Natasha Geiling, - Think Progress
Stephan: There is so much horrifying news coming out of the Trump administration, and the Republican congress is such a pusillanimous tribe of little zombies, that a major trend affecting every aspect of America has been swamped out of the media and is going on almost without public awareness.
I am speaking here of the dismantlement of the American government. Hundreds of positions are going unfilled, and the ones that are filled, usually the most senior posts, are being filled by Donald Trump with men and women utterly incompetent for the job to which they have been appointed.
As a result the quality of American government infrastructure has been severely degraded and that is going to affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people.
Here is the latest example of what I mean.
Sam Clovis
Credit: Charlie Neibergall/AP
Sam Clovis, a former Trump campaign adviser and one-time conservative talk radio host, has no background in the hard sciences, nor any policy experience with food or agriculture. Still, that did not stop President Donald Trump from officially nominating Clovis to the position of the United States Department of Agriculture’s undersecretary of research, education, and economics, the agency’s top science position.
In the past, the undersecretary of research, education, and economics has brought years of experience in science, public health, or food policy. Previous undersecretaries have been biochemists, plant physiologists, or food nutrition experts. The most recent undersecretary, Catherine Woteki, came to the position from Mars, Inc., where she helped manage the company’s scientific research on health, nutrition, and public safety.
Clovis, on the other hand, comes to the position after serving as national co-chair for the Trump campaign, which he joined in 2015. Before that, Clovis was a professor of economics at Morningside College in Sioux City, […]
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Rich Haridy, - New Atlas/: University of Tampere
Stephan: Here is some potentially wonderful news about diabetes Type I.
It has long been hypothesized that viral infections play a significant role in the development of type 1 diabetes. Researchers in Finland have been investigating this connection for over 25 years and now believe they have targeted the particular virus group that can trigger the disease. After developing a prototype vaccine the team is now moving to human clinical trials in 2018.
Though not as common as type 2 diabetes, type 1 diabetes it still affects millions of people worldwide. The disease generally begins in childhood and an estimated 80,000 new cases are diagnosed worldwide every year.
Type 1 diabetes occurs when the immune system destroys insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas. Recent research suggests that enteroviruses could play a strong role in the onset of type 1 diabetes, with several studies showing that the presence of an enteroviral infection significantly increases the chance of a person developing the disease.
The causal relationship between an enteroviral infection and type 1 diabetes is still unknown, but one study suggests it could act as “a critical trigger to push an already dysfunctional metabolic equilibrium over the brink.”
A research group at the University of Tampere initially looked at the more than 100 different […]
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KALINA OROSCHAKOFF AND MARION SOLLETTY, - Politico
Stephan: The reality of nuclear energy is, and always has been, that no one knows how to deal with the waste that the technology produces. It is hard to even think about. How do you maintain in unbroken perpetuity the safety of of the most toxic substance on earth, when micrograms can kill a person and you have thousands of tons of it?
Perpetuity? Am I exaggerating? I don't know, what do you think? Of particular concern in nuclear waste planning are two long-lived fission products,
Tc-99 (half-life 220,000 years) and
I-129 (half-life 17 million years), which dominate spent fuel radioactivity after the first few thousand years.
To get a sense of scale consider this: The Sumerian language is one of the earliest known written languages, dating to circa 3300 to 3000 BCE, basically just 5,300 hundred years ago.
And what do you think it costs to store it? It is very hard to actually get a number; try Googling it yourself to see how obfuscated the actual cost is. The best I can work out is $750 million a year. Just a 1,000 years of storage would cost $750,000,000,000. I'm not even sure what you would call that number.
It's all absurd. The truth is nuclear power makes no sense and never did. It is the evil child of the Cold War.
European nuclear waste facility
Credit: Politico
BURE, FRANCE — Half a kilometer underground in floodlit tunnels, a French government lab is testing the safety of a site intended to hold 80,000 cubic meters of deadly radioactive waste.
Crews drill barrel-sized openings into the sides of the shafts, dug deep into the earth not far from the small town of Bure, in northeastern France. The containers will have to be retrievable for a century, in case better technologies for dealing with radioactive materials are developed. Barring such a discovery, the idea is for the waste to spend the next 100,000 years underground.
The technical hurdles will be the easy bit. Far more difficult for France’s radioactive waste management agency, Andra, will be overcoming political opposition to the construction of the site — of any site — intended to serve as the final resting place for tons of radioactive waste.
Six decades after the construction of the first wave of nuclear power plants, no country has opened a permanent storage site. Spent nuclear fuel and other contaminated […]
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Mike Cason, - Alabama Media
Stephan: Here you see the real moral values of the Christofascist fundamentalist cult. These people endlessly talk about Jesus invoking his name, but it is all sham, as their actions make very clear.
Where do you have to be psychologically to demand that a 12 year old, barely pubescent girl raped by a an adult male relative should be forced to bear the child resulting from that rape?
The full Alabama Court of Civil Appeals ruling can be found at:
Abortion Ruling for 12-Year-old by
Mike Cason BIRMINGHAM — A former state court official and a counselor for pregnant women today criticized an Alabama court ruling allowing a 12-year-old girlwho was raped by an adult relative to have an abortion without parental consent.
They said the girl was not mature enough to make the decision and not equipped to deal with what they said would be the negative long-term consequences.
Last week, the Alabama Court of Civil Appeals upheld a juvenile court’s ruling that the girl’s horrific circumstances warranted allowing a waiver to the requirement for parental consent for a minor to have an abortion. State law allows for waivers.
The district attorney in the girl’s county opposed the waiver and appealed the juvenile court decision, which came on June 27. Neither the girl’s name nor the county was made public in the appeals court opinion.
Win Johnson, who was legal director for the Administrative Office of Courts under former Chief Justice Roy Moore, and Lorie Mullins, executive director of COPE Pregnancy Center in Montgomery, held a news conference today at the state judicial building.
Johnson spoke both about his staunch opposition to abortion overall and about leaving it up to a child whether to have the procedure.
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Thursday, July 20th, 2017
Media Matters Staff, - Media Matters
Stephan: This is a transcript taken from NRATV. It is a deliberate and blatant effort to stir up race hatred, and social violence. It is also a pack of lies. No question South Africa is a violent country but to give you a sense of proportion in 2016 16 people a day were killed by guns in South Africa. In the United States during that same period 92 people a day were killed by guns.
Lies, distortions, disinformation and race conflict, pretty much par for the course for this loathsome operation. The National Rifle Association in my view is an evil organization and I do not see how an ethical life-affirming person can possibly belong to the NRA. It is a measure of how badly America has degenerated that the NRA is thriving.
GRANT STINCHFIELD (HOST): Our race relations are strained here in American after eight years of Barack Obama, but nowhere is near as bad as it is in South Africa where white families are being tortured and killed almost every day in racist violence. It is a warning for the United States that you will never hear from the mainstream media in this country. Veteran Army Ranger and Frontlines correspondent Chuck Holton joins me with more on this. Chuck, I know you’ve been looking into this, particularly doing some research, and really the things that we’re starting to learn are frightening and I guess it’s not shocking that the mainstream media is not talking about this.
CHUCK HOLTON: Right, you know the parallels between what’s happening in South Africa and the blatant racism and violence we’re seeing from people like the Black Lives Matter crowd, from people like Louis Farrakhan and his minions, is happening in spades in South Africa. The violence against farmers is being called for by government officials, it’s being celebrated by politicians, and the scary thing is, it’s kind of a warning for what could happen in the United States […]
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