Today’s comic by Matt Bors is Trump condemns both sides:
• Private prisons thrive under Trump:
So much for not profiting from suffering. After Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinded an Obama-era order in February to phase out the use of private prisons, the industry has recovered, CNN reports.
In 2016, President Obama’s deputy attorney general, Sally Yates, issued a memo calling on the Department of Justice to curtail its use of prisons run by for-profit companies. But now the private prison industry looks as it did before that.
• Nuclear industry is “bleeding cash”:
The nuclear industry is so uncompetitive now that over half of all existing U.S. nuclear power plants are “bleeding cash” according to a Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) report released earlier this summer. BNEF found that $2.9 billion is lost every year by just 55 percent of all the nuclear plants in the United States. [...]
And if existing nukes are so uneconomic, it’s no shock that new nuclear plants are completely unaffordable. The nuclear industry has priced itself out of the market for new power plants, at least in market-based economies.
•
• Two studies show that automated safety systems prevent car crashes:
Safety systems to prevent cars from drifting into another lane or that warn drivers of vehicles in their blind spots are beginning to live up to their potential to significantly reduce crashes, according to two studies released Wednesday.
At the same time, research by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety raises concern that drivers may be less vigilant when relying on automated safety systems or become distracted by dashboard displays that monitor how the systems are performing.
• Billionaire co-founder of Sun Microsystems defies California court order so he can keep the rabble off a public beach.
• Top Animal Planet show fined for mistreated animals, but activists unimpressed: Three-and-a-half years ago, Mother Jones magazine investigated the reality show Call of the Wildman and revealed how producers trapped wild animals so they could fake “rescue” scenes. Animals were frequently neglected or worse. Among the discoveries: bats were left stranded in a Houston hair salon, a coyote was trapped and caged, a zebra was drugged and tackled. In each of those instances and others, the producers ignored animal welfare laws. It’s now been learned that in March 2017, federal investigators from the U.S. Department of Agriculture did their own report, cited the Animal Planet producers for several violations of the Animal Welfare Act, and fined them a grand total of $1,400. They ignored the worst mistreatment uncovered by the magazine and focused on Animal Planet’s producers’ failure to obtain licenses for some of the program’s work. Fines could have exceeded $100,000.
• Report: A decade of state higher education funding cuts have driven up tuition and hurt quality:
A decade since the Great Recession hit, state spending on public colleges and universities remains well below historic levels, despite recent increases. Overall state funding for public two- and four-year colleges in the 2017 school year (that is, the school year ending in 2017) was nearly $9 billion below its 2008 level, after adjusting for inflation. (See Figure 1.) The funding decline has contributed to higher tuition and reduced quality on campuses as colleges have had to balance budgets by reducing faculty, limiting course offerings, and in some cases closing campuses. At a time when the benefit of a college education has never been greater, state policymakers have made going to college less affordable and less accessible to the students most in need.
• Study: Rising temperatures will cut deep into crop yields:
A sweeping study examining decades of research says that yields of the globe's most important crops—providing two-thirds of the world's calories—will plummet as temperatures rise.
For every degree Celsius that the Earth warms, corn yields will go down an average of 7.4 percent, according to the study, which focused on the effects of rising temperatures and did not directly examine other influences related to climate change.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, we continue with the origin stories of the so-called “alt-right,” their money man Regnery, the meteoric rises and falls of some of their leading insta-celebs, and a reminder that this might just be our future. I mean, who else is left in the Republican Party?
YouTube | iTunes | LibSyn | Keep us on the air! Donate via Patreon or Square Cash