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National Parks Face Years of Damage From Government Shutdown (nationalgeographic.com)
When the government eventually reopens, park experts warn reversing damage won't be as easy as throwing out the trash. From a report: National parks are America's public lands, but right now they're America's trashcans. That's because the U.S. federal government, embattled over funding for a border wall, has shut down, leaving national parks open and largely unattended. Since the shutdown began, brimming trashcans, overflowing toilets, and trespassing has been reported at many parks locations. "Never before have I seen the federal government tempt fate in national parks the way we are today," says Diane Regas, president of the Trust for Public Land. "It's not about what has happened already. It's about what could happen if you don't have the appropriate staffing."
According to the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), staffing varies by park, but some 16,000 parks service employees are furloughed, leaving a small number active for policing and security. The government shut down three times in 2018, but only three days last January and less than a day that following February. As of Friday, the government had been partially shut down for 13 days. Further reading: Government Shutdown is Putting a Damper on Science in Seattle and Elsewhere.
According to the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), staffing varies by park, but some 16,000 parks service employees are furloughed, leaving a small number active for policing and security. The government shut down three times in 2018, but only three days last January and less than a day that following February. As of Friday, the government had been partially shut down for 13 days. Further reading: Government Shutdown is Putting a Damper on Science in Seattle and Elsewhere.
I'd expect something like this out of a third-world nation, not a world-leader.
How quickly you've fallen from your world power high in the mid 1970s.
SAD. But a few Boomers got rich so FUCK YEAH!!!
from what I remember trump promised the US would not be paying for that wall as Mexico would.
Or you know, don't hold the running of the government hostage for a hair brained scheme that literally won't do anything positive for the country.
Ask for that money to fix actual existing failing infrastructure. I heard Flint still doesn't have access to clean water locally.
So let me get this straight... you're miffed that people didn't take YOUR feelings into account while you don't care for the feelings of others on this matter whom you'd be disturbing.
Yeah, I have a hard time feeling sorry for you.
makes me sad that a great piece of nature can't stay clean for a few days unless there are paid people who clean up after the visitors - the real trash are the humans leaving their trash behind.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Maybe that's because they perceived this as a sufficient and adequate response. Maybe the ROI on continuing to invest in walls and fencing has reached the point of ridiculousness. Maybe America doesn't actually have an immigration crisis, and justifying continued investment in fencing to filter out hypothetical Mexican rapists is an immoral act of unfounded prejudice.
Your entire model of hypocrisy leaves out of the possibility that the previous response was a proportional response, and the proposed response is a disproportionate response. There's no two ways about this: Americans want to buy Californian fruit at a price you can only have if the fruit is picked by undocumented immigrants, without actually having the immigrants.
So you disparage the immigrants so that they have no rights whatsoever in the country where the work and reside, until you've got a de facto caste society.
Once upon a time, India did not have a caste society as rigid as the one they have now. But for some reason, there caste system solidified. Was it the people on the bottom who wanted to become permanently consigned to an underclass? Or was it the people at the top, who wanted something akin to slavery (all the benefits, few of the costs) without turning people into actual property (which is problematic, and always has been).
America's Deep South has never quite forgotten the wonderful heroine hit of being a gentrified ruling class, where you can sit in your drawing rooms and perfect your manners (and mannerisms), while some other group of people is baking in the hot sun for long hours doing the scut work. Gosh, what if you could have that without slavery? What if you could hem and howl until the immigrants had a status below dirt, and do everything conceivable to pretend to stop this, while actually still providing the immigrants with all the same work opportunities? (All the better to sate one's enormous appetite on cheap, local fruit.)
The wall then becomes a permanent monument to the notion, "well, we did what we could" and the immigrants are still showing up to do the same nasty jobs as the same low, low wages (with few benefits), well that just proves that they're lowly and incorrigible and deserve what they get.
Voila: caste system. All of the benefits, few of the costs.
I'll gladly believe otherwise once there's a vigorous enforcement effort to arrest businessmen who routinely look the other way over worker documentation (with the prospect of serious jail time for repeat offenses). Rounding up the first 1000 would be like gathering windblown apples off the ground. That would slow undocumented immigration down to a trickle at way less cost than Trump's giant monument to caste-society lust.
Problem: a sudden wave of orchard bankruptcies among hard-working, tax-paying Californian orchard owners (mostly white) would shine a harsh spotlight in the evening news cycle for many months on the actual hypocrisy here. We wants them in one way (cheap prices), but we don't wants them in the other way (affording them dignity and civil rights).
A hugely expensive wall (that still won't actually work) is just a giant branding exercise in justifying this extremely un-American division between labour and civil rights. This is not so different from the extremely un-American division between taxation and representation that once lead to a giant tea party.
But times change, and tea party rebrand themselves. Now we're more like the British society from which we once sought refuge, than we are like our forefathers (and foremothers) who bravely endured the back-breaking labour of setting up shop in a giant land of opportunity, theirs for the taking.