Today’s comic by Jen Sorensen is Democracy is not partisan:
• A single turn of the blades on the world’s newest, tallest wind turbines can power a home for 29 hours: The world's tallest towers for wind turbines are now those offshore in Burbo Bank, UK. And are these 633 feet tall, 8-megawatt machines with 260-foot blades made by a U.S. company? Nope. Because U.S. policy all but destroyed the U.S. wind industry in '80s, just when Denmark and the Danish company Vestas joined in policy and production to make the country the world leader in the field. The United Kingdom now boasts 5.3 gigawatts of offshore wind power.
• Meanwhile, two Georgia nuclear power plants years behind schedule, huge over budget: The nuclear reactors, made by Westinghouse (owned by Toshiba) were to be part of a nuclear renaissance. Unlike earlier custom-built nukes, the Westinghouse AP 1000s were standardized, which maker and advocates said would speed construction and lower costs. Instead, two Georgia reactors and two in South Carolina are about three years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. Meanwhile, Westinghouse filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in March. If the reactors ever come on line, the cost overruns will be born by electricity consumers in those states. Already, Georgia customers are paying a $100 a year surcharge for the nukes, the first of which is now slated to switch on in 2019. Nobody who has watched this fiasco is likely to give even odds on that schedule being met.
• Mouse with 3D-printed bioprosthetic ovaries gives birth to healthy pups.
• Roger Moore dead from cancer at 89. The British actor starred in seven James Bond films between 1973 to 1985 and as Simon Templar in “The Saint” between 1962 and 1969.
• In Riyadh, Trump claims he’s created a million jobs in the past few months: The Associated Press points out that Barack Obama was president for most of one of those months, but allows that Trump's claim that almost 1 million jobs have been added “is in the ballpark.” Uh...738,000 new jobs have been added to the U.S. economy from January through April, according to monthly reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s some serious rounding-up despite the fact that in baseball making it three-fourths of the way around the bases doesn’t score. A new president’s economic policies don’t have much impact in the first months of an administration, say, until the end of the fiscal year in September. But, if we ignore that and give Trump credit anyway, we find that average gains in 2017 so far have been 185,000 a month; in 2016, they were 187,000 a month, and in 2015, 226,000 a month. Trump also claimed in his speech on Sunday that his regime has made record investments in the military. In fact, no increases in military spending have been made so far by the regime. Trump has only proposed. And those proposals fall short of a “record” even when you cut out World War II and the Korean War. His proposed budget calls for a 10 percent boost in military spending for fiscal year 2018. But the base military budget rose 14.3 percent, in 2002, 11.3 percent in 2003, and 10.9 percent in 2008.
• Food waste contains all the nutrients lacking in our diets:
Turns out raccoons might have the right idea: we could all use a little more trash in our diet.
Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health recently published a study that calculated the nutritional value of the roughly 60 million metric tons of food we waste every year. They found that if we ate these foods instead of throwing them away, we could close the nutritional deficiency in millions of Americans' daily diets.
• A visit to Betty DeVos’ hometown shows how school choice leads to segregation.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Trump thinks Yad Vashem is totes amazeballs. Now that “alt-right” types are murdering black students, maybe don’t Nazi speakers? A dispatch from CO on the Bradley Foundation & the world of how interlocking right-wing “charities” shape your world.
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