https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-right-wingers-are-going-crazy-about-meat

When liberals called for gun control, conservatives rushed to gun stores and rifle clubs. When Democratic cities suggested banning plastic straws, right-wing Twitter personalities posed with straws to own the libs. Now, amid a liberal-driven call for vegetarianism, a wave of conservative media personalities are promoting all-meat diets.

Meat is poised to be the next proxy battleground in a left-right culture war.

Vegetarians skew left. Meat production, particularly beef, creates more greenhouse gases and requires more energy than vegetable farming, leading environmentalists (statistically a left-leaning set) to call for meat reduction. In response, an all-red meat “carnivore diet” is surging in popularity among conservatives; Fox News has done so many segments where an anchor debates a feminist vegetarian in front of a steak they’ve become formulaic; Ted Cruz wrapped bacon around the barrel of a gun to cook it, ostensibly to upset liberals.

InfoWars founder Alex Jones laid out the looming debate on a platter in August 2016 when, apparently unprompted, he tweeted a picture of himself red-faced and glowering over a platter of uncooked sausages, steaks, and meat patties.

“Celebrating Americana with some Red Meat,” Jones tweeted, “f-you Obama!”

Why would then-President Barack Obama, a meat-eater, care about Alex Jones’ lunch? With the exception of the time Jones blamed a spicy bowl of chili for his memory loss during a court appearance, why would anybody care about Alex Jones’ lunch? The implication was clear: Obama and his ilk wanted to take away America’s meat, just like they were coming for guns and Confederate flags and all manner of totems beloved by conservatives who believe themselves besieged by the left.

And just as a set of too-online conservatives pose with plastic straws or carry automatic rifles in public with the hopes of upsetting liberals, some meat-eaters double down on their diets in response to vegetarianism.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/16/politics/high-speed-trains-trump/index.html

(CNN)In President Donald Trump's world, Democrats are after your cars and want to force everyone onto trains.

"I really don't like their policy of taking away your car, of taking away your airplane rights, of 'let's hop a train to California,'" he said during a speech in El Paso, Texas, this past week, drawing a predictable chorus of boos.

He was talking about the Democrats' Green New Deal proposal, but it was a complete mischaracterization of what's actually in the plan, recently introduced by freshman New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey. It suggests new US investment in high speed rail, as a cleaner alternative to automobile and air traffic.
But that wasn't the only time the President dunked on rail this week.

Trump wasted no time making fun of California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who announced in his State of the State address Tuesday that he was going to scale back a massive planned high speed rail project. The train might ultimately carry passengers from megalopolis of Los Angeles to the metro area that includes both Silicon Valley and San Francisco, but for now, Newsom said, they're just going to focus on the line from Bakersfield (population: 380,000) to Merced (population: 83,000).

"The whole project is a 'green' disaster," Trump said on Twitter, and demanded that California return $3.5 billion in funding for the project that was first doled out as part of the 2009 federal stimulus meant to kickstart the country out of the Great Recession.
The President loves to hate on California. He's trashed the state's wilderness management practices, suggesting its forests should be raked to prevent wildfires, he's criticized the state and its cities for protecting undocumented immigrants. His policies are at odds with California's opposition to offshore drilling, its emissions standards for cars, its legalized marijuana and more.

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/shifting-scrutiny-of-h-1b-visas-raises-eyebrows-about-motive

Posted Feb. 14, 2019, 6:21 AM
Agency looking at job requirements, not wage levels
Employers still seeking visas despite extra work, expense

The Trump administration has always given extra scrutiny to the H-1B program, but exactly what it’s scrutinizing appears to be changing.

In the last year and a half, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has shifted its scrutiny from the amount of wages for new visa holders to whether the positions qualify for a specialty visa in the first place.

The shift is causing immigration attorneys to wonder if USCIS is actively trying to disrupt, slow down, or discourage companies from seeking the skilled guestworker visas.

“I believe that they have been using procedural means to achieve their policy goals” of decreasing H-1B visas, Sandra Feist of Grell Feist in Minneapolis told Bloomberg Law.

Around mid-2017, the agency’s focus was on employers offering entry-level wages to their H-1B workers, questioning whether those entry-level jobs were in fact appropriate for the visa. Now, the focus has shifted to whether the position is a “specialty occupation” covered by the visa, attorneys say.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/02/13/why-united-states-will-never-have-high-speed-rail/?utm_term=.25a2d4a47a77

California likes to think of itself as the state where the future happens, and in 2008, its voters decided the future was high-speed rail. In November of that year, they approved a $9 billion bond issue to begin one of the most ambitious government infrastructure projects in U.S. history: a bullet train connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles, at a cost of $33 billion.

For years, the optimists have spun starry visions of millions of Californians traveling quickly, comfortably and environmentally consciously between the state’s two major population centers. The pessimists, meanwhile, have grimly watched the projected costs mount. At last count, the estimates had traveled northward of $75 billion, and for all anyone could tell, were still climbing.

On Tuesday, during his first State of the State speech, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) called for the state to scale back the project to a less costly leg that would run through the Central Valley — much simpler to build in large part because there are relatively few people there who might want to raise objections to the project, or, say, ride a high-speed train. California voters can stop clutching their wallets. But voters elsewhere should pay close attention, because what happened in California illustrates the perils that face any U.S. rail project, or for that matter, any project at all that tries to meaningfully reshape U.S. infrastructure.

Almost anyone who travels abroad comes back wondering why every other country in the world seems to have cheap, speedy rail travel while Americans can barely go out for a cup of coffee without enduring either the tedium of an endless road-trip or the indignities of the TSA. Sadly, there is no one reason; rather, there are many reasons, all of them hard-to-impossible to fix, all of them conspiring to deprive us of the (gee-whiz!) trains that many of us would like to ride.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/02/11/mass-invasion-polar-bears-is-terrorizing-an-island-town-climate-change-is-blame/?utm_term=.f200d1b7bc55



Fences have risen around kindergartens. Special vehicles transport military personnel to their work sites. Residents of the island settlement are afraid to leave their homes.

Novaya Zemlya is a Russian archipelago stretching into the Arctic Ocean. It once played host to Soviet nuclear tests, including the largest man-made explosion, when the “king of bombs” detonated in 1961, releasing 50 megatons of power and deepening an arms race that threatened to turn the Cold War hot.

Today, the barren landscape is under siege — from dozens of polar bears locked in their very own sort of hot war. Marine ecologists have long been warning of the peril posed by global warming for the vulnerable species. In the far reaches of Russia, the situation has become traumatic for humans, too.

Officials in the Arkhangelsk region, where the archipelago lies, declared a state of emergency Saturday because of the marauding mammals. Polar bears are typically born on land but live mostly on sea ice, where they hunt and feed on seals. But as Arctic ice thins, an occurrence linked to the acceleration of climate change, the animals move ashore, ravenous. They scavenge, sometimes coming into contact with human populations.

https://searchhrsoftware.techtarget.com/news/252457168/Trumps-H-1B-work-visa-plan-cuts-employers-costs-not-criticism

President Trump, a critic of the H-1B visa program, has implemented a rule change that will reduce the visa filing cost for employers. But it may also make visa holders more expensive.

President Trump's effort to restrict H-1B work visas has taken a rare turn. His administration is cutting the cost of filing for a visa and is making it easier for a firm to file for a visa. It's doing this with an electronic registration system.

This new registration system, which will begin in the 2021 fiscal year, means an employer will be able to register a visa candidate in a visa lottery "without submitting a completed [visa] package," said Shanon Stevenson, an immigration attorney at Fisher Phillips. This new process is "going to save employers time and money because they're not going to have to submit an H-1B petition for someone who isn't selected in the lottery," she said.

The administration's registration plan will help HR departments save "a lot of wasted time and effort," said Becki Young, an immigration attorney at Grossman Young & Hammond. Companies today now put together thousands of visa petitions "which never even get looked at," she said.

The electronic registration system is not the only change the White House is making to the H-1B work visa. It is also reordering the visa lottery system to favor people who have earned a U.S. master's or higher degree, a change that will take effect for this year's H-1B work visa lottery. But this change is more in line with Trump's efforts to restrict visa use. In its recently published rule change, the administration said it may help raise the wages of H-1B workers.