Montgomery County, MD Green Party Blog

2042. That’s the year the Social Security Trust Fund will run out of money, according to the Social Security Administration (SSA). But its doomsday prophesy is based on overly pessimistic assumptions about our economic future: The SSA expects the U.S. economy to expand at an average annual rate of just 1.8% from 2015 to 2080—far slower than the 3.0% average growth rate the economy posted over the last 75 years.

What’s behind the gloomy growth projections? Is there anything to them—or has the SSA’s economic crystal ball malfunctioned?

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The day my fiancé fell to his death, it started to snow, just like any November day, just like the bottom hadn’t fallen out of my world when he freefell off the roof. His body, when I found it, was lightly covered with snow. It snowed almost every day for the next four months, while I sat on the couch and watched it pile up

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‘Anonymous Résumés’ Fuel Debate

Typically, in France, “they throw away the résumés of people who are from bad parts of town which are supposed to have Arabs or blacks,” Bebear, 70, said in an interview. “When you have somebody whose name is Mohammed and he lives in St. Denis,” a low-income community outside Paris, “you say, ‘I won’t bother with that one,’ and so they don’t even answer them.”

The solution, Bebear said, is to strip résumés of anything that could tip off recruiters to a person’s racial, ethnic and national background or other information that could be used to discriminate — name, age, sex, even residential postal code. “Then the man who is in charge of recruitment will look at that and say, ‘Oh, that résumé is a very good one. Send me that guy,’ and in the folder he has in front of him is an old black woman or a handicapped person.”
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A report the institute published in 2004 cited a study showing that a job applicant with a French-sounding name was five times more likely to be called for an interview than someone with an identical résumé but an Arabic- or North African-sounding name. That bias contributed to unemployment rates as high as 40 percent — four times the national average — among young men in low-income communities outside Paris, according to the report.

Armed with such data, Bebear and the Montaigne Institute have persuaded about 300 companies — including the Total energy group, the car manufacturer Peugeot Citroen, the steel giant Arcelor and SNCF, the national railway — to sign a charter pledging to oppose discrimination and make their companies “reflect the diversity of France.”

Among the recommendations in an accompanying report were that companies use anonymous résumés in hiring, produce annual reports charting progress in ending discrimination, and create internships to start young minority people on career paths.

Bebear said the proposals were meant to correct inequities without American-style affirmative action programs, which are illegal under French law and viewed by many people here — Bebear included — as antithetical to French culture and society.

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The field of social psychology has long been focused on how social environments affect the way people behave. But social psychologists are people, too, and as the United States has become increasingly politically polarized, they have grown increasingly interested in examining what drives these sharp divides: red states vs. blue states; pro-Iraq war vs. anti-Iraq war; pro-same-sex marriage vs. anti-same-sex marriage. And they have begun to study political behavior using such specialized tools as sophisticated psychological tests and brain scans.
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The new interest has yielded some results that will themselves provoke partisan reactions: Studies presented at the conference, for example, produced evidence that emotions and implicit assumptions often influence why people choose their political affiliations, and that partisans stubbornly discount any information that challenges their preexisting beliefs.

Emory University psychologist Drew Westen put self-identified Democratic and Republican partisans in brain scanners and asked them to evaluate negative information about various candidates. Both groups were quick to spot inconsistency and hypocrisy — but only in candidates they opposed.

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County Schools Find Course More Effective

The program — “Investigations in Number, Data, and Space” — uses mostly worksheets and often poses math questions as real-life anecdotes, requiring students to show how they can solve a problem in many ways rather than merely scribble answers based on memorized formulas.

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Some Experts on Global Warming Foresee ‘Tipping Point’ When It Is Too Late to Act

There are three specific events that these scientists describe as especially worrisome and potentially imminent, although the time frames are a matter of dispute: widespread coral bleaching that could damage the world’s fisheries within three decades; dramatic sea level rise by the end of the century that would take tens of thousands of years to reverse; and, within 200 years, a shutdown of the ocean current that moderates temperatures in northern Europe.

The debate has been intensifying because Earth is warming much faster than some researchers had predicted. James E. Hansen, who directs NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, last week confirmed that 2005 was the warmest year on record, surpassing 1998. Earth’s average temperature has risen nearly 1 degree Fahrenheit over the past 30 years, he noted, and another increase of about 4 degrees over the next century would “imply changes that constitute practically a different planet.”

“It’s not something you can adapt to,” Hansen said in an interview. “We can’t let it go on another 10 years like this. We’ve got to do something.”
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While both the Greenland and the Antarctic ice sheets as a whole are gaining some mass in their cold interiors because of increasing snowfall, they are losing ice along their peripheries. That indicates that scientists may have underestimated the rate of disintegration they face in the future, Oppenheimer said. Greenland’s current net ice loss is equivalent to an annual 0.008 inch sea level rise.

The effects of the collapse of either ice sheet would be “huge,” Oppenheimer said. “Once you lost one of these ice sheets, there’s really no putting it back for thousands of years, if ever.”
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This tipping point debate has stirred controversy within the administration; Hansen said senior political appointees are trying to block him from sharing his views publicly.

When Hansen posted data on the Internet in the fall suggesting that 2005 could be the warmest year on record, NASA officials ordered Hansen to withdraw the information because he had not had it screened by the administration in advance, according to a Goddard scientist who spoke on the condition of anonymity. More recently, NASA officials tried to discourage a reporter from interviewing Hansen for this article and later insisted he could speak on the record only if an agency spokeswoman listened in on the conversation.

“They’re trying to control what’s getting out to the public,” Hansen said, adding that many of his colleagues are afraid to talk about the issue. “They’re not willing to say much, because they’ve been pressured and they’re afraid they’ll get into trouble.”

But Mary L. Cleave, deputy associate administrator for NASA’s Office of Earth Science, said the agency insists on monitoring interviews with scientists to ensure they are not misquoted.

“People could see it as a constraint,” Cleave said. “As a manager, I might see it as protection.”

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