Saturday Report 8/26/23 - Have scientists now discovered why a record number of young people are getting cancer?

The Best of the Rest of the News

Image by kalhh from Pixabay

Isn’t is weird that Trump is printing “Never Surrender” under the mugshot of him surrendering to authorities at the Fulton County jail? Irony, it appears, is dead, at least in the world of Trump-humpers. Trump’s niece, clinical psychologist Mary Trump, suggests in her excellent The Good In Us Substack newsletter that to get the angry look just right Donald probably practiced it for hours in a mirror. Between that and his claim that he’s 6’ 3” and 215 pounds, his habit of wearing high-heeled/lift shoes and a girdle (and, according to the crew of his former TV show, adult diapers) Trump’s arrest has essentially broken the internet. From constipation memes, to open ridicule, to comparing his stature to 5’10” Ted Cruz and actual 6’3” Jeb Bush, to Barack Obama’s 6’1”, they all show what a neurotic (psychotic?), insecure man he is that he feels he must lie even about such easily debunked things. Or perhaps he’s a pathological liar — a compulsive, can’t-stop-himself liar — so he couldn’t help himself. Whichever it is, it’s pretty pathetic. Or, as Trump would say, sad.

Is Trump getting ready to flee the country? In the same week that Donald Trump “joked” on his Nazi-infested social media site about flying to Russia to live with Putin under a “gold dome,” we learned that he transferred ownership of Mar-a-Lardo to his son, Don Jr. via a corporation that Junior solely owns. Given that Florida has a homestead exemption to bankruptcy, this isn’t because he’s thinking the trials may wipe him out: he still gets to keep his “home” even if he ends up destitute and his debts are eliminated by a court. But if he flees justice, hopping on his plane for, say, Saudi Arabia (like Idi Amin did back when I was working in Uganda in 1979/1980), his property could be subject to seizure by a court. Another weird thing that may suggest he’s a flight risk was his bail, which the Georgia court set at $200,000. When you post a cash bond, you get it all back when your case is finally adjudicated (whether you’re sent to jail or freed). But if you’re thinking of skipping out (or can’t afford the entire bond amount — the most common reason people use bail bondsmen), you have the option of paying a bail bondsman 10% of the total bond, a fee that is not refunded to you, and the bondsman then puts up the entire $200,000 from his own money that he will lose if you successfully skip town. Trump’s a notorious cheapskate and could easily have written a check for the $200K, but if he leaves the country to avoid justice he’d lose the entire thing: by using a bail bondsman, he only loses $20K. And, sure enough, Trump paid $20K to a Georgia bail bondsman to cover his bail. I realize this is all skating close to conspiracy theory territory, but it’s a pattern prosecutors have seen over and over in years past among other career criminals. And nobody has yet taken away Trump’s passport…

Georgia Republicans prepare to oust Fani Willis from her job. In May, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed a law creating a 5-person panel — appointed solely by himself — to adjudicate complaints against elected prosecutors. If they find the complaints have merit, the panel can simply fire any district attorney in the state, much like DeSantis has already done with two elected DAs in Florida. The law goes into effect on the first of October, and a prominent Georgia legislator has already said he’s going to introduce a complaint about Willis to the panel when it first convenes in two months. If Kemp decides to enter the presidential race (there are rumors about both him and Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, which is who I’m betting on), bouncing Willis out would give him a huge boost with the GOP base, something he must be considering right now. Does this explain why Fani Willis just proposed an October start to the racketeering trial, in addition to calling Ken Chesebro’s bluff? With this case, and all the political cross-currents flowing through and around it, anything is possible.

— The world is subsidizing the fossil fuel industry’s efforts to destroy our planet at a rate of $13 million per minute. A new report from the International Monetary Fund (which has funded fossil fuel projects in the past, so they’re not likely exaggerating), the total amount of subsidies given to fossil fuel billionaires and their companies last year was around $7 trillion, or about 7 percent of global GDP. The biggest culprits are, in descending order, China, the US, Russia, the EU, and India. Here in America we give around $600 billion in subsidies every year to the fossil fuel industry, and that doesn’t even begin to count the costs we pay for cleaning up the industry’s messes, from abandoned wells and coal mines to rebuilding cities destroyed by climate-change-caused violent weather and fires. This is insane, and must stop immediately. The IMF calculates that if the world’s subsidies were to end this year, next year would see a 34% decrease in the use of fossil fuels because they’d become so much more expensive. While we can’t control the rest of the world, we can set an example by cutting off American fossil fuel companies and their billionaires from our absurd taxpayer-funded subsidies: call your members of Congress at 202-224-3121 and let them know you support ending fossil fuel subsidies.

Speaking of fossil fuels, the feds are cracking down on the pathetic, childish, and deadly practice of “rolling coal.” This fad, popular among Republicans, involves modifying diesel trucks to cause them to pour huge clouds of poisonous diesel exhaust behind them when a switch is flipped under the dashboard. Generally men (it’s always men, presumably with small penis issues) do this by cutting in front of electric or hybrid cars and then crapping their exhaust all over the drivers behind them. Two companies that sell modification kits to facilitate this practice were each fined $1 million, and a third company in California is awaiting trial. There’s talk in some state legislatures about mandating vehicle inspection sites to look carefully at diesel trucks for such modifications and to impound or fine then when found. That’s something worth reaching out to your state representative and state senator about.

— Billionaire-funded rightwing think tanks are lining up to lobby SCOTUS to block even the possibility of Congress passing a wealth tax. Elizabeth Warren and other progressives in Congress have been pushing an annual 1% or less tax on the wealth of America’s morbidly rich. In response, billionaire-funded groups have filed an amicus brief in an upcoming case (Moore v US) that seeks to preemptively rule that taxes on unrealized gains (wealth) are unconstitutional. The Guardian reports that the leading group is the Manhattan Institute. They note: “The billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Singer is chairman of the Manhattan Institute and Kathy Crow, who is married to the real estate mogul Harlan Crow, serves as a trustee of the group. Both have provided two of the justices – Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, respectively – with private travel gifts and have socialized with the judges on lavish vacations, according to reports in ProPublica and other media outlets.” Surprise, surprise: billionaires are willing to spend money to keep from being taxed. And, of course, they can do it because five Republicans on the Supreme Court — with Clarence Thomas providing the tie-breaking vote — legalized the bribery of politicians and SCOTUS justices with their 2010 Citizens United decision.

— Ranked choice voting is gaining momentum, but both the Republican and Democratic parties are pushing back. Two weeks ago I wrote here about how swing-state voters who cast a ballot for Green Party nominee Cornel West (or No Labels if/when they bring a candidate into the ring) are simply throwing away their votes, while people in solidly Red or Blue states can easily vote third party with no consequence to our republic. That calculus changes entirely when a state goes to ranked choice voting, where if your “first choice” candidate doesn’t hit (typically) 15 percent of the vote, your vote rolls over to your “second choice.” That way, my 2000 experience of voting for Ralph Nader while living in Vermont could have both cast a supportive vote for him but also ended up counting in the Gore column. Both parties, however, hate ranked choice voting because it increases the viability of third parties. It’s on the ballot here in Oregon, for example, for 2024 (Portland has already adopted it). State after state is moving in this direction and we all need to support it.

— Tough on crime should not mean inhumane US prison conditions. That’s the headline of an editorial in this week’s Chicago Tribune, and it’s an important and urgent truth Americans need to take seriously. While the entire rest of the developed world has moved toward a rehabilitation model of imprisonment for all but the most vicious and incorrigible inmates, here we still hold tight to a purely punative corrections model. The result is that inmates are severely traumatized, hardened, and often so deeply mentally injured that they come out of prison more dangerous than when they went in. Given that most all inmates end up back out of jail and among the rest of us, America needs serious and systemic prison reform. Because it’s an issue that mostly affects lower-income people — who historically have had the last political power and faintest voice in our political dialogues — this has been largely ignored. But we must pay attention and establish solid and enforceable federal standards for state and local incarceration.

— Geeky Science! Have scientists found a link between junk food and tumors? Is this why young people are getting cancer in record numbers? The past few decades have seen an explosion in colorectal cancers among young people. According to a new study published in JAMA Surgery, colon cancer will have increased by 90 percent and rectal cancer by 124 percent among people 20 to 34 years old by the end of the decade. New research suggests high-fat and highly-processed fast food and junk food may be the culprit. Bottom line: eat your fruit and veggies!

— Crazy Alert! A morbidly rich wannabee cult leader is calling himself a warlord and creating a city to survive the coming apocalypse, according to reporting in Raw Story and elsewhere.