FirstCircle

joined 2 years ago
[–] FirstCircle@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

This sounds almost identical to the PFAS problem west of Spokane WA.

https://westplainswater.org/

The so-called "West Plains" area is home to both the Spokane airport (GEG) and Fairchild Air Force Base. The latter is a huge refueling base with tankers flying in/out all the time. It's surrounded by a lot of cropland and has one of those common "military towns" adjacent to it - the city of "Airway Heights". Trump 2024 signs everywhere.

From what I understand, the problem originates from PFAS chemicals used in the base's firefighting operations. I've been told by an employee of the local power company that the base has all of its water pumped uphill from the Spokane river now. I don't know what Airway Heights or surrounding residents do ... maybe they just drink bottled water and avoid bathing.

[–] FirstCircle@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 days ago

They usually don't even say it will put them out of business. They say something like "not polluting the groundwater with toxic wastes would place an undue burden on our industry". Which translates to "we won't maximize our profits". And the brainwashed among us think "oh yeah, I get it, they are required by law to maximize corpo profits on behalf of shareholders" (not true) "so of course they have to be allowed to {pollute, enslave, hire children, provide unsafe working conditions, lie, misrepresent, not clean up up after themselves (uncapped oil/gas wells, nuclear waste, mines leaching chemicals, "superfund" (public $) cleanup sites, etc} or the poor dears might be in big trouble all because of us Poors".

[–] FirstCircle@lemmy.ml 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

the New York Farm Bureau (NYFB), the state’s largest agricultural industry lobbying group

“It must be mentioned that many agricultural workers come from very weather countries (sic), via the federal H2A program, such as Mexico and Jamaica, and working (sic) and would feel very comfortable working in New York in the summertime,” the memo stated.

"very weather countries". These lobbyist scum have sub-zero IQs apparently.

The NYFB’s claims are nothing new. Pseudoscientific theories about non-white laborers’ ability to withstand extreme heat date back centuries. In 1851, Samuel Cartwright, a Louisiana physician, justified the enslavement of Africans in a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Daniel Webster, claiming that white people are naturally unsuited to work on hot cotton and sugar plantations but for the enslaved Africans the work “proves to be only a wholesome and beneficial exercise to the negro.”

Chinese laborers in Hawaii sugarcane fields were also viewed as being more adaptable to the harsh climate than white laborers. Japanese fruit pickers in California were believed to “endure the heat found in a few localities better than most other races.” Mexican laborers who worked in the smoldering Pennsylvania steel mills in the 1920s were also believed to “endure heat well.”

I think that wealthy white corporate management and its lobbyist flunkies would endure jobs in arctic gulags much better than anyone else. Efficiency is the name of the game, and there's already a big federal domestic terrorist-military org that can help these people get up there to the northern wastes, an org, appropriately enough, named after frozen water.

[–] FirstCircle@lemmy.ml 28 points 3 days ago

"The car was parked in a space facing west during the hottest part of the day."

Hernandez was getting a lip filler procedure at the Always Beautiful Med Spa Sunday, according to reports. Those same reports say she didn’t check on her children until two and a half hours later.

“In a normal person, it’s not gonna happen,” said Gricelda Anaya.

Anaya works next door and saw people scrambling into the building to try to save the boys.

“What we see on the camera is that they’re trying to put cold water right here on the reception, and it was something very sad that never had to happen.”

Those scrambling people are probably going to have some kind of PTSD now too.

Oh and Dad's in prison for some other unspecified reason.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/never-had-to-happen-court-documents-reveal-horrific-details-in-death-of-1-year-old-in-hot-car/ar-AA1HVbMl

[–] FirstCircle@lemmy.ml 30 points 3 days ago (11 children)

Leaving your baby children alone in a running car ... you parents out there ... clue me in, but isn't this the pinnacle of irresponsibility, even on a cool day? I thought "you don't leave kids alone in a running car" was a widely-known and accepted principle, probably since cars were invented. Fold into that the fact that the kids would be in a hazardous environment (protected only by the integrity of the A/C system) as well as in an unprotected environment (car break ins maybe, kidnapping, crashes (even in a parking lot), battery fires ...), why would anyone think it would be preferable to leave one's kids in such a situation, when

Earlier in the day, Hernandez had texted the nurse performing her treatment to ask whether she could bring her children, to which the nurse responded, “Sure if you don’t mind them waiting in the waiting room,” according to the police report.

No, no, much more convenient to leave them in SoCal sun in a parking lot in your car, for hours. And all this just to get your duck lips. FFS.

[–] FirstCircle@lemmy.ml 4 points 3 days ago

I leave a couple of feet between the front of my Miata or Wrangler and the next car ahead. I've been driving since the late 70s and this is the first I've heard of the "botton of the tires" rule of thumb. It wasn't taught back in the day (is it, widely, now?) and it doesn't make much sense to me since it's a function of the size and the shape and height of one's vehicle, which can vary greatly, whereas I know where my front bumper is and I can (usually) clearly see where the rear of the car in front of me is, and hence create the appropriate gap. Sure, I might leave more space if I'm on a steep hill and think the person in front might have a manual (another Miata for example) but that's rare.

Up until very recently people seemed to always keep just a couple of feet between cars at stops like I did. This business of "a car length or two" seems like a very new thing - the past 5 years mostly - and that led me to think it's some kind of stupid new internet cancer. Probably some "influencer" telling his/her audience that you should put your dominance on display at stoplights by pissing people off and preventing them from getting through intersections. Or putting your dominance and alpha-hood on display by blocking them from getting into the turn lane at all. Anything to get attention, anything to show that you're not (truly) a nobody, even when you are, because you have power!

I've only been rear-ended once in 45 years of driving. Being a d*ck on the road in order to (allegedly) absolutely f-ing MAXIMIZE your own self-perceived "safety" (from highly unlikely events) at the expense of everyone else is a totally modern-American sort of thing to do I guess. But I'm not doing it.

[–] FirstCircle@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 days ago

Though, of course, don't use them until you're already halfway through the turn or lane change. It's not like the signal is to show your intention, it's to assert that You Had The Right Goddamn It to have just made that abrupt and dangerous maneuver that you just made. You signaled, so all's OK, you're in the right, no matter what happens.

[–] FirstCircle@lemmy.ml 46 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Me, no. Corpo Amerika absolutely if it's profitable and low-risk. So which Lemmy "community" is the one where these corps are being ID'd (with all crowdsourced supporting evidence) and named and shamed?

[–] FirstCircle@lemmy.ml 3 points 4 days ago

senior vice president of environmental health at the Natural Resources Defense Council, blasted the Trump administration

"Blasted". Not criticized. Not denounced. Big 'splosions boom boom fire click here.

[–] FirstCircle@lemmy.ml 6 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Here in Spokane we're showing off our second-ratedness again. Can't even have a proper mass shooting: https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2025/jul/04/false-report-of-shooting-scatters-crowd-of-thousan/ .

Flocks of panicked people fled Riverfront Park late Friday after false reports of an active shooter quickly spread through the crowd.

The fear in the crowd apparently was sparked by a misunderstanding of an “altercation” near the Clocktower, Spokane police said in a news release. Officers initially were told a gun may have been seen but no shots were fired. When they contacted a male believed to be involved, he was unarmed and “no victim came forward.” No arrests were made. And police found no evidence a shot was fired.

By the time fireworks restarted before 10:30 p.m., there was only a scattering of people left. Even many of those still in the park who knew the report was false were no longer in the mood for patriotic revelry and continued to leave.

Spokanistanians are clearly dying for a world-class patriotic mass shooting with all the panic and fallout, but no deal, just disappointment. Idaho is currently stealing all the attention with the recent ambush and murders of wildlands firefighters.

[–] FirstCircle@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 week ago

That little image of the bald, earless, eyeless head talking into a bullhorn is hilarious.

[–] FirstCircle@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Wow, I'd totally forgotten about PB. I seem to recall they were on the low end of the PC clone market but I could be misremembering. I can't seem to find my Computer Shopper catalog right now to check. I dig that huge Enter key but it's a shame this came with the utterly useless Windows keys and what I guess is a "menu" key. I've never used either but then I've used Linux exclusively since the aughts and OS/2 before that. My M$ "Natural" keyboard wastes space on these keys too. This specimen is going to look great when it's cleaned up. Hope you can find a pen or a pencil to put in that little trench just for show.

 

“They can assume that everybody is armed,” Seth Stoke, chairman of the St. Maries School Board said in an interview Monday night after the board voted 4-0 to finalize a policy that will allow permitted staff to carry concealed firearms inside the district’s public schools.

The board developed the policy during the last school year in response to decades of school shootings across the nation, Stoke said.

Parents also won’t be allowed to appeal if they have specific concerns about a specific staff member’s decision to arm themselves in the classroom.

“The whole idea is not knowing who is carrying,” Stoke said, adding that parents always have the right to remove their child from the school.

Staff members who are approved to bring a gun to their school job must have an Idaho concealed carry license, which requires a national background check. Employees must use their personal firearms; guns will not be provided by the school district.

 

As fascism always does, today’s Armageddon complex crosses class lines, bonding billionaires to the Maga base. Thanks to decades of deepening economic stresses, alongside ceaseless and skillful messaging pitting workers against one another, a great many people understandably feel unable to protect themselves from the disintegration that surrounds them (no matter how many months of ready-to-eat meals they buy). But there are emotional compensations on offer: you can cheer the end of affirmative action and DEI, glorify mass deportation, enjoy the denial of gender-affirming care to trans people, villainize educators and health workers who think they know better than you, and applaud the demise of economic and environmental regulations as a way to own the libs. End times fascism is a darkly festive fatalism – a final refuge for those who find it easier to celebrate destruction than imagine living without supremacy.

It’s also a self-reinforcing downward spiral: Trump’s furious attacks on every structure designed to protect the public from diseases, dangerous foods and disasters – even to tell the public when disasters are headed their way – strengthen the case for prepperism at both the high and low ends, all while creating myriad new opportunities for privatization and profiteering by the oligarchs powering this rapid-fire unmaking of the social and regulatory state.

 

Oyer has since told various media outlets that her firing came shortly after she declined to recommend restoring gun rights to actor Mel Gibson, a supporter of President Donald Trump. She is one of several Justice Department officials slated to testify on Monday afternoon before a hearing organized by Democrats in the House of Representatives and Senate about the Trump administration's treatment of the Justice Department and law firms who act in cases disliked by the Republican president.

Democratic U.S. Senator Adam Schiff of California called the mobilization of the Marshals to deliver a letter an effort to "intimidate and silence" Oyer, while U.S. Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland compared it to a move "ripped straight from the gangster playbook."

 

cross-posted from: https://reddthat.com/post/38404455

Cooperation with federal authorities tests bounds of law and policy, stirs fear in immigrant communities

 

An officer stationed outside Saturday’s protest wrote of seeing Powell speeding through the Tesla parking lot in a blue Volkswagen Beetle. The officer started following Powell until she entered another parking lot across the street at a high speed, the police report says. The officer turned on his lights and sirens in an attempt to stop her, but said she entered the main roadway without slowing down.

A separate officer documented Powell speeding and weaving in and out of the roadway, yelling out the window and flipping off protesters. She made a sharp right turn onto North Bitterroot Street and then a wide, illegal U-turn, which “nearly caused what would have been a significant accident,” according to the police report. When Powell came back, she was allegedly driving towards the sidewalk, swerving towards the center lane at a high speed and still making gestures at the protesters.

Liberty Lake Police Chief Damon Simmons was traveling south in his patrol car and tried to intercept Powell with his emergency lights on, the report states. Powell initially tried to drive around him, but there was no room to keep going. At that point, she was asked to exit her car and placed under arrest, the police report says.

Powell, pictured during her arrest wearing a top emblazoned with Trump’s “You’re Fired” slogan, had no valid driver’s license, according to the report. She was taken to the Spokane County Jail for booking, but jail staff advised they could not take her due to a medical issue, so her brother was called to pick her up. Her Volkswagen Beetle was also towed and impounded for blocking the roadway.

 

Spokane Valley might approve a resolution declaring the city is not a sanctuary city and, counter to state law, direct its police department to start helping “other” agencies enforce federal immigration law.

Spokane Valley is also holding a public hearing for a proposed public safety sales tax of .1% to pay for increased law enforcement costs and to hire more cops.

 

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, although battered by Trump administration attempts to impose massive staff and budget cuts on the agency, nevertheless continues to publish critical climate information, including some dire drought warnings in the spring outlook published March 20 by NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center.

About 40% of the contiguous 48 states are currently in some stage of drought or abnormally dry conditions, and those are expected to persist in the Rocky Mountains and the Southwest and Southern Plains, according to the March 20 bulletin.

In the past two weeks, water officials in the West warned that, despite near-average snowpack in some parts of the Colorado River’s mountain watershed, the river’s flows are expected to drop below normal, exacerbating tensions between water users in the region. In New Mexico, water experts said the Rio Grande is likely to dry up completely in Albuquerque as early as June. A 2024 study explained how global warming drives a cycle that leads to measured flows in Western rivers and streams being consistently lower than predictions based solely on snowpack measurements.

Other recent research suggests drought risks in North America have been widely underestimated by major climate reports, as rising global temperatures bake the moisture out of plants and out of the soil itself. Annual cycles of decreasing winter snow followed by extreme heat are pushing “a global transition to flash droughts under climate change,” a 2023 study concluded.

The continuing budget resolution passed by Congress March 14 reduces NOAA’s operations, research and facilities budget by 11% from the previous year, and according to congressional sources, it stripped away some of Congress’s budgetary oversight privileges. That could enable the Trump administration to zero out budgets for programs and offices within NOAA and use its ocean and climate budgets as a slush fund.

 

In addition to supporting jobs that address oil patch pollution, these federal dollars are used on wells that lack any owner to pay for reclamation. Left unplugged, such orphaned oil and gas wells leak huge amounts of methane into the atmosphere and can contaminate local water sources with salty water and benzene.

The Interior Department estimates that there are about 157,000 documented orphaned oil and gas wells nationwide. This figure is likely a dramatic undercount: The Environmental Protection Agency stated in an April 2021 report that there could be as many as 3.4 million abandoned wells nationally.

“Undocumented orphaned wells may emit nearly 63 million grams of methane per hour into the atmosphere,” according to a November 2024 report, “the equivalent of over 3.6 million gasoline-powered passenger cars driven per year.”

Orphaned wells represent the final stage in what ProPublica recently described as the oil industry’s “playbook”: When oil wells are no longer productive, large companies sell them off to smaller companies and thereby shed their obligation to plug those wells.

The increasingly marginal wells change hands, eventually landing with operators who lack the financial means to plug them. And when these companies go bankrupt, the wells become orphaned, meaning that the plugging costs then fall on American taxpayers.

 

Capitol News Illinois and ProPublica detailed cases documented in internal reports and police and court records where staff had beaten, choked, whipped, sexually assaulted and humiliated residents. Those cases included the 2014 beating by staff of a man with intellectual disabilities for failing to pull up his pants. They also included the verbal abuse of a resident with developmental disabilities in 2020, including a threat by staff to break one of his fingers, captured on a recorded 911 line, according to court records, police reports and IDHS watchdog findings.

The reporting also documented a culture of covering up abuse and neglect at the facility, findings later echoed by IDHS’ Office of Inspector General — the watchdog arm that investigates abuse and neglect allegations at state-run facilities and provides agency oversight.

 

Assuming 128 grams a day and a lifetime in the vicinity of seventy-five years, you’ll leave behind around three and a half metric tons of feces when you die. The volume of your urine will be closer to thirty-eight thousand liters, a bit larger than a standard twenty-foot shipping container and about double the accumulated volume of your flatulence. You’ll have made hundreds of liters of tears, though even for the most emotive of individuals, the portion derived from feelings will represent a minuscule fraction of that number. For all the hullabaloo surrounding ejaculation, the total semen production of even the most alacritous masturbator could be contained handily by a shelf of two-liter soda bottles, and though a period sometimes seems as though it will never end, you could only barely paint a closet with the three or so liters of menses produced during a lifetime. You’ll have made a great deal of mucus, though, close to a hundred thousand liters. And when Atropos snips the thread of your life, the hair from your head, measured as a single strand, will stretch more than three and a half million feet. This is what you will leave behind.

 

Richard Spiese, a hazardous site manager with the Department of Environmental Conservation, said that Bennington has the most severe PFAS contamination problem in Vermont due to this groundwater spread.

As an environmental studies professor at Williams College, Martin focuses on environmental justice. She explained that PFAS, known as “forever chemicals,” have been shown to build up in the body over time and to persist in the food chain. However, the community harm and individual health concerns related to chronic exposure to industrial pollutants is hard to prove and quantify.

She added that regulation of chemicals in the United States places the burden of proof of harm on individuals and communities, rather than requiring companies to prove that their products are safe and not polluting the environment.

“There’s a couple of different barriers that rural communities like those in Vermont face when seeking justice for companies exposing them to pollutants,” Martin said. “One of them is the fact that these pollutants like PFOA cause injuries that take years to decades to manifest.”

Martin noted that Vermont’s limit on PFAS contamination in public drinking water — 20 parts per trillion — is currently less strict than federal guidelines. She believes the state should work to align its policies with federal standards.

Bryan Redmond, director of the state’s Drinking Water and Groundwater Protection Division, said the state has been working to come in line with the EPA regulations set by the Biden administration. But a recent EPA lawsuit filing – from new leadership there under the new administration of President Donald Trump, resulted in the court issuing in February a 60-day temporary suspension of the federal guidelines.

3
Letters from an American - March 13, 2025 (heathercoxrichardson.substack.com)
 

It is an astonishing thing to watch a single man hamstring the United States economy. It is also astonishing to watch Republican senators try to convince the American people that a falling stock market and contracting economy is a good thing. “Our economy has been on a sugar high for a long time. It’s been distorted by excess government spending,” Montana Senator Tim Sheehy told Fox News Channel host Larry Kudlow today. “What we're seeing here from this administration and what you're gonna see from this Congress is re-disciplining to ensure that our economy is based on private investment and free-market growth, not public sector spending.”

In fact, until a brief spike in spending during the coronavirus crisis, government expenditure in the United States as a percentage of gross domestic product has held relatively steady around 20% since the 1950s.

Today, Trump met with Secretary-General Mark Rutte of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) who was eager to get Trump to reiterate U.S. support for NATO. Trump told Rutte that the United States needs control of Denmark’s autonomous territory of Greenland “for international security, not just security—international—we have a lot of our favorite players cruising around the coast, and we have to be careful.” Asked about whether the U.S. would annex Greenland, he answered: “I think that will happen.”

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