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Open thread Nov. 2, 2021

Dan Crawford | November 2, 2021 6:09 am

Comments (7) | Digg Facebook Twitter |
7 Comments
  • Ron (RC) Weakley (A.K.A., Darryl For A While At EV) says:
    November 2, 2021 at 11:10 am

    It is a cool dreary drizzly day in both northern and central VA this election day.  The weather favors Youngkin, but early and mail-in voting favor McAuliffe.  At least the campaign ads will end regardless of the election results.  Wait until tomorrow.

    • Ron (RC) Weakley (A.K.A., Darryl For A While At EV) says:
      November 3, 2021 at 6:40 am

      [Oh, well.  I expected as much when McAuliffe had his “deplorables” moment.  Since he was only a gubernatorial candidate then he implied that his party was standing with him.  Apparently he was not up on the  1992 law change allowing public referendum to elect school boards rather than having them appointed.  Now Republicans think they have a mandate and they do, just not the mandate that they think they have.  Their actual mandate is to not be as dumb as Democrats, but they cannot maintain with such a mandate as that.]

       

      https://acluva.org/en/press-releases/why-we-have-and-should-have-elected-school-boards-virginia

       

      Why We Have — and Should Have — Elected School Boards in Virginia

      October 15, 2009

      By Kent Willis, Executive Director, ACLU of Virginia
      In 1992, Virginia became the last state in the nation to allow elected school boards. Within a few years, voters in more than 80% of Virginia’s school districts decided to trade their old appointed school boards for elected ones.
      The knock on appointed school boards was that they were too often occupied by unqualified hacks and sycophants who ignored their duties while using the position as a launching pad for political careers.
      Now, after only a handful of years, voters in some parts of the state are finding fault with their elected schools boards, the knock being that unqualified people are getting elected and then using their school board experience to seek higher office.
      Even if the results have been about the same for both elected and appointed boards, there is a simple, glorious argument in favor of elected school boards. Democracy is the governing principle of our culture and has served us well for more than 200 years. It can be messy and yield unpredictable results, but, generally speaking, the more democracy, the better. If we don’t like the results of elected school boards, we should pay more attention to making them work, not abandon them.
      There is also an argument against appointed school boards. It is neither simple nor glorious, though, as it requires a trip through Virginia’s racially-tainted past to be understood.
      Appointed school boards are part of the legacy of Virginia’s post-Reconstruction period, during which the state’s white leaders sought to limit the political influence of African-Americans. It culminated in the infamous Constitutional Convention of 1901, which was devoted to codifying Jim Crow practices. At that well-documented gathering, Virginia’s leading statesmen amended the Constitution to require literacy tests and poll taxes and reinstituted felon disfranchisement. They also rejected attempts to allow elected school boards in Virginia…

      • Ron (RC) Weakley (A.K.A., Darryl For A While At EV) says:
        November 3, 2021 at 6:48 am

        Maybe Terry did not know that parents vote or that voting matters in local government.  Of course the incestuous relationship between local school boards and text book publishers probably does have more effect on pedagogical standards than parents’ wishes.

  • Fred C. Dobbs says:
    November 2, 2021 at 11:14 am

    How Car Shortages Are Putting the World’s Economy at Risk

    Because so many jobs depend on automaking, the industry’s production problems are causing the pain to ripple. 

    • Fred C. Dobbs says:
      November 2, 2021 at 11:19 am

      Turmoil in the auto industry, a powerful engine of the global economy, is threatening growth and sending tremors through companies and communities that depend on carmakers for money and jobs.

      For every car or truck that does not roll off an assembly line in Detroit, Stuttgart or Shanghai, jobs are in jeopardy. They may be miners digging ore for steel in Finland, workers molding tires in Thailand, or Volkswagen employees in Slovakia installing instrument panels in sport utility vehicles. Their livelihoods are at the mercy of supply shortages and shipping chokeholds that are forcing factories to curtail production.

      The auto industry accounts for about 3 percent of global economic output, and in carmaking countries like Germany, Mexico, Japan or South Korea, or states like Michigan, the percentage is much higher. A slowdown in automaking can leave scars that take years to recover from.

      The shock waves from the semiconductor crisis, which is forcing virtually all carmakers to eliminate shifts or temporarily shut down assembly lines, could be strong enough to push some countries into recession. In Japan, home of Toyota and Nissan, parts shortages caused exports to fall by 46 percent in September compared with a year earlier — a potent demonstration of the car industry’s importance to the economy. …

      … It’s difficult to calculate just how much auto industry problems will spread to the rest of the economy, but there is little doubt that the impact is enormous because so many other industries depend on carmakers. Auto manufacturers are big consumers of steel and plastic, and they support vast supplier networks as well as restaurants and grocery stores that feed autoworkers. …

      … There is no sign the crisis will end soon. Semiconductor makers have promised to increase supply, but building new factories takes years and car companies are not necessarily the most important customers behind the technology giants. …

  • Fred C. Dobbs says:
    November 2, 2021 at 11:30 am

    Jeff Bezos, who recently flew into space, vows to do more to protect the Earth

    Jeff Bezos, one of the richest humans on the planet, and who started his financial empire by selling books online, pledged $2 billion to restoring natural habitats and transforming food systems at the climate summit in Glasgow on Tuesday.

    Speaking at a conference where President Biden and other leaders announced a global pact to end deforestation by 2030, Mr. Bezos said that private industry must play a central role in the campaign.

    “Amazon aims to power all its operations by renewable energies by 2025,” he said, restating his goal for the company to be carbon-neutral by 2040.

    That will be a sizable challenge.

    Amazon said, for example, that the company’s emissions from indirect sources had increased 15 percent last year over 2019. The company has pointed out that when its emissions are measured relative to its booming sales, its carbon footprint has been decreasing. But some climate experts say this calculation, called carbon intensity, obscures that the company is still generating an increasing amount of carbon. …

  • Fred C. Dobbs says:
    November 2, 2021 at 11:35 am

    Global leaders announce new efforts to curb methane emissions

    Nations around the world joined together Tuesday to promise to curb emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that spews from oil and natural gas operations, livestock production and landfills and can warm the atmosphere 80 times as fast as carbon dioxide in the short term.

    President Biden, calling the agreement a “game-changing commitment,” also announced that for the first time, the Environmental Protection Agency intended to limit the methane coming from existing oil and gas rigs across the United States.

    The federal government previously had rules that aimed to prevent methane leaks from oil and gas wells built since 2015, but the Trump administration rescinded them. President Biden intends to restore and strengthen them, administration aides said. …

    The White House said that more than 90 countries had signed the Global Methane Pledge, a commitment to reducing methane emissions 30 percent by 2030, including half of the world’s top 30 methane emitters. The United States, European Union, Brazil, Indonesia, Pakistan and Nigeria are among those that have signed on. Some major polluters, like China, India and Russia, have not joined.

    Methane is the second most important greenhouse gas warming the planet, after carbon dioxide, which is produced when countries burn oil, coal and natural gas for energy. Methane is the main ingredient in natural gas, and when it leaks out of wells and pipelines and into the atmosphere before being burned, it creates methane emissions. Livestock and landfills also produce methane.

    The European Union announced the formation of the International Methane Emissions Observatory to ensure accountability. It will focus first on tracking the fossil fuel industry, which is responsible for one-third of anthropogenic emissions, and will then move on to other sectors like agriculture and waste.

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