Across the country, local governments are accelerating their efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions, in some cases bridging partisan divides. Their role will become increasingly important.
As Federal Climate-Fighting Tools Are Taken Away, Cities and States Step Up
This week, the Supreme Court curtailed the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to limit greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.
The efforts of local governments, in some cases bridging partisan divides, will become increasingly important as the national strategy weakens.
Legislators in Colorado, historically a major coal state, have passed more than 50 climate-related laws since 2019. The liquor store in the farming town of Morris, Minn., cools its beer with solar power. Voters in Athens, Ohio, imposed a carbon fee on themselves. Citizens in Fairfax County, Va., teamed up for a year and a half to produce a 214-page climate action plan.
Across the country, communities and states are accelerating their efforts to fight climate change as action stalls on the national level. This week, the Supreme Court curtailed the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to limit greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, one of the biggest sources of planet-warming pollution — the latest example of how the Biden administration’s climate tools are getting chipped away.
During the Trump administration, which aggressively weakened environmental and climate protections, local efforts gained importance. Now, experts say, local action is even more critical for the United States — which is second only to China in emissions — to have a chance at helping the world avert the worst effects of global warming. …
The following quote is from an interview with Michael Hudson, he is referring to the Chinese and their development of an alternative to the West’s SWIFT payment system;
So, yes, they already have a rudimentary system. They’re making it a better system that can also be immune from U.S. computer espionage and interference. So yes, of course there’s already a system.
I have a relationship with a couple cyber security experts, one of whom is also a special forces veteran with extensive combat and cyber warfare experience.
In conversation concerning the proxy war with Russia, I mentioned the lack of any news of cyber war, and the obvious explanation being there must be a realization at the very highest levels of control that a cyber war would very rapidly collapse the whole world’s economy in a way unimaginable in comparison with conventional war, the sort we’re currently seeing.
Understanding this situation highlights the fact that the MIC, and Wall Street are making a lot of profit off the conventional war, which of course requires that the financial sector’s functions run unimpeded.
Those functions are uniquely vulnerable to cyber attack, either side being able to completely destroy the other with something as simple as a robust EMP attack, resulting in a sort of financial armageddon.
It seems obvious to me that both the Eurasian and Neoliberal powers must, so far, be in tacit agreement not to destroy the world by wrecking one or the other’s financial systems.
However, it also seems obvious that if one or the other side comes to believe, rightly, or not, that their financial payment infrastructure is effectively protected from cyber attack, the result would be almost guaranteed catastrophe.
I worry lately that my short term memory has been destroyed by long covid.
An important part of my post is the fact that my cyber expert buddies agreed with me that there’s an obvious avoidance of serious cyber aggression at the moment.
I think it is to avoid world-wide economic collapse.
There has always been a certain amount of artifice in what Supreme Court justices do. Whether they are conservatives or liberals, they pretend that their personal moral and political values are irrelevant to their votes, and that they are just Following The Law. They delude themselves into thinking they are mere “umpires” who might have differing legal theories but are certainly not partisan. They try to get the public to accept this myth, because if we did think of the justices as mere “robed legislators,” there would be little reason to treat their decisions with deference and respect. It is necessary for the court’s legitimacy that the public not see its rulings as the mere imposition of certain partisan policy preferences by an unelected council who are only in their positions for arbitrary reasons (e.g., because of the timing of another justice’s death).
The desire to preserve the myth of a legitimate court was one reason Ruth Bader Ginsburg refused to retire. She felt it “belittles and diminishes the court to have retirements so obviously timed for political reasons.” It also explains why some liberal legal professionals praised the nominations of Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. Their politics and personal beliefs were seen as irrelevant. Instead, their qualifications and intelligence were what mattered. Yale Law School’s Akhil Amar predicted that Kavanaugh “will be a pro-intellectual and anti-polarizing force on the Court.” The Washington Post ran a law professor’s op-ed called “I’ve known Amy Coney Barrett for 15 years. Liberals have nothing to fear.” The author argued that as a justice, “Barrett would not draw on any extralegal source of authority—be it religious, moral or political.”
These predictions were obviously lies or unbelievably naive delusions. As I documented at great length at the time, both Kavanaugh and Barrett both had long track records of making conservative decisions that obviously incorporated their value judgments. The justices themselves, during their confirmations, pretended they weren’t going to be partisan (Kavanaugh was said to have called Roe v. Wade “settled law” in an August 2018 conversation with Sen. Susan Collins; yet the New York Times, reporting on his confirmation hearings a month later, mentioned documents revealing that Kavanaugh had, in the past, questioned whether Roe was indeed “settled law.” In any case, he clearly didn’t actually think the “important precedent” was worth upholding—although that somewhat paled next to the many other egregious instances of outright perjury in his testimony defending himself against allegations of past sexual assault). The pretense of neutrality was obviously untrue. Donald Trump had publicly promised that the justices he appointed would overturn Roe. It’s reasonable to doubt that any statement uttered by Donald Trump could ever be accurate, but this was one pledge he followed through on. Lindsey Graham, in his recent debate with Bernie Sanders (in which Sanders cleaned Graham’s clock), boasted openly about having a “conservative” Supreme Court. So much for objective “umpires” merely applying the law. …
I have always had doubts about the SC’s. or anyone’s, claims to objectivity. But we liked it with Brown v Board and Roe v Wade, and Miranda….
so the problem is how do we stop an SC that is obviously bent on destroying democracy itself in favor of its political…or possibly deluded ideological…agenda, while preserving a last resort institution to protect us from popular human and civil rights abuses?
The odd assurance follows an explosive report by The Times of London that the former prime minister of Qatar gave Charles suitcases and shopping bags filled with cash on three occasions between 2011 and 2015.
The money came from billionaire Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, whose term as Qatar’s prime minister—2007 to 2013—partially overlapped with the time in which the gifts were made.
In 2017, Hamad bin Jassim said his government “maybe” funded the al Qaeda spin-off al Nusra Front in Syria. British media have called him “the man who bought London,” as he owns or has a stake in many of the city’s most prestigious addresses and businesses.
note that the Sheikh in question is the one who bought the 1,000 Toyota pickup trucks for al Qaeda when they were first getting organized..
The goal of the revised plan in the draft EA is to replace the wooden boardwalk with a “tubular steel and concrete” walkway along a carefully marked pathway approved by paleontologists that protects the ancient resources, including more than 200 tracks dating back millions of years to the early Cretaceous time period.
That was not the case in January, when BLM construction workers removing the wooden boardwalk drove over fossil beds with a backhoe and other heavy equipment, according to damage assessment conducted by Brent Breithaupt, a bureau paleontologist based in Cheyenne, Wyo., who visited the site in early February (E&E News PM, March 30).
BLM in late January halted the project to replace the boardwalk near the dinosaur tracks while it assessed the damage that had been reported by visitors to the site.
I thought she might only talk about the trump issues to the gathering of Republicans there . She did talk about the attempted overthrow. What she did not talk about is how many Republicans knew about this attempt before it happened. How many that knew did not warn authorities early on of the conspiracy or even an hour or minutes before the attack on the Capitol. There can be no excuse for this given the lives lost on January 6, the injuries, the attempted bombings which many seem to have forgotten, the destruction, the denials, the failure to join the January 6 committee, etc. They were supposed to march to SCOTUS and never made it.
Yes, she did deny the Republican Party. Yes, she has played a part on the Committee and has asked many questions of witness. Did she know of the upcoming insurrection? If so, when did she know it? And if so, why didn’t you too say something.
People seem to forget, this was a planned insurrection and many in the House and the Senate appear to know something about its upcoming. Then too, is our intelligence so weak, the rumours eluded them? There are pieces to the puzzle missing.
At the Reagan Center, she took a swipe at Biden’s economic policies and the worst inflation in forty years caused by him and only his policies. Killing jobs and economic grown. Wow, I did not know it was that bad. It certainly is not s bad as when I had to find work outside of Michigan for 4 years in upstate NY and Mid-Ohio. My favorite is to watch Participation Rate. It has almost returned to what it was pre-pandemic. Thanks to Wall Street, the country will never have the Participation Rate it had pre-2008.
How bad was inflation in the seventies to 1980?
Supply Chain is a B*tch when manufacturing is not making enough to meet exaggerated demand by other companies and when people have money to spend.
We could have undersized the stimulus packages like what was done in 2008. McConnell was intent on making Obama a one term president and did everything he could to make it bad. Then there would be more whining.
Is gasoline as expensive as when it was in 2008? Nope, not even you take inflation into consideration.
Things are not bad people. It could have been far worse.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in a dissenting opinion Thursday cited claims that Covid-19 vaccines were “developed using cell lines derived from aborted children.”
The conservative justice’s statement came in a dissenting opinion on a case in which the Supreme Court declined to hear a religious liberty challenge to New York’s Covid-19 vaccine mandate from 16 health care workers. The state requires that all health care workers show proof of vaccination.
“They object on religious grounds to all available COVID–19 vaccines because they were developed using cell lines derived from aborted children,” Thomas said of the petitioners.
notice that use of “aborted children”, as if an aborted fetus might even be a teenager…that is a manipulative messaging tactic, and it occurs to me that Clarence Thomas isn’t bright enough to conceive of using that expression on his own….i’ll bet that whole spiel came from his wife…and no doubt that’s not the first time; you can probably find Ginni Thomas in a lot of Supreme Court opinions…
Senior Catholic leaders in the United States and Canada, along with other antiabortion groups, are raising ethical objections to promising COVID-19 vaccine candidates that are manufactured using cells derived from human fetuses electively aborted decades ago. They have not sought to block government funding for the vaccines, which include two candidate vaccines that the Trump administration plans to support with an investment of up to $1.7 billion, as well as a third candidate made by a Chinese company in collaboration with Canada’s National Research Council (NRC). But they are urging funders and policymakers to ensure that companies develop other vaccines that do not rely on such human fetal cell lines and, in the United States, asking the government to “incentivize” firms to only make vaccines that don’t rely on fetal cells. …
Note: Constitution of the United States. Article VI, states that “no religious Test shall ever be required as Qualification” for federal office holders’ …
However, six of the nine Supreme Court justices are Roman Catholics.
On abortion, climate change, guns and much more, two Americas — one liberal, one conservative — are moving in opposite directions.
Pressed by Supreme Court decisions diminishing rights that liberals hold dear and expanding those cherished by conservatives, the United States appears to be drifting apart into separate nations, with diametrically opposed social, environmental and health policies.
Call these the Disunited States.
The most immediate breaking point is on abortion, as about half the country will soon limit or ban the procedure while the other half expands or reinforces access to reproductive rights. But the ideological fault lines extend far beyond that one topic, to climate change, gun control and L.G.B.T.Q. and voting rights.
On each of those issues, the country’s Northeast and West Coast are moving in the opposite direction from its midsection and Southeast — with a few exceptions, like the islands of liberalism in Illinois and Colorado, and New Hampshire’s streak of conservatism. …
Lawmakers passed measures that would prohibit concealed weapons in many public places, as well as an amendment that would initiate the process of enshrining the right to abortion in the state constitution.
Republicans are bracing for Donald J. Trump to announce an unusually early bid for the White House, a move designed in part to shield the former president from a stream of damaging revelations emerging from investigations into his attempts to cling to power after losing the 2020 election. …
Mr. Trump has long hinted at a third consecutive White House bid and has campaigned for much of the past year. He has accelerated his planning in recent weeks just as a pair of investigations have intensified and congressional testimony has revealed new details about Mr. Trump’s indifference to the threat of violence on Jan. 6 and his refusal to act to stop an insurrection. …
The timing of a formal announcement from Mr. Trump remains uncertain. But he recently surprised some advisers by saying he might declare his candidacy on social media without warning even his own team …
I recommend Pass a Law: this is entirely Consitutional
expand the Court to ten members. with term limits of ten years. terms staggered: one new justice each year as one old justice (by term length) retires each year. justices must have twenty years experience as appeals court judges, and be elected by popular vote, such votes overseen by Federal authorities, by paper ballot, on a vote-day holiday.
please note, i suggest popular vote because I hope that over ten years “popular enthusiasms” will tend to balance out. wiser heads may prevail. i would hope the twenty year appeals court experience would make judges old enough to have some sense. i would like it if they were not over sixty when they were elected, so they would be retired before age seventy… finding a balance between youthful stupidity and old-age rigidity. i would like it if advertising be limited to printed media…no TV and no Social Media.
something like this could be done tomorrow as far as the Constitution is concerned. all it would take would be 51 Democrats in the senate. plus 218 in the House. if I haven’t lost count.
But David Sirota has more facts than I have. Don’t stop there. His July 2 newsletter.essay from Jacobin appears in RSN
comment interrupted by ad that would not get out of the way. Reader Supported News, July 2, 2022, has a repreint of David Sirota’s essay in Jacobin. Worth thinking about. Worth acting on? You decide.
Lifetime appointment for federal judges is in the Constitution. An Amendment would be necessary to change this.
To ensure an independent Judiciary and to protect judges from partisan pressures, the Constitution provides that judges serve during “good Behaviour,” which has generally meant life terms. …
thanks for this. trouble is that Kelton wants to save social security with a major change in financial thinking that even i am doubtful of.
if you know of a way to get her or anyone to even think about just raising the payroll tax about a dollar per week per year, please let me know.
i’d be happy to try MMT, but Social Security can be fixed in an instant by making people realize it is their money and all they are doing is moving a little bit more of it from “consumption now” to “consumption later,” then we can start working of the underlying economic injustices and deficit crocodile tears.
personally i am at the end of my rope…. or just beyond the end.
The Supreme Court becomes irrelevant?
As Federal Climate-Fighting Tools Are Taken Away, Cities and States Step Up
NY Times – July 1
Across the country, local governments are accelerating their efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions, in some cases bridging partisan divides. Their role will become increasingly important.
As Federal Climate-Fighting Tools Are Taken Away, Cities and States Step Up
This week, the Supreme Court curtailed the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to limit greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.
The efforts of local governments, in some cases bridging partisan divides, will become increasingly important as the national strategy weakens.
Legislators in Colorado, historically a major coal state, have passed more than 50 climate-related laws since 2019. The liquor store in the farming town of Morris, Minn., cools its beer with solar power. Voters in Athens, Ohio, imposed a carbon fee on themselves. Citizens in Fairfax County, Va., teamed up for a year and a half to produce a 214-page climate action plan.
Across the country, communities and states are accelerating their efforts to fight climate change as action stalls on the national level. This week, the Supreme Court curtailed the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to limit greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, one of the biggest sources of planet-warming pollution — the latest example of how the Biden administration’s climate tools are getting chipped away.
During the Trump administration, which aggressively weakened environmental and climate protections, local efforts gained importance. Now, experts say, local action is even more critical for the United States — which is second only to China in emissions — to have a chance at helping the world avert the worst effects of global warming. …
The following quote is from an interview with Michael Hudson, he is referring to the Chinese and their development of an alternative to the West’s SWIFT payment system;
I have a relationship with a couple cyber security experts, one of whom is also a special forces veteran with extensive combat and cyber warfare experience.
In conversation concerning the proxy war with Russia, I mentioned the lack of any news of cyber war, and the obvious explanation being there must be a realization at the very highest levels of control that a cyber war would very rapidly collapse the whole world’s economy in a way unimaginable in comparison with conventional war, the sort we’re currently seeing.
Understanding this situation highlights the fact that the MIC, and Wall Street are making a lot of profit off the conventional war, which of course requires that the financial sector’s functions run unimpeded.
Those functions are uniquely vulnerable to cyber attack, either side being able to completely destroy the other with something as simple as a robust EMP attack, resulting in a sort of financial armageddon.
It seems obvious to me that both the Eurasian and Neoliberal powers must, so far, be in tacit agreement not to destroy the world by wrecking one or the other’s financial systems.
However, it also seems obvious that if one or the other side comes to believe, rightly, or not, that their financial payment infrastructure is effectively protected from cyber attack, the result would be almost guaranteed catastrophe.
I worry lately that my short term memory has been destroyed by long covid.
An important part of my post is the fact that my cyber expert buddies agreed with me that there’s an obvious avoidance of serious cyber aggression at the moment.
I think it is to avoid world-wide economic collapse.
Watt4:
Missed your initial comment. Everyone is hell bent for physical destruction of Eastern Europe. Nobody is thinking of cyber attacks.
Just getting old plays hell with short term memory. I would start to read multiples of books. It may help.
Run,
The reason their not thinking of cyber is it destroys the FIRE sector wealth.
Selling arms makes them rich, easy as that.
Both sides want each other’s systems to survive so the world doesn’t end.
The drive for destruction is felt in the guts of the instigators, but the implementors think about this stuff.
The Supreme Court Has Destroyed Its Legitimacy and There Is No Reason to Respect It
Current Affairs – June 14
SCOTUS Has Destroyed Its Legitimacy
Dobbs
I have always had doubts about the SC’s. or anyone’s, claims to objectivity. But we liked it with Brown v Board and Roe v Wade, and Miranda….
so the problem is how do we stop an SC that is obviously bent on destroying democracy itself in favor of its political…or possibly deluded ideological…agenda, while preserving a last resort institution to protect us from popular human and civil rights abuses?
some good news for the British royals, given that Prince Andrew appears to be the FBI’s next target in the Epstein child trafficking investigation..
note that the Sheikh in question is the one who bought the 1,000 Toyota pickup trucks for al Qaeda when they were first getting organized..
we’re from the government, and we’re here to help….
Susan Chaney spoke at the Reagan Center in California. https://t.co/eAdIVaEvk7 pic.twitter.com/rpkTBFB7ko
I thought she might only talk about the trump issues to the gathering of Republicans there . She did talk about the attempted overthrow. What she did not talk about is how many Republicans knew about this attempt before it happened. How many that knew did not warn authorities early on of the conspiracy or even an hour or minutes before the attack on the Capitol. There can be no excuse for this given the lives lost on January 6, the injuries, the attempted bombings which many seem to have forgotten, the destruction, the denials, the failure to join the January 6 committee, etc. They were supposed to march to SCOTUS and never made it.
Yes, she did deny the Republican Party. Yes, she has played a part on the Committee and has asked many questions of witness. Did she know of the upcoming insurrection? If so, when did she know it? And if so, why didn’t you too say something.
People seem to forget, this was a planned insurrection and many in the House and the Senate appear to know something about its upcoming. Then too, is our intelligence so weak, the rumours eluded them? There are pieces to the puzzle missing.
At the Reagan Center, she took a swipe at Biden’s economic policies and the worst inflation in forty years caused by him and only his policies. Killing jobs and economic grown. Wow, I did not know it was that bad. It certainly is not s bad as when I had to find work outside of Michigan for 4 years in upstate NY and Mid-Ohio. My favorite is to watch Participation Rate. It has almost returned to what it was pre-pandemic. Thanks to Wall Street, the country will never have the Participation Rate it had pre-2008.
How bad was inflation in the seventies to 1980?
Supply Chain is a B*tch when manufacturing is not making enough to meet exaggerated demand by other companies and when people have money to spend.
We could have undersized the stimulus packages like what was done in 2008. McConnell was intent on making Obama a one term president and did everything he could to make it bad. Then there would be more whining.
Is gasoline as expensive as when it was in 2008? Nope, not even you take inflation into consideration.
Things are not bad people. It could have been far worse.
another opinion comes down from SCOTUS…
notice that use of “aborted children”, as if an aborted fetus might even be a teenager…that is a manipulative messaging tactic, and it occurs to me that Clarence Thomas isn’t bright enough to conceive of using that expression on his own….i’ll bet that whole spiel came from his wife…and no doubt that’s not the first time; you can probably find Ginni Thomas in a lot of Supreme Court opinions…
Hmmm …
Abortion opponents protest COVID-19 vaccines’ use of fetal cells
Science – June 5, 2020
Note: Constitution of the United States. Article VI, states that “no religious Test shall ever be required as Qualification” for federal office holders’ …
However, six of the nine Supreme Court justices are Roman Catholics.
Anti-Roe justices a part of Catholicism’s conservative wing
AP – June 30
Spurred by the Supreme Court, a Nation Divides Along a Red-Blue Axis
NY Times – July 2
Include Maine in New England’s conservative redoubt, as the only state in the region with GOP representation in Congress (Senator Susan Collins).
NY Lawmakers Respond on Guns and Abortion After Supreme Court Rulings
NY Times – July 1
Lawmakers passed measures that would prohibit concealed weapons in many public places, as well as an amendment that would initiate the process of enshrining the right to abortion in the state constitution.
I think the country could live with whatever we decide about abortion or guns, though i might not like it.
I don’t think the world can survive with whatever we decide about the environment, not limited to global warming.
Things the country should not have to live with.
First on the list:
Trump Eyes Early 2024 Announcement as Jan. 6 Scrutiny Intensifies
NY Times – July 1
what to do?
a place to start:
The Democrats Are Enabling the Right’s Supreme Court Takeover
David Sirota/Jacobin
I recommend Pass a Law: this is entirely Consitutional
expand the Court to ten members. with term limits of ten years. terms staggered: one new justice each year as one old justice (by term length) retires each year. justices must have twenty years experience as appeals court judges, and be elected by popular vote, such votes overseen by Federal authorities, by paper ballot, on a vote-day holiday.
please note, i suggest popular vote because I hope that over ten years “popular enthusiasms” will tend to balance out. wiser heads may prevail. i would hope the twenty year appeals court experience would make judges old enough to have some sense. i would like it if they were not over sixty when they were elected, so they would be retired before age seventy… finding a balance between youthful stupidity and old-age rigidity. i would like it if advertising be limited to printed media…no TV and no Social Media.
something like this could be done tomorrow as far as the Constitution is concerned. all it would take would be 51 Democrats in the senate. plus 218 in the House. if I haven’t lost count.
But David Sirota has more facts than I have. Don’t stop there. His July 2 newsletter.essay from Jacobin appears in RSN
comment interrupted by ad that would not get out of the way. Reader Supported News, July 2, 2022, has a repreint of David Sirota’s essay in Jacobin. Worth thinking about. Worth acting on? You decide.
Lifetime appointment for federal judges is in the Constitution. An Amendment would be necessary to change this.
To ensure an independent Judiciary and to protect judges from partisan pressures, the Constitution provides that judges serve during “good Behaviour,” which has generally meant life terms. …
The Court as an Institution
The number of justices on the Supreme Court is set by legislation, however.
“meant life terms”
i expect that’s the way the court would see it. but as for good behavior…
i think an impeachment might succeed…if there are enough patriots in Congress.
MMT Guru Stephanie Kelton weighs in on SS: https://stephaniekelton.substack.com/p/save-social-security-from-its-saviors
Am Soc
thanks for this. trouble is that Kelton wants to save social security with a major change in financial thinking that even i am doubtful of.
if you know of a way to get her or anyone to even think about just raising the payroll tax about a dollar per week per year, please let me know.
i’d be happy to try MMT, but Social Security can be fixed in an instant by making people realize it is their money and all they are doing is moving a little bit more of it from “consumption now” to “consumption later,” then we can start working of the underlying economic injustices and deficit crocodile tears.
personally i am at the end of my rope…. or just beyond the end.