May 8, 2018

EPA "Head" Scott Pruitt Discounts The Value Of Human Life (Literally)

In doing cost-benefit analyses of new rules, experts account for auxiliary benefits of those rules. For example, the goal of the EPA’s Clean Power Plan — a target for Pruitt — is to reduce heat-trapping carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants. But, in prompting utilities to switch away from coal to cleaner energy sources like wind and solar, the measure would also reduce emissions of particulate matter, sulfur dioxide and other pollutants, saving thousands of lives. These saved lives are counted as co-benefits.

Federal agencies must assign a monetary value to a human life when performing cost-benefit analyses. That valuation varies slightly from agency to agency, but the rough consensus is that an American life is worth a little more than $9 million. That is significant when considering a new rule’s impact on industry. The Clean Power Plan, for example, would cost the coal sector billions of dollars, but it would save the country billions more by guarding public health.

Under Pruitt’s proposal, the EPA wouldn’t deny that the Clean Power Plan could save around 4,500 lives each year — a fact it currently acknowledges. Rather, when tallying up the benefits of reducing pollution, those lives simply would not count. In short, the man charged with protecting Americans’ health believes that, when performing a cost-benefit analysis, the EPA should not consider the value of saving American lives.

cleantechnica.com/2018/05/08/epa-head-scott-pruitt-discounts-the-value-of-human-life-literally

May 7, 2018

Trump is up and tweeting. first tweet of Monday

To the great people of West Virginia we have, together, a really great chance to keep making a big difference. Problem is, Don Blankenship, currently running for Senate, can’t win the General Election in your State...No way! Remember Alabama. Vote Rep. Jenkins or A.G. Morrisey!
3:53 AM - 7 May 2018

May 7, 2018

Lava flow intensifies from Hawaii's Kilauea volcano, 26 homes now destroyed - updated pictures

The flow of lava intensified Sunday from ongoing eruptions at Hawaii Island’s Kilauea volcano, and molten rock is pouring from fissures that opened overnight, farther from the original eruptions.

Twenty-six homes have now been destroyed, Hawaii County officials reported, as residential destruction rapidly accelerated Sunday. The community where the lava eruptions have been occurring, Leilani Estates remains at the greatest threat, but other areas in the region may come under risk as the eruption progresses, the U.S. Geological Survey said.

Toxic sulfur dioxide gas spewing near the fissures is at lethal concentrations, said USGS volcano scientist Wendy Stovall. Lava fountains emerging from the cracks in the ground are producing even more gas than previously observed.

The USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory said Sunday afternoon that since the overnight hours, eruptions of lava from cracks in the ground have been continuous. A flow of lava has advanced northward for about 0.6 miles.

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-hawaii-volcano-earthquake-20180506-htmlstory.html













http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5696771/Lava-destroys-five-homes-Hawaii-Kilauea-volcano-erupts.html


Amber Makuakane, 37, a teacher and single mother of two, said her three-bedroom house in Leilani Estates was destroyed by lava.

The dwelling was across from a fissure that opened Friday, when "there was some steam rising from all parts of the yard, but everything looked fine," Makuakane said.

On Saturday, she received alerts from her security system that motion sensors throughout the house had been triggered. She later confirmed that lava had covered her property.

Makuakane grew up in the area and lived in her house for nine years. Her parents also live in Leilani Estates.

"The volcano and the lava -- it's always been a part of my life," she said. "It's devastating ... but I've come to terms with it."

Lava has spread around 387,500 square feet (36,000 square meters) surrounding the most active fissure, though the rate of movement is slow. There was no indication when the lave might stop or how far it might spread.

"There's more magma in the system to be erupted. As long as that supply is there, the eruption will continue," U.S. Geological Survey volcanologist Wendy Stovall said.

Cherie McArthur wondered what would become of her macadamia nut farm in Lanipuna Gardens, another evacuated neighborhood near Leilani Estates. One of the year's first harvests had been planned for this weekend.


https://www.kgw.com/article/news/nation-world/hawaii-volcano-destroys-dozens-of-homes-forces-evacuations/507-549364675

May 7, 2018

Where the Story of Trump's $400 Million Cash Spending Could Go Next - where did the cash come from?

Where the Story of Trump’s $400 Million Cash Spending Could Go Next

A big story in Sunday’s Washington Post lays out in detail how Donald Trump’s business, in the years before Trump became president, went on what the newspaper describes as a “buying binge,” purchasing property and extending the reach of the brand. What’s most surprising, however, is that much of this—at least $400 million worth—was done in cash. Not only was it a surprising strategy for someone who famously—and infamously—used to go into debt to make purchases; it also raises the question of exactly where the cash came from. And, indeed, this question may be of interest to federal investigators.

The Post article was written by three reporters: Jonathan O’Connell, Jack Gillum, and David A. Fahrenthold. After its publication, I spoke by phone with Fahrenthold, who won a Pulitzer Prize last year for his coverage of Trump’s charitable work. (He also broke the story of the Access Hollywood tape.) During the course of our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, we discussed how the Post came upon this story, what makes the Trump business so unusual, and where reporting on Trump’s finances goes from here.

Isaac Chotiner: What was it that led you to look into the Trump Organization’s use of cash, and why hadn’t it been extensively reported on more?

David A. Fahrenthold: The Trump Organization is a really unusual business that has its arms in a lot of different things, and it is opaque from the outside. So, we have been trying to understand pieces of it as we went along. Our resolution for this year was to understand the debt of the Trump Organization. There are some really mysterious things I don’t understand about his debt. The Great White Whale of this reporting is something called Chicago Unit Acquisition LLC, which is this odd LLC that Trump has listed on his personal financial disclosures. It’s like a shell company that he himself owns and yet he claims it has no assets. And yet he says that he owes that shell company more than $50 million. I don’t know anything about that.

So, I got started looking at: Who are his debts? Who does he owe money to? And I thought the way to do that comprehensively would be to pull the land records for everything I knew he owned, and try to see what mortgages were on the deeds. Who owned the mortgages? How old were they? What rates were they for? And I thought I might find mortgages he hadn’t accounted for in his personal financial disclosures. Instead I found a bunch of places with no debt at all. And when we figured that out, especially in places like Scotland and Ireland, where there is tons of money going in with no loan, that’s what made us say: OK, maybe that’s the story—this odd buying pattern that doesn’t comport with how other people do it.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/05/trumps-usd400-million-cash-spending-david-fahrenthold-on-where-the-story-goes-next.html

May 7, 2018

Americans are starting to suffer from Trump's health-care sabotage

IT IS a tribute to the resilience of the United States’ public and private institutions that, despite President Trump’s incoherent management, the country has, by many measures, continued to improve, notching its lowest unemployment rate since 2000 in the latest federal employment update. But the effects of the president’s underinformed instincts, enabled by the ideologues in his administration, are beginning to show up in some of the numbers, representing real pain that Americans are suffering for Mr. Trump’s deficient leadership.

The Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit foundation focused on health-care issues, announced last week that the rate of working-age Americans without health insurance in the group’s annual survey rose to 15.5 percent, up about three percentage points since 2016. Things are worse in the 19 holdout states, such as Virginia, that have refused to expand their Medicaid programs: The rate of uninsured working-age Americans hit 21.9 percent in those areas, up nearly six percentage points over two years. Nationally, the spike has been particularly bad at the modest end of the income scale, rising nearly five percentage points since 2016 for low-income, working-age Americans.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/americans-are-starting-to-suffer-from-trumps-health-care-sabotage/2018/05/06/c60fb6fa-4fb2-11e8-b725-92c89fe3ca4c_story.html?utm_term=.c0b86afb6122

May 7, 2018

Trump divines his own truth without consequences, denies words from his own mouth w/o consequence

Before Trump, the idea of having a President who habitually fails to tell the truth and survives would have been unthinkable. But it's becoming clear that Trump's tenure is not just a lesson in fractured presidential convention. It amounts to a unique challenge to the office of the presidency itself, to the institutions that underpin American democracy and the long-held idea that government can only function effectively if it has the trust of the governed.

The most shocking aspect of the President's latest flurry of untruths in recent days relating to events before the 2016 election is that they were not at all shocking to a nation numbed by his barrage of easily disprovable claims and statements.

Revelations that Trump dictated a doctor's report on his health before voters went to the polls and his ever-shifting story on a hush payment made to porn star Stormy Daniels might have been a debilitating blow to any normal politician.


In Trump's case, they were simply more of the same flurry of daily controversies that characterize his presidency. While his critics reacted with outrage, his supporters saw media fact checks as just more "fake news."

https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/07/politics/donald-trump-presidency/index.html

Trump, who according to The Washington Post Fact Check has so far lied more than 3,000 times as President, is possibly proving that peddling untruths on an industrial scale is how to avoid a blowback.

-----

When the reporter pointed out that Trump had said "no" when she asked him whether he knew about the payment, Trump replied: "Excuse me, you got take a look at what we said."

It was a typically unreal moment in a presidency that has often shattered norms of logic and convention -- here was Trump openly denying words that had come out of his own mouth.

May 7, 2018

Black grads aggressively yanked off stage

https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5aef1edce4b0c4f19323a98a



Outrage After Celebrating Black Graduates Are Yanked Off College’s Stage

The University of Florida’s president has apologized for what he called “inappropriately aggressive” behavior.



A day of joy and celebration spurred complaints of racism after a college graduation marshal pushed and propelled several black students off the commencement ceremony’s stage, prompting an apology from the school.

The University of Florida graduates were walking across the stage on Saturday after their names had been called out when they took a moment to revel in their accomplishments while featured on the arena’s jumbotron.


Videos taken at the ceremony show each individual performing a roughly three-second dance or wave before they were grabbed by a white man wearing a ceremonial robe and forced out of the jumbotron camera’s view.

May 6, 2018

Proposed plan to fix the sinking SF Millennium Tower could exceed cost to build it.

The 58-story Millennium Tower cost an estimated $350 million to build in 2008, but the cost to fix the sinking and tilting skyscraper may climb even higher, reaching even to $500 million.

San Francisco Chronicle’s Mattier and Ross—who first broke the story of the Millennium Tower’s meandering foundations in 2016—now report that a potential engineering fix for the building involves securing only half of the structure to bedrock with hundreds of long “micropiles” in the foundation and then “letting the other side continue to sink until the building straightens itself.”

After the structure is level again, further piles will attach the entire building base to bedrock, and all will be righted in the world. The process could take as long as five years—and come with a hefty price tag.

Pennsylvania-based construction company Nicholson explains that micropiles are:

High-performance, high-capacity drilled deep foundation elements typically between 5–12 inches in diameter that can extend to depths of 200 feet and achieve working loads of over 200 tons. Micropiles are comprised of high-strength steel casing, rebar and grout.

[...] Micropiles are generally used when there are difficult ground conditions, such as natural or man-made obstructions, sensitive ground with adjacent structures, limited access/low headroom and/or karstic geology. They are commonly used to replace deteriorating foundation systems [...] or reinforcement including embankment, slope and landslide stabilization.

Mattier and Ross go on to report that some of the building’s well-heeled inhabitants aren’t fond of this fix; there are other competing proposals for how to get the tower and its ritzy business back on an even keel.


https://sf.curbed.com/2018/4/16/17242450/millennium-tower-sinking-repair-tilting-building-san-francisco

News has broke that one of the country's most luxe residential towers is sinking and tilting. The story is ongoing, so here's where you can find the most recent updates about one of the biggest stories in San Francisco real estate history.

May 6, 2018

Pics of lava advancing towards homes, Hawaii on Saturday

fissure opens in subdivision




Lava burns across the road in the Leilani Estates in Pahoa, Hawaii on Saturday as residents fled from the area






Knox's home is a few hundred yards from the lava flow and he is not evacuating. He hopes the lava will not take his home





http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5695425/Hawaiis-Kilauea-volcano-spews-toxic-gasses-new-fissures-form-thousands-flee.html

May 6, 2018

Goose levels golfer, reasserting dominance over all humankind

"aaaaaaaaaaaaa!"






"Such majestic creatures!" -- said literally no one about geese.
(CNN)Geese are terrifying. Everyone knows this. Their bites hurt like hell and they have no respect for children or the elderly. In fact, they are the second-most terrifying bird behind turkeys (large, tenacious) and ahead of crows (eidetic, vengeful).

So this momentous trio of photographs showing a Canada goose absolutely trucking a high school golfer near Blissfield, Michigan, is just a reminder of the natural order of things. You can have, as one Twitter user put it, a "quiver full of bird maulers" and a whole high school athlete's worth of physical power, but the goose is going to win every time. It's science.

The unlucky human sacrifice here is Isaac Couling, a member of the Concord High School golf team. According to Blissfield Golf Coach Steve Babbitt, Couling, 16, was competing in the Madison Tournament at the World Creek Golf Course in Adrian, Michigan, when terror rained down.

"The group just finished teeing off on hole #7 and were walking down the fairway," Babbitt told CNN in an email. "They were aware of a goose nest on their left which they were looking at but not bothering when from behind them and to the right came the guard goose (protecting the nest)."

https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/24/us/goose-golf-attack-michigan-photos-trnd/


"aaaaaaaaaaaaa!"
Then came a rather alarming escalation, a whole Shakespearean tragedy in three acts. The Blissfield Athletics Twitter account explained that Couling was caught off guard by the charging bird as he was keeping an eye on another, probably equally threatening, goose.