Weekend music: The End of Time

Think Mr. Jimmy was all about reverb and amplification? Listen to him stroke the twelve string on this delta blues ballad while we await the end of time.

"Toontime: This Week in Trump

credit: D. Whamond
Wackydoodle sez: Spontaneous destruction!

This week was a big looser for the Looser in Chief.  The Supremes told him 8-1 to fork over his White House records because they are not covered by executive privilege any longer, and his precious daughter Ivanka got invited to testify before the J6 Committee in an eight page letter that detailed her knowledge of Herr Trumpillini's failure to act while his mob attacked the Capitol.  Pundits make a big deal out of proving criminal intent, but the fact is intent can be inferred from context and circumstances.  Ivanka has some of that evidence.  According to the investigators, she witnessed a phone call between her father and Mike Pence the night before the attack in which he urged him to cooperate in the coup by not counting the Electoral College votes. When rioters heard the news that Pence had refused to cooperate, according to defendants' testimony in court,“Once we found out Pence turned on us and that they had stolen the election, like, officially, the crowd went crazy. I mean, it became a mob. We crossed the gate.” Another defendant testified, “We heard the news on Pence, so we stormed.”  Res ipsa loquitor.

Former press secretary Stephanie Griffiths also testified before the Committee.  She identified closed-door meetings Trump conducted in his residence--not the Oval--on the night before he urged the Ellipse crowd to march on the Capitol. He apparently did intend to march with the crowd, but was warned off that action by the Secret Service.  She did not know who attended those meetings, but identified another staffer--the White House usher, Timothy Harleth--who should know.  Unsurprisingly, all the president's movements in the building are recorded by the Secret Service.  Yet another lead to follow.

The Committee is methodically closing in on the former guy's inner circle of staff and confidants. Its letter makes clear the Committee has amassed substantial evidence of Herr Trumpillini's state of mind and what occurred in the hours prior, during, and after the insurrection.  It is pouring through hundreds of pages of responsive documents released by the National Archives after the former guy's loss at the Supremes.  One of the first documents to emerge is a draft executive order requiring the Defense Department to seize voting machines claimed to be fraudulent by the delusional White House occupant.  The extent to which he was prepared to go to remain in power is chilling.  A conclusion that he had corrupt intent to overthrow  the federal government in its most vulnerable moments is becoming plausibly undeniable. Hiding in plain sight is a tactic that has become trite.  The question is: do the neoliberal Democrates have the fortitude to go all the way to the top and prevent their own demise? (Gallup polling inidcates a 14pt shift from Democrats to Repugnants in the last quarter)

The Day Democracy Died

Repugnants knew they faced a demographic dilemma by mid-century. By 2150 white people will no longer be a majority of the US population. Apparently, without giving them to much credit, they had a plan--just like their corrupt, delusional leader. They have stacked the Supreme Court with conservatives since Ronald Reagan making inevitable that the federal election oversight provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1965 would be gutted.  Last night, they filibustered the voting rights legislation in the Senate with the connivance of two confirmed radicals,  the Copperhead tag team of Manchin and Sinema.  Their state legislators are now free of federal restraint to pass restrictive election rules that will increase their chances of winning federal elections against the will of the people. That. reprehensible bourbon, Mitch McConnell, (decendant of slave owners) called the voting rights bill defeat the most significant day in the history of the Senate. Indeed.

Unless Chuck Schumer or Joe Biden can calculate a way to modify the filibuster without the support of the two subversives in his own party, voting rights legislation is dead, just like the president's social agenda.  American democracy is dying, not from COVID-19 but from the filibuster, a relic of Jim Crow that Repugnants feel they need to win.   Protection from the non-Americans at the voting booth? You decide.

Tesla S Travels Farther

US Person has posted before {13.05.21} about next generation batteries that offer a quantum leap in performance and efficiency. That exciting development has been demonstrated with a prototype Model S that traveled a whopping 752 miles on a single charge using a new type of lithium phosphate battery design developed by start-up company ONE (Our Next Energy). The range is equivalent to or more than that achieved by a gasoline engine on a single fill-up; the breakthough relieves one of the primary concerns consumers have about adopting electric vehicles. It still takes longer to recharge a vehicle battery compared to a fill-up at your local gas station, and their are significant limitation on how many times a battery can be recharged before degrading. ONE's technology was debued at a Las Vegas tech conference earlier this month.

Lithium batteries face limitations on their energy density. Gasoline has a high energy density of about 46 MJ/kg. Lithium vehicle batteries used by Tesla have a density of 260W/kg. One hundred joules of energy is equivalent to 1667 Watts. A quick calculation shows that gasoline is has more energy in it per kg than lithium ion batteries. Battery performance has been improved with technological tweaks such as improved anodes and digital processors, but engineers have been searching for a more fundamental redesign of batteries using advanced chemistry. These advances are still in laboratory stage, but ONE's demonstration of new battery technology is encouraging. Mercedes has promised a range in its EQXX prototype electric vehicle of 965km. Here is a video of ONE's sweet demonstration ride:

 

'Toontime: The Unthinkable Words

credit: Ramirez, Las Vegas Review-Journal

More:  A second state has joined Michigan in referring the fake elector certificates to the Justice Department for a criminal investigation. New Mexico's attorney general Hector Balderas told reporters he has also referred the matter to the DOJ saying it was part of protecting the fundamental democratic right to vote.  Trump lost New Mexico by 11 percentage points.  Significantly, as this aspect of the "Green Bay Sweep" has played out in the press, local party members are pointing to Trump election lawyers as the source of the fake document idea.  A participant in the Arizona fake certifications said she exchanged text messages with members of Congress about the documents and met with Rudy Giuliani and Mark Meadows.  Giuliani and his motley crew of unethical lawyers that held press conferences to spread the Big Lie in the media, have all been served with subpoenas from the J6 Committee. Numerous members of the mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6th say they were there because Trump told them to go.  Is it necessary to repeat that Trump's criminal attempt to overthrow our democratic government is without parallel in US history. 

Update:  {18/01/22}Just when you thought all the corrupt insanity has been revealed, the rabbit hole gets deeper.  Rachel told us this week that a set of interstate documents, suspiciously similar to each other, was used to attempt a deception against state officials certifying their Electoral College votes to be sent to Washington, DC for counting on January 6th at the Capitol.  This most clearly occurred in Michigan were there is  videotape of Trumpists posing as duly certified electors for the former guy try to gain access to the state capitol.  This in spite of the fact that the state was awarding its votes to Biden based on the popular vote count.  The motive for this charade is unclear at this point, but it smells enough for the Michigan attorney general to refer the matter to the US Attorney for the Western District of Michigan for further investigation.  US Person thinks this is appropriate because what we have here are initial indications of a coordinated plot at the national level to install, against the popular will, Trump electors that presumably would have presented their forged certificates when objections were raised to counting Michigan electors for Biden.  This attempted  fraud using forged documents to overturn the election results took place in seven swing states including Michigan.  The phony certificates were exposed by the oversight group American Oversight  The J6 Committee will definitely want to talk to these poseurs too.

The Department of Justice has, at last, charged participants in the Insurrection of January 6th with the crime no one in DC apparently wanted to say out loud--"seditious conspiracy". Members of the far-right extremist group Oath Keepers and its founder Stewart Rhodes, were charged with a federal crime that carries a stiff maximum penalty of twenty years in prison. The question now is whether the J6 Committee or the DOJ can find enough evidence to connect Der Leader to the conspiracy. Right now, it is not looking good for the former guy who gloated over the televised results of his incitement in the White House and ignored pleas to intervene for three hours. The mob was central to the planned effort to stop or delay the counting of Electoral College votes. The new indictment by DOJ reads, "The purpose of the conspiracy was to oppose the lawful transfer of presidential power by force, by preventing, hindering or delaying by force the execution of the laws governing the transfer of power, including the Twelfth and Twentieth Amendments to the Constitution" 

Rhodes was a key actor in the staging and coordination of the attack. His group stored weapons at a Virginia Comfort Inn near the Capitol as part of their so-called "quick reaction force".  Oath Keepers used a military style "stack" formation to assault the Capitol building dressed in tactical gear. These are not your casual protesters, but an organized, armed militia that poses a present threat to democracy. Two of the men also charged were photographed with Roger Stone, a Trumpist confidant, who has refused to testify before the Committee on Fifth Amendment grounds.  The Committee faces some hard decisions on whether to issue subpoenas to members of Congress that were complicit in   mob violence.  

credit: S. Sack, Star Tribune

Elephants Eating Plastic



Sri Lanka, although a relatively small island, is blessed with a native population of Asian Elephants, Elephas maximus maximus. It has the highest the highest density of elephants in Asia, consequently human conflict is increasing. Elephants live primarily in the dry north and east of the island [map] but some still persist in unprotected zones and therein lies one of the problems. IUCN estimates the island's population has declined by 50% in the last three generations due to habitat loss and fragmentation, human predation and poisoning.

Conservationists have warned that elephants are consuming plastic debris at an open landfill which of course, is toxic to them. [photo credit:AP] About twenty elephants have died eating plastic in the last eight years from the dump in Pallakkadu village, 130 miles east of the capitol, Columbo. A wildlife vet told AP that post mortem examinations revealed large amounts of plastic waste in their digestive systems. Normal food was not even present in their guts indicating food shortages and hunger is driving the elephants to regularly visit the dump to feed. After filling their stomachs with plastic waste they are unable to eat normal food and drink water. Since the waste has no nutritional value, the animal weakens and dies

Elephants are revered in Hindu religion, but also endangered. The nation's first survey in 2011 revealed only 7500 are alive, down from about 14,000 living in the late 19th century. The government said in 2017 it would recycle waste near wildlife areas and enclose dumps. with electric fencing, butneither action has taken place. The dump in Pallakkadu was set up with aid from the European Union and serves nine villages. It was once surrounded by electric fencing that was damaged in an electrical storm in 2014 but never relaced, allowing elephants to move in. A villagecouncillor told an interviewer that the elephants are considered a menace since villagers often do not know how to repel the large beasts safely. But they are also a resource he concluded, and something should be done to protect them and villagers.

Fukushima: The Melt Down That Keeps On Going

US Person does not want to belabor this point, but it fis worth restating again because the stake are so high. High level nuclear waste like, spent fuel rods, does not go away and does not break down for decades and even centuries. The best our vaunted technology can do is store it somewhere away from population centers where hopefully the public will forget about it while is slowly, very slowly decays. This truth is what the Chernobyl and Fukushima melt-downs are teacing us every day.

Fukushima is unadulterated mess--a devil's brew of contaminated water, radioactive slurry, and contaminated debris. The striken plant's TEPCO has no idea what to do with it all. The melted fuel rods and building debris must be constantly doused in a flow of water which itself become radioactive almost instaneously. The contstant flow is necessary to prevent an explosion that would spread deadly radioactivity into the streets of Tokyo prompting a mass evacuation event. But the water flow flushes out a slurry of highly radioactive material resembling shampoo but containing high concentrations of radioactive strontium. TEPCO is faced with the problem of how to dispose of it permanently, if that is even possible. The storage containers used to confine it temporarily quickly errode from and need to be constantly replaced, Since March TEPCO has accumulated 3,373 of these vessels and they will need to be replaced by 2025 before they spring a leak. The NRA has concluded that 31 of them have already reached the end of the useful life and another 56 will need to be replace within two years. Considering the danger of exposure during a transfer of the slurry, TEPCO plans to use robots apparently, but so far has not reveal acceptable plans for this highly dangerous transfer of waste material.

TEPCO's nighmarish problems do not end there. The company stored radioactive waste water underground in two building near Reactor Four. It used bags of a mineral known as zeolite to absorb radioactive cesium--about twenty six ton of mineral bags. They emit 4 sieverts an hour, enough to kill half the site workers nearby in ah hour. The bags need to be disposed of, but where to put them? TEPCO is again, at a loss. TEPCO will begin release of 1.37 million tons of contaminated waste water into the Pacific Ocean in the fall of this year when storage capacity is full. The decision to allow release of treated water containing tritrium is opposed by fishers and conservtionists. Ii is expected that gradual releases will take thirty years to complete. [photo: waste water tanks] 

Rubble at the site, including felled trees, now exceeds 480,000 cubic meters as of 2021, all of it radioactive. TEPCO wants to incinerate the debris and is building a special incinerator. Where to put the radioactive conbustion waste is also an unknown. In fact, Where to put it?, is still the bane of the nuclear power industry. These problems are not unique to Japan, but every nation that uses nuclear power on a commerical scale faces waste disposal problem. USA now stores mounting tons of spent fuel rods in open pools next to nuclear reactors. If exposed to the air, the rods erupt into sizzling zirconium fires that spew bursts of radioactivity into the air. These atomic sparklers, if you will, could force evacuation of major cities and contaminate large areas of countryside. Any policy maker that considers nuclear power a viable solution to the climate crisis is playing with never-ending fire.