Up From Facebook

  This is a seven year-old NPR interview with David Honig, an attorney and adjunct professor at Indiana University, where he teaches negotiations. While this discussion dates from the first Trump term, he’s obviously learned nothing about negotiation skills since then: “HONIG: It’s an interesting question. I reread “The Art Of The Deal” today in anticipation of this discussion. And when you look even at his own book, in the pure real-estate environment, it did serve him well. But when the deals that he was seeking went beyond simple real estate purchase and sales, ownership of a professional football team or his casinos, where the deals were more complex and had a lot more involved than just buying and selling something of value, they did not ultimately work out well for him. Sometimes, you have to deal with people again. And if you’ve taken them, or they feel like they’ve been taken, they’re not going to deal with you again. You can do that with a cabinet maker who put the cabinet...

“U.S. President Donald Trump’s military deportation flight to Guatemala on Monday likely cost at least $4,675 per migrant, according to data provided by U.S. and Guatemalan officials.   “That is more than five times the $853 cost of a one-way first class ticket on American Airlines from El Paso, Texas, the departure point for the flight, according to a review of publicly available airfares. “It is also significantly higher than the cost of a commercial charter flight by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).” Looks like Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency is AWOL.   https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/us-military-deportation-flight-likely-cost-more-than-first-class-2025-01-30/

“Trump claims his policies will do just that, creating a new "golden age"  that will lift most boats and more than make up for what people might lose in government largesse. Low taxes will trigger blowout growth; tariffs on imports will bring back millions of good-paying manufacturing jobs; unshackled workers aided by artificial intelligence will become more productive than ever.” Hmm. Tax cuts don’t pay for themselves and have *never* let to “blowout growth” of anything except the deficit and the national debt. And everything I’ve read about AI says that it will take jobs *away* from workers.  Then there’s this: “But an important theme is emerging from Trump’s actions and the legislative plans of Republicans who control Congress. Trump and his allies want to shrink the federal bureaucracy and establish the sort of libertarian government that Trump backer Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech investor, seems to favor.” Well, no wonder Trump’s policies are incoherent. They’re moor...

The Trump OMB announced yesterday a pause on government spending. “The memo required agencies to pause all spending, with a footnote exempting “assistance received directly by individuals.” HHS suspended states from drawing down Medicaid funds and tribal facilities from drawing down Indian Health Service Funds. Also suspended were grants that provide funds for Head Start, child care, LIHEAP, and more. By midday yesterday, OMB issued a corrective note explaining that the footnote excluded Medicaid and Head Start, as well as other programs like SNAP and Pell grants. That was good, if incoherent, since Medicaid makes payments through intermediaries (states, which may in turn pay managed care organizations which pay providers) as much as any federal program. And the order leaves in the crosshairs, just at HHS, programs offering drug treatment and mental health services, funding foster care, serving the homeless, engaging in medical research, and on and on.   “Smart lawyers have focused...

As I’ve said here before, together with water purification and sanitary sewers, vaccines are a triumph of public health. Hundreds of millions of lived (at least) have been saved by vaccination, not just as a direct result of immunization but indirectly by slowing the rate of pathogen evolution. It is both shocking and frankly dangerous that in the wealthiest nation on the planet, there is growing resistance to vaccines: “Childhood vaccination rates against dangerous infections like measles and polio continue to fall nationwide, and the number of parents claiming non-medical exemptions so their kids don't get required shots is rising.   “In 2024, whooping cought cases reached a decade-high and 16 measles outbreaks, the largest among them in Chicago and Minnesota, put health officials on edge. Most states are below the 95% vaccination threshold for kindergartners -- the level needed to protect communities against measles outbreaks.   “About half of Americans ...

“Donald Trump's move to block diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives has led to the US Air Force removing material on the role of black and female pilots during World War Two from its training programmes. “A military official said "immediate steps" were taken to remove material to "ensure compliance" with the US president's order, the BBC's US news partner CBS reported.   “Trainee troops were previously shown footage of pioneering servicemen and women as part of DEI courses during basic military training. “Trump signed an executive order banning such programmes in the federal government soon after returning to office, fulfilling a pledge he repeatedly made during the campaign.”   Why does Trump hate our military? https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c74e175p40qo?fbclid=IwY2xjawIDqANleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHWMx-SjyGp3xztjyXcljDwE5XMya-xwVNxGL8BCwerOwV6NlDWRW2UxHVQ_aem_WESeoYqF6o7T85pFLqbL2Q  

I see where Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk attended a AfG neo-Nazi party rally. In these times when authoritarianism is in ascendency throughout the world, I wonder whether Germany will be the next to succumb to right-wing extremism. I don’t have the resources to do my own polling, but I have an American friend who has worked in German biotech for decades. I asked him if AfG is about to come to power. His response: “They are basically CSU/CDU but much further right. Which is why they have gotten more support than they should have. All this Nazi hoopla is shining an unwanted light on them, and it is likely to cost them in upcoming elections. German voters may move too far right some times, but they draw the line at Nazism. It is the anti-vaxxers that have joined the AfD that are the problem.”

Once they seized power, the Bolsheviks set about re-making Russia in their own image. One manifestation of this was changing place names: Saint Petersburg became Leningrad, Tsaritsyn became Stalingrad. Following in their footsteps, Trump has renamed the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. This calls to mind the pathetic attempt to rebrand French fries as “Freedom Fries” during GW Bush’s invasion and military occupation of Iraq that France opposed. Of course, Trump’s action will prove far more ephemeral, as the world will revert to the Gulf of Mexico after he leaves office. Just like the Bolshevik place names reverted to their earlier form after Stalin’s death. But as with Stalin, the goal is sinister: At first, this may seem absurd, even laughable—a petty rebranding with no real impact. In reality, it is a frighteningly important shift—a calculated loyalty test designed to divide the country, enforce obedience and flag those who refuse to fall in line.   This renaming isn’t just...

Trump has charged the DoJ and FBI to focus on his political enemies. That means that the focus of these “law and order” agencies will be on Trump’s political security and not our national security. Expect terrorist attacks and domestic violence, which will then be used as an excuse for martial law. Trump has pardoned or commuted the sentences of violent criminals for Jan 6, including the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. That means they are free to attack, intimidate and kill witnesses and critics with impunity. Trump has announced that the US is pulling out of the World Health Organization and has muzzled the NIH and CDC, two preeminent public health organizations. That means that Americans will be more vulnerable to death and injury from preventable disease. Shame. https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/the-health-docket/113886?xid=nl_mpt_DHE_2025-01-22&mh=eb71348a5ff6ae370cc6759bc5dc3300&zdee=gAAAAABm4u1YoCP4y5SBTJUyUyqo9KxZhft26L1xeGdP0BzzQQN1Pb_ifR6vFqhFh-3U6Q_nU7DbA-EawzzXKxSRhM...

The former German Democratic Republic (“East Germany”) was a police state in which neighbors spied on neighbors and family members spied on one another. If you were named by a friend or colleague as a potential subversive, the Stasi—the secret police—would arrest you and you could be imprisoned for years on trumped-up charges. After your release, you would be unemployable. It was a policy that encouraged suspicion and insured that the people feared each other and the state. Now, the Trump Administration is taking a page from the Stasi handbook: “Federal employees received emails Wednesday warning that they could face repercussions if they do not report on co-workers who work in diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility positions that might have gone unnoticed by government supervisors.   "We are aware of efforts by some in government to disguise these programs by using coded or imprecise language," said emails sent to government employees and obtained by NBC News.   “Emp...

It’s easy to spot historical parallels between the stated Trump agenda and the agenda of Hitler when he was appointed chancellor in 1933. And while I don’t doubt that Trump and his supporters share Hitler’s vision (and in the case of Elon Musk, the sieg heil salute), there are many significant differences in context and circumstances that conspire against a repeat of the Nazi paradigm: • When he came to power, Hitler was 44 years old; Trump begins his second term at the age of 78; • In 1933, Germany had only been a country for 62 years  (and a parliamentary democracy for only 15 years) ; the US has been a country for nearly 250 years; • In 1933, Germany was just recovering from (a) punitive war reparations from a war it had helped instigate and lost, and (b) a world-wide depression and hyperinflation in Germany; the wars the US has lost didn’t result in punitive reparations and we haven’t had a depression since the 1930s; • Hitler was appointed Chancellor, he didn’t win the positio...

The COVID pandemic in the US began five years ago. It wasn’t declared a pandemic then, but in retrospect, that’s when it began.  My university has an NIH-designated vaccine testing and evaluation unit. In late January 2020, I attended a lecture by the clinical director about the recently named SARS-CoV-2. That was the first time it really came home to me that this could be more serious than the usual flu season.  Even then, there were skeptics. The Israeli chemistry Nobel Laureate Michael Levitt pooh-poohed the virus. He predicted there would be no more than ten deaths in Israel due to COVID-19. In the event, he was off by two logs. I bet my chairman a bottle of scotch whiskey that the peak in COVID infections and deaths in the US would come after April 22. He lost and he paid up. Our VTEU was a site for the phase III trial of the Moderna vaccine, and I enrolled. As I had just turned 65, they were happy to have me. It was a placebo-controlled double-blind study, so I didn’t kn...

  In honor of Dry January, I propose a drinking game: you take a shot every time an ICE raid results in the arrest of an employer who illegally hired an undocumented worker.

The way to make money in America’s private health insurance industry is to deny coverage. There’s no question about that. The question is whether the denials are valid. According to one long-time doc, industry is valorizing speed over accuracy. “In late 2020, Dr. Debby Day said her bosses at Cigna gave her a stark warning. Work faster, or the company might fire her.   “That was a problem for Day because she felt her work was too important to be rushed. She was a medical director for the health insurer, a physician with sweeping power to approve or reject requests to pay for critical care like life-saving drugs or complex surgeries. She had been working at Cigna for nearly 15 years, reviewing cases that nurses had flagged for denial or were unsure about. At Cigna and other insurers, nurses can greenlight payments, but denials have such serious repercussions for patients that many states require that doctors make the final call. In more recent years, though, Day said that the Cigna n...

From my brother, who lives on the Colorado front range: “An excerpt from today's National Weather Service's Area Forecast Discussion:   "The mountain valleys are expected to see the coldest temperatures where lows are expected to fall to -20 to -30F. The coldest locations could approach -40F." “[we’re] due to get to -10F...we've seen lows of -20F in years past so it won't be near record breaking.   “Interesting fact though...Propane boils at about -43 F at sea level (and only slightly less than that at 7,000 feet).  Unless designed for these temperatures, the typical installation draws vapor off the top of a tank (containing liquid and vapor phases - at saturation).  The tank maintains saturation pressure based on the ambient temperature.  Below -43F, there is no vapor phase and the tank is just an unattractive paper weight in the backyard.   “Even at temperatures above (but near) -43F, the system will no longer have enough pressure to operat...

Here in Southern New England, morning temps have mostly been in the 20s. We have a natural gas furnace and forced air keeping the house at 68°F. We had a heat pump in our house when I was growing up in East Tennessee. My dad, an MIT-trained engineer, was proud of the money he was saving in the land of the TVA by using a heat pump for both AC and heating. Judging from the air emerging from the register, I suspect most of the savings came from tepid air in the winter and barely coolish air in the summer. Hell, why not just turn the damn thing off and save even more? I understand that heat pump technology is improved since the 1960s.  “In five short years, Massachusetts aims to have at least a half-million homes running off heat pumps, those cutting-edge devices that can wrench energy from the air and convert it to heat or cool a building.   “But there is a problem: Heat pumps are powered by electricity, and in Massachusetts, electric rates are among the highest in the nation. ...

For much of the world, simply getting enough calories to sustain life is a daily challenge. Among the relatively affluent citizens in the west, wave after wave of dietary fashions encourage us to medicalize food. A recent example is the demonization of “processed” and “ultraprocessed” foods. This has been validated by the Trump nominee for HHS secretary*. While we can stipulate that a diet of exclusively unprocessed foods won’t be harmful**, what’s the evidence that processed food is harmful?   Dietician Jessica Wilson decided to do an unblinded, non-placebo-controlled experiment. Designing the experiment was challenged by the lack of a rigorous definition of “processed” and “ultraprocessed” foods. “For the month, 80 percent of my diet came from ultraprocessed foods, as best I could define them. But while van Tulleken purposefully swapped snacks like nuts for chips, I didn’t make any nutritional compromises with my diet. I ate that cashew yogurt, as well as Aidells Chicken and...

My track record in prophecy is certainly mixed, but based on what I’ve seen so far, RFK Jr will be the next HHS secretary. He’s certainly no more unqualified than Pete Hegseth is to be secretary of defense, and it looks like Hegseth is headed for approval. “Amid reports that the adults in Donald Trump’s room may be convincing him to put some guardrails in place on his HHS nominee — whom he vowed to let “go wild on health” — there are also reportedly some cracks forming around the nominee himself within Republican circles.   “But it’s not clear if the anti-RFK contingent of Trump allies is yet strong enough to actually make a dent, let alone imperil, RFK Jr.’s ability to be confirmed as HHS secretary.” That RFK Jr is even being seriously  discussed  as secretary of HSS is testament to deep cynicism of Trump and the modern GOP. Vaccines are a triumph of public health that have saved billions of lives, and RFK Jr is a notorious anti-vaxxer who repeats long-debunked lies...

Kevin Drum has a post up at jabberwocking.com about Trump’s proposed “External Revenue Service.” This agency, which would duplicate the work currently done by Customs and Border Protection, would allegedly be responsible for collecting tariffs from exporting countries. Only that’s not how tariffs work—they’re collected from the importers, who in turn pass them on to consumers. Higher tariffs -> higher prices -> inflation. Look, this is just a charade to set Trump up to blame foreigners when prices go up. It's a pre-emptive deflection, and the Trumpenproletariat and MSM will fall for it.   The Internal Revenue Service is widely hated, so an “External” Revenue Service” would be the opposite, the anti-IRS, right? The ERS isn’t new policy, it’s purely marketing. https://jabberwocking.com/trump-creates-federal-department-that-already-exists/#comments

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...