sataniccapitalist reblogged
Excerpt from this story from Inside Climate News:
As the coal industry has collapsed in Kentucky, companies have racked up a rising number of violations at surface mines, and state regulators have failed to bring a record number of them into compliance, internal documents show.
Enforcement data from 2013 through February, along with recent internal emails, both provided to Inside Climate News by the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet in response to a state open records law request, paint a picture of an industry and its regulators in a state of crisis.
The documents reveal an agency struggling to enforce regulations designed to protect the public and the environment from some of the industry’s most destructive practices amid mining company bankruptcies and an overall industry decline that has also seen the shedding of thousands of coal mining jobs in the state.
Environmental advocates fear lax enforcement could also be happening in other coal mining states, such as West Virginia, Virginia and Pennsylvania, due to similar pressures on the industry and regulators, despite a recent uptick in coal mining. And they are calling on federal regulators to make sure slowed, idled or bankrupt mines are not left to deteriorate.
“This data shows there are a lot of zombie mines out there,” said Mary Varson Cromer, an attorney and deputy director of the Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center Inc., in Whitesburg, Kentucky, using a term that refers to mines that have been idled, sometimes for years, without the required reclamation work on their sites.
In one Dec. 15 email, a state official noted that the number of notices of noncompliance with surface mining regulations statewide had reached a record high of 810 the previous month. The increase came even though the number of active mining permits had declined 28 percent since 2013, a year when there were roughly half as many unresolved violations despite more mining activity.
“This is completely out of control,” warned Courtney Skaggs, a senior environmental scientist in the Kentucky Department for Natural Resources, in a separate Dec. 15 email to the department’s commissioner, Gordon Slone. “This is going to blow up in someone’s face,” wrote Skaggs, a former acting director of the agency’s Division of Mine Reclamation and Enforcement.
sataniccapitalist reblogged
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A proud quarantine purchase 😂🙌🥰
Thick-fil-A
Encroaching Fascism In Kentucky
Published on 25 Mar 2021
A bill recently made it's way to the state house in Kentucky which would criminalize insulting the police.
And while it may seem comical that the conservative-led and well-armed police state would require additional legal protections to keep them from having their feelings hurt, there are far more serious implications of such legislation.
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sataniccapitalist reblogged
Only hours after he appeared to lose his re-election bid last week, Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin ® started making baseless claims about supposed irregularities and voter fraud.
Since then, the firebrand conservative has only waded deeper into the most hysterical online fever swamps, embracing new and even more outlandish claims of fraud circulated by small groups of his supporters and amplified by right-wing conspiracy theorists like Laura Loomer and Alex Jones.
On Wednesday, eight days after Bevin refused to concede defeat to Democratic Attorney General Andy Beshear — and the day before the state will begin the official recanvass of election results to recheck vote totals, something Bevin formally requested — the governor tweeted his support for an event held by Citizens for Election Integrity, a supposedly “grassroots” group started just this week.
Bevin’s tweet suggested he might attend the event if his schedule allowed.
Erika Calihan, the Lexington-area woman behind the event, has spent the last three days making unverifiable and unsubstantiated claims of fraud and calling on the attorney general’s office to open some sort of investigation into her allegations ― most of which seem derived primarily from posts she has read on Facebook, screenshots of unofficial election results and rumors she’s heard.
Bevin, who lost the election by roughly 5,000 votes, has described Calihan as “my friend” and appointed her to a state government position earlier this year.
Calihan’s claims have gone viral-ish, at least in the corners of the internet allergic to basic facts and prone to thinking that prominent Democrats operate a child sex dungeon in the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant that has no basement, or that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax meant to help the feds confiscate guns they still haven’t gotten around to confiscating.
That Bevin chose to dignify the conspiracy theorists’ fever dreams has only helped bring more chaos into an election that was already “shaping up to be a case study in the real-world impact of disinformation — and a preview of what election-security officials and experts fear could unfold a year from now if the 2020 presidential election comes down to the wire,” as The New York Times suggested last week when conservatives took a parody tweet about destroying ballots as hard evidence of fraud.
Bevin spent the weekend raising the possibility that he lost a “dirty election.”
“I would rather lose a clean election than win a dirty election. And I’ll be darned if I want to lose a dirty election,” he said at an event for young conservatives, the Louisville Courier-Journal reported.
