Your favorite First Lady

 I recently got into a debate on another forum about which First Lady had been the bestest. Believe it or not, some (and you can guess their demographic) argued it was Melania but definitely not Michelle.

Sad but true.

That aside, many polls have shown that Eleanor was the most popular and bestest. Some liked Jackie or go back further and have selected Lady Bird. 

https://elections-daily.com/2022/09/21/ranking-the-first-ladies/

So, for a change of pace on here, list your faves. Michelle is mine. I admired Laura as well. Ditto for Roselynn. Not crazy about Melania, Hillary, or even Jackie for that matter. Too young to have an opinion about the more historic ladies. 

And I definitely like our current First Lady.

Your turn.

News bits: About inflation: AI experts warn about AI; From Christian nationalism wars

The NYT writes about inflation:

The prices of oil, transportation, food ingredients and other raw materials have fallen in recent months as the shocks stemming from the pandemic and the war in Ukraine have faded. Yet many big businesses have continued raising prices at a rapid clip.

Some of the world’s biggest companies have said they do not plan to change course and will continue increasing prices or keep them at elevated levels for the foreseeable future.

That strategy has cushioned corporate profits. And it could keep inflation robust, contributing to the very pressures used to justify surging prices.  

PepsiCo, the snacks and beverage maker, has become a prime example of how large corporations have countered increased costs, and then some.

Hugh Johnston, the company’s chief financial officer, said in February that PepsiCo had raised its prices by enough to buffer further cost pressures in 2023. At the end of April, the company reported that it had raised the average price across its products by 16 percent in the first three months of the year. That added to a similar size price increase in the fourth quarter of 2022 and increased its profit margin.

“I don’t think our margins are going to deteriorate at all,” Mr. Johnston said in a recent interview with Bloomberg TV. “In fact, what we’ve said for the year is we’ll be at least even with 2022, and may in fact increase margins during the course of the year.”

The bags of Doritos, cartons of Tropicana orange juice and bottles of Gatorade drinks sold by PepsiCo are now substantially pricier. Customers have grumbled, but they have largely kept buying. Shareholders have cheered. PepsiCo declined to comment [the good 'ole KYMS tactic].  

For much of the past two years, most companies “had a perfectly good excuse to go ahead and raise prices,” said Samuel Rines, an economist and the managing director of Corbu, a research firm that serves hedge funds and other investors. “Everybody knew that the war in Ukraine was inflationary, that grain prices were going up, blah, blah, blah. And they just took advantage of that.”

But those go-to rationales for elevating prices, he added, are now receding [hence the need for the KYMS tactic].

KYMS = keep your mouth shut; a common tactic in politics, commerce and religion to deal (or refuse to deal) with inconvenient facts, true truths and/or sound reasoning 

So when one experiences radical right Republicans ignoring major causes of inflation and instead blaming socialist Democrats, evil Joe Biden and pandemic spending for inflation, one can rest assured that the allegation is standard radical right lies, slanders and irrational nonsense. Corporations know two things for certain about the radical right. One, the radical right in congress will ferociously defend big corporate interests. Two, bad corporate behavior will be ferociously ignored, denied and/or rationalized. After all, corporations bought and paid for those precious defenses. That's just called free speech in action.

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The NYT reports that some prominent experts in artificial intelligence will release a 1-sentence long open letter warning about AI. The warning is short to keep the core message from being diluted with details:

A group of industry leaders is planning to warn on Tuesday that the artificial intelligence technology they are building may one day pose an existential threat to humanity and should be considered a societal risk on par with pandemics and nuclear wars.

“Mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war,” reads a one-sentence statement expected to be released by the Center for AI Safety, a nonprofit organization. The open letter has been signed by more than 350 executives, researchers and engineers working in A.I.

The signatories included top executives from three of the leading A.I. companies: Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI; Demis Hassabis, chief executive of Google DeepMind; and Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic.

Well, now that we have been properly warned everything will be just fine. Or maybe not. We all know how this is going to play out before we get to see if AI will make us go extinct or not.

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Tales from the brutal land of cynical Christian nationalism (CN): The WaPo writes about some brave parents who decided to send their child to public school. This illustrates how years of vicious, slandering CN propaganda has cynically trapped, deceived and betrayed tens of millions of American adults. It takes guts to break away from a cult. Breaking away can come with some very high costs. The WaPo writes:

Aaron and Christina Beall had never attended school when they were children. Until a few days earlier, when Round Hill Elementary held a back-to-school open house, they had rarely set foot inside a school building. Both had been raised to believe that public schools were tools of a demonic social order, government “indoctrination camps” devoted to the propagation of lies and the subversion of Christian families.

At a time when home education was still a fringe phenomenon, the Bealls had grown up in the most powerful and ideologically committed faction of the modern home-schooling movement. That movement, led by deeply conservative Christians, saw home schooling as a way of life — a conscious rejection of contemporary ideas about biology, history, gender equality and the role of religion in American government.

Christina and Aaron were supposed to advance the banner of that movement, instilling its codes in their children through the same forms of corporal punishment once inflicted upon them. Yet instead, along with many others of their age and upbringing, they had walked away.

Aaron and Christina Beall pose with their daughter, Aimee, then 6, 

on her first day at Round Hill Elementary School in VA on Aug. 26, 2021

Like all rebellions, this one had come with consequences. Their decision to send Aimee to the neighborhood elementary school — a test run to see how it might work for their other kids — had contributed to a bitter rift with their own parents, who couldn’t understand their embrace of an education system they had been raised to abhor. And it had led Christina, who until that summer day had home-schooled all of their children, into an existential crisis. 

“I never imagined sending you to the local elementary school instead of learning and growing together at home,” she wrote later that day in an Instagram post addressed to her daughter. “But life has a way of undoing our best laid plans and throwing us curveballs.”

Christina did not describe on Instagram how perplexed she and Aaron had been by a ritual that the other parents seemed to understand; how she had tried, in unwitting defiance of school rules, to accompany Aimee inside, earning a gentle rebuke from the principal.

And she did not describe what happened after their daughter vanished into a building they had been taught no child should ever enter. On that first day of school — first not just for one girl but for two generations of a family — the Bealls walked back to their SUV, and as Aaron started the car, Christina began to cry.  

Through their influence, a practice with roots in the countercultural left took on a very different character. Among conservative Christians, home schooling became a tool for binding children to fundamentalist beliefs they felt were threatened by exposure to other points of view. Rightly educated, those children would grow into what HSLDA [Home School Legal Defense Association] founder Michael Farris called a “Joshua Generation” that would seek the political power and cultural influence to reshape America according to biblical principles.  

Christina, 34, and Aaron, 37, had joined no coalitions. They had published no memoirs. Their rebellion played out in angry text messages and emails with their parents, in tense conversations conducted at the edges of birthday parties and Easter gatherings. Their own children — four of them, including Aimee — knew little of their reasons for abandoning home schooling: the physical and emotional trauma of the “biblical discipline” to which they had been subjected, the regrets over what Aaron called “a life robbed” by strictures on what and how they learned.

Aaron had grown up believing Christians could out-populate atheists and Muslims by scorning birth control; Christina had been taught the Bible-based arithmetic necessary to calculate the age of a universe less than 8,000 years old. Their education was one in which dinosaurs were herded aboard Noah’s ark — and in which the penalty for doubt or disobedience was swift.  

“It’s specifically a system that is set up to hide the abuse. ... At some point, you become so mentally imprisoned you don’t even realize you need help.” — Christina Beall

This raises some serious questions. Who is being indoctrinated or brain washed here? Children brought up under lies, intolerance and hate-filled CN "education", or children who go to secular public schools? Exactly what are the lies and subversion tactics of Christian families that CN elites tell the rank and file comes from public schools? 

Presumably, the hated secular lies and subversion tactics prominently include (i) being woke, (ii) acknowledging and tolerating non-heterosexuality and secularism generally, and (iii) the unpleasant aspects of actual American history, instead of the false, comforting narratives that White CN elites falsely assert are historical facts and truths. On thing that cannot be a guiding biblical principle is thou shalt not lie. CN dogma and narratives are loaded with lies and slanders.

Qs: Is it reasonable to argue that, compared to standard public school curricula, CN dogma, lies and slanders is the main source of damaging indoctrination of false beliefs and bigoted intolerance? 

Exactly what are the biblical principles that the CN movement want to impose by social coercion and force of law on American politics and society? 

Is it reasonable to feel seriously threatened, insulted and/or disrespected at the aggressive attitude that theocratic CN has for secular public education and people who want to live secular lives free of Christian coercion, bigotry, oppression and biblical principles, e.g., in the form of Christian nationalist forced birth laws and tax subsidies (worth tens of billions of dollars each year) for politically aggressive anti-democratic Christian theocracy that everyone supports? 

Channel note: Book review not yet done

I'm working my way through the 2023 book, Spin Dictators: The Changing Face Of Tyranny In The 21st Century. This one hits much harder home about modern tyranny and mass murder than anything I have seen so far. This analysis of tyranny supersedes even the great master analyst of mass scale slaughter and cruelty described in Hannah Arendt's 1951 masterpiece, The Origins of Totalitarianism (chapter review here). Arendt did not, and could not, see what is happening right now. She wrote in the 1950s. Spin Dictators is a 2023 analysis about a mostly unrecognized form of dictatorship, which has existed for millennia.

I've written about Arendt's observations about unspeakably brutal mass slaughter of humans by humans. The closest thing I am aware of to Arendt is the incredibly sad masterpiece by Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Spin Dictators sees reality as beyond modern mass slaughter replaced replaced by mass deception with far fewer corpses and far more popular support. I need a day or two to finish and write a review.

Heart of Darkness was first published in 1899 as 

a three-part serial story in Blackwood's Magazine

I'm all jazzed about Spin Dictators because it opens a line of data and reasoning that is new to me about (i) the human condition and modern mass politics, and (ii) the grave danger to American secular democracy.

Hannah Arendt

Nazi Survivor (1906 – 1975) 

historian and political philosopher

News bits: Artificial intelligence software reads images in brain scans; About inflation; Etc.

Vice writes about AI generated images based on fMRI brain scans:

AI Reconstructs 'High-Quality' Video Directly from Brain Readings in Study

Researchers Jiaxin Qing, Zijiao Chen, and Juan Helen Zhou from the National University of Singapore and The Chinese University of Hong Kong used fMRI data and the text-to-image AI model Stable Diffusion to create a model called MinD-Video that generates video from the brain readings. Their paper describing the work was posted to the arXiv preprint server last week.


Their demonstration on the paper’s corresponding website shows a parallel between videos that were shown to subjects and the AI-generated videos created based on their brain activity. The differences between the two videos are slight and for the most part, contain similar subjects and color palettes.

MinD-Video is defined by the researchers as a “two-module pipeline designed to bridge the gap between image and video brain decoding.” To train the system, the researchers used a publicly available dataset containing videos and fMRI brain readings from test subjects who watched them. The "two-module pipeline" comprised a trained fMRI encoder and a fine-tuned version of Stable Diffusion, a widely-used image generation AI model.

Specifically, they said that these results illuminated three major findings. One is the dominance of the visual cortex, revealing that this part of the brain is a major component of visual perception. Another is that the fMRI encoder operates in a hierarchical fashion, which begins with structural information and then shifts to more abstract and visual features on deeper layers. Finally, the authors found that the fMRI encoder evolved through each learning stage, showing its ability to take on more nuanced information as it continues its training.

This study represents another advancement in the field of, essentially, reading people's minds using AI. Previously, researchers at Osaka University found that they could reconstruct high-resolution images from brain activity with a technique that also used fMRI data and Stable Diffusion.

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A NYT opinion focuses an effect on inflation that huge retailer corporations like Walmart indirectly cause. Economists call this phenomenon the water bed effect. The NYT opines:

To understand why grocery prices are way up, we need to look past the headlines about inflation and reconsider long-held ideas about the benefits of corporate bigness.

Like other independent grocers, Food Fresh buys through large national wholesalers that purchase goods by the truckload, achieving the same volume efficiencies the big chains do. What accounts for the difference in price is not efficiency but raw market power. Major grocery suppliers, including Kraft Heinz, General Mills and Clorox, rely on Walmart for more than 20 percent of their sales. So when Walmart demands special deals, suppliers can’t say no. And as suppliers cut special deals for Walmart and other large chains, they make up for the lost revenue by charging smaller retailers even more, something economists refer to as the water bed effect.

This isn’t competition. It’s big retailers exploiting their financial control over suppliers to hobble smaller competitors. Our failure to put a stop to it has warped our entire food system. It has driven independent grocers out of business and created food deserts. It has spurred consolidation among food processors, which has slashed the share of food dollars going to farmers and created dangerous bottlenecks in the production of meat and other essentials. And in a perverse twist, it has raised food prices for everyone, no matter where you shop.   

A level playing field was long a tenet of U.S. antitrust policy. In the 19th century, Congress barred railroads from favoring some shippers over others. It applied this principle to retailing in 1936 with the Robinson-Patman Act, which mandates that suppliers offer the same terms to all retailers. The act allows large retailers to claim discounts based on actual volume efficiencies but blocks them from extracting deals that aren’t also made available to their competitors.

Independent grocery stores flourished, accounting for more than half of food sales in 1958. Supermarket chains like Safeway and Kroger also thrived. This dynamism fed a broad prosperity. Even the smallest towns and poorest neighborhoods could generally count on having a grocery store. And the industry’s diffuse structure ensured that its fruits were widely distributed. Of the nearly nine million people working in retailing overall in the mid-1950s, nearly two million owned or co-owned the store where they worked. There were more Black-owned grocery stores in 1969 than there are today.

Then, amid the economic chaos and inflation of the late 1970s, the law fell into disfavor with regulators, who had come to believe that allowing large retailers to flex more muscle over suppliers would lower consumer prices. For the most part, the law hasn’t been enforced since. As a top Reagan administration official explained in 1981, antitrust was no longer “concerned with fairness to smaller competitors.”

Once again, we see adverse anti-consumer effects of aggressive brass knuckles capitalist ideology. It explicitly favors big businesses over smaller ones. That ideology is one of the two dominant ideologies in the Republican Party. The same ideology is a non-trivial influence in the mostly neoliberal Democratic Party.

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From the Lost Cause Files: Lawfare writes:

Domestic terrorism charges were absent from the charges brought against those who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021—not because they don’t apply but because they simply don’t exist. In the days that followed the attack, the Congressional Research Service neatly captured the complicated question of how to define the incident and the individuals involved, noting that “an individual may commit criminal acts that are widely considered domestic terrorism and be prosecuted for the criminal acts themselves, but an individual cannot be charged with committing an act of domestic terrorism under current federal law.”  

Although the U.S. Code defines “domestic terrorism” using language laid out in the 2001 Patriot Act, the entry does not carry a criminal penalty, meaning individuals cannot be charged for such acts at the federal level. In rare cases, federal prosecutors are able to request a terrorism enhancement on top of existing convictions, which can lengthen sentences.

Talk about Lost Causes, this is definitely one of 'em. The fascist Republican Party still officially refers to the 1/6 coup attempt as legitimate political discourse. There is roughly a snowball's chance in Hell of any meaningful domestic terrorism law being passed over vehement Republican Party opposition. The GOP has already blocked at least one domestic terrorism bill according to CNN: 

Senate Republicans on Thursday blocked a bill designed to combat domestic terrorism from advancing in a key vote. The vote comes as lawmakers are under intense pressure to take action in the wake of multiple recent episodes of horrific gun violence.

At CPAC in Aug. 2022, the radicalized GOP explicitly

acknowledged it is a domestic terrorist organization

News bits: Tax cuts and the federal debt; Tax code commentary; Etc.

 The Center for American Progress wrote:

Tax Cuts Are Primarily Responsible for the Increasing Debt Ratio

Without the Bush and Trump tax cuts, debt as a percentage of the economy would be declining permanently

The need to increase the debt limit has focused attention on the size and trajectory of the federal debt. Long-term projections show that federal debt as a percentage of the U.S. economy is on a path to grow indefinitely, with increased noninterest spending due to demographic changes such as increasing life expectancy, declining fertility, and decreased immigration and rising health care costs permanently outstripping revenues under projections based on current law. House Republican leaders have used this fact to call for spending cuts, but it does not address the true cause of rising debt: Tax cuts initially enacted during Republican trifectas in the past 25 years slashed taxes disproportionately for the wealthy and profitable corporations, severely reducing federal revenues. In fact, relative to earlier projections, spending is down, not up. But revenues are down significantly more. If not for the Bush tax cuts and their extensions—as well as the Trump tax cuts—revenues would be on track to keep pace with spending indefinitely, and the debt ratio (debt as a percentage of the economy) would be declining. Instead, these tax cuts have added $10 trillion to the debt since their enactment and are responsible for 57 percent of the increase in the debt ratio since 2001, and more than 90 percent of the increase in the debt ratio if the one-time costs of bills responding to COVID-19 and the Great Recession are excluded. Eventually, the tax cuts are projected to grow to more than 100 percent of the increase.

No doubt, nearly all or all radical right Republican elites, propagandists and major donors would vehemently disagree with this analysis if they were aware of it. They blame the Democrats as usual, without regard for contrary facts, also as usual. The question is this: Is this analysis basically correct?

Multiple choice Q: If the CAP analysis is correct, why aren't the Dems constantly pounding on it in their messaging?

A - The Dems are unaware of this analysis

B - The Dems do not believe the analysis

C - The Dems are shockingly incompetent about their messaging

D - The Dems are actually old fashioned horse and sparrow economic nonsense Republicans, not the radical right dictator-loving freaks that dominate the GOP today

I'm leaning toward D, but C seems just as plausible too. Maybe its both C and D about equally.

Democrats too?

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The Peter G. Peterson Foundation comments on the tax code:

INSUFFICIENT REVENUES

It would be one thing if our tax code were designed to fund all the promises we’re making, but it’s not. The U.S. tax system does not generate enough revenues to cover the spending levels promised.

Our tax code is also overly complex, confusing, inefficient, and unfair. For example, it remains riddled with tax expenditures, or “tax breaks,” that provide financial benefits to specific activities, entities, and groups of people. Those tax breaks, which total $1.7 trillion in 2022, increase annual deficits and can create market distortions that are damaging to economic growth and productivity.

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Multiple sources are reporting a deal on the debt bomb has been reached, but it is unclear if enough radical House Republicans will support it. If not, it looks like a debt default is more likely on the horizon than not. One point the WaPo mentioned is this:

Claws back some money for the IRS

Despite sparing domestic programs from cuts, the Biden administration agreed to do so in part by paring back some portion of the $80 billion it approved last year for an expansion of the IRS.

That $80 billion was included in the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s signature economic bill, to help pay for the climate and health-care spending in the measure. While the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said the expansion would increase revenue by $240 billion by allowing the IRS to step up enforcement, conservatives furious with the measure have argued it would unleash tens of thousands of new auditors on Americans. The IRS has said it plans to raise audit rates back to 2011 levels only for wealthy taxpayers.

This is solid evidence of how deeply corrupt the radical right, government and taxes-hating Republican Party has become. The fascists hate government so much that they are willing to protect wealthy tax cheats or default on federal debt. There is nothing democratic or in good will here. This is pure partisan corruption. 

To be crystal clear, corrupt Republican fascists in congress oppose spending $80 billion to get $240 billion in return from criminal tax cheats. Protecting criminals like this is fiscal hypocrisy, insanity and corruption on a gigantic scale.

Also in the WaPo article is this little horror about the proposed debt deal:

Out of the deal: Closing tax loopholes, cutting student debt relief

Negotiators on both sides agreed to drop key demands.

The White House had proposed closing a number of tax loopholes, arguing that any deal to lower the deficit should include increases in federal revenue as well as spending cuts. The GOP ruled those ideas out.

Similarly, House Republicans had fought for repealing some of the clean energy tax credits approved by Democrats last year, as well as stopping the White House’s plan to cancel student loan debt. The Biden administration objected strongly to those proposals, and they fell out of the final deal.

What the Republicans wanted to do was keep tax loopholes for the wealthy open, while opposing energy credits to support doing something about climate change. Clearly, Republican fascists favor deep corruption for elites and special interests. On top of that wonderful ideology, they are also staunchly pro-pollution and anti-climate science want to block efforts to deal with climate change. What an unspeakably morally rotted, fully corrupted political party.

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From the Shocked in Texas Files: Texas House actually voted to impeach Ken Paxton. But even more shockingly, some Texans are slowly waking up to the kind of politics, policy and impacts their radical right politics leads to. The WaPo writes about some worried Texans who are apparently starting to understand the realities their radical right politics:

Chap Ambrose has always been a fan of Elon Musk. He spent $100 to join the waiting list for Tesla’s first pickup in 2019 and bought internet service from Musk’s satellite provider.

But then the billionaire’s companies moved in next door to the computer programmer, who works from his rural, hilltop home.

Two years later, massive construction sites and large white warehouses have taken over the green pastures where cattle used to graze. Semis barrel up and down the narrow country roads. And the companies — rocket manufacturer SpaceX and tunneling company Boring — are seeking state permission to dump treated wastewater into the nearby Colorado River.

“I just have no faith that the leadership there values the environment and these shared resources,” said Ambrose, who leads a group of local residents pushing Musk’s companies to slow down and address concerns about the environmental risks of the development. “I would say, I’m still a fan [of Elon], but I want him to do better here and be a good neighbor.” 

“Between Elon Musk coming in here and all the sand and gravel mines ... suddenly this bucolic, pastoral prime farmland is now more than a thousand acres of an industrial site,” organic farmer Skip Connett said. “There’s no zoning, there are no rules. It’s the Wild West.” 

The growth is “more than this county was ready to handle. This is Texas. This is called property rights,” Bastrop County commissioner Mel Hamner said. “If you own the property and you stay within the state laws, you can pretty much do what you want.”

Yeehaw!! It's the Wild West!! Of course the leadership doesn't care about the environment. They are brass knuckles capitalists. If Chap and his neighbors actually want Elon to do better and be a good neighbor, they are in for serious disappointment. Chap and his neighbors will indeed be disgruntled, polluted-upon chaps.

Chap Ambrose -- worried about being polluted 

out of his nice Wild West home

News bits: Tesla & customer complaints; About the debt; Etc.

From the Brass Knuckles Capitalism Files: Jalopnik writes about Tesla's bad attitude toward customers and complaints about safety:

Whistleblower Drops 100 Gigabytes Of Tesla Secrets To German News Site

The files contain over 1,000 accident reports involving phantom braking or unintended acceleration--mostly in the U.S. and Germany

A German news outlet sifted through over 23,000 of Tesla’s internal files and found a disturbing trend of brushing off customers complaining about dangerous Autopilot glitches while covering the company’s ass.

Customers from the U.S. and Europe told Handelsblatt Tesla wasn’t too interested in assisting with their issues, but seemed more intent on covering for the company. It turns out, this was explicit policy at Tesla: 

 

How did the company deal with complaints? The Tesla files also provide information about this. The files show that employees have precise guidelines for communicating with customers. The top priority is obviously: offer as little attack surface as possible.

For each incident there are bullet points for the “technical review”. The employees who enter this review into the system regularly make it clear that the report is “for internal use only”. Each entry also contains a note in bold type that information, if at all, may only be passed on “VERBALLY to the customer”.

“Do not copy and paste the report below into an email, text message, or leave it in a voicemail to the customer,” it said. Vehicle data should also not be released without permission. If, despite the advice, “an involvement of a lawyer cannot be prevented”, this must be recorded.

A bit of the Google translated Handelsblatt article:

"My autopilot almost killed me": Tesla files cast doubt on Elon Musk's promises

Insiders have passed 100 gigabytes of data to the Handelsblatt, which is said to come from Tesla's IT system. They suggest that the automaker has bigger technical problems than previously thought. Tesla speaks of data theft.

For Tesla, building self-driving vehicles is a question of existence. Developing a working autopilot, said CEO Elon Musk in June 2022, “decides whether Tesla is worth a lot of money or practically zero”.

This resonates with me. On two occasions while on the freeway driving with cruise control (not autopilot) with no car in my lane ahead of me, my Tesla Model 3 slammed on the brakes while sounding a loud urgent collision warning. It came out of nowhere. That scared the crap out of me. The car's speed dropped by ~35 mph real quick. I had no time to control what happened. Fortunately no one was behind me, so no collision happened.

Elon urgently needs to pull his head out of his ass, get his stupid mind off his Twitter hellscape, and instead focus on Tesla car safety. But given his gigantic ego and shameless arrogance, I suspect his head will stay firmly embedded right where it is now. Elon is not endangering just Tesla owners and people in his cars. He is endangering the public at large.

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About the debt ceiling: The NYT writes:

Yellen’s Debt Limit Warnings Went Unheeded, 

Leaving Her to Face Fallout

In the days after November’s midterm elections, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen was feeling upbeat about the fact that Democrats had performed better than expected and maintained control of the Senate.

“I always worry about the debt ceiling,” Ms. Yellen told The New York Times in an interview on her flight from New Delhi to Bali, Indonesia, in which she urged Democrats to use their remaining time in control of Washington to lift the debt limit beyond the 2024 elections. “Any way that Congress can find to get it done, I’m all for.”

Democrats did not heed Ms. Yellen’s advice. Instead, the United States has spent most of this year inching toward the brink of default as Republicans refused to raise or suspend the nation’s $31.4 trillion borrowing limit without capping spending and rolling back parts of President Biden’s agenda.

Yellen currently projects that the US will start defaulting on debts on June 5.

Q: Why should Yellen face fallout for something that is the fault of congress and beyond her control?

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From Russia's brutal tyranny: The WaPo writes:

Parishioners have denounced Russian priests who advocated peace instead of victory in the war on Ukraine. Teachers lost their jobs after children tattled that they opposed the war. Neighbors who bore some trivial grudge for years have snitched on longtime foes. Workers rat on one another to their bosses or directly to the police or the Federal Security Service.

This is the hostile, paranoid atmosphere of Russians at war with Ukraine and with one another. As Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime cracks down on critics of the war and other political dissenters, citizens are policing one another in an echo of the darkest years of Joseph Stalin’s repression, triggering investigations, criminal charges, prosecutions and dismissals from work.

The effect is chilling, with denunciations strongly encouraged by the state and news of arrests and prosecutions amplified by propagandist commentators on federal television stations and Telegram channels. In March last year, Putin called on the nation to purge itself by spitting out traitors “like gnats.” He has since issued repeated dark warnings about internal enemies, claiming that Russia is fighting for its survival.

This could happen in the US. It probably will happen if voters keep putting Republicans in power in Washington. The Christian nationalist and the brass knuckles capitalism wings of the radical right Republican Party are both inherently authoritarian. The former dreams of a corrupt Christian Taliban, while the latter lusts after a corrupt autocratic plutocracy.

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Air-Gen tech: An Update: Air-gen is the use of materials with tiny nanopores in it to generate electricity using water vapor in the air to naturally create an electrical battery. At this point, the batteries actually work. Now, the unknown question is whether it is possible to make the nanopored materials on a gigantic scale. Also to be done is to see if there are some materials that are more efficient than the current early-generation devices. If this can be made to work on a gigantic scale, it will probably take ~4-6 years to begin to come online. The WaPo writes:

Nearly any material can be used to turn the energy in air humidity into electricity, scientists found in a discovery that could lead to continuously producing clean energy with little pollution.

The research, published in a paper in Advanced Materials, builds on 2020 work that first showed energy could be pulled from the moisture in the air using material harvested from bacteria. The new study shows nearly any material can be used, like wood or silicon, as long as it can be smashed into small particles and remade with microscopic pores.

“What we have invented, you can imagine it’s like a small-scale, man-made cloud,” said Jun Yao, a professor of engineering at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the senior author of the study.

The air-powered generator, known as an “Air-gen,” would offer continuous clean electricity since it uses the energy from humidity, which is always present, rather than depending on the sun or wind. Unlike solar panels or wind turbines, which need specific environments to thrive, Air-gens could conceivably go anywhere, Yao said.

The device, the size of a fingernail and thinner than a single hair, is dotted with tiny holes known as nanopores. The holes have a diameter smaller than 100 nanometers, or less than a thousandth of the width of a strand of human hair.

The tiny holes allow the water in the air to pass through in a way that would create a charge imbalance in the upper and lower parts of the device, effectively creating a battery that runs continuously.

Yao estimated that roughly 1 billion Air-gens, stacked to be roughly the size of a refrigerator, could produce a kilowatt and partly power a home in ideal conditions. The team hopes to lower both the number of devices needed and the space they take up by making the tool more efficient.

 

The original discovery of Air-gen in 2020 was in protein that the bacterium Geobacter sulfurrducens makes naturally. The Engineer commented:

The laboratories of electrical engineer Jun Yao and microbiologist Derek Lovley at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst) have created Air-gen with electrically conductive protein nanowires produced by the microbe Geobacter. The Air-gen connects electrodes to the protein nanowires in such a way that electrical current is generated from the water vapor naturally present in the atmosphere. 

The Air-gen device requires a thin film of protein nanowires less than 10 microns thick [about one-eighth the diameter of a human hair], the researchers said. The bottom of the film rests on an electrode, while a smaller electrode that covers only part of the nanowire film sits on top. The film adsorbs water vapor from the atmosphere. A combination of the electrical conductivity and surface chemistry of the protein nanowires, coupled with the fine pores between the nanowires within the film, establishes the conditions that generate an electrical current between the two electrodes.

The device produces a sustained voltage of around 0.5 volts across a 7-micrometer-thick film, with a current density of around 17 microamperes per square centimeter.

The original discovery came from observations that the flagella or pili of Geobacter bacteria were electrically conducting, basically acting as nanowires in water. Phys Org wrote in 2017:

Microbiologists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst report that they have discovered a new type of natural wire produced by bacteria that could greatly accelerate the researchers' goal of developing sustainable "green" conducting materials for the electronics industry. The study by Derek Lovley and colleagues appears this week in mBio, the American Society of Microbiology's premier journal.

As Lovley explains, "Microbial nanowires are a revolutionary electronic material with substantial advantages over man-made materials. Chemically synthesizing nanowires in the lab requires toxic chemicals, high temperatures and/or expensive metals. The energy requirements are enormous. By contrast, natural microbial nanowires can be mass-produced at room temperature from inexpensive renewable feedstocks in bioreactors with much lower energy inputs. And the final product is free of toxic components."

Until now Lovely's lab has been working with the nanowires of just one bacterium, Geobacter sulfurreducens. "Our early studies focused on the one Geobacter because we were just trying to understand why a microbe would make tiny wires," Lovley says. "Now we are most interested in the nanowires as an electronic material and would like to better understand the full scope of what nature may have to offer for these practical applications."

Artist's cool rendition of

G. sulfurreducens

Cooler electron microscope rendition

G. sulfurrducens lives in the mud or sediment in water that is depleted of oxygen. The bug chemically converts minerals in the mud as its energy source. It "breathes" minerals outside the bug's body, not oxygen. It has a strange lifestyle: 

Geobacter sulfurreducens was the second Geobacter recovered in pure culture, yet the first to have a genetic system and a sequenced genome. It quickly became the model representative of a group known for coupling organic matter degradation to metal reduction and mineralization. Conductivity of type IV pili at unprecedented rates and distances was demonstrated in G. sulfurreducens. The pilus nanowires extend the cell’s respiratory chain beyond its envelope to reduce iron oxides to magnetite, which electronically couples Geobacter to syntrophic partners. The pili also trap uranium extracellularly to prevent its permeation in the cell envelope and dynamically disassemble and reassemble to detach the mineral and continue breathing. Cells use the nanowires to grow as electroactive biofilms on electrodes, allowing current harvesting in bioelectrochemical devices. G. sulfurreducens electrified microbiology and set the foundation for the electromicrobiology subfield.