Illiberal Democracy Redux

Heather Cox Richardson provides the analysis. There have been cycles in our history as power has shifted back and forth between the wealthy and the common people. 

It has been hard for me to see the historical outlines of the present-day attack
on American democracy clearly. But this morning, as I was reading a piece in
Vox by foreign affairs specialist Zack Beauchamp, describing Florida
governor Ron DeSantis’s path in Florida as an attempt to follow in the
footsteps of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, the penny dropped.

Capital moved 
upward until a very few people controlled most of it, and then, usually after an
economic crash made ordinary Americans turn against the system that
favored the wealthy, the cycle began again.
When Trump was elected, the U.S. was at the place where wealth had
concentrated among the top 1%, Republican politicians denigrated their
opponents as un-American “takers” and celebrated economic leaders as
“makers,” and the process of skewing the vote through gerrymandering and
voter suppression was well underway. But the Republican Party still valued
the rule of law. It’s impossible to run a successful business without a level
playing field, as businessmen realized after the 1929 Great Crash, when it
became clear that insider trading had meant that winners and losers were
determined not by the market but by cronyism.

Trump’s election brought a new right-wing ideology onto the political stage to
challenge the rule of law. He was an autocrat, interested not in making money
for a specific class of people, but rather in obtaining wealth and power for
himself, his family, and a few insiders. The established Republican Party was
willing to back him so long as he could deliver the voters that would enable
them to stay in power and continue with tax cuts and deregulation.

But their initial distancing didn’t last. Trump proved able to forge such a
strong base that it is virtually a cult following, and politicians quickly
discovered that crossing his followers brought down their wrath. Lawmakers’
determination to hold Trump’s base meant they acquitted him in both
impeachment trials. Meanwhile, Trump packed state Republican machinery
with his own loyalists, and they have helped make the Big Lie that Trump won
the 2020 election an article of faith.

That Confederate impulse has been a growing part of the South’s mindset
since at least 1948, when President Harry S. Truman announced the federal
government would desegregate the armed forces, and white southerners who
recognized that desegregation was coming briefly formed their own political
party to stop it.

Abbott and the Texas legislature have tapped into this traditional white
southern ideology in their quest to commandeer the right wing. Texas S.B. 8,
which uses a sly workaround to permit a state to undermine the 1973 Roe v.
Wade decision declaring abortion a constitutional right, has become a model
for other Republican states. In June 2021, along with Arizona governor Doug
Ducey, Abbott asked other state governors to send state national guard
troops or law enforcement officers to the Mexican border because, he said,
“the Biden administration has proven unwilling or unable to do the job.”
Abbott’s recent stunt at the border, shutting down trade between Mexico and
the U.S., was expensive and backfired, but it was also a significant escalation
of his claim of state power: he essentially took the federal government’s
power to conduct foreign affairs directly into his own hands.

DeSantis is following this model right down to the fact that observers believe
that Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill was modeled on a similar Hungarian law.
DeSantis’s attack on Disney mirrors Orbán’s use of regulatory laws to punish
political opponents (although the new law was so hasty and flawed it
threatens to do DeSantis more harm than good). DeSantis is not alone in his
support for Orban’s tactics: Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson
openly admires Orbán, and next month the Conservative Political Action
Committee will hold its conference in Hungary, with Orbán as a keynote
speaker.

Nuclear Power for Cruise Ships

Norwegian shipbuilder Ulstein this week unveiled a new concept for a cruise vessel that would run electricity generated at sea using a nuclear reactor.

The twist is that the reactor wouldn’t be located on the cruise ship itself, but on a separate service vessel. The service vessel would recharge electric batteries on the cruise ship every few days.

Ulstein’s idea is that one service vessel with a small nuclear reactor could serve as a floating power station for up to four small, all-electric expedition ships sailing in a region such as Antarctica.

As Ulstein conceives it, the service ship would feature a rarely built type of nuclear reactor that uses a thorium molten salt mixture. Such reactors are considered safer than conventional nuclear reactors because they operate with fuel in a molten state. In the event of an emergency, the fuel would drain into a containment vessel and solidify, preventing the sort of uncontrolled nuclear meltdown that can happen with a more traditional uranium-fueled reactor.

Muren noted that thorium has relatively low radioactivity and produces radioactive waste that is easier to manage than the radioactive waste from more traditional uranium reactors.

“Thorium is a much nicer substance, and it produces very little waste compared to uranium [used in other reactors],” she said. “With uranium, you have a lot of waste that you have to take care of for … thousands of years. For thorium, it is a couple of hundred years.”

Gamechanger Water Purification Tech

There is a low-power, user-friendly, and easily-portable water desalination unit out there. Imagine what that could mean for the poor or even the military.

MIT researchers have developed a portable desalination unit, weighing less than 10 kilograms, that can remove particles and salts to generate drinking water.

The suitcase-sized device, which requires less power to operate than a cell phone charger, can also be driven by a small, portable solar panel, which can be purchased online for around $50. It automatically generates drinking water that exceeds World Health Organization quality standards. The technology is packaged into a user-friendly device that runs with the push of one button.

Unlike other portable desalination units that require water to pass through filters, this device utilizes electrical power to remove particles from drinking water. Eliminating the need for replacement filters greatly reduces the long-term maintenance requirements.

their unit relies on a technique called ion concentration polarization (ICP), which was pioneered by Han's group more than 10 years ago. Rather than filtering water, the ICP process applies an electrical field to membranes placed above and below a channel of water. The membranes repel positively or negatively charged particles -- including salt molecules, bacteria, and viruses -- as they flow past. The charged particles are funneled into a second stream of water that is eventually discharged.

The process removes both dissolved and suspended solids, allowing clean water to pass through the channel. Since it only requires a low-pressure pump, ICP uses less energy than other techniques.

The resulting water exceeded World Health Organization quality guidelines, and the unit reduced the amount of suspended solids by at least a factor of 10. Their prototype generates drinking water at a rate of 0.3 liters per hour, and requires only 20 watts of power per liter.

McConnell Miscounted

Has the GOP really been stuck with Trump because McConnell miscounted the impeachment vote? He's a genuine coward because he couldn't bring himself to do the right thing when the choice was the moral high ground or power. Powe trumps everything for Mitch.

Mitch McConnell thought the Jan. 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol would finally vanquish Donald Trump, initially predicting that at least 17 Republican senators would vote to convict him in his impeachment trial, barring the former president from running again. 

He was wrong. 

McConnell’s miscalculation is one of the new details reported in the latest book on the chaotic end of the Trump presidency, “This Will Not Pass” by New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns.

In the weekend following the riot in early January 2021, McConnell is described by the authors as “in a lather, using profanity to refer to Trump,” and outlining what he saw as his “imminent demise.” “McConnell told his advisers there would be at least 17 Senate Republicans ready to affirm Trump’s impeachment, supplying the two-thirds vote needed to convict,” Martin and Burns write.

But just a month later when the unprecedented second impeachment trial of Trump unfolded with him out of office and kicked off of Twitter, just seven GOP senators voted for Trump’s conviction and McConnell wasn’t even one of them. 

The head-snapping change in the Kentuckian’s mindset is a vivid illustration of how he ultimately chose the preservation of his own power over damning condemnation of the man he said was “practically and morally responsible” for the Capitol attack. In the end, when McConnell saw most of his party falling into line with Trump, he wasn’t going to be out of step.

Food Price Inflation

Food price inflation is being driven by factors outside our control. Almost. One factor is misgovernance by a Texas Republican Governor.

The war in Ukraine is having a huge impact on the cost of food in the United States — particularly the price of corn. The Chicago Board of Trade corn futures topped $8 a bushel earlier this week, reaching its highest price in nearly a decade.

The worst avian flu outbreak in the United States since 2015 is causing a major spike in the price of chicken and turkey and an even more noticeable surge in egg prices.

The federal government operates a system of dams, reservoirs and canals in California that the state relies on for agriculture and drinking water. Water agencies contract with the federal government for certain amounts of water each year. The federal government fulfills the contracts based on how much water is available. This year, as the state’s megadrought drags into its third year, the government said it had no water to give farmers.

Produce coming from Mexico, stalled at the border for days, has gotten more expensive at a time of year when the United States still relies heavily on imports.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/04/21/food-prices-inflation-surge/

Solutions to super-spreading

If we improve the way we clean our indoor air, we could hinder lots of diseases.

At every stage of the pandemic, a disproportionate number of coronavirus infections have been traced to a relatively small number of gatherings, also known as superspreader events. The recent Gridiron dinner, after which over 70 people tested positive, including members of the Biden administration, is just the latest example.

There’s a better way to hold indoor events without masks, and it doesn’t rely on vaccines and rapid tests. Vaccinations can prevent the worst possible outcomes of Covid-19 but cannot always prevent infections. Pre-event testing is imperfect, and for it to be most effective, people need to test right before entering an event.

Putting this much of the onus of infection control on individuals is unlikely to work well to prevent superspreading and lets hosts of large events off the hook for keeping their attendees, workers and others safe. Instead, there are ways that building owners can make indoor environments safer by disinfecting indoor air. One of the best technologies to do so — germicidal ultraviolet light — has been studied for decades and can now be used safely.

The risk of catching diseases transmitted through the air like Covid, measles, tuberculosis and likely many other respiratory infections, including the flu, depends in large part on the amount of infectious viruses — or bacteria in the case of TB — in the air we breathe. The number of these germs in indoor air is controlled by two things: the rate at which infected people in a room exhale germs and the rate at which infectious germs are removed from the air.

Ventilation and filtration can remove germs floating indoors either by blowing them out of the building and replacing the air with fresh outdoor air or by capturing them while moving the indoor air through a filter. At two air changes per hour, which is commonly provided in large buildings, a little more than half of the existing germs are removed every 30 minutes. At six air changes per hour, which is common in hospital rooms and classrooms with multiple portable HEPA air filters, a little more than half of the germs are removed every 10 minutes.

That’s where air disinfection with germicidal ultraviolet light, or GUV, comes in.

GUV can easily and silently kill half of the germs floating in indoor air every two minutes or less. It was developed and tested beginning in the 1930s using some of the same technology in fluorescent light fixtures. It is still commonly used in TB wards, as well as some major hospital systems and homeless shelters.

The conventional GUV technology could cause temporary eye irritation and therefore is mounted above people’s heads in rooms with ceilings around nine feet or higher. It is also best used alongside ceiling fans to make sure germs in a room are blown up into the zone where the GUV can render them harmless.

Newer, commercially available GUV technologies are even safer for skin and do not irritate the eyes. They can be used safely at lower areas of a room and can directly disinfect the air between people sitting at a dinner table.

A major barrier to wider use is that GUV technologies need to be expertly installed and require a set of technical skills different from what’s needed to improve a building’s ventilation and filtration systems (both of which are still critically important). The initial costs for equipment and installation of a highly effective GUV system can often be lower than upgrading or replacing ventilation systems. GUV also disinfects the air faster and with far less electricity than ventilation and filtration, which means it’s a climate-friendly solution for high-risk environments.

Kindness and Well-being Chemical

Can the levels of well-being and kindness be driven by the level of oxytocin in the brain?

The findings revealed older adults released more oxytocin in response to watching the video compared to younger subjects. And those older adults with higher levels of oxytocin generally reported greater degrees of life satisfaction.

“People who released the most oxytocin in the experiment were not only more generous to charity, but also performed many other helping behaviors,” said Zak. “This is the first time a distinct change in oxytocin has been related to past prosocial behaviors.”

The study was not able to establish a direct causal link between oxytocin and generous behavior. Instead, the researchers hypothesize oxytocin plays more of a bi-directional role in the positive feedback loop between empathetic behavior and chemically-enhanced feelings of life satisfaction.

According to Zak this oxytocin-enhanced feedback loop most likely plays a role in the consistently observed link between charitable religious behavior and increased life satisfaction. Helping others tends to make you feel good by triggering the release of oxytocin, which then enhances sensations of empathy leading to more prosocial behaviors.

Recycling Plastics

 Start with a plastic-eating bacterium, add a little chemistry artificial intelligence and you get an enzyme that can decompose PET plastics back to monomers that can be use to rebuild new plastics. That's what I call recycling. Landfills may be mined in the future for feed stock. What could it mean if plastics become fully renewable?

the team developed a machine learning model that could predict which mutations in a PETase enzyme would afford it these capabilities. This involved closely studying a range of PET plastic products, including containers, water bottles and fabrics, and then using the model to design and engineer a new and improved enzyme dubbed FAST-PETase (functional, active, stable and tolerant PETase).

With the ability to quickly break down post-consumer plastic waste at low temperatures, the researchers believe they have landed on a technique that is portable, affordable and able to be adopted on an industrial scale. They have filed a patent for the technology and hope to see it put to use in landfills and polluted areas.

“The possibilities are endless across industries to leverage this leading-edge recycling process,” said Alper. “Beyond the obvious waste management industry, this also provides corporations from every sector the opportunity to take a lead in recycling their products. Through these more sustainable enzyme approaches, we can begin to envision a true circular plastics economy.”

Good Law Isn't Easy

The Florida law supposedly banning any discussion about sexual minorities is so vague that opponents will use it to sue people who talk about sexual majorities as well.

“If a teacher can’t assign a story about a young girl who comes home after school to her two mommies,” Matz told me, “that teacher also can’t assign a book about a young girl who comes home to her mommy and daddy.” Taking the law at face value, Matz said, both “equally instruct” on “sexual orientation.”

Such actions from the left might be rooted in a desire to lay bare the law’s actual intent. If the law’s sponsors object to such actions while supporting ones brought against invocation of LGBT matters, doesn’t that give away the game?

Morality in War

The Russian invasion shows what war looks like when coupled with crazy rightwing philosophies. Do any of these themes sound familiar?

Right-wingers have long claimed that the U.S. military should not be hobbled by humanitarian considerations or even the laws of war.

More recently, former president Donald Trump has been an enthusiastic advocate for war crimes: He endorsed torture, vowed to “bomb the s--- out” of terrorists, suggested killing terrorists’ families and said that the United States should steal Iraq’s oil. Trump did not order the U.S. military to carry out war crimes — the military would never have done so — but he did pardon members of the military accused of war crimes. Since Trump left office, Republicans have been loudly complaining that the U.S. military has become so “woke” that it can’t win wars.

By right-wing lights, Russia should have the world’s greatest army. The Russian military, after all, is as illiberal, or “un-woke,” as it is possible to get.

In Ukraine, the Russian military is deliberately targeting civilians with artillery, air and missile strikes and summary execution, torture and rape. The Russian strategy is to raze any towns that refuse to surrender. When the Russians take over towns, they launch a reign of terror. My Post colleagues report that investigators in Bucha have “uncovered evidence of torture before death, beheading and dismemberment, and the intentional burning of corpses.”

The Russian soldiers are even following Trump’s advice to make war pay for itself. They have not been taking Ukraine’s oil because it’s still underground, but they have been avidly looting anything they can get their hands on, from washing machines to flat-screen TVs. Naturally, they have been helping themselves to whatever liquor they find.

The Russian high command has as little regard for its own soldiers as it does for civilians who are in their path. Rest assured, Republicans, there is no “diversity training” in the Russian ranks. There is, instead, brutal hazing of conscripts that includes “robbery, torture, and sexual assault.” In 2019, a Russian private was so badly abused that he snapped and killed eight fellow soldiers. The Russian army also deals with simmering tensions between ethnic Russians and other ethnic groups, particularly from the Caucasus, who form gangs that prey on fellow service members.

Yet, despite the Russian army’s lack of wokeness and its proclivity for war crimes, it is not, in fact, a capable military force. Although Russia has a much larger and better-funded military than Ukraine, its combat performance has been abysmal. The war is not yet over, but, as the Associated Press noted, “Russia’s failure to take Kyiv was a defeat for the ages.”

How do you explain this, Republicans?

The brutalization of Russian soldiers, combined with the corruption of their officers, detracts from unit cohesion and therefore from combat performance. No doubt the abuse inflicted on Russian soldiers by their comrades makes them more willing to abuse civilians, but this, too, undercuts the professionalism of the Russian military.

Soldiers engaged in rape, looting and murder are distracted from their primary task, which is to close with, and destroy, the armed forces of the enemy. There is a reason Viking-style marauders gave way long ago to professional, disciplined armies obedient to the chain of command and bound by the laws of wars. It’s not just because disciplined armies are more humane; it’s also because they are more militarily effective.

Professional armed forces, such as the U.S. military, occasionally commit abuses, but they try to limit “collateral damage” to the extent possible not just because that is what international law demands but also because that is what military success requires. The Russians in Ukraine are learning what the Soviets learned in Afghanistan and the Nazis in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union: Indiscriminate violence simply generates more domestic and international opposition, thereby creating more enemies than you eliminate.

So spare me the caterwauling about the “woke” U.S. military. The U.S. military’s “wokeness” — its commitment to the humane treatment of soldiers and civilians alike — is actually a major source of strength.

Organ rejuvenation in mice

Scientists have observed signs of rejuvenation in the pancreas, liver, spleen, and blood of mice after applying one cycle of cell reprogramming 

All tissues in our bodies are characterised by having highly specialised cells, such as neurons or muscle cells, among many others. The identity of these cells was considered fixed and inflexible until the Japanese researcher Shinya Yamanaka found a way to alter their identity (that is to say, "reprogram them") by introducing high levels of four proteins, called the "Yamanaka factors" (OCT4, SOX2, KLF4 and MYC), into them. Although these proteins can be found in some of our cells, it is the simultaneous presence of high levels of all four that can alter cell identity.

This rejuvenation technique allows something previously unimaginable, namely taking cells that are easy to obtain from a patient (such as skin cells) and converting them into others that are difficult or impossible to collect, for example, heart cells or neurons, which can then be used for cell therapy applications.

To their surprise, Dr. Izpisúa-Belmonte´s team observed that when this partial and reversible reprogramming process was repeated over multiple cycles, it resulted in the cellular rejuvenation of the whole organism, making the mice healthier and better protected to a variety of diseases.

In this latest study, published in the journal Aging Cell, the researchers have examined the effects of a single cycle of Yamanaka factor stimulation in order to better define the mechanisms involved. To this end, they have probed the changes in metabolism, gene expression and cellular DNA status that occur during ageing and how these changes are partially reversed by reprogramming.

Saved by the law

The Texas woman who was jailed for a self-induced abortion had the charges dropped. It seems there's a law on the books that applies.

Steve Vladeck, a University of Texas law professor, told Texas Public Radio that a murder charge against Herrera did not make sense based on the case’s murky information.

“The Texas murder statute does apply to the killing of an unborn fetus, but it specifically exempts cases where the person who terminated the fetus is the pregnant woman,” he said.

Pistol Shrimp meets Nuclear Fusion

Using shockwave techniques inspired by the pistol shrimp, a new fusion startup has demonstrated a practical way to produce nuclear fusion.

This technique, says First Light, is inspired by the pistol shrimp, and its famous underwater bubble-shooting weapon. These little fellas snap their claws together at incredible speed, creating a shockwave and squirting a jet of water forward at up to 60 mph (96 km/h). That's so fast that the water itself gets vaporized as it shears against the still water around it, creating tiny bubble cavities. The bubble cavities interact with the shockwave, and collapse in an infinitesimally short period of time – but for the briefest of moments, the vapor in those bubbles is heated to tens of thousands of degrees, and even emits a bright flash of light.

irst Light took this as a starting point and began designing ways to amplify this effect well beyond what the shrimp's claw can achieve, to a point where it can create fusion-friendly conditions. It has created and refined a series of small targets, some in cubic form with sides of about 1 cm (0.4 inches) that are designed to create a series of interacting shockwaves and bubble cavities when they're hit with coin-shaped projectiles at super-high velocities. These shockwaves intersect at planned moments to supercharge the pistol shrimp's cavitation effects, greatly multiplying the pressure around a small, precisely positioned fuel pellet in the middle.

The target design uses interacting cavity collapses and pressure waves to amplify that pressure up to around one terapascal, and when the fuel pellet implodes just as massive pressure waves bear down on it from all sides, the final pressure can get as high as 100 terapascals, with the fuel accelerating to more than 70 km/sec (252,000 km/h, 157,000 mph), or Mach 204, as it implodes.

At this instant, says First Light, the fuel becomes the fastest-moving object on Earth, and the pressure and temperature that fuel pellet generates as it's compressed from several millimeters down to less than 100 microns is enough to trigger fusion reactions. These release impressive amounts of heat energy and neutrons, which are absorbed by 1-meter-thick (3.3-ft) curtains of liquid lithium metal flowing within the chamber.

As the pellet splashes down into a pool of liquid lithium, a heat exchanger transfers the heat to water, generating steam that turns a turbine and produces electricity in the final commercial reactor design.

Each target, says First Light, would produce enough energy to power an average UK home for two years. According to Energy UK, that equates to about 6.2 megawatt-hours. In a commercial power plant, this would happen once every 30 seconds, giving the plant an effective output around 744 MW – a little under the 1 GW of the average US nuclear fission plant, but without any nuclear waste or potential of meltdown.

The company says this relatively simple technique (well, certainly simple when compared to tokamak and stellarator designs) "offers a pathway to a very competitive Levelised Cost Of Energy ("LCOE") of under US$50/MWh." That's only a little pricier than the LCOE of current solar and wind energy – but of course it can be produced on demand, making it an excellent base load generator for a power grid, or a good option to ramp up and down to keep up with the demand curve.

Destroying Public Education

The aroma has been around but now the quiet part has been said out loud. All the activism around charter schools and CRT is part of an effort to destroy public education.

Hillsdale has inconspicuously been building a network of "classical education" charter schools, which use public tax dollars to teach that the U.S. was founded on "Judeo-Christian" principles and that progressivism is fundamentally anti-American. In January, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee announced plans to partner with Hillsdale to launch as many as 50 such schools, which public education advocates fear could be a tipping point in the privatization battle.

n this three-part series, Salon looks at Hillsdale's multifaceted and far-reaching role in shaping and disseminating the ideas and strategies that power the right. In our first installment, we met Hillsdale president Larry Arnn, a Winston Churchill scholar who led Trump's short-lived 1776 Commission and has used his connections to right-wing thought leaders like Ginni Thomas and Betsy DeVos to turn his school into a political powerhouse. In the second installment, we explored the curriculum taught at Hillsdale and widely promoted through its national network of charter schools, which is informed by a deeply conservative understanding of American history, an "originalist" reading of the U.S. Constitution and an explicit desire to undo progressive educational reforms of the last 100 years.

The Orange County Classical Academy (OCCA), part of Hillsdale College's Barney Charter School Initiative, opened its doors in August 2020 with a combative flair. The school flew a pro-police "Thin Blue Line" flag and announced its adoption of a sex-ed curriculum "designed to support parent authority and family values," which, an ACLU review has found, includes the suggestion that LGBTQ students may outgrow their orientations or identities, and that women who have abortions are "destroying" themselves. While other school districts around the country stressed over masking or whether to open in person at all, OCCA advertised its complete lack of pandemic restrictions.

Pure Callousness

States With Strictest Abortion Laws Are Hardest Places To Raise Children

States with some of the nation’s strictest abortion laws are also some of the hardest places to have and raise a healthy child, especially for the poor, according to an analysis of federal data by The Associated Press.

The findings raise questions about the strength of the social safety net as those states are poised to further restrict or even ban abortion access following an expected U.S. Supreme Court decision later this year. The burden is likely to fall heaviest on those with low incomes, who also are the least able to seek an abortion in another state where the procedure remains widely available.

If Roe is overturned, 26 states are certain or likely to quickly ban abortion, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a think tank that supports abortion rights. Many of those states ranked poorly in measurements that nonpartisan advocacy groups consider key to ensuring children get a healthy start.

The AP analyzed figures from several federal government agencies in seven categories — metrics identified by several nonprofits and experts as essential to determining whether children get a healthy start.

Generally, states that had passed preemptive abortion bans or laws that greatly restrict access to abortion had the worst rankings. Alabama and Louisiana joined Mississippi as the top three states with the highest percentage of babies born with low birth weights. Texas, Indiana and Mississippi had the highest percentage of women receiving no prenatal care during their first trimester.

Abortion restrictions and troubling economic data aren’t directly linked, but finances are a major reason why women seek abortions, according to research by Diana Greene Foster, a professor of reproductive science at the University of California, San Francisco.

Children born to women who were denied an abortion are more likely to live in a household where there isn’t enough money for basic living expenses, her work has found.

 

USPS fixed

President Joe Biden signed the Postal Service Reform Act of 2022 into law on Wednesday, providing the agency with a much-needed financial overhaul.

The Postal Service has remained fiscally underwater due to legislation passed decades ago limiting how it spends its money and what services it could offer. The USPS reform bill will give the agency that flexibility back.

The bill easily passed Congress with rare bipartisan support, receiving a 79-19 vote in the Senate on Tuesday evening, after the House passed it last month in a 342-92 vote. 

Under the law, the mandate that required the Postal Service to pay into future retiree health benefits will be dropped. Instead, retired postal employees will be required to enroll in Medicare. 

In addition, the USPS must maintain a public dashboard tracking service performance and will report regularly on its "operations and financial condition," according to a summary of the bill. It will also be able to create "non-postal services" in partnership with state and local government, like fishing licenses and subway passes, McConnell said.

"This bill, which has been 15 years in the making, will finally help the Postal Service overcome burdensome requirements that threaten their ability to provide reliable service to the American people,” Peters, a Democrat, said in a March 8 statement.  

Regime Change

 How does Russia get rid of Putin?

Efforts to depose Putin would require either active or passive support from three key organizations — the military, the FSB (successor to the KGB) and the National Guard (“Rosgvardiya”). Putin has firm allies in place in all of these institutions. FSB Chief Aleksandr Bortnikov belongs to Putin’s Leningrad/St. Petersburg clan of former KGB officers and is a direct protege of Putin and National Security Council chief Nikolai Patrushev, who Bortnikov replaced as FSB chief in 2008. The FSB has its own special troops and a vast network of counterintelligence officers to watch over the military.

Although Putin seems to have his bases covered, the fates of Beria and Khrushchev have shown that loyalties can shift when the Kremlin is in crisis. Bortnikov could conceivably become another Semichastny and switch camps to save his own skin. Even Shoigu and Zolotov, faced with a coalition of Putin’s opponents, might consider jumping ship, just as Beria’s lieutenants did. But one thing seems certain: Any coup attempt against Putin would probably be the most perilous, high-risk operation in Kremlin history.

Safe Spaces

A conservative acknowledges that sometimes safe spaces trump free speech. 

There is now little doubt that students frequently bite their tongues because they feel unsafe. A 2021 survey of more than 37,000 college students — by far the largest on free expression to date — found that more than 80 percent of students censor their own viewpoints at least some of the time, while roughly one in five students regularly do so. Only 40 percent of students say that they are comfortable openly disagreeing with their professors.

While robust defenses of free expression and debate, like the “Chicago Principles” — a widely adopted statement developed at the University of Chicago in 2014 — are important, they do little to soften the climate of fear that has gripped our campuses. This is because such statements of abstract principle — like the liberal tradition from which they spring — neglect the concrete social norms necessary to facilitate and regulate the collective search for truth in college classrooms.

All of us who teach controversial subjects are struggling to identify and cultivate these norms, especially as our students have become more anxious in the age of cancel culture. For example, when I first taught a course on policing in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, some of my students lobbied for a version of the “Vegas rule” since they worried about their comments spilling out into social media land. So, I told them: “What happens in Government 137B, stays in Government 137B.”

I have little doubt that our “Vegas rule” allowed them to express perspectives that ranged from support for abolishing the police to center-right endorsements of the status quo. As soon as I announced it, in fact, one student let out an audible sigh of relief. But I have to confess that in asking students to maintain our classroom as a place of private deliberation I am asking them to keep quiet — and all in the name of open and free expression.

Labor Unions Emergent

Recent unionization victories at places like Amazon don't come from the legacy union people. The wave of labor organization in the future is independent worker organization.

Amazon fought to beat back the unionization effort, and the victory against one of the country’s largest private employers could provide a new playbook for workers that are trying to reverse a historic trend away from union rights. And while Amazon confronts this new reality, other companies are dealing with restless workers, including railroad engineers, coal miners, baristas, nurses and teachers.

Some of these union drives aren’t being driven by Washington-led progressive groups. Instead, they are being launched by upstart, worker-led campaigns that effectively ambush large companies still relying on old-model, anti-union strategies.

“We did whatever it took to connect with those workers to make their daily lives just a little bit easier, a little bit less stressful,” said Chris Smalls, a former Amazon employee who led the Staten Island grass-roots effort funded by a GoFundMe account.

The Staten Island victory and recent successes at six Starbucks coffee shops in Buffalo were each accomplished by worker-led unions independent of the labor movement’s legacy organizations. Recruitment campaigns were deeply personal, with workers attracting colleagues one by one and including discussions about civil rights and environmental justice, not just wages and working conditions, strategies that national leaders say could be key to the future of the labor movement.

“If you think of unions as just for a certain industry or sector from the ‘old economy,’ that’s not the case. It’s an outdated view of what unions are,” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said in an interview. “Unions are what you want them to be. The workers themselves define it, and I’m seeing all kinds of innovative examples of unions being used to negotiate their companies carbon footprint, and workers in some of these new ‘emerging industries’ are facing the same working conditions and challenges around securing predictable schedules and decent pay and benefits as workers in the traditional economy.”

Workers are wielding new leverage as the economy emerges from pandemic conditions with fewer workers, making employers more desperate for talent. Nearly 8 million workers left the labor force since the start of the pandemic, and almost 4 million workers have quit their jobs each of the last six months, according to federal workforce statistics, in a phenomenon known as the Great Resignation. It’s led to a boost in wages as employers compete for staff; wages have risen 5.6 percent in the past year, although 7.9 percent inflation has eaten away at much of those gains.

“Amazon, like Google and others in tech, relies on a split workforce that is extractive and damaging to all workers — Amazon’s warehouse workers, who do the bulk of the work propping up the company, get a fraction of the pay and benefits given to software engineers and others,” said Parul Koul, a software engineer at Google and executive chair of the Alphabet Workers Union.

There’s also renewed energy for unionization in the health-care industry, as grueling conditions and long hours during the pandemic have pushed more workers to seek out better protections and working conditions. Tens of thousands of health-care workers at Kaiser Permanente threatened to strike in 2021 over the company’s plans to introduce a system where newer employees would get less pay and benefits.

“In the short term there will probably be more organizing efforts at Amazon facilities throughout the country,” Sanders told The Post. “And more broadly it shows that working people are disgusted with the reality that corporate profits are soaring, and the billionaire classes are getting much richer, while working people struggle to meet their basic needs.”