How to Protect Your Vote in the Fall Elections

Stephan:  Follow these steps where applicable. Make sure you are registered and vote as if your life depends on it, because it does.

With the midterm elections rapidly approaching, and with so much riding at both national and state level on voter turnout, the stakes could not be higher.
Credit: Justin Lane/EPA

With the midterm elections rapidly approaching, many Americans are beginning to worry about their votes.

A recent poll by Politico and Morning Consult found that 52% of registered voters believed Russia was likely to try to influence the 2018 midterm elections for Congress, while a Supreme Court decision in June upholding Ohio’s aggressive voter roll purging practices has renewed concerns about who gets stripped from state registration lists, especially among Democrats.

“The vote is a precious resource that we need to guard and make that we are able to express,” said Paul Beck, professor emeritus of political science at Ohio State University and an expert in voting behaviors. “Sometimes state practices get in the way of that.”

Here are some steps you can take to protect your vote this November and beyond.

Re-register […]

Read the Full Article

1 Comment

NantEnergy announces rechargeable zinc-air battery system

Stephan:  Another bit of good news about moving out of the carbon-energy era. This from an immigrant or the son of an immigrant, who probably wouldn't be here if Trump had been in power when his family came to America.

NantEnergy Chairman Patrick Soon-Shiong with his company’s rechargeable zinc-air battery cell.
Credit: Calvin B. Alagot / Los Angeles Times

Remote villages in Africa and Asia are receiving electricity using a little-known type of technology: zinc-air batteries.

The goal is to provide a battery that can capture renewable energy and store it for later use.

El Segundo-based NantEnergy announced Wednesday that it has created a rechargeable zinc-air battery storage system that can provide power at a lower cost than lithium-ion batteries.

The technology has been deployed in more than 110 villages serving 200,000 people who have no other access to electricity in their communities, said NantEnergy Chairman Patrick Soon-Shiong, who also is the owner of the Los Angeles Times.

“If you look at a map of Earth at night and […]

Read the Full Article

1 Comment

The Oil Companies not only knew fossil fuels caused climate change, they knew how bad it would get.

Stephan:  Here we see the truth of the oil industry. They knew what was happening, they knew how bad it would get, and they didn't give a damn because profit was more important than the health and wellbeing of human beings.

The full extent to which the fossil fuel industry, companies like Shell and Exxon, knew—as early as the 1970s—how their combustible products were contributing to irreversible warming of the planet, became public knowledge over the last few years. A series of painstakingly researched articles published in 2015 by the Pulitzer-prize winning Inside Climate News revealed an industry totally aware and informed for decades about the inevitable warming certain to occur as more and more carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels was released into the atmosphere.

In fact, the oil industry, and Exxon in particular, had the best climate models available, superior to those relied on by scientific community. And armed with the foreknowledge developed through those models, Exxon and the other oil companies planned and executed an elaborate, cynical long term strategy: to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in a comprehensive propaganda effort designed to raise doubts about the existence and cause of climate change, a phenomenon they well knew was irrefutable, based on their own research. By 2016 the industry’s lobbying to discredit the science of climate change had surpassed 

Read the Full Article

No Comments

China cancels US warship visit to Hong Kong amid military sanction backlash

Stephan:  The media simply has more or less given up covering anything other than the Washington cesspit, and the struggle to get a second Republican sexual predator on the supreme court. But that doesn't mean the rest of the world has stopped. I am running this article because I take it as a major alarm that a geopolitical crisis is brewing, like a storm in the Caribbean before it hits land as a hurricane. Overt recognition of the geopolitical incompetence of Trump and the people he has appointed, as you could tell from the humiliating laughter at Trump's presentation at the UN is another sign. There is a massive geopolitical realignment underway because of this incompetence and how it is going to play out is far from clear.

USS Wasp
Credit: U.S. Navy

The Chinese government has blocked a US Navy ship from docking in Hong Kong amid a growing diplomatic feud between the two countries over strict military sanctions imposed by Washington.

The USS Wasp, an amphibious assault ship comparable to a baby aircraft carrier, with a crew of more than 1,000 sailors, was scheduled to make a port call in Hong Kong next month according to two US officials.
It isn’t the first time Beijing has canceled a visit by a US warship in protest. Most recently, China denied the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis access to Hong Kong in 2016 after the ship hosted then US Secretary of Defense Ash Carter on a visit to the South China Sea.
“The Chinese side reviews and approves such request in accordance with the principle of sovereignty and in light of specific situation on a case-by-case basis,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said on Tuesday.
The move is likely to worsen already poor […]

Read the Full Article

No Comments

Vanishing Joshua trees: climate change will ravage US national parks, study says

Stephan:  Some of my happiest and most important experiences and memories took place in national park, forests, rivers and waterways, and I have always considered our national public lands a precious resource to be protected from one generation to the next. Thus, I take particular exception to the rape of public lands being carried out by the Republican Congress and the Trump administration. Now, because of their neglect to deal with climate change it appears our public lands will particularly suffer. Here is the story

Most of Joshua Tree national park could become uninhabitable for its eponymous trees, according to a new study.
Credit: Eric Lowenbach/Getty/Flickr RF

America’s national parks have warmed twice as fast as the US average and could see some of the worst effects of climate change, according to a new study. (Emphasis added)

Most of Joshua Tree national park could become uninhabitable for its eponymous trees, glaciers will continue to melt away at Glacier national park, and many other of America’s most treasured beauty spots could be rendered virtually unrecognizable by climate change, Patrick Gonzalez, the lead author of the study, writes in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

Even the tiniest of creatures are at risk in the worst-case predictions: the American pika, a small alpine mammal, may no longer be able to survive on park land.

“We are preserving the most remarkable ecosystems, and they happen to be in extreme environments,” said Gonzalez, a climate scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. Gonzalez is also the principal climate change scientist for the US National Park Service but conducted […]

Read the Full Article

No Comments