Stephan: Coal, like nuclear, has left American with weeping buboes of poisonous pollution. It will take generations to heal what these industries did to the environment, and the people who live proximate to their sites. This is the best general article on the real coal legacy that I have read. It is very depressing, but important to read.
HAROLD, Ky.—Along the winding, two lane road that leads to Tracy Neece’s mountain, there’s no hint of the huge scars in the hills beyond the oaks and the pines.
Green forests cover steep slopes on each side of the road, which turns from blacktop to dusty gravel. Modest homes are nestled into the bottomlands along a creek with gardens that grow corn and zucchini under a hot summer sun.
The first sign of the devastation above is a glimpse of a treeless mesa, a landform more appropriate in the West.
As Neece navigates his Ford F-150 pickup truck past an abandoned security booth, he drives into a barren expanse. The forest is gone, replaced by grasses. The tops and sides of entire mountains have been blasted away by dynamite.
Neece stops at about 1,000 feet above the hollow to look at what is left of his mountain, where a coal mining company walked away and left sheer cliffs, exposed and dangerous, after miners gouged the black bituminous coal out of the mountainside with huge earth moving machines.
Stephan: I am not the only person who tracks trends but when I came across this article, I realized that my sense of trends is rather different from what Fast Company thinks of as trends and I thought my readers might find this of interest.
Illustration: Daniel Salo/Fast Company
After 20 years, the Y2K era is back. COVID-aside, we’ve watched as techno-optimism, ranging from the Metaverse to NFTs, has been off the charts. Countless millionaires have been minted overnight in cryptocurrency and algorithmically generated art.
But we’re here to splash a bit of cold water on the hype cycle going into 2022, with topics ranging from the blockchain to the hybrid workplace to “sustainable” DTC companies. And we enlisted a team of thoughtful designers to question the status quo of the contemporary hype cycle.
An overhyped trend can be something so sweet that it leaves a sour taste in your mouth, or so in the spotlight that it leaves more important topics in the shadows. “Overhype” might mean something that’s profitable, sure. But it still falls short of its sanctimonious positioning or actual ability to impact and improve our world.
Without further ado, here are the most overhyped trends of 2022.
The Metaverse
We, like so many others, have been pursuing concepts around the Metaverse for years. While AR and VR have long been assumed […]
Stephan: Amy Coney Barrett, in my opinion, has no business being an Associate Justice on the Supreme Court. It isn't just that she does not have the legal chops for the post, there is also the issue of her being a member of a religious cult with views completely out of synch with the general American culture. And then there is the fact that Donald Trump nominated her, and McConnell and the MAGAt Republicans in the senate confirmed her, specifically because her cult is strongly anti-choice, again a minority position in the American culture, and she would vote against a woman's ability to control her own body. So how did she get that appointment. This article provides some insight and shows, once again, how corrupt the American government became under criminal Trump's administration.
Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett stands during a group photo of the justices at the Supreme Court in Washington, DC, on April 23, 2021. Credit: Erin Schaff / Getty
A conservative dark money group led by former president Donald Trump’s judicial adviser Leonard Leo bankrolled Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court confirmation campaign with nearly $22 million in anonymous cash, while another nonprofit Leo helps steer saw a fundraising bonanza and showered cash on other organizations boosting Barrett, according to tax returns obtained by us.
The new taxreturns shed light on how Barrett’s successful, last-minute confirmation campaign was aided by a flood of dark money. They also reveal the rapid growth of Leo’s already highly successful dark money network and its tentacles in the broader conservative movement.
Corporate interests with access to nearly unlimited money have a huge stake in tilting the court to the right: in recent years, the court has played a pivotal role not only in swaying social policy, but also in shifting economic policy and corporate regulations. In Barrett’s first year, she has […]
Stephan: Have you noticed that MAGAt world constantly criticizes what it, itself, is doing. It is a well-established technique of misdirection, blame others for what you yourself are doing. Stop the Steal is a classic example of this. The people who were actually trying to steal the election were the Republicans, as story after story has confirmed. Here is the latest.
New documents reveal that the pro-Trump fringe group Liberty Center for God and Country (LCGC), “led a lucrative fundraising blitz in the run-up to the election and quietly networked with now-notorious election denialists. Their work came to light in October of that year when former Houston Police captain Mark Aguirre, 63, allegedly rammed his SUV into a man’s truck, forced the man onto the ground at gunpoint, and accused him of transporting 750,000 fraudulent ballots,” The Daily Beast reported. The driver of the truck was “an innocent air conditioner technician” named David Lopez-Zuniga.
Aguirre was indicted this week for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
“[Aguirre] crossed the line from dirty politics to commission of a violent crime and we are lucky no one was killed. His alleged investigation was backward […]
Stephan: Here is some more good news from the Biden administration. They are putting well-qualified people on the American judiciary; judges who will actually serve the law and not their political prejudices.
As 2021 draws to a close, President Joe Biden has good reason to be frustrated. His legislative agenda is stymied in the Senate. His executive authority is under assault from Donald Trump’s judges. His administration was blindsided, again, by a spiraling COVID surge, this time with omicron. But there is one front on which Biden has a near-perfect score: judicial nominations. Over the past year, the White House has put forth slate after slate of diverse, well-qualified, progressive nominees—and the Senate has swiftly confirmed them. Biden’s breakneck pace, combined with his choice of nontraditional judges, has shattered too many records to count. No, the president has not loosened Donald Trump’s stranglehold on the Supreme Court. But his transformation of the lower courts will still have a profound impact on American law for decades to come.
President Joe Biden at the White House in November. Credit: Samuel Corum/Getty
There are two defining features of Biden’s push to remake the federal judiciary: speed and diversity. Let’s start with speed. In his first year, just 19 […]
