Wednesday, January 6th, 2016
Ethan Corey, - Reader Supported News
Stephan: This is what American city schools in all too many cities look like... from the inside. That we permit this situation to exist is to our shame as a country. And it is so self-mutilating to our national wellness and future.
Credit: PBS
Growing up in Compton, California, Kimberly Cervantes, an 18-year-old freshman at American Career College in Long Beach, has witnessed far more violence than the typical high-school grad.
There’s the time she and her brother were walking home from school and nearly collided with a group of armed men mid-shootout with an opposing gang. And the time two of her classmates were gunned down just outside the school gate. And the time she was sexually harassed and physically attacked while riding the bus. After she started missing classes because she was too anxious to show up, she was ultimately placed in an alternative school for students the district is otherwise either unwilling or unable to teach.
None of these experiences, of course, were particularly conducive to Cervantes’ learning. “It’s hard to concentrate on class when you’re thinking about how someone you knew just died,” she says.
Cervantes’ experiences are far from unique. A recent study by the RAND Corporation suggests that as many as nine out of 10 middle schoolers in the area have […]
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Wednesday, January 6th, 2016
Jim Hightower, National Radio Commentator - Nation of Change
Stephan: Jim Hightower echoes my own views as you have read. The non-coverage of Bernie Sanders is one of the most glaring things about corporate media during this election cycle. Beyond his allotted 30 seconds he has virtually vanished from MSNBC and CNN. It is so blatant.
Donald Trump is a study in how to run for President spending almost no money, and Bernie Sanders is a study in how a campaign is kept alive and thrives when shut out of the media.
Presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders Credit: Jacquelyn Martin/AP
Polls show that Bernie Sanders would trounce Donald Trump, but you’d never know that from watching TV news. (emphasis added)
Let’s go to the scoreboard to see who’s winning the exciting presidential election media coverage game.
The Tyndall Report, a non-partisan media monitoring firm that has been tracking the nightly news broadcasts of ABC, CBS, and NBC, found that Trump is tromp, tromp, tromping over the airtime of everyone else.
From last January through November, these dominant flagship news shows devoted 234 minutes of prime-time coverage to the incessant chirping of the yellow-crested birdbrain, with no other contender getting even a fourth of that.
Take Bernie Sanders, who’s stunning the political establishment with a fiery populist campaign that’s drawing record crowds. Indeed, Sanders’ upstart campaign is commanding a comparable share of support within the Democratic Party’s voting base to what Trump is enjoying from the Republican electorate.
And — get this — polls also show Bernie trouncing The Donald if they face each other in November’s presidential showdown. […]
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Wednesday, January 6th, 2016
Stephan: Here is some good news, excellent news really. If this pilot works as it appears to, an entirely new energy development sector will open up. Great fortunes that are going to be made with the technologies that take us out of the carbon age. Note particularly the water desalinization aspect to this story.
It also supplies zero-emission desalinated water.
The world’s first grid-connected wave power station has been activated off the coast of Western Australia (WA). After more than a decade of testing and demonstrations, Australian company Carnegie Wave Energy has switched on a pilot project that has begun feeding wave-generated electricity into a local WA grid.
“This is the first array of wave power generators to be connected to an electricity grid in Australia and worldwide,” said Ivor Frischknecht, CEO of the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, in a statement. The Agency has provided $13 million of the $32 million project.
Also See: HAWAII’S NEWEST POWER PLANT USES OCEAN TEMPERATURES TO GENERATE ENERGY
The company’s technology named CETO after a Greek goddess of the sea converts ocean swell into zero-emission renewable power and zero-emission desalinated freshwater. The company says its system is “different from other wave energy devices as it operates under water where it is safer from large storms [and corrosion] and invisible from the shore”.
The round, submerged buoys are tethered to seabed pump units, which are installed at a depth of between 25 and 50 metres. Waves crashing into the buoys drive the pumps, which push […]
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Wednesday, January 6th, 2016
Pema Levy, - Mother Jones
Stephan: Here is another those states as laboratories trend stories. Yesterday it was Kansas, today it is Wisconsin.
This is another Red state where Theocratic Rightist policies have been put into place. And in Wisconsin the governor has withstood a recall. The situation in Wisconsin is very revealing in another way: it is one of the states where people have voted repeatedly to have the economy and wellness of their lives degraded. And, of course with this kind of governance corruption is a central feature of state democracy.
But even by those low standards this story is something else.
It’s the campaign scandal that just won’t die. For three years, prosecutors in Wisconsin tried to investigate what they believed was illegal campaign coordination between Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and conservative outside groups. The investigation has become a political flash point in the state: Walker and conservatives claim it is a witch hunt led by liberal prosecutors, while liberals believe it is about the power of dark money in Wisconsin politics.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court dismissed the case, but on Friday, the case moved to the national stage when prosecutors signaled their intention to take it to the US Supreme Court. And the focus is now set to shift from the actions of Walker and his allies to potential ethical violations by the Wisconsin Supreme Court justices themselves.
This summer, the Wisconsin Supreme Court took up the question of whether to stop the investigation into alleged coordination between Walker’s 2012 recall campaign and conservative outside groups that receive unlimited donations from undisclosed donors. The problem was that the election campaigns of two justices on the state’s top court had benefited significantly from spending by those same groups accused of illegal coordination with Walker. […]
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Tuesday, January 5th, 2016
Bryan Bender , - Politico
Stephan: The United States military-intelligence-security apparat has a budget larger than most of the rest of the world combined. The sums spent by this complex that President Eisenhower warned us against are so vast that most people cannot even conceptualize the numbers involved.
When I read these stories what I see is hungry children, frightened elders, families without healthcare, schoolchildren getting grossly substandard educations. This is where we spend our money America. It has nothing to do with wellness.
The 1.3 million-square-foot Susquehanna Distribution Center in Pennsylvania is one of several dozen run by the Pentagon’s Defense Logistics Agency that have undergone a series of mock financial audits in preparation for the agency’s first-ever attempt to pass an independent scrub of its books. Credit: John Shinkle
Fifty-four years ago, the brand-new Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara thought he could bring Pentagon spending on everyday items under control by applying efficiencies he had used to help turn around Ford Motor Co.
Instead, he created a monster. McNamara’s creation, known as the Defense Logistics Agency, has grown into a global, $44 billion operation that, were it a private enterprise, would rank in the Fortune 50. Its 25,000 employees process roughly 100,000 orders a day for everything from poultry to pharmaceuticals, precious metals to aircraft parts. In terms of Pentagon contracts, it is nearly as large as Boeing and Lockheed Martin, the Pentagon’s largest contractors, combined.
Air Force […]
