U.S. proposes 100 new nuclear power plants

Business appears to be looking up.

The United States needs to add about 100 nuclear power plants over the next two decades to meet burgeoning demand for electric power and maintain the current generating mix, Nils J. Diaz, chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission told reporters Tuesday.

Creation of Black Hole Detected

Two neutron stars merged and set off a characteristic gamma ray burst. 2.2 billion years ago for us to see today.

Pheromone attracts straight women and gay men

Another indication that homosexuality is biological. The brain structure is different.

But brain structure is not static and permanently fixed. Psychological trauma such as combat can alter brain structure sufficiently that PTSD can be diagnosed from a CAT scan.

Another Statistical Oddity

From Kevin Drum.

The results are simple: Democratic presidents have consistently higher economic growth and consistently lower unemployment than Republican presidents. If you add in a time lag, you get the same result. If you eliminate the best and worst presidents, you get the same result. If you take a look at other economic indicators, you get the same result. There's just no way around it: Democratic administrations are better for the economy than Republican administrations.

Webby Awards

Guess who's receiving a Webby Award!

Setting the record straight on one of recent history's most persistent political myths, The Webby Awards will present Former Vice President Al Gore with The Webby Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of the pivotal role he has played in the development of the internet over the past three decades. Vint Cerf, widely credited as one of the "fathers of the internet," will present Vice President Gore with the award.

Not much of a consolation for all the distortions in the political campaign, though. Makes one wonder how much better off we might all be today if that particular distortion had been omitted and replaced by the truth.

Here's a transcript of the remarks that started it all.

Plan B: Ignore the Science?

As with most things in public debate today, the facts about Plan B get short shrift. The western Taliban describe it as an abortion pill. Actually it is nothing more than emergency contraception. The distinction is real.

The hidden oil demand in China

It's not the new cars in China that are driving the growing demand for petroleum demand and the pollution problem. It's the diesel mules. China fields three of these little beasties to every car it makes.

Spontaneous Ignition

This could be one of those seminal breakthroughs that will someday change everything. Catalysts at a nano-scale can start and sustain combustion at near room temperature with an efficiency better than a fuel cell.

Room temperature combustion is not unknown since that is how life forms get their energy. It's pretty efficient, too. Just think about how hard it is to work off the energy one derives from a single doughnut.

FDA uses bad science

Only the conservative homophobes and other genuinely misinformed folks still believe that HIV is a gay disease. So why is the FDA setting rules that prohibit gays from donating sperm for fear of HIV contamination? What kind of people are running that outfit?

We are really going to miss the unions...

after they are destroyed.:

"But the right wing never rests, and for any of my liberal readers who harbor suspicion of labor unions as an 'old' liberal cause — just another one of those special interest groups that Democrats are always pandering to — ask yourself this: why are conservatives so hellbent on breaking them? Why did Ronald Reagan fire those air traffic controllers in 1981? Why did George Bush make union busting a key issue in the 2002 midterm election? Why the relentless opposition to using card checks to organize workers in new industries? Why the continuing demonization of unions from a party that's otherwise so conscientious about building its appeal to the working and middle classes?

It's because unions are the only truly effective check on the sine qua non of modern conservatism: corporate power. For all their faults — and they have plenty, just as corporations do — unions are the only organizations that have the power to bargain effectively for the interests of the middle class. Union power in the private sector began to wane in the 1970s, and it's not a coincidence that this was exactly the same time that middle class wages began to stagnate, CEO pay began to skyrocket, and income inequality began increasing inexorably."

Some Religions are less equal than others

If you are not Judaeo-Christian don't expect equal treatment in America's courts. This time the other side looks like it is playing fast and loose with the Constitution.

Interest-Group Conservatism

Jacob Weisberg:

"Today the dominant conservative interests form a rival constellation: corporations, especially in the energy and military contracting sectors, evangelical Christians, wealthy investors, gun owners, and the conservative media. In the daily business of Washington, the old pattern remains in place, only with the substitution of these new supplicants and their new benefactors in the GOP. As in the old days, lobbyists work the halls of Congress and the regulatory agencies, functioning like carpenter ants to build a federal government ever bigger in size and more intrusive in scope.

True, the clients, patrons, and causes are different. Instead of the Children's Defense Fund pushing to fully fund Head Start, we now have church-affiliated social service agencies lobbying to have faith-based drug treatment funded by HHS. Instead of Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts promoting a hate-crimes bill endorsed by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, it's Sen. Wayne Allard of Colorado introducing a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage on behalf of James Dobson's Focus on the Family. Instead of the Environmental Protection Agency proposing higher air-quality standards, it's the Federal Communications Commission levying fines and threatening broadcast licenses on the basis of profanity and indecency."

DeLay's shadow fades

The Hammer used to cast such a shadow in Congress than none dare cross him. But Republican Congressmen are recovering their spines and showing that they CAN do the right thing from time to time. Maybe there's reason to hope that there will be some integrity in the DeLay ethics investigation. Homeboy Doc Hastings is pleased to see 2 Ethics Committee congressmen who are close to DeLay recuse themselves. They are recent appointees to the committee who replaced congressmen who have been critical of the Hammer.

A convergence of phenomena

Fashion, fads, tipping points, and magnetism may all be explanable and quantifiable by similar equations. Fascinating.

Flying circles around the helicopter

This is pretty cool. It seems that if an airplane pays out a tether and flies in a tight circle the tether will assume a vertical configuration allowing it to be raised and lowered just like a helicopter.

"The system could find many uses. As well as rescue and military operations, a commercial cable system would allow light planes or even pilotless aircraft to retrieve or deliver packages almost anywhere. Remote settlements and scientific bases could receive vital supplies without the need for an airstrip or the risks associated with parachute drops. Payloads could include fragile items such as scientific specimens, medical supplies or living creatures.

Trivailo believes the technology has a more urgent application in firefighting. Wildfires have become more severe in recent years but many of the US fire service's water tankers are due for retirement. Trivailo's cable system could help take the pressure off, since it would allow almost any large aircraft to collect water and spray it from the air or deliver it to remote sites without the need to land."

New Prospects for High Sulfur Coal

Advances in combustion methods permit the burning of nasty coal with dramatically fewer emissions.

"Circulating fluidized bed combustors are relatively new to the electric power industry. They promise lower capital costs, lower pollution-control costs, better pollution control, fuel flexibility and higher combustion efficiency. Those qualities translate into moderate electricity costs for consumers.

While conventional coal-fired plants required expensive add-ons to clean pollutants from flue gases after combustion, fluidized-bed technology captures most of them inside the boiler during combustion."

What the Pre-War Intelligence Reports Do Tell Us

Ken Sanders compares what the President (hswib) knew from the (imperfect) intelligence and what he actually said.

"On no fewer than four separate occasions, Bush flat-out lied about Iraq's nuclear capabilities. Bush took already exaggerated estimations about Iraq's alleged nuclear threat to the U.S. and stretched them even further. The intelligence community, as wrong and as biased as it might have been, told Bush that as of 2002 Iraq was at least five to seven years away from developing a nuclear weapon. Bush looked at that information, deemed it insufficient to scare the nation into supporting his war, and then knowingly and deliberately lied about America's vulnerability to Iraq's nuclear terror."

To The Troops

I have been noting to myself the many parallels between the Vietnam and Iraq wars and wondering how to express it in a blog entry. In the news all the tough news about the fighting was mixed with batches of official optimism, just as we see today. We have come far enough from that experience that these nuances are now lost on a population that is too young to remember. Bernard Weiner expresses some of what I have been thinking.

"In this, and in so many other ways, Iraq resembles Vietnam. It took a good share of a decade until the citizenry at home and the troops on the ground in 'Nam came to realize and admit that their government had taken them into an immoral and unwinnable war. They began to organize to oppose that war and negotiate a face-saving way out. In the end, the guerrillas won and the U.S. exited hastily, a much embarrassed superpower.

There are signs that the opposition to this war is developing further, faster, both inside the U.S. and in Iraq. Desertion rates are way up, fewer troops (especially among the overused and abused Reserves and National Guard forces sent to Iraq) are re-upping, military recruitment is way down, support for the war is falling rapidly in the polls, even many conservatives and military personnel think we're engaged in the wrong war at the wrong time in the wrong place.

Nobody wants to die for a mistake (or for a bad policy decision), but until the U.S. finds a quick way out of Iraq, that's the position you and your buddies are placed in over there. Granted, you signed up for the military and thus have even less leverage than draftees in terms of opposing the war. But know that your fellow citizens at home pay great attention to what the troops on the ground say and do. (Just one soldier asking Rumsfeld why the grunts weren't receiving proper body armor had a great impact.)"

Update: The party line on the right is that soldiers by and large are content with or even support the actions of the current administration (hswib). As a counter to that hypothesis Yahoo! News reports that recruitment targets are not being met across the board. It could be that the targets are not realistic or it could be... that the unpopularity of the Iraq War is showing in diminished recruitments.

It's Official

They went in on false causes and ignored planning for the aftermath. In the minutes of a confidential briefing Tim Dunlop sees what the Bush (hswib) is still trying to put the lie to today.

"Overall, though, I think the most revealing aspects are the fact that 'the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy' and that 'There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.' Combine these two factors and you end up with a recipe for precisely the sort of instability and insurgency that even in the last few days, two years after the invasion, has been responsible for coordinated attacks and three-figure death tolls."

A New and Effective Secret Weapon

As an administration that has often come off sounding clueless and mean-spirited, they may have found a new media tactic in the form of Laura Bush. She stole the show in a sendup of her husband and family at a recent dinner. By deflating the pomposity around her she has the potential to put a likeable face on this presidency (hswib).