technocrit

Enforcement against polluters in the United States plunged in the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, a far bigger drop than in the same period of his first term, according to a new report from a watchdog group.

By analyzing a range of federal court and administrative data, the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project found that civil lawsuits filed by the US Department of Justice in cases referred by the Environmental Protection Agency dropped to just 16 in the first 12 months after Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2025. That is 76 percent less than [the 66] in the first year of the Biden administration.

Trump’s first administration filed 86 such cases in its first year, which was in turn a drop from the Obama administration’s 127 four years earlier.

I added that "66" for biden. It's fairly obvious disinformation to hide his numbers. It obscures the ongoing decline under both "parties".

Last Saturday around 6pm, Regan Cole-Graham, a mother of two and pregnant with her third, was out on a bike ride with her husband and two young boys. A driver hit her from behind and killed her, and her unborn baby died at the hospital despite an emergency c-section. This wasn’t an accident. In 2017, L.A. installed bike lanes on Pershing Drive, exactly where she was hit, and removed them after backlash by the neighborhood council, and a lawsuit by Keep LA Moving.

If the bike lanes the city had installed in 2017 had remained in place, Regan likely would be alive today.

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This is a black or white issue. Anyone running for Mayor or city council that doesn’t talk about this issue and come with political will to redesign our streets is part of the problem. I plan on devoting every fiber of my being to defeating NIMBYism and political cowards. Enough is enough.

Latest batch of documents show researchers consulting the financier and sex offender on publications, visas and more.

Noam Chomsky’s life and work cannot be understood without taking into account his militarily-funded linguistics research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)...

... [W]hen confronted by journalists about his involvement with Epstein, Chomsky ... explained his behaviour by saying (a) that Epstein had ‘served his sentence, which wiped the slate clean’ and (b) that ‘far worse criminals’ were associated with MIT. When speaking to the Harvard Crimson, Chomsky was still more forthright, pointing out that MIT’s donors included the ‘worst criminals’ and that he’d met all sorts of people in his lifetime including ‘major war criminals’ and didn’t regret having met any of them.

"Hosting the Games is already accelerating policing, displacement, inequality, and exploitation in some of our city’s lowest-income communities — and, now, it’s being coordinated hand-in-glove with Donald Trump's Department of Homeland Security," says Chris Tyler, SAJE's communications director. "At this point, these intersecting harms will not be reduced in any meaningful way unless we cancel."

LA has limited options to get out of hosting — but LA does have options, says the report's author Neil deMause, editor of Torched-recommended Field of Schemes. (Torched is cited several times, and I was interviewed for the report.) "The IOC has the hammer of the contract, but it also very much does not want to see the 2028 Olympics caught up in legal wrangling, so there’s at least the potential to try to make some demands in terms of limiting LA’s potential liability." However, says deMause: "LA28 finances are so opaque that we may not know until 2028, if then, who’s really on the hook for what."

Which is why the report outlines steps that LA can take, right now, which seem even more urgent in light of recent developments.

A growing number of Los Angeles-area politicians are calling on Olympics chief Casey Wasserman to step down after recently released files included a series of flirty emails between him and convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell from 2003.

It took him just a few minutes, using ChatGPT, to generate a delusional six-page text about supposed experiments to alleviate anxiety in 60 pregnant women and their fetuses with mathematical metaphors. In the article’s references, he included non-existent studies, four of them attributed to the fictitious author Me-Lo I Nvent O (“I Make It Up”). The paper was published a few days later.

Diago, an associate professor at the University of Valencia, explained by phone that his intention was somewhere between a joke and a denunciation of so-called predatory journals, fraudulent publications that present themselves as prestigious and publish anything in exchange for money. It’s a growing business. The list of predatory journals exceeded 20,000 this Tuesday, according to a count by the specialized firm Cabells. Five years ago there were 15,000. Seven years ago, 10,000. No serious institution takes them into account, but the figures show that they have carved out a niche in the global scientific system.

The study published by Diago, riddled with square roots, is unintelligible even to himself. “Even I don’t know what it’s about; it makes no sense at all. I’ve tried to understand it a couple of times, and I think it deals with the effect on children’s mathematical learning of teaching prime numbers during pregnancy,” he explains, laughing. The professor, born in Castellón, Spain 43 years ago, included explicit signs that the whole thing was a hoax, such as scientists’ surnames that were puns on English terms associated with cheating: Cheatillo, Sneakydez, Trickón, Sneakarez.

For anyone who wants a truly progressive Democratic Party, Gavin Newsom is bad news.

Unsurprisingly, there has been little indication the American progressive left perceives Newsom as deserving anything but disdain. Recent weeks have only bolstered the sense that committing to the abolition of ICE is a prerequisite for any remotely moral candidate in 2028. If Newsom fails to become that candidate, it will not be because he appeared too left-wing, but because he lacked the guts or the inclination to be anything except what he manifestly is: a preening political operator, beholden to a status quo that no longer exists.

Source: https://thisisnthappiness.com/post/807567249204461568/please-clap-brecht-vandenbroucke

These votes demonstrate that the Democratic Party functions not as an opposition but as an enabler of the Trump administration. Its priority is to ensure the uninterrupted funding of the US military while diverting popular opposition with calls for meaningless cosmetic changes to the administration’s efforts to establish a presidential dictatorship.

Last week was the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision enshrining the idea that money in politics is not corruption, but constitutionally protected speech. States and cities across the US are battling the rotten legacy of that decision.