The pivotal Democratic senator owns millions of dollars in coal stocks. Shouldn’t he recuse himself from US climate talks?
Last modified on Thu 30 Sep 2021 06.02 EDT
In the realm of law, a judge who had anything like this level of financial conflict in a case would have to recuse and let a different judge handle the proceedings.
The legal profession’s code of ethics dictates this approach not only because a judge’s financial interest would tempt them to rule in their own favor. It’s also because the two parties litigating the case and the broader public could not have faith that justice had been done by a judge with such a conflict.
Why shouldn’t a similar standard apply to the American public’s faith in government policy, especially when what’s at stake is, you know, the future of life on earth?
(Manchin could still vote for the budget bill; he just couldn’t touch its climate provisions.)
Joe Manchin is surrounded by a gaggle of reporters whenever he steps outside his Senate office, and he frequently appears on the agenda-setting Sunday morning TV shows. With votes on the budget bill fast approaching and the Glasgow summit starting 31 October, it’s high time that journalists press America’s climate decider-in-chief about his glaring conflict of interest – and why he shouldn’t step aside from US climate deliberations."
This story is published as part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of news outlets strengthening coverage of the climate story. Mark Hertsgaard is Covering Climate Now’s executive director
You might just enjoy it all: https://blogforarizona.net/
Following Arizona politics, it is sometimes hard to keep up with the wild, preposterous, and downright crazy statements and acts of some of the Grand Canyon states most "colorful" fringe
Permanent musical accompaniment, A Matter of Trust, by Billy Joel (1986). Amanda Marcotte is exactly right: Centrist Dems broke a promise on infrastructure. They should not get their "bipartisan" victory
This past week Senator Sinema threatened to derail President Biden's legislative agenda for lowering prescription drug prices meanwhile taking more than $750,000 in donations from the pharmaceutical and medical device
To the People of Arizona: A group of Arizona "lawmakers" have outed themselves as the enemies of democracy in an open letter packed with lies, misinformation, and insurrection. They call
Yeah, that's a thumbs down to you, princess! Update to Sen. Kyrsten Sinema Is Facing A Vote Of ‘No Confidence’. They elected her to office, now she treats them with
Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman of the Washington Post make the point that I have been making for months, Memo to centrists: Progressives aren’t your problem. Manchin and Sinema are.:
The longtime Trump aide harassed her at a charity event, a major Republican Party contributor alleges.
“On the evening of September 26 in Las Vegas, Nevada, I attended a dinner to support a charity and spend time with wonderful friends,” Odom said in a statement to POLITICO. “He repeatedly touched me inappropriately, said vile and disgusting things to me, stalked me, and made me feel violated and fearful,” she said, referring to Lewandowski.
"I am coming forward because he needs to be held accountable,” Odom continued. “I am blessed to have a loving husband and family behind me. I want other women to know that you can be heard, too, and together we can stop terrible things like this from happening.”
David Chesnoff, a Las Vegas attorney representing Lewandowski, did not directly address the allegations. “Accusations and rumors appear to be morphing by the minute and we will not dignify them with a further response,” he said.
Lewandowski, who did not respond to multiple requests for comment, has positioned himself as one of Trump’s closest and most loyal advisers — a role he has leveraged to gain access to top Republican donors and claim influence over the direction of the Republican Party. He was Trump’s first presidential campaign manager in 2016, advised him during the presidency and now is part of the circle of aides advising the former president. His duties included steering a pro-Trump super PAC until Wednesday, when Trump spokesperson Taylor Budowich tweeted after the publication of this article that "Trump World" had severed its association with Lewandowski.. ."
"Landsat has provided a critical reference for assessing long-term changes to Earth's land environment due to both natural and human forcing," scientists concluded in the journal Remote Sensing of Environment, in 2020. . ."
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RELATED CONTENT 2021
Updated 8:30 AM ET, Tue August 17, 2021
(CNN)The federal government on Monday declared a water shortage on the Colorado River for the first time, triggering mandatory water consumption cuts for states in the Southwest, as climate change-fueled drought pushes the level in Lake Mead to unprecedented lows.
(CNN)The federal government on Monday declared a water shortage on the Colorado River for the first time, triggering mandatory water consumption cuts for states in the Southwest, as climate change-fueled drought pushes the level in Lake Mead to unprecedented lows.
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Biz & IT —
>> The report continues ". . .Over 40 years of NASA satellite data has been "ingested into Earth engine," said Sargent. "That's been married to Google's compute infrastructure, so you can detect deforestation or find land use changes."
Sargent and the Earth Engine team used 909 terabytes of data from the Landsat 4, 5, and 7 satellites—with each of the million images weighing in at more than 100 megapixels.
Landsat's polar orbit allows each satellite to take a full set of images of the Earth's surface every 16 days. But not all of those images are keepers due to weather and other factors. "It's not as easy as just lining up the pixels," Sargent said. "Most of the challenges involved dealing with the atmosphere—if it's cloudy, you're not seeing anything. And if it's hazy, you have to look through it. So we had to build mosaics that excluded cloudy images and then correct for haze." . .
Time Machine ingests very high-resolution videos and converts them into multiple overlapping multi-resolution video tiles delivered as a stream, using a manipulation of HTML5's video tag in a way similar to how Google uses HTML image tags to pan and zoom in Google Maps.
Previous Time Machine projects had handled videos with billions of pixels of resolution. But Time-Lapse Earth pushed the envelope for Time Machine because of the size of the data. The 30-meter-per-pixel video was generated from 29 Mercator-projected mosaics created by Earth Engine, and each frame had 1.78 trillion pixels.
Every time Amazon announces a new kind of gadget, there’s an inevitable and often justified backlash of concern that it’s further eroding our privacy. Although the company has done lots of work to secure its devices and provide clear and strong protections, the backlash is unavoidable given the nature of the products.
Amazon’s ambient intelligence platform, it’s no longer a joke. The computer is both in the cloud and on the device, and the actual computing happens here, there, and everywhere — and as a consumer, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to locate. . .it’s a messy melange of inputs, outputs, machine learning, and hunches (literally, Amazon calls its technology for predicting your commands “hunches”). Limp says that as many as one out of four actions taken by Alexa devices today are proactive — they’re done by Alexa based on what it has learned about your desires instead of in response to a specific command.
Ambient computing is here; now what?
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"For his last column in 2017, Walt Mossberg predicted that technology would fade into the background, and so-called “ambient computing” would become ubiquitous. Four years later, we are well on our way — but what exactly that term means for how computers will work and how we’ll live is still very much up in the air.
Many companies are working on some vision of ambient computing, but there’s nobody working harder to try to make the idea of ambient computing happen right now than Amazon’s head of hardware, Dave Limp.
How he’s building that future today is a case study in how Big Tech confounds our preconceived notions of how progress works. We expected AI to look like HAL 9000. Instead, it looks a lot more like a Hammacher Schlemmer catalog.
At Amazon’s yearly lollapalooza of gadget announcements, the company typically announces literally dozens of new Alexa-connected devices. Releasing so many different devices at such a heady clip makes a certain kind of sense: if computers are meant to be all around us, Amazon needs to produce as many different kinds of computers as possible.
This year, among the flood, Limp presented three devices that are paradigmatic of his vision for what he calls “ambient intelligence.”
Subbing out the word “computer” for “intelligence” is a tell that he’s trying to change consumers’ thinking about how our digital lives will work in the future.
Today, however, these three devices are limited to pushing the boundaries of — and our comfort levels with — what we expect out of smart homes. Critically, all three take part in a new kind of computing platform that is unlike what we’re used to seeing from Big Tech. It’s diffuse, dispersed, and sometimes difficult to comprehend. . ."
READ MORE: https://www.theverge.com/22696187/amazon-alexa-ambient-disappearing-computer-limp-interview
In This Stream
Whether you like it or not, let’s be clear about what Amazon is selling
Hmmm something suspicious
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Environmental Quality Omnibus Bill Takes Effect Streamlining and Eliminating Unnecessary RegulationsHouse Bill 2580 achieves highest number of deregulatory, clean-up and technical corrections in Department historyPHOENIX (Sept. 29, 2021) – Arizona Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ) officials today thank Governor Doug Ducey for signing House Bill 2580 (HB 2580) into law. Sponsored by Representative Gail Griffin, this legislation reduces unnecessary regulations, while continuing to promote environmentally responsible economic growth in Arizona. In response to Governor Ducey’s Executive Order 2015-01, HB 2580 is part of ADEQ’s continuous evaluation of existing statutes and rules to identify and remove, simplify or correct duplicative, contradictory and ambiguous regulatory hurdles. HB 2580 successfully repeals 15 pieces of statute, amends an additional five statutes, and enables ADEQ to streamline three sections of rule from the Arizona Administrative Code, offering tangible benefits to both Arizona taxpayers and industry. “This is the latest in a series of omnibus bills I have sponsored to make it easier to do business with ADEQ without reducing ADEQ’s ability to protect public health and the environment,” said Representative Gail Griffin. “ADEQ is committed to achieving positive mission outcomes through efficient, effective government at the speed of business,” said ADEQ Director Misael Cabrera. “Streamlined regulations eliminate waste from our processes and increase our capacity to work with our customers to do more mission-critical work for Arizonans and our unique environment." Details: The latest in a series of bills enacted to improve the ADEQ regulatory structure, HB 2580 accomplishes the following: Eliminates statutes:
Modifies statutes:
View ADEQ’s 2021 Legislative Summary >
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