* 22 entries including: America's Constitution (series), green energy & business (series), vaccine persistence (series), Biden climate plan, US military footing in West Pacific, comparing COVID-19 vaccines, COVID-19 as ultimately an annoyance, and rethinking batteries.
* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (148): When Ronald Reagan was shot on 30 March 1981, George Bush was in Texas; he flew back to Washington DC immediately. His aides suggested he fly from the airport to the White House in a presidential helicopter to show he was in charge -- but Bush decided that it would be unwise to so obviously take over in Reagan's place. He presided over Cabinet meetings, met with congressional leaders and foreign dignitaries, and briefed reporters, but he refused to take on the mantle of the presidency. After Reagan came back to the White House, the two men became closer.
Reagan assigned Bush to chair two special task forces -- one on deregulation, the other on international drug smuggling, both issues popular with conservatives. The task force on deregulation provided Reagan with a blueprint for streamlining or even eliminating government regulation in a wide range of industries and activities. Bush also sat in on negotiations between Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, and made it clear to Gorbachev that a Bush Administration would continue to work on improving US-Soviet relations. When the Iran-Contra scandal arose, Bush denied all knowledge, but the record shows he was aware of the arms-for-hostages deal.
In 1987, Bush began his primary run for the 1988 Republican nomination. He had moved to the Right during his time as vice president -- dumping his "voodoo economics" rhetoric and endorsing anti-abortion policies -- he wasn't far enough to the Right to please hard-core conservatives. They often mocked him as a "wimp", despite his distinguished combat record. Nonetheless, he won the primary, with rivals such as Kansas Senator Bob Dole conceding defeat. Bush gave a noteworthy speech at the Republican convention, the theme being "a thousand points of light", though it was more a list of Right-wing talking points: endorsing the Pledge of Allegiance, prayer in schools, capital punishment, and gun rights. He emphasized that he wouldn't raise taxes, notably channeling the popular BEVERLY HILLS COP movie: "Read my lips. No new taxes."
Bush chose Indiana Senator Dan Quayle as his running mate. There was nothing particularly distinguished about Quayle, but he had fans among conservatives, and his youth might bring in younger voters. Bush's rival in the general election was Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, who began the contest leading in the polls. As was his custom when under pressure, Bush chose to fight dirty, painting Dukakis as unpatriotic and too far Left, and notably attacking him for releasing felons from prison. The Bush campaign seized on Willie Horton, a black inmate convicted of a brutal murder who escaped on a weekend furlough, to then assault a couple and rape the woman.
The Dukakis campaign, in response, was ineffective. In an attempt to show he was strong on defense, Dukakis posed in an Abrams tank, the only result being to look ridiculous instead. Bush crushed Dukakis in the electoral vote, 426 to 111, though the popular vote margin was 53.4%. Bush was the first sitting vice president since Martin Van Buren in 1836 to be elected president. However, Bush would have to deal with a Democrat-controlled Congress through his presidency.
A Bush Administration promised continuity with the Reagan Administration, but there were doubts at first that detente with the Soviet Union was in American interests, with skeptics wondering if the USSR under Gorbachev's leadership was really much different than before. Skepticism dissolved in 1989, as Communist governments fell across Eastern Europe, and Gorbachev refused to intervene. The Bush Administration could do little but watch, and avoid unhelpful gloating over the collapse of the Soviet empire.
Bush met with Gorbachev at Malta in December 1989, the two men establishing good rapport that would endure. The major issue at the Malta Summit was German re-unification. The British and French felt wary of a re-unified Germany, but Bush was enthusiastic, working with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl for re-unification. After negotiations, Gorbachev agreed to allow a re-unified Germany to be part of NATO, an idea that would have horrified previous Soviet leadership. Germany officially reunified in October 1990.
Gorbachev was not so forbearing with notions of independence in the Soviet Union itself, with the Kremlin suppressing nationalists in Lithuania. The Bush Administration issued a mild rebuke, and left it at that; Bush didn't want to undermine cooperation with Gorbachev elsewhere, and also believed the disintegration of the USSR would not be in American interests. There were particular worries about the security of the Soviet nuclear arsenal, should things fall apart. In a 1991 speech, Bush warned against "suicidal nationalism", with the address being mocked as the "Chicken Kiev" speech. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* BIDEN'S CLIMATE PLAN: Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University in New York City -- a prominent environmental advocate -- published an essay on CNN.com on 23 April 2021 titled "Biden's Remarkable Success On Climate" that both described Biden's climate agenda, and indicated Sachs' enthusiasm for it. Reflecting on a virtual climate summit arranged by Biden that took place on 22 and 23 April, Sachs commented:
BEGIN QUOTE:
By every standard, President Joe Biden's climate change summit was a remarkable success. With great diplomatic dexterity, Biden and climate envoy John Kerry assembled world leaders representing 82% of world carbon emissions, 73% of the world population, and 86% of world economic output to commit to bold climate action.
Biden deftly used the occasion to set the US economy on the path of bold decarbonization by 2030. And all of this was accomplished by videoconference, a daily act for schoolchildren and office workers, yet a much-needed breakthrough for a gathering of world leaders.
END QUOTE
The climate crisis has been becoming ever more apparent, with attempts to downplay it becoming ever less credible. The technology to deal with climate change appears to available, with advances in renewable energy, electric vehicles, and a wide range of other innovations. Biden's leadership has been catalytic, allowing national leaders to compete in establishing environmental goals. Yes, we've had big talk about dealing with climate change before, and have amounted to nothing -- but now the threat is more obvious, while the promise of an emerging Green economy offers opportunities. There is an emerging shift of jobs to Green technologies, with the prospect of the change feeding back on itself, resulting in rapid progress. Either nations address the challenge, or fall behind.
All governments are to make long-term pledges on decarbonization at a global summit in Glasgow, Scotland, in November 2021. Biden's teleconference with 40 leaders was to pave the way towards the conference, which will include all 193 member states of the United Nations. Biden challenged the world to come up with plans to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.
Rightist propaganda continues to mock attempts to get control of climate change as unneeded, expensive, and useless, but they are not. There are six paths towards achieving net-zero:
The US pledge to cut emissions by half by 2030 is based particularly on the first step: to shift decisively to zero-carbon electricity in this decade, thanks to the rapidly declining price of renewables. Biden's infrastructure plans also invest in other steps -- for example, supporting the transition to electric vehicles through investments in charging stations, as well as research & development for advances in battery technology. There's a long way to go, but it's a promising start.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* ORDER OF BATTLE: As discussed in an article from THEDRIVE.com ("This Is The Pentagon's $27 Billion Master Plan To Deter China In The Pacific" by Joseph Trevithick, 5 March 2021), tensions between the USA and China are running high. Accordingly, the Pentagon has come up with a plan that asks the US Congress for $27 billion USD over the next six years to add capabilities to deal with China. This expansion of what is now known as the "Pacific Deterrence Initiative (PDI)" envisions:
Congress approved the creation of the PDI in the annual defense policy bill, or National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), for the 2021 Fiscal Year, which was passed over former President Donald Trump's veto in January. This initiative broadly mirrors the "European Defense Initiative (EDI)", which was established to deter Russian aggression following the Kremlin's invasion and subsequent annexation of Ukraine's Crimea region in 2014.
The Fiscal Year 2021 NDAA had included plans to spend approximately $6.9 billion USD on the PDI through Fiscal Year 2022. The new plan lays out between $27.3 billion and $27.4 billion USD in total spend through FY 2027. Line items in the plan include:
The goal of the effort is clearly to put land-based systems relatively close to the Chinese mainland and other strategic areas in the Western Pacific. One of the PDI documents says that the USA "requires highly survivable, precision-strike networks along the First Island Chain, featuring increased quantities of ground-based weapons. These networks must be operationally decentralized and geographically distributed along the western Pacific archipelagos using Service agnostic infrastructure."
The term "First Island Chain" refers to an area of the Pacific inside a boundary formed by the first line of archipelagos out from mainland East Asia. This broad zone includes the contested South China Sea, as well as the highly strategic Taiwan Strait. Strategic planning in the Pacific also often takes into account needs within a region defined by a "Second Island Chain", the boundary of which stretches between Japan and eastern Indonesia and includes the US territory of Guam.
The US military, in particular the Army and Marines, wants to obtain a number of different long-range land-attack and antiship missiles, and also wants to base them in forward positions to act as a deterrent to China. Reaction from US allies in the Western Pacific, such as Australia and Japan, has been lukewarm so far, suggesting they're not completely convinced of the wisdom of that idea.
The Guam-based Aegis Ashore anti-missile system doesn't really need approval of American allies -- all the more so because the Aegis system is already deployed on Navy ARLEIGH BURKE-class guided-missile destroyers in the Western Pacific, and the less capable "Terminal High Altitude Air Defense (THAAD)" system is already deployed on Guam. Defensive systems are less controversial anyway.
The space-based radar network also doesn't concern US allies very much, since it would be a global capability, space is open territory, and it would not be a strike system. It would integrate into various distributed sensor and general battle management concepts being developed across the US armed services, such as the Air Force's "Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS)", the Army's "Integrated Battle Command System (IBCS)", and the Navy's "Project Overmatch" -- as well as joint service programs, such as the Joint All Domain Command & Control (JADC2)" effort.
The PDI plan does not give specifics on the ISR aircraft, but they can be assumed to be similar to what the Army with its "Airborne Reconnaissance & Targeting Multi-Mission Intelligence System (ARTEMIS) program." An Army press release said that ARTEMIS "provides high-altitude sensing capabilities against near-peer adversaries, and bridges gaps in the Multi-Domain Operations mission." The initial ARTEMIS platforms are two modified contractor-owned and operated Bombardier Challenger 650 business jets. Their exact configuration has not been announced, but they do carry the "High-Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System (HADES)" sensor suite, which includes a radar, as well as electronic intelligence (ELINT) and communications intelligence (COMINT) packages.
As far as improving facilities in the Western Pacific goes, once again the PDI plan doesn't give many details. Angaur Airfield in Palau has been improved and lengthened recently, with other improvements in infrastructure no doubt in the works. Given that there is bipartisan agreement in the US Congress that China is an aggressive threat that must be countered, it is likely that the PDI plans will be implemented, with specifics emerging in time.
* Incidentally, the Taiwan government announced that production has begun of a long-range missile system, and that three other undescribed long-range weapon systems are under development. One suspects that the Taiwanese are obtaining technical assistance from the USA, but nobody's talking. Taiwan is also obtaining a number of Lockheed Martin Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) Missile Segment Enhancement (MSE) interceptor missiles from the USA to enhance its air defense capabilities -- and in this case, cooperation with the USA is obvious. The Taiwanese fear China, and with good reason; add in America's friendliness with Taiwan and adversarial relationship with Beijing, the potential for trouble is highly visible.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* NEW AGE OF ENERGY (3): The most obvious hazard of climate change is the growing intemperance of the weather. That has effects all across society, and businesses are not exempt: bad weather can raise hell with companies and their supply chains.
As a case in point, in 2012 -- when post-tropical storm Sandy devastated New York -- the city was left in darkness. Among the few buildings still lit up was the headquarters of Goldman Sachs, which had a 25,000-sandbag wall and a backup generator. Gary Cohn, then the bank's president, said one problem was how to get staff into the office in a shut-down city. In 2018, after a storm battered Vancouver Island, falling trees toppled electricity poles. The resulting power cut led to the closure of a water-treatment plant. And last January, when wildfires ravaged Australia's outback, the toxic air hampered production at a coalmine owned by BHP, a commodity giant.
Of course, it is true that weather is always changing, and businesses have had to adapt. However, climate change is making this much more difficult. Some companies are trying to plan for it -- but it is impossible to mitigate all risks, there being too much that is out of their control. For many firms, the physical impact of climate change will affect them more through disaster-struck suppliers or flooded transport routes than in their own operations.
That indirect impact makes risks trickier both to assess and to manage. One result may be shorter supply chains, with more products made close to home; firms that rely on foreign suppliers may have to spend more to make their imports resilient to the climate. The move towards shorter supply chains is already under way, thanks to trade wars and COVID-19. However, while the pandemic will eventually fade out and trade wars should subside, the climate just keeps getting worse. Hauke Engel of McKinsey, a consultancy, says: "Things will just keep on changing."
They are changing towards more powerful storms, flooding rainfalls, and hot long droughts. There will be no quick changing back to a more stable environment, no matter what is done; global temperatures shift very slowly, one way or another.
Even if the goals of the Paris Agreement were met and warming limited to below 2C, the weather would keep getting worse. This may mean, among other things, a 40 to 80-centimeter rise in sea levels, a 25% increase in dangerously hot days, and a 36% jump in the quantity of rainfall over land. Each additional degree of warming increases the impact. Between 1981 and 2010, the average likelihood of a big heatwave -- defined as at least four days with maximum temperatures above the 99th percentile of a normal warm season -- was 5%. With global temperatures up by 1.5C over pre-industrial levels, that probability rises to 28%. At 2C it is 49%; at 4C, 92%. Similarly, floods that in the past might have happened only once in 50 years become more frequent as temperatures rise. One would happen every 42 years with 1.5C of warming; every 34 years with 2C; and every 19 years with 4C.
Obviously, these changes mean pain for the world economy, but it's hard to predict how much. All models trying to forecast climate hazards have big error bars, and so taking them out too far in the future doesn't buy much. However, since most assets only last for 10 to 20 years, there's not so much reason to project out farther than that. The pain will certainly be greater in poorer countries, which have less capacity to adapt and tend to be closer to the equator, where the weather is already hot.
Two particular studies demonstrate the threats, and show that risks are unevenly spread. The first comes from Schroders, an asset manager. Its analysts looked at the physical risks posed to 11,000 publicly listed companies, and concluded that climate change could reduce the firms' value by 2% to 3% on average. However, the numbers vary greatly by industry. Energy and utility sectors stand to lose 4% and 8%, respectively, while property firms could lose up to 9%. For services firms with few physical assets, such as tech and finance, the impact is smaller, less than 0.5% of their value.
The other study is from Four Twenty Seven, a climate consultancy. It looked at the events that most threaten facilities owned by publicly listed firms. Water stress was the most prominent, affecting 30% of assets. Another 10% were at risk from heat stress and roughly 20% were vulnerable to floods, hurricanes, and typhoons. Sea-level rise was the least concerning for businesses, affecting only 3% of assets in the data set.
As its impact becomes clearer, companies are being driven to take climate change more seriously. Partly that's due to growing pressure from regulators, who want them to disclose their climate risks; doing so is already mandatory for some firms in France, and the European Union, Britain, and Canada will follow. Institutional investors are also insisting on fuller disclosure -- that being a key demand of the Climate Action 100+, a group of investors that includes BlackRock, the world's biggest asset manager, and Fidelity, one of its rivals. Consumers and customers, especially younger ones, are calling for stronger and faster action on climate change.
More businesses now carry out risk assessments, but they may not be completely honest. Emilie Mazzacurati, of Four Twenty Seven, says that disclosures are self-reported, and companies tend to downplay their risks. On the other hand, firms are inclined to play up opportunities, such as selling new products to green-minded consumers. In 2019, the CDP -- an environmental charity promoting emissions disclosure -- surveyed the self-reported climate risks of 200-odd big firms. Total risks added up to roughly $1 trillion USD, 5% to 7% of the firms' value. Suspiciously, offsetting opportunities were put at more than twice as high.
Companies will not always get to mark their own homework. Third-party analysis is improving fast. Climate-risk consultancies are combining asset-level data with climate and econometric models to generate estimates of values at risk. Rohan Hamden -- boss of the Cross Dependency Initiative, a Sydney-based climate-risk firm -- says: "We now know many firms' climate risk better than they do." Investors are doing similar analysis or hiring consultants. Many say they use analytics to exclude vulnerable firms from specialized climate funds. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THE WEEK THAT WAS: The big news this last week was the conviction of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd after his arrest on 25 May 2020 -- which set off a wave of urban protests that went on all over the USA through the summer and into the fall, with protests in sympathy overseas. I've been a remote spectator in the issue, not feeling involved or having anything to contribute, but the fallout of the conviction promises to be substantial, with police reform bills being advanced across the USA.
There was considerable apprehension that there would be big trouble if Chauvin was convicted -- an apprehension that was enhanced when, while the trial was wrapping up, House Representative Maxine Waters said that Chauvin needed to be convicted of murder, and urged protesters to "get more confrontational." There was an uproar over the remark among the Right, but it faded after the verdict.
There was a follow-up flap when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said: "Thank you, George Floyd, for sacrificing your life for justice." The sentiment was not exactly bad, it was just cringingly expressed. Pelosi has her virtues, but warmth is not among them; one Twitter observer said she spoke from the heart, and forgot she didn't have one.
Fortunately, all such gaffes were rescued by Joe Biden, who spoke of the matter in smooth terms, praising the police officers who testified against Chauvin in the trial, as well as those witnesses who documented the event. Biden said: "It was a murder in the full light of day, and it ripped the blinders off the whole world to see. Systemic racism is a stain on our nation's soul."
There was nothing very specific in what Biden said; he was just being reassuring, with the failures of judgement by Waters and Pelosi permanently sidelined. The Right-wing press also did themselves no good through their outrage at the verdict -- apparently because they were hoping for riots, and didn't get them.
In any case, Biden once again demonstrated his political adroitness. That was also on display in his selling of his infrastructure plan -- playing up America's commitment to dealing with climate change on the international stage, while emphasizing jobs for Americans at home. After all, playing up climate change to American voters would only be preaching to the faithful; instead, by pushing jobs first, Biden was reaching towards Americans who have been influenced by Right-wing propaganda, believing that climate change isn't a real problem, and that efforts to fix it are just expensive boondoggles.
* The latest initiative from the Biden Administration is a proposal to raise taxes on the wealthy. According to an editorial from REUTERS.com by one Richard Beales ("Shock At Biden Capital-Gains Tax Plan Looks Staged", 23 April 2021), Biden wants to increase the top marginal income tax rate to 39.6% from 37%, and nearly double taxes on capital gains to 39.6% for people earning more than $1 million USD a year. In addition, Biden wants to close loopholes in capital gains on inherited wealth and "carried interest" -- the stakes in portfolio companies that private equity bigwigs collect for free, substituting for performance fees that would otherwise be taxed as income.
There was howling among the rich, with Beales commenting:
BEGIN QUOTE:
"I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!" So exclaimed Captain Renault in CASABLANCA as he was handed his winnings. Some of America's wealthiest people seem to be having the same reaction to proposals from President Joe Biden that would increase taxes on capital gains. Much of the purported shock looks as stagey as Renault's.
END QUOTE
First and foremost, during the presidential campaign, Biden made it clear he planned to increase taxes on Americans bringing in $400,000 USD or more in a year -- so this was not news, and in fact there was only a ripple in the markets. In reply to the noisy theatrics about impending economic doom, Beales added:
BEGIN QUOTE:
In October [2020], even the conservative-leaning Tax Foundation [mentioned here last week, and not in a good sort of way] concluded that the capital-gains part of Biden's package would only dent long-run GDP by 0.02%. And for what it's worth, Microsoft was founded in 1975 when the top capital-gains rate was 36.5%, and the top income tax rate was 70%.
END QUOTE
How much Biden will actually get out of Congress remains to be seen. By all evidence, the USA is headed for a post-pandemic economic boom. The rich may end up not getting richer as fast as they did during Trump's term, but they will still get richer. "So please do stop whining."
* In late-breaking news, the Biden Administration issued a proclamation acknowledging the Turkish genocide of Armenians during World War I, that being a clear slap in the face to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The message, it seems, is that the USA is not humoring autocrats like Erdogan any more.
This fits into comments on "global muscular liberalism (GML)" run here on week 12, which also discussed how critics of the Biden Administration see GML as naive. I didn't see that it was. An editorial from ECONOMIST.com ("America's Reset", 20 April 2021), provided an effective defense of the Biden strategy, starting with:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Whereas during his presidency, Donald Trump pursued his own peculiar version of a reset with President Vladimir Putin of Russia -- joking with him about Russian election interference, and saying the two liked one another -- President Joe Biden has called Mr. Putin a killer without a soul. And yet Mr. Biden also says he wants to work with the Russian president.
END QUOTE
Biden's lieutenants say they are working with "allies and partners" -- a clear slap at Donald Trump, who stepped on America's allies and kissed up to America's enemies -- while saying they are being "clear-eyed" about adversaries -- hinting that Barack Obama's foreign policy was too optimistic about Russia, China, and Iran, as Obama himself may well now admit. Biden has decided GML is the way to go:
BEGIN QUOTE:
His overall goal, as one of his advisers put it, is to pursue a "strengthening of the multilateral, rules-based order, in which the United States takes a role to make sure authoritarian states don't undermine those rules". Mr. Biden is attempting a two-track policy, trying at once to resist and relate to these regimes: to constrain their territorial ambitions and discourage their human-rights abuses and transnational meddling, while working with them where their interests might overlap with America's.
END QUOTE
Put simply, Joe Biden calls them as he sees them: if Russia works against US interests, the USA will protest, while simultaneously seeking areas of agreement with Russia. A few weeks ago, Biden imposed sanctions on Russia for interfering in the 2020 American election, conducting the big SolarWinds cyber-hack, and other affronts; the sanctions were discussed ahead of time with American allies, who chimed in with their support. Biden called up Russian President Vladimir Putin two days before announcing the sanctions, suggesting that Russia "respond appropriately" to the sanctions and not try to escalate. During the same conversation, Biden proposed that the two countries get together to discuss arms limitation.
Daniel Fried of the Atlantic Council -- a foreign-policy think-tank, previously of George W. Bush's State Department -- sees the mixed messaging as welcome:
BEGIN QUOTE:
American administrations have had a tendency to fall into two traps in dealing with Russia. It's either: "reset" -- or: "a hard line across the board". [In contrast,] the Biden team has given themselves room to work with Putin, without pulling their punches.
END QUOTE
The Iranians thought Biden would be quick to restore the nuclear deal; that hasn't been the case, with the Biden Administration engaged in tough bargaining. Biden has accused the Chinese government of genocide in Xinjiang Province, and militarily bullying its neighbors -- while at the same time John Kerry, Biden's climate envoy, helped put together a joint statement in which China and the USA committed to taking on climate change.
In sum, GML is not naive; it is instead naive to believe that the only choices are either appeasement or Cold War. Of course, the Biden Administration is just getting started, and has a lot to do:
BEGIN QUOTE:
... issuing joint statements, like talking about summit meetings, is pale progress compared with closing coal plants, withdrawing troops, decommissioning nuclear weapons, or halting genocide. Almost 100 days in, President Biden has shown that he can make a hard decision, as he did on Afghanistan. He has many more ahead of him as he seeks to strike not just a theoretical balance, but actual compromises between an idealist's hopes and a realist's expectations.
END QUOTE
* I got my first COVID-19 vaccine shot on Tuesday -- driving out to the fairgrounds on the prairie, going in circles on the roads a bit since I wasn't that familiar with the area. The shot was nothing, caused me no troubles. It was a nice little drive, since the area had got some late snow the day before and the mountains were pretty. Of course, the roads were wet, and I had to clean up the car good after I got back.
I get the second shot four Tuesdays from now. It may not go as easily. Rick Wilson of the Lincoln Project kicked off a bit of a tweetstorm after his second shot:
Rick Wilson / @TheRickWilson / Apr 21:
Was down for the count yesterday while the nanobots in the second vaccine dose did their work transforming me into an antifa super-soldier with glowing red eyes and a taste for adrenochrome. Other than that, I'm back to scourge the unrighteous.
Timothy Erick PhD / @DrTimothyErick:
You can now send telepathic messages to other vaccinated individuals, as long as you have a WiFi signal.
Rick Wilson / @TheRickWilson:
I got the 5G upgrade.
Xola / @Xola81201697:
The chip is phenomenal -- it started off upping my internet speed, now it's running my errands for me and even taking my calls for me. It's the Pfizer with the Gates Chip.
An unrelated Twitter thread discussed nicknames for Donald Trump. "Cheetoh Mussolini" and "Agolf Twitler" I was familiar with, but not "Velveeta Voldemort" and "Apricot Pol Pot". One Tweeter suggested to me: "Honorable mention for 'Tangerine Nightmare'"?
I replied: "That's good, but I do prefer 'Marmalade Menace'. Sounds like an opponent for The Tick, or The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl."
I added a comment that though Trump was bad, it was something of a mitigation that he was also ridiculous. Alas, we are not actually done with him yet. We're in a period of "Phony War" that will last up to the moment he is indicted -- and then the 79-car pile-up will begin.
In other goofy superhero references, Rick Wilson hit it out of the ballpark again when he nailed Texas Senator Ted Cruz, a senior Right-wing troll in the Senate. Cruz was complaining to the press about Democrat attempts to pack the Supreme Court with additional justices: "You didn't see Republicans when we had control of the Senate try to rig the game. You didn't see us try to pack the court."
Wilson tweeted: "Fat Wolverine doesn't understand that reality has all the receipts." I had to add that Fat Wolverine is a member in good standing of the Q-Men. We'll probably be getting Fat Wolverine imagery in a week or so.
Incidentally, the Lincoln Project was in the doghouse a few months back, thanks to a member trolling the internet for teenaged boys, and also concerns about the financial arrangements of the group. There were calls for the LP to disband, but they issued apologies and promised corrective actions. Not surprisingly, the controversy has now bored itself to death. We're too used to controversy, with the result that it takes a really big controversy to keep the public's attention.
PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (147): By the early 1960s, George Bush was becoming more directly involved in Republican politics, becoming the chairman of the Harris County Republican Party in 1963, and supporting Barry Goldwater's presidential bid in 1964. In that same election, Bush ran for senator from Texas against Democrat Ralph Yarborough. The election campaign was notable for Bush's attack on Yarborough for his backing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, with Bush arguing that the act was unconstitutional. Privately, Bush had misgivings about challenging the Civil Rights Act; as he would repeatedly demonstrate again later, he didn't like to fight dirty, but he would do it anyway if he felt he had to in order to win.
Bush lost the election, but it didn't matter too much, because the campaign raised his public profile. In 1966, Bush ran for a seat in the House and won; Republican leadership in the House recognized that he had potential, and placed in the powerful House Ways & Means Committee, an unusual distinction for a junior Member of Congress. His voting record was centrist: he supported the war in Vietnam, but also was in favor of birth control -- and ironically voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1968.
In the 1968 election, Bush endorsed Richard Nixon, snubbing Ronald Reagan. Nixon considered selecting Bush as his running mate, but of course selected Spirow Agnew instead. In 1970, Bush ran for the Senate, but was defeated by Democrat Lloyd Bentsen. Following the defeat, Nixon took Bush on as a White House advisor, with Bush persuading Nixon to then make him the US ambassador to the United Nations. This introduced Bush to foreign policy; at the UN, he supported Nixon's efforts at detente with the USSR and China.
He and the US suffered a humiliation in 1971, when the Republic of China / Taiwan was expelled from the UN Security Council, to be replaced by the People's Republic of China -- though as mentioned earlier, that wasn't entirely against US interests. Also in that year, Bush supported India in the Indo-Pakistan War over East Pakistan, which would become Bangladesh. This put him at odds with Nixon, who leaned towards Pakistan, in part as an element of his courting of China.
After Nixon won the 1972 election, he appointed Bush as the chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC). Of course, following the election, the Watergate scandal began to surface, with Bush initially backing Nixon. When Vice President Agnew was forced out, Bush was considered as a replacement, but the nod went to Gerry Ford. When the Watergate tapes were released, Bush joined other GOP leadership in asking Nixon to resign.
With Nixon resigning, Gerry Ford became president. Ford considered Bush as his vice-president, but chose Nelson Rockefeller instead -- one reason being that Bush was under suspicion, the tale being that his 1970 Senate campaign had obtained money from a secret fund set up by Nixon. Investigation cleared him. Ford then appointed Bush as the head of the US Liaison Office in the People's Republic of China, making him the effective ambassador to China. The assignment expanded Bush's foreign-policy perspectives.
In early 1976, Bush returned to the US to become Director of Central Intelligence, in charge of the CIA. Ford considered him as a running mate in 1976, but chose Bob Dole instead. When Carter became president, Bush assisted in the transition, then found himself out of a job.
Bush then took an executive position at the First International Bank in Houston, and also spent time as a part-time professor at Rice University's Jones School of Business. He remained in the Council on Foreign Relations, a non-partisan think tank, an international discussion group of movers and makers. Bush's real objective to run for president in 1980, and ended up in the race against Ronald Reagan. There was considerable sniping between the two camps, Bush criticizing Reagan for his age, while famously and accurately calling Reagan's supply-side thinking as "voodoo economics". However, after Bush dropped out of the primary race, Reagan picked him as his running mate, mostly because he was more centrist than Reagan.
Of course, Reagan crushed Jimmy Carter in the election, and George Bush became vice president. He kept a low profile, in particular mending fences with Reagan after the shots exchanged during the primary campaign. Bush spent much of his time in ceremonial activities, and also -- as President of the Senate -- acted as a liaison between the White House and Congress. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* WINGS & WEAPONS: As discussed in an article from JANES.com ("Icarus Aerospace Reveals Clean Sheet Light Attack And ISR Designs" by Gareth Jennings, 17 August 20), the Canadian Icarus company has revealed its designs for a "Tactical Air Vehicle (TAV)" light attack aircraft strike and related "Branta" intelligence / surveillance / reconnaissance (ISR) platform.
The TAV will be available in a variety of configurations, the fully combat-optimized version being named "Wasp". The Wasp has a strong resemblance to the Rockwell OV-10 tactical aircraft of the 1960s, being a twin-boom aircraft with a high tail, dual turboprop engines providing 1270 kW (1700 HP) each, and a tandem-seat cockpit. Length is 15.9 meters (52.1 feet) and wingspan is 15.5 meters (50.8 feet).
A fixed or turreted cannon of up to 30-millimeter caliber can be fitted under the fuselage. The Wasp has four stores attachments under each wing, and three under the fuselage. External payload is up to 3,630 kilograms (8,000 pounds), including external fuel tanks. Without external tanks, endurance is about 6.5 hours. The Wasp can be fitted with an inflight-refueling probe, and features an undernose electro-optic / infrared turret with a laser rangefinder / target designator. It can optionally also be fitted with a miniature synthetic aperture radar, and has datalink capabilities.
It can perform light attack, ISR, signals intelligence, or battlefield communications relay missions. The Branta is a high-altitude / long-endurance platform with a 30-meter (98-foot) wingspan, and an unrefueled endurance of about 30 hours. All the members of the family are to be optionally-piloted, capable of being flown as drones.
* As discussed in an article from AVIATIONWEEK.com ("KLM-Backed Flying-V Airliner Concept Makes First Flight" by Graham Warwick, 01 September 2020), the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands has now flown a subscale model of the "Flying-V" ultra-efficient airliner.
The Flying-V is a V-shaped concept aircraft, a tail-less flying wing, with the same wing span and passenger capacity as the Airbus A350, but is expected to use 20% less fuel. That's because the aircraft has less surface area, meaning lower drag. Instead of a single wide, twin-aisle cabin, the Flying-V has two A320-size single-aisle cabins integrated into the V-shaped airframe along, with the cargo holds and fuel tanks.
The flying test model is 4.7%-scale, with a wingspan of 3 meters (10 feet). It is powered by two small electric ducted fans. It is intended to evaluate stability and control issues. Initial flight was in July 2020; there were some stability issues, resulting in the model losing its nose gear on landing. TU Delft is obtaining backing from KLM and Airbus in the Flying-V effort. The concept actually originated at Airbus in Germany.
* As discussed in an article from NEWATLAS.com ("Avidrone Takes A Double-Headed Approach To Cargo Delivery" by Ben Coxworth, 21 August 2020), Canadian startup company Avidrone Aerospace has taken a relatively unusual approach to its 210TL helicopter cargo drone, using a "tandem-rotor" configuration. The tandem-rotor helicopter is nothing new, the Boeing Chinook being its best-known representative, but it's unusual for drone helicopters.
The two ends of the 210TL are joined by a boom. Cargoes are attached to rails on the boom; customers can devise their own carriage scheme, or use the company's cargo boxes, which come in different sizes. The flight plan for the drone is set up and download with a tablet or laptop; the drone will then fly autonomously to its destination, unhook its cargo, and then come back home.
The 210TL uses a lithium battery pack that gives it a range of about 120 kilometers (75 miles). The drone has a top speed of about 100 KPH (60 MPH) and can haul up to 25 kilograms (55 pounds). The company claims the tandem-rotor configuration is more efficient than the conventional main-tail rotor configuration, permitting longer range; it is also well-known that tandem-rotor helicopters aren't too fussy about load balancing. The 210TL is in production, and commercially available.
* As discussed in an article from JANES.com, ("South Korea Selects Companies To Develop Gliding Graphite Bomb" by Kim Dae Young, 18 August 2020 South Korea's Agency for Defense Development (ADD) is now funding development of a gliding guided "blackout" bomb. Concept images show a weapon with a cluster-munition bomb case featuring pop-out "switchblade" wings, and five pop-out tailfins. The case will stow conductive fibers, it appears made of graphite, that will be dispersed over power switching stations to short them out.
Poongsan Corporation will build the weapon's case, LIG Nex1 will be in charge of providing the guidance kit and integrating the system, and Hanwha will develop the fuze. Introduction to service is expected in 2024 at earliest.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* COMPARING COVID-19 VACCINES: As discussed in an article from NATURE.com ("Why COVID Vaccines Are So Difficult To Compare" by Heidi Ledford, 23 February 2021), the mass introduction of COVID-19 vaccines around the world has led to confusion over the effectiveness of the different vaccines.
Yusuff Adebayo Adebisi -- director for research at African Young Leaders for Global Health, a non-profit organization based in Abuja, Nigeria -- knows that a vaccine that offers 70% protection against COVID-19 could be valuable in fighting the coronavirus pandemic in Nigeria, particularly if that vaccine is cheap and doesn't have to be stored at deep-cold temperatures. However, what if another vaccine, one that is more expensive to buy and handle, was 95% effective? He asks: "Should we send the less-effective vaccine to Africa? Or should we look for a way to strengthen the cold storage?"
It's not an easy question to answer. Given the need for speed while vaccine supplies are only now ramping up, any effort to rank the vaccines must take into account not only their reported effectiveness, but also supplies, costs, the logistics of deploying them, the durability of the protection they offer, and their ability to protect against emerging viral variants.
The difficulty is that such questions can only be finally answered by experience, and we don't have enough experience at present to answer them. Cristina Possas -- a public-health researcher at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil -- says: "It is not possible to compare these vaccines at this point." Health economist Shafiun Shimul at the University of Dhaka in Bangladesh believes that governments can't delay vaccinations: "If you want to control infection, you have to rely on something that is contextually doable for you. It's not only about effectiveness, If they wait for perfection, I think it will be a long wait."
Hundreds of millions of vaccine doses have been administered so far, with studies tracking their effects. The results from those studies suggest a range of protection: from 95% efficacy for a vaccine made by Pfizer of New York City and BioNTech of Mainz, Germany, to about 70% suggested by initial results on a vaccine made by AstraZeneca of Cambridge and the University of Oxford, both in the United Kingdom.
David Kennedy -- who studies the ecology and evolution of infectious diseases at Pennsylvania State University in University Park -- points out that such numbers can't be taken at face value. Each measure of efficacy comes with a degree of uncertainty, and trials might have differing definitions of important criteria, such as what constitutes a "severe" bout of COVID-19 compared to a "moderate" one. Demographics also plays a significant role in such assessments: in the case of the Oxford–AstraZeneca vaccine, for example, the developers collected few data about the vaccine's efficacy in people over 65. That led Germany to authorize the vaccine only for those under 65, even though the European Medicines Agency recommends it for all adults.
To complicate matters further, the vaccines were studied at different times in various countries. As Kennedy points out, each trial can only offer a snapshot of protection against the viral variants that were dominant in that time or place: "That number relates to a particular point in time. How that translates into protection over one to two years is not the same."
SARS-CoV-2 variants have been emerging around the world, and it's hard to tell if a vaccine with high effectiveness against one variant will be as effective against another variant. It might actually be more effective, but without data, nobody can tell. Such data as is available suggests the AstraZeneca vaccine does poorly against a variant that emerged in South Africa, with the South Africa then announcing a hold on that vaccine.
However, some regions in Africa could still benefit, says infectious-disease specialist Loice Achieng at the University of Nairobi says that variants may not be that big of a problem. She says that the South African 501Y.V2 variant has not yet become dominant in Kenya, and it's still possible that the AstraZeneca vaccine could protect against severe COVID-19 caused by it: "I think it's probably something that shouldn't be written off."
There are hopes that more convenient vaccines will become available. Johnson & Johnson in New Brunswick, New Jersey, for example, is developing a single-shot vaccine that would dramatically simplify vaccine roll-outs -- but it's only just got out of clinical trials, and it is not clear how fast the company can ramp up production.
Jerome Kim -- director-general of the International Vaccine Institute in Seoul -- says the world is still waiting for crucial data about the vaccines that are being rolled out now. Pharmaceuticals do not always perform as well in the real world as they do within the strict confines of a clinical trial. Early data from Israel's massive vaccination campaign suggest that the Pfizer vaccine is doing well, but it will take months to collect similar data about other vaccines.
Researchers are also investigating a range of doses, schedules, and combinations of vaccines. They still do not know how long vaccine-mediated immunity will last, or how well the various vaccines reduce coronavirus spread, with all such factors involved in judging which vaccine is "best". Mark Jit, a vaccine epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, says:. "It's not just a matter of getting them out as fast as possible. It's making sure that as we get them out, we are putting in place the surveillance studies to see how well the vaccines are doing in different situations."
Kim believes that, in time, there will be enough data to reduce uncertainty. For the moment, we're stuck with uncertainty: "You're watching these things change in real time. In the next month, we could think something quite different."
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* NEW AGE OF ENERGY (2): The COVID-19 pandemic was a blow to the world, killing hundreds of thousands and stalling the global economy. Greenhouse-gas emissions did fall by about 5% or so, but it was telling that it took an economic disaster to accomplish even that much. `
In 2015, more than 190 countries signed the Paris Agreement committing them to try to limit this warming to well below 2 degrees C over pre-industrial levels. Net emissions have grown by 40% over the past 30 years; meeting the Paris goals will demand a 90% fall from the current covid-struck levels over the next 30 years. That's a tall order -- and to make it even more challenging, during that time world population is expected to rise by 2 billion, and gross product may triple. It is obvious the world economy, which still generates over four-fifths of its energy consumption from fossil fuels, has to be fundamentally rethought.
In 2018, before the pandemic, the world emitted greenhouse gases with warming potential equivalent to about 55 gigatonnes. Roughly a fifth of that comes from changes to land use and agriculture, with the rest largely made up of emissions from energy consumption and industrial processes. Data from the World Resources Institute, a think-tank, lists how these emissions are parceled up:
On a national level, China is the biggest emitter, generating about a quarter of the world's emissions. America is next, with 12%, while the European Union and India produce about 7% each. In sum, the world's 20 most-polluting countries produce roughly 80% of global emissions.
Making big changes means big investments. The International Energy Agency (IEA), an intergovernmental organization, says $1.2 trillion USD of extra annual investment will be needed in the power system alone. Energy use must become smarter and more efficient, to save both money and emissions. By making the economy greener and more efficient, the goal is to keep below the 2C threshold -- but on current trends, a rise of 3C to 4C is looking more likely. That would make the weather much worse. Weather-related losses are already soaring: between 2017 and 2019 their annual costs averaged $210 billion, twice as high as ten years previously, according to Swiss Re, a re-insurer.
The pandemic, by pausing the world economy, offers an opportunity to get a new start on decarbonization. Some governments, particularly in Europe, have been attaching green strings to corporate bail-out packages, and are promising to invest more in the low-carbon economy. The pandemic has also shown that many trips, whether daily commutes or business flights, may not be really necessary in a virtualized world. Falls in oil prices mean that cutting fossil-fuel subsidies should become politically easier.
Carbon taxes will soon cover a fifth of the world's emissions. Only full coverage coupled with a high price can put the world on a low-carbon path. Carbon taxes will force change, but also create pain. Trillions of dollars of assets could become worthless or "stranded" if fossil fuels are eliminated out of the energy system. Of course, if there are losers, there are winners as well. Carbon-efficient firms can get an edge over competitors. Engineers, scientists and entrepreneurs are coming up with clever ways to help.
From a low base, capital is starting to flow. Climate-related investing grew by 70% to $579 billion between 2013 and 2018, according to the Climate Policy Initiative, a lobby group. Returns on renewables projects are making them ever more competitive with fossil-fuel ones. However, more is needed. Decarbonizing the economy is an enormous task and will be hugely disruptive, but failing to do it will result in a harsher climate and uncontrolled disruption. One of the lessons of the pandemic is that scientists' warnings about seemingly distant disasters should be heeded, and those claiming scientists cannot be trusted are not to be believed.
Of course, businesses need to worry about climate change. Depending on the industry, it will have some lesser or greater effect on their operations. Companies will also face ever more intense regulation, driven both by governments and by the demands of customers and consumers. There will also be a growing risk of litigation over climate change. Firms will have to embrace new approaches and technologies -- imposing costs, but also presenting opportunities. Any company that doesn't accept change risks being destroyed by competitors.
For now, too few companies are taking climate change seriously. That must and will change. As Rich Sorkin, head of Jupiter Intelligence, a consultancy, argues: "In ten years there won't be a large entity anywhere on the planet that does not have a handle on its climate risk. Consumers, shareholders and employees won't stand for it." [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THE WEEK THAT WAS 15: As discussed in Stephen Collinson and Maeve Reston in CNN.com ("Biden Starts To Execute On Policies Trump Abandoned By Crossing Off Another Campaign Promise", 15 April 2021), this last week President Joe Biden committed to withdrawing US troops from Afghanistan by 11 September 2021, after two decades of conflict there.
Biden's decision was blasted by prominent military figures and hawkish Republicans. However, Biden had campaigned on ending America's "Forever Wars", writing before the election: "Staying entrenched in unwinnable conflicts drains our capacity to lead on other issues that require our attention, and it prevents us from rebuilding the other instruments of American power."
He was following public sentiment: a 2019 Pew survey found that 59% of American adults said the war in Afghanistan was not worth fighting, and a staggering 58% of US veterans said the same. On the announcement of the decision, Biden said: "We went to Afghanistan because of a horrific attack that happened 20 years ago. That cannot explain why we should remain there in 2021."
The prospect of a Taliban victory in Afghanistan looms unpleasantly large, It appears that, though the US is pulling out uniformed forces, Americans will remain in Afghanistan in a more covert role, with the US doing what it can to back up Afghan forces. American ground forces hadn't been seeing much combat in Afghanistan as of late anyway, being there in a supporting role. It might turn out well, it might not. It is a huge gamble for Biden -- though criticism of the decision by the Right is hobbled, because Trump planned to pull out of Afghanistan, too. Once again, Biden has been sounding many of the same notes as Trump did, while demonstrating that he can follow through on the rhetoric far better and more sensibly than Trump did.
On the particular plus side, Biden made the decision against the protests of many of his advisors, demonstrating that he really is in charge. It was announced that Biden had spoken to Obama and George Bush about the decision; Obama publicly endorsed it, Bush did not. Biden, to no surprise, did not talk to Trump about it -- Trump having nothing to say worth listening to.
* Joe Biden's infrastructure plan involves raising the corporate maximum tax rate. Although a 28% tax rate is, by historical standards, on the low side, the Republicans of course oppose it; they don't want to see their "Trump tax cut for the rich" go up in smoke. It appears that the GOP are saying across the aisle in Congress that they regard any attempt by the Democrats to raise taxes as a "red line" that will not be crossed. They are, in effect, demanding unconditional surrender. Good luck with that.
CNN ran an editorial by two pundits, Erica York and Garrett Watson, the title saying that the tax hike would undermine American competitiveness in the global economy. OK, that's nonsense on the face of it; the Obama Administration had higher taxes and -- in Obama's second term, when the economy was building up momentum following the 2007:2008 financial crisis -- corporations were raking in profits.
I did some googling around on York and Watson, to find out they were with The Tax Foundation. The name itself made me suspicious; I looked up The Tax Foundation on RationalWiki -- which reports in its snarky style, with some detuning here:
BEGIN QUOTE:
The Tax Foundation is a non-partisan wingnut think tank which publishes slanted economic papers about politically charged issues to push a Libertarian perspective. The Foundation was founded by and for corporate interests by its own admission, and advocates global warming denialism, tax protester theories about the legality of taxation, and other Right-wing talking points. Many of their reports have been thoroughly debunked by economists, and by popular outlets like Forbes.
The Tax Foundation is heavily bankrolled by the Koch Brothers, who donated $545,000 through the Claude R. Lambe Foundation -- a Koch-owned "charity" which also funded similar think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, and Americans for Prosperity before it was dismantled in 2013. The Charles Koch Institute lists the Tax Foundation as a "partner organization", along with other think tanks.
Other contributors to the Tax Foundation include ExxonMobil, PepsiCo, General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, and General Motors. The Tax Foundation receives 40% of its funding from corporate sponsors, and an additional 42% from "philanthropic foundations" like the Koch groups above.
END QUOTE
As of late, the GOP has been on a fit of denouncing corporations, because companies have been boycotting Georgia for passing restrictive voting laws. The sincerity of the denunciations is questionable, given that the Republicans have no intention of turning down corporate contributions. However, the GOP has also denounced Big Tech for "censorship" -- for banning trolls telling whopping lies -- with Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, a super troll himself, proposing that Big Tech be denied further buyouts of other companies. Twitter shot back:
BEGIN QUOTE:
@rojopendejo (Rojo Pendejo): And every electronic device he owns mysteriously stopped working all at once.
END QUOTE
* On 10 April, one Deedee Mueller was at her home in Pasadena, California, with her little terrier Mei Mei in her lap -- when Mei Mei got excited, jumped off her lap, and dashed into the kitchen, barking furiously. Mei Mei was immediately joined by Squirt, another terrier owned by the Muellers.
On investigation, it turned out that a young black bear had invaded the kitchen, looking for something to eat. The dogs, though no match for the bear, were unafraid, barking their little heads off at it; the bear, not knowing what to make of these two fierce little creatures, decided to beat a hasty retreat. Deedee Mueller said on Facebook: "Thank god we have these two fierce dogs protecting us ... they don't know what fear is, but I was sweating for them." The bear was caught on security cameras, with the video going viral.
In other news of the unusual, a Brazilian named Fabricio Franzoli has figured out how to use Tesla coils (electric arc generators) to synthesize music.
Franzoli has put together a number of music videos, based on game and movie music. His MEGALOVANIA theme version works very well, and his BEVERLY HILLS COP theme works, too; he did the MORTAL KOMBAT theme, but only with one coil, not two, so it wasn't as good.
PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (146): George Herbert Walker Bush was born in Milton, Massachusetts on 12 June 1924, being the second son of Prescott Bush and Dorothy (Walker) Bush. The family moved to Greenwich, Connecticut, in 1925, with Prescott Bush becoming vice president of the investment bank William Averell Harriman & Company there, where his father-in-law, George Herbert Walker, was president. Not only did young George Bush inherit his maternal grandfather's name, he also inherited his nickname: "Pop", modified to "Poppy".
It was a family immersed in wealth and privilege; Averell Harriman became a prominent New Deal Democrat, working as a diplomat and government administrator, while in the postwar period Prescott Bush became a prominent Progressive Republican politician and senator. Although Poppy grew up in Greenwich, he spent summers at the family vacation home in Kennebunkport, Maine, or at his maternal grandparents' plantation in South Carolina.
George Bush went to primary school in Greenwich, then went on to the elite Phillips Academy in Massachusetts in 1937. He was thoroughly immersed in student politics, as well as captain of the varsity baseball and soccer teams. He graduated in 1942 at age 18, and promptly enlisted in the US Navy, taking aviator training. He went into operational service in 1944 as an ensign, flying a Grumman Avenger torpedo bomber off the aircraft carrier USS SAN JACINTO -- the Avenger being a single-engine aircraft with a three-man crew. He was nicknamed "Skin", being notably skinny.
Bush flew combat missions from May 1944, becoming a lieutenant JG in August. His Avenger was shot down during one mission; two of the crew were lost, but he was rescued by a US submarine. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. He returned to civilian life in September 1945, after the fall of Japan, though he remained on the reserve list until 1955, when he was formally discharged with the rank of lieutenant.
In January 1945, even before he'd left active service, Bush married Barbara Pierce; the marriage would last the rest of their lives. They had six children: George W. (born 1946), Robin (1949:1953), Jeb (born 1953), Neil (born 1955), Marvin (born 1956), and Doro (born 1959). Robin died of leukemia at age four.
On returning to civilian life, Bush enrolled at Yale, working on a condensed schedule that allowed him to graduate in less than three years. As with the Phillips Academy, he was active in campus life, being a fraternity president, captain of the baseball team, on the cheerleading squad, and becoming a member of the Yale Skull & Bones society. He graduated Beta Kappa in 1948 with a Bachelors degree in economics.
The Bush family then relocated to West Texas, where he wouldn't be under the shadow of his father and grandfather. Bush started out working as an oil field equipment salesman for Dresser Industries, led by family friend Neil Mallon. Bush was mobile during this time, living in Odessa, Texas; then a number of California cities; and then back to Midland, Texas.
From 1951, with help from family connections, Bush helped establish two oil companies, becoming the president of the offshore drilling arm of the Zapata Oil Company in 1954. Zapata Offshore became an independent company in 1959, with the Bush family then relocating from Midland to Houston, Texas. There, he obtained prominent attorney James Baker as a friend and ally. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* Space launches for March 2021 included:
-- 04 MAR 21 / STARLINK 19 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 0824 UTC (local time + 5) to put 60 SpaceX "Starlink" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit. The satellites were built by SpaceX, each having a launch mass of about 225 kilograms (500 pounds). This was the 20th Starlink batch launch. The Falcon 9 first stage performed a soft landing on the SpaceX recovery barge; it was its 8th flight.
-- 11 MAR 21 / STARLINK 20 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 0813 UTC (local time + 5) to put 60 SpaceX "Starlink" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit. The satellites were built by SpaceX, each having a launch mass of about 225 kilograms (500 pounds). The Falcon 9 first stage performed a soft landing on the SpaceX drone barge; it was its sixth flight. This was the 21st Starlink batch launch.
-- 11 MAR 21 / SHIYAN 9 -- A Chinese Long March 7A booster was launched at 1751 UTC (local time - 8) from the Chinese Wenchang launch center on Hainan Island to put the "Shiyan (Experiment) 9" geostationary satellite into orbit. It was described as a "technology demonstration satellite", but appears to have been a military payload.
-- 13 MAR 21 / YAOGAN 31 -- A Long March 2C booster was launched from Xichang at 0219 UTC (local time - 8) to put the secret "Yaogan 31" payloads into orbit. It was a triplet of satellites and may have been a "flying triangle" naval signals intelligence payload.
-- 14 MAR 21 / STARLINK 21 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 1001 UTC (local time + 4) to put 60 SpaceX "Starlink" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit. The satellites were built by SpaceX, each having a launch mass of about 225 kilograms (500 pounds). This was the 22nd Starlink batch launch. The booster made a soft landing on the SpaceX recovery barge; it was its ninth flight.
-- 22 MAR 21 / CAS500 1 & SMALLSATS -- A Soyuz 2-1a booster was launched from Baikonur at 0607 UTC (local time - 6) to put the South Korean "CAS500 1" remote sensing satellite, and 37 other smallsats, in low Earth orbit.
CAS500 1 was built by Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) and industry partners. It was the first in a series of satellites based on a new bus design for the Korean satellite industry. It had a launch mass of 500 kilograms (1,100 pounds) and featured an electro-optical payload that could produce panchromatic images with a resolution of around 0.5 meters (20 inches) and multispectral images with a resolution of around 2 meters (6.5 feet). Other relatively large satellites included:
The Netherlands-based ISILaunch had four quadpack CubeSat deployers on the flight, containing 14 satellites for seven customers.
Another pair of quadpack CubeSat deployers from Russia's Aerospace Capital were in the launch. They carried nine more CubeSats:
The Soyuz 2.1a booster was built Soyuz is manufactured by the RKTs Progress joint-stock company headquartered in Samara and dates back to the 1960s, with the original design an upgraded version of the earlier Voskhod booster -- itself derived from Sergei Korolev's R-7 missile.
The R-7 first flew in 1957, becoming the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). Later that year, it launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, into orbit. Although its time in service was short, as it was quickly superseded by other designs with storable liquid and later solid propellants which could remain on alert for much longer periods, its derivatives -- including Soyuz, Voskhod, Vostok, and Molniya -- became the backbone of the Soviet and later Russian space programs.
First flown in 1966, Soyuz was initially used in support of the human spaceflight program of the same name, launching initial test flights and, beginning the following year, crewed missions. Over the next few years, several modified versions of Soyuz were built to launch a handful of reconnaissance satellites and test flights related to the Soviet lunar program.
The most significant development in the series was the Soyuz-U in 1973. This replaced all previous Soyuz variants, as well as the earlier Voskhod which was still being used for most military launches. The most-flown booster of all time, the Soyuz-U remained in service until 2017, making over 750 launches.
The first flight of the modernized Soyuz 2.1a was in November 2004. Changes included upgraded engines and a digital flight control system, with the booster gaining the ability to roll onto a desired launch trajectory for the first time. This successful test paved the way for a first orbital launch in October 2006 with the European METOP-A weather satellite.
Soyuz 2 can be used in conjunction with two different upper stages, Fregat and Volga, to build a four-stage vehicle. These configurations allow it to deliver payloads to higher orbits or to perform more complex missions -- such as multiple satellite deployments -- than the three-stage Soyuz can achieve. Fregat, which was used on this mission, is the most commonly used upper stage, while Volga is used for smaller payloads, often in conjunction with the Soyuz 2.1v.
Soyuz launches take place from four sites worldwide: the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, the Plesetsk and Vostochny Cosmodromes in Russia, and the Centre Spatial Guyanais in Kourou, French Guiana. Slightly different versions of the booster are used depending on the launch site: while the boosters that fly from Plesetsk and Baikonur are the same, boosters built to fly from Vostochny and Kourou require different on-board computer and telemetry systems. Those launched from Korou, designated "Soyuz-ST", are also kitted up for the tropical conditions at that launch site.
-- 22 MAR 21 / BLACKSKY GLOBAL & ETC -- A Rocket Labs Electron light booster was launched from New Zealand's Mahia Peninsula at 2230 UTC (next day local time - 13) to put the 7th "BlackSky Global" remote sensing satellite into orbit. Built by LeoStella, a joint venture between Thales Alenia Space and Spaceflight Industries. BlackSky Global had a launch mass of about 55 kilograms (120 pounds).
Each of the current generation of BlackSky spacecraft can capture up to 1,000 color images per day, with a resolution of about 3 feet (1 meter), from orbits around 280 miles (450 kilometers) above Earth. BlackSky is building a constellation of 16 to 24 microsatellites to collect high-resolution imagery for sale to commercial and government customers, including the US military.
There were a number of CubeSats on the launch:
The Electron kick stage operated as a "Photon" satellite as well, with solar panels to generate power for its payload. The Photon, named "Pathstone" for this flight, which tested spacecraft systems for NASA's CAPSTONE small satellite mission, to be sent to the moon later in 2021. CAPSTONE will collect data on the radiation environment around the Moon in the same type of orbit that NASA's planned Gateway space station will use later in the 2020s. It's a precursor mission for NASA's Artemis Moon program. Rocket Lab sees Photon as a useful platform for deep-space missions.
The flight was nicknamed "They Go Up So Fast". Rocket Lab did not attempt to recover the Electron's first stage on this flight.
-- 24 MAR 21 / STARLINK 22 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 0828 UTC (local time + 4) to put 60 SpaceX "Starlink" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit. The satellites were built by SpaceX, each having a launch mass of about 225 kilograms (500 pounds). This was the 23rd Starlink batch launch.
-- 24 MAR 21 / ONEWEB 5 -- A Soyuz 2.1b booster was launched from Vostochny at 0247 UTC (local time - 8) to put 36 "OneWeb" low-orbit comsats into space. OneWeb plans to put a constellation of hundreds of comsats into near-polar low Earth orbit, at an altitude of about 1,000 kilometers (600 miles).
-- 30 MAR 21 / GAOFEN 12-02 -- A Long March 4C booster was launched from Jiuquan at 22457 UTC (next day local time - 8) to put the "Gaofen (High Resolution) 12-02" civil Earth observation satellite into Sun-synchronous low Earth orbit. The Gaofen satellites were part of the China High-Resolution Earth Observation System (CHEOS).
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* COVID-19 AS AN ANNOYANCE: As discussed in an article from AP ("Virus May Never Go Away But Could Change Into Mild Annoyance" by Aniruddha Ghosal and Christina Larson, 14 February 2021), the end of the COVID-19 pandemic is in sight. However, once the "end" is declared, what then? Will the coronavirus, which has already killed millions of people worldwide, eventually be eliminated by a global vaccination campaign, like smallpox? Will new variants defy vaccines? Or will the virus settle in to stay, transforming into a minor annoyance, like the common cold?
Dr. T. Jacob John -- who studies viruses and in charge of India's efforts to tackle polio and HIV/AIDS -- suggests that the SARS-CoV-2 virus will become yet "another animal in the zoo," joining the many other infectious diseases that humanity has learned to live with. However, the emergence of variants confuses that picture. As the virus spreads, the more likely it is that a new variant will become capable of evading current tests, treatments, and vaccines.
At present, the priority remains as it was: vaccinate as many people as quickly as possible. What happens after that? Jeffrey Shaman, who studies viruses at Columbia University, says: "Are people going to be frequently subject to repeat infections? We don't have enough data yet to know." Like many researchers, he believes chances are poor that vaccines will confer lifelong immunity.
That still may not be very troublesome. Jennie Lavine, a virologist at Emory University, co-authored a recent paper that offered a relatively optimistic scenario: After most people have been exposed to the virus, either through vaccination or surviving infections, the pathogen "will continue to circulate, but will mostly cause only mild illness," like an ordinary cold.
Ottar Bjornstad -- the other co-author of the paper who studies viruses at Pennsylvania State University -- says that although immunity from other coronaviruses, like those that cause colds, SARS, or MERS, fades in time, symptoms upon reinfection tend to be milder than the first illness: "Adults tend not to get very bad symptoms if they've already been exposed." The analysis in the paper was based on evaluation of the behavior of other coronaviruses, and assumed that SAR-CoV-2 continues to evolve, but not quickly or radically.
The 1918 flu pandemic can provide insights into the possible future of the COVID-19 pandemic. The 1918 virus wasn't a coronavirus, it was an H1N1 virus with genes that originated in birds. There was no vaccine at the time; it is estimated that it infected about a third of the world. Once infected people either died or developed immunity, the virus stopped spreading quickly -- to mutate into a less virulent form, which continues to circulate seasonally. Stephen Morse, who studies viruses at Columbia University, says: "Very commonly the descendants of flu pandemics become the milder seasonal flu viruses we experience for many years."
As new coronavirus variants emerge -- some being more contagious, some more virulent, and some possibly more resistant to vaccines -- scientists have to admit they don't really know what direction the virus will take, according to Mark Jit, who studies viruses at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine: "We've only known about this virus for about a year, so we don't yet have data to show its behavior over five years or 10 years."
About 12 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses will be produced in 2021. Rich countries have bought about three-quarters of those, and many have options to buy more. Ian MacKay, who studies viruses at the University of Queensland, points out that poorer countries will have to wait for the vaccine. That means higher mortality rates in those countries, as well as giving more opportunity for new variants to arise.
That some vaccines seem less effective against the new strains is worrisome, but since the shots provide some protection, vaccines could still be used to slow or stop the virus from spreading, according to Ashley St. John, who studies immune systems at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore.
Dr. Gagandeep Kang, an infectious diseases expert at Christian Medical College at Vellore in southern India, said the evolution of the virus raises new questions: At what stage does the virus become a new strain? Will countries need to re-vaccinate from scratch? Or could a booster dose be given? Kang adds that there is also the issue of the long-term impact of COVID-19 on patients who survive but are incapacitated for months. He points out that nobody has yet quantified how much economic damage that causes, with people who aren't hospitalized, but are unfit for any kind of labor. That's the story of COVID-19 overall; we just don't know how much trouble it will be in the future. Kang says: "We haven't had a lot of diseases that have affected people on a scale like this."
* In a related article from LIVESCIENCE.com ("Prior Infection With Common Cold Viruses Won't Protect Against COVID-19" by Yasemin Saplakoglu, 13 February 2021), coronaviruses are not new; four have been circulating as common cold bugs for years. There's been speculation that having been infected by a cold coronavirus may confer some resistance to the SARS-CoV-2 virus -- but a recent study throws cold water on that idea.
Scott Hensley -- one of the study leads, an associate professor of microbiology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania -- said: "We found that many people possessed antibodies that could bind to SARS-CoV-2 before the pandemic, but these antibodies could not prevent infections." Such antibodies could not prevent severe disease, either.
An earlier study, led by George Kassiotis -- an immunologist at The Francis Crick Institute in the United Kingdom -- did find that a number of subjects with antibodies from cold coronaviruses could prevent severe disease, if not infections. Kassiotis says it would be unlikely that cold coronaviruses could prevent infection with SARS-CoV-2, since children repeatedly come down with colds, and so "means that their antibodies to common cold coronaviruses don't even stop them [from] catching more common colds -- it would be fairly odd if they could stop them catching the pandemic virus." The important issue, he says, is if they can stop severe disease. He believes the new study isn't conclusive.
Hensley and his team analyzed blood samples collected in 2017, with samples taken from 263 children at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and from 168 adults at the Penn Medicine Biobank. Most of these samples contained antibodies against seasonal coronaviruses, but only around 20% of them contained antibodies that also had the ability to bind to SARS-CoV-2's spike protein or its nucleocapsid protein.
They then analyzed 502 other serum samples taken from people before the pandemic; half of these people ended up being infected with SARS-CoV-2, the other half didn't, being used as a control group. Some of those infected with SARS-CoV-2 had antibodies left from infection by cold coronaviruses. These antibodies bound to SARS-CoV-2, but they did nothing perceptible to change the course of the disease. That contradicts Kassiotis' study. Kassiotis suspects Hensley's study suffers from procedural errors, though it is possible that other factors were involved, such as geographic differences.
Hensley also points out that antibodies aren't all there is to an immune response: "Although antibodies from prior coronavirus infections cannot prevent SARS-CoV-2 infections, it is possible that pre-existing memory B cells and T cells could potentially provide some level of protection or at least reduce the disease severity of COVID-19. Studies need to be completed to test that hypothesis."
* Ironically, another study showed that being infected with rhinoviruses -- the most stereotypical cold virus -- blocks infection with SARS-CoV-2. Researchers at the Centre for Virus Research in Glasgow, Scotland, used a replica of the lining of our airways, made out of the same types of cells, and infected it with SARS-CoV-2 and rhinovirus. If rhinovirus and SARS-CoV-2 were released at the same time, only rhinovirus was successful. If rhinovirus had a 24-hour head start, then SARS-CoV-2, couldn't get in. If SARS-CoV-2 had a 24-hour head start, the rhinovirus still booted it out.
Further experiments showed the rhinovirus was triggering an immune response inside the infected cells, which inhibited the ability of SARS-CoV-2 to replicate. Of course, once the rhinovirus infection is over, SARS-CoV-2 has no difficulty infecting a host.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* NEW AGE OF ENERGY (1): As discussed in a survey from ECONOMIST.com ("The New Energy Order", 17 September 2020), the 20th century was the age of oil, reflected in its cars, its economy, and its wars. In the 21st century, the old oil order is unstable and faltering, prone to highs and disastrous lows. The arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020 dealt oil a particular blow, causing demand for oil to drop by more than a fifth, with an inevitable collapse in oil prices. There has been some recovery, but the long-term outlook for oil remains grim. ExxonMobil has been dropped from the Dow Jones Industrial Average, having been a member since 1928. Petrostates such as Saudi Arabia need an oil price of $70 to $80 USD a barrel to balance their budgets; right now, prices are at about $60 USD a barrel.
Boom and bust is, again, nothing new to the oil industry -- but there's a big difference with the current bust, in that governments are now working on plans to kick the oil habit, with citizens and investors approving. While oil remains in the dumps, clean-power stocks are soaring, up by 45% in 2020. America's Democratic president, Joe Biden, wants to spend trillions to decarbonize America's economy. The European Union has earmarked 30% of its $880 billion USD COVID-19 recovery plan for climate measures, while EU president Ursula von der Leyen has stated that she wants the EU to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by 55% over 1990 levels in the next decade.
The new energy order promises to be better for human health, more politically stable, and less economically volatile. However, it poses formidable challenges -- the first and most obvious being that it may not happen fast enough. It may also introduce instability in petrostates, and concentrate control of the green supply chain in China.
At present, fossil fuels are the ultimate source of 85% of the world's energy, and that order is no longer sustainable. Energy accounts for two-thirds of greenhouse-gas emissions, while pollution from burning fossil fuels cuts short the lives of over four million people a year, mostly in the emerging world's polluted mega-cities. Petrostates such as Venezuela and Saudi Arabia remain far too reliant on oil to stay in business, while the world's big powers are politically and militarily over-extended in attempting to accommodate them; America has about 60,000 troops in the Middle East. The fact that oil stocks are concentrated in a few countries, linked by the erratic OPEC cartel, makes the world's oil reserves vulnerable to geopolitical shocks. Oil prices have swung by over 30% in a sixth-month period 62 times since 1970.
A broad picture of the new energy order is emerging. With bold action, renewable electricity such as solar and wind power could rise from 5% of supply today to 25% in 2035, and almost 50% by 2050. Oil and coal use will drop, though cleaner natural gas will remain significant. The primary benefit of decarbonization will be, of course, limiting climate change, with its devastating droughts, fires, floods, famine, and mass dislocation. In maturity, it should be more politically stable as well, since supply will be diversified -- both geographically and technologically.
Petrostates will have to reform; as their governments start to depend on taxing their citizens instead of oil, they may become more representative. Consuming countries will no longer be chained to the petrostates, reducing conflicts and permitting more balanced relations. Finally, the new order will be less economically volatile: electricity prices will be determined not by a few big actors but by competition and gradual efficiency gains.
There are two big risks. Autocratic China could temporarily gain clout over the global power system because of its dominance in making key components and developing new technologies. Today Chinese firms produce 72% of the world's solar modules, 69% of its lithium-ion batteries, and 45% of its wind turbines. They also control much of the refining of minerals critical to clean energy, such as cobalt and lithium. Instead of a petrostate, the People's Republic might become an "electrostate". It is aggressively investing in green technology development.
There is no reason that the rest of the world can't catch up. Europe is home to giant developers of wind and solar farms -- Orsted, Enel, and Iberdrola are building such projects around the world. European firms are leading the race to cut their own emissions as well. To be sure, America's trajectory has been deflected from decarbonization by the rise of shale oil and gas, which has made it the world's largest oil producer, and by Right-wing resistance to decarbonization measures. If America were to act on climate change -- with, say, a carbon tax and new infrastructure -- its capital markets, national energy laboratories, and universities would make it a formidable green power. Hostility towards green technology is fading in the USA, while the embrace of green technology is growing more enthusiastic.
The second risk is the transition of petrostates, which account for 8% of world GDP and have nearly 900 million citizens. They are faced with huge challenges, and may not handle them well. Although oil demand won't go to zero any time soon, it is on the downtrend, and will lead to a vicious fight for market share which will be won by the countries with the cheapest and cleanest crude; reform will be hobbled by the lack of money to pay for it. In 2020, Saudi Arabia's government revenue plummeted: troublesome decades lie ahead.
The temptation in the face of these challenges is to go slow. That's the wrong answer: climate change is overtaking the world much too quickly, and not spending the money now to deal with it will cost much more later. We're not spending enough now; annual investment in wind and solar capacity needs to be about $750 billion USD. We have a choice between a revolution by design, or a revolution imposed on us by necessity. [TO BE CONTINUED]
NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* CNN's Chris Cillizza seems impressed by the performance of Joe Biden in the White House. An essay Cillizza published on 9 April 2021 ("The Sneaky Radicalism of Joe Biden's First Few Months In Office"), even suggested there was something sly in Biden's approach.
Biden, after all, campaigned on a theme of bipartisanship, of bringing America back together. That worried Left-tilted Democrats, who thought he would be little more than a Republican under the skin. They were wrong:
BEGIN QUOTE:
The first 79 days of Biden's presidency have been defined by a series of executive orders, laws, legislative maneuvers and policy proposals that suggest that the 46th president is willing to go bigger, bolder and, yes, more liberal, than many observers -- of both parties -- thought he would.
END QUOTE
As evidence:
Add to that Biden's suspension of the Keystone XL pipeline, his decisions to rejoin the World Health Organization and the Paris climate accord, and his latest move -- setting up a commission aimed at considering structural changes to the composition of the Supreme Court. Incidentally, Biden is not in favor of adding justices, or "court-packing" -- apparently being inclined to an 18-year SCOTUS term limit. Obviously, he doesn't see it as an issue that needs to be addressed right away.
Incidentally, there is a great irony in seeing Biden's actions as all that radical; they're just prudent. It's just that the Republicans have shifted so far to the Right that prudence has become Left radicalism, with the Woke Left bristling at the notion Biden is at all like them. Actually, there was never that much difference between Democratic Moderates and the Woke Left, the disagreements being mostly on tactical issues.
Anyway, so how did a stereotypical middle-roader like Biden end up swinging towards the Left? Cillizza believes there were two reasons:
Ezra Klein of THE NEW YORK TIMES listed cases of GOP obstructionism, with one standing out:
BEGIN QUOTE:
... it's impossible to overstate the damage that [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell's stonewalling of Merrick Garland [in his nomination to the Supreme Court], followed by his swift action to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, did to the belief among Senate Democrats that McConnell was in any way, in any context, a good-faith actor. They gave up on him completely.
The result is that Obama, Biden, the key political strategists who advise Biden and almost the entire Democratic congressional caucus simply stopped believing Republicans would ever vote for major Democratic bills.
END QUOTE
As mentioned in this column on 22 March, to Biden "bipartisanship" means taking actions to benefit all Americans, as opposed to the Trump doctrine of simply punishing the other side. Of course, pleasing everyone is impossible, but all Biden has to do is please a comfortable majority of the citizens -- which he appears to be doing. This is defuzing the new civil war supposedly raging in America from the bottom up. If the Republicans don't want to get with the program, they're headed for the trashcan of history.
* As discussed in an article from REUTERS.com ("Yellen Tells World's Big Economies: Spend Big, Danger Lurks" by Andrea Shalal & David Lawder, 8 April 2021) Janet Yellen, Biden's Treasury secretary, has been beating the drum for funding to keep the global economy going.
In a statement to the steering committees of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, Yellen suggested that wealthy countries need to continue supporting developing countries as they confront the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, and high debt burdens. She urged the World Bank to help all countries get COVID-19 vaccines, and backed talks to replenish the World Bank's International Development Association fund for the poorest countries, which the bank hopes to tie up by the end of 2021.
Yellen said that the USA had pledged $4 billion USD to the COVAX global vaccine distribution initiative, and urged other countries to help out. So far, the US has only provided vaccines to Mexico and Canada, but she says other countries may well get help in the future. "The United States will continue to work with partners to increase vaccine supplies, explore sharing excess vaccines, and make sure financing does not become an obstacle for global vaccination." She concluded:
BEGIN QUOTE:
The [COVID-19] crisis has exacerbated the trend of rising income inequality, raising concerns about a divergent path within and across countries. We also face the existential threat of climate change. We can only resolve these problems through strong international cooperation. The job is not yet done, given high uncertainty and the risk of permanent scarring. I urge major economies to not just avoid removing support too early, but to strive to provide significant amounts of new fiscal support to secure a robust recovery.
END QUOTE
An article from REUTERS.com the next day ("Biden Budget Would Beef Up IRS Tax Enforcement -- Yellen" by David Lawder, 9 April 2021) reported on Yellen's moves to bolster the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The Republicans have underfunded the IRS, with the consequence that substantial tax revenues have leaked away. The Biden Administration wants to stop the bleeding. [ED: One wonders if Right-wing talking heads, like those of Fox News, are going to be given particular scrutiny. They have a lot of money, along with an outspoken contempt for rules and obligations.]
According to Yellen, the administration's budget request envisions that the IRS budget will increase by $1.2 billion USD, or 10.4%, in 2022. The $13.2 billion USD overall IRS budget would include an additional $900 million USD for tax enforcement. At present, the IRS has 15,000 fewer revenue agents than it had in 2010, forcing it to reduce the number of audits it conducts. Rebuilding the agent force is expected to bring in much more tax revenue than the IRS spends on the exercise.
In addition, Yellen is pushing for international tax standardization, saying in a recent speech:
BEGIN QUOTE:
We're working with G20 nations to agree to a global minimum corporate tax rate that can stop the race to the bottom. Together, we can use global minimum tax to make sure that the global economy thrives, based on a more level playing field in the taxation of multinational corporations and spurs innovation, growth, and prosperity. ... It's about making sure that governments have stable tax systems that raise sufficient revenue to invest in essential public goods and respond to crises, and that all citizens fairly share the burden of financing government.
END QUOTE
* According to a Reuters-Ipsos poll conducted at the end of March, about half of Republicans believe the 6 January 2021 attack on the Capitol Building was largely a non-violent protest, or was the work of Leftist activists "trying to make Trump look bad." 60% of Republicans also believe Trump's bogus assertion that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him through massive voter fraud, and want him to run for re-election in 2024.
Prominent Republicans have, for the most part, tried to pretend nothing is wrong. John Geer, an expert on public opinion at Vanderbilt University, says: "Republicans have their own version of reality. It is a huge problem. Democracy requires accountability, and accountability requires evidence."
In a recent Reuters-Ipsos poll, only about three in 10 independents said they have a favorable view of Trump, among the lowest level recorded since his presidency. Most Americans -- about 60% -- also believe Biden honestly won the November election. There is something "not for real" about the lingering Trump frenzy. Joe Walsh, a prominent anti-Trump conservative, commented on Twitter:
BEGIN QUOTE:
I come from the world of Trump supporters. I still engage with thousands of these folks every day. It's clear to me that all they want is "leaders" who will fight. They don't care what they're fighting for. They don't care how illegally they fight. They just want them to fight.
END QUOTE
It is hard to see that this is sustainable. I was talking to a neighbor about another neighbor, who likes to fly Trump flags and such: "I was thinking about Peter [not his real name] -- he's kinda dippy, but he's harmless. He wouldn't hurt a fly." There's a discrepancy between the rabid rhetoric and an inclination to action.
The big question is: what happens when the Department of Justice indicts Trump? Although many people are in denial over the prospect, it's very hard to believe it won't happen. If Trump's defense is like that of his second impeachment trial, he's doomed. I don't know what's going to happen, but it's going to be noisy.
* In somewhat related news, I ran across a comment about "Birds Aren't Real". What? I looked it up, and it turns out to be a fake conspiracy theory, the prime mover being 20-year-old Peter McIndoe. There's an elaborate back story, enough to say that it seems that the US government exterminated all birds, and replaced them with robot birds to spy on Americans.
McIndoe claims he is "completely serious" about the birds conspiracy, but it's with a nudge and a wink. He and others in the movement are making money selling t-shirts and stickers proclaiming: BIRDS AREN'T REAL. It's been going viral as of late, and presumably they're making some money off of it.
* It was 27 degrees Celsius (80 degrees Fahrenheit) here in Loveland, Colorado, on Easter Sunday -- a record high temperature. That is ominous, suggesting another hot dry summer in the US West, with fires out of control. The Colorado state government, and other state governments in the region, are mobilizing to deal with the threat. I suspect there may be a push to get people who live in the woods to clear out fire buffer zones around their houses and other structures, and add fireproofing.
It went cool again, which was encouraging. As for the big snow we had a few weeks back, it was hard on the ash trees, many broken limbs -- but only the ash trees as far as I can see. Since they hadn't leafed out, they shouldn't have broken so easily. I think the emerald ash borer beetles are here in force, and all the ashes are dying now. We'll see. In any case, I'm glad I cut down the two ashes in my back yard, and replaced them with catalpas. They're not full-size yet, but coming along. They leaf out late, followed by impressive blossoms.
As a very petty issue, I long wondered why, when I went up my roof, I would find small rocks up there. Where did they come from? I just found out that crows will pick up rocks and use them as bombs. It appears that they will bombard the cars of people they don't like with rocks, and I imagine they nail cats that way every now and then. Crows are very smart birds. Then again, they're probably robots.
PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (145): There were two major SCOTUS decisions during the Reagan Administration. The first, STRICKLAND V. WASHINGTON (1984), involved one David Washington, who was convicted of three murders by a Florida court and sentenced to death. Washington felt that his counsel had not done a good job, failing to call character witnesses or ask for a psychiatric evaluation. Washington claimed that his 6th Amendment rights to a fair trial had been violated.
SCOTUS judged against Washington by a vote of 8:1, saying that his complaint could only be seen as valid if the counsel assistance had not met an "objective reasonableness" standard -- in effect, when the counsel was blatantly incompetent -- and if there were a "reasonable probability" the judgement would have been different with competent counsel. Given that Washington was clearly guilty of three murders, that was obviously not the case. Washington was executed on 13 July 1984, two months after the court's decision.
The other decision was CHEVRON V. NATURAL RESOURCES DEFENSE COUNCIL (1984), concerned a 1977 amendment to the Clean Air Act, in which states were required to reduce electric power plant pollution. Under the amendment, any particular power plant site was regarded as a single unit, no matter how many smokestacks it included. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) felt this "bubble interpretation" was a loophole that was being exploited, and sued the EPA. The NRDC won in lower court; a challenge took it up to SCOTUS, with the Chevron oil company being the lead in the challenge.
SCOTUS judged unanimously against the NRDC -- the decision saying that if the law was unambiguous, an agency had to follow it, while if it was ambiguous, the courts would not override the agency's policy. That was a sensible attitude for the court to take, since otherwise the judiciary would be second-guessing agency policy, which the court didn't really have the expertise to do. The difficulty was that, during an administration such as Reagan's that wasn't keen on regulation, an agency might end up not doing its job. The "Chevron Defense" has been heavily cited ever since, but not to much effect, since the decision was more or less a no-brainer.
* Reagan left office in 1989, with a high public-approval rating of 68%. The Reagans went back to California, opening his presidential library in 1991. He continued to speak in favor of reforms, such as a balanced-budget amendment and repeal of the 22nd Amendment, which of course limited presidents to two terms. In 1992, he established the Ronald Reagan Freedom Award as a function of the new Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation. His last public appearance was at the funeral of Nixon on 27 April 1994.
That same year, 1994, at the age of 83, Reagan was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. He continued to be active, even playing golf with supervision, but finally went into seclusion at home with Nancy in 2001. On his 87th birthday in 1998, Washington National Airport was renamed the "Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport" through a bill signed into law by President Bill Clinton; the US Navy named an aircraft carrier in his honor, with the USS RONALD REAGAN launched in 2001.
Ronald Reagan died on 5 June 2004 at age 93. His body laid in state in the Capitol Building, leading to a state funeral on 11 June, with world leaders in attendance. The body was interred at the Ronald W. Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. Nancy Reagan died on 6 March 2016, at the age of 94.
Ronald Reagan initiated a shift towards conservatism that would last for a generation, what would be called the "Reagan Era". He was deified by the Right, and with some justification: his presidency had significant successes, particularly in rapprochement between the US and the Soviet Union. His advocates credit him with winning the Cold War -- but that was an exaggeration, since the Soviet Union was falling apart even as Reagan took office, and he simply helped the process along. The authoritarian Soviet system was defeated by Western democracy.
The adulation heaped on Reagan tended to conceal that his policies were not universally popular, indeed less popular than Reagan as a person. His push towards tax cuts helped bring in an era of hollowing-out government programs by underfunding them. Most significantly, Reagan helped foster a mindset of mistrust of government, saying on 12 August 1986: "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help."
It was in the context of government farm policy, which has always had its problems, and it was clearly meant as a joke -- but it became an enduring slogan of the Reagan mythology. Even as a joke, it was startling that a leader would denounce the organization of which he was the head. He could have just as well said: "If the American people need help, they won't get it from the government." A generation after Reagan, that mindset would help wreck the Republican Party. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: As discussed in an article from NEWATLAS.com ("REE Demonstrates Its Wildly Innovative Vehicle Platform Of The Future" by Loz Blain, 6 October 2020), an Israeli startup firm named REE has come up with an innovative, but in some ways obvious, design concept for electric vehicles.
They have implemented a flat, modular vehicle chassis in which all steering, suspension, motor, gearbox and braking functions are bundled up into removable, replaceable "corner units" in the wheels. All the vehicular functions are electronically controlled; different bodies can be attached to the chassis and plugged into it. The chassis is reminiscent of a skateboard, amounting to a fully functional EV, just without a body.
The corner units can be specified with a wide range of options. Active suspension? 4 wheel steering? How much ground clearance? How much power? Desired torque? Top speed? Two or four wheel drive? A corner unit that fails can be immediately replaced. REE is testing three different chassis sizes, covering a 1.3-tonne delivery vehicle, a 2.5-tonne passenger and cargo transport, and a 4.5-tonne delivery van.
Toyota has partnered with REE on its "Flatformer" range of electric Hino vehicles, which will include everything from passenger shuttles and delivery vans to trash trucks, food trucks and mobile medical services. Indian automaking colossus Mahindra has an agreement with REE to develop and build an initial run of up to a quarter of a million commercial EVs.
* As discussed in an article from THEVERGE.com ("The US Army Is Testing Augmented Reality Goggles For Dogs" by James Vincent, 9 October 2020) the military has long and good experience with dogs on the front lines. Given the military's high-tech orientation, it's not too surprising that military dogs are being given tech upgrades as well -- the latest exercise being development of canine augmented-reality goggles.
Military dogs already wear goggles, known as "Rex Specs", to protect their eyes. The AR goggles are based on the Rex Spec, with a camera to allow a handler to see what the dog sees, plus an AR display for communicating with the dog. A dog's face has to be 3D-scanned to ensure optimum placement of the display. More traditionally, handlers give commands to their dogs using hand signals or laser pointers, but of course, that means the dog has to be in line of sight to the handler. The AR display simulates what a dog would see with a laser pointer.
The goggles are being developed by Command Sight, a Seattle-based private company, under contract with the Army Research Laboratory (ARL). The prototype goggles have a wired comlink, but of course production googles will be wireless. There's no commitment to production yet.
The CEO of Command Sight, AJ Peper, says: "Much of the research to date has been conducted with my rottweiler, Mater. His ability to generalize from other training to working through the AR goggles has been incredible. We still have a way to go from a basic science and development perspective before it will be ready for the wear and tear our military dogs will place on the units."
* I ran across an ad on Twitter concerning a toy from Boley, a Hong Kong toymaker. It was a little toy locomotive for tots, but with a twist: it had a magazine that could be loaded up with domino-style blocks, and then dispense them in sequence as it rolled around on the floor, to set up a "domino show" to topple when desired. The smokestack can be twisted to turn the locomotive. Obviously, the product of some clever Chinese person at work.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* RETHINKING BATTERIES: As discussed in an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("New Generation Of Lithium-Ion Batteries Could Hold More Charge -- Without Catching Fire" by by Robert F. Service, 8 May 2019), the modern lithium-ion battery is a marvelous piece of technology -- except for its tendency to catch on fire, Now, researchers report they've improved on such batteries so they don't catch on fire easily, and they may be able to store more power as well.
Lithium-ion batteries feature three main components: two charge-storing electrodes, and a liquid organic electrolyte that separate them. The electrolyte shuttles lithium ions back and forth between the electrodes during charging and discharging; the problem is that the electrolyte is flammable.
Researchers have attempted to deal with the "catch on fire" problem by replacing the liquid electrolytes with solid electrolytes, or water-based electrolytes that can't catch fire. Unfortunately, if the operating voltage of these water-based batteries is greater than 1.23 volts then electrode materials can electrolyze water molecules, splitting them into hydrogen and oxygen gas, with possibly explosive results. However, if researchers try to stay below the 1.23V threshold, they get batteries that store much less energy than traditional lithium-ion cells, which operate at about 4V.
Progress towards a solution appeared in 2015, when a team led by Wang Chunsheng -- a materials scientist at the University of Maryland in College Park -- reported they had developed a new salt-rich water-based electrolyte. This "water-in-salt electrolyte (WiSE)" promotes the formation a protective layer around the electrodes that prevented them from ripping apart water molecules in the electrolyte's interior. Unfortunately, the electrode materials in those batteries could only produce 3 volts. Wang and his team reported further progress in 2017, announcing they had developed an anode -- positive electrode -- material that was compatible with 4V operation and with the WiSE. That left them with the problem of the cathode, the negative electrode. Now, they've announced a graphite-based cathode that works with the WiSE at 4V and above.
The new electrode material includes bromine and chlorine, and it becomes protected from the water-based electrolyte by locking reactive electrode materials in solid salt particles around the electrode. It works like this:
Wang and his colleagues say that on a per-mass basis, their cathode materials already have about 30% greater charge storage capacity than conventional cathode materials. It remains to be seen if the "all-up" battery will be more efficient as well. However, the battery won't require cobalt, which is a toxic heavy metal, and so promises to be more environmentally benign.
* As discussed in an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Zinc-Air Batteries Are Typically Single-Use. A New Design Could Change That" by Maria Temming, 5 January 2021), zinc-air batteries are in widespread use, and highly effective. They do have the problem that they are not rechargeable, but new research suggests that will change.
Zinc-air batteries consist of a zinc anode and a porous cathode, with an electron-conducting electrolyte between them, for example aqueous potassium hydroxide (KOH). The rear of the cathode is exposed to air. Oxygen in the air enters the cathode, to produce hydroxide (-OH) ions that migrate to the anode. At the anode, the hydroxide ions react with the zinc to produce zinc hydroxide -- Zn(HO)2 -- with two electrons flowing out of the anode, through a circuit to the cathode. At the cathode, the two electrons support the generation of hydroxide ions.
Sun Wei, a materials scientist at the University of Muenster in Germany, says: "The problem is, this reaction is not very reversible." In other words, the battery can't be recharged. The caustic electrolyte in conventional zinc-air batteries also degrades the cathode and anode -- meaning that even if they could be recharged, it wouldn't be very many times.
Sun and his colleagues developed a new electrolyte, containing water-repellent ions, that shifts the reaction. The ions stick to the cathode, ensuring that water can't reach it -- and so zinc ions migrating through the electrolyte react directly with oxygen on the cathode to form zinc peroxide (ZnO2), releasing two electrons that travel through the electrolyte to the anode. The reaction is reversible, and the new electrolyte isn't so hard on the cathode. In lab tests, the research ran their battery through 320 charge-recharge cycles with little difficulty.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* VACCINE PERSISTENCE (4): Along with concerns about the yellow fever vaccine, some vaccinologists are also questioning a 1991 switch to a supposedly safer vaccine against pertussis, which causes whooping cough. For decades, the USA and other countries had great success with a vaccine made from killed Bordetella pertussis, the bacterium that causes the disease. However, that "whole cell" vaccine became controversial about 40 years ago, due to a much-argued claim that in rare cases, it caused serious neurological damage. As a result, an acellular vaccine -- containing an inactivated version of the pertussis toxin that causes the disease, as well as pieces of B. pertussis -- replaced it.
The vaccine is given along with two others, against diphtheria and tetanus. ACIP calls for six doses of the triple-combo vaccine between infancy and age 12; it then recommends tetanus and diphtheria boosters every 10 years for adults. Despite the robust vaccination schedule, in 2010:11 and 2014:15, California experienced about 20,000 pertussis cases in two massive outbreaks.
To find out if waning protection was to blame, Kaiser Permanente in Northern California -- a health care system that has detailed medical records for its millions of long-term patients -- examined more than 4,000 children from 2006 to 2015. The Kaiser study concluded that protection faded 27% per year after children's fifth dose of the acellular vaccine, which is given between ages 4 and 6.
The Oregon Primate Center's Mark Slifka believes the replacement of the whole cellular vaccine with the acellular one was unnecessary and a mistake: "Acellular starts with 80% to 90% protection, but crashes over the next few years." It leaves many children dangerously susceptible between their fifth dose and sixth given at 11 or 12 years of age; whooping cough causes little or no trouble in teens and adults, but it can kill young children.
Ironically, the two other components of the triple vaccine have surprising staying power. The Oregon Primate Center where Slifka works draws blood from its employees to monitor potential infections to and from monkeys and other nonhuman primates. Slifka and colleagues obtained blood samples collected over a 26-year period, and assessed how quickly antibodies to the tetanus and diphtheria bacteria decayed after vaccination -- to find that it would take more than 40 years for people to begin to lose protective immunity against those two pathogens. Slifka says: "We have a much higher level of immunity than previously realized."
WHO, Slifka notes, already does not recommend tetanus and diphtheria boosters for adults who have received their complete childhood shots. He says ACIP -- a rotating group of vaccine experts that meets three times a year, and regularly revises recommendations, should also consider withdrawing its recommendation for boosters. Slifka estimates eliminating those shots would save the United States about $1 billion USD per year.
Exactly why only one vaccine in the trio fades, while the others work for almost a lifetime, underlines the bigger mystery of how to make vaccines more durable. Clues are coming from an unusual vaccine against HPV.
Concerned that an attenuated or an inactivated HPV vaccine might still contain viral components that can cause cancer, researchers genetically engineered another virus to manufacture copies of a harmless HPV surface protein that self-assembles into a "viruslike particle (VLP)". Trials have shown that almost everyone vaccinated with that noninfectious VLP develops high levels of HPV-neutralizing antibodies. Those levels decline moderately after 2 years, but then remain stable for at least a decade.
John Schiller -- an oncologist at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, who in the 1990s pioneered development of the vaccine, which protects against genital cancers and warts -- says: "Until we did the human studies with the vaccine, we really weren't aware we were going to get such consistent and durable antibody responses." VLPs challenge the widely-held notion that durability depends primarily on memory B cells waking and going into action when an infection occurs. Schiller says that the HPV vaccine leads to consistent blood levels of neutralizing antibodies for years, which is not consistent with the operation of memory B cells: "If it were memory B cells, you should see spikes, blips up and down."
Schiller and others suspect that VLPs trigger production of a different set of B cells known as "long-lived plasma cells (LLPCs)", which reside in the bone marrow and continually produce antibodies specific to different foreign antigens. He says that VLPs "are clearly the best way to make LLPCs."
Following the success of the HPV vaccines, VLPs have become a trendy vaccine strategy. A hepatitis E vaccine on the market in China uses VLPs, and experimental influenza, norovirus, chikungunya, encephalitis, malaria, and dengue VLP vaccines are in development. However, nobody is exactly sure how VLPs prod the immune system to make LLPCs. Schiller points to the work of Nobel Prize winner Rolf Zinkernagel of the University of Zurich in Switzerland and his then-graduate student Martin Bachmann. They reported 25 years ago that dense, highly repetitive proteins on the surfaces of viruses trigger the strongest antibody responses. A VLP is just such a structure. In theory, that allows the viral antigens to "cross-link" to many receptors on the surface of B cells. That, in turn, triggers a cascade of signals in immune cells that lead to strong, durable antibodies. Exactly how that happens, Slifka calls "the million-dollar question."
Slifka is frustrated with the status quo, in particular being unhappy that epidemiologists who study pandemics don't work as closely as they could with researchers investigating the mechanisms by which vaccines confer immunity: "How do we sort out this mess? We need to have the epidemiologists and the immunologists discuss their findings. Both sides could learn so much." [END OF SERIES]
START | PREV | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THE WEEK THAT WAS: On the morning of 23 March, the EVER GIVEN -- a 400-meter (1,300-foot) long container ship -- was en route north through the Suez Canal, when high winds forced it to yaw and wedge itself in the canal. It took six days of digging, dredging, pushing, and an unusually high tide to get it on the move again, By that time, hundreds of vessels were backlogged, waiting to get through, with hundreds of millions of dollars of losses. There were a lot of corny jokes about it on Twitter, as well as an odd sense of comfort: given how mad things are these days in the USA, it's nice to have a problem that can be fixed and put to bed.
In less troublesome news, in March one Captain Haida StarEagle -- a member of the Matinecocks, an Algonquin tribe on Long Island -- transferred from the US Air Force to the US Space Force, to become a Space Force intelligence officer. It was played up in press releases as a diversity thing, and it certainly had its amusement value: Captain StarEagle of Space Force? That has class, much better than Buzz Lightyear!
* The Biden Administration made a big splash this last week by announcing a US infrastructure revitalization plan, with a pricetag of more $2.25 trillion USD. It was not really a surprise, since Biden had promised it during his presidential campaign -- but as discussed in an editorial by Stephen Collinson on CNN.com ("Infrastructure Was A Trump Punchline But Is A Window Into Biden's Soul" 31 March 2021), it was still a bold move that established a firm direction for the Biden agenda.
Biden, in sum, wants to revitalize the American economic system. Since the presidency of Ronald Reagan, there's been a drift towards concentration of economic power in the hands of the ultra-wealthy, while the lower and middle class have fallen behind:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Biden's vision now is not just for new highways, broadband and ports. He sees revived labor unions, equally shared GDP growth, easier access to health care, equal pay for women, clean energy, and better child care for workers. "My economic plan is all about jobs, dignity, respect, and community. Together, we can, and we will, rebuild our economy," Biden said in his Democratic National Convention speech in August, which explained his core philosophy.
END QUOTE
The plan has two components:
Biden launched the effort with a speech in Pittsburgh, a blue-collar city that is undergoing the kind of revitalization the plan is to promote -- Pittsburgh being a hub of modern industries, medical tech firms, excellent education institutions, and innovation. Besides, Biden is from Scranton originally, and Pittsburgh is close to home.
Republicans have already denounced the plan, since it means the doom of the Trump tax cut that was near and dear to the hearts of the GOP. The Democrats will need to maintain a united front in the face of resistance -- and also figure out some way of neutralizing the filibuster, so they can pass the bill on a 51:50 vote. Actually, it seems likely they already have figured out what they're going to do about the filibuster; they're just waiting for the Republicans to force the issue with their obstructionism before taking that action.
Of course, the Biden Administration and Congressional Democrats have other issues on the plate: gun control, climate change, and a voting rights act to deal with Republican ballot suppression. The infrastructure bill, however, gets priority, because it's clearly about helping the American people. Passing a new voting rights act, however much it's needed, can't make a statement like that.
Biden is greatly helped by the contrast of his administration with that of Donald Trump, which was incompetent and focused primarily on indiscriminately picking fights. Trump liked to occasionally play up an infrastructure plan, but he never really had one; indeed, he never had any plans worthy of the label, he had no capability to make them. From the time of Reagan, the Republicans have proclaimed the end of the "era of big government", and tried to put that slogan into practice. The chaos created by the Trump Administration has discredited that ideology, giving Biden an opportunity to supercharge government intervention.
Like so much of what the Biden Administration is doing, it's just good sense and no surprise. What is surprising is that Biden has appropriated Trump's assertive populist-nationalist tone to push the new agenda. Trump liked to pretend he was for helping ordinary people, but he only cared about his personal interests. Biden, in contrast, honestly cares about working people, putting them first and foremost in his considerations. He wants to fix problems holding back working and middle class Americans, and he's broadcasting that on all channels.
Along the same lines, although Biden has completely reversed Trump's deranged foreign policy -- with the Biden Administration reaching out to allies and taking a sharp line against tyrants, exactly the opposite of the Trump Administration -- Biden has also made it clear that foreign policy is a second priority to domestic policy, which he sees as all about ordinary American people. Nicholas Dungan, a nonresident senior fellow at The Atlantic Council, says: "Biden isn't doing AMERICA FIRST, but his policy is AMERICANS FIRST. That makes total sense. It's why he was elected."
* As discussed in an editorial from ECONOMIST.com ("Fiscal Wrecktitude", 29 March 2021), Joe Biden's big plans envision running up big deficits. Unlike his Democratic predecessors in the White House, he doesn't seem to be very worried about them:
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Today, as spending has spiked and the economy has faltered, the debt stands above $27 trillion USD, or around 130% of GDP. The Federal deficit tripled last year to more than $3 trillion USD. America is once again [after the stimulus efforts of the Obama Administration] trying to kick-start its economy, this time with a fiscal jolt of $1.9 trillion USD, far more than Presidents Clinton or Obama dared. And yet when Joe Biden held his first press conference as president on March 25th, he felt no need to mention deficits at all. After some 38 minutes, unbidden, he brought up the cost of his stimulus plan, but only to mock Republican officials' newfound concerns about it as hypocritical, given their support for Donald Trump's tax cuts: "I love the fact that they found this whole idea of concern about the Federal budget. It's kind of amazing."
END QUOTE
There is little fretting over deficits among Democrats, who believe that they are much less of a threat than challenges such as broken infrastructure and climate change. Polls suggest the public isn't much worried, either. In a recent Gallup survey, only 3% of those polled thought public debt was America's biggest problem.
Low interest rates are keeping down the cost of servicing the public debt, and Biden is seeking to raise taxes on corporations and the wealthy. Biden is extremely cautious about raising taxes, however, since the Republicans have thoroughly weaponized them against the Democrats; getting too enthusiastic about raising taxes would simply pave the way for another Ronald Reagan. However, all prospects are of an economic boom after America puts COVID-19 behind it, with Biden's infrastructure plan likely to give it a substantial boost -- and that's certain to help with deficits.
Biden was once a deficit hawk, as were Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Clinton proved adept at dealing with the deficit, but the Republicans took back the White House after he left. Obama managed to make headway against the deficits he had to rack up with stimulus to deal with the 2007:2008 financial crisis, but once again the Republicans took back the White House after he left. After they did, their concern for deficits evaporated, with the GOP cheerfully rubber-stamping a Trump tax cut that was focused on enriching the wealthy, with Trump peddling the dusty old "supply-side" argument to claim the tax cuts would pay for themselves with economic growth. Deficits skyrocketed.
That was the end of concern over deficits among Democratic legislators, who concluded that deficits were just another bludgeon the Republicans used to beat the Democrats over the head -- and no matter what the Democrats did, all the GOP would do was keeping beating them over the head. It was a sucker game. Under Trump, the Republicans lost whatever reservations they had about hypocrisy, embracing it enthusiastically, indifferent to credibility. Rahm Emanuel, who served as a policy adviser to Clinton and chief of staff to Obama, calls the Republicans "seasonal deficit hawks. They come around every fall when a Democrat wins."
To be sure, deficits are a problem that will have to be addressed, but they're not the most important of America's problems. Joe Biden does want to raise taxes to pay for Federal outlays -- but again, he has to be very careful about how he does it. Some problems will just have to wait for events to present opportunities.
* A week ago, there was a wedding at Trump's "billionaire's boys club" at Mar-a-Lago in Florida; Trump showed up at the reception and addressed the crowd, saying little about the newlyweds, and a great deal about how he was being mistreated by the world. Okay, Trump's mistreatment has hardly begun yet -- it will start in earnest when the indictments start coming down -- but, on a suggestion that there was something bizarre and Lovecraftian in Trump's behavior, Rick Wilson of The Lincoln Project picked up the challenge:
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What eldritch horror had emerged from the ebon depths of the Intracoastal? What chthonic force had expelled from the very depths of hell this shambling creature, gibbering in the tongues of a dead races of madmen? Gripped by the unspeakable horror, the wedding party never recovered.
END QUOTE
I was never a fan of HP Lovecraft, but I still sense that Wilson hit it out of the ballpark. Incidentally, Trump was and is doing a lot of website fundraising -- with reports now emerging that the donation web pages are heavily wired with fine print and misleading controls, with suckers thinking they were donating hundreds of dollars, but donating thousands instead. Once a scammer, always a scammer.
PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (144): In the meantime, Reagan's pressure on the USSR was having effect. The Soviet economy was stagnant, and put under strain by the decline in oil prices from 1985. The Soviets could not increase military spending, even though they were frightened of Reagan's bellicose rhetoric -- the president calling the Soviet Union an "Evil Empire", and predicting its downfall. The pressure was too much to bear, and so a reformer, Mikhail Gorbachev, emerged at the top of Soviet leadership.
Reagan felt that Gorbachev was a very positive change for the USSR, and conducted four summits with him, the focus being on arms limitation: the first in Geneva, Switzerland, the second in Reykjavik, Iceland, the third in Washington DC, and the fourth in Moscow. The Reykjavik summit was a breakthrough of sorts, with Reagan and Gorbachev meeting privately, only with translators -- to then announce that both superpowers would abolish nuclear weapons, much to the global astonishment.
However, that was no more than a statement of intent; when it came to negotiations, the Soviets wanted the US to abandon the Star Wars program. Reagan didn't want to give up SDI, replying that it was strictly defensive, and suggesting that the US would share SDI technology with the USSR. In the end, there was no agreement. Nonetheless, the two leaders had achieved a personal rapport, underlined by mutual respect. On 12 June 1987, speaking at the Berlin Wall, Reagan famously challenged Gorbachev:
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General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!
END QUOTE
Gorbachev didn't want the wall either; his policy of "Glasnost" -- "Openness" -- envisioned a reform of the Socialist system, stripped of authoritarianism and imperialism. He was also sincere, as was Reagan, in his desire for nuclear disarmament -- leading to the signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty at the White House in December 1987, which eliminated intermediate-range nuclear weapons, primarily sited in Europe. The two leaders also established a framework for the "Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START)". Reagan insisted on the new name, believing that the older "Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT)" name was inadequate, since it didn't "roll back" nuclear arms.
When Reagan visited Moscow for the fourth summit in 1988, he was popular with the Russian people. A journalist asked the president if he still considered the Soviet Union the evil empire, to which Reagan answered: "No, I was talking about another time, another era." At Gorbachev's request, Reagan gave a speech on free markets at the Moscow State University.
Gorbachev believed that there would be wide support for the reformed system. What happened was that the system collapsed. In November 1989, East German authorities began allowing citizens to pass freely through border checkpoints; they began dismantling the wall in June, with its demolition complete by 1992. This was only the start of the disintegration of Communism in Eastern Europe.
* As far as the judiciary went, Reagan appointed four Supreme Court justices. During the 1980 presidential campaign, Reagan pledged that he would appoint the first female Supreme Court Justice -- and he was as good as his word, selecting Sandra Day O'Connor in 1981, on the retirement of Justice Potter Stewart. She was conservative, judging towards the center-right; she supported ROE V. WADE, though she was more inclined to give states the benefit of the doubt on abortion restrictions.
The other three appointments were in Reagan's second term. In 1986, Reagan appointed Associate Justice William Rehnquist to replace Chief Justice Warren Burger, and then appointed Antonin Scalia to replace Rehnquist's seat. Rehnquist clearly leaned center-Right; Scalia would become well-known as a very conservative justice, though he was respected for his intellect and propriety. In 1987, Reagan attempted to appoint Robert Bork, a conservative judge, to SCOTUS -- but Bork was too far to the Right, being opposed by civil rights and women's groups; the Senate refused to confirm his appointment. The slot was, after some reconsideration, filled by Anthony Kennedy, who would judge very close to the center. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* SCIENCE NOTES: As discussed in an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Watch Artificial Intelligence Learn To Simulate Sloppy Mixtures Of Water, Sand, And Goop" by Matthew Hutson, 15 July 2020), it is not hard to see what happens if we throw a pile of a pile of sand, a glob of "goop", and a flood of water into a box? It is, however, complicated and hard to simulate it on a computer.
The AI company Deepmind has come up with a better way, based on artificial intelligence tech. Their scheme, which they call a "Graph Network-based Simulator (GNS)", can realistically recreate the interactions between tens of thousands of particles of different materials, lasting thousands of animation frames.
The system, of course, uses "graph networks," which represent a scene as a network of interacting particles, each particle being much bigger than a molecule that pass "messages" to each other about their positions, velocities, and material properties. The message passing, and how particles respond, is learned through trial and error by comparing forecasts with those of traditional physics simulations. Once trained, the system can generalize to new situations -- predicting the behavior of far more particles, or what would happen if obstacles like ramps were added, or the box was shaken.
In experiments, the Deepmind system was more accurate and better at generalizing various phenomena than competing AI approaches. The researchers believe their approach can be generalized to create smarter systems in a range of applications.
* As reported by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("AI Invents New Recipes For Potential COVID-19 Drugs" by Robert F. Service, 7 August 2020), the latest drugs tend towards the expensive to produce. Drugs are in the wings to deal with COVID-19, but the cost promises to be ruinous. Researchers are now using artificial intelligence (AI) to figure out more efficient ways of synthesizing such drugs.
The AI-planned new recipes, for almost a dozen medicines at last notice, would streamline production. Since the new methods use cheap, readily available starting materials, licensed drug manufacturers would be able to quickly ramp up production.
Patents grant pharmaceutical companies the right to be the sole supplier of a new drug in a given country, usually for 20 years. Once a drug goes off patent, other companies can produce and sell it as a generic. The method to make the drug is often secret to discourage competition, even after patents expire. However, Danielle Schultz -- a chemist at Merck -- says that's not acceptable in the era of COVID-19: "We are at a time when it's all hands on deck."
To head off drug supply crunches, University of Michigan chemist Timothy Cernak and his team turned to a commercial drug synthesis AI program named "Synthia". This software can help pharmaceutical manufacturers find the best strategy for synthesizing medicines -- many of which are based on elaborate molecules that can be pieces together in a vast number of ways. Cernak says: "It's more options than the human mind can comprehend."
Cernak and his team went through the research and patent literature for ways to synthesize 12 medications being investigated as COVID-19 therapies. They then programmed Synthia to search for new synthetic solutions -- limiting their search to options that used cheap, common starting materials, didn't require expensive catalysts or equipment, and could produce kilogram-scale amounts of drug.
What they came up with was new recipes for making 11 out of the 12 compounds, including generic antivirals umifenovir and favipiravir. The AI program came up with four different ways to synthesize umifenovir, for example, in one case with cheaper starting materials than those currently in use. Cernak says: "For the same amount of money [or less], we can make these drugs from different starting materials." The one miss was the drug remdesivir, Synthia not being able to find any alternate synthesis scheme. [ED: Remdesivir was seen as promising early in the pandemic, but thorough studies showed it ineffective.]
Cernak says he and his team filed patents on all of their new synthetic routes -- but the goal wasn't to make a profit, instead to license their manufacturing approaches to one or more pharmaceutical companies to ensure adequate supplies and low prices.
* As discussed in an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Dark Lunar Eclipse Points To Medieval Volcanic Eruptions" by Katherine Kornei, 4 May 2020), there was an eclipse of the Moon on the night of 5 May 1110 CE. While the Moon usually appears reddish in a lunar eclipse from light bent around the Earth by the atmosphere, in this case it was completely dark -- an Old English description saying it "was so completely extinguished withal, that neither light, nor orb, nor anything at all of it was seen."
Now, by combining this report with an analysis of tree-ring records and ice cores, scientists have figured out the cause of the dark Moon: a set of volcanic eruptions in the early 12th century that blocked the light. The eruptions had widespread climatic effects, including making temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere drop by about one degree Celsius.
After a volcanic eruption, ash and sulfate aerosols eventually rain back down to Earth. Some of this fallout lands on snow, which is compacted over time into ice. As a result, according to Sebastien Guille -- a paleoclimatologist at the University of Geneva -- ice cores are "one of the best archives available" for tracing past eruptions.
Guillet and his team examined records of three ice cores: two from Greenland and one from Antarctica. Cores from both places revealed sulfate spikes, one in the Antarctic core in 1109 CE, and several in the Greenland ice cores from 1108:1113 CE. Some researchers believe the spikes are consistent with the eruption of one big volcano in the tropics around 1108 CE, which would have generated aerosols that rain down around the Earth for several years.
However, accurately dating ice cores is not straightforward, and so the researchers colleagues turned to other records to nail down the eruption dates. They started with tree ring records from North America, Europe, and Asia. Since trees grow thinner rings in colder weather, the researchers were able to reconstruct past temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere. They found that 1109 CE was about one degree Celsius cooler than normal -- consistent with the global cooling typically associated with big volcanic eruptions.
Next, they went through 17 European and Near Eastern manuscripts that referenced lunar eclipses that occurred between 1100 and 1120 CE. Guillet and his collaborators found references that one lunar eclipse, on 5 May 1110 CE, was unusually dark. That's consistent with at least one eruption occurring around 1108 CE, concurring with the ice core records.
The researchers identified a suspect: Japan's Mount Asama, which records suggest erupted in 1108 CE. However, Guillet says sulfates could have reached Greenland but probably not Antarctica: "Atmospheric circulation makes it very difficult for eruptions located at high latitudes to cross the tropics." There must have been at least one other eruption at the same time, but it's not clear where it was.
Michael Sigl -- a chemist at the University of Bern in Switzerland who focuses on volcanic eruptions -- says that tiny bits of volcanic ash, or volcanic glass, in ice cores could help pin down the source of the eruption. He says the ash will have unique geochemical fingerprints, that can be "linked to the source volcano."
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