Friday, January 29th, 2016
Alan Pyke, - Think Progress
Stephan: Maine is another laboratory state ruled by a far right Republican governor, Paul LePage. He appears to be asking vigilantes to shoot drug dealers in Maine. If one thinks about it, this is the logical extension of the open carry mindset. "Good guys" with guns patrolling their neighborhoods. Sort of late Middle Ages "hue and cry" brought into the 21st century.
Maine’s Republican Governor Paul LePage
Fresh off saying Maine should revive the guillotine to decapitate drug dealers, Gov. Paul LePage (R) said Wednesday that private citizens should get in on the criminal-killing action too.
“I tell ya, everybody in Maine, we have constitutional carry,” LePage said in an on-camera interview in Lewiston, referring to the state’s protections for carrying concealed handguns without a special permit.
“Load up and get rid of the drug dealers. Because, folks, they’re killing our kids,” the governor said. The reporter he was speaking with quickly asked if the head of the state government was calling for vigilante justice. LePage denied that he meant to invite vigilantism by saying Mainers can use concealed firearms to “get rid of” drug dealers when they find them.
The day before appearing to deputize every Maine citizen to shoot people they think are selling drugs, the governor joked that it’s time to handle pushers like French princes. “What we ought to do is bring the guillotine back,” LePage said on WVOM radio […]
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Thursday, January 28th, 2016
, - The Guardian (U.K.)/Agence-France Presse (France)
Stephan: Four hundred U.S. cities and hundreds more around the world are going to be submerged in whole or part by searise. And, as with everything else about climate change, this is another story about the collapse of the timeline. In 30 years the world's coastlines will look very different than they do today. By the end of the century they will be unrecognizable.
Note particularly that searise is not going to occur equally around the world. Check this
map to see what your area will look like
Sea levels can rise due to melting ice and the expansion of water as it warms.
Credit: Alamy
The amount of sea level rise that comes from the oceans warming and expanding has been underestimated, and could be about twice as much as previously calculated, German researchers have said.
The findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed US journal, suggest that increasingly severe storm surges could be anticipated as a result.
Sea level can mount due to two factors – melting ice and the thermal expansion of water as it warms.
Until now, researchers have believed the oceans rose between 0.7 to 1mm per year due to thermal expansion.
But a fresh look at the latest satellite data from 2002 to 2014 shows […]
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Thursday, January 28th, 2016
Robert McSweeney, - EcoWatch/Carbon Brief
Stephan: Is climate change causing extreme weather. Here's the case.
Flooded U.K. city
A rapid near-time analysis of the UK’s record-breaking wet December in 2015 suggests that climate change increased the odds of the exceptionally high rainfall by 50-75 percent.
Carbon Brief takes a look at the research and quizzes of the experts on the science behind attributing extreme weather events to human-caused climate change.
Warmest and Wettest
Last week, the Met Office announced that December 2015 was the UK’s wettest on record, seeing more rain than any other month since 1910. It was also the UK’s warmest December over the same period.
A series of storms—first Desmond, then Eva and finally Frank—dumped 230mm of rain on the UK during December, triggering flooding across much of Scotland, northern England and Northern Ireland.
After some rapid number-crunching, scientists at the University of Oxford and the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) have assessed the role climate change played in last month’s extreme weather.
The preliminary results—from three different approaches—indicate the human impact on climate was as large or even larger, than the impact of […]
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Thursday, January 28th, 2016
Bryan Schatz, Editorial Fellow - Mother Jones
Stephan: Remember the $500 million wasted to create an Afghanistan coal industry, and the $300 million wasted on a dam, and the $43 million gas station? Well here's another one. These reports just keep piling up. The level of incompetence and the ignorance about Afghanistan's culture is truly mind boggling.
Cashmere goat
The Pentagon airlifted Italian goats to Afghanistan as part of a failed $6 million project aimed at boosting the country’s cashmere industry.
That’s one of the latest findings from John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, who testified at a Senate hearing yesterday on the Defense Department’s efforts to boost the Afghan economy at a cost of more than $600 million. SIGAR, Sopko said, “has not been able to find credible evidence showing that TFBSO’s [Task Force for Business and Stability Operations] activities in Afghanistan produced the intended economic growth or stabilization outcomes that justified its creation.”
The Pentagon’s cashmere project entailed importing nine rare blond male goats from Italy, building a farm, and setting up a laboratory to certify the their wool. It’s possible the program created as many as 350 jobs. But according to Sopko, the Pentagon failed to track its spending, and the project’s status is unknown. It remains unclear whether or not the goats were eaten.
Sopko has detailed other examples of waste and unchecked spending in Afghanistan, including $150 million for […]
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Thursday, January 28th, 2016
Tom Miles and Ben Hirschler, - Reuters
Stephan: The Zika virus causes such horrible damage to fetuses that it has led governments in Latin American to call for women to stop having babies! Functionally in countries where women have very little control over the occurrence of pregnancy because contraception is hard to get or too expensive, and marital rape is very prevalent that is impossible.
But beneath this story there is another one. What does the occurrence of potentially hundreds of thousands of brain damaged severely handicapped babies do to the abortion debate? And what would happen if the birth rate in countries where the Zika virus is prevalent sharply dropped off. Imagine a society where almost no one was born in 2016, 2017, and 2018, as governments are recommending.
And the virus is spreading to the U.S..
A transmission electron micrograph (TEM) shows the Zika virus, in an undated photo provided by the Centers For Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia.
Credit: Reuters/CDC/Cynthia Goldsmith
GENEVA/LONDON — The mosquito-borne Zika virus, which has been linked to brain damage in thousands of babies in Brazil, is likely to spread to all countries in the Americas except for Canada and Chile, the World Health Organization said on Monday.
Zika transmission has not yet been reported in the continental United States, although a woman who fell ill with the virus in Brazil later gave birth to a brain-damaged baby in Hawaii.
Brazil’s Health Ministry said in November that Zika was linked to a fetal deformation known as microcephaly, in which infants are born with smaller-than-usual brains.
Brazil has reported 3,893 suspected cases of microcephaly, the WHO said last Friday, over 30 times more than in any year since 2010 and equivalent to 1-2 percent of all […]
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