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I had lunch yesterday with my longtime friend and former colleague John. John is nearly three years older than me and has two adult children, but no grandchildren. He had somehow forgotten that I became a grandfather in April. When I reminded him, he said "You realize this makes you older than me now." I laughed, but it made me think about the life events that I associate with being "older." When I got married, I felt older than my contemporaries who were still single. When I became a father, I felt suddenly older than when we were childless. And looking in the mirror and thinking "grandpa" makes me feel way older than a year ago. The next aging marker is when I retire. Then I'll be unemployed for the first time since college. Even though my brother who is seven years younger and his wife who is 10 years younger both retired several years ago, retirement seems like something old people do. Yes, I know you're as young as you feel, and all of these l...

Over at jabberwocking.com , Kevin Drum blames pro-choice writers for failing to make the case for reproductive choice. Well, from everything I've read, a clear majority of Americans believe that Roe should still stand. Seems like the case has been made, and if we lived in a truly representative democracy, a limited national right to abortion would be preserved. But beyond that reality, I think Drum has it exactly backwards. Why does the burden of proof fall on those advocating for personal autonomy? Seems to me the null hypothesis is that women should be allowed to make decisions about their own health, and that the justification for nanny state intrusion into such decisions rests with the minority who assert state coercion. Democrats need to hammer on the right-wing GOP to explain why the government takes temporary custody of pregnant Americans. https://jabberwocking.com/liberals-really-suck-at-defending-abortion/

"Rep. Mary Miller (R-IL) has come under fire after she thanked former President Trump for appointing conservative judges who overturned Roe v. Wade, a ruling that she praised as a “historic victory for white life” during a Trump rally in Illinois on Saturday night. “President Trump, on behalf of all the MAGA patriots in America, I want to thank you for the historic victory for white life in the Supreme Court yesterday,” Miller said in her speech, with Trump standing behind her." *snip* "This isn’t the first time Miller has come under scrutiny after issuing comments that nodded to white supremacy. "Days after she entered office in January last year, Miller was met with backlash after she cited Adolf Hitler in a speech to a conservative women’s group." “Each generation has the responsibility to teach and train the next generation. You know, if we win a few elections, we’re still going to be losing unless we win the hearts and minds of our children. This is the ba...

  Spotted on a comment thread over at angrybear blog: "Be very afraid. There is a reasonable probability that the court will find a way to rule that every zygote is a full citizen; so that anyone in the country who aids an abortion will be prosecuted for murder." To which I replied: "At that point tens of millions of Americans will reply with a paraphrase of Andrew Jackson: “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.” Blue states will simply ignore such a ruling and there will be no way to impose it in such cases. "SCOTUS rulings are like money; they’re only worth something if people believe in them. That, not zygotic citizenship, is the real threat to civil order in this country."

With all the justifiable outrage about the recent SCOTUS decisions on gun control and abortion, it's important to recall that the law means exactly what the Supreme Court says it means. It's been true since Marbury v Madison. And it isn't even a consensus decision that's required: "William Brennan, the great liberal who dominated the heyday of Warren Court in the 1960s, used to quiz his law clerks about the most important rule at the Supreme Court. They would ponder ... freedom of speech? ... due process of law? The diminutive Brennan would hold up his tiny hand, assert his now-famous "Rule of Five" and say, "Five votes can do anything around here."" https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/24/opinions/clarence-thomas-what-next-toobin/index.html?fbclid=IwAR3EHkHkwEgsaJ5Sk00SmIW2D0tXrdVvD64loMLU2abLt75ut1iJLDEAQEM

In his invitation for the SCOTUS to overturn its previous decisions that used the due process clause of the Constitution to protect access to contraception, gay sex and gay marriage as well as Roe v Wade, Thomas was silent about Loving v. Virginia, in which the SCOTUS ruled that state laws banning interracial marriage violate the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. Thomas isn't gay and doesn't need contraception, but he's married to a White woman.

In a concurring opinion with the Supreme Court's Friday ruling to overturn the precedent set in Roe v. Wade, Justice Clarence Thomas said the court should reconsider rulings that protect access to contraception, same-sex relationships, and same-sex marriage. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/justice-thomas-says-the-supreme-court-should-reconsider-rulings-that-protect-access-to-contraception-and-same-sex-marriage-as-the-court-overturns-roe-v-wade/ar-AAYPDpt?li=BBnb7Kz&fbclid=IwAR3phmoxZDXWa0PRQmRbfiZluRd_4gNaAX8eHSyjJxdX_c2yCN3BmWhcetc

We are closing in on nine years of rooftop solar. Even though 2/3 of the cost was paid by Ameren and by a tax rebate, we still haven't made back our investment in savings on electric bills. Most electricity in Missouri is generated by burning coal, so we have the satisfaction of knowing we offset a substantial amount of that. In the end, solar and wind power result in a lot of environmental destruction in their normal life cycle, and there's the intermittency problem. Getting more energy from nuclear is the only real solution for industrialized nations. If you're skeptical, watch this short TED talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-yALPEpV4w

When your Republican friends ask why the political discourse in this country is so aggressive and why we can't all just get along, ask them why Republicans support insurrections and air videos extolling violence: "A campaign ad for Greitens’ new political assassination campaign opens with Greitens holding a shotgun and strolling past a mailbox labeled “The RINO’s Den.” “I’m Eric Greitens, Navy SEAL, and today we’re going RINO hunting,” Greitens says in the ad — though he’s not actually a SEAL anymore. "The ad then pans to Greitens joining several men with military fatigues on the front porch of a house. One of them uses a battering ram to knock down the door, followed by the deployment of a flash-bang grenade. "Greitens and his anonymized military stand-ins enter the house with guns drawn, though the dwelling is apparently abandoned, allowing the disgraced former governor to deliver the latest fundraising pitch for his campaign: a hunting permit! “The RINO feeds on c...

Just to be clear: today's GOP is not longer the conservative party, it is the party of right-wing extremism. It is the party that rejects democracy. It is the party of intolerance. Sadly, the so-called "Log Cabin Republicans" who purport to represent gay Republicans could only summon a mild objection to the Texas GOP position on homosexuality. The Texas GOP is chugging the hateraid. Shame. "For the first time in four years, Texas Republicans met in person at their state party convention over the weekend. And boy, did they make up for lost time. Consider: * They approved a measure that stated that President Joe Biden "was not legitimately elected." * They rebuked the 10 Senate Republicans involved in the bipartisan talks on gun legislation -- including Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who was booed during his speech Friday at the convention. * They voted to advance language in the party platform that describes homosexuality as "an abnormal lifestyle choice"...

Scott Fitzgerald wrote: “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.” Substitute “Trump” for “rich” and “the very rich” and you have some insight into Trump. But in Trump’s case, it’s worse. Trump is narcissism on stilts. Josh Marshall has a useful commentary over at TPM, but it’s paywalled so I won’t link to it. Here are the nut grafs: "I’ve discussed before that for Trump and many others we have too binary, too linear an understanding of what “belief” means. Someone like Trump doesn’t “believe” things in the way most of us do — which is that we “believe” things that we think did happen and vice versa. We’re human, so bias may affect our judgments at the margins. But that’s the model. For Trump, there is just what he wants. He “believes” whatever...

From Judge Luttig’s testimony today to the Jan. 6 select committee: "Today, almost two years after that fateful day in January 2021 … Donald Trump and his allies and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy. That’s not because of what happened on January 6th. It’s because to this very day the former president, his allies and supporters pledge that in the presidential election of 2024 if the former president or his anointed successor as the Republican Party presidential candidate were to lose that election that they would attempt to overturn that 2024 election in the same way they attempted to overturn the 2020 election but succeed in 2024 where they failed in 2020. "I don’t speak those words lightly. I would have never spoken those words ever in my life except that that’s what the former president and his allies are telling us. … The former president and his allies are executing that blueprint for 2024 in open and plain view of the American public. I re...

"Congregants from a synagogue in South Florida are suing to block the state’s 15-week abortion ban from going into effect on July 1, arguing the law violates their religious freedom as adherents of Jewish law. "Abortion clinics in the same county as the synagogue also sued earlier this month, according to the Miami Herald, arguing the ban, signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) in April, violates constitutional rights. Both lawsuits argue that the law violates a privacy right in Florida’s state constitution. "But the latest suit, brought by Congregation L’Dor Va-Dor, makes a novel argument about the harms of the ban, suggesting the new restriction violates Jewish people’s religious freedom. “For Jews, all life is precious and thus the decision to bring new life into the world is not taken lightly or determined by state fiat,” the lawsuit reads, according to the Miami Herald. “In Jewish law, abortion is required if necessary to protect the health, mental or physical wel...

The official newspaper of the Communist Party was called Pravda (правда), which translates as "Truth." Donald Trump recently founded a fake twitter lookalike called "Truth Social." In the spirit of Stalin, it censors actual, you know, truth and hosts lies (or what are politely called "conspiracy theories). "While we knew this off-brand Twitter account would eventually become a den of disinfo about Trump-related election lies, the aggressiveness with which moderators are reportedly trying to ban certain types of information (real, fact-checked reporting) juxtaposed with what it is allowing to run rampant, highlights an eerie, but unsurprising reality. Trump’s social app was always meant to become a safe haven for the very conspiracy theories Twitter and others in big tech aimed to crack down on after the violent Jan. 6 insurrection." https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trump-off-brand-twitter-truth-qanon-content

There's a recent piece on the NYT on Oak Ridge and desegregation. One of the local players at the time was Waldo Cohn, a chemist and symphony conductor, who was on the school board at the time. Here's his account: MR. COHN: So, this Advisory Town Council met every week, every second week with him. There were seven people. I was interested in not only community affairs, but I was also interested in politics, and I was not on the original one at all. Before one of the elections would come up, which was every two years, some of the people who were interested in who would run for it, asked me to run. I believe the person who asked me to run for it was Evelyn Snell, wife of Arthur Snell, now retired from the physics division. So I agreed to run and I think this was 1951, and I ran, and I was elected. I became secretary of the seven member council, not chairman. I forget who was chairman. And then came 1953, and I ran for re-election. Then again, they wanted a chairman, and no one wa...

The only way to avert a global climate disaster is some combination of carbon capture and geoengineering. It's too late for conservation alone. This is a step in the right direction, albeit nowhere on a scale to dent the current atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. And what about the energy to drive carbon capture? Iceland hasn't suspended the 2nd law of thermodynamics. "Orca is powered using fully renewable geothermal energy, supplied by the Hellisheidi Geothermal Power Plant. Because of this, Climeworks claims that the facility’s “grey emissions” are kept to below ten percent. In other words, for every hundred tons of carbon that are captured, at least 90 percent is permanently removed and less than 10 percent is re-emitted." Can we have some more, please? https://www.iflscience.com/worlds-largest-carbon-capture-plant-switched-on-in-iceland-60899?fbclid=IwAR2XDXiudpxzCUNAlLP6hkOUlshy8duzm-BBbaKQR0_TaxhUuRh2BNQmcV4

Back in the early days of COVID-19 vaccine development, three strategies were being pursued: recombinant adenovirus (AstraZenica and J&J), mRNA (Moderna and Pfizer) and recombinant protein (Novavax). The first two strategies have become well-established, with millions of vaccinated subjects (I got my first jab in August 2020 as a subject in the Moderna Phase III trial). Some concerns have emerged with the recombinant adenovirus vaccines, none with the mRNA vaccines. Because of technical issues, the Novavax vaccine was late to the table. For some folks, a protein vaccine may not be as scary, and this one uses protein expressed in Fall Army Worm cells infected by an insect virus (no human fetal tissues). The chief advantage of the Novavax vaccine is that it doesn't require as stringent storage conditions, but storage hasn't proven to be the barrier to vaccination in the industrialized world; that barrier is ignorance/paranoia. At present, there's no vaccine for stupidity....

I was in third grade at Woodland elementary school when the first African-American student showed up in the Oak Ridge public schools in our ostensibly enlightened community. Our teacher prepared us in advance. I don't recall any problems, but of course I'm White. By the time I got to ORHS in 1970, there were a few AA students. Maybe 15% of the student body. Other than in gym, and in extracurricular activities (sports, band), the only class I was in that had a representative number of Black students was journalism/yearbook staff my junior year. I'm glad AA students were "allowed" at ORHS, but at the time, they weren't really "integrated" at all levels. Flash forward: our daughter attended University City High School, where she was in the 15% minority of White students. Her calculus teacher (two years) was Black, and she certainly had Black friends. When Rebecca matriculated at Colorado State University, she complained that there were no minority stude...

There seems to be a cottage industry among the MAGA crowd to explain everything bad in America by claiming that Biden is old and senile. Setting aside the fact that there isn't an atom of evidence that Biden is senile, if your concern were presidential senility, y'all could have voted for Hillary in 2016 if having a sharp, non-deranged mind in the Oval Office were really so important to you. Today's reality check.

I don’t watch TV, but I’m certainly reading about the 6 January hearings. Here’s a thumbnail summary of the goals: • Putting Trump at the center of it all • Getting Trumpworld to turn against itself • Tying the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers • It was a broad, sweeping conspiracy • Trump knew he lost, and still lied Read the rest here: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/january-6-committee-key-points-hearing-one?fbclid=IwAR1KIVeRBlwCSXdpnisSWautCcyB1hkOvKeyr6nOizONgxmXcJOY1QnaTk4

The great statistician R.A. Fisher was a smoker. He was well aware of the statistical evidence linking smoking with cancer. In order to avoid confronting the obvious truth, he hypothesized that people with with cancer predisposition had a greater tendency to smoke. With all its transparent misdirection and goofy gun-adjacent theories, it seems to me that the ammosexual lifestyle is associated with a kind of dementia. Yes, I know that correlation isn't causation, so I don't know if ammosexuality causes dementia (lead poisoning?) or that dementia predisposes to ammosexuality. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/republicans-dumb-guns-mass-shootings-scalise-house-legislation?fbclid=IwAR21JjM_UQ0Ornq83imiy7Z1ISXTt-Nyp4byl8jqnuQSO6AU29bDqgO4JnQ

This is just obscene. "Republican New York House candidate Carl Paladino, who’s been endorsed by House GOP conference chair Elise Stefanik (R-NY), shared an unhinged rant on his Facebook page last week that pushed conspiracy theories about the shootings in Uvalde and Buffalo. "The tirade, which was apparently written by a person named “Jeff Briggs,” was posted on Paladino’s now-deleted Facebook page on June 1, according to screenshots published by Media Matters, which was the first to report on the post. "The post ranted that “they call it gun control, but what they really mean is population control,” and suggested that mass shootings were false flag operations devised by the government to take away people’s guns." https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/paladino-uvalde-buffalo-shootings-false-flag?fbclid=IwAR2IJpKwCfx5n1B5e-ViPPevLjzfZy9Xo4_3nl3fePHFpnRvW-Hw45gxg3Y

"Jared Holt . . . in a recent post about Greene: “Her job is to say something terrible every day so we do all her viral marketing for her.” The cruelty is the point. The shit-posting and the unintelligible language mix-ups (“gazpacho police,” “peach tree dish”) and the outlandish remarks and the racist scapegoating and the offensive legislating are all the point. And collective outrage about said remarks or policy points help fuel people like Greene and Trump and their bombastic self-serving skill sets. It keeps them in the headlines. AND it does the work necessary for riling up the most far-right extreme members of the Republican base so fanatically over non-existent issues (think: outrage over banned books and trans rights) that it makes a Republican vote at the polls a practice equivalent to and centered solely upon owning the libs." https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/milo-yiannopoulos-hiring-majorie-taylor-greene-intern-viral-cruelty-trolling-gop-remains-the-point

I’m not a particular fan of Bob Dylan and I don’t own any of his albums. He does have a clever way with words sometimes and has made a remarkable career out of a limited musical vocabulary. I’m listening to a podcast that’s part of a series on the favorite Dylan songs of various people. In this case, the person is Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo. I’ve been a big fan of Josh Marshall’s writing over the past couple of decades. Here’s a thoughtful graf from Josh’s commentary that I thought worth transcribing as a personal reflection on optimism: “This song resonates with something that has been a basic—one of the kind of the core preoccupations of my life, and that is—which has shown up in various ways in my writing over the years, which is how we live with dignity in an adverse world. And I’ve written at various points in a political context that optimism is not a matter of predicting the future. Optimism is sort of an ethical posture towards life. When things are going great, you...

There is no reason why any American not employed by the military or law enforcement needs to own a handgun. You can hunt with a long gun. You can protect your home with a long gun. A lot of people own guns in the belief that they will protect them from an assailant with a gun. In must murders, the victim knew their assailant. Moreover, the most frequent cause of gun-related deaths in America is suicide, in which the victim--by definition--knew their assailant. "At the state level, of the top three states in guns per capita: Wyoming, Alaska, and Montana, they are among the top four in suicides per capita. And the nine states with the fewest guns per capita also happen to be the nine states with the lowest in suicides per capita. There is simply no getting around this relationship. "So, limiting handguns, in particular, would probably substantially reduce the death rate by suicide in this nation, far more than any reduction in deaths in mass shootings we are likely to see by an...

I have no doubt that some of my FB friends believe in the power of thoughts and prayers to affect the course of events. Of course, praying for any given outcome and seeing it is an experiment without a control, and an appeal to the elementary logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc. This is the closest I've seen to an empirical test of the power of prayer. If the null hypothesis is that prayer doesn't help with longevity and/or health, then this study supports the null hypothesis: "The sovereigns are literally the shortest lived of all who have the advantage of affluence. The prayer has therefore no efficacy, unless the very questionable hypothesis be raised, that the conditions of royal life may naturally be yet more fatal, and that their influence is partly, though incompletely, neutralized by the effects of public prayers. It will be seen that the same table collates the longevity of clergy, lawyers and medical men. We are justified in considering the clergy to be ...