Stephan: Tom Cotton (AR), Ted Cruz (TX), Josh Hawley (MN), Roger Marshall (KS), Rand Paul (KY), and Tommy Tuberville (AL), six Republicans that have no business being senators, because they can't even manage to be decent human beings, but whose states elected them anyway. The problem with America once again turns out to be Americans who cannot control their hate.
Six Senate Republicans are trying to block legislation that would help combat the rise in hate crimes and violence against Asian Americans fueled by the coronavirus pandemic and a former president and members of his party who insist on calling it the “Chinese virus.”
Late Wednesday afternoon the Senate voted 92-6 to begin debate on the legislation, known as the “COVID–19 Hate Crimes Act.” Six Republicans voted against moving the legislation forward, in an attempt to block its passage.
The six are Senators Tom Cotton (AR), Ted Cruz (TX), Josh Hawley (MN), Roger Marshall (KS), Rand Paul (KY), and Tommy Tuberville (AL).
Missy Ryan, Pentagon Reporter - The Washington Post
Stephan: The United States spends more on the military-industrial complex than the next highest-spending SEVEN nations in the world COMBINED. You would think that such expenditures would guarantee that we had the most technologically advanced military, one so powerful it could not be challenged. You might think that, but you would be wrong. The American military-industrial complex, as Dwight Eisenhower warned us, has become one of the world's greatest grifts.
A U.S. Air Force KC-135 Stratotanker refuels a Swiss air force F-18 Hornet. Credit: Senior Airman Justine Rho/100th Air Refueling Wing Public Affairs
EVERETT, WASHINGTON — As they conduct bombing and surveillance missions around the globe, today’s U.S. military pilots rely on aerial refueling aircraft built as early as 1957, when the Soviet Union dominated American security fears, the average home cost $12,000 and “I Love Lucy” was debuting new episodes.
The cost of keeping those aging jets in the air has grown sharply while the military awaits a next-generation refueling plane whose rollout has been repeatedly delayed by design and production issues.
The Air Force’s two-decade effort to field a 21st-century tanker, one of several premier air systems whose development has been beset with problems, is emblematic of the challenges Pentagon leaders face in seeking to maintain the U.S. military’s shrinking edge over its chief competitor, China.
The United States, once the world’s undisputed military superpower, has been struggling for years to efficiently update its arsenal and field new technology in cutting-edge areas such as hypersonics and artificial intelligence, at a time when […]
Stephan: Plastics have become the Gollem of the age. I understand the use of plastics, but new bio-sensitive technologies not based on petroleum must be developed or we are literally going to pollute ourselves to death.
Credit: Mike Kemp/Getty
If you find yourself in some secluded spot in the American West—maybe Yellowstone, or the deserts of Utah, or the forests of Oregon—take a deep breath and get some fresh air along with some microplastic. According to new modeling, 1,100 tons of it is currently floating above the western US. The stuff is falling out of the sky, tainting the most remote corners of North America—and the world. As I’ve said before, plastic rain is the new acid rain.
But where is it all coming from? You’d think it’d be arising from nearby cities—western metropolises like Denver and Salt Lake City. But new modeling published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that 84 percent of airborne microplastics in the American West actually comes from the roads outside of major cities. Another 11 percent could be blowing all the way in from the ocean. (The researchers who built the model reckon that microplastic particles stay airborne for nearly a week, and that’s more than enough time for them to cross continents and oceans.)
Stephan: Here is an aspect of America's wealth inequality crisis -- yes, it is a major crisis, see SR archives -- that I had not considered or seen asserted based on data. But now we have that data, and I take it as yet another reason why U.S. wealth inequality needs to be addressed through the restructuring of our tax code.
A woman enjoys her choice of Krug or Dom Perignon champagne while relaxing in the first class cabin on a Singapore Airlines Airbus A380 flight. Credit: s.yume/Flickr
As world leaders prepare for this November’s United Nations Climate Conference in Scotland, a new report from the Cambridge Sustainability Commission reveals that the world’s wealthiest 5% were responsible for well over a third of all global emissions growth between 1990 and 2015.
“Rich people who fly a lot may think they can offset their emissions by tree-planting schemes or projects to capture carbon from the air. But these schemes are highly contentious and they’re not proven over time.” —Peter Newell, Sussex University
The report (pdf), entitled Changing Our Ways: Behavior Change and the Climate Crisis, found that nearly half the growth in absolute global emissions were cause by the world’s richest 10%, with the most affluent 5% alone contributing 37%.
“In the year when the U.K. hosts COP26, and while the government continues to reward some of Britain’s biggest polluters through tax credits, the commission report shows why this is precisely the wrong way to meet the U.K.’s […]
Stephan: The activities described in this report completes the transformation of the Republican Party into what it has become today.. This devolution, I think, will be seen by historians in the future, as a historically significant event. What these people are trying to do would condemn several billion people to misery, and cause countless deaths. The way to defuse these movements is to foster wellbeing.
Republican efforts to stall President Joe Biden’s climate agenda are slowly beginning to take shape. In March, a coalition of 12 Republican state attorneys general filed a lawsuit challenging Biden’s executive order creating a working group to establish a metric for the “social cost of carbon.” Led by Missouri’s attorney general, Eric Schmitt, the lawsuit charges that the order is an “enormous expansion of federal regulatory power” and that such cost calculations are “inherently speculative, policy-laden, and indeterminate” and should instead be undertaken by Congress.
In a similar vein, 21 Republican-controlled states, led by Texas and Montana, have sued the Biden administration over its decision to revoke a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, calling it an unconstitutional overuse of executive power that would diminish the states’ economies and tax revenue. Both lawsuits are pending in federal courts. Separately, in response to Biden’s alleged “hostility to the energy industry,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued an executive order in January directing state agencies to “use all lawful powers” to challenge federal […]
