AUDIO:

POSSIBLE TOPICS: VOTETEXAS.GOV—Voter Information; The Community Climate Summit will be a day-long gathering of climate activists, community leaders, and frontline community members Sep 10; Montgomery County approves reduced tax abatement for steel company Husteel America; The TX Lege sure thinks a lot of companies need to be coddled; At $249 per day, [Connecticut] prison stays leave ex-inmates deep in debt; Elizabeth Warren points out Mitch McConnell graduated from a school that cost $330 a year amid his criticisms of Biden’s student-loan forgiveness: ‘He can spare us the lectures on fairness’; Ted Cruz says there’s a ‘real risk’ that Biden’s student-loan forgiveness will help Democrats in the 2022 midterm elections; Mississippi’s Jim Crow-era felony voting law is constitutional, federal court rules; US life expectancy last year fell to the lowest age since 1996; US life expectancy last year fell to the lowest age since 1996; Half of UK Conservative voters back renationalising energy firms – poll; Rival Chechen fighters take war to battlefields of Ukraine; Forever Chemicals No More? PFAS Are Destroyed With New Technique; More.

Thinkwing Radio with Mike Honig (@ThinkwingRadio) is now on Wednesdays at 11AM (CT) on KPFT-HD2, Houston’s Community Station. You can also hear the show:

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Welcome to Thinkwing Radio with Mike Honig where we discuss local, state, national, and international stories. My co-host and show editor is Andrew Ferguson.

• An educated electorate is a prerequisite for a democracy.
• You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.

1. Make sure you are registered to vote! VoteTexas.GOV – Texas Voter InformationTEXAS SoS VOTE-BY-MAIL BALLOT APPLICATION (ALL TEXAS COUNTIES) HarrisVotes.com­ – Countywide Voting Centers, (Election Information Line (713) 755-6965), Harris County Clerk
   1. Harris County “Vote-By-Mail’ Application for 2022
      1. Fort bend County Elections/Voter Registration Machine takes you to the proper link
      2. GalvestonVotes.org (Galveston County, TX)
      3. Liberty County Elections (Liberty County, TX)
      4. Montgomery County (TX) Elections
      5. Brazoria County (TX) Clerk Election Information
      6. Waller County (TX) Elections
      7. Chambers County (TX) Elections
      8. For personalized, nonpartisan voter guides and information, Consider visiting Vote.ORG.   Ballotpedia.com and Texas League of Women Voters are also good places to get election info.
      9. If you are denied your right to vote any place at any time at any polling place for any reason, ask for (or demand) a provisional ballot rather than lose your vote.
      10. HarrisVotes.com – Countywide Voting Centers, HARRIS COUNTY – IDENTIFICATION REQUIRED FOR VOTING: Do not possess and cannot reasonably obtain one of these IDs?
          1. Fill out a declaration at the polls describing a reasonable impediment to obtaining it, and show a copy or original of one of the following supporting forms of ID:
          2. A government document that shows your name and an address, including your voter registration certificate
          3. Current utility bill
          4. Bank statement
          5. Government check
          6. Paycheck
          7. A certified domestic (from a U.S. state or territory) birth certificate or (b) a document confirming birth admissible in a court of law which establishes your identity (which may include a foreign birth document)
          8. You may vote early by-mail if:You are registered to vote and meet one of the following criteria:
             1. Away from the county of residence on Election Day and during the early voting period;
             2. Sick or disabled;
             3. 65 years of age or older on Election Day; or
             4. Confined in jail, but eligible to vote.
             5. Make sure you are registered:
             6. Ann Harris Bennett, Tax Assessor-Collector & Voter Registrar
             7. CHECK REGISTRATION STATUS HERE
             8. CLICK How to register to vote in Texas
             9. Outside Texas, try Vote.org.
2. BE REGISTERED TO VOTE, and if eligible, REMEMBER TO FILL OUT AND MAIL YOUR MAIL-IN BALLOT APPLICATIONS FOR 2022
   1. You can track your Mail Ballot Activity from our website with direct link provided here https://www.harrisvotes.com/Tracking
   2. NEXT ELECTION: 2022 November General Election – November 8, 2022
   3. GENERAL ELECTIONS SCHEDULE
      Oct 11: Last day to register to vote
      24-Nov 4: Early Vote
      Oct 28: Last day to apply for a ballot by mail
      Nov. 8: ELECTION DAY!!!
3. ANNOUNCEMENT: The Community Climate Summit will be a day-long gathering of climate activists, community leaders, and frontline community members. Sep 10 at the Rice University Glasscock School of Continuing Studies
   1. The hope for this event is to support a coming together of frontline community members, community leaders, organizers, activists, and environmental advocacy professionals to share resources, learn about neighborhood-specific issues, identify sustainability strategies, collaborate to support each other’s existing initiatives, and create a shared vision and action plans toward both short- and long-term goals to protect the health of Houston communities. More details to come at the linked event site.
4. Montgomery County approves reduced tax abatement for steel company Husteel America; By Jishnu Nair | COMMUNITYIMPACT.COM | 11:42 AM Aug 30, 2022 CDT, Updated 11:42 AM Aug 30, 2022 CDT
   1. Montgomery County commissioners approved a five-year tax abatement for steel company Husteel America’s planned Splendora facility at an Aug. 23 meeting. Commissioners voted 4-1 with Precinct 3 Commissioner James Noack opposing the deal.
   2. According to a copy of the agreement provided by County AttorneyD. Griffin, [South Korea-based] Husteel America will receive a 100% ad valorem tax abatement in 2023 and then decreasing abatements in following years.
   3. The abatement period—which will begin Jan. 1, 2023, and end Dec. 31, 2032—will solely target improvements constructed on the 35-acre property and not any changes in the land value itself. In an email to Community Impact Newspaper, Griffin estimated the improvements would be valued at $122 million upon completion.
   4. Griffin previously told Community Impact Newspaper that companies tend to use the first years of their abatements to build up infrastructure and hire employees. The agreement contains a commitment of minimum employees that Husteel must meet by 2025 and 2029.
   5. If the company does not employ the minimum amount of full-time workers, it must pay back the county 1.5% of its abated taxes multiplied by the amount of positions below the limit, according to the agreement. …
   6. Commissioners previously rejected a 100% abatement over 10 years—the maximum permitted by Texas law—on June 28. …
5. The Lege sure thinks a lot of companies need to be coddled; by Charles Kuffner | OFFTHEKUFF.COM | Aug 29th, 2022
   1. As Kuffner excerpted from the Texas Tribune:
   2. Texas banned 10 financial firms from doing business with the state after Comptroller Glenn Hegar said Wednesday that they did not support the oil and gas industry.
   3. Hegar, a Republican running for reelection in November, banned BlackRock Inc., and other banks and investment firms — as well as some investment funds within large banks such as Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan — from entering into most contracts with state and local entities after Hegar’s office said the firms “boycott” the fossil fuel sector.
   4. Hegar sent inquiries to hundreds of financial companies earlier this year requesting information about whether they were avoiding investments in the oil and gas industry in favor of renewable energy companies. The survey was a result of a new Texas law that went into effect in September and prohibits most state agencies, as well as local governments, from contracting with firms that have cut ties with carbon-emitting energy companies.
   5. State pension funds and local governments issuing municipal bonds will have to divest from the companies on the list, though there are some exemptions, Hegar said.
   6. “The environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) movement has produced an opaque and perverse system in which some financial companies no longer make decisions in the best interest of their shareholders or their clients, but instead use their financial clout to push a social and political agenda shrouded in secrecy,” Hegar said in a written statement on Wednesday.
   7. New York-based BlackRock, which has publicly embraced investing more in renewable energy, criticized Hegar’s decision.
   8. “This is not a fact-based judgment,” a spokesperson for the company said in a written statement. “BlackRock does not boycott fossil fuels — investing over $100 billion in Texas energy companies on behalf of our clients proves that.
   9. “Elected and appointed public officials have a duty to act in the best interests of the people they serve,” the spokesperson added. “Politicizing state pension funds, restricting access to investments, and impacting the financial returns of retirees, is not consistent with that duty.” …
   10. MIKE: Kuffner adds a lot to this, so I’ll suggest you go to his article.
   11. MIKE: Texas is a business-friendly state, they say. Apparently as long as those businesses are friendly to Texas oil and gas. 
   12. MIKE: At least the neo-Fascist Republican Party is getting more even-handed. Now they infringe on the freedoms of people AND businesses.
6. At $249 per day, [Connecticut] prison stays leave ex-inmates deep in debt; By Pat Eaton-Robb | ASSOCIATED PRESS | Sat, August 27, 2022 at 6:30 AM·5 min read
   1. Two decades after her release from prison, Teresa Beatty feels she is still being punished.
   2. When her mother died two years ago, the state of Connecticut put a lien on the Stamford home she and her siblings inherited. It said she owed $83,762 to cover the cost of her 2-1/2 year imprisonment for drug crimes. …
   3. “I’m about to be homeless,” said Beatty, 58, who in March became the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the state law that charges prisoners $249 a day for the cost of their incarceration. “I just don’t think it’s right, because I feel I already paid my debt to society. I just don’t think it’s fair for me to be paying twice.”
   4. All but two states have so-called “pay-to-stay” laws that make prisoners pay for their time behind bars, though not every state actually pursues people for the money. Supporters say the collections are a legitimate way for states to recoup millions of taxpayer dollars spent on prisons and jails.
   5. Critics say it’s an unfair second penalty that hinders rehabilitation by putting former inmates in debt for life. Efforts have been underway in some places to scale back or eliminate such policies.
   6. Two states — Illinois and New Hampshire — have repealed their laws since 2019.
   7. Connecticut also overhauled its statute this year, keeping it in place only for the most serious crimes, such as murder, and exempting prisoners from having to pay the first $50,000 of their incarceration costs.
   8. Under the revised law, about 98% of Connecticut inmates no longer have to pay any of the costs of their incarceration after they get out, said state Rep. Steve Stafstrom, a Bridgeport Democrat and a sponsor of the repeal legislation. …
   9. Pay-to-stay laws were put into place in many areas during the tough-on-crime era of the 1980s and ’90s, said Brittany Friedman, an assistant professor of sociology at University of Southern California who is leading a study of the practice.
   10. As prison populations ballooned, Friedman said, policymakers questioned how to pay for incarceration costs. “So, instead of raising taxes, the solution was to shift the cost burden from the state and the taxpayers onto the incarcerated.”
   11. Laws vary from state to state. Many, like Connecticut, only go after inmates for the cost of incarceration if they come into money after leaving prison. A few, such as North Carolina, have laws on the books but almost never use them, Friedman said.
   12. Connecticut’s partial repeal went into effect July 1. The state is projected to collect about $5.5 million less per year from ex-prisoners because of the change.
   13. State Sen. John Kissel, the top Republican on the legislature’s Judiciary Committee, said he opposed the repeal passed by the Democratic majority, but might support reforms like allowing inmates to pay off debt in installments.
   14. Kissel said that while Beatty’s situation tugs at one’s heartstrings, “Everybody has issues.”
   15. “The policy is to make one appreciate that your incarceration costs money,” [Kissel] said. “The taxpayers footed the bill. They didn’t do anything wrong. And knowing that one has to pay the state back a reasonable sum on a regular basis is not a bad policy.” …
   16. The state even collected money awarded to inmates in lawsuits over alleged abuse by prison guards.
   17. Former Connecticut inmate Fred Hodges, who served more than 17 years in prison for killing a man while trying to retrieve his son’s stolen bicycle, came into $21,000 after his car was totaled in a 2009 traffic accident. The state claimed half of that, he said. After paying his lawyer, he was left with about $3,000. …
   18. Beatty’s lawsuit, which is seeking class-action status, argues that the pay-to-stay seizures violate the excessive fines clause of the Constitution.
   19. Da’ee McKnight, who works with Hodges as a coordinator for an organization called Family ReEntry, said the state took an insurance settlement from him, even though he served most of his sentence before the law was on the books.
   20. “Here, I’m being penalized for something that I was not even made aware of at the time I was sentenced, because it did not even exist,” he said.
   21. ANDREW: Yes, prison costs money. If cost is concerning, maybe exchange punitive so-called justice for systems that actually rehabilitate people who do wrong, which reduces recidivism, which lowers operating costs long-term. Guardian article with alternatives, like restorative justice where safe, controlled movement in society for more dangerous offenders, drug courts, hefty fines for white-collar crime. Of course, that would mean less profit from prisoners.
   22. MIKE: The unfairness here begins with the fact that “pay-to-stay” charges are basically fines. Apparently, it’s usually illegal to levy fines this big as part of the original sentences, so they finagle a way to “fine” these prisoners as “rent”. I don’t know how that has remained Constitutional this long.
   23. MIKE: I presume that Texas also still does this. It again raises David Fowler’s question, “Are you sent to prison AS punishment, or are you sent to prison FOR punishment.” This is salt in the wounds, and prevents the formerly incarcerated from every rehabilitating their lives. Punishment becomes perpetual.
   24. REFERENCE: How Norway turns criminals into good neighbours; COM | 7 July 2019
7. Elizabeth Warren points out Mitch McConnell graduated from a school that cost $330 a year amid his criticisms of Biden’s student-loan forgiveness: ‘He can spare us the lectures on fairness’; By Ayelet Sheffey | BUSINESSINSIDER.COM | Aug 26, 2022, 11:24 AM
   1. Republican lawmakers have been quick to slam President Joe Biden’s recent student-loan forgiveness announcement — and Democrats aren’t letting it slide.
   2. On Wednesday, Biden announced up to $20,000 in student-loan forgiveness for Pell Grant recipients making under $125,000 a year, and $10,000 for other federal borrowers within the same income cap. While this was a long-awaited policy that many Democrats were waiting for the president to implement, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was not thrilled with the expansive relief.
   3. “President Biden’s student loan socialism is a slap in the face to every family who sacrificed to save for college, every graduate who paid their debt, and every American who chose a certain career path or volunteered to serve in our Armed Forces in order to avoid taking on debt,” McConnell wrote in a statement. “This policy is astonishingly unfair.”
   4. But Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who has been a vocal leader pushing Biden to approve $50,000 in student-loan forgiveness, didn’t want to let McConnell off the hook for his comments.
   5. [In a tweet, Warren said:] “Senator McConnell graduated from a school that cost $330 a year,” Warren wrote on Twitter on Thursday. “Today it costs over $12,000. McConnell has done nothing to fix it — and is irate that the President is stepping up to help millions of working Americans drowning in debt. He can spare us the lectures on fairness.” —Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) August 25, 2022
   6. McConnell graduated from the University of Louisville in 1964 [It is part of the Kentucky state university system] when annual tuition there cost $330. As has been the case with colleges across the country, tuition has surged and enrollment there now costs $12,000 a year, as Warren noted. While many other Republican lawmakers have joined McConnell in calling Biden’s relief unfair to taxpayers and those who have paid off their debt, some of them have introduced legislation that attempts to address higher education costs without student-loan relief.
   7. GOP lawmakers Virginia Foxx, Elise Stefanik, and Jim Banks introduced a bill that would end targeted loan forgiveness programs while prohibiting tuition and fees from exceeding the expected earnings of a certain program, among other things. And GOP Sen. Rick Scott on Monday introduced a bill that would “hold university administrators accountable for unacceptable skyrocketing price of education.” …
   8. ANDREW: Fairness is not making sure everyone has the same obstacles. Fairness is making sure everyone can finish the course. Even when tuition was in the hundreds, plenty of people still couldn’t afford college. Loan forgiveness is good and should be expanded, but I think making education fair starts with making it free.
   9. MIKE: I went to Brooklyn College for a couple of years. It’s part of the City University of NY (CUNY). It cost me less than $500 per semester, including books. I didn’t graduate, but still consider that those 2 years were essential for my intellectual and philosophical growth. Everyone should have that opportunity if they want it.
8. Ted Cruz says there’s a ‘real risk’ that Biden’s student-loan forgiveness will help Democrats in the 2022 midterm elections; By Yelena Dzhanova | BUSINESSINSIDER.COM via YAHOO | Sat, August 27, 2022 at 8:21 AM·2 min read
   1. Ted Cruz on Friday railed against President Joe Biden’s student-loan forgiveness plan, predicting it’ll give Democrats an edge in the upcoming midterm elections. …
   2. Cruz said “there is a real risk” that the Democrats will net more support in November. …
   3. [Full Transcribed Quote from Ted Cruz mocked for blasting ‘slacker baristas’ after Biden scraps some student loan debt, By Rachel Sharp | INDEPENDENT.CO.UK | Aug. 27, 2022, 1 day ago]:
      1. “There is a real risk that if you are that slacker barista who wasted seven years in college studying completely useless things, now has loans and can’t get a job, Joe Biden just gave you 20 grand.
      2. “Like, holy cow! 20 grand. You know, maybe you weren’t gonna vote in November, and suddenly you just got 20 grand.
      3. “And you know, if you can get off the bong for a minute and head down to the voting station.
      4. “Or just send in your mail-in ballot that the Democrats have helpfully sent you, it could drive up turnout, particularly among young people.”
   4. … Prominent Democrats like Sen. Bernie Sanders have slammed Cruz’s remarks.
   5. “This is what a leading Republican thinks of young ‘slacker’ Americans who took out loans to go to college,” Sanders tweeted in response to a clip of his remarks.
   6. Read the original article on Business Insider.
   7. MIKE: There is a quotation I’ve seen recently that is both provocative and infuriating, if true, but I have never seen a context or citation for it. I don’t like to quote uncited statements, so I did some research. I found a PDF document of a 1975 study from Missouri Univ. —Kansas City, [The] Center for Resource Development in Adult Education.
      1. [B]ack at Stanford University, where [H. Bruce Franklin] taught for eleven years, and where they train many of those who make and enforce public policy, they sometimes openly say why they withhold money from public higher education. For instance, this is how it is put by Stanford Professor Roger A. Freeman, former adviser to ex-President Richard M. Nixon: “We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow to go through higher education. If not, we will have a large number of highly trained and unemployed people: Not only the opponents of education have seen its potential to subvert the power and ambition of America’s rulers. Way back in 1779, Thomas Jefferson tried to get the Virginia legislature to set up public schools [with the] “Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge” … ~ Why Teach the Humanities to Adult Basic Education Students? (1975), page 16.
   8. MIKE: If we take this quote as actual evidence and as representative of a certain ruling elite point of view, this can actually be construed as part of a decades-long Republican/Conservative/Rightwing plot to ‘dumb down’ the adult population of this country in order to make them both more ignorant and more politically and socially manipulable.
   9. MIKE: I don’t think I’m the kind of person who makes inflammatory, hyperbolic statements; at least, not without evidence. But again, if this is truly representative of a ‘secret’ agenda of the Right, Americans all over this country should be protesting about it in the streets, demanding the best education possible at the lowest possible cost, for the good of the people and of the country. And the perpetrators and supporters of this “plot” — and it can be called nothing less, if true — should be voted out of office and made to face public anger.
   10. MIKE: Do you still have doubts that college debt is actually a rightwing plot? Here’s something recent: @RepJimBanks — Student loan forgiveness undermines one of our military’s greatest recruitment tools at a time of dangerously low enlistments. 10:14 AM · Aug 25, 2022 — [ Jim Banks (R-IN-03) since 2017]
   11. MIKE: The sad thing is, that tweet by Rep. Banks sounds like a satirical piece, but it’s not. Jim Banks said it and he meant it.
   12. ANDREW: It’s not just right wing. It’s a feature of capitalism. The goal of capitalism is to generate profit, which can only be done by taking the product of someone’s work, assigning it value, and giving only part of that value back to them. Working to generate profit means you never receive the full value of your labor, so people only do it if they don’t have any other choice or don’t know better. Education allows them to know better, which threatens capitalism, but some jobs require education, so the amount of people allowed to be educated is kept limited by making it hard to obtain. As a bonus, the military plays an important role in giving people no other choice but to work under capitalism, so every person who has to go into the military for education is one more person who can force others into capitalist exploitation.
   13. REFERENCE: Ronald Reagan stuck it to millennials: A college debt history lesson no one tells; Dramatic, awful changes occurred on my generation’s watch — and it amounts to a fiendishly successful conspiracy. By Peter Lunenfeld | COM | Published July 5, 2014, 2:00PM (EDT)
9. Mississippi’s Jim Crow-era felony voting law is constitutional, federal court rules; Law passed in 1890 was tailored ‘to exclude the Negro’ but appeals court says tweaks in 20th century ‘cleansed … discriminatory taint’. By Sam Levine in New York | THEGUARDIAN.COM | Fri 26 Aug 2022 13.30 EDT, Last modified on Fri 26 Aug 2022 14.37 EDT
   1. A Jim Crow-era provision of the Mississippi constitution designed to disfranchise Black voters is constitutional, a federal appellate court ruled on Wednesday.
   2. The case deals with a provision of the Mississippi constitution, Section 241, that lays out specific crimes that cause its citizens to permanently lose the right to vote. Mississippi officials initially adopted the provision at a constitutional convention in 1890, choosing crimes such as theft, arson, embezzlement and bigamy that they believed African Americans were more likely to commit. “We came here to exclude the Negro,” said the convention’s president. “Nothing short of this will answer.”
   3. A majority of judges on the US court of appeals for the fifth circuit did not dispute that the original provision was racist and unconstitutional. But they said Mississippi had since “cleansed” the provision of its “discriminatory taint” by tweaking the provision twice in the 20th century. Voters removed burglary from the list of disfranchising crimes in 1950 and added murder and rape to the list in 1968.
   4. “Plaintiffs failed to meet their burden of showing that the current version of Section 241 was motivated by discriminatory intent. In addition, Mississippi has conclusively shown that any taint associated with Section 241 has been cured,” a majority of justices for the fifth circuit, one of the most conservative in the US, wrote in an opinion.
   5. The challengers in the case have said they plan to appeal the ruling to the US supreme court.
   6. The decision will allow Mississippi to continue to enforce an extremely harsh policy when it comes to voting rights for those with certain felony convictions.
   7. Ten per cent of the state’s voting age population – the highest rate in the country – cannot vote because of a felony conviction, according to an estimate by the Sentencing Project, a criminal justice non-profit. That includes 16% of the Black voting age population. The vast majority of people disenfranchised in the state have completed their criminal sentence. …
   8. MIKE: It shouldn’t be this hard to make this kind of statutory racism illegal.
   9. ANDREW: A society that excludes those it imprisons gives itself a vested interest in imprisoning anyone who disagrees with those who hold its power. White people held power when these laws were written, and they used prison to try and exclude Black people so that they couldn’t gain power. Thankfully, Black people gained some power despite those efforts, but that strategy will continue so long as people who have been in prison are excluded from voting.
10. US life expectancy last year fell to the lowest age since 1996; In the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, the estimated American lifespan has shortened by nearly three years. Author: MIKE STOBBE (AP Medical Writer) | KHOU.COM | Published: 11:29 PM CDT August 30, 2022, Updated: 12:09 AM CDT August 31, 2022
    1. … The last comparable decrease happened in the early 1940s, during the height of World War II.
    2. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials blamed COVID-19 for about half the decline in 2021, a year when vaccinations became widely available but new coronavirus variants caused waves of hospitalizations and deaths. Other contributors to the decline are longstanding problems: drug overdoses, heart disease, suicide and chronic liver disease.
    3. S. life expectancy … [in 2021] fell to about 76 years, 1 month. The last time it was that low was in 1996. …
    4. Declines during the pandemic were worse for some racial groups, and some gaps widened. For example, life expectancy for American Indian and Alaskan Native people saw a decline of more than 6 1/2 years since the pandemic began, and is at 65 years. In the same span, life expectancy for Asian Americans dropped by about two years, and stands at 83 1/2.
    5. MIKE: For those who are curious, the Life Expectancy for non-Hispanic Whites was not included in the KHOU story. I had to search the internet for that. According to USNEWS.COM: “The second-biggest decrease in life expectancy by race and ethnicity from 2020 to 2021 occurred among the white population, which saw a one-year decline from 77.4 years to 76.4 years.” USNEWS.COM actually goes into the lot more nuanced detail about variations in White life expectancy. Differences seem to differ by region, politics, science-skepticism, etc. Story reference is below.
    6. REFERENCE: S. life expectancy down for second-straight year, fueled by covid-19; By Akilah Johnson and Sabrina Malhi | WASHINGTONPOST.COM | August 31, 2022 at 12:05 p.m. EDT
    7. G. REFERENCE: U.S. Life Expectancy Down Again in 2021; Early data from the CDC shows a drop of nearly one year from 2020 to 2021, thanks largely to the COVID-19 pandemic. By Steven Ross Johnson | USNEWS.COM | Aug. 31, 2022, at 12:01 a.m.
11. Half of UK Conservative voters back renationalising energy firms – poll; Reporting by Kylie MacLellan; Editing by Christina Fincher | REUTERS | August 29, 20223:41 AM CDT, Last Updated 14 hours ago
    1. Around half the backers of Britain’s governing Conservative Party support renationalising the country’s energy industry, according to a survey published on Monday, as soaring energy prices put pressure on household budgets. …
    2. The YouGov poll for the Times newspaper found 47% of those who currently plan to vote Conservative at the next election favoured returning the energy companies to public ownership, with 28% percent opposed and 25% unsure.
    3. Among those who voted for the Conservatives at the last election in 2019, 53% backed renationalisation.
    4. Britain’s energy suppliers were privatised by Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher more than 30 years ago. While the opposition Labour Party has previously called for renationalisation, current leader Keir Starmer has said the money would be better spent directly reducing people’s bills.
    5. Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, the frontrunner to succeed Boris Johnson as prime minister in a contest due to run until Sept. 5, has said she favours using tax cuts rather than direct payments to help people with the cost-of-living crisis.
    6. The YouGov poll, conducted on Tuesday and Wednesday before the latest rise in energy bills was announced by the regulator, found 55% of those questioned said they would need to turn down their heating or limit its use over the coming months. …
    7. ANDREW: A left-wing capitalist party refusing to implement policies that would weaken capitalism even though the policy has the support of both their own voter base AND a large chunk of the right-wing capitalist party’s voter base? I wonder where I’ve heard that before.
12. Rival Chechen fighters take war to battlefields of Ukraine; By DEREK GATOPOULOS and ANDREW KRAVCHENKO | ASSOCIATED PRESS via YAHOO NEWS | Sat, August 27, 2022 at 12:57 PM·3 min read
    1. MIKE It’s more widely reported that Chechens are fighting on the Russian side, too. “They are known as “Kadyrovtsy” or “Kadyrovites” after their leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, Chechnya’s pro-Kremlin strongman …”, as per an article in Al Jazeera.
    2. … Fighters from Chechnya, the war-scarred republic in southern Russia, are participating on both sides of the conflict in Ukraine.
    3. Pro-Kyiv volunteers are loyal to Dzhokhar Dudayev, the late Chechen leader who headed the republic’s drive for independence from Russia.
    4. [MIKE: “On 21 April 1996, while using a satellite phone, Dudayev was assassinated by two laser-guided missiles, after his location was detected by a Russian reconnaissance aircraft, which intercepted his phone call.” — Wikipedia]
    5. They form the “Dudayev Battalion” and are the sworn enemies of Chechen forces who back Russian President Vladimir Putin and joined Russia in the months-long siege of Ukraine’s key port of Mariupol and other flashpoints in eastern and southern Ukraine. …
    6. Ukrainian officials say the Chechen battalion currently numbers several hundred who fight alongside the country’s military but are not formally under the national command. …
    7. MIKE: I only mention this as another example of how war makes strange bedfellows.
    8. REFERENCE: “Meaning of “strange bedfellows.” — com
13. Forever Chemicals No More? PFAS Are Destroyed With New Technique; The harmful molecules are everywhere, but chemists have made progress in developing a method to break them down. By Carl Zimmer | NYTIMES.COM | Aug. 18, 2022
    1. A team of scientists has found a cheap, effective way to destroy so-called forever chemicals …
    2. The chemicals — known as PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances — are found in a spectrum of products and contaminate water and soil around the world. [They remain] dangerous for generations.
    3. … In a study, published Thursday [8/19] in the journal Science, a team of researchers rendered PFAS molecules harmless by mixing them with two inexpensive compounds at a low boil [MIKE: from elsewhere in the article, “between about 175 degrees to 250 degrees Fahrenheit”]. In a matter of hours, the PFAS molecules fell apart. …
    4. The new technique might provide a way to destroy PFAS chemicals once they’ve been pulled out of contaminated water or soil. But William Dichtel, a chemist at Northwestern University and a co-author of the study, said that a lot of effort lay ahead to make it work outside the confines of a lab. …
    5. A common method to get rid of this concentrated PFAS is to burn it. But some studies indicate that incineration fails to destroy all of the chemicals and lofts the surviving pollution into the air. …
    6. MIKE: This is an advance, for sure, but in the absence of a way to pull PFAS from the environment, it would rely on boiling water and soil in a chemical mix in order to “disassemble” PFAS into less noxious compounds. (The article doesn’t specify what these compounds are.)
    7. MIKE: So this is certainly an important step forward, but a way needs to be found to break down PFAS outside the lab. Perhaps this will be a small step in that direction.
    8. ANDREW: Reflects an important part of actions against environmental damage like pollution and climate change: fixing the damage that’s already happened. Stopping things getting worse definitely important, but not alone enough to dig us out. Any progress on environmental restoration is good news.

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