When Marc Edwards opens his mouth, dangerous things come out.
Edwards, a professor of civil engineering at Virginia Tech, has been investigating dangerously high lead levels in the Flint, Mich., water supply. “The agencies paid to protect these people weren’t solving the problem,” he says. “They were the problem. What faculty person out there is going to take on” the government? In 2003 the Virginia Tech civil-engineering professor said that there was lead in the Washington, D.C., water supply, and that the city had been poisoning its residents. He was right.
Last fall he said there was lead in the water in Flint, Mich., despite the reassurances of state and local authorities that the water was safe. He was right about that, too.
February 2, 2016
The Case for Very Hot Water | Science News
For years, conservation advocates have told consumers to turn down the thermostat on their hot-water heaters — largely to save energy, but also to avoid scalding showers and baths. At least for some people, however, this green tactic could prove dangerous, new studies indicate.
The number one cause of waterborne disease outbreaks in the United States,” says environmental engineer Marc Edwards, “is not contaminants leaving the water treatment plant (we do a good job of killing those). It’s the pathogens that grow in home water heaters.”
If You’re Liberal and You Think Hillary Clinton Is Corrupt and Untrustworthy, You’re Rewarding 25 Years of GOP Smears – The Daily Banter
Bernie Sanders will never be president. Let’s just get that out of the way right now. He stands very little chance of pulling down the Democratic nomination and no chance at all of winning a general election. His rabid acolytes can argue with this all they want but they’ll be wrong for several inarguable reasons: because the “political revolution” Bernie Sanders needs to advance his campaign and agenda is pie-in-the-sky thinking that simply doesn’t occur in representative democracies like ours, where change always comes incrementally and our entire system is designed so it can’t be remade in one fell swoop; because he’s a one-note candidate who concerns himself with nothing other than his admittedly noble lifelong obsession with wealth inequality; because America isn’t evolved enough to elect an avowed socialist, democratic or otherwise, and it unfortunately won’t get near someone who openly eschews religion; and maybe most importantly because once the GOP considered Bernie a sworn enemy rather than the perfect foil it can use to destroy Hillary Clinton, it would eat him alive. Eat. Him. Alive.
Hillary Clinton Is Not Telling The Truth About Wall Street
Clinton’s attack on Sanders is as simple as it is untrue: Unlike Sanders, Clinton has argued, she is willing to take on “shadow banking” — a broad term for various financial activities that aren’t regulated as strictly as conventional lending.Sanders has in fact proposed attacking shadow banking in two principal ways: by breaking up big financial firms that engage in shadow banking, and by severing federal financial support for shadow banking activities by reinstating Glass-Steagall.
These would be substantive changes. A lot of shadow banking takes place at firms with traditional banking charters, like JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America. Some of it takes place at specialized hedge funds, or at major investment banks like Goldman Sachs. Breaking them up would not eliminate the risk shadow banking poses to the economy, but it would limit it. Risky shadow banking activities cannot bring down institutions that are too-big-to-fail if there are no too-big-to-fail institutions.
Yet the Clinton campaign has repeatedly said Sanders is wholly ignoring shadow banking, accusing Sanders of taking a “hands-off” approach to it that would not apply to firms like Lehman Brothers and AIG. This barrage has come from Clinton’s press aides, campaign CFO Gary Gensler, and Clinton surrogate Barney Frank.
Source: Hillary Clinton Is Not Telling The Truth About Wall Street
Why Wall Street Loves Hillary – POLITICO Magazine
According to a wide assortment of bankers and hedge-fund managers I spoke to for this article, Clinton’s rock-solid support on Wall Street is not anything that can be dislodged based on a few seemingly off-the-cuff comments in Boston calculated to protect her left flank. (For the record, she quickly walked them back, saying she had “short-handed” her comments about the failures of trickle-down economics by suggesting, absurdly, that corporations don’t create jobs.) “I think people are very excited about Hillary,” says one Wall Street investment professional with close ties to Washington. “Most people in New York on the finance side view her as being very pragmatic. I think they have confidence that she understands how things work and that she’s not a populist.”