Midday open thread: 29 World Heritage sites added; as coal fades, Wyoming faces economic trouble
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Today’s comic by Mark Fiore is 'R' is for Racist: What’s coming up on Sunday Kos: The alt-right has a plan to win 2020, and it involves YOU—so listen up, by Chris Reeves #CowardTrump can't disavow racist 'send her back' chant a day laMidday open thread: 29 World Heritage sites added; as coal fades, Wyoming faces economic trouble
Today’s comic by Mark Fiore is 'R' is for Racist: What’s coming up on Sunday Kos: The alt-right has a plan to win 2020, and it involves YOU—so listen up, by Chris Reeves #CowardTrump can't disavow racist 'send her back' chant a day later. When it counted he said nothing, by Ian Reifowitz Ignore conservatives' advice on how to pick the Democratic nominee, by Sher Watts Spooner It took a lot more than a small step to land on the moon, by Mark E Andersen We must stop Trump from winning with the race card. It starts with the traditional media, by Egberto Willies 'Mapping Resistance': Activism past and present and the New York Young Lords, by Denise Oliver Velez Why you can't be nice to neo-Nazis or their enablers in the GOP, by Frank Vyan Walton How the press rewards GOP cowardice in the age of Trump, by Eric Boehlert • UNESCO inscribes 29 new properties as World Heritage Sites: The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) adds World Heritage properties based on those that are “unique in some respect as a geographically and historically identifiable place having special cultural or physical significance (such as an ancient ruin or historical structure, building, city, complex, desert, forest, island, lake, monument, mountain, or wilderness area). It may signify a remarkable accomplishment of humanity, and serve as evidence of our intellectual history on the planet.” Among the additions this week: the archaeological ruins of Liangzhu City in the Yangtze River Basin on the southeastern coast of China; Bagan, a site on the Ayeyarwady River on the central plain of Myanmar that includes a broad range of Buddhist art and architecture, including temples, stupas, and frescoes dating from the 11th–13th centuries CE; a megalithic jar site in Xiengkhuang in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, featuring 2,100 tubular-shaped stone jars used for funerary rituals in the Iron Age dating from 500 BCE to 500 CE; eight scattered U.S. properties displaying the 20th century architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, including Fallingwater in Mill Run, Pennsylvania, the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, and the Herbert and Katherine Jacobs House in Madison, Wisconsin. • Wanna know how Elon Musk plans to install a computer in your brain? MIDDAY TWEET xDow, a chemical company, gave $1 million to TrumpâÂÂs inauguration.Now one of their chemicals, which is known to cause brain damage in children, conveniently wonâÂÂt be banned by TrumpâÂÂs EPA.@MikeLevinCA has the story linked â¬Â︠https://t.co/FrIEOHZhrb— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) July 19, 2019 • Appalachian fracking operation not going so well financially: Leaders of EQT, the nation’s largest independent producer of natural gas, don’t agree with each other on how to proceed. EQT acquired Rice Energy, a major Appalachian fracker, but Toby and Derek Rice convinced shareholders last week that they, not EQT’s team, can manage the company better. Since 2010, EQT has lost $8 billion, which is pretty good evidence that new leadership was needed. The Rices said they can lower production costs using expensive new technology that so far has been commercially unproven. EQT’s former CEO, Steve Schlotterbeck thinks this approach won’t do what its adherents claim for it. Not too long ago, he called the natural gas fracking industry “an unmitigated disaster for any buy-and-hold investor.” He said the industry is “self-destructing from the success of the shale gas technologies [...] They continue to believe that volume growth is necessary for them to be successful, although we now have several years of data that demonstrates the opposite.” • How A 10-Year-Old-Boy Helped Apollo 11 Return To Earth. • Raising the federal minimum wage to $15 would lift pay for 33.5 million workers: That’s a fifth of the entire U.S. workforce. On Thursday, with just three Republicans in favor, and six Democrats opposed, the House of Representatives voted to raise the federal minimum to $15 an hour from the paltry $7.25 set a decade ago. A full-time worker earns a gross annual income of $15,000 at the current rate. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who never sees a piece of Democratic legislation he can’t shelve, said there won’t be a Senate vote on the House bill because the higher hourly wage “would kill jobs and depress the economy.” That’s BS, as noted in a number of studies. • Wyoming, the nation’s largest coal-producing state, faces a tough economic future: As Mark Sumner wrote on Wednesday about a new report, many communities, regions, and entire states are facing big financial troubles as the coal industry continues its nationwide decline. One of those is Wyoming, which, at 580,000 people, is the least populated state. Nearly 40% of U.S. coal is mined in Wyoming, which has been the leading coal-producing state for 33 years. The industry had 5,535 employees as of the end of 2018. from coal extraction, taxes pulled in more than $1 billion in revenue for state and local governments in Wyoming last year: The diminishing value of coal draws ominous parallels to the subprime mortgage bubble that precipitated the Great Recession of 2008. But the coal free-fall is likely to be even worse than the housing market crash, because houses always retained some value, while coal mines could end up worthless if investors see costs that outstrip potential income, said energy analyst Clark Williams-Derry of the Sightline Institute, a sustainability think tank. With mines likely to close, Wyoming is entering a new and untested paradigm for coal — reclamation without production. Typically, mines clean up their mess as they go; if they don’t, then the state can shut down operations until they do. But once a company goes broke and the mine shuts down, the only funds for cleanup are reclamation bonds, which critics say are inadequate in Wyoming.[...] Meanwhile, coal’s collapse is delivering a one-two punch of unemployment and unpaid taxes to Campbell County, where more than one-third of all coal in the U.S. is mined from the Powder River Basin. The Blackjewel bankruptcy put nearly 600 miners out of work, and the county may never get $37 million in taxes owed by the company, which was run by Appalachian coal executive Jeff Hoops. This is partly because of the county’s lenient approach to collecting back taxes. On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: SDNY unseals Cohen search warrant documents, and we find Trump all over the hush money deals. (Duh.) There’s an alternate theory about that, by the way. Hey, what is it with right-wing pedophilia projection? 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