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When I was in first grade, we had daily bible readings. Each child was allowed a turn to read a verse or two from their bible. This was in a public school. The problem of how to manage verses from, e.g., Muslim or Hindu children was solved by the fact that in East Tennessee there *were* no Muslim or Hindu children in my class. Still, as a little Catholic boy, I was somewhat embarrassed to read from the Douay-Rheims bible, the RCC-approved version, with its awkward and stilted phrasing. I don’t recall whether there were readings in second grade, but for sure, there weren’t any in 3 rd   grade or after. I grew up right at the inception of Vatican II. When I started going to mass, it was in Latin and the priest faced away from the congregation. With Vatican II, the mass was (mostly) in English and the priest stood behind the altar, facing the congregation. I remember as a young Catholic boy embracing the new spirit of ecumenism and religious tolerance. In fact, I was shocked when I we...

Pete Hesgeth, Trump’s nominee for defense secretary, thinks that Fort Liberty should go back to its previous name, Fr. Bragg. “Fort Bragg, one of the largest Army bases in the US, was named for Braxton Bragg, a general in the Confederacy and slave owner who lost nearly every battle he was involved in during the Civil War. A naming commission set-up by Congress to study renaming bases noted Bragg is “considered one of the worst generals of the Civil War,” and was “widely disliked in the pre-Civil War U.S. Army and within the Confederate Army by peers and subordinates alike.”” It seems fitting that a Trump appointee, working for a man who advocated overthrow of the government in 2021 and who saw nearly every business enterprise named for him fail, should advocate naming a military base after a traitor and a failure. https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/13/politics/pete-hegseth-confederate-generals-military-bases/index.html

Most of the media finger-pointing by Trump and his cult has been about sullying Gavin Newsom as a presidential candidate in 2028. Trump and Fox don’t actually care about the reason for the fires (anthropogenic climate change) or how to mitigate the consequences. Over at jabberwocking.com, Kevin Drum has a long but excellent summary of the history and challenges of controlled burns as a way to mitigate risk. I recommend you read the whole thing (link below) if you really care about the California fires and their implications. Tl;dr? “Bottom line: regulatory hurdles are real for both prescribed burns and mechanical treatments, but they aren't the biggest obstacles by any means. The biggest impediments are public opposition, rising insurance costs, resource constraints, and the risk-averse views of forest managers, many of whom are still wary of prescribed burns. This is partly for technical reasons and partly out of fear. Only one out of a thousand prescribed burns gets out of contro...

A Facebook friend just posted this: “So wildfires and the threat of wildfires is a part of our lives. Our homeowner’s insurance company, American National Property and Casualty (ANPAC) has notified us they are pulling out of New Mexico because their claims (especially fire claims) are higher than their reserves and they can't cover the costs or make money. I have until the end of July to find homeowners and car insurance coverage. Something needs to change. I don't have the answer.” This is New Mexico, not Southern California. But I imagine this will extend to Arizona and Texas in the next few years. And I expect a similar problem for Florida, the Gulf Coast and much of the Eastern Seaboard because of coastal flooding due to sea level rise and increased hurricane intensities. When we moved to Rhode Island—"The Ocean State”—we checked the elevations and 100-year flood risk for our neighborhood. While this could end up as beachfront property by 2150, we’ll be too dead to app...

Back in October, I posted that Elon Musk’s claim that he could cut $2 trillion from the federal budget showed he couldn’t do arithmetic. Evidently, Elon has finally acknowledged this, but he tries to make a virtue of necessity: “Elon Musk has walked back his previous claim that he could cut at least $2 trillion from the federal budget, saying Wednesday that half that amount would be “an epic outcome.”” Look, here’s what’s gonna happen. The Congress will eventually pass a bill that will cut a few billion from federal programs while making earlier tax cuts for the wealthy and businesses permanent. As a result, the deficit and debt will skyrocket. When the GOP loses their Congressional majorities in the midterms, they can go back to flogging Democrats for the deficits the GOP created. Rinse and repeat. https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/09/politics/elon-musk-backtracks-federal-budget-cuts/index.html

“Sen. John Fetterman (D-Penn.) downplayed the drama that Donald Trump’s second term as president could cause, telling his fellow Democrats there is no need to “freak out” before the Republican has even returned to office. “During a Sunday interview on ABC’s “This Week,” the legislator told host Jonathan Karl that he thinks many of his peers’ handwringing about Trump has been counterproductive.” I get what he’s doing. When Trump proves to be a disaster for the country, Fetterman can shake his head mournfully and say “Well, I supported him and he disappointed me.” Fetterman can’t lose politically. Now, Fetterman says he’ll meet with Trump in Mar-A-Lago. He seems to think this will make him look apolitical and willing to consider all sides. I’m not that stupid. Being a member of a political party should mean *something*.  I think staking out our objections to Trump early and often makes it clear that Democrats oppose what Trump stands for and offer an alternative path. ...

The right-wing mantra is that private enterprise is always more efficient than government.     As far as I can tell, private enterprise is more efficient at extracting dollars from citizens, yes. And banks have proven to be efficient at extracting bail-outs when their judgement leads to insolvency.   Recently, the bankruptcy of for-profit Steward Health Care closed several hospitals in Massachusetts, causing a crisis in emergency services. The affected communities are asking for a bailout by the state: “Four months after the Nashoba Valley Medical Center in North Central Massachusetts shuttered, emergency medical services in the surrounding communities are “on the verge of collapse,” 13 local fire chiefs wrote in a recent letter to the state.   “The letter, sent Dec. 27 from the chiefs, their towns’ leaders, and state lawmakers, urged Governor Maura Healey’s administration to include in the state’s budget proposals $9.6 million over the next two fiscal years to incre...

I don't listen to Spotify, but lots of my friends do. I had been spoiled for decades in St. Louis by the community radio station KDHX that broadcast lots of new music in many genres. But now that most of the KDHX DJs I listened to have quit or been fired as the management turned away from the community radio mission, I need a fresh infusion of content. Could Spotify be my answer? Then I read this: "In early 2022, I started noticing something strange in Spotify’s jazz playlists. "I listen to jazz every day, and pay close attention to new releases. But these Spotify playlists were filled with artists I’d never heard of before. "Who were they? Where did they come from? Did they even exist?" *snip* "Many of these artists live in Sweden—where Spotify has its headquarters. According to one source, a huge amount of streaming music originates from just 20 people, who operate under 500 different names. "Some of them were generating supersized numbers. An obscur...

Your diet doesn’t just feed you, it also feeds the bacteria that live in your gut. And metabolites from these bacteria can influence not only your metabolism but your risk of depression and dementia. How can you cultivate a healthy gut microbiome to maximize the benefits and minimize the harm due to these minute colonists? A study of the gut microbiomes of over 21,000 people with different diets pinpointed key variables pointing to better gut health: “Using their unprecedented dataset, the researchers discovered that although vegan and vegetarian participants had healthier diets than omnivores, the omnivores studied had a higher rate of gut microbiome diversity. Sounds like a win for the omnivores, except that gut microbiome diversity alone isn’t a reliable measurement of how healthy that microbiome is. That’s because different bacteria have different influences on our guts and wider health, and not all of them are good.   “It seemed each dietary pattern had unique microbial signat...

Despite the breathless paranoia, the most likely source of SARS-CoV-19 was from an infected animal in the Wuhan wet market. Deadly viruses can move from animals to humans. That’s the most likely source of HIV—SIV transmitted via bushmeat. Same with the “Spanish Flu” that probably began in Iowa pig farms. Now, we’re facing the possibility of a pandemic caused by bird flu: “The first U.S. bird flu death was reported, a person in Louisiana who had been hospitalized with severe respiratory symptoms. “Louisiana health officials announced the death on Monday. “Health officials have said the person was older than 65, had underlying medical problems, and had been in contact with sick and dead birds in a backyard flock. They also said a genetic analysis suggested the bird flu virus had mutated inside the patient, which could have led to the more severe illness.” And so here we are, at the beginning of another Trump pandemic. What will RFK Jr and Dr. Oz recommend? Horse dewormer? Bleach...

I grew up in East Tennessee and graduated from UT-Knoxville in 1977. I recall the episode of the Snail Darter and the Tellico Dam project. The Darter was considered an endangered species at the time, and a lawsuit to protect it held up dam construction for awhile. In the event, the Darter was relocated and the dam was built. At that time, the principal tool for taxonomic classification of species was morphology, the same approach used by Carl Linnaeus. Yes, protein sequencing—particularly of Cytochrome C—was starting to come into use, but it was new back then. And genomics was in the distant future. Now a new study using both morphometric and genomic analyses calls into question whether the Snail Darter is/was a unique species: “We present a comparative reference-based taxonomic approach to species delimitation that integrates genomic and morphological data for objectively assessing the distinctiveness of species targeted for protection by governmental agencies. We apply this protocol ...

What sort of person commits suicide in a vehicle filled with flammables in front of a Trump-branded hotel? A deeply troubled person, I’d say. It’s tempting to write a motive to fit the circumstances, but how does that work? A highly decorated vet back from a war zone commits suicide. PTSD? TBD? Both? We do have his own words, and they’re a dog’s breakfast of grievance. He denounces Democrats, demanding that they be “culled” from Washington by violence if necessary. He hopes his death will serve as a kind of claxon for a national rebirth of masculinity under Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Bobby Kennedy Jr. He thinks Democrats are the problem, but then there’s this: “The top 1% decided long ago they weren’t going to bring everyone else with them. You are cattle to them.” Of course, the top 1% includes Musk, Trump and their billionaire tribe. I couldn’t make heads or tails of any of this from the MSM reports, but TPM linked to his entire manifesto, and I attach it here: https://nevadacurrent...

Juan Cole has a recap of the 2024 global warming picture. It ain’t pretty: “The World Meteorological Organization projected total global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in 2024 to be 41.6 billion tons. Some 37.4 billion of that was from humans burning petroleum, fossil gas, and coal. The rest was from deforestation. 2024 was the hottest year on record, and likely the hottest in 125,000 years, though some of its ferocity was from the lingering cyclical El Niño that has now subsided.” Global carbon dioxide emissions in 2023 came to 40.6 billion tons. While much of the CO 2  increase was directly anthropogenic, some was an indirect result. “After storing carbon dioxide in frozen soil for millennia, the Arctic tundra is being transformed by frequent wildfires into an overall source of carbon to the atmosphere, which is already absorbing record levels of heat-trapping fossil fuel pollution.”  Cole doesn’t mention other causes of increased global warming including (a) the meltin...

The problem with renewable energy like solar and wind is intermittency. When sun goes down or when the wind isn’t blowing, no generation happens. Lithium batteries are one solution. Pumped hydroelectric is another. Lithium-ion batteries store power in their electrodes. Flow batteries store power in their liquid electrolytes. “Electrolyte solutions are stored in external tanks and pumped through a reactor where chemical reactions take place at inert electrodes to produce energy.    “Flow batteries can be altered to suit requirements of a task. You can change how much power you generate (in kilowatts) and how much storage (in kilowatt-hours). If you want more storage, you increase the volume of electrolytes in the tanks.    “As you increase storage capacity, the cost per kWh of stored energy decreases dramatically. This is because you only have to add more liquid electrolytes rather than adding entirely new battery packs, as in conventional batteries.    “Thi...

"In a Truth Social post the morning of the attack, Trump manufactured hysteria over “criminals coming in” to the country. Trump continued to falsely blame “Biden ‘Open Border’s Policy’” Thursday morning, long after incorrect reports – that the rented truck in the New Orleans attack was driven across the border from Mexico – had been debunked. "The alleged attacker was a native born U.S. citizen and Army veteran from Texas. "In both posts, Trump crowed that the attack proved him correct." Trump lied. In other news, dog bites man, water is wet, the sun rose in the east and the pope is Catholic. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/morning-memo/trump-trafficks-in-racist-disinfo-after-new-years-day-attack

In the age of Fox News and the manufactured fear industry, the Y2K bug "crisis" seems almost quaint. While it was certainly exploited by Christian evangelists and others, there was a core of genuine uncertainty. "When programmers began their work with the first wave of commercial computers in the 1960s, computer memory was expensive, so they used a two-digit format for dates, using just the years in the century, rather than using the four digits that would be necessary otherwise—78, for example, rather than 1978. This worked fine until the century changed. "As the turn of the twenty-first century approached, computer engineers realized that computers might interpret 00 as 1900 rather than 2000 or fail to recognize it at all, causing programs that, by then, handled routine maintenance, safety checks, transportation, finance, and so on, to fail. According to scholar Olivia Bosch, governments recognized that government services, as well as security and the law, could b...

Yale Professor Timothy Snyder is an expert on the history of Eastern Europe, especially the histories of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia and World War II. He has become a public intellectual with the publication of his books “On Tyranny” and “On Freedom.” Snyder has been sounding warnings about the second Trump Administration, not only for what it portends for Ukraine (capitulation to Putin) but to the slide into autocracy and oligarchy as Trump continues to recruit billionaires to his side: “I think we overestimate Trump and we underestimate Musk,” he says. “People can’t help but think that Trump has money, but he doesn’t. He’s never really had money. He’s never even really claimed to have money. His whole notion is that you have to believe that he has money. But he’s never been able to pay his own debts. He’s never been able to finance his own campaigns.   “Musk, with an amount of money that was meaningless to him, was able to finance Trump’s campaign, essentially. And all the thr...