Sunday, October 28th, 2018
Frankie Schembri, - Science
Stephan: Here is more good news about noncarbon energy. When I read about these breakthroughs, and this is an important one, I always wonder what would the world be like today if we had followed Jimmy Carter's 1973 plan to exit carbon, and provide major funding for noncarbon?
Imagine being stuffed into a crowded train car and noticing a less crowded one just down the platform. You’d probably want to move over as soon as possible. Particles that follow this balancing act—known as osmosis—spontaneously move from an area of high concentration to one of low concentration. Now, scientists have used this tendency to create a power-producing membrane that can harvest electric current from nothing but salty water.
When ionic salts, made of bundles positively and negatively charged particles, dissolve in water, the bundles break apart, leaving positively and negatively charged particles free to participate in osmosis. By placing charged, thin membranes in between salty water and freshwater, scientists can create an expressway for the flowing particles, generating electric current. But these membranes are often expensive to manufacture and they tend to get leaky over time. That lets particles pass back through in the wrong direction, cutting into how much electricity they can produce.
Now, researchers have developed a new kind of gatekeeper—a “two-faced” membrane that has different properties on either side, from the size of the pores to the […]
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Saturday, October 27th, 2018
FRANK DALE, - Think Progress
Stephan: I have watched Trump television over the last couple of days as we have gone through this assault on the leadership of the Democratic Party by a Trumpkrieger. I never had any doubt the bomber would turn out to a White supremacist Trump supporter, probably a middle-aged man, and a loser. And so it has turned out to be. But on Trump television it is another world entirely. Yesterday this was what they covered and how they reported it.
In less than two weeks America will decide which direction it is going to go. If you're not voting you're voting for Trump
Fox News and Fox Business reached new levels of shamelessness to defend President Donald Trump on Thursday night, invoking conspiracy theories, and Cher, to claim that Democrats are actually to blame for recent violence.
After explosive devices were mailed to numerous prominent Democrats — all frequent targets of Trump, including former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and former Vice President Joe Biden — Trump has faced intense scrutiny for his history of promoting physical violence.
The White House and their Republican allies have denied Trump’s rhetoric could have inspired recent violence like the attempted bombings that also targeted Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), George Soros, and CNN.
Fox News and Fox Business followed those conservative cues on Thursday in an evening of programming that was bizarre even by Fox’s standards.
7 p.m. ET
While DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was telling Fox News’ Martha MacCallum there are no plans “right now to shoot at people” traveling in a migrant caravan, MAGA man Lou Dobbs, fresh off of deleting
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Saturday, October 27th, 2018
Stephan: David Frum is a Republican in the sense that word meant prior to the capture of the party by the White supremacist christofascist movement. You can sense his pain and discomfort as he talks about what has happened to his party under Trump.
David Frum
David Frum, who is an author and conservative editor at the Atlantic magazine, thinks Republicans have backed themselves into a corner.
In Frum’s book Trumpocracy, he argues that Republicans are wedded to an ideology that cannot succeed democratically. They have virtually abandoned the democratic process, he believes, and have chosen to support a demagogue who can push their unpopular agenda. It’s a strong rebuke of the current president and the Republican establishment that has enabled him at every step.
I spoke to Frum about the dangers of this moment, and why he thinks Republicans will, ultimately, have to face up to the fact that what they believe can’t be achieved if everybody votes.
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Sean Illing
What’s the main argument you’re making in this book?
David Frum
The argument I’m making is that Donald Trump’s rococo personality is outrageous and ridiculous and consumes all of our attention, but what we really need to pay attention to is his system of power. A president does not rule […]
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Saturday, October 27th, 2018
Kristina Marusic, - Environmental Health News
Stephan: Trump, his administration, and the Republican zombies of the Congress are doing everything they can to rescind air pollution regulations at the behest of their corporate masters. It couldn't be more transparent. These changes are not an abstraction. Here's some data to bring this trend into the realm of reality.
Credit: John Fowler/Flickr
PITTSBURGH—Air pollution is to blame for up to 33 million emergency room visits for asthma attacks around the world annually, according to a new study.
While previous research has looked at the connection between air pollution and a number of other diseases, the new study, led by researchers at George Washington University and published today in Environmental Health Perspectives, is the first to quantify the global burden of asthma caused by unhealthy air.
Asthma is the most prevalent chronic respiratory disease worldwide, affecting about 358 million people. In Pittsburgh, the region’s long-term problems with air pollution and asthma persist: Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is situated, scored all F’s on the American Lung Association’s 2018 air quality report card, and recent research suggests that an estimated 22 percent of children in the most polluted parts of the city have asthma—as compared with the national average of 8 percent.
“A growing body of literature over the last several decades links health and air pollution, but we haven’t had a way to incorporate asthma before,” Susan C. Anenberg, lead author of the study and […]
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Saturday, October 27th, 2018
Greg Palast, Investigative Reporter - truthout
Stephan: I keep telling you Republicans don't like democracy and do anything they can to undermine its substance even while prattling on about protecting its form. Where are my facts to back up such a statement? Well, here is a small part of that evidence. I frankly do not understand why Brian Kemp is not in jail, nor how he could possibly be running for public office while at the same time he is doing everything he can to rig the election. Where is the state legislature in all this? The answer, of course, is that a majority of legislators are Republicans, and so complicit in Kemp's assault on democracy in Georgia. Even worse some large but unknown number of Georgians are perfectly okay with what Kemp and the legislature are doing.
Last year, Brian Kemp, Georgia’s secretary of state canceled the registrations of over half a million Georgians because they left the state or moved to another county. Except they didn’t. The nation’s top experts in address location reviewed Kemp’s list of purged voters — and returned the names and addresses of 340,134 who never moved at all.
John Lenser, CEO of CohereOne of San Rafael, California, led the team analyzing the purge list. He concluded, “340,000 of those voters remained at their original address. They should have never been removed from the voter registration rolls.”
This is the story of the mass exodus from Georgia that never happened, and the mass purge of voters by Kemp, GOP candidate for governor, through methods guaranteed to disproportionately take away the vote from the young, the poor and voters of color.
It began five years ago, when Kemp stonewalled my first requests for information on purges in Georgia, first for Al Jazeera and Rolling Stone,now for Truthout and Democracy Now! It took my lawyer’s threat of a federal lawsuit, filed last week in Atlanta […]
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