Richard Stevens, - Alternet/Aeon
Stephan: Because technologies are advanced on the basis of profit not whether they foster wellbeing they often have unintended consequences that do great harm. Here is an example of what I mean.
Blue range LED light
Light pollution is often characterised as a soft issue in environmentalism. This perception needs to change. Light at night constitutes a massive assault on the ecology of the planet, including us. It also has indirect impacts because, while 20 per cent of electricity is used for lighting worldwide, at least 30 per cent of that light is wasted. Wasted light serves no purpose at all, and excessive lighting is too often used beyond what is needed for driving, or shopping, or Friday-night football.
The electric light bulb is touted as one of the most significant technological advancements of human beings. It ranks right up there with the wheel, control of fire, antibiotics and dynamite. But as with any new and spectacular technology, there are invariably unintended consequences. With electric light has come an obliteration of night in much of the modern world; both outside in the city, and indoors during what was once ‘night’ according to the natural position of the Sun.
Life has […]
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Stephan: Bravo Amalgamated Transit Union Local 689. This is how you stop christofacists. This is real citizen action. If those who knew ICE agents involved with the child concentration camps would shun them that situation would change very quickly.
christofascists-in-Charlottesville
The Amalgamated Transit Union Local 689, the largest union for Washington, DC’s public transit system, is refusing to go along with a plan to have separate trains for participants of a controversial “Unite the Right” rally planned for August 12.
Jason Kessler organized last summer’s deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville and is organizing the rally as an “anniversary” celebration.
On Friday, The Washington Post reported that Metro board chairman Jack Evans said that the agency might provide separate trains for white nationalists attending the rally.
“We haven’t made any decisions about anything,” Evans said. “We’re just trying to come up with potential solutions on how to keep everybody safe.”
Transit workers were revolted by the proposal.
“Sources have shared with ATU Local 689 that a hate group with Ku Klux Klan affiliation will be provided three private Metro rail cars and police escort to Foggy Bottom Metro Station for the ‘Unite the Right’ 2018 rally,” ATU Local 698 said in a statement.
“More than 80% of Local 689’s membership is people of color, […]
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Marisa Fernandez, - Axios
Stephan: Now Trump wants to wash his hands of the concentration camp children passing them on to the ACLU. Do you think there is any perfidy, or moral abomination to which the Trump administration will not sink?
Credit: Michael Candelori/Pacific Press/LightRocket
The Department of Justice asked the American Civil Liberties Union in a court filing Thursday to take on the responsibility of reuniting immigrant children with their missing parents that have already been deported, Politico’s Ted Hesson reports.
Why it matters: The Trump administration has reunified 1,442 of the original 2,551 migrant children between the ages of 5 and 17 with their parents by the court-ordered deadline in late July. But there are still parents who have been deported back to their home countries without their children. As of the last update, DHS was unsure how many of the deported parents have been removed with their kids.
The details: The ACLU filed a class action lawsuit in March against the government’s new policy of separating immigrant families. A senior administration told Politico the filing “simply asks the court to require the ACLU to determine the wishes of and fulfill their obligations to their clients, as they have repeatedly represented in court that they […]
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Stephan: Unless you have fallen under the hallucination of Trump reality this story is going to make absolutely no sense, indeed to be so incoherent and bizarre as to be too over the top for a Netflix series. And yet, millions of Americans believe it. What am I talking about? Why, #QAnon of course. Buckle up dear readers and we will go into the twilight zone.
A Trump rally attendee holds a QAnon sign during a Make America Great Again rally Tuesday, July 31, 2018, at the Florida State Fair Grounds in Tampa Florida. Credit: NurPhoto/Getty
The Russia investigation is a sham. It’s actually a cover story for special counsel Robert Mueller and Donald Trump working together to expose thousands of pedophiles hidden in plain sight — including Hillary Clinton (and Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama), who will soon be under arrest. (Or perhaps already have been and are on their way to Guantanamo Bay.)
The GOP lost the Alabama special election for Jeff Sessions’s Senate seat on purpose — a plan devised years ago to reveal the use of fraudulent voting machines and, ultimately, take down none other than George Soros. Or the Rothschilds. Or the Illuminati.
And there’s no White House chaos at all; in fact, despite legal scandals and special counsel investigations and bile-laden tweets, everything, absolutely everything, is going just as Donald Trump intended it.
Welcome to QAnon, sometimes referred […]
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Stephan: I agree with this essay, and it is the first time I have seen it anyone publish it. Instead of tearing countries apart we should have been focused on issues like making sure there was peace between India and Pakistan.
Pakistan nuclear missile
Credit: AFP
“Pakistan is the most dangerous country in the world — not this year, not next year, but certainly down the road,” says Michael Morell, former acting CIA director.
The big picture: Pakistan has the world’s 5th largest population, 5th largest military and 6th largest nuclear arsenal. The danger begins, Morell says, with a dysfunctional economy and a rapidly growing population of young people without education or job prospects. Add to that a military that continues to call the shots as though war could break out at any moment.
“The main reason the military has a grip on decision-making is because of a long-held and now mistaken belief in Pakistan that India is an existential threat to Pakistan and that Islamabad must do everything it can to protect itself from that threat,” he says.
- “One of the areas in which this plays out is in Pakistan’s support to jihadists — in short, its support to terrorists fighting India. That support bleeds over […]
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