Nuclear Waste Reclassification

Finally, DOE has decided to reclassify nuclear waste in terms of what it is rather than what it was. 

Wrong Lessons Learned

 When the USSR collapsed, the Movement Conservatives took wrong lessons from that and started to destroy our country in a similar manner, Much of today's political woes and social deterioration can be traced to their efforts. 

Who Knew?

 Wyoming is a major global tax haven.

Bogus BBB Arguments

 Paul Krugman objects to the Build Back Better criticism.

there may be some sincere concern that the bill would increase budget deficits. Actually, it wouldn’t have a significant deficit impact — the Congressional Budget Office says that the spending is almost completely paid for, and attempts to claim otherwise aren’t credible. But even if the deficit did rise, why would that be such a bad thing?

I was struck the other day by Elon Musk’s declaration that Build Back Better shouldn’t pass because it would increase the budget deficit. Interesting fact: Tesla was founded in 2003 and had its first profitable year in 2020. That is, it spent 17 years spending more money than it was taking in, because it was investing in the future. If, as many executives like to say, the government should be run like a business, why shouldn’t it be willing to do the same thing?

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It’s true that the bill’s $1.75 trillion price tag is, on the surface, a lot of money. But that’s spending over 10 years, which means that annual outlays would be far smaller than the $1.9 trillion rescue plan passed earlier this year, or for that matter the $768 billion annual defense bill the House passed last week.

Also, much of the spending would be paid for with new taxes. Furthermore, you should never cite a big-sounding budget number without putting it in context. Remember, the U.S. economy is enormous. The budget office estimates that in its first year Build Back Better would expand the deficit by 0.6 percent of gross domestic product, a number that would shrink over time.

I’m not aware of any economic model suggesting that spending on that scale would make much of a difference to inflation. And because much of the spending would expand the economy’s productive capacity, it would probably reduce inflation over time.

The Current Inflation Is NOT a Problem

 Paul Krugman examines the details. 

Rising prices have certainly eroded many workers’ wage gains, although real personal income per capita is still above its prepandemic level even though the government is no longer handing out lots of money. And my sense is that inflation has a corrosive effect on confidence even when incomes are keeping up, because it creates the perception that things are out of control.

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Republicans say, bizarrely, that current economic conditions are much worse than they were in March 2009, when the economy was losing 800,000 jobs a month.

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ask people how their current financial situation compares with five years earlier; 63 percent say they’re better off, the same number as in September 1984, just before Ronald Reagan won an electoral landslide with claims that it was “morning in America.”

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If consumers are really as depressed as the sentiment numbers say, why are retail sales running so high?

And if we turn our attention from consumers to businesses, what we see is a huge surge in capital expenditures. That is, businesses are investing as if they see a booming economy and expect the boom to continue.

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In short, the public’s highly negative assessment of the economy is at odds with every other indicator I can think of.

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Two-thirds of Republicans believe that the 2020 election was stolen; how much of a stretch is it for them also to believe that the Biden economy is terrible, whatever their personal experience? 

This is actually a very good economy, albeit with some problems. Don’t let the doomsayers tell you otherwise.

SCOTUS and Civil Rights

 SCOTUS gutted federal power to enforce national civil rights

Inequality programs are worth talking about

 link

Warning to Democrats

 We have to stop eating our own.

Covid Fatigue

 Dulling our sensitivity. The pandemic has become boring. Routine counts of unnecessary deaths no longer alarm us. Is the virus winning? It knows when you are sleeping. It knows when you're awake. It knows if you've been bad or good, so be good for everybody's sake.

The mood of the year might also be numbing people’s fear response. As the pandemic has dragged on, I’ve highlighted how many people are languishing in a state of emptiness and ennui. When you feel that “blah” or “meh,” your emotional reactions are subdued. The sense of impending doom that plunged you into action last spring feels more like a nagging headache this fall. Many are tired of being afraid — and just plain tired, too. If a Covid-19 variant falls in a community and no one is there to fear it, does it still make a sound?

Asymmetrical Political Warfare

 Dan Rather comments:

Those who have made the biggest differences in humanity’s march towards a more just and equitable society are invariably the ones who do not give up. To succumb to fatalism is its own form of privilege. I can count the votes in Congress. I can see who has the power of elected office in state and local governments. I understand that it might seem like nothing can be done.

But I also firmly believe that no political leader, including the president of the United States, is bigger than the country (or state or county) they lead. The voices of the people matter, and not just at the ballot box. If there is a sustained national movement around this issue, if it is everywhere, if the troops fighting for it on the frontlines can feel the support from the “homefront,” I believe change is possible. I’ve seen it happen.

There’s an old saying which happens to be a wise one: Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

COVID and Obesity

 It seems that COVID thrives in fatty tissue. This why folks with a few extra pounds fair worse when infected.

Now researchers have found that the coronavirus infects both fat cells and certain immune cells within body fat, prompting a damaging defensive response in the body.

“The bottom line is, ‘Oh my god, indeed, the virus can infect fat cells directly,’” said Dr. Philipp Scherer, a scientist who studies fat cells at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, who was not involved in the research.

Is Douthat making any sense?

 Ross Douthat

To get an idea of how smart Douthat isn't, (from Gillman):

In a column headlined “There Will Be No Trump Coup,” the New York Times writer Ross Douthat had predicted, shortly before Election Day, that “any attempt to cling to power illegitimately will be a theater of the absurd.”

I think it makes more sense to believe people who's predictions bear out that those who miss the mark. 

Coup is underway

 Barton Gellman tells how Jan6 was just a practice run.

DOJ Sues Texas

TX redistricting plan under the microscope 

The heavily gerrymandered maps violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Justice Department said, because they deny equal representation to the state’s Black and Latino voters.

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The lawsuit is the first the Justice Department has filed over gerrymandered maps during this year’s redistricting cycle. The department, which has filed numerous lawsuits against states that have restricted voting rights this year, warned in September that it would act against any state that moved too aggressively to gerrymander maps in a way that diluted minority representation.

That’s precisely what Texas did, the department alleged in the complaint filed Monday.

Texans of color are responsible for 95% of Texas’ population growth over the past decade, according to recent census figures. But the new maps significantly limit their political power, the department determined, citing the fact that while the minority population growth resulted in the state gaining two new seats in the U.S. House, lawmakers drew both districts to have white-majority populations.

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Under the new maps, white Texans would make up the majority population of 23 of the state’s 38 congressional districts, 89 of its 150 state House districts and 20 of its 31 state Senate districts, meaning a population that makes up roughly 40% of Texas as a whole would make up majorities in roughly 60% of its districts.

Latino Texans, who account for roughly 40% of the population, would make up the majority in just 20% of those districts. And Black Texans, who make up about 12% of the Texas population, would be the majority in less than 3% of districts.

Response to the Case Against Abortion

Ross Douthat attempts to use logic rather than misogyny and religion to defend abortion bans.

The problem today is the same problem SCOTUS faced in Roe v. Wade. How can we establish the legal right to life of the fetus? Historically, all sorts of different lines have been drawn from conception to child survival of infancy. Then, the justices picked a line that would seem to have the most popular support, ie., let the woman decide. Between the fetus and the mother, the mother certainly has the stronger right-to-life. Medically, we don't sacrifice the mother in favor of the child if such a stark choice is called for.  Douthat doesn't seem to get that. He comes down on the idea that the fetus trumps everything else. He refuses to see that whenever the fetus ranks higher than the mother, we are using law to lessen the status of a full-fledged person against an organism that cannot survive independently. The uncomfortable truth is that developing humans are not legal persons, yet.

He also ignores the demonstrated fact that abortion rates are minimized in societies where women have full control over their childbearing. Women do better and babies do better when women are in control.

Right Wing Cognitive Dissonance

Michelle Goldberg articulates the cognitive dissonance between being anti-vax and anti-abortion. They espouse body-autonomy when it comes to the mild discomfort of a vaccine yet deny body autonomy to women who are would rather not go through a pregnancy, birth, and parenting. As Frank Schaeffer says, it isn't about the fetus, it's about making sure women have less autonomy than men.

It’s striking, the gap between the bodily impositions people on the right will accept in their own lives and those they would impose on others. When it comes to themselves, many conservatives find any encroachment on their physical sovereignty intolerable, and arguments about the common good irrelevant. Yet their movement is dragging us into a future where many women will be stripped of self-determination the moment they get pregnant. Choices, it seems, aren’t for everybody.

As the feminist Ellen Willis once put it, the central question in the abortion debate is not whether a fetus is a person, but whether a woman is. People, in our society, generally do not have their bodies appropriated by the state. It’s unimaginable that they would be forced to, say, donate blood. As we’ve seen, even mask and vaccine requirements elicit mass umbrage. Americans tend to believe that their bodies are inviolate.

“You can’t make a case against abortion by applying a general principle about everybody’s human rights; you have to show exactly the opposite — that the relationship between fetus and pregnant woman is an exception, one that justifies depriving women of their right to bodily integrity,” Willis wrote in 1985. To ban abortion is to say that pregnant women are not entitled to the authority over their physical selves that other adults expect and demand.

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Judge Kurt D. Engelhardt, a Trump appointee, wrote that the public interest is “served by maintaining our constitutional structure and maintaining the liberty of individuals to make intensely personal decisions according to their own convictions — even, or perhaps particularly, when those decisions frustrate government officials.”

Engelhardt, a former member of Louisiana Lawyers for Life, obviously doesn’t believe that all individuals should have the liberty to make “intensely personal decisions according to their own convictions.” But that doesn’t mean he’s a hypocrite. He simply appears to believe, as much of the modern right does, that there are some people who should be subject to total physical coercion, and some who should be subject to none at all.

Spinal Cord Therapy

 Imagine. One injection to the spinal cord and the ability to walk can be restored.

The research will be published in the Nov. 12 issue of the journal Science.

By sending bioactive signals to trigger cells to repair and regenerate, the breakthrough therapy dramatically improved severely injured spinal cords in five key ways: (1) The severed extensions of neurons, called axons, regenerated; (2) scar tissue, which can create a physical barrier to regeneration and repair, significantly diminished; (3) myelin, the insulating layer of axons that is important in transmitting electrical signals efficiently, reformed around cells; (4) functional blood vessels formed to deliver nutrients to cells at the injury site; and (5) more motor neurons survived.