Copyright © 2016 - 2021, The Troy Press
Copyright © 2016 - 2021, The Troy Press

News Summaries For 20180825

 

How a DuPont Spinoff Lobbied the EPA to Stave Off the Use of Environmentally Friendly Coolants

Contributed by: Wnt

Source

EDITOR'S NOTE:

As frequently happens on The Intercept, they have good articles but even better comments from some of the regulars. In this instance, Commenter Wnt has provided a damned good response to the article (linked as "source").

I wanted to know what HFO stood for (you don't say) and found a brochure from

Now the first take-home message is these are still graded F for fluorine -- organic fluorine, the same source of all the issues with those fluorinated firefighting foams, for example.

The other is that these compounds are safer because they break down quickly in the atmosphere ... which raises the question of what they break down to.

From these two references they clearly have a body of work to show that they are drop-in replacements to use in existing equipment, they are not nearly as flammable as propane, and they seem to produce products in the atmosphere which, though undesirable, are already present from other industry. It is not known to be toxic by inhalation and seems to be cleared from the body quickly. So this isn't some War on Drugs/capital punishment level idiocy you just need to wake people up about -- the company has apparent facts on its side, and if you want to rain on their parade, you're going to need some research, from somewhere.

The main angle for attack is that you do have this fluorine, attached to a reactive double bond, getting out into the environment ... is there something the researchers have missed so far? It takes a week to react with air ... what if it finds some other chemical in your house, or in the environment, that it can interact with and come up with something nasty? The problem is, these are concerns that can be raised for almost any chemical product currently in use, and despite the inherent misgivings of fluorine, it's not a compelling argument compared to cost or the concerns of firemen who have to come into your kitchen and put out a grease fire next to a refrigerator full of pressurized propane. You're going to need to know now whatever it might be that is hidden in company files and will come out in the news only after the patent expires and generic competitors get started -- or you'll lose this one.

Former MI6 spy v WikiLeaks editor: Who really deserves 1st Amendment protection?

Contributed by: Art Richards

Source

If 'Dirty Dossier' author Christopher Steele deserves protection under the 1st Amendment but WikiLeaks' Julian Assange doesn't, then the concept of a free press is merely a distant memory.

The gist of <[this article by the Daily Mail]="https://t.co/O3waKe4b6K" is that former British MI6 intelligence officer and current mercenary spy-for-hire, Christopher Steele, author of the discredited 'Dirty Dossier' about Donald Trump, has been accorded First Amendment rights in a court case in the USA.

Steele's treatment is in marked contrast to that accorded to WikiLeaks Publisher and Editor-in-Chief, Julian Assange, and the hypocrisy is breathtaking. Steele is a British intelligence officer of pretty much my vintage. According to what is he worked for MI6, the British overseas intelligence gathering agency, for 22 years, serving in Russia in the early '90s and in Paris at the end of that decade - around the time that MI5 whistleblower, David Shayler, was in that city pending a failed extradition case to the UK. It is probable that Steele would have been monitoring us then.

After being as an MI6 officer in 1999 by his former colleague, Richard Tomlinson, he was pretty much desk-bound in London until he resigned in 2009 to set up, in the inimitable way of so many former spooks, a private consultancy that can provide plausibly deniable services to corporations and perhaps their former employers.

Steele established just such a mercenary spy outfit, with another ex-colleague Chris Burrows in 2009. Orbis made its name in exposing corruption at the heart of in 2015 and was thereafter approached as an out-sourced partner by Fusion GPS - the company initially hired to on presidential candidate Trump in 2016 by one of his Republican rivals and which then went on to dig up dirt on behalf of Hillary Clinton's DNC.

The result is what has become known as the <'Dirty Dossier,'="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41752908"> a grubby collection of prurient gossip with no real evidence or properly sourced information. As a former MI6 intelligence officer, Steele should be hanging his head in shame at such a shoddy and embarrassingly half-baked report.

There's MUCH more in the original source, link above.

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