Trump to lift military gear ban for local police

Stephan:  Quite predictably fascists want militarized  police forces, and Trump is no exception. This is exactly the wrong direction for a democracy to go, as history makes clear.

Alabama sheriff and his new military gear

The Trump administration will unveil a new plan Monday to roll back limits on a controversial program that provides local law enforcement agencies with surplus military gear, marking the end of a policy implemented during the Obama administration.

President Barack Obama issued an executive order in 2015 prohibiting the transfer of a host of equipment, including armored vehicles, grenade launchers, high-caliber weapons and camouflage uniforms following controversy over the “militarization” of the police response to unrest in Ferguson, Missouri.
“We’ve seen how militarized gear can sometimes give people a feeling like there’s an occupying force as opposed to a force that’s part of the community that’s protecting them and serving them,” Obama said at the time. “It can alienate and intimidate local residents and send the wrong message.”
President Donald Trump will sign a new executive order Monday rescinding Obama’s directive and Attorney General Jeff Sessions addressed the policy change during a speech at the annual conference of the Fraternal Order of […]

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New app ships affordable birth control to women, no doctor’s visit required

Stephan:  The Christofascists, defined in part by their lack of Christian charity and their obsession to take away women's ability to control their own bodies, have made it very difficult in the Red value states where they are in power for girls and women to get birth control.  Now there is a new option. If you live in a Red value state you might pass this report along to girls and women you know who might find it useful.

Nurx users must answer a few medical questions before a medical provider can provide a birth control prescription.
Credit: Nurx

RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA — Whether it’s a 30-year-old woman who has no time for doctor’s visits, or an embarrassed teen who doesn’t want to tell her parents she wants to use birth control, Nurx brings the doctor’s visit to their palms and eliminates a trip to the pharmacy.

Nurx is a start-up focused on making birth control more accessible through an app, according to a company statement.

After talking to one of Nurx’s licensed doctors, either by its messaging feature or by phone, teens and women can get birth control shipped to their homes, according to Nurx’s website. It automatically refills the prescription about every three months.

Users must answer a few medical questions and upload identification before getting a prescription. User information remains confidential, according to its website, and Nurx encrypts users’ conversations and transactions.

“In North Carolina, girls at any age can get birth control from a […]

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ExxonMobil allegedly misled the public on climate change for 40 years

Stephan:  It is the tobacco story all over again. The tobacco industry knew decades before it became public that their products sickened and killed people. But profit was more important than integrity. And now we have this. An industry that has put the entire planet at risk, and has known that what they are doing is doing that. But, once again, profit is more important than either adaptation, or integrity. Exxon Mobil and the other carbon multinationals had years to take their trillions and create a carbon alternative, but greed and vision rarely go together. And so all life on the planet is at risk.

Steam rises from towers at an Exxon Mobil refinery in Baytown, Texas. Exxon Internal documents show ExxonMobil believed that climate change could be a major problem as early as 1977
Credit: AP Photo/Pat Sullivan

ExxonMobil officials reportedly knew about the dangers of climate change as early as 1977 but continued to publicly raise doubts about the science behind it for more than 40 years, a new study by Harvard University has found.

Researchers examined 187 public and private communications from the company between 1977 and 2014 and found that there was a massive discrepancy between the way the oil and gas giant talked about climate change publicly and privately. In internal documents, around 80 percent allegedly acknowledged that climate change was “real and human caused,” but only 12 percent of “advertorials” – editorial-style advertisements in the New York Times – said it was cause for concern.

“We conclude that ExxonMobil contributed to advancing climate science – by way of its scientists’ academic publications – but promoted doubt about it in advertorials,”

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The US coal industry is going out, not with a whimper, but with a burst of rent-seeking

Stephan:  The profit only model ultimately implodes; it is a failed economic model. Here, and in the next story, we see case studies of the principle; a negative proof of the Theorem of Wellbeing. The coal industry could have assessed the situation and begun a transition that would have left them as powers in the emerging non-carbon era. Instead this is what coal has become.

“Welcome to the small-government party. What kind of subsidies would you like?” Credit: CAP Photo/Susan Walsh

The US coal industry is dying — but not with any dignity. As the end approaches, its sense of aggrieved entitlement is increasingly naked, its demands for government handouts increasingly frantic. As dread builds, shame has left the building.

The story of coal’s decline has been told many times now (see this post for more), but at root, it’s not complicated: The industry’s product is outmoded.

Natural gas and wind power are cheaper than coal power in most places, and solar power is heading the same direction. What’s more, wind and solar (variable renewable energy, or VRE) and natural gas complement each other. VRE is completely clean but variable. Natural gas is moderately clean but flexible. Variable and flexible work well together; they are the basis for the modern grid. (Whether we can find equally flexible but entirely clean alternatives to natural gas in the coming decades is the most pressing issue facing […]

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Nuclear power plants are ‘bleeding cash’

Stephan:  And finally, here is what is happening in the nuclear industry, like coal a dying sector bleeding money. If wellbeing had been a social priority the civilian nuclear industry would never have been created and this story, unlike coal will never be gone. As I have covered in SR, we're going to being dealing with nuclear waste functionally forever. All of this is good news.  I hope I have made it clear with these three reports that for all the kicking and screaming the Carbon Energy Era is coming to an end.    

The V.C. Summeer Nuclear STations in South Carolina.
Credit: AP/Chuck Burton

“It sometimes seems like U.S. and European nuclear companies are in competition to see which can heap greater embarrassment on their industry,” the Financial Times wrote earlier this month.

This appears to be the summer that the final nails are put in the coffin of the much-overhyped U.S. nuclear renaissance — despite President Trump’s comment in June that “we will begin to revive and expand our nuclear energy sector, which I’m so happy about.”

The nuclear industry is so uncompetitive now that over half of all existing U.S. nuclear power plants are “bleeding cash” according to a Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) report released earlier this summer. BNEF found that $2.9 billion is lost every year by just 55 percent of all the nuclear plants in the United States.

But, as the chart below shows, even the profitable plants have the narrowest of positive operating margins.

NEGATIVE OPERATING MARGINS ARE […]

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