Good. Maybe take the money and use it for homeless veterans
Trump officials shut off funding for climate adaptation centers
Tracking bird populations after hurricanes. Mapping the risk of megafires across the Midwest. Identifying less expensive ways to battle invasive plants. Preparing communities’ stormwater drains against intense flooding.
A third of the nation’s offices that do this work — known as the U.S. Geological Survey’s Climate Adaptation Science Centers — are expected to drastically wind down and possibly close after Tuesday because of a lack of funds, according to employees and an announcement by one of the closing centers.
The potential shuttering of the South Central, Northeast and Pacific Islands centers, which collectively cover about one-third of the U.S. population and are funded under the Interior Department, would hamper projects aimed to help people, wildlife, land and water adapt to a changing climate locally. Their demise is unconnected to a possible federal shutdown: Instead, employees say, Interior Department officials have not approved paperwork that would help fund them for another five years.
“We’re not willing to just drop everything and walk away,” said Bethany Bradley, the co-director of the Northeast Climate Adaptation Science Center and a University of Massachusetts professor. “But the reality is we can’t do this for free and pay our [research] students nothing.”
So, get private funding. The reality is that many of these projects are worthwhile, however, they decided to make the climate scam the primary concern, and this is the be all end all. If they weren’t all climate cult and just did what they were supposed to do the Trump admin wouldn’t have noticed.
In recent weeks, federal workers across all adaptation centers have also been unable to spend money on traveling, publishing papers or funding new projects without approval.
Why are they traveling? Because we all know this is by using fossil fuels. Just stay on your turf and do your job.
The South Central Climate Adaptation Science Center confirmed last week that it and the two other centers were on the brink of losing federal backing. The center said in an announcement on its website Thursday that beginning Wednesday, it “will fully transition to minimal operations” until more federal funding is acquired.
Might be waiting a while for that. Too bad.
Our esteemed host ignores a tough reality:
Kelly was a homeless veteran.
Kelly lived in the yards behind the concrete plant in Hampton, Virginia, when I ran the place last century. His mother lived just a few blocks away, so he didn’t have to be homeless, and he got some sort of check from the government once a month; he didn’t have to be homeless.
But what Kelly truly was is crazy, as in completely demented, wild-eyed, delusional, whatever it was; Vietnam had totally f(ouled) up his brain.
Every so often, Kelly would do something to get himself locked up, and the Hampton Police would clean him up, put him in new clothes, and eventually release him. Then he’d wander right back to the back of the plant, cover himself and his clothes with waste oil, and go right back to living the way he had been for years, in the heat of the summer and cold of the winter. He made his home inside Lockwood’s old, abandoned storage units, and at least one time inside an old, plastic admixture tank. My strongest memory of Kelly was him wandering back out of the yard, waving his arms, having a very loud argument with God, arms waving, covered head to toe in his black ‘armor,’ on a 90º F summer day.
There are many programs to help the homeless veterans, but most of them can’t be helped, because they are just plain crazy. Their bodies came back, but their minds were left somewhere in the fields of Vietnam — and Kelly has to be in his 70s now, if he’s still alive — or Iraq or Afghanistan.
The only thing that could be done for most of them would be to reopen the asylums, and care for them there, warehousing them like used to be done for all crazy people, perhaps hoping that some few of them could be cured, but that’s it.
Mr Dana admits you have to be crazy to talk with God, which we all know.
Should we warehouse the mentally ill? We realize that America has no interest examining how other western nations manage homelessness, but hear us out.
For example Norway (and other European nations) use a housing-first approach, providing permanent housing and integrating support services for addiction and mental health.