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Author: Leslie Eastman

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Leslie Eastman

I am an Environmental Health and Safety Professional, as well as a science/technical writer for a variety of news and professional publications. I have been a citizen activist since 2009, and am one of the co-founders of the San Diego-based group, Southern California Tax Revolt Coalition.

Posted by Leslie Eastman on May 25, 2016 11 Comments
The last time we checked the regulatory runoff from the Animas River spill, a 132-page report by the Interior Department and Bureau of Reclamation laid the blame for the contamination at the doorstep of the Environmental Protection Agency. Now, the legal runoff is about to hit.
New Mexico is seeking more than $136 million from the Environmental Protection Agency and the owners of Colorado’s Gold King Mine, noting that dangers from contaminants spewed into the Animas River by the Aug. 5 mine spill are still lurking in New Mexico waters. In a lawsuit filed Monday in federal court, Attorney General Hector Balderas and the New Mexico Environment Department cite economic setbacks and environmental damage suffered by the state after more than 3 million gallons of toxic waste was dumped into the river. It demands reimbursement of $889,327 for short-term emergency-response costs paid by the state, more than $6 million to pay for long-term monitoring of the Animas and San Juan rivers and $130 million for lost income, taxes, fees and revenues suffered by the state because of the spill.

Posted by Leslie Eastman on May 24, 2016 11 Comments
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders predicts that the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia could be "messy" as he presses his progressive platform planks: "Democracy is not always nice and quiet and gentle." If the upcoming California primary is any indication, the Democratic Party could get messier far sooner. Both former President Bill Clinton and Sanders held rallies in the San Diego area this weekend. Sanders' first rally had at least 10,000 attendees.

Posted by Leslie Eastman on May 22, 2016 5 Comments
Legal Insurrection has been covering the lawsuit against the producers of a Star Trek fan film, and the amicus brief filed in the case by the Language Creation Society. There has been a development in this case that has been...fascinating.
In advance of the July release of Star Trek Beyond, it seems Paramount is going to try to get itself beyond a serious problem it’s having with the passionate fanbase of Trekkies, and clear up a PR black eye in the process. Tonight during a Trek fan event held on the Paramount lot, Star Trek Beyond executive producer JJ Abrams announced that the studio will be dropping a contentious lawsuit against a Star Trek fan film production. “This wasn’t an appropriate way to deal with the fans,” Abrams put it bluntly, signaling a major about face and many mended fences.
That is thrilling news indeed for many Trekkies. The Star Trek universe is certainly large enough for both the involvement of major studios and group-funded fan productions. It seems like Abrams and the director of the movie poised to be released this summer, Justin Lin, put a lot of pressure on the studio to back off the legal attack.
“A few months back there was a fan movie — Axanar — that was being made and there was a lawsuit that happened between the studio (Paramount and CBS) and the fans and Justin was sort of outraged as a longtime fan. We started talking about it and we realized that this was not an appropriate way to deal with the fans. The fans should be iceboating this thing, like you’re saying right now.” Abrams said when asked about the Axanar lawsuit.

Posted by Leslie Eastman on May 21, 2016 20 Comments
State attorneys general aren't the only ones engaging in climate justice thuggery. The board for Portland Public Schools unanimously approved a resolution to eliminate materials that question on the existence of climate change and mankind's impact on the global environment.
"A lot of the text materials are kind of thick with the language of doubt, and obviously the science says otherwise," Bill Bigelow, a former Portland Public Schools teacher who was involved in working to present the resolution, told the Portland Tribune. "We don't want kids in Portland learning material courtesy of the fossil fuel industry."

Posted by Leslie Eastman on May 20, 2016 10 Comments
I have previously reported that a coalition of 17 state attorney generals has formed (AGs United for Clean Power), which intends to promote the climate change agenda by targeting the fossil fuel industry. The first victim of the Climate Change purge was the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a non-profit organization that has assisted businesses in countering climate justice activism, when Attorney General Claude E. Walker of the U.S. Virgin Islands issued a subpoena in an attempt uncover the content of CEI’s comprehensive work on climate change policy.

Posted by Leslie Eastman on May 19, 2016 7 Comments
The last time we looked at Flint, the courts arraigned three bureaucrats over their roles in allowing lead-infused water to contaminate the municipal drinking water supply. Now, in an apparent bid to regain some relevancy, one national group is filing a lawsuit over the water-crisis.
Another big name has surfaced in the tsunami of Flint water lawsuits: the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People], which is suing several state officials and two engineering firms, alleging they poisoned a city with toxic drinking water by failing to detect that something was wrong, pretending a problem didn't exist and ignoring numerous red flags. "Just the color of Flint's water should have led any reasonable engineer to the conclusion that Flint's pipes were dangerously corroded," the 103-page lawsuit states. The NAACP announced the lawsuit today, though it was filed on March 31 in U.S. District Court, where at least two dozen other Flint-related lawsuits are pending. This one blames Gov. Rick Snyder, several state officials and two engineering firms for the crisis, claiming they engaged in "gross negligence" and "outrageous conduct" that harmed many. Not only did officials fail to detect a water problem, the lawsuits says, but they made the problem worse by not properly treating the water. And even when they knew the water was tainted, the suit says, public officials repeatedly maintained that it was safe to drink, despite a deadly Legionnaires' disease outbreak linked to the water. "All the while — despite public assurances of safety — government officials in Flint quietly switched to bottled water while the citizens and businesses of Flint continued to drink dangerously contaminated water,” the lawsuit states.

Posted by Leslie Eastman on May 18, 2016 28 Comments
The way I see it, #NeverHillary can truly claim the primary victory in Oregon's contests on Tuesday.
Sen. Bernie Sanders is the projected winner of the Democratic primary in Oregon. Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican party nominee, has won the GOP primary in Oregon, CNN projected. Tuesday's contests aren't likely to change the overall dynamics of the race. Clinton maintains a sizable delegate lead and is poised to become the presumptive Democratic nominee in early June when the final round of states vote. But her inability to snuff out the Sanders challenge has underscored concerns about her skills on the campaign trail and raised questions about whether the party will unite behind Clinton when she takes on presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump in the fall. Trump taunted Clinton about the closeness of the Kentucky race. "Do you think Crooked Hillary will finally close the deal?" Trump tweeted.

Posted by Leslie Eastman on May 18, 2016 10 Comments
Recall the initial days of the 2016 presidential primary cycle, when Hillary Clinton's victory over Bernie Sanders in the Iowa caucus was the result of 6 perfectly tossed coin flips. Now, as we are wrapping up the primary season, Clinton shas scored a razor-thin win over sanders in Kentucky.
Hillary Clinton is the apparent winner of the Kentucky Democratic primary Tuesday night, NBC News projects. The win — which seems like it will be by the narrowest of margins, perhaps just a few thousand votes — will blunt rival Sen. Bernie Sanders primary winning streak by winning Tuesday's nominating contest in Kentucky. ...After the results came in, Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver said, "Essentially a tie in a state they dominated last time. And Oregon is yet to come."
The press is already massaging the news, because "a few thousand votes" is a stretch. It was approximately 1800, and less than 0.5% difference.

Posted by Leslie Eastman on May 17, 2016 23 Comments
Last fall, Kemberlee Kaye reported on the continued incompetence of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and suggested that a smart presidential candidate should add become a “strong proponent of defunding the TSA.” Now, as one party has a presumptive nominee and the other is still fighting over the matter, it turns out that things have already changed at the TSA! Changed as in gotten far, far worse, as airlines report that some 4,000 passengers have missed flights at O’Hare Airport because of the long wait times since February, and there have been reports of screening hold-ups, delayed baggage transport, and difficulties at many other airports.

Posted by Leslie Eastman on May 15, 2016 3 Comments
An expert's report in the Harvard Public Health Review asserts that the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro could cause a "full-blown public health disaster” because of the Zika virus unless the event is postponed, relocated or canceled. The author of this analysis is Amir Attaran, Associate Professor of Law and Population Health and the holder of the Canada Research Chair in Law, Population Health and Global Development Policy at the University of Ottawa. His education includes a D.Phil in immunology from the University of Oxford. Interestingly, Attran has been a fighter for for renewed use of DDT in sub-Saharan Africa to combat malaria. His full piece in the Harvard publication makes 5 key points, which are as follows:

Posted by Leslie Eastman on May 14, 2016 9 Comments
While the Obama Administration is setting the country on fire with public school transgender bathroom dictates, a Wyoming man has scored a major legal victory against a regulatory Goliath. The Pacific Legal Foundation represented Wyoming rancher Andy Johnson in challenging an EPA compliance order threatening him with $37,500 per day in fines for constructing a stock pond on his property. The PLF lawsuit argued that Johnson’s pond is expressly exempt from the Clean Water Act and that the stream in which he constructed the pond is not a jurisdictional water because it does not affect a navigable water. And, as an extra bonus, a former Corps of Engineers enforcement officer asserted that Johnson's pond has many environmental benefits, including fish and wildlife habitat and enhanced water quality.

Posted by Leslie Eastman on May 13, 2016 7 Comments
Legal Insurrection's sci-fi fans will recall our recent report on the legal case filed by CBS/Paramount against a fan-based film being funded by Kickstarter donations. I was intrigued by the team from the Language Creation Society (LCS), who filed an amicus brief challenging Paramount’s dubious claim about copyright infringement based on the fan-film's use of the Klingon language.  I noted that Marc Randazza (a first amendment attorney) and Alex Shepard had filed an amusing and scholarly legal document filled with Klingon words, its alphabet, and cultural references on behalf of that group. Fortunately, two LCS board members were able to be guests on the Canto Talk show this week, and provided an update on the case as well as details on constructed languages (conlangs) and their organization.

Posted by Leslie Eastman on May 11, 2016 14 Comments
I must admit, I have seen a lot of crack-pot theories about Climate Change/Global Warming in the past two decades. However, Ghassan Hage (a Lebanese-Australian academic serving as Future Generation Professor of Anthropology and Social Theory at the University of Melbourne in Australia) has hit the motherlode of social justice nuttiness. Three Massachusetts Institute of Technology entities (Global Studies and Languages, Global Borders Research Collaboration, and Anthropology) sponsored his presentation, which answered the burning question: Is Islmabopbia Accelerating Global Warming?
This talk examines the relation between Islamophobia as the dominant form of racism today and the ecological crisis. It looks at the three common ways in which the two phenomena are seen to be linked: as an entanglement of two crises, metaphorically related with one being a source of imagery for the other and both originating in colonial forms of capitalist accumulation. The talk proposes a fourth way of linking the two: an argument that they are both emanating from a similar mode of being, or enmeshment, in the world, what is referred to as ‘generalised domestication.’
As an environmental health and safety professional, I assess that the only way Islamophobia contributed to global warming is from the hot air Hage emitted while presenting this lecture, which was given May 9.

Posted by Leslie Eastman on May 09, 2016 17 Comments
Mother Nature has engaged our neighbors to the North in a battle, as a massive wildfire has consumed the forests around the oil-sands region of Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada since May 1. The Canadians may finally be making some progress in containing the conflagration after one-week of intense fire-fighting.
Canadian officials showed some optimism on Sunday they were beginning to get on top of the country's most destructive wildfire in recent memory, as favorable weather helped firefighters and winds took the flames southeast, away from oil sands boomtown Fort McMurray. There was still no time line, however, for getting Fort McMurray's 88,000 inhabitants back into what remains of their town, or when energy companies would be able to restart operations at evacuated sites nearby. The wildfires have cut Canada's vast oil sands output in half. "It definitely is a positive point for us, for sure," said Alberta fire official Chad Morrison in a news briefing, when asked if the fight to contain the flames had a reached a turning point. "We're obviously very happy that we've held the fire better than expected," said Morrison. "This is great firefighting weather, we can really get in here and get a handle on this fire, and really get a death grip on it."

Posted by Leslie Eastman on May 07, 2016 25 Comments
I still assert that Donald Trump will vanquish Hillary Clinton in the fall, especially when his likely opposition begins working for him! Via Fox News contributor and talk show host Tammy Bruce comes an ad being put out by the Clinton campaign. The video backfires, because it provides example after example of strong positions Trump offers that appeal to his record-number of primary voters.

Posted by Leslie Eastman on May 07, 2016 7 Comments
Finally, some good news from the Golden State! It looks like we have solved all our other problems, so Governor Jerry Brown was able to focus on the issue of paramount importance: Smoking!
Gov. Jerry Brown on Wednesday signed a package of bills that will regulate the manufacture and sale of e-cigarettes and increase the legal smoking age from 18 to 21. Other bills the governor signed will close loopholes in existing smoke-free workplace laws and require that all K-12 schools be tobacco-free.
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