Soon we’ll get to have all our utilities go out at once!
Comcast may soon provide customers with retail electricity supply, along with its “Triple Play” bundle of cable, Internet, and phone service.
Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission Chairman Robert F. Powelson said Wednesday that the Philadelphia cable giant was working with a third-party supplier to include retail electricity in its bundle of services this year.
Yes, this is England. But it will happen here:
Chief constables are shortly to press the home secretary, Theresa May, to authorise the use of water cannon by any police force across England and Wales to deal with anticipated street protests.
The Association of Chief Police Officers says that the need to control continued protests “from ongoing and potential future austerity measures” justifies the introduction of water cannon across Britain for the first time.
The London mayor, Boris Johnson, has already announced a consultation on the introduction of water cannon onto the streets of London ready for use by this summer.
If only we had the computer chip cards like they have in Europe:
McALLEN, Texas (AP) — Account information stolen during the Target security breach is now being divided up and sold off regionally, a South Texas police chief said Monday following the arrest of two Mexican citizens who authorities say arrived at the border with 96 fraudulent credit cards.
McAllen Police Chief Victor Rodriguez said Mary Carmen Garcia, 27, and Daniel Guardiola Dominguez, 28, both of Monterrey, Mexico, used cards containing the account information of South Texas residents. Rodriguez said they were used to buy tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of merchandise at national retailers in the area including Best Buy, Wal-Mart and Toys R Us.
“They’re obviously selling the data sets by region,” Rodriguez said.
Garcia and Guardiola were both being held Monday on state fraud charges. It was not immediately known whether they had retained lawyers.
One of the things Deborah Blum doesn’t mention in her story is the effect of 35 years of further cutting government spending and gutting government regulatory agencies. Yes, I know she’s a science writer. But she’s railing against the government’s refusal to do its job and these things in W. Virginia didn’t happen in a vacuum:
Oh and one other thing. The limited data used by CDC? It wasn’t government research on the compound because as we all know that doesn’t exist. It wasn’t based on independent testing. No, the government relied on the 15-year-old studies done by Eastman Chemical. Or to be precise one of the studies, a kind of superficial analysis that infuriated environmental advocacy groups like the Environmental Defense Fund. In fact – again as reported by the Gazette – the agency had so depended on that one study, which was done with “pure MCHM” that its own river testing looked only for that and ignored the six other chemicals found in the messier “crude MCHM” that actually spilled into the river.
Still, those of us desperate for information will accept any data, any data at all. To that end, let’s look at the Eastman studies, shall we?
The first thing you’ll notice is that there is no human toxicity data. These are studies in species ranging from fathead minnows to rabbits. The study that the CDC used to calculate the safe level of MCHM –this one, in fact – involved 95 rats (45 male, 50 female) force-fed pure MCHM in corn oil for four weeks. The poison concentrations ranged from the 200 to 800 milligram/kilogram level. This is considered roughly equivalent to an exposure in the 200 to 800 part per million range but to be consistent about what these tests say, I’m going to mostly stick with mg/kg. In the mid-range (400 mg/kg) the scientists found a small but consistent pattern of liver and kidney damage, which appeared to be slightly worse in females. They calculated at one-fourth the dose, they would see no effect at all – and its this calculation of zero-effect of 100 mg/kg or 100 ppm in rats that CDC used to set a far more conservative level of zero-effect in humans at 1 ppm. But what the CDC advisory doesn’t tell you is that Eastman made at least one important assumption in this study. It assumed that the damage was transient – “the effects were most likely reversible” to quote from the abstract – and it didn’t track the animals long enough to find out.
To be fair, the Eastman chemists were just trying to figure out how poisonous the compound was. They’d run another more lethal experiment using 30 rats (half male, half female) looking at a higher doses. In that study, they divided the animals into three test groups and three doses. Ten of the rats received oil containing 2000 mg/kg of the compound. All were dead in a day. At half that dose, 3 of the 5 male rats and 4 of the 5 female rats died in less than 24 hours. At half that dose (500 mg/kg) the survival rate went up dramatically – just one female had to be euthanized on the second day. Another study at the 500 ppm level recorded zero mortality. The Eastman researchers calculated that the LD50 (Lethal Dose- 50 percent, a standard toxicity measure of the dose that will kill half of a test population) should be set at 825 mg/kg.
Continue reading “This month’s national guinea pigs in W. Virginia”
Naturally, I’m a little suspicious, but it sure sounds hopeful:
World’s largest retailer to put unprecedented market power behind groundbreaking Fair Food Program; Will work with CIW “to strengthen and expand” the FFP beyond Florida and into new crops!
United Nations Working Group on Business and Human Rights says FFP “offers promise for us all,” is “eager to see whether Fair Food Program is able to… serve as a model elsewhere in the world.”
This afternoon, at a ceremony held under a watermelon packing shed on a tomato farm outside of Immokalee (photo above), Walmart and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers signed an historic agreement for the world’s largest retailer to join the CIW’s Fair Food Program, the widely-acclaimed social responsibility program that is bringing real, measurable change to the men and women who harvest tomatoes for Florida’s $650 million tomato industry. As part of the agreement, Walmart will work with the CIW to expand the Fair Food Program beyond Florida and into “other crops beyond tomatoes in its produce supply chain.”
Alexandra Guáqueta, chair of the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights, also attended the signing ceremony “to support the Immokalee workers and the Fair Food Program, which offers such promise for us all,” and conveyed a statement on behalf of the Working Group. The statement praises the Fair Food Program for its “smart mix” of monitoring and enforcement tools, including “market incentives for growers and retailers, monitoring policies and, crucially, a robust and accessible mechanism to resolve complaints and provide remedy,” adding, “Workers have no fear of retaliation if they identify problems.” The statement concludes, “We are eager to see whether the Fair Food Program is able to leverage further change within participating businesses, and serve as a model elsewhere in the world.”
It’s been a long week in the Tinicum swamp. That crack in the roof of my shack that Swamp Rabbit fixed didn’t stay fixed very long, so I stole another bucket of epoxy and put him to work when the rain stopped. “If it ain’t the cold, it’s the rain,” the rabbit whined. Things could be worse, I told him. He could be Chris Christie, trying to patch leaks in the hot air balloon he was hoping to sail to the White House in 2016.
Christie, the prince of paypacks, is still desperately trying to convince people he’s not the jerk behind the jerks who caused major traffic problems in Fort Lee, N.J., whose mayor refused to endorse Christie for governor in 2013.
Good luck with that. The Fort Lee fiasco has focused attention on other people to whom bad things happened after they bumped up against Christie. In fact, it seems bad things happen to most people who don’t kowtow to the gov’ner. He often physically confronts perceived enemies, including women schoolteachers who are one-third his size.
But let’s face it: A lot of people have admired and voted for Christie precisely because he is a bully, adept at deflecting accusations of greed away from his corporate masters and onto regular people, especially teachers, firefighters, and other labor union members. It’s much easier to resent the guy up the street whose income is a bit higher than yours than it is resent billionaire fascists like Charles and David Koch who are genuinely ruining your life, but from a great distance.
And Christie got a lot of help from mainstream journalists, many of whom are instinctive ass-kissers, genuinely enthralled by the wielding of power and their proximity to those who wield it. Journalists like Joe Scarborough and Brit Hume, for example, who gush about politicians who talk tough and dumb down every issue of import. I read this piece from The Nation to Swamp Rabbit when he came down from the roof:
It didn’t matter that [Christie] lost $400 million of federal school funding, or unilaterally canceled a plan to build a commuter train tunnel connecting New Jersey and Manhattan and presented it falsely as a big savings for his state, or vetoed — five times —additional funding for family planning, directly causing six reproductive health centers to close. Christie has filled the place formerly occupied by John McCain: the straight-shooting Republican “maverick” (a maverick being a Republican who admits the earth is probably older than 10,000 years). It doesn’t matter what he actually did or said.
It didn’t matter, not even when Christie was accused of using “money that was intended for victims of [Hurricane] Sandy to promote himself in a series of TV ads.” It only started to matter when the Christie administration got caught in an act of retribution so mean-spirited that it wasn’t possible to justify Big Boy’s style of governance by calling him a “straight-shooter” or an old-fashioned practitioner of “hardball politics.”
There are many exceptions, of course, but what is it about people in the media — usually men — that compels them to kiss up to politicians who are inflexible and vindictive, and to equate these flaws with leadership qualities?
“I ain’t sure,” Swamp Rabbit shrugged. “Maybe Christie and them other blowhards remind them journalists of the guys they work for. Or maybe they just ain’t got no balls.”
Same thing, rabbit.
Footnote: Notice Christie always makes sure he is flanked by a squad of cops when he confronts someone. What a maverick. What a man.
These poor people. I wonder if they’ll ever be safe again:
CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Government investigators are still trying to determine exactly how much of a toxic chemical that spilled at the Freedom Industries tank farm along the Elk River soaked into the ground and could later leach into the river, a top U.S. Environmental Protection Agency official said Wednesday evening.
“An investigation is going on to figure out where there might be any materials in the ground, and so far that investigation is still going on,” EPA regional administrator Shawn Garvin told The Charleston Gazette.
Asked if that meant officials simply don’t know how much of the “Crude MCHM” is still in the soil and could reach the river without proper containment and cleanup measures, Garvin said, “I think that’s probably … we’re still investigating to ensure we have a complete answer to that.”
I can’t find any info about how it went. I hope it passed:
A group of up to 30 Amazon employees at one of the company’s Delaware warehouses will have the opportunity to vote today in an election that could establish the first-ever labor union representation at a U.S. Amazon facility.
The group, which consists of equipment technicians and mechanics, will be voting on whether they want to join the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. A simple majority — or half of those who vote plus one — is needed to establish the first-ever union shop inside an Amazon facility in the U.S., according to IAMAW spokesman John Carr.
Carr said the voting workers, who make up just a small fraction of the more than 1500 employees at the facility, are not most concerned with the wages they are paid. Rather, they’d like help negotiating for things such as vacation and promotion policies, seniority rules, as well as the possible creation of a safety committee, Carr said.
In the weeks leading up to the vote, the workers have been pulled into what unions call “captive audience meetings,” during which their superiors at Amazon attempt to persuade workers against unionization, according to Carr.
The New Republic’s Noam Scheiber piece, “Here Comes The Anti-Government Left” does an interesting compare and contrast between Bill DeBlasio and Elizabeth Warren. He says Warren’s populism is more radical — and more popular across the country:
de Blasio accepts that today’s rich and powerful will continue to be rich and powerful; he just thinks they should do more to help the rest of us. Warren questions the very legitimacy of their wealth and power. “I’ve been in the Senate for nearly a year and believe as strongly as ever that the system is rigged,” she said in a recent speech.
This difference of emphasis isn’t shocking: New York City would fall into a deep depression if the financial sector shrunk substantially. And I don’t mean to belittle de Blasio’s agenda, which I consider important. But neither is that agenda especially ambitious in any cosmic sense. As other politicians have demonstrated before him, there’s no particular tension between a concern for the poor and a deference to the rich.*
It’s why some have begun to think of de Blasio’s worldview as “Bloombergism with a populist mask.” De Blasio helped nurture this impression himself by courting the lords of finance and real estate during his general election campaign, then making a handful of Bloomberg-esque appointments, like the Goldman Sachs executive he named as his deputy mayor for housing and development.2
But here’s the thing: In addition to being more radical substantively, Warren’s agenda is much more sale-able politically.
The reason is that it plays directly to the source of today’s anti-government skepticism. While trust in government has been steadily falling since hitting a decades-long peak after 9/11, voters’ particular beef against government changed in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Around that time, a variety of indicators suggested that voters’ suspicions were tied to the relationship between the government and powerful interests, whom voters believed were lavishing benefits on themselves at taxpayer expense. Pew found a sharp bipartisan drop in the number of voters who felt “government is really run for the benefit of all the people” beginning in 2009. Gallup found a spike in the number of people dissatisfied with “size and influence of major corporations.”
It turns out that many of the voters who’d lost faith in government weren’t anti-government per se. They’d simply concluded it was working for the powerful and not for them.
Continue reading “The difference between DeBlasio and Warren”
I’ve fallen out of love with the easy convenience of debit cards, but it’s just a matter of time until I get screwed again:
(Reuters) – Target Corp and Neiman Marcus are not the only U.S. retailers whose networks were breached over the holiday shopping season last year, according to sources familiar with attacks on other merchants that have yet to be publicly disclosed.
Smaller breaches on at least three other well-known U.S. retailers took place and were conducted using similar techniques as the one on Target, according to the people familiar with the attacks. Those breaches have yet to come to light. Also, similar breaches may have occurred earlier last year.
The sources said that they involved retailers with outlets in malls, but declined to elaborate. They also said that while they suspect the perpetrators may be the same as those who launched the Target attack, they cannot be sure because they are still trying to find the culprits behind all of the security breaches.
