The Digger

The Night Sky Will Never Be the Same Elon Musk’s plan for worldwide internet has sent bright artificial, lights streaking through the dark. MARINA KOREN FEBRUARY 6, 2020                                  Starlink satellites streak through images captured by a telescope in Chile. Last year, Krzysztof Stanek got a letter from one of his neighbors. The neighbor wanted to build a shed two feet taller than local regulations allowed, and the city required him to notify nearby residents. Neighbors, the notice said, could object to the construction. No one did, and the shed went up. Stanek, an astronomer at Ohio State University, told me this story not because he thinks other people will care about the specific construction codes of Columbus, Ohio, but rather because it reminds him of the network of satellites SpaceX is building in the space around Earth. “Somebody puts up a shed tha...

‘Clean meat’ is neither – we can and must do better by  Nicolette Hahn Niman   Americans and Britons alike have been advised for decades to reduce consumption of meat – especially red meat – to benefit our health. Environmental and animal rights groups (whose ‘meat is murder’ message has run its course) have lately urged that saving the planet requires us all to stop eating meat. Perhaps you’ve absorbed enough of this bombardment over time that you feel a bit guilty every time you bite into a burger? Amidst this food shaming tsunami has ridden the sparkling cavalry of  Silicon Valley-financed  ‘clean meat’. Our guilt, we are assured, can be assuaged by consuming nuggets and patties made from plants. This may seem a tempting way out, but faux meats are not progress, they are a distraction. The phrase ‘clean meat’ is itself revealing. Originally, it was advanced by high-tech entrepreneurs wanting to ‘disrupt’ the food system status quo.  Multination...

EH here.  Kunstler's first paragraph compares the latest Democratic Party hijinks to the Marx Bro's Duck Soup , which made me realize what Donald Trump has been up to all along: a Groucho interpretation, as in this fabulous song and dance,   "The Laws of My Administration." ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ With Adam Schiff and Jerrold Nadler cast as Laurel and Hardy, the Democratic Party entered the slapstick phase of its self-destruction, moving from one botched scheme to the next amidst a chaos of falling pianos, splintered two-by-fours, and crashed bi-planes. The old 1930s screen comedies usually also featured a “grand dame” character making herself ridiculous, like Margaret Dumont in  Duck Soup , and congressional central casting has fashioned just such a late-career role for Nancy Pelosi, all fluster and spleen, and well-supplied with comic props like the carefully pre-torn State of the Union address she ceremoniously sundered on Tuesday night. Can so...

Victoria Agoglia was reported missing 136 times between February and September 2002. Whenever she returned to her residential care home she was thought to be drunk or to have taken drugs. Staff at the home were aware of a “pimp” who appeared to be in his mid-twenties and who was thought to have been supplying her with drugs. “No attempts were made to verify his age,” one reported. Victoria told her social worker that she had been injected with heroin by an older man. This information was not relayed to the police. Astonishingly, Victoria’s “drugs worker” thought an appropriate course of action was to make the girl agree to smoke rather than inject heroin. Within two months, Victoria was dead after a 50-year-old man injected her with the drug. This tragic and appalling case is detailed in a  new review  of “the effectiveness of multi-agency responses to child sexual exploitation in Greater Manchester.” As in similar cases in  Rotherham ,  Rochdale  and elsew...