Author Archives: Charlie Smith

Study Chides U.S. Over Loan Default by Solar Business

by Charlie Smith Posted on April 17, 2014

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How to Raise the Perfect Dog – Cesar Millan & Melissa Jo Peltier

From the bestselling author and star of National Geographic Channel’s Dog Whisperer , the only resource you’ll need for raising a happy, healthy dog. For the millions of people every year who consider bringing a puppy into their lives–as well as those who have already brought a dog home–Cesar Millan, the preeminent dog behavior expert, says, “Yes,

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Codex: Astra Militarum (Enhanced Edition) – Games Workshop

The Astra Militarum are the mighty Hammer of the Emperor, an army so vast that it has never been fully recorded by the scribes of the Administratum. Drawn from a million worlds, its men and women are the thin line between Humanity and the void. On hundreds of thousands of warzones across the galaxy the armies of the Astra Militarum hold back the advance of a

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White Dwarf Issue 11: 12 April 2014 – White Dwarf

This issue, the Bullgryns smash into Warhammer 40,000 along with their Ogryn counterparts and the infamous bodyguard Nork Deddog, complete with painting guides in Paint Splatter. We also take the Astra Militarum out for a Battle Report: who will win, humanity’s finest defenders or the marauding Orks? About this Series: White Dwarf is Games Workshop

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Codex: Astra Militarum (eBook Edition) – Games Workshop

Codex: Astra Militarum The Astra Militarum are the mighty Hammer of the Emperor, an army so vast that it has never been fully recorded by the scribes of the Administratum. Drawn from a million worlds, its men and women are the thin line between Humanity and the void. On hundreds of thousands of warzones across the galaxy the armies of the Astra Militarum hol

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The One-Minute Cleaner Plain & Simple – Donna Smallin

Clean smarter, not harder! That’s Donna Smallin’s motto, and now she shows readers how to do it in just minutes a day. The One-Minute Cleaner Plain & Simple is the perfect handbook for busy people who might never find the time for a top-to-bottom household scrub but do want to keep their homes clean and clutter-free. Room by room, challeng

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The Complete Compost Gardening Guide – Deborah L. Martin & Barbara Pleasant

Barbara Pleasant and Deborah L. Martin turn the compost bin upside down with their liberating system of keeping compost heaps right in the garden, rather than in some dark corner behind the garage. The compost and the plants live together from the beginning in a nourishing, organic environment. The authors’ bountiful, compost-rich gardens require less d

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Beautiful No-Mow Yards – Evelyn Hadden

What has your perfect green lawn done for you lately? Is it really worth the time, effort, and resources you lavish on it? Armed with encouragement, inspiration, and cutting-edge advice from award-winning author Evelyn Hadden, you can liberate yourself at last! In this ultimate guide to rethinking your yard, Hadden showcases dozens of inspiring, eco-friendly

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The Art of Raising a Puppy (Revised Edition) – Monks of New Skete

For more than thirty years the Monks of New Skete have been among America’s most trusted authorities on dog training, canine behavior, and the animal/human bond. In their two now-classic bestsellers, How to be Your Dog’s Best Friend and The Art of Raising a Puppy, the Monks draw on their experience as long-time breeders of German shepherds and as t

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How to Paint Citadel Miniatures: Astra Militarum – Games Workshop

The Astra Militarum is an army of regimentation and proud tradition, with soldiers drawn from across the length and breadth of the Imperium. Their uniforms and iconography reflect this strict adherence to military organisation, and whether it is the Scions of the Militarum Tempestus, the Imperial Guardsmen of Cadia or the tanks of an armoured formation, each

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Inside of a Dog – Alexandra Horowitz

The bestselling book that asks what dogs know and how they think, now in paperback. The answers will surprise and delight you as Alexandra Horowitz, a cognitive scientist, explains how dogs perceive their daily worlds, each other, and that other quirky animal, the human. Horowitz introduces the reader to dogs’ perceptual and cognitive abilities and then draw

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Study Chides U.S. Over Loan Default by Solar Business

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Fox News Confuses NAACP and NCAA 2 Days After SNL Joked About It

by Charlie Smith Posted on April 8, 2014

Mother Jones

On Tuesday morning, Fox & Friends First host Heather Childers referred to the UConn Huskies as “NAACP national champs.” This is funny, because what she meant was “NCAA national champs.” The NAACP is the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which, among other things, mounted anti-lynching campaigns in the United States. The NCAA is the National Collegiate Athletic Association, which didn’t.

So we all had a brief chuckle at Childers‘ expense, and were ready to move on—until we noticed that her on-air mix-up was predicted by a Saturday Night Live sketch that aired just last weekend.

In SNL‘s latest lampooning of Fox & Friends, the cohosts start by blasting the Obamacare enrollment numbers. “It’s tough to sign up for things, I’ve tried for years to join the NAACP,” Brian Kilmeade (played by Bobby Moynihan) says. “Brian, why would you do that?” Elisabeth Hasselbeck (Vanessa Bayer) responds. “Well, I just loved college basketball,” Brian says.

The SNL writers room is full of time travelers. Watch the sketch here:

(H/t Ben Dimiero)

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Fox News Confuses NAACP and NCAA 2 Days After SNL Joked About It

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Will the Supreme Court Force Immigrants to Leave Their Children Behind?

by Charlie Smith Posted on December 10, 2013

Mother Jones

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Foreigners applying to permanently live in the United States spend years, sometimes decades, waiting to receive their green cards. But when that visa finally arrives, some law-abiding immigrants have to choose between emigrating to America and staying back with their children—all because their young sons and daughters became adults during the lengthy process. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court is expected to hear a case, Mayorkas v. Cuellar de Osorio, that could have a big effect on whether some applicants who turned 21 during the US visa process are allowed to immigrate at the same time as their parents, rather than being bumped all the way to the back of the line.

“I hope the Supreme Court will show common sense and realize that if a mother applied for a visa when her children were clearly minors, she could not have predicted that it would take so long,” says Richard Alba, an immigration expert and sociology professor at the Graduate Center, CUNY. “The kind of conservative notion that undocumented immigrations are law-breakers really doesn’t apply at all here.”

One of the case’s named plaintiffs is Rosalina Cuellar de Osorio, who applied for a visa in 1998 to join her mother, who is a US citizen. At the time, Cuellar de Osorio’s son was 13. The visa application only took a month to be approved—but a visa didn’t become available until 2005, after her son, Melvin, had turned 21. (US law dictates that only a certain number of visas may be issued per country in a fiscal year.) She was able to emigrate from El Salvador, but the government would not issue an immediate visa for Melvin because he was no longer a child.

Under the 2002 Child Status Protection Act, children who turn 21 during the application process are supposed to “retain the original priority date issued upon receipt of the original petition”—which prevents kids like Melvin from being moved to the back of the visa line just because of their birth date. But in 2009, the Board of Immigration Appeals ruled differently—arguing that the original law wasn’t very clear and could be interpreted to only apply to certain categories of visas—like those that are filed by a lawful permanent resident on behalf of his or her spouse and children—but not necessarily those filed by US citizens. The board maintains that if the law starts applying to everyone, it will “undermine the perception of fairness of the rules” and introduce “tensions” among immigrants.

The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled in September 2012 that the immigration board was wrong because it failed to take into account Congress’s intent behind the law: That lawmakers never intended for the petitioner’s visa category to factor into the decision-making process. A bipartisan group of lawmakers who were serving when the original law passed in 2002—including Senators John McCain (R-Ariz.), Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.), and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.)—filed a brief on November 4, 2013, backing up that position: “The Solicitor General’s continuing insistence that that the law is ambiguous raises serious institutional concerns…Congress does not typically give an agency carte blanche to rewrite statutory language that is clear.”

The Supreme Court isn’t the only branch taking up this issue—the Senate’s mammoth immigration reform bill, which still hasn’t passed the House, would also fix this problem. Alba, the immigration professor, says, “This is a committee within the immigrations board that made a bad decision, so the question is now, can it be reversed?” The American Immigration Council notes that the current policy “has been heartbreaking for too many individuals,” and that countless immigrants sit in limbo until the issue is resolved. An Iranian applicant who goes by the initials K.M.K., for example, waited with his family for 12 years to get a visa before being bumped because he turned 21. He’s still in Iran, separated from his family, and waiting.

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Will the Supreme Court Force Immigrants to Leave Their Children Behind?

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NRA: Our Elephant Gun Owned by a Guy Who Shot a Baby With an Elephant Gun Is a "Treasure"

by Charlie Smith Posted on December 6, 2013

Mother Jones

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In addition to fighting furiously to keep guns in our warm, live hands, the National Rifle Association celebrates guns pried from cold, dead hands in its National Firearms Museum, “one of the world’s finest museum collections dedicated to firearms.” The museum’s Treasure Collection includes everything from Annie Oakley’s guns to Dirty Harry’s Smith & Wesson. Another item in the trove, which the NRA tweeted about yesterday, is an elephant rifle that belonged to Henry Morton Stanley, the 19th-century British American journalist and “explorer” who marauded through east, southern, and central Africa.

The 22-pound rifle, which fired a quarter-pound of lead with each shot “was considered heavy artillery,” explains NRA museum senior curator Doug Wicklund in the clip above. With it, Stanley shot 16 elephants during his 1871 trek in search of the missionary and doctor David Livingstone. Yet the NRA doesn’t mention that when he wasn’t shooting charismatic megafauna with his elephant guns, Stanley was shooting people with them.

As Stanley related in his own accounts, he repeatedly used his big guns to intimidate and kill people he encountered on his African travels. Here’s how he dealt with some of the “savages” who got in the way of his trans-continental journey in 1875:

I discharged my elephant rifle, with its two large conical balls, into their midst…My double-barreled shotgun, loaded with buckshot, was next discharged with terrible effect, for, without drawing a single bow or launching a single spear, they retreated up the slope of the hill…

Twice in succession I succeed in dropping men determined on launching the canoes, and seeing the sub-chief who had commanded the party that took the drum, I took deliberate aim with my elephant rifle at him. That bullet, as I have since been told, killed the chief and his wife and infant, who happened to be standing a few paces behind him, and the extraordinary result had more effect on the superstitious minds of the natives than all previous or subsequent shots.

On getting out of the cove we saw two canoes loaded with men coming out in pursuit from another small cove. I permitted them to come within one hundred yards of us, and this time I used the elephant rifle with explosive balls. Four shots killed five men and sank the canoes.

The final body count of this incident, Stanley claimed, was 14 dead and 8 wounded, presumably including the baby and its mother. Due to tales such as this, Stanley gained a reputation for indiscriminate slaughter. George Bernard Shaw described him as a “wild-beast man, with his elephant gun, and his atmosphere of dread and murder.” Fellow expeditionist Richard Burton observed, “Stanley shoots negroes sic as if they were monkeys.” Though the elephant gun in the NRA’s collection is likely not the one fired in the passage above, it’s not surprising that the gun lobby isn’t volunteering the larger story behind the trigger-happy owner of this “special treasure.”

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NRA: Our Elephant Gun Owned by a Guy Who Shot a Baby With an Elephant Gun Is a "Treasure"

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Just 90 Companies Caused Two-Thirds of Man-Made Global Warming Emissions

by Charlie Smith Posted on November 20, 2013

Mother Jones

This story first appeared on the Guardian website and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The climate crisis of the 21st century has been caused largely by just 90 companies, which between them produced nearly two-thirds of the greenhouse gas emissions generated since the dawning of the industrial age, new research suggests.

The companies range from investor-owned firms—household names such as Chevron, Exxon, and BP—to state-owned and government-run firms.

The analysis, which was welcomed by the former Vice President Al Gore as a “crucial step forward” found that the vast majority of the firms were in the business of producing oil, gas, or coal, found the analysis, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Climactic Change.

“There are thousands of oil, gas, and coal producers in the world,” climate researcher and author Richard Heede at the Climate Accountability Institute in Colorado said. “But the decision makers, the CEOs, or the ministers of coal and oil if you narrow it down to just one person, they could all fit on a Greyhound bus or two.”

Click here to explore the Guardian‘s interactive roster of the companies behind climate change. via The Guardian

Half of the estimated emissions were produced just in the past 25 years—well past the date when governments and corporations became aware that rising greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of coal and oil were causing dangerous climate change.

Many of the same companies are also sitting on substantial reserves of fossil fuel, which—if they are burned—put the world at even greater risk of dangerous climate change.

Climate change experts said the data set was the most ambitious effort so far to hold individual carbon producers, rather than governments, to account.

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Just 90 Companies Caused Two-Thirds of Man-Made Global Warming Emissions

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Federal solar auction flops in Colorado

by Charlie Smith Posted on October 25, 2013

Federal solar auction flops in Colorado

By

Tee Poole

No one bid to build solar projects in the San Luis Valley this week.

Oh come on, solar industry. You know you want a piece of Colorado.

The rights to build solar projects on 3,705 acres of high-altitude, federally owned desert in Colorado were put up for bid on Thursday. But not a single bidder showed up.

The outcome was a disappointment for U.S. Bureau of Land Management officials. They were conducting the first of many planned solar auctions on public lands in the West.

The officials are describing the auction as a learning experience and say they will try again. The Denver Post reports:

Five companies had filed preliminary applications for the three San Luis Valley parcels, and there were another 27 inquires about the sites, according to Bureau of Land Management officials.

Based on that interest, officials scheduled an auction at the BLM Colorado office in Lakewood for the 3,700 acres of valley land.

“We are going to have to regroup and figure out what didn’t work,” said Maryanne Kurtinaitis, renewable-energy program manager for the BLM in Colorado.

Ken Johnson, a spokesperson for the Solar Energy Industries Association, suggested that the auction was premature.

“To date, BLM has yet to finalize any regional mitigation plans,” Johnson told the newspaper. “Frankly, it’s not smart business to commit to something until you’ve read the fine print.” Solar developers may also have been concerned about securing financing in a time of market uncertainty.


Source
1st auction of solar rights on public lands in Colorado draws no bids, The Denver Post

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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"Prisoners": The Strongest Anti-Torture Argument That Has Come Out of The Movies in Years

by Charlie Smith Posted on September 20, 2013

Mother Jones

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Prisoners
Warner Bros. Pictures
153 minutes

Prisoners is one of the year’s finest films. It’s a riveting and superbly acted two-and-a-half hours, carefully and smartly crafted by director Denis Villeneuve and screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski.

The film focuses on the Thanksgiving kidnapping of two daughters, one from the Dover family and one from the Birches. Hugh Jackman commands the screen as Keller Dover, a father who abducts and terrorizes Alex Jones (played by Paul Dano), a mentally impaired young man who Keller is convinced took the girls and knows where they’re being held. The police investigation is led by the ultra-dedicated Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal). The movie scores high marks as a gripping mystery, and as a terrifying human drama. It’s also the best argument against torture that has emerged from the film industry in a long time.

Last year, a lengthy debate began regarding Zero Dark Thirty‘s depiction of the United States’ use of torture during the Bush administration. Some anti-torture commentators were rather generous. “It is an exposure of torture,” Andrew Sullivan wrote. “It removes any doubt that war criminals ran this country for seven years and remain at large, while they scapegoated the grunts at Abu Ghraib who were, yes, merely following their superior’s own orders.” This point, made by Sullivan and many others at the time, is (to put it politely) excessively generous, given that ZDT offers a severe mangling of recent history that gives the viewer the impression that torture was crucial in tracking down Osama bin Laden. (It simply wasn’t.) With Prisoners, however, there is no hedging on the matter. The film has nothing to do with politics or the abuses of the War on Terror, but it does depict the prolonged, illegal, and sloppy interrogation of someone for vital information.

Very quickly, Keller (Jackman) looks more like a villain than a determined and sympathetic family man. Alex’s face is swollen and bloodied beyond recognition. Shards of glass protrude from his flesh. He’s been drenched in streams of scalding water. There are serious doubts about whether Alex had anything to do with the abduction, and Keller’s “hurt him until he talks” policy grows increasingly unsuccessful and problematic.

It is an ugly, frightening, and self-defeating act that is committed out of love and desperation. And it’s a punishing depiction handled responsibly and masterfully by Villeneuve, and his cast and crew. It addresses a question we’ve heard many times before. For instance, in a 2006 episode of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, the panel discussed the issue of Bush-era torture and “enhanced interrogation.” Actor Jason Alexander stated that if a prisoner had information on the location of his kidnapped child, he would without hesitation go “Quentin Tarantino” on him. That seems like something many parents would say, and it’s not hard to understand why. But Prisoners intelligently explores the failings of that logic. What if you have the wrong person? Is this undermining effective police work? What do you lose of yourself if you go down this road? Prisoners strips any hint of heroism or romanticism from the notion of doing “whatever it takes” to save your family. Take that, Jack Bauer.

Here’s a trailer for the powerful film:

Prisoners gets a release on Friday, September 20. The film is rated R for disturbing violent content including torture, and language throughout. Click here for local showtimes and tickets.

Click here for more TV and film coverage from Mother Jones.

To read more of Asawin’s reviews, click here.

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"Prisoners": The Strongest Anti-Torture Argument That Has Come Out of The Movies in Years

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Russia "Welcomes" Plan to Control Syria’s Chemical Weapons, But That’s About It

by Charlie Smith Posted on September 10, 2013

Mother Jones

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Guess what? It turns out that Russia isn’t really all that excited about forcing Syria to give up its chemical weapons after all:

A last-ditch effort to avert a U.S. military strike by transferring control of Syrian chemical weapons ran into obstacles Tuesday, as Russia balked at a French plan to enforce an international agreement under a binding U.N. Security Council resolution with a military option if necessary.

….A telephone conversation between French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius and his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, revealed a deep divide over their visions of the Security Council’s role — and particularly over the prospect of military action to ensure that an agreement would be honored….After a telephone conversation Tuesday with Lavrov, Fabius said Russia is reluctant to agree to a binding U.N. Security Council resolution that would provide a framework to control Syria’s chemical weapons stocks.

….Russia considers Fabius’s proposal unacceptable at least in part because it would imply that the Syrian government is responsible for last month’s chemical weapons attack on the outskirts of Damascus. Instead, a Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman said, Russia plans to submit a draft U.N. Security Council presidential statement “welcoming” the initiative to transfer Syrian chemical weapons to international control in order to destroy them. The statement would call for the U.N. secretary general, the director general of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and “interested parties” to implement the plans, Russia’s Interfax news agency reported.

There are lots of ways of weaseling the wording on this, of course, and no one is better at that than a bunch of UN diplomats. But this proposal is going to end up in the ash heap pretty quickly if this turns out to be a hard-and-fast position from Russia. Stay tuned.

Also: apologies for the 100 percent focus on Syria so far today. It’s just one of those odd coincidences. Maybe next I’ll write something mean about the new iPhone in order to spark a witty and enlightening conversation about Apple in comments.

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Russia "Welcomes" Plan to Control Syria’s Chemical Weapons, But That’s About It

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Vermont can’t shut down nuke plant, court says

by Charlie Smith Posted on August 15, 2013

Vermont can’t shut down nuke plant, court says

By John Upton

NRC

The Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, on the Connecticut River.

An unwanted nuclear power plant is going to be sticking around in Vermont like a drunk uncle after the party has ended.

State lawmakers have been trying to force the closure of the 41-year-old Vermont Yankee plant by denying it permits following radioactive leaks and other safety concerns. But a U.S. Court of Appeals ruled Wednesday that doing so was beyond the legislature’s power, upholding a lower court’s ruling that states are “pre-empted” by federal law from regulating nuclear safety.

“The nuclear power industry has just been delivered a tremendous victory against the attempt by any state to shut down federally regulated nuclear power plants,” Kathleen Sullivan, a lawyer for power plant owner Entergy, told The New York Times. From the Times article:

[T]he court said Vermont was unpersuasive when it said that the reasons for the denial were that the reactor was too costly and unreliable, and that closing it would encourage the development of renewable energy from wind or wood.

In hearings and floor debate, Vermont legislators referred often to the idea that they could not legislate over the safety of the plant, which is on the Connecticut River near the Massachusetts border, and would have to find other reasons to close it.

“Vermont tried to escape the prohibition by saying, ‘Oh, no, we were really trying to encourage energy diversity,’ ” Ms. Sullivan said.

The court also found that because the reactor operated in a competitive market for electricity, Vermont could not close it because it was too expensive.

The ruling comes as nuclear power is increasingly being seen as uneconomical in America in an era of cheap natural gas and renewable power. Earlier this year, Entergy announced that it would shed 30 of the 650 jobs at Vermont Yankee.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Vermont can’t shut down nuke plant, court says

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Energy companies say releasing CO2 data would jeopardize trade secrets

by Charlie Smith Posted on July 2, 2013

Energy companies say releasing CO2 data would jeopardize trade secrets

By John Upton

Shutterstock

“Shhhh … don’t tell anybody how much we’re wrecking the climate … that’s a trade secret.”

Energy and chemical companies are urging the Obama administration to dump a proposal on greenhouse gas emissions reporting. They say new reporting requirements could put their trade secrets at risk. From The Hill:

The White House is currently reviewing a proposal from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that could require companies to publicly release the information they use to calculate the emissions, like the volume of production or raw materials that are used.

Companies and market regulators worry that that data can be “reverse-engineered and reverse-calculated to basically give away trade secrets,” according to Lorraine Gershman, director of the environmental, regulatory and technical affairs office of the American Chemistry Council.

“We pretty much are reiterating our concern that the data be protected and not divulged,” she said. “Our members’ concerns are release of information, both domestically and internationally as well.”

The energy industry uses the “trade secrets” cry a lot. Frackers use it to prevent the public from knowing which chemicals they’re pumping underground, for example. And ExxonMobil has been using it to argue that it should be allowed keep secret its inspection reports on the tar-sands oil pipeline that ruptured in Mayflower, Ark., earlier this year. From EnergyWire:

Federal regulators at the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration are set to decide as soon as this week whether Exxon can claim a trade secret exemption that would let it withhold inspection data for the ruptured Pegasus pipeline from Arkansas officials seeking it, including two GOP members of Congress. The immediate dispute hinges on a request from the local water utility to relocate the 96,000-barrel-per-day Pegasus following the spill, but the Arkansas conflict over Exxon’s confidentiality rights echoes warnings from [Keystone XL] opponents that pipeline operators are too loosely overseen to ensure safe oil transportation.

It seems that wrecking the environment is just part of the trade for fossil fuel companies, and they don’t want anybody to know how exceedingly good at it they are.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Energy companies say releasing CO2 data would jeopardize trade secrets

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