Category Archives: ethics

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Restoring voting rights for people with felony convictions can improve public safety, report finds

https://news.yahoo.com/restoring-voting-rights-for-people-with-felony-convictions-can-improve-public-safety-report-finds-214741100.html After Akeem Simms spent 11 months and his 30th birthday in a Pennsylvania correctional facility for a felony conviction for drug possession with the intent to …

“The report found that voting is a prosocial behavior that can improve public safety, by promoting and creating a positive self-identity and offering a sense of inclusion to those who have served time for a felony conviction. The research it surveyed demonstrated that restoring voting rights can lead to a reduction of contact with criminal activity. It also showed that returning citizens were 10% less likely to reoffend if they were released in automatic restoration states, as opposed to states where people convicted of felonies are permanently disenfranchised.”

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Tenure, academic freedom, free speech

“Academic freedom cannot be a privilege of those who only espouse prevailing views but a protected right of all faculty,” the Academic Freedom Alliance wrote in July to the university’s president, M. Elizabeth Magill, arguing that the school should end the process to sanction Professor Wax.” https://nyti.ms/3Lfuxbt

But for many students, her public speech, which often mixes public policy with insulting broadsides, is the point.

Students have asked: Aren’t these statements relevant to her performance in the classroom? Don’t they show the potential for bias? And does this professor, and this speech, deserve the protection of tenure?”

These are timeless, and yet timely questions about free speech and unpopular views.

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NYTimes: The Liberal Maverick Fighting Race-Based Affirmative Action

The Liberal Maverick Fighting Race-Based Affirmative Action https://nyti.ms/3Zlrzp3

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“For the college class he teaches on inequality, Richard D. Kahlenberg likes to ask his students about a popular yard sign.

“In This House We Believe: Black Lives Matter, Women’s Rights Are Human Rights, No Human Is Illegal, Science Is Real,” it says.

His students usually dismiss the sign as performative. But what bothers Mr. Kahlenberg is not the virtue signaling.

“It says nothing about class,” he tells them. “Nothing about labor rights. Nothing about housing. Nothing that would actually cost upper-middle-class white liberals a dime.”

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David Brooks: The urban backlash against the populist backlash – The Salt Lake Tribune

https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2019/11/22/david-brooks-urban/

“The populist backlash came in different forms in different parts of the world. In Central and Eastern Europe it came in the form of nationalist strongmen — Victor Orban, Vladimir Putin, the Law and Justice party in Poland. In Latin America it came in the form of the Pink Tide — a group of left-wing economic populists like Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro. In the Anglosphere it was white ethnic nationalism of Donald Trump and Brexit. In the Middle East it was Muslim fundamentalism. In China it was the increasing authoritarianism of Xi Jinping. In India it was the Hindu nationalism of Narendra Modi.”

David Brooks

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Opinion | The Two Codes Your Kids Need to Know – The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/12/opinion/college-board-sat-ap.html

“Every student needs to understand that, as Coleman put it, “our country was argued into existence — and that is the first thing that binds us — but also has some of the tensions that divide us. So we thought, ‘What can we do to help replace the jeering with productive conversation?’”

Thomas Friedman

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2 gallons of radioactive nuclear waste done; 56M gallons to go | The Columbian

http://www.columbian.com/news/2018/may/16/2-gallons-of-radioactive-nuclear-waste-done-56m-gallons-to-go/

“It’s a big deal,” said Dawn Wellman, sector manager for environmental health and remediation at the national lab in Richland. “At a scaled version we have done what they will do at full scale at Hanford.”

The vitrification plant — or Waste Treatment Plant — at the Hanford nuclear reservation has been under construction since 2002, with a court-ordered deadline of 2023 to start treating some of the 56 million gallons of radioactive waste in underground tanks.

Much of the waste, which is left from the past production of plutonium for the nation’s nuclear weapons program, is planned to be vitrified, or turned into a solid glass form for disposal.”

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Don’t let Congress lock the public out of the courts! – Waterkeeper Alliance

https://waterkeeper.org/dont-let-congress-lock-the-public-out-of-the-courts/
Section 437 of the bill attempts to block judicial review of all agency decisions regarding the environmental review of a proposed water transfer project in California known as the “delta tunnels project,” or “California WaterFix.”

The bill is cited in article.

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New idea for dealing with school shootings, slate.com

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/02/a-nationwide-teacher-walkout-could-shake-us-out-of-our-mass-shooting-stupor.html

Exercise your Civic duty. Keeping sending legislative proposals to your representatives until something breaks through the stangle holds on our nation’s lawmakers.

Teachers in Europe strike with much less provocation – in the US now teachers lives and the lives of their students are at stake.

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Waste shipments to WIPP to soon resume

http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/WR-Waste-shipments-to-WIPP-expected-to-resume-soon-1602174.html

“The shipment of transuranic wastes from generator sites to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico is set to resume in April. The US Department of Energy (DoE) expects a total of 128 shipments to be made to WIPP over the next 12 months.”

Scary huh?