flights by Pruitt, or Ben Carson’s decorating budget. In just the first nine months of 2017, Donald Trump personally charged the Secret Service $137,000 to rent golf carts. So they can …

Drug company sales rep admits bribing N.J. doctors to prescribe addictive painkillers

S.P. Sullivan  -  New Jersey Time-News

Michelle Breitenbach, 38, of Middletown.

A former sales representative for a major drug manufacturer has admitted to charges she helped fuel the opioid addiction crisis by bribing doctors to prescribe a potent painkiller, authorities said.

Michelle Breitenbach, who worked for the pharmaceutical company Insys Therapeutics, Inc., pleaded guilty Wednesday to a second-degree charge of conspiracy to commit commercial bribery, according to the state Division of Criminal Justice, which brought the

Breitenbach’s guilty plea comes after state authorities filed a civil lawsuit against her former employer, accusing Insys of “evil” practices that pushed doctors to prescribe its painkiller Subsys for conditions it was never intended to treat. The civil case is ongoing.

Attorney General Gurbir Grewal said Wednesday that a “primary cause of the devastating opioid epidemic gripping the country has been overprescribing of prescription opioids, driven by the greed of manufacturers.”

State authorities say the company gave kickbacks to doctors in the form of phony “speaker’s fees” that really served as payments for “off-label” prescriptions that gave patients the painkillers for purposes not approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration.

An NJ Advance Media investigation published last year found many doctors across the state received lucrative payments from drug …

Previous Models of Ancient Populations in the Americas were ‘Unrealistically Simple’

  -  Ancient Origins

A new genetic study of ancient individuals in the Americas and their contemporary descendants finds that two populations that diverged from one another 18,000 to 15,000 years ago remained apart for millennia before mixing again. This historic “re-convergence” occurred before or during their expansion to the southern continent.

The study, reported in the journal Science, challenges previous research suggesting that the first people in the Americas split into northern and southern branches, and that the southern branch alone gave rise to all ancient populations in Central and South America.

• Did Paleoamericans Reach South America First?
• Underwater discovery in submerged Mexican cave provides glimpse of First Americans
• Did first Americans make a 10,000-Year Pit Stop on Beringian land bridge?

Ancient individuals, population genetic analyses and modeling. ( A) Sites of newly sequenced ancient individuals are designated by colored triangles. Comparative modern populations and ancient individuals are designated by black circles and triangles, respectively. (Image: C. L. Scheib et al, Sciencemag)

The study shows for the first time that, deep in their genetic history, many Indigenous people in the southern continent retain at least some DNA from the “northerners” who are the direct ancestors of many Native communities living …

How Do I Respond? What Can I Do?

Dozens of people have written me asking: How do I respond to what I see happening to my country after this election? What can I do?

My answer can be found in my book The 8 Laws of Change.  Since 1991 I have been following trends that are shaping the future, and have seen the rise of fascist and identitarian politics. I wrote 8 Laws based on years of research to show how nonviolent compassionate life-affirming change can be achieved.

If you are despondent about what you see happening to your country I recommend you read The 8 Laws of Change. It will give you detailed actions you can take, actions that have proven they work based on scientific outcome data.