Month: February 2018

Life comes at you fast, and in technology, it’s never been faster.

The future is knocking at the door, as much as Trump and co. would like to nail it shut.

Justin Gillis and Hal Harvey in the New York Times:

DENVER — Imagine planning your next trip and finding that Delta was selling first-class seats for less than the cramped middle seats in the back of the plane.

So you fly first class to New York and walk into the best French restaurant, only to discover that every dish is cheaper than the burger and fries down the street. Waiter, bring the duck à l’orange!

Fanciful as that might sound, something a bit like it is happening right now in the world of electricity.

Xcel Energy is a utility company with millions of electric customers in the middle of the country, from Texas to Michigan. In booming Colorado, the company asked for proposals to construct big power plants using wind turbines and solar panels.

The bids have come in so low that the company will be able to build and operate the new plants for less money than it would have to pay just to keep running its old, coal-burning power plants.

You read that right: In parts of the country, wind and solar plants built from scratch now offer the cheapest power available, even counting old coal, which was long seen as unbeatable.

Xcel, Colorado’s biggest power company, has pitched a plan to regulators that will involve replacing two large coal-burning units with renewable energy and possibly some natural gas. The company expects to save tens of millions of dollars as a result. Power bills in Colorado have been falling recently, and they are likely to fall further with this plan.

Continue reading “Renewables Becoming the Cheapest Option Across US and the World”

Above, I used important points from communication expert George Lakoff in the above vid on climate comms.

Dr. Lakoff is now under attack by one of the Trump Tower trolls.

San Francisco Chronicle:

Retired UC Berkeley linguist George Lakoff is being dragged into a legal fight over comments he made about possible Russian influence on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Lakoff was slapped with a libel and slander suit by Irakly “Ike” Kaveladze— a Georgian American businessman who attended a highly scrutinized Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 between members of Trump’s inner circle and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. She was allegedly dangling dirt to Team Trump about Hillary Clinton.

The suit Kaveladze filed last week in Orange County Superior Court stemmed from an interview Lakoff gave to MSNBC’s Chuck Todd, in which Lakoff called Kaveladze “the major person who has been responsible for money laundering from Russia and other post-Soviet countries.”

Kaveladze’s suit calls that accusation “baseless and scurrilous.”

Kaveladze’s legal team includes Scott Balber, who represented Trump in a suit he filed against Bill Maher in 2013 after the comedian promised to give $5 million to charity if Trump could prove he wasn’t “the spawn of his mother having sex with an orangutan.” Trump eventually dropped the suit.

Lakoff’s lawyer, Travis LeBlanc, promised a vigorous defense, saying California’s free-speech laws “protect individuals like Dr. Lakoff from being forced to engage in costly litigation of frivolous claims.”

Go Fund Me:

George Lakoff is being targeted by a baseless lawsuit  for exercising his First Amendment rights.  A lawyer who has previously represented Donald Trump has filed this lawsuit on behalf of Irakly “Ike” Kaveladze, one of the eight people who attended a controversial meeting in Trump Tower in June 2016. That meeting is currently being investigated  by the highest levels of the United States government. Any amount you can give to Professor Lakoff’s legal defense fund will help protect freedom and truth.

The lawsuit alleges libel and slander. Professor Lakoff has retained a powerful legal team to vigorously defend against this attack on the First Amendment. Defending yourself from meritless lawsuits can be expensive. So, I’m asking my fellow citizens to give what they can to support his legal defense fund. Any donation you make will help pay legal costs – and protect freedom and truth. Continue reading “Communications Expert Sued by #TrumpRussia Perp”

If you think Science is expensive, try ignorance.

Washington Post:

The Trump administration is poised to ask Congress for deep budget cuts to the Energy Department’s renewable energy and energy efficiency programs, slashing them by 72 percent overall in fiscal 2019, according to draft budget documents obtained by The Washington Post.

Many of the sharp cuts would probably be restored by Congress, but President Trump’s budget, due out in February, will mark a starting point for negotiations and offer a statement of intent and policy priorities.

The document underscores the administration’s continued focus on the exploitation of fossil fuel resources — or, as Trump put it in his State of the Union address, “beautiful clean coal” — over newer renewable technologies seen as a central solution to the problem of climate change.

The Energy Department had asked the White House for more modest spending reductions to the renewable and efficiency programs, but people familiar with the process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share unfinished budget information, said the Office of Management and Budget had insisted on the deeper cuts.

The cuts would also be deeper than those the Trump administration sought for the current fiscal year but was unable to implement because of the budget impasse in Congress. The federal government has been operating on a series of continuing resolutions that have maintained existing spending. The current continuing resolution expires Feb. 8.

Not just renewable energy. In the midst of the worst flu epidemic in decades, Republicans heading toward gutting the Center for Disease Control as well.

The Center for Disease Control.

Think Progress:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) dwindling pot of money aimed at fighting infectious-disease epidemics like Ebola will run out this year, and the agency doesn’t anticipate new dedicated funds. So the CDC is scaling back epidemic prevention work in 39 countries, and this has experts, including a United Nations Dispatch on Friday, saying “you should be freaking out.”

The United States currently partners with 49 countries to address the global vulnerabilities to public health threats. The global health security agenda’s mission is clear: “ensure that a trained workforce has the tools needed to prevent, detect, and respond rapidly and effectively to infectious disease threats.”

Continue reading “The Stupid Party Strikes Again: Science on the Chopping Block”

Inexplicably ignored when it was released last year, (“The Shape of Water” – really?) the telling of a very important piece of hidden history, “Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House” completes, with “The Post”, and “All the President’s Men”, another essential point of view of the US as it was in 1972, and as it is now again.

Compare Liam Neeson’s Felt with Hal Holbrook’s “Deep Throat” in “All the Presidents..”.

Renato Mariotti in the New York Times:

For weeks, allies of President Trump ratcheted up pressure to “release the memo.” The impact, according to supporters, would be monumental: It would shake the F.B.I. “to its core” (Representative Jeff Duncan of South Carolina) or it would reveal abuses “100 times bigger” than what incited the American Revolution (Sebastian Gorka, a former White House official).

The president himself said, after the memo’s release on Friday, that it “vindicates” him in the probe.

But it does no such thing. The memo from House Republicans, led by Representative Devin Nunes, fell well short of the hype. Its main argument is that when the Justice Department sought a warrant to wiretap the former Trump adviser Carter Page, it did not reveal that Christopher Steele — the author of a controversial opposition-research dossier — was funded by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign through a law firm.

This is actually a fairly common — and rarely effective — argument made by defendants who seek to suppress evidence obtained by a warrant.

What might be the lasting legacy of the Nunes memo is how President Trump reacted to it. According to reports, Mr. Trump suggested “the memo might give him the justification to fire [the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein] — something about which Trump has privately mused — or make other changes at the Justice Department, which he had complained was not sufficiently loyal to him.”

In fact, Mr. Trump’s approval of the release of the memo and his comments that releasing it could make it easier for him to fire Mr. Rosenstein could help Robert Mueller, the special counsel, prove that Mr. Trump fired James B. Comey, then the F.B.I. director, with a “corrupt” intent — in other words, the intent to wrongfully impede the administration of justice — as the law requires.

Continue reading “All the President’s Meh: The Unmemorable Memo”

Apparently this is on the “Black Panther” soundtrack .
Looking like a huge blockbuster, can only imagine the impact in Africa, Asia, South America.

NPR:

Just days after Kendrick Lamar shared the official tracklist to Marvel’s Black Panther soundtrack, the rapper and Toronto R&B star The Weeknd unleash their collaboration from the album, “Pray For Me.”

“Tell me who’s goin’ save me from myself / When this life is all I know? / Tell me / Who’s goin’ save me from this hell? / Without you, I’m all alone,” croons Weeknd over the analog, quasi-dance beat.

Continue reading “Music Break: The Weeknd, Kendrick Lamar – Pray For Me”

Continue reading “FBI Ticked……Tick..Tick..Tick..Tick…”

There’s dumb, and there’s too-dumb-for-Trump dumb.

UPDATE-Washington Post:

The White House plans to withdraw its controversial nominee to head the Council on Environmental Quality, Kathleen Hartnett White, according to two administration officials briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the decision has not been announced yet.

One of the officials briefed on Hartnett White’s plans said that her nomination had failed to gather momentum even as some of the administration’s other senior environmental policy picks had won approval, with some Senate Republicans raising questions about her expertise.

Hartnett White, who once headed the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and now serves as a fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, has stirred controversy because of her statements on climate change. Testifying last fall before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, she said that while humans probably contribute to current warming, “the extent to which, I think, is very uncertain.”

Her comments, which echoed some other appointees of President Trump, contradicts the conclusion of an overwhelming number of scientific experts and the findings of the federal government. Leading scientific assessments have repeatedly found that climate change is fueled largely by human greenhouse gas emissions.

Reposting from November 9, 2017.

Senators play with Kathleen Hartnett White, Trump appointee to Council on Environmental Quality.

Like baffling a cat with a laser pointer.

SplinterNews:

Kathleen Hartnett White, who was nominated to lead the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality, tried and failed to defend her denial of climate change during a Senate confirmation hearing for the position on Wednesday.

During the hearing, Sen. Ben Cardin, a Democrat from Maryland, bluntly asked Hartnett White if she believed in climate change. “I am uncertain,” she answered before realizing she was clearly off script. “No, I’m not. I jumped ahead. Climate change is of course real.” Hm. It sure sounds like Hartnett White was coached to acknowledge climate change, but question its causes. Scott Pruitt, current Environmental Protection Agency administrator, pulled a similar stunt during his confirmation hearing.

Hartnett White also confirmed that she wasn’t a scientist, which seems to be a theme amongst hopeful Trump administration environmental and agricultural appointees. “I’m not a scientist, but in my personal capacity I have many questions that remain unanswered by current climate policy,” Hartnett White told Cardin. “I think we indeed need to have more precise explanation of the human role and the natural role.”

Continue reading “Trump Dumps Dumbass Denialist Doyenne”

President Trump, no surprise,  is nominating a cadre of the stupidest and most ideologically driven judicial candidates in history.

The moron above had to withdraw – but there’s plenty more where he came from,  and the GOP Senate has been more than happy to pass on the overwhelming majority so far.

Yale Environment 360:

Lawyer Richard Ayres has been fighting for the environment in federal courts for nearly five decades, but he says he’s never seen an onslaught on basic environmental protections like the one coming out of the Trump White House. Still, something scares Ayres even more than the determination of the Trump team to dismantle President Barack Obama’s climate change initiatives, shrink federally protected lands, weaken smog standards, scale back habitat for rare species, and expand drilling into the Atlantic and Arctic oceans.

What most unnerves Ayres and other veteran environmental lawyers and legal experts is the unprecedented opportunity President Trump has to fill the federal judiciary with anti-regulatory, pro-business appointees.

Trump has far more openings to fill than previous presidents, and Democrats have far less power to block his nominees than the opposition party has had in the past. And while Trump has trailed his predecessor in nominating officials for the executive branch, he has far outpaced recent presidents in selecting federal judges. So far, he’s nominated 31 judges to fill 140 open slots out of the 890 federal judgeships. By contrast, Obama had 54 openings for federal judges when he took office.

Not only will these judges potentially play a role in upholding Trump’s rollbacks of environmental protections, they likely will remain in their posts for decades after Trump leaves office. Federal judges are appointed for life, and so far Trump’s appointees are younger on average than appointees of previous presidents.

“Trump is going to appoint a lot of judges that will change the complexion of the court system for a long time,” says Ayres, who has been a prominent environmental lawyer since 1970 and was one of the founders of the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It very well could be the biggest impact he has on the environment. Imagine another 10 percent of the judiciary filled with Trump appointees. Environmental organizations will fight back and litigate and save some things, but there’s a whole lot of damage that will take forever to repair — if it’s repairable.”

Among Trump’s early nominees is Ralph Erickson for the 8^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis. As a judge on the U.S. District Court in North Dakota, Erickson in 2015 blocked the implementation of President Obama’s Clean Water Rule in 13 states that had sued the Environmental Protection Agency; the rule expanded federal jurisdiction over certain streams, wetlands, and headwaters. The Trump administration plans to repeal the rule, a move opposed by conservationists but backed by many agriculture, construction, and energy groups.

Alliance for Justice:

On February 18, 2015, Judge John Tinder of Indiana took senior status from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. After Senator Daniel Coats did not return the blue slip for President Obama’s nominee to the court, Myra Selby, on May 8, 2017, President Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett, a professor at the Notre Dame Law School, to fill the vacancy. Alliance for Justice opposes Barrett’s nomination.

Continue reading “Trump’s Judges: The GOP’s Slow Poison for Democracy, and the Planet”