Preventing Tragic Accidents

Instead of finding fault, tragic accidents could be more preventable by using systems thinking. 

Instead she looks at how accidents can be caused by unforeseen interactions between various components of a complex system.

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“I don’t believe in blame,” Leveson says. “When it’s about blame, you just find someone to blame and then you go on.” Instead, she emphasizes making systems mistake-resistant, if not mistake-proof. “You need to design your system to prevent accidents, not depend on the operator,” she says.

Leveson contends that too many systems today are designed so that “we’re guaranteed the operator is going to make a mistake of some kind.” For example, a 2010 investigation of radiation oncology accidents by The New York Times found that while new technology helped doctors better attack tumors, the complexity of the technology also “created new avenues for error through software flaws, faulty programming, poor safety procedures or inadequate staffing and training.”

It's all the interactions among components of the process that tends to bring out unintended consequences. And it's failure to account for how humans actually tend to operate systems.

Killing the Leaf Blowers

A NY Times article points out the problem.

a two-stroke gasoline-powered leaf blower spewed out more pollution than a 6,200-pound Ford F-150 SVT Raptor pickup truck. Jason Kavanagh, the engineering editor at Edmunds at the time, noted that “hydrocarbon emissions from a half-hour of yard work with the two-stroke leaf blower are about the same as a 3,900-mile drive from Texas to Alaska in a Raptor.”

With those words, the California ban seems quite reasonable. 

Gasoline-powered lawn-care machines — mowers, trimmers, leaf blowers, etc. — consume nearly 2.2 billion gallons of gas each year and are responsible for about 10 percent of all the mobile hydrocarbon emissions in this country.

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“Using a two-stroke engine is like heating your house with an open pit fire in the living room — and chopping down your trees to keep it going, and trying to whoosh away the fetid black smoke before your children are poisoned by it.”

Anti-democratic Anti-business Tax Cheaters

The Republican Party has made it very clear. They are all theses things.

Each year, about $600 billion in taxes legally owed are not paid. For scale, that’s roughly equal to all federal income taxes paid by the lowest-earning 90 percent of taxpayers, according to Treasury Department data.

These unpaid taxes — often called the “tax gap” — are predominantly owed by wealthy individuals. The richest 1 percent alone duck an estimated $163 billion in income taxes each year.

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There are some types of income, however, for which little or no third-party reporting exists. These income categories — including partnership, proprietorship and rental income — accrue disproportionately to high earners. The government has much less ability to tell when these filers are misreporting; as a result, they can more easily get away with cheating.

And some of them do.

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When it comes to ordinary wage and salary income, taxpayers are remarkably forthcoming, with noncompliance averaging only 1 percent; for those more “opaque” income sources, noncompliance is an estimated 55 percent.
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Financial institutions already report certain information to the IRS about their clients’ accounts, such as interest income accrued over the year. Under Democrats’ latest proposal, banks would — once a year — also report the sums of all deposits and withdrawals for certain accounts. Not every transaction; just the year-end totals. Only accounts with flows of more than $10,000 not tied to wage income or exempted benefits would be affected — the idea being that the IRS already knows about the wage income anyway.

The reporting proposal is estimated to bring in $200 billion to $250 billion in revenue over the next decade, according to Treasury.

This is revenue that would be collected without having to raise a single tax rate, which you’d think Republicans would applaud. Instead, the GOP, backed by the bank lobby, has fought every version of the reporting policy tooth and nail.

Just as they did with Obamacare “death panels,” Republicans have megaphoned misinformation. They allege that Democrats would create a Marxist “surveillance program designed to target low- and middle-income earners” (false) in which the government would “monitor every single transaction you make” (false) with “no limits” (definitely false).

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The GOP seeks to exploit the confusion of honest, rank-and-file taxpayers. Their income is already quite well reported to the IRS: Three billion 1099 forms alone will be issued this year, and Americans haven’t considered this a “dragnet” or “infringement on personal privacy.” But suddenly it is — when similar reporting is proposed to ensure high-income people’s tax compliance, too.

Republicans also presumably have another shameful aim: communicating to tax cheats that, now and in the future, the GOP has their backs.

Not Divided

The headlines are misleading. The Democratic Congress is not divided or at war with each other. They are remarkably unified but are being held hostage by some corporate-friendly outliers. 

The big number for the reconciliation infrastructure bill is misleading. Trump's tax cut was a %5 trillion dollar bill and the anti-democratic Republicans didn't even blink at it despite the economic theory behind it has been proven to be wrong multiple times.

I'm looking forward to have Medicare provide vision and hearing coverage. Many folks living in states controlled by the anti-democratic Republicans are looking forward to expanded Medicaid. Families are looking forward to the expanded tax credit that will lift them out of poverty. Family bread-winners are looking forward to paid family and medical leave so they don't have to choose between keeping their job and being there for their family when the family needs them most. 

There Was So Much Good Stuff with Lawrence Last Night

Here's the link to the transcript.

Democrats with Biden have done a lot. Unemployment relief, child tax credit. Millions of previous felons have had their voting rights restored.

While Republicans have devolved into a purely obstructionist anti-democratic cult.

Democrats need to use the human side of Biden's accomplishments to speak to the hearts of people rather than the wonky checklists. We need to stop selling the recipe and start selling the brownie.

And the Senate needs to be fixed. The filibuster needs to be changed such that it returns to being a tool to fostering negotiation rather than a weapon of obstruction.

O'Donnell:

Today in his column in "The Washington Post," Michael Gerson writes the GOP is a garbage scow of the corrupt, the seditious, and their enablers. This is unprecedented in American political history, but by now, we`ve grown used to it, that the most eloquent and lacerating and accurate descriptions of the Republican Party now come from the former leading lights of the Republican Party, intellectuals like George Will, speech writers like Michael Gerson and Bill Kristol, presidential campaign strategists like Stuart Stevens and Steve Schmidt, and the list goes on and on.

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Jennifer Rubin who writes: It is long past time that Democrats seize the high ground on values including fair play, honesty, respect, and nonviolence. In truth, a party that winks at violence and tries to undermine faith in elections is anti-American and anti-democratic. Hold Republicans accountable when they rationalize violence and denigrate the importance of elections. Take them to task as anti-work and anti-family for opposing necessities such as subsidized child care for working parents or paid family leave to take care of parents.

That`s how Democrats can achieve consensus, if not unity, cast themselves as defenders of American values and put Republicans on defense.

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Jennifer Rubin, a conservative opinion writer at "The Washington Post," and author of "Resistance: How Women Saved Democracy from Donald Trump":

we who have been on the Republican side once upon a time do have a little perspective. And you`re right, they on the Republican side use values to hit the Democrats over the head with you`re anti-family, you`re not patriotic, you`re anti-police. All of this, of course, is nonsense, and is now directly applicable to them.

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[Biden] really has to set a much higher bar and talk about his package as one that is pro-family, that is pro-democratic, that is pro-national unity and begin to talk in the language of values pointing out that Democrats are the repository of those values now.

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I would point him in the direction of my dear friend Matt Dowd who is running for lieutenant governor of Texas of all things.

You watch his ads, he`s talking about common sense, common purpose for the common good. That`s language that we need to hear on a national level from Democrats.

Eddie Glaude, chair of the African- American studies department at Princeton University

it falls upon the shoulders of an unsuspecting generation to save American democracy, and that`s where we are. And that`s what the Democratic Party has to understand its task as, so as we articulate these values, we have to articulate within a framework that the republic is in crisis, that it`s in danger, and that we must in some way stand behind or stand for those values if we`re going to salvage this fragile experiment it seems to me.

Rubin:

The issue of our time is whether we`re going to have a democracy, whether the American ideal, equal justice under the law, a Constitution that restrains those in power is going to survive or not.

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go out and tell the American people what you are for, that you are there to not only protect their interests but to embody and save American democracy. And really take it to the next level.

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[Presidencies] are built on this emotional connection in which voters see in that leader someone who cares about them, someone who embodies their values, and someone who makes them feel like America is a place for them. And if Democrats can`t do that, we are in deep, deep trouble.

O'Donnell:

The August payment of the child tax credit lifted 3.5 million children out of poverty. New polling shows many Americans don`t know that Democrats and the Biden administration provided that relief and that every single Republican in Congress opposed that relief. The latest "Politico"/Morning Consult poll finds 61 percent of respondents say they received the expanded child tax credit of up to $300 for every child each month, but only 47 percent of those respondents credited Democrats for passing the legislation, and only 38 percent credited President Biden.

ANAT SHENKER-OSORIO, FOUNDER, ASO COMMUNICATIONS:

So, a message is like a baton that has to be passed from person to person to person. If it gets dropped anywhere along the way, by definition, it isn`t heard, and even someone with arguably the largest pulpit,

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it is the media, hate to tell you, that determine what it is people hear about these programs. The child care tax credit, for example, was dropped right around the same time as what happened in Afghanistan. That swamped the coverage, and to me, it is very, very sad that the numbers that you report are there are certainly not what we`re seeing in our nightly focus groups very much reaffirming that and in the polling we`ve done privately, but it`s also utterly unsurprising. 

If the media isn`t telling folks about these things, then how is it they`re supposed to get this message, even if the president is reporting on it.

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something very interesting is happening in the polls. Republican voters with children tend to be more favorably disposed to Biden than Republican voters without children. That could be correlation or causation, but the people I talk to say that shows there is some resonance.

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motivated cognition is a hell of a drug. And what I mean by that is that the more the descriptor of the human cognitive processing system would be I`ll see it when I believe it, not the other way around.

What we find in experiment after experiment is that when people have already cemented a world view, they in essence have a frame around what is occurring, then facts are simply impervious to it. They bounce off of it, right?

In lay terms if you`ve ever had the experience of trying to tell one of your friends that the guy that she`s dating is a complete and total jerk and you provide her fact after fact after fact and they are just going ping, ping, ping, that`s what I`m talking about. But spread across massive issues of social justice and economic well-being.

And so people are incredibly adept at discounting factual information that`s simply weeding it out, not paying attention to it, ignoring it that doesn`t fit their pre-existing frame.

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We could recognize that we have to speak as your previous guests were saying in the language of values. And more than that, as I often like to tell people, don`t take your policy out in public. It`s unseemly.

Messaging about policy is always less effective than what that policy delivers. So when we ask people, how do you feel about paid family leave? They`re into it. When we say instead you`re there the first time your newborn smiles, they`re way more into it.

When we say raising wages very popular. When we say instead everyone makes enough to care for their family, way more popular.

What Democrats need to do when they do have the mic is stop selling the recipe and start selling the brownie. Stop talking about the names of your policies and instead speak to voters in imageable terms about what it would feel like to have that as the reality in their life.

And so it`s not a child care tax credit, which is the name of a policy. It`s you go off to work and you feel great about what your kid is and you know that they`re safe, loved, and cared for and that you can afford it.

 NORM ORNSTEIN, CONGRESSIONAL HISTORIAN:

And the Senate`s going to get worse. I mean we have to consider that, Lawrence, that before long it`s become -- going to become even less representative of the country as a whole. But right now we are in a moment where we need triage. And the fact is if we don`t fix the Senate, we can kiss our democracy good-bye.

Certainly the debt ceiling fiasco is a part of it. I think and hope that Mitch McConnell, not for good purposes, but his own malign ones, has given us an opportunity, a little bit of breathing room to take that reconciliation bill and make it work so we have a big accomplishment, one that will include an enormous set of things for the American public, especially for working class and middle class and poorer people.

And then we have to fix that debt ceiling blackmail once and for all. It`s Tom Hannah (ph) and I, when we wrote more than ten years ago about what was then an insurgent outlier purpose, now an obstructionist cult, saw that this was being used for horrible purposes. And there are ways to do that in reconciliation.

And third and most important, we discussed it before, we have to discuss it many times. We need to find a way to restore the filibuster where the burden is on the minority so we can get the things done starting primarily with democracy reform but moving on to many, many other things that are just going to be blocked because every single Republican will filibuster and keep them from happening.

BBB Borrowing is OK

While people are wringing their hands about Sinema's "No new taxes" stance on the Build Back Better bill, Paul Krugman points out that borrowing the money to pay for it is much less worse than not having it at all.

the Trump tax cut was just the latest in a long series of giveaways to the wealthy that were sold on false pretenses. And Sinema should be ashamed of herself for helping corporate interests perpetuate this grift.
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If the U.S. were to end up borrowing another $1.75 trillion, that would be over the course of a decade, not a single year — and the Congressional Budget Office projects total G.D.P. over the next decade of $288 trillion. So while it might sound as if we’re talking about huge deficit spending, the additional deficit would be only 0.6 percent of G.D.P., which simply isn’t a big deal.

In fact, given the arithmetic you might wonder why Biden ever wanted to raise taxes enough to fully pay for his investment agenda. The answer, I think, was more about the politics than the economics — that pitching his plans as deficit-neutral was supposed to reassure politicians who haven’t caught up with current mainstream economic thinking, and who still regard budget deficits as a major threat.
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We can deplore the corporate influence that may block some justified tax increases, but borrowing to invest for the future isn’t a bad thing in itself. Hey, businesses do it all the time. So Democrats should just go for it.

Merkel Was Right

When Angela Merkel bravely accepted the influx of a million refugees, the backlash was vocal. Now, it looks like Merkel made the right move. The scare stories never materialized and the German economy has grown its workforce for future economic growth.

In the recent German election, refugees were barely an issue, and the AfD lost ground. “The sense is that there has been comparatively little Islamic extremism or extremist crime resulting from this immigration, and that on the whole, the largest number of these immigrants have been successfully integrated into the German work force and into German society overall,”
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the refugees had more to offer Germany than a burnished self-image. In an aging country with a low birthrate, they were a useful addition to the work force. The economy, Stelzenmüller said, “was looking for labor before the pandemic, and so there was a real demand and presumably a willingness from the labor market and companies to help people. And of course we have a long experience, a decades-long practice, of on-the-job training that is seen as a model by other European countries and in fact by America.”
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in absorbing a million desperate people at a time when others were putting up razor wire, Germany did something great, something the rest of the world could learn from as wars and ecological calamity send many millions more trudging across the globe in search of sanctuary.

“We now have a case study, an example, of how it can work, and I’m hoping the world will make use of Merkel’s example,” said Marton. The chancellor’s refrain in 2015 was, “We can do this.” If only the rest of us could too

Incompetence Is Their Best Feature

Once again a Trumpist attempt to build a media mouthpiece which fails because of incompetence. 

For people who should know that the geeks are out to snarl their plans, they just can't seem to put up a website using sufficient security. 

the site’s early hours revealed lax security, rehashed features and a flurry of bizarre design decisions. An open sign-up page allowed anyone to use the site shortly after it was revealed, sparking the creation of the “donaldjtrump” account and the pig posting. A Washington Post reporter was able to register and post under the account name “mikepence” without any stops in place. New sign-ups were blocked shortly after.

What Democrats Need to Do

 David Brooks has some ideas.

Are Democrats up for such a tough (and expensive) fight? Many liberal voters have taken a step back from politics, convinced that Mr. Trump is no longer a threat. According to research conducted for our super PAC, almost half of women in battleground states are now paying less attention to the political news.

But in reality, the last election settled very little. Mr. Trump not only appears to be preparing for a presidential campaign in 2024; he is whipping up his supporters before the 2022 midterms. And if Democrats ignore the threat he and his allies pose to democracy, their candidates will suffer next fall, imperiling any chance of meaningful reform in Congress.

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Having underestimated Mr. Trump in the first place, Democrats shouldn’t underestimate what it will take to counter his malign influence now. They need a bigger, bolder campaign blueprint to save democracy that doesn’t hinge on the whims of Congress.

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Where possible, Democrats should sponsor plebiscites to overturn anti-democratic laws passed by Republicans in states. They should underwrite super PACs to protect incumbent election officials being challenged by Trump loyalists, even if it means supporting reasonable Republicans. Donations should flow into key governor and secretary of state races, positions critical to election certification.

The good news is that liberals do not have to copy what the right is doing with its media apparatus — the font of falsehoods about voter fraud and a stolen election — to win over voters. Democrats can leapfrog the right with significant investments in streaming video, podcasting, newsletters and innovative content producers on growing platforms like TikTok, whose audiences dwarf those of cable news networks like Fox News.

Issues like racial justice, the environment and immigration are already resonating online with audiences Democrats need to win over, such as young people, women and people of color. Democratic donors have long overlooked efforts to fund the media, but with so much of our politics playing out on that battlefield, they can no longer afford to.

Why Supply Chain Problems

It's the pandemic. When people can go do things like attend public activities or dine in restaurants, they buy stuff, lots of stuff. Our supply-chain problem is the result of a huge increase in shipping demand. The way we solve this is to get vaccinated, put the pandemic behind this, and get out there and do stuff rather than buy stuff.

Small Worlds

Whatever world we live in I think we all fabricate for ourselves a smaller, tribal world to live in. It serves as a place of safety, nurture, and refuge. It can be a circle of compatible friends that are emotionally comforting.

The dark side of small worlds is that if they are too small you can get to feel hemmed in and want to escape. You have to be able to have the small world with the freedom to step out of it any time you feel the need.

It's in the small worlds that one has the biggest sense of obligation because there are fewer folks

With my particular church fellowship, that fellowship serves as a small world. It's a pretty sparse membership so that world is small indeed.

A small world can have all the comfort and frustrations of the family in My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Each must decide how to deal with that, escape or embrace. There are costs to both paths. I would like to figure out how to minimize the costs of embracing the small world and maximize the benefits.

A small world leads to protected childhoods and youths frequently unprepared for the wider world and it demands and temptations. I'm all for protecting children but we need to also raise our youth the be complete adults.

Even though we think we are ready and willing to live in a small world, life (or something) sometimes kicks us out unwillingly.

If the small world is large enough it can be a fairly complete experience. Some are willing to fit in and stay in completely. They have no concern or desire about whether they might be missing something. The small world is a safe refuge in a larger, scarier universe.

Anti-democratic anti-business Republican Party

In addition to being anti-democratic, the GOP is becoming more and more an anti-business party.

Republican politicians are at odds with corporate America on crucial issues. It’s not just vaccines. Corporate interests also want serious investment in infrastructure and find themselves on the outs with Republican leaders who don’t want to see Democrats achieve any policy successes. Basically, the G.O.P. is currently engaged in a major campaign of sabotage — its leaders want to see America do badly, because they believe this will redound to their political advantage — and if this hurts their corporate backers along the way, they don’t care.
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Now they’re learning that they aren’t in control, and in fact have barely any voice in the party they bankrolled. They thought they were using the extremists; it turns out that the extremists were using them.

The question is, what are they going to do about it?

Unfortunate Title

A poorly titled Harvard study seems to imply that vaccinations aren't working against COVID. However the authors of the study simply say that vaccinations themselves are not enough to stop the pandemic, masking and distancing are also essential. 

Anti-vaxxers, of course, are not bothering to actually read the paper and are touting as "proof" that vaccines don't work. And, as usual, what they want to hear is getting higher engagement than the actual truth.  

Some Roman Concrete Gets Stronger Over Time

The tomb of Caecilia Metella is a landmark on the Via Appia Antica. the Appian Way. It has stood for over 2,000 years. The mortar in its construction has actually become stronger over time. It's secret is minerals from a nearby pyroclastic flow. As water saturates the mortar, unique chemical reactions create stronger bonds and the aggregate works to stop microfracture from propagating.

Jackson and her colleagues are working to replicate some of the Romans' successes in modern concretes, specifically in a U.S. Department of Energy ARPA-e project to encourage similar beneficially reactive aggregates in concretes that use engineered cellular magmatics in place of the tephra of the ancient Roman structures. The objective, according to ARPA-e, is that a Roman-like concrete could reduce the energy emissions of concrete production and installation by 85% and improve the 50-year lifespan of modern marine concretes four-fold.

"Focusing on designing modern concretes with constantly reinforcing interfacial zones might provide us with yet another strategy to improve the durability of modern construction materials," Masic says. "Doing this through the integration of time-proven 'Roman wisdom' provides a sustainable strategy that could improve the longevity of our modern solutions by orders of magnitude."

A Tonic for the Party

Gaining ground in rural America has become a difficult task for the Democratic Party. Major sparkplug Anderson Clayton shows us how to do it.

Part of the reason Democrats fail to get traction in rural America is failure to be loud and proud about what they stand for. Another is that many Democratic committees have all the institutional vigor of a mid-20th-century men’s fraternal organization. What’s needed is not just more younger activists, but more “legacy Democrats” willing to stand aside and let them take the reins.

Tension Between Individualism and the Good of Society

Psychology has shown that the more choices we get to exercise, the more we feel independent and empowered. The dark side of that is that we are less likely to be committed team players. 

When people think of themselves as independent, they are less likely to tolerate harassment or discrimination, more willing to raise their voice, and more willing to negotiate better conditions for themselves."

However, the increase in individualism can potentially have negative consequences for the collective well-being.

"Choice is good for the individual but could be bad for society," Madan explained. "As people become more independent and more individualistic, more self-interested, it becomes more difficult to take collective action.

Being Smart About Conspiracy Theories

Here's a quiz that exposes how well you deal with the conspiracy theory landscape. Not only can it be useful for you, you can use these questions to feel out where your antagonists fall in the landscape. There's also some good information on how to "smell out" a potential false conspiracy theory.

Conspiracy theories follow a simple formula
Powerful people + Use deceitful or shadowy means + Benefit themselves or harm the public

Barack Obama faked his citizenship to become president.
Donald Trump faked having covid-19 to help his chances at reelection.
Hillary Clinton conspired to give Russia access to nuclear materials.

Real-world events sometimes follow this formula as well. Example: The Reagan administration acted secretly and illegally in the Iran-contra affair, and the FBI did spy on King. But the key difference is that these real incidents are backed up by evidence, facts and witnesses.

Conspiracy theories are different. They’re just theories. Most have no evidence to support them. They often connect unrelated facts to create an impression of plausibility.

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These theories have consequences. Since the 2020 election, Republicans have pursued election “audits” — recounts aimed at casting doubt on Joe Biden’s win. Other conspiracy theories, such as anti-vaccine narratives, threaten public health.

Eventually, you’ll run into a conspiracy theory that appeals to you politically or psychologically. So be careful and double-check your sources — or you could fall down the rabbit hole, too.

Fixing Facebook

From the outside, it looks intractable, but a former Facebook data engineer has a solution. Kill the algorithms.

The solution is straightforward: Companies that deploy personalized algorithmic amplification should be liable for the content these algorithms promote. This can be done through a narrow change to Section 230, the 1996 law that lets social media companies host user-generated content without fear of lawsuits for libelous speech and illegal content posted by those users.

As Ms. Haugen testified, “If we reformed 230 to make Facebook responsible for the consequences of their intentional ranking decisions, I think they would get rid of engagement-based ranking.” As a former Facebook data scientist and current executive at a technology company, I agree with her assessment. There is no A.I. system that could identify every possible instance of illegal content. Faced with potential liability for every amplified post, these companies would most likely be forced to scrap algorithmic feeds altogether.

Vaccine Against Rheumatoid Arthritis

At first they thought there was a specific protein that was causing or exacerbating the disease. But when they knocked out the production of that protein, the disease appeared where it wasn't before or got worse if already present. Then they developed a vaccine that worked against antibodies that depleted the protein. The vaccine kept arthritis from appearing and reduced it when it was already present.  

How Evil Persists

Stephanie Grisham is a case study on how evil can persist with the assistance of lower level enablers.

the story of the Trump presidency was less about one demagogue than it was about the everyday choices of the smaller people working at the levels below policy-making, and how run-of-the-mill self-centeredness and expediency, when practiced by dozens or hundreds of people in an organization, amounts to the system that allows evil. The Trump administration was not possible because of Trump and his brain trust, as it were. It was possible because of the people like Grisham who let them, in minor and individual ways, function.

Carbon neutral kerosene

 This plant in Germany uses renewable energy resources like wind and solar to produce aviation fuel. If the price is right, the market is huge.

The facility in Werlte, near Germany’s northwestern border with the Netherlands, will use water and electricity from four nearby wind farms to produce hydrogen. In a century-old process, the hydrogen is combined with carbon dioxide to make crude oil, which can then be refined into jet fuel.

Burning that synthetic kerosene releases only as much CO2 into the atmosphere as was previously removed to produce the fuel, making it “carbon neutral.”

Urban Mining

 A new method that uses flash joule heating can not only pull toxic heavy metals from a waste stream, but also provide the recovered metals for industry. Furthermore, it is much less energy-intensive that current extraction methods.

The researchers reported that one flash Joule reaction reduced the concentration of lead in the remaining char to below 0.05 parts per million, the level deemed safe for agricultural soils. Levels of arsenic, mercury and chromium were all further reduced by increasing the number of flashes.

"Since each flash takes less than a second, this is easy to do," Tour said.

The scalable Rice process consumes about 939 kilowatt-hours per ton of material processed, 80 times less energy than commercial smelting furnaces and 500 times less than laboratory tube furnaces, according to the researchers. It also eliminates the lengthy purification required by smelting and leaching processes.

We Have Biden Because Pence Blinked

There was a Jan. 6 coup plan. Pence would have had to unilaterally throw out the electoral votes and Trump and cronies worked very hard to convince him but couldn't. What a lame limp noodle of a hero!

The true contours of this emerge from a New York Times excavation of the role of John Eastman, the lawyer who wrote the Trump coup memo. It outlined how Pence supposedly could exercise unilateral power (that he did not have) over the process to refuse to count President-elect Joe Biden’s electors, throwing the election to Trump.

Buried in that piece is an important revelation: Pence apparently went further than previously known in probing whether he could execute a version of Eastman’s scheme.

Postal Banking Coming Soon

The USPS has started a pilot low-cost banking program. The Visa gift cards are already a service provided by the Post Office. This program just adds a tweak to the check scanners that allows the USPS to accept third party checks.

The United States Postal Service (USPS) has taken the most dramatic step in a half-century to re-establish a postal banking system in America. In four pilot cities, customers can now cash payroll or business checks of up to $500 at post office locations, and have the money put onto a single-use gift card. It’s the most far-reaching executive action that the Biden administration has taken since Inauguration Day.

The move puts the USPS in direct competition with the multibillion-dollar check-cashing industry, which operates storefronts to allow unbanked or underbanked residents to cash their paychecks.

According to USPS spokesperson Tatiana Roy, the pilot launched on September 13 in four locations: Washington, D.C.; Falls Church, Virginia; Baltimore; and the Bronx, New York. To test the system, Prospect art director Jandos Rothstein visited a post office in Falls Church on Saturday and successfully cashed a business check onto a Visa gift card.

Exempt Me from Religious Laws

If religious folks can exempt themselves from secular laws, then secular folks should be able to exempt themselves from religious laws. 

If they’re going to be making these laws, and the Supreme Court is going to let them, then the rest of us should be able to opt out.

In Louisiana, the attorney general helpfully offered language to parents in his department who object to school mask mandates: “I do not consent to forcing a face covering on my child, who is created in the image of God. Masks lead to antisocial behaviors, interfere with religious commands to share God’s love with others, and interfere with relationships in contravention of the Bible.”

For a rational exemption to the Texas law, may I suggest, “I do not consent to bearing a child I do not wish to have. Pregnancy and childbirth lead to assorted health issues up to and including death, and bearing a child interferes with my right to live my life and use my body as I wish, in contravention of both reason and morality.”

Mint the Coin

The debt limit is a gimmick that violates the 14thh Amendment. So it makes some sense to combat with another gimmick. If the Treasury Secretary were to mint a trillion-dollar coin and deposit it in the Federal Reserve, she could pay our government's bills without borrowing making the debt limit moot. Given that Congress has no problem increasing it when Republicans are in power (because Democrats are responsible enough to not threaten to bring government to a halt), but the Republican minority use it to not pay for the losses in revenue they themselves have enacted. This is just silly.

Sure, there would be court fight about this action, but the Republicans would lose since the debt limit is blatantly unconstitutional according to the 14th Amendment. Just get rid of it.

What about the politics? Look, the reason we’re in this situation is that Republicans have learned a terrible truth: Voters don’t know or care about process; they only react to how things are going. The G.O.P. believes that it can benefit from outright, naked sabotage; Democrats shouldn’t worry about undoing that sabotage through whatever tricks they can deploy.

The coin could be minted at the last minute.

Hiding Your Money

The recent release of the "Pandora Papers" is proving to be an embarrassment of wealthy players around the world. Create shell corporations then pump ill-gotten money through them to invest in really expensive real estate.

The Pandora Papers are a follow to a similar project released in 2016 called the “Panama Papers” compiled by the same journalistic group.

The latest bombshell is even more expansive, porting through nearly 3 terabytes of data — the equivalent of roughly 750,000 photos on a smartphone — leaked from 14 different service providers doing business in 38 different jurisdictions in the world. The records date back to the 1970s, but most of the files span from 1996 to 2020.

In contrast, the Panama Papers culled through 2.6 terabytes of data leaked by one now-defunct law firm called Mossack Fonseca that was located in the country that inspired that project’s nickname.

More on the papers: 

The offshore financial system can siphon money from government treasuries, worsen wealth disparities and protect those accused of wrongdoing while depriving their victims of potential recourse.

Studies have estimated that the world’s ultra-wealthy own the bulk of the trillion-dollar-plus realm of offshore companies. More than 130 people on the Forbes magazine list of billionaires turn up in the Pandora Papers. Some of those billionaires have faced questions regarding the sources of their wealth. Several have been charged with thefts of money or natural resources; others have faced international sanctions for their ties to autocrats and political corruption.

And here's some details on the following key takeaways:

1. Country leaders on five continents use the offshore system
2. Some American states have become central to the global offshore system
3. A global treasure hunt leads to an indicted art dealer’s offshore trusts — and the Met
4. U.S. sanctions imposed on Russian oligarchs hit their targets

Brace Yourselves

More natural disasters are coming. Many more people will get to know about what FEMA does by personal experience.

Climate change will affect people who weren’t threatened before. New technology that allows analysts to study the environs around each home led to a stunning find: 6 million homes in states such as Utah, Idaho, Vermont and Tennessee that didn’t require insurance because they were thought to be safe from flooding are actually at risk because of climate change.


Another 2 million homes across the country will fall into the risk group within 30 years as the climate changes, according to First Street Foundation, which developed the new flood-risk rating used by FEMA.

Problems in the UK

Essentially, Boris Johnson is grossly mishandling the Brexit transition. 

any sense of normality has been banished in the past few weeks. A dramatic fuel crisis, which has been caused in large part by a lack of truck drivers and at its peak forced around a third of all gas stations to close, is only the most glaring concern.

A convergence of problems — a global gas shortage, rising energy and food prices, supply-chain issues and the Conservatives’ decision to slash welfare — has cast the country’s future in darkness.

Vaccine Mandates are a Win for Democrats

Paul Krugman points out how mandated vaccinations work in favor of Democrats.

Democrats shouldn’t fear the political fallout. Almost nobody will vote Republican because they’re enraged by public health rules, since such people are most likely to vote Republican anyway. What really matters for Democrats’ political fortunes is that life in America be visibly getting much better by next fall — and getting shots in arms is the way to make that happen.

Whe We Need Build Back Better

David Brooks sees this effort as a major first step to resetting the compass for our economy, our politics, and social well-being.

The Democratic spending bills are economic packages that serve moral and cultural purposes. They should be measured by their cultural impact, not merely by some wonky analysis. In real, tangible ways, they would redistribute dignity back downward. They would support hundreds of thousands of jobs for home health care workers, child care workers, construction workers, metal workers, supply chain workers. They would ease the indignity millions of parents face having to raise their children in poverty.
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These packages say to the struggling parents and the warehouse workers: I see you. Your work has dignity. You are paving your way. You are at the center of our national vision.

This is how you fortify a compelling moral identity, which is what all of us need if we’re going to be able to look in the mirror with self-respect. This is the cultural transformation that good policy can sometimes achieve. Statecraft is soulcraft.
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we can make it clear that we value people’s choices. For years, there was almost an officially approved life: Get a B.A., move to those places where capital and jobs are congregating, even if it means leaving your community, roots and extended family.

That fundamental respect is the key scarcity in America right now.