March 2016 - Page 4 of 25 - Schwartzreport

Monday, March 28th, 2016

Nuclear Waste Creates Casualties of War in Missouri

Lori Freshwater, - Earth Island Journal

Stephan: This is the ugly truth of the nuclear industry. And it is ugly. The truth is nuclear accidents are forever accidents that manifest in all sorts of often painful problems for decades and decades, no one knows how long it will be before Fukishima is really safe. Chernobyl still isn't either. And in Washington we have Hanford, the most polluted site in the U.S. This is why I am and always have been against nuclear power as a commercial energy source.

Patricia Barry, 33, is suffering from appendix cancer – a disease so rare it’s usually seen in 1 of 500,000 Americans. About 45 North County residents have had this cancer in recent years.
Credit: Lori Freshwater

Patricia Barry arrives at the St. Louis Bread Company to meet with me. I’d seen photos of her earlier so she’s easy to spot. She had also texted ahead to say: “Look for the world’s cutest baby.” Barry is a beautiful and vibrant woman. You would never know she is the mother of four small children all under the age of nine, including a set of twins and the aforementioned world’s cutest toddler. You would also never know that this 33-year-old was recently diagnosed with stage-three appendix cancer – a disease so rare it’s usually seen in 1 of 500,000 Americans. In contrast about […]

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Sunday, March 27th, 2016

Scotland is Entirely Coal Free for the First Time Ever

Trevor English, - Interesting Engineering

Stephan: Here is some quite wonderful news. Scotland has closed its last coal power plant and is well on the way to being entirely run on renewable power in four years.

A Scottish coal power plant now closed.

The drive for countries to reduce their dependence on coal power and convert to sustainable green energy has been growing stronger in the past years. Up until recently, Scotland had one operating coal fire plant, the Longannet power station, which picked up the slack from the largely wind farm driven Scottish energy industry. Just yesterday however, the country of 5 million burned its last piece of coal for energy production and now runs nearly solely off of renewable sources. Surprisingly, this one plant generated enough power to supply energy to 1/4 of all Scottish homes, so it’s a pretty big deal that it is now shut down.

Workers and reporters gather in the control room where they watched on as the shut down button was pressed for the plant, marking a historic occasion for the country. The shut down comes in the wake of Scotland’s efforts to run off of 100% renewable energy by 2020, an effort that other European countries […]

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Sunday, March 27th, 2016

The Mysterious Thing About a Marvelous New Synthetic Cell

Ed Yong , - The Atlantic

Stephan: Here is the latest in genetic engineering. Personally, I wish there was more public discussion about the ethics of this research.

Dr. Craig Venter of the J. Craig Venter Institute listens to comments by lawmakers during a hearing on “Developments in Synthetic Genomics and Implications for Health and Energy” by the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, May 27, 2010.
Credit: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst

In 2010, a team of scientists announced that they had created a synthetic living cell. The team, led by Nobel laureate Ham Smith, microbiologist Clyde Hutchison III, and genomics pioneer Craig Venter, fashioned the full genome of a tiny bacterium called Mycoplasma mycoides in their lab, and implanted the DNA into the empty cell of another related microbe. They nicknamed it Synthia. Some news sources claimed that the team had, for the first time, created

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Sunday, March 27th, 2016

Chaos in the Family, Chaos in the State: The White Working Class’s Dysfunction

Kevin D. Williamson, - The National Review

Stephan: I have noticed a very interesting shift in conservative media. The establishment Rightist media has been forced by the Trump movement to confront the fact that their economics and governance has destroyed the middle class, to a point where even their hundreds of millions of dollars cannot placate them into supporting an establishment candidate. So something is clearly wrong; who is responsible? It obviously can't be them or their policies, they are the uber-rich and elite. They see themselves as smart; they went to the right schools. So it must be the people themselves. National Review is the iconic establishment Rightwing publication, this is how they explain it. I am sorry this essay is slow and given to insider references; this kind of writing is often turgid. And some of the most important material making what I think is the central point, about responsibility, doesn't show up until half way through. But it is hard to be any clearer than this:

"It is immoral because it perpetuates a lie: that the white working class that finds itself attracted to Trump has been victimized by outside forces. It hasn’t. The white middle class may like the idea of Trump as a giant pulsing humanoid middle finger held up in the face of the Cathedral, they may sing hymns to Trump the destroyer and whisper darkly about “globalists” and — odious, stupid term — “the Establishment,” but nobody did this to them. They failed themselves."

Supporters at a Trump Rally

Michael Brendan Dougherty is bitter. I think that I can write that in both truth and charity. (I think you might even say that he and I are friends.) Dougherty is a conservative of the sort sometimes advertised as “paleo” and served as national correspondent for The American Conservative. Like many conservative writers with those associations, Dougherty spends a great deal of time lambasting the conservative movement and its organs, from which he feels, for whatever reason, estranged — an alienation that carries with it more than a little to suggest that it is somewhat personal. In 2013, he announced that he planned to set aside political writing to concentrate on the relatively sane world of professional baseball, saying: “National politics has most of the vices of ‘bread and circuses.’ And if that’s the case, pro sports is a better circus.” But it is difficult for a politics man to give up politics — look at all the political crap that ESPN viewers and […]

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Sunday, March 27th, 2016

Mike Pence’s sadistic abortion law: Indiana passes draconian anti-choice bill geared towards humiliating and bankrupting women who have abortions

Amanda Marcotte, Political Writer -

Stephan: Yet another example of Republican governance. Governor Mike Pence and his legislature have a very unhealthy obsession to subject women to humiliation, punishment, and general nastiness. It's creepy. Mike Pence and this legislature are in office because social progressives did not vote in sufficient numbers to elect their opponents.

Indiana Republican Governor Mike Pence
Credit: AP Photo/AJ Mast

The Republican war on women continues unabated. The same week that conservatives argued in the Supreme Court that employers should be able to stop their employees from getting contraception coverage outside of the company health plan, Indiana joined the ranks of states like Texas and Florida in passing a draconian law that purports to protect women while in fact endangering their health by making safe abortion much harder to get. Gov. Mike Pence signed it Thursday night.

The bill is one of those omnibus anti-choice bills Republicans are fond of these days, a giant bill stuffed with as many asinine restrictions on abortion with an eye towards making abortion as miserable and humiliating an experience as possible, and ideally something women can’t get legally at all. The sadism of the whole thing is truly breathtaking. Despite the legalistic language, it is as clearly woman-hating in its intent as anything Donald Trump tweets.

The bill requires […]

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