Linkee-poo

Well that was some interesting traffic over the weekend.

"Small streams look more like rivers. Rivers like raging torrents. And city streets and stretches of interstate highways -- dotted with rescue boats -- like free-flowing waterways… That's the reality in wide swaths of eastern North Carolina in the watery wake of Hurricane Florence." And we're not done yet.

"Heavy rains from Florence caused a slope to collapse at a coal ash landfill at a closed power station near the North Carolina coast, Duke Energy says… Duke spokeswoman Paige Sheehan said late Saturday about 2,000 cubic yards of ash were displaced at the L. V. Sutton Power Station outside Wilmington and that contaminated runoff likely flowed into the plant's cooling pond… The company has not yet determined whether the weir that drains the lake was open or if contamination may have flowed into the Cape Fear River. That's roughly enough ash to fill 180 dump trucks."

"The raccoon scourge was bad enough that (Toronto) spent CA$31 million on 'raccoon-resistant' organic green-colored waste bins in 2016. It was the latest assault in what Canadian media have called a 'raccoon war.'" Nature finds a way.

"As more states legalize marijuana for medical or recreational use — 30 states plus the District of Columbia to date — the cannabis industry is booming. Among the fastest growing group of users: people over 50, with especially steep increases among those 65 and older. And some dispensaries are tailoring their pitches to seniors like Avedon who are seeking alternatives treatments for their aches, pains and other medical conditions." The rise in cannabis can be seen as a direct reputation of the current state of healthcare in America.

"A U.S. Border Patrol supervisor is being held in Texas on a $2.5 million bond after his arrest over the weekend on charges of killing four women after a fifth would-be victim escaped and alerted authorities."

"In a sign that America's two centuries-old democracy is under strain, nearly 2 in 5 American voters do not believe elections are fair, according to a new NPR/Marist poll. Nearly half of respondents lacked faith that votes would be counted accurately in the upcoming midterm elections." The various breakdowns are even more telling. "Whereas 62 percent of white respondents said they travel less than 10 minutes to get to their polling place on average, just 41 percent of African-Americans and Latino voters said the same." The game is rigged, but not in the way the president is saying.

"Internal emails show that the Berkeley, California Police Department (BPD) talked of building a 'counter-narrative' on social media against anti-fascist protesters as BPD tweeted out their names and mugshots, then boasted of retweets and 'engagement' metrics when mugshots went viral. This amounts to cops doxxing protesters and high-fiving each other over it. That's creepy, and seems like an obvious abuse of power, if not also an abuse of the law."

"At the downtown bistros and power-lunch venues that serve as official Washington’s unofficial commissaries, there is a creeping sense of paranoia. It’s not just the heightened political sniping… Instead, for those career civil servants whose bureaus have attracted the suspicion of the White House, much of the fear is emanating from the president himself. 'That is the new normal. We meet in the back rooms of coffee shops, and only set up in-person conversations and talk in private,' an ex-administration official said of interactions with their former colleagues. 'They are absolutely paranoid, even when the discussion is of the most anodyne nature.'" It's worse than we think. I can't wait to hear the revisionists in the GOP come out with "we need to elect 'good' business people to run government like a 'good' business." (Grokked from William Freedman)