Thursday, February 7th, 2019
ADDY BAIRD, - Think Progress
Stephan: The linkage of disproportionate incarceration of people of color, and keeping former prisoners from voting, is one of the many White Supremacist moves that have corrupted American democracy. Here is an example of what I mean.
Credit: Philip Scott Andrews/The Washington Post/Getty
One out of every four African American voters is disenfranchised in the state of Kentucky, a higher rate than any other state, as a result of the state’s law barring people with felony convictions from voting, according to a new report from the Kentucky League of Women Voters released Tuesday.
Kentucky is one of three states that currently has a lifetime ban keeping people with felony convictions — also known as returning citizens — from voting, and the report found that the state ranks third in the United States in rate of disenfranchisement. Currently, more than 312,000 people in Kentucky are currently without ballot access, or one out of every 11 adults. (For context, nationally, just one in 40 people, about 2.5 percent of the country, are ineligible to vote due to felony convictions, including about 9.1 percent of African Americans.)
In 2016, lawmakers in Kentucky passed a bill that allowed some people in the state with low-level felony convictions to have their convictions expunged and right […]
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Wednesday, February 6th, 2019
David Armstrong, - ProPublica/STAT
Stephan: This story is one of the most amazing examples of despicable greed and a lack of ethics I have read in some time, and that's saying a lot given what is going on in the United States.
More than 200,000 people in the U.S. alone have died from the drugs this evil family markets. And then, having created hundreds of thousands of addicts they tried to sell the cure for the problem they created, as this fact-based article describes
It is my personal view that every adult member of the Sackler family who in any way benefits from Pardue Pharma should be arrested and tried in the World Court for crimes against humanity and imprisoned for life. All the assets of the Pardue Pharma should be confiscated and used to help those whose lives were destroyed by the Sacklers, and committed to research on how to treat pain without creating addiction.
Families and friends who have lost loved ones to opioid overdoses leave pill bottles outside the Purdue Pharma headquarters in protest on 17 August 2018. Credit: Jessica Hill/AP
Not content with billions of dollars in profits from the potent painkiller OxyContin, its maker explored expanding into an “attractive market” fueled by the drug’s popularity — treatment of opioid addiction, according to previously secret passages in a court document filed by the state of Massachusetts.
In internal correspondence beginning in 2014, Purdue Pharma executives discussed how the sale of opioids and the treatment of opioid addiction are “naturally linked” and that the company should expand across “the pain and addiction spectrum,” according to redacted sections of the lawsuit by the Massachusetts attorney general. A member of the billionaire Sackler family, which founded and controls the privately held company, joined in those discussions and urged staff in an email to give “immediate attention” to this business opportunity, the complaint alleges.
ProPublica reviewed the […]
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Wednesday, February 6th, 2019
Metin Celebi, Marc Chupka, Kelly Oh, Richard Sweet , - The Brattle Group
Stephan: Over the last week, three readers have written sending me various articles about how Bill Gates is pushing new nuclear technologies, asking what I thought about that.
I am utterly opposed to any civilian nuclear power technology currently available or being discussed. As I have said before virtually no one, and I include most Congress members, and all of the White House staff, seems to understand that civilian nuclear power was an evil bastard creature of the Cold War. It was brought to life to assure Westinghouse and General Electric that there would be enough nuclear technicians and engineers to maintain America's nuclear navy, and enough profit to justify the investment those corporations would have to make to develop workable nuclear reactors.
If few people know that, even fewer know that Admiral Hyman Rickover almost single-handedly created America's nuclear navy, against considerable resistance from the navy itself, until Admiral William Raburn and his team developed the first submarine capable ballistic missile, the Polaris, which allowed the defense triad upon which the nuclear Mutually Assured Destruction strategy was based.
And fewer yet know that Admiral Rickover requested that he be called to testify before Congress about civilian nuclear power as his last public duty. In that testimony, he stated unequivocally that civilian nuclear power was a bad idea that would create endless problems, never be truly profitable, and leave the U.S. with a huge waste problem. History has shown he was right about everything.
Here is a very good assessment of the current state of affairs and the absolute wrong-headedness of the Trump administration, in trying to keep this destructive industry going.
As to coal power: as this report makes clear anyone with an IQ bigger than their shoe size, except Trump, Pence, and the owners of the coal industry, knows that is a bad idea.
Credit: Shutterstock
The Trump Administration has responded to continued retirements of coal and nuclear units by proposing policies intended to prevent any further retirements of the traditional “baseload” fleet, under the premise that such retirements impair grid reliability, “resilience” and, more recently, national security. The first attempt at imposing a policy designed to deter retirements occurred when the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) proposed a rule for Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) consideration in October 2017. That proposal, which would have required cost-of-service based payments to merchant coal and nuclear plants in certain Regional Transmission Organizations (RTOs) and Independent System Operators (ISOs) regions, was unanimously rejected by the FERC in January 2018. The FERC decided instead to examine the premise of grid resilience in greater depth at a regional level.
The second major policy attempt was described in a May 31, 2018 article by Bloomberg Energy, which revealed a draft memorandum (“Draft Memo”) by the DOE that outlined a proposal to prevent retirement of certain generation plants (“Subject Generation Facilities” or SGFs) that might, according […]
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Wednesday, February 6th, 2019
, - Smart Energy International
Stephan: The United States which arguably has the least competent government in the developed world is doing everything the Republicans can think of to keep oil, gas, and coal operational and in the forefront of power generation, with nuclear tagging along.
Meanwhile, governments run by smarter people who create policies fostering social wellbeing, such as the Netherlands, are moving in the opposite direction. Here is some good news from there.
The Dutch Flag
The Netherlands has joined a host of nations looking to pass forward-thinking green energy legislation, as
Europe takes serious steps to cut fossil fuel use.
The Dutch government has confirmed a date for the country’s parliament to participate in a round-table discussion that could see the sale of conventionally-fuelled vehicles banned by 2025. This will be followed by a debate scheduled for October 13th.
If the suggestions put forward by the country’s Labour Party are adopted in March, Holland will join Norway and Denmark in making a concerted move to develop its electric car industry.
This follows news from Germany, which saw all of its power supplied by renewable energy, specifically solar and wind power on one day in May last year as part of the economic powerhouse’s plan to phase out nuclear energy and fossil fuels.
Outside of Europe, countries like India and China have demanded the use of cars on alternate days in an attempt to lower exhaust fumes which cause serious health problems for the populations of both countries.
Richard Smokers, the principal adviser […]
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Wednesday, February 6th, 2019
PETER DOCKRILL, - Science Alert
Stephan: Yet another bad surprise concerning climate change. Remember the two constants: First, the timeline is always collapsing; second, the outcome of change is always worse than predicted.
Here is the latest from Antarctic, and it is pretty scary.
Primary Source Citation: Heterogeneous retreat and ice melt of Thwaites Glacier, West Antarcticahttp://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau3433
Antarctic Credit: NASA/GSFC
Antarctica is not in a good place. In the space of only decades, the continent has lost trillions of tonnes of ice at alarming rates we can’t keep up with, even in places we once thought were safe.
Now, a stunning new void has been revealed amidst this massive vanishing act, and it’s a big one: a gigantic cavity growing under West Antarctica that scientists say covers two-thirds the footprint of Manhattan and stands almost 300 metres (984 ft) tall.
This huge opening at the bottom of the Thwaites Glacier – a mass infamously dubbed the “most dangerous glacier in the world” – is so big it represents an overt chunk of the estimated 252 billion tonnes of ice Antarctica loses every year.
Researchers say the cavity would once have been large enough to hold some 14 billion tonnes of ice. Even more disturbing, the researchers say it lost most of this ice volume over the last three years alone.
“We have suspected for years that Thwaites was not tightly attached to the bedrock beneath it,” says […]
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