This is the stuff of 60's Super Hero vs the Evil Villain who wants to destroy Planet Earth and Everybody On it...for Money!

This week, the United Nations released a damning report. The short version: We have about 12 years to actually do something to prevent the worst aspects of climate change. That is, not to prevent climate change—we're well past that point—but to prevent the worst, most catastrophic elements of it from wreaking havoc on the world's population.

...There are probably no individuals who have had a more toxic impact on public and political attitudes about climate change than the Koch brothers, and it would take an absurd amount of space to document all the money and organizations they've scraped together for that purpose.

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“What is clear is that all of the messaging clearly sought to benefit the Republican Party — and specifically Donald Trump,”

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"...right now in American politics there are no more reckless, helpless, desperate junkies than the True Conservative and the Both Siderist, joined at the hip, shaking, down on their knees, both begging for a hit of anything that will let them pretend for just one more day that the Left hasn't been right about the Right all along."

William Burroughs

Trump’s longtime accountant, Allen Weisselberg, has turned state’s evidence.

At a time when the Trump administration is removing all traces of scientists from the EPA, Roane County needs some scientists there and at TDEC. TVA groundwater testing shows a fluctuation in arsenic and radium levels, but they claim they are well below action levels set by the EPA. Fact is Trump's EPA has been gutted and is not to be trusted to protect us. TVA claims they are not legally obligated to report the results of their monitoring to TDEC. That would seem to be easily corrected if Roane County had effective representation.

Roane County Commission Chairman Randy Ellis said TVA has an obligation – even without a legal requirement – to his community to be transparent about what’s going on at its coal ash landfills given both the destruction caused by TVA’s spill and the recent discovery that TVA misled Ellis and the public about the danger of coal ash.

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Apologizing to his family, the judge, and “the people of the United States,” Cohen lamented his career as a “loyal soldier to the president” and that “time and time again I felt it was my duty to carry out his dirty deeds.”

“It was my own weakness and blind loyalty to this man that led me to choose a path of darkness over light,” Cohen said.

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Cohen's attorney skewered Trump:

“He came forward to offer evidence against the most powerful person in our country” in a probe “of utmost national significance, no less than that seen 40 years ago in the throes of Watergate”

The Tennessee Valley Authority promised the public nine years ago that it would pay the medical expenses for anyone sickened from exposure to the 7.3 million tons of coal ash that spilled from its dike, newly discovered records show.

Now that a federal jury has ruled that the disaster clean-up workers who toiled unprotected in the ash were likely poisoned by it, TVA – the nation’s largest electricity provider and deemed responsible for the nation’s largest coal ash spill - is refusing to say if it will honor its word.

From the Knox News Sentinel

The best quote of the Summit so far is from Lord Nicholas Stern, of the London School of Economics “You don’t create jobs for the 21st century by trying to whistle up jobs from the 19th century.”

Nations that cling to fossil fuel economies will get destroyed economically in the near future:

Global investors managing $32tn issued a stark warning to governments at the UN climate summit on Monday, demanding urgent cuts in carbon emissions and the phasing out of all coal burning. Without these, the world faces a financial crash several times worse than the 2008 crisis, they said...

Investment firm Schroders said there could be $23tn of global economic losses a year in the long term without rapid action. This permanent economic damage would be almost four times the scale of the impact of the 2008 global financial crisis. Standard and Poor’s rating agency also warned leaders: “Climate change has already started to alter the functioning of our world.”

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At the very least, dismissing the investigation as a witch hunt or fishing expedition? No longer operative, as Ron Ziegler might have said. There was a ton of Russia contact, and at the same time finance violations were done at the behest of the president.

Also THIS

The fact checkers are not kind to right wing columnists like Flo, who claimed that Obama got $150 billion to give to Iran and it's sad that Trump can't get $5 billion for his useless wall. The amount that was released to Iran was about a third of Flo's claim and it was Iran's money held in world banks, embargoed because of the Iran Nuke treaty to start with.

Nothing was appropriated by Congress! But why let facts get in the way of a good story? Here's some snips from the fact check:

"The past administration made a horrible deal giving $150 billion," Trump said April 26 on the Fox News morning show. "Giving $1.8 billion in cash — in actual cash carried out in barrels and in boxes from airplanes."

Of the two numbers he gave, $150 billion and $1.8 billion, the first is dodgy and the second is slightly exaggerated. And there’s no evidence that barrels and boxes were involved...

In July 2015, U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew told lawmakers Iran would gain access to $56 billion.

It’s important to know that little of that money was under the control of the United States or any U.S. bank. Most of it, Habibi said, was in central and commercial banks overseas. Furthermore, it was Iran’s money to begin with, not a payment from any government to buy Iran’s cooperation.

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“We are in trouble. We are in deep trouble with climate change,” United Nations Secretary General António Guterres said this week at the opening of the 24th annual U.N. climate conference, where countries will wrestle with the ambitious goals they need to meet to sharply reduce carbon emissions in coming years.

“It is hard to overstate the urgency of our situation,” he added. “Even as we witness devastating climate impacts causing havoc across the world, we are still not doing enough, nor moving fast enough, to prevent irreversible and catastrophic climate disruption.”

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The Roane County Commission voted to “file suit as needed against Jacobs Engineering and/or TVA” during a special-called meeting at the courthouse Tuesday night.

“The primary complaint will be with Jacobs Engineering,” Commissioner Darryl Meadows said. “They were under contract under the oversight of TVA on this and there may be some culpability on TVA.”

This may be behind the paywall but here's the link:

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"Today, in a nation of more than 325 million and 37 additional states, not only is that structure antiquated, it’s downright dangerous. California has almost 40 million people, while the 20 smallest states have a combined population totaling less than that. Yet because of an 18th-century political deal, those 20 states have 40 senators, while California has just two. These sparsely populated, usually conservative states can block legislation supported by a majority of the American people. That’s just plain crazy."

Former Congressman John Dingell

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Tusks 11 feet long, 10 feet tall at the shoulder, This is a major ongoing story of Tennessee's fossil natural history. It ought to be big in our schools. The Gray fossil site is thought to be a Miocene watering/sink hole from 4.5 million to seven million years ago. There are several mastodons found in the same spot. The biggest one, Ernie, was originally calculated to weigh 16 tons. A modern African elephant weights 6 tons. Ernie was freakin' HUGE!

And Ernie is from Tennessee. I hereby propose Ernie the Mastodon officially be named the Tennessee State Elephant!

He’d been offering tantalising hints throughout his presentation: an ulna here; a large femur there; a calculated weight of 16 tons for this animal. But it wasn’t until he showed an image of the excavated jaw that some of us became really excited.

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Because of the interference from follicle magnetism, researchers are using bald people to study magnetite in the brain and its possible relationship to Alzheimer's disease.

Amazing what we learn here at RoaneViews.com!

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Sorry folks. We'll reschedule Andrew Leahey as soon as we can.

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Key findings of the NCA4, Vol. II Communities:

Human health and safety, our quality of life, and the rate of economic growth in communities across the U.S. are increasingly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.

The cascading impacts of climate change threaten the natural, built and social systems we rely on, both within and beyond the nation's borders.

Societal efforts to respond to climate change have expanded in the last five years, but not at the scale needed to avoid substantial damages to the economy, environment, and human health over the coming decades.

Without substantial and sustained global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and regional initiatives to prepare for anticipated changes, climate change is expected to cause growing losses to American infrastructure and property and impede the rate of economic growth over this century.

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The United States already warmed on average 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit over the past century and will warm at least 3 more degrees by 2100 unless fossil fuel use is dramatically curtailed, scientists from more than a dozen federal agencies concluded in their latest in-depth assessment.

The 13-agency consensus found in the second volume of the Fourth National Climate Assessment makes it clear the world is barreling toward catastrophic―perhaps irreversible―climate change. The report concluded that warming “could increase by 9°F (5°C) or more by the end of this century” without significant emissions reductions.

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A big thank you to all the friends who watch over RoaneViews global headquarters while we venture off for Thanksgiving. So here...

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Do you think it's OK for Trump to let polluters get a free ride while we have our local economy ruined and our children get sick?

The Trump administration’s top environmental official for the Southeast was arrested Thursday on criminal ethics charges in Alabama reported to be related to a scheme to help a coal company avoid paying for a costly toxic waste cleanup...

“Trey Glenn should have never made it through any serious vetting process,” said Rep. Frank Pallone of New Jersey, the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. “Scott Pruitt may be gone, but it’s clear the culture of corruption remains.”

So corruption stares us in the face and what does the GOP want to investigate? Hillary's emails! Idiots!

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“My kids lost everything. I voted for him – and now? He can kiss my red ass,” Ellsworth said. “What he said was ridiculous. It hurts my heart. A lot of us voted for him and he [talks] down to us?”

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This is all the more interesting since we are in just reelected Chuck Flieschmann's Congressional District.

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I guess the right wing opinionist for the Roane County News has her marching orders to tell us how wonderful Nationalists are. Let's just note the real definition of Nationalism as it has morphed over the years until the present day in which it is used by the American Nazi Party to describe themselves as patriots to downplay the inherent bigotry and racism.

The Nazi Party emerged from the German nationalist, racist and populist Freikorps paramilitary culture, which fought against the communist uprisings in post-World War I Germany.[6] The party was created as a means to draw workers away from communism and into völkisch nationalism.[7] Initially, Nazi political strategy focused on anti-big business, anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist rhetoric, although such aspects were later downplayed in order to gain the support of industrial entities and in the 1930s the party's focus shifted to anti-Semitic and anti-Marxist themes.[8]

Pseudo-scientific racism theories were central to Nazism.

"Bredesen carried 10 biggest counties by cumulative 10 points. It didn’t matter."

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Jury: Jacobs Engineering endangered Kingston disaster clean-up workers

The verdict means the workers now will get a chance to seek damages, including money to cover medical testing for all laborers who worked at the site and medical treatment for themselves and their families. Many of the workers’ family members also are believed to have been sickened by exposure to the coal ash the laborers brought home each night on their skin and clothing.

The workers were represented by a small group of attorneys - Jim Scott, Keith Stewart, John Dupree, J. Tyler Roper, Gary Davis and Jeff Friedman – and investigator Stephanie Johnson, all of whom are donating much of their time in the case so far.

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Dems won MORE VOTES and MORE SEATS tonight, in both the House and the Senate. The Senate represents states not people. It was formed as a platitude to the racist South and less populous states. Voters cast ten million more votes for Democrats in the Senate than Republicans. Minority government continues for now.

HOUSE:
Dems ~48 million votes, 230 seats
Rs ~45M votes, 205 seats

SENATE:
Dems ~42M votes, 22 seats
Rs ~32M votes, 13 seats

There were 35 Senate seats up for grabs. Dems won approx 22 of them, Rs won approx 13. Some of those 13 were previously held by Dems, so Rs had a net gain, but the fact is Dems actually had more victories.

Vote! Because it does!

When NASA finally retired the Kepler Space Telescope this week after it ran out of fuel, the mission had helped discover more than 2,600 exoplanets. Kepler even likely discovered a moon outside our solar system. Thanks to Kepler, we now know there are more planets than stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

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‘Let’s rock’: The last words of a double-murderer who chose the electric chair over lethal injection

He spent 34 years on death row, becoming a “model inmate,” according to his attorney, Kelley Henry, a federal public defender. She said he had once saved the life of a guard. The last time he was on death watch, other inmates pooled their resources for a pizza dinner in his honor, according to the Tennessean.

“Capital prisoners are not entitled to pleasant deaths under the Eighth Amendment, but they are entitled to humane deaths. The longer we stand silent amid growing evidence of inhumanity in execution methods like Tennessee’s, the longer we extend our own complicity in state-sponsored brutality.” Justice Sotamayor

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