17 days remain until the last ballots are cast in the 2018 midterms
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• What’s coming up on Sunday Kos….
- Republicans are coming for your Medicare in 2019, by Jon Perr
- Coal is dying, and Trump knows it, by Sher Watts Spooner
- Examining the nature of true and pure "Evil," by Frank Vyan Walton
- Republicans want to take away your Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid, by Laurence Lewis
- Stop the handwringing and conjecture about the 'Latino vote,' and support groups doing GOTV, by Denise Oliver Velez
- Cripple healthcare, Social Security, Medicare, driving huge deficits & win? by Egberto Willies
- We must choose to solve climate change, by Mark E Andersen
- Don't we want a president America can be proud of, by Ian Reifowitz
• Analysis shows Georgia leaders wrongly purged more than 340,000 voters from registration rolls: An investigation commissioned by Greg Palast, a journalist and the director of the Palast Investigative Fund, revealed that 340,134 voters were removed from the Peach State’s registration rolls in 2016 and 2017 on the grounds that they had moved. But they were actually still living at the addresses where they were registered. “Their registration is cancelled. Not pending, not inactive—canceled. If they show up to vote on 6 November, they will not be allowed to vote. That’s wrong,” Palast told reporters on a call on Friday. “We can prove they’re still there. They should be allowed to vote.” The Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda joined Palast in filing a lawsuit against Secretary of State Brian Kemp on Friday to force him to release additional records related to the state’s removal of voters. Kemp is running against Stacy Abrams in a close contest.
• If somebody wins the next drawing of the Mega Millions lottery, s/he will likely have a net worth larger than Donald Trump’s: Nobody won the top prize in Friday’s drawing, and the estimated take for the next drawing rose to $1.6 billion, the largest prize ever. Lottery officials say the lump-sum pay-out on that would be around $905 million. But the total will likely be a lot higher than $1.6 billion by the time Tuesday’s drawing takes place.
MIDDAY TWEET
• Biohackers are implanting chips in everything from dancer’s shoulders to sex toys. Forecasts are that the human augmentation industry will hit $2.3 billion by 2025:
A Spanish dancer named Moon Ribas has a chip in her arm connected to seismic sensors, which is triggered when there are tremors anywhere on the planet. She uses it in a performance art piece called Waiting for Earthquakes. Neil Harbisson, a colorblind artist from Northern Ireland, has an antenna-like sensor in his head that lets him “hear” colors. And Rich Lee, from St. George, Utah, has spent about $15,000 developing a cyborg sex toy he calls the Lovetron 9000, a vibrating device to be implanted in the pelvis. Lee hasn’t sold (or used) the Lovetron yet, but he’s got magnetic implants in his fingertips to pick up metal objects, two microchips in his hands that can send messages to phones, and a biothermal sensor in his forearm to measure temperature. “We’re the first movers,” Lee says. “But as the technology becomes more mainstream, there will be potential uses for pretty much everybody.”
• Student loan debt continues to soar:
America’s student loan debt crisis may be about to get much worse amid rising tuition and borrowing costs. Student loans are the only consumer debt segment with continuous cumulative growth since the Great Recession, with an almost 157 percent surge over the last 11 years. By comparison, auto loan debt has grown 52 percent, while mortgage and credit card debt actually fell by about 1 percent, according to Federal Reserve and Equifax data compiled by Bloomberg. All told, there’s a whopping $1.5 trillion in student loans out there, marking the second largest household debt segment in the country, after mortgages.