Edible Wild Plants for Beginners: The Essential Edible Plants and Recipes to Get Started – Althea Press
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Tag Archives: ultima
These 21 kids taking on Trump could be our best hope for climate action
Scientists figured out how to make concrete that grows in seawater.
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Tagged cities, climate-change, infrastructure, news, Ona, roman empire, science, sea level rise, seawall, ultima
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The Eighty-Dollar Champion – Elizabeth Letts
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Snowman, The Horse That Inspired a Nation
Genre: Nature
Price: $2.99
Publish Date: August 23, 2011
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Seller: Penguin Random House LLC
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER   Harry de Leyer first saw the horse he would name Snowman on a truck bound for the slaughterhouse. The recent Dutch immigrant recognized the spark in the eye of the beaten-up nag and bought him for eighty dollars. On Harry’s modest farm on Long Island, he ultimately taught Snowman how to fly. Here is the dramatic and inspiring rise to stardom of an unlikely duo. One show at a time, against extraordinary odds and some of the most expensive thoroughbreds alive, the pair climbed to the very top of the sport of show jumping. Their story captured the heart of Cold War–era America—a story of unstoppable hope, inconceivable dreams, and the chance to have it all. They were the longest of all longshots—and their win was the stuff of legend.
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Actually, Apple’s shiny new office park isn’t that cool.
There’s been much high-profile gushing over the spaceship-in-Eden–themed campus that Apple spent six years and $5 billion building in Silicon Valley, but it turns out techno-utopias don’t make great neighbors.
“Apple’s new HQ is a retrograde, literally inward-looking building with contempt for the city where it lives and cities in general,” writes Adam Rogers at Wired, in an indictment of the company’s approach to transportation, housing, and economics in the Bay Area.
The Ring — well, they can’t call it The Circle — is a solar-powered, passively cooled marvel of engineering, sure. But when it opens, it will house 12,000 Apple employees, 90 percent of whom will be making lengthy commutes to Cupertino and back every day. (San Francisco is 45 miles away.)
To accommodate that, Apple Park features a whopping 9,000 parking spots (presumably the other 3,000 employees will use the private shuttle bus instead). Those 9,000 cars will be an added burden on the region’s traffic problems, as Wired reports, not to mention that whole global carbon pollution thing.
You can read Roger’s full piece here, but the takeaway is simple: With so much money, Apple could have made meaningful improvements to the community — building state-of-the-art mass transit, for example — but chose to make a sparkly, exclusionary statement instead.
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Tagged apple, apple-park, circle, company, francisco, private, region, rogers, silicon, those, ultima, wired
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The Trump administration may shrink Bears Ears national monument.
There’s been much high-profile gushing over the spaceship-in-Eden–themed campus that Apple spent six years and $5 billion building in Silicon Valley, but it turns out techno-utopias don’t make great neighbors.
“Apple’s new HQ is a retrograde, literally inward-looking building with contempt for the city where it lives and cities in general,” writes Adam Rogers at Wired, in an indictment of the company’s approach to transportation, housing, and economics in the Bay Area.
The Ring — well, they can’t call it The Circle — is a solar-powered, passively cooled marvel of engineering, sure. But when it opens, it will house 12,000 Apple employees, 90 percent of whom will be making lengthy commutes to Cupertino and back every day. (San Francisco is 45 miles away.)
To accommodate that, Apple Park features a whopping 9,000 parking spots (presumably the other 3,000 employees will use the private shuttle bus instead). Those 9,000 cars will be an added burden on the region’s traffic problems, as Wired reports, not to mention that whole global carbon pollution thing.
You can read Roger’s full piece here, but the takeaway is simple: With so much money, Apple could have made meaningful improvements to the community — building state-of-the-art mass transit, for example — but chose to make a sparkly, exclusionary statement instead.
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The Trump administration may shrink Bears Ears national monument.
Posted in alo, Anchor, ATTRA, Casio, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, ONA, PUR, Ringer, solar, solar power, Ultima, Uncategorized, Vintage
Tagged apple-park, company, francisco, king, lai, solar power, those, trump nation, ultima, where-it-lives, wired
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Jared Kushner Is Reportedly Under FBI Scrutiny for Meetings With Russians
Mother Jones
Jared Kusher, the husband of President Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka and one of the president’s top advisers in the White House, is “now a focus in the FBI’s Russia investigation,” according to a Washington Post report published Thursday evening. And NBC News reported, “Investigators believe Kushner has significant information relevant to their inquiry, officials said. That does not mean they suspect him of a crime or intend to charge him.”
Kushner’s December meetings with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and the head of a Russian bank from Moscow are being looked at by investigators probing Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election and examining possible ties between Trump associates and Russia, according to the Post. Former national security adviser Michael Flynn and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort have also been under scrutiny for their contacts with Russians or pro-Russian Ukrainian politicians.
From the Post:
In early December, Kushner met in New York with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, and he later sent a deputy to meet with Kislyak again. Flynn was also present at the early December meeting, and later that month, Flynn held a call with Kislyak to discuss U.S.-imposed sanctions against Russia. Flynn initially mischaracterized the conversation even to the vice president — which ultimately prompted his ouster from the White House.
Kushner also met in December with Sergey Gorkov, the head of Vnesheconombank, which has been the subject of U.S. sanctions following Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its support of separatists in eastern Ukraine.
In addition to the December meetings, a former senior intelligence official said FBI agents had been looking closely at earlier exchanges between Trump associates and the Russians dating back to the spring of 2016, including one at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. Kushner and Kislyak — along with close Trump adviser and current Attorney General Jeff Sessions — were present at an April 2016 event at the Mayflower where then-candidate Trump promised in a speech to seek better relations with Russia. It is unclear whether Kushner and Kislyak interacted there.
As reported by the New York Times in April, Kushner failed to disclose several meetings with Russian officials, an omission Kushner’s lawyers have characterized as a mistake. Jamie Gorelick, one of Kushner’s attorneys and a former deputy attorney general during the Clinton administration, told the Post Thursday that Kushner volunteered to share information about his contacts with the Russians with investigators.
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Jared Kushner Is Reportedly Under FBI Scrutiny for Meetings With Russians
Astrophysics for People in a Hurry – Neil de Grasse Tyson
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Astrophysics for People in a Hurry
Genre: Physics
Price: $9.99
Publish Date: May 2, 2017
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Seller: W. W. Norton
The #1 New York Times Bestseller: The essential universe, from our most celebrated and beloved astrophysicist. What is the nature of space and time? How do we fit within the universe? How does the universe fit within us? There’s no better guide through these mind-expanding questions than acclaimed astrophysicist and best-selling author Neil deGrasse Tyson. But today, few of us have time to contemplate the cosmos. So Tyson brings the universe down to Earth succinctly and clearly, with sparkling wit, in tasty chapters consumable anytime and anywhere in your busy day. While you wait for your morning coffee to brew, for the bus, the train, or a plane to arrive, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry will reveal just what you need to be fluent and ready for the next cosmic headlines: from the Big Bang to black holes, from quarks to quantum mechanics, and from the search for planets to the search for life in the universe.
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Tagged anchor, bestseller, company-seller, from-the-big, hurry, norton, people, times, ultima
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Pence’s Perch Atop Trump’s Voter Fraud Commission Hints at Suppression Efforts
Mother Jones
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After claiming that as many as 5 million people voted illegally in the November election, President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday to create a commission to address voter fraud. With widespread evidence that voter fraud is nearly nonexistent, voting rights groups have seen similar efforts as a pretense to suppress voting among young voters and minorities.
The announcement of the commission’s leadership team reinforced civil rights groups’ concerns that the panel’s work will be used to justify voter suppression techniques such as voter ID laws and registration purges. The commission’s chair will be Vice President Mike Pence. Last year, as governor of Indiana, Pence cheered the actions of state police and the secretary of state’s office as they shut down a voter major registration drive under the guise of protecting the integrity of the voting process.
Trump’s order instructs the new Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity to study “vulnerabilities in voting systems and practices used for Federal elections that could lead to improper voter registrations and improper voting, including fraudulent voter registrations and fraudulent voting.” Election law experts and civil rights groups quickly condemned the record of the commission’s vice chair, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who has helped craft anti-immigrant laws, the post-9/11 “Muslim registry,” and voter suppression efforts in his state.
But the track records of Pence and another former Indiana official on the commission also hint at voter suppression—particularly since the state’s crackdown hinged on one of the targets outlined in Trump’s order: inconsistencies apparently caused in part by outdated voter registration rolls.
In April 2016, a group called the Indiana Voter Registration Project began a registration drive in the Hoosier State, focusing on underrepresented African American communities. By the summer, the group had about 100 canvassers in the state and was registering thousands of people. Under Indiana law, canvassers are required to turn in every voter registration form they receive to the county—they can’t withhold the forms of people who might not vote the way they want—and to sign each form and flag suspicious ones. Bill Buck, a spokesman for the Indiana Voter Registration Project, says canvassers were following all of these rules.
But by late summer, state officials had begun to investigate the group. On September 15, Indiana’s secretary of state, Republican Connie Lawson, warned local election officials about the group’s voter registration efforts. “Nefarious actors are operating here in Indiana,” she wrote. “A group by the name of the Indiana Voter Registration Project has forged voter registrations.” The state police opened an investigation, and canvassers reported that police were interrogating them in their homes.
On October 4, state police raided the group’s Marion County headquarters, seizing phones, computers, and papers. The raid halted the group’s registration efforts a week before the state’s registration deadline, preventing the group from registering an additional 5,000 to 10,000 people, according to Buck. The investigation eventually expanded to 56 counties in Indiana. In mid-October, a spokesman for the state police described vague evidence that the group had been forging registration forms: “The possible fraudulent or false information is a combination of made up names and made up addresses, real names with made up or incorrect addresses and false dates of births with real names as well as combinations of all these examples.”
The Indiana Voter Registration Project, run by a liberal super-PAC called Patriot Majority USA, suspected that the discrepancies were caused by outdated information in the state’s voter rolls. The group was turning in new information it collected, but that information may not have matched older data in the state system. So the group hired a data analysis firm, TargetSmart, to assess the rolls. TargetSmart’s report showed that Indiana’s data was woefully out of date, including more than 800,000 instances in which the voter rolls did not contain the newest federal data. “We were turning in up-to-date data and it didn’t match their old, flawed data,” Buck told Mother Jones last fall.
But Indiana authorities presented the situation as much more insidious. “I’ll tell you, in the state of Indiana right now, we’ve got a pretty vigorous investigation into voter fraud going on,” Pence, campaigning as the Republican Party’s vice presidential nominee, said in Iowa in October, a week after the raid shut the registration drive down. Shortly before leaving office, he awarded Lawson the state’s highest civilian honor. Lawson will also serve on Trump’s new commission.
The state police stated in affidavits released after the election that they believed that among the thousands of registration forms the group turned in were some that appeared to have been forged. From the evidence presented, it seemed likely that a few canvassers had fraudulently filled out applications. But Patriot Majority USA claimed it was vindicated by the release of these documents because, in addition to apparent evidence of forged applications, they also showed that the group’s staff had flagged suspect applications for county authorities. Buck concedes it’s possible that a few canvassers had broken the rules and forged applications, but that that could not account for the accusation of large-scale fraud from the Lawson’s office. “Thousands of dates of births and first names were changed,” Lawson said in a statement last October. “We believe this may be a case of voter fraud and have turned our findings over to the State Police, who are currently conducting an investigation into alleged voter fraud.” Buck says the claim that thousands of voters had their information altered is an indication that the rolls were out-of-date. “Their theory was that we were paying people to sit around and make up forms,” he said. “Why would we be doing this? What would we have to gain?”
There is no evidence that any fraudulent ballots were ultimately cast. It wasn’t even clear how forged registration forms or mismatched registration data could lead to in-person voter fraud, since Indiana has a law requiring voters to present identification. In late January, the state police finished their investigation and turned it over to the Marion County prosecutor to determine whether to file any charges. Contrary to Pence’s statement, a spokeswoman for the prosecutor’s office stressed that the police had not investigated voter fraud. “The Indiana State Police investigated alleged voter registration discrepancies prior to the November 2016 election,” Peg McLeish told Mother Jones in an email. “The investigation was not into fraudulent voting, that being ballots cast improperly.” McLeish says the prosecutor has not yet decided whether to press charges.
Other states have used outdated voter registration to pursue legally dubious purges of their voter rolls that disproportionately affect minority voters, who more often vote for Democrats. In 2010, Georgia instituted a policy of automatically rejecting a voter application form if the name, birth date, driver’s license number, or last four Social Security number digits didn’t exactly match the state’s existing data. Over a three-year period, this resulted in 34,874 canceled applications, more than 75 percent of which were from minority applicants. In February, the state agreed to modify the practice as part of a court settlement with civil rights groups.
Voting rights advocates condemned Trump’s order on Thursday. “As President Trump’s own lawyers have said, ‘All available evidence suggests that the 2016 general election was not tainted by fraud or mistake,'” Dale Ho, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project, said in a statement. “Signing a piece of paper will not make Trump’s false statements about voter fraud true. This commission, to be co-led by King of Voter Suppression Kris Kobach, is a sham. We call on professional elections administrators, serious academics, and elected officials to refuse to participate in what will be a pretext for disenfranchising Americans.”
The “only good news,” election law expert Rick Hasen wrote on his blog, is that the “Administration’s credibility is so low that few except the true believers are likely to believe anything produced by the likely worthless report.”
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Pence’s Perch Atop Trump’s Voter Fraud Commission Hints at Suppression Efforts
The Voting Rights Act May Be Coming Back From the Dead
Mother Jones
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On June 25, 2013, the Supreme Court killed the core provision of the Voting Rights Act. Four years later, it may be coming back from the dead.
Before Shelby County v. Holder, the 2013 case, the 1965 Voting Rights Act barred nine states with a history of discrimination against minority voters, and portions of six others, from passing new voting laws without federal approval. The court’s 5-4 decision, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, found that the formula for determining which jurisdictions needed approval—or “preclearance”—was outdated and therefore unconstitutional.
“Coverage today is based on decades-old data and eradicated practices,” Roberts wrote, and “‘current burdens’ must be justified by ‘current needs.'” In other words, states couldn’t be subject to preclearance based on the pervasive discrimination of the Jim Crow era, which Roberts wrote was now firmly in the past. Implicit in that ruling was the idea that states could be brought back under preclearance if they showed new evidence of discrimination. The law contains a provision specifically for that purpose, allowing courts to place jurisdictions under preclearance if they demonstrate intentional discrimination.
Freed by the court’s ruling from oversight for the first time in decades, many of the formerly constrained state and local governments quickly began imposing new restrictions on voting. But by passing measures that curtail voting by minorities, these jurisdictions are essentially calling Roberts’ bluff—and could force the Supreme Court to consider restoring preclearance.
Texas is the likeliest setting for the return of preclearance. In the last two months, federal courts have three times ruled that the state intentionally discriminated against minority voters. Its 2011 voter ID law and two redistricting maps it drew that year—for the state House and for Congress—were intended to limit the voting power of minorities, the courts found. Plaintiffs in the cases are asking the courts to place Texas back under preclearance. One or more of the cases could reach the Supreme Court as early as its next term. If so, the Roberts Court will have to decide what to do with states that demonstrate that racial discrimination in voting laws is not just a thing of the past.
“Shelby County said that any preclearance had to be based on current evidence,” says Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. “And these trials are based on current evidence, not based on something that happened in the 1960s. And so one way of reading this is that the courts are being faithful to what the Supreme Court said in Shelby County, which is that in order to have the extraordinary remedy of preclearance, you need to show that there is a current problem with intentional race discrimination. That’s exactly what’s at stake in these cases.”
In 2010, a conservative backlash to President Barack Obama put Republicans in charge of legislatures and governorships across the country. They quickly passed new voter ID requirements, restrictions on early voting and same-day registration, and other measures that have been found to reduce voting among minorities, the poor, young people, and the elderly. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, by the time of the 2012 elections, 19 states had passed 25 restrictive voting laws.
Fourteen of those laws were blocked by the courts or the Justice Department under the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance rule, and the torrent of voting restrictions began to slow. Shelby changed that. It set in motion a new wave of voter suppression laws across the country. Weeks after the court’s ruling, for example, North Carolina passed a voter suppression bill that the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, in striking it down, called “the most restrictive voting law North Carolina has seen since the era of Jim Crow,” targeting “African Americans with almost surgical precision.”
No state moved more quickly than Texas to implement a wish list of election reforms that had been blocked under preclearance. Hours after the court’s decision, the state’s attorney general, Gregg Abbott, announced, “With today’s decision, the state’s voter ID law will take effect immediately.” The next day, Gov. Rick Perry signed into law maps for congressional and state Legislature districts that were based on the ones that had been struck down by a federal court under preclearance in 2012 as deliberately discriminatory against minority voters.
Those moves have not fared well in the courts. In April, a federal judge in Corpus Christi ruled that the voter ID law was passed with discriminatory intent. In the past two months, a federal court in San Antonio found both the congressional and the statehouse maps from 2011 intentionally discriminatory. In July, a federal court will determine whether the maps Texas adopted after Shelby are also discriminatory; that case could result in court-drawn maps for the 2018 elections. The string of rulings might lead the courts to reimpose preclearance on Texas. After all, preclearance was intended to target repeat offenders so that the courts wouldn’t be left playing whack-a-mole to strike down discriminatory measures every time they emerged.
“You see the consequence of not having preclearance,” says Mark Gaber, an attorney on the plaintiffs’ legal team in the redistricting cases. “It’s 2017 and we’re still having to litigate about something that happened in 2011.” He adds, “In that period of time, we’ve now gone through three election cycles under maps that quite clearly are—the court’s going to find to be discriminatory.”
Any court that finds intentional discrimination could put Texas back under preclearance for up to 10 years. The courts can decide what types of election laws, if not all of them, would be subject to federal approval.
Wendy Weiser of the Brennan Center, who is part of the plaintiffs’ litigation team in the Texas voter ID case, says there’s a “reasonable chance” that one or more of the Texas cases will result in Texas being placed under preclearance. “The thing that persuades me that this is more likely than not is…the existence of multiple findings of discrimination in the state during this period,” she says. “So it really feels quite widespread.” Hasen concurs that there’s “a fair chance” that at least one of the Texas cases will result in preclearance. Texas would almost certainly appeal a preclearance order, putting the ultimate decision before the Supreme Court.
Texas is not the only place facing the potential return of preclearance. In the days and months after Shelby, Alabama and Mississippi enacted voter ID laws that had previously been held up by preclearance. North Carolina has stood out for the sheer number of voting bills Republicans have passed to preserve their power, including a redistricting map currently before the Supreme Court and a voter ID bill on which it could also rule. At least two cities have already been placed under preclearance in the aftermath of Shelby: Evergreen, Alabama, for gerrymandering its city council districts to produce a majority-white council in a city that is 62 percent African American, and Pasadena, Texas, which also restructured its city council to reduce the power of Hispanic voters. Pasadena is appealing that decision. But if a court places Texas under preclearance, it would mark the return on a much bigger level of a policy thought to be all but dead.
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