MrG's Blog & Notes

* This is an archive of my own online blog and notes, with weekly entries collected by month.

[MON 01 MAR 21] THE WEEK THAT WAS 8

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: The big news -- at least, here in the USA -- of last week was that the Supreme Court curtly dismissed Donald Trump's last attempt to keep his tax forms out of the hands of Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance. It seems likely a grand jury indictment will quickly follow, all the more because Vance's office may well have got their hands on leaked Trump tax documents. Information as is already available suggests Trump played such games as giving big payouts to his kids as "consultants", and then writing them off his taxes. Once the DA's office gets the official documents, they can move quickly.

Trump is on the defensive, seeking to leverage his control over the Republican Party to make money and build up defenses. This was on clear display at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Florida, which was entirely devoted to adulation of Trump -- one notable example being a preposterous gilded statue of him on prominent display. It looked like mockery, but it was supposed to be serious.

The Biden Administration pointedly ignored Trump, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki saying: "Our focus is certainly not on what President Trump is saying [at CPAC]." Bob Shrum -- former Democratic strategist and director of the Center for Political Future at University of Southern California -- commented:

QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

The Republicans are busy denouncing their own who have dared criticize Trump, while prominent GOP politicians are trying to pretend the Capitol riot never happened. Democratic strategist Steve Elmendorf says: "The Republicans are having a fight with themselves about Donald Trump. We should let them have it and stay out of it."

David Gergen, a prominent advisor to both Democratic and Republican presidential administrations, says there are limits to casualness:

QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

The Trump circus is obviously spiraling out of control; it's alarming, but seems to suggest an imminent crash, not strength. One Larry Tye, who wrote a book on Joe McCarthy, suggested in CNN that Trump's political career seems to be paralleling that of McCarthy -- who was on a tear for four years, until he was censured by Congress.

What Tye pointed out is that McCarthy, even after censure, still had 34% public approval, the same as Trump has now. McCarthy called the congressional tribunal a "circus," pledged to "get back to the real work of digging out communism", and even talked about running for president.

McCarthy didn't. He was ailing, in large part because he was an alcoholic, and possibly more significantly his public support was in decline -- still substantial, but headed downward. He was old news, he no longer had any momentum. Although Trump doesn't drink, he's obviously unhealthy; his mental functioning, never very good, seems to be getting worse as his troubles pile up. He's going down, it's just a question of how long it takes. [ED: Longer than anyone expected.]

* The Biden Administration is pushing a pandemic stimulus, with worries that it means profligate government spending, leading to inflation and other ills. As discussed in an article from REUTERS.com ("Powell's Econ 101: Jobs Not Inflation. And Forget About The Money Supply" by Harold Schneider, 23 February 2021), in a congressional hearing, the highly-regarded Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell told Members of Congress, in so many words: Toss out the college textbooks, the world has changed.

Unemployment rate? Don't worry about it. The Fed only cares about the number of people working and how to get it higher, not a dusty old statistic that overlooks a key group -- namely those who stopped looking for work during the pandemic and need to be brought back.

Inflation? Don't worry about that, either. Queried by Democratic Senator Mark Warner about the need to make "a sizeable investment" in America's infrastructure, Powell shrugged off classic concerns of too much government borrowing driving up prices, and replied "this is not a problem for this time as near as I can figure."

The money supply? No longer relevant, Powell told Republican Senator John Kennedy, about the once-important measures of cash and easily spent assets that was a central focus for the Fed in the past, saying they don't "really have important implications. It is something we have to unlearn I guess."

The Fed, as discussed here last year, was already rethinking things before the pandemic came in like a thunderclap, having concluded that the Fed's response to the 2007:2008 Great Recession was flawed, and led to a slow recovery. In particular, the Fed was reconsidering one of its core ideas: that when the unemployment rate is low, inflation is high, and vice versa.

Traditionally, central bankers were inclined to raise interest rates whenever the jobless rate went below a certain level, on the assumption that would head off inflation. However, slowing down the economy put people out of work. Now, the Fed has concluded that whatever it is that drives inflation -- and there is much disagreement over what -- a low unemployment rate is no longer seen as part of it.

That concept was pretty much thrown overboard as of August: Whatever drives inflation, the Fed concluded -- and there is plenty of disagreement about what that is -- a low unemployment rate is no longer considered part of it. The Fed is now concerned with the employment rate, seeking to promote "high levels of participation". The underlying issue in this discussion is taxation: the Biden Administration is not happy about running up deficits, but bringing taxes into line with expenditures demands a truly bipartisan solution. The Democrats are constrained in what they can do with taxes, as long as the Republicans use their tax hikes as a weapon to defeat them in the vote.

This demonstrates that economics is nothing that resembles a hard science. That's not a criticism, it can't be a hard science -- and we'd be a lot worse off without it, the alternative being voodoo economics. We may not always be sure of what's right, but it's not so hard to see what's wildly wrong.

* On 20 February, United Airlines Flight 328, a Boeing 777, took off from Denver International Airport, en route to Honolulu -- only to suffer an engine failure that forced it to return to the airport minutes later. The engine shed parts over the suburb of Broomfield; there was some property damage, but nobody was hurt, though the passengers were of course very frightened.

All 777s with Pratt & Whitney 4000 turbofan engines were grounded. It seems there were fan-blade failures, with engine inspections to be mandated. Broomfield residents energetically hunted down pieces of the engine. The authorities told them not to worry about the smaller parts, they were more bother than they were worth, but they were in demand as curios.

* As discussed in an article from NEWATLAS.com ("Reaction Engines Testing Ammonia As Carbon-Free Aviation Fuel" by David Szondy, 23 August 2020), Reaction Engines of the UK -- which has been working on the "Skylon" spaceplane -- has collaborated with Reaction Engines and Britain's Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC) to generate a study on the use of ammonia as an aviation fuel.

The idea of using ammonia as aviation fuel is not new. Though it only has a third of the energy density of diesel, it's not hard to liquefy and store. It was used on the X-15 rocket-plane, which flew suborbital near-space flights in the 1950s and '60s. In addition, it's carbon-free. Reaction Engines has devised a plan for a new propulsion system using ammonia, based on the heat exchanger technology it developed for its SABRE hypersonic engine, which was then evaluated by STFC's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Didcot in Oxfordshire.

In the Reaction Engines system, the ammonia is stored as a chilled, pressurized liquid in the wings of the airplane, just as kerosene-based fuel is today. Heat harvested from the engine by the heat exchanger -- designed by Reaction Engines -- would warm the ammonia as it is pumped out and fed into a chemical reactor where a catalyst -- designed by the STFC -- breaks down some of the ammonia into nitrogen and hydrogen:

   2NH3 --> N2 + 3H2

The mixture is then fed into the jet engine where it burns like conventional fuel, except that the emissions consist mainly of nitrogen and water vapor. Ammonia in itself isn't really a fuel; it's more a way of storing hydrogen.

Dr. James Barth, engineering lead at Reaction Engines, says: "Our study showed that an ammonia-fueled jet engine could be adapted from currently available engines, and ammonia as a fuel doesn't require a complete re-think of the design of civil aircraft as we know them today. This means a fast transition to a sustainable aviation future is possible at low cost; ammonia-powered aircraft could be serving the world's short-haul routes well in advance of 2050."

* As discussed in an article from AVIATIONWEEK.com ("How Can Sustainable Aviation Fuel Be Kept Sustainable?" by Thierry Dubois, 4 June 2020), aircraft are a major contributor to CO2 emissions. The main focus of addressing this problem is to use biofuels.

The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) estimates that about 600 million tonnes of jet fuel will be necessary to cover all aviation needs in 2050. That could demand up to 45 exa-joules (EJ) of biomass input to biofuel production, given the relatively low efficiency of the transformation process.

A sustainable biomass supply of 70 EJ could be produced each year, "possibly going up to 100 EJ, thanks to tightly regulated reforestation efforts," as suggested in a 2018 report from the Energy Transitions Commission (ETC), a London-based international think tank representing energy producers, energy users, and economists -- notably Britain's Nicholas Stern. The ETC believes that biofuel production be focused on aviation; aircraft demand energy-dense fuels and don't work well with batteries, as do cars.

Biofuel production for ground vehicles is in something of an uncertain state, and so the aviation industry needs to push for it independently. One key factor is to ensure that plant mass grown for biofuels not compete with food production, instead being based on plant waste streams. That leads to the challenge of collecting municipal, agricultural, or forestry waste. There's also the issue of ensuring that biomass production is carbon-neutral. There's interest in sunlight-to-fuel conversion, though that's not at all practical at present.

[MON 08 MAR 21] THE WEEK THAT WAS 9

* This last week was dominated by the passage of $1.9 billion USD stimulus bill to deal with the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was a clean sweep in Congress: all the Democrats voted for it, all the Republicans voted against it. I keep wondering how much of a future the GOP has, given the completely useless Republican response to the pandemic.

As a further case in point, the week was otherwise characterized by the Troglodyte Right denouncing "cancel culture", proclaiming that there was an orgy of banning in progress against The Muppet Show, the books of Dr. Seuss (Ted Geisel), and the Mr. Potato Head toy. OK, the reality:

• Disney has released The Muppet Show episodes on video. There were no deletions, just a number of obligatory content warnings.
  
  
• Ted Geisel's estate decided that six of his titles would no longer be printed, being judged awkwardly out of date and tactless. All his popular titles remain in print.
  
  
• Hasbro simply changed the product labeling of "Mr. Potato Head" to just "Potato Head". The names of the toy characters themselves remained unchanged.

This is all the better these people have to worry about? For perspective, in 1968, Warner Brothers decided to stop peddling 11 of its older cartoons with obnoxious ethnic stereotypes. There was no outcry, the world did not come to an end, and it is easy to find the "Censored 11" online. Viewing them suggests that it was best were sidelined.

Actually, Bob Clampett's COAL BLACK AND DE SEBBEN DWARFS was seen as progressive in its time, being a sendup of black jitterbugging culture of the era -- along with a bit of satire on Disney -- but it won't fly now.

* Donald Trump spent a considerable amount of time denouncing free trade, saying it was a bad deal for the USA. As discussed in an article from REUTERS.com ("US Manufacturers Grapple With Steel Shortages, Soaring Prices" by Rajesh Kumar Singh, 23 February 2021), of course the reality isn't so simple.

At present, steel is in short supply in the USA. Backlog on orders is high and inventory is low, with prices higher than they have been for over a decade. The soaring prices are driving up costs and squeezing profits at steel-consuming manufacturers, generating calls to halt former President Trump's steel tariffs -- including from the Coalition of American Metal Manufacturers & Users, which represents more than 30,000 companies. Paul Nathanson, the group's executive director, says: "Our members have been reporting that they have never seen such chaos in the steel market."

Chaos was certainly a trademark of Trump's leadership style, but the COVID-19 pandemic played a part as well, having led domestic steel mills to scale back production. Now that demand is picking up again, they're not ramping up production fast enough. Those businesses that have been doing well in the pandemic can't get enough steel to support their operations.

Domestic steel prices have risen more than 160% since last August, leaving steel consumers faced with the ugly choice of raising prices, or eating the cost increase. US steel prices are 68% higher than the global market price and almost double China's, even with prices in both China and Europe up over 80% from their pandemic-induced lows. The price gap is so wide that even with a 25% tariff, it would be cheaper to import than buy from domestic mills -- but logistical problems, such as container shortages, have restrained imports.

Domestic steel producers are of course raking in profits, and have called on the Biden Administration to keep the tariffs. The administration, confronted with vast numbers of challenges on every front, is under pressure to clarify policy on steel, since nobody knows which way to jump right now. Angela Reed, an executive at Atlanta-based steel distributor Reibus International, says that people "are trying to make sure that they don't get hung with any of the higher-priced stuff."

* While electric vehicles (EV) are a coming thing in the developed world, a video from REUTERS.com showed they are having an impact in the undeveloped world as well. In Zimbabwe, startup company Mobility For Africa has introduced electric-powered tricycles with flatbeds that rural women drive to carry cargo and people. The trikes are made in China, and assembled from kits in Harare; they have a going price of $1,500 USD. They have the name of "Hamba (Go)", and are charged up at a solar station. The trikes are leased to groups of five women.

Mary Mhuka, a 58-year-old mother-of-six who is leasing the Hamba with her daughter-in-law and a neighbor, says the motorcycle had eased the strain of domestic work. She could now sell her vegetables at a business center 15 kilometers away for more money than she would get locally. "We used to carry firewood on our heads for very long distances ... but now it's much easier as this motorcycle has taken away that burden." They also transport patients and pregnant women to local clinics.

Fadzai Mavhuna, the Hamba pilot coordinator, says women pay an equivalent of $15 USD a month as a group to lease the Hamba, which has a maximum range of 100 kilometers (60 miles). It costs between $0.50 and $1 USD to change the motorcycle batteries. He says: "Some of the women have increased their income because they have embarked on ... projects like baking, tailoring and horticulture."

[MON 15 MAR 21] THE WEEK THAT WAS 10

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: Joe Biden finally signed the $1.9 trillion USD American Rescue Plan (ARP) into law, taking on COVID-19 with a tsunami of debt. There has been much sniping from the Right about it, with claims that only 9% of the funds had anything to do with COVID-19. Of course, that's lying; it's more like 85%, much depending on assumptions in the estimation, and there's little in it that seems unreasonable.

As discussed in an essay from ECONOMIST.com ("The $3 Trillion Question", 9 March 2021), the Biden Administration is banking on the ARP to drive an economic boom. The idea of a massive stimulus bill grew from the aftermath of the 2007:2008 economic downturn: the recovery was slow and anemic, the conclusion being that the government's response was stingy and short-sighted.

The pandemic has been an economic boost to many, an economic disaster to many others. ARP is intended not only to reduce the pain to those thrown out of work or suffering business losses, but also to make sure that, when pandemic measures are ended, people have cash to burn, then go out and spend it. Nobody's expecting the wealthy to change their spending habits much, but those lower on the economic pyramid will feel like spreading their money around.

Thanks to stimulus, household incomes have actually risen in the past year, even as pandemic measures and public insecurity have limited spending. What will actually happen when the gates are opened? Nobody knows for sure, but all major economic forecasts point to a rapid economic recovery. Of course, as is always true of economics, there's a psychological component to such forecasts, in that sunny economic expectations will damp insecurity, and promote economic activity.

What about the downsides to big-time deficit spending? The USA can't keep piling up debt indefinitely without pain, and there's no consensus in sight for funding the government. Whether the Biden Administration will be praised or condemned by history remains to be seen.

* With ARP out of the way, Congress is considering what to work on next. One big priority is, of course, setting up a commission to investigate the 6 January 2021 attack on Congress. There's been a lot of grumbling on Twitter that nothing seems to be happening on that score, but it seems more likely that a handful of Democrat Members of Congress were putting together a plan for the commission, while the rest worked on ARP.

Another priority is to deal with the filibuster -- a rule peculiar to the Senate, not found in the House of Representatives, where it takes a vote of a "supermajority" of senators, 60 out of 100, to end debate on a measure. The Senate is divided 50:50 between Democrats and Republicans, with Vice President Harris adding a Democrat vote, and so the filibuster means the Republicans can block Democrat initiatives. The Democrats accordingly need to do something about the filibuster before they do much else, but there's some dispute over exactly what.

The filibuster came about by accident. Alexander Hamilton, writing at the foundation of the US government, commented that supermajorities were not a "remedy", they were a "poison" -- not protecting the rights of minorities, so much as allowing minorities to hold the government hostage. Hamilton and the other Framers did agree there were important issues where supermajorities made sense: for convicting impeached officials, overriding presidential vetoes, ratifying treaties, and enacting constitutional amendments. However, the Framers did not see fit to establish supermajorities for the normal passage of laws.

In 1805, Vice President Aaron Burr, in his role as President of the Senate, suggested that the Senate rules be modified to eliminate a mechanism for ending debate; it was seen as unnecessary. Three decades later John C. Calhoun, the prominent senator from South Carolina, realized there was nothing to stop senators from continuing debate indefinitely. After the Civil War, filibusters -- the term is derived from the Dutch "vrijbuiter", meaning "freebooter", pirate or privateer -- became a recognized, if not common tactic.

In 1917, the Senate belatedly passed a rule on "cloture", which would terminate debate: it required a two-thirds vote of the Senate, reduced in 1975 to three-fifths. That didn't help matters much, with segregationists making use of the filibuster to derail civil-rights legislation. In 1970, another change to the Senate rules meant that there was no reason to get up and talk indefinitely any more: the mere threat of a filibuster was enough to block legislation.

Both Democrats and Republicans made ever-increasing use of the filibuster. What else could happen? If one side used the weapon, the other side would as well. With the growth of partisanship, the filibuster is no longer a lever for deal-making, but a means of hurting the other side. Given its inconvenience, to no surprise the filibuster is gradually being whittled down. In 2013, the Democrats eliminated the filibuster on presidential nominations other than those for the Supreme Court. The Republicans objected, but in 2017, they got rid of the filibuster for Supreme Court confirmations.

Why did they not go further? One reason is that in the 1970s the Senate created an early exception to the filibuster: reconciliation, which allows a bill to pass the Senate if its provisions are aimed at changing spending and taxes. That means tax cuts, like the appointment of conservative judges, are rendered filibuster-proof. Since the Republicans are not interested in ambitious government programs, that was good enough for them.

Reconciliation could be used to pass ARP, but it's not enough for the Biden Administration's ambitions -- much less the ambitions of Members of Congress to the Left of the Biden Administration. What is particularly frustrating to Democrats is that Republican filibusters are doubly minoritarian, since Republican states tend to be less populated. The 41 Republican senators needed to defeat a cloture motion could, in principle, represent just 23% of the population.

There has been a loud outcry among Democrats to kill off the filibuster once and for all, which they could do with 51 Senate votes. They can't get them, since two moderate Democrats, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, have made it clear they will not kill the filibuster. Pressed on the possibility by a reporter, Manchin shot back: "Jesus Christ, what don't you understand about NEVER?"

Manchin, however, has made it equally clear that he is for whittling down the filibuster again. One proposal from Norm Ornstein -- a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a relatively moderate conservative think tank -- suggests requiring the minority to provide 41 votes to continue debate, instead of requiring the majority to find 60, and insisting that the debate-seekers actually hold the floor of the Senate and debate the measure they object to.

Which raises questions: will the revised filibuster still be effective in holding up the majority? If it does, then the case for killing it completely is stronger. If not effective, retaining the filibuster would be merely cosmetic, and there would be no great reason to keep it. In either case, the filibuster is on the way out; it's just a question of how long it will take, and how much trouble it will be to put it down.

* As I write on Sunday, the snow is still coming down. Not an unusual sort of thing here in March: dampish snow up to the knees, then sunny the next day. It's brought everything to a halt, but for the moment I've still got electrical power. I was trying to keep up with the shoveling, but I had to quit out of sheer exhaustion. I'll shovel it off in stages tomorrow.

* As discussed in an article from NEWATLAS.com ("NZ To Trial World-First Commercial Long Range, Wireless Power Transmission" by Loz Blain, 03 August 2020), there's long been tinkering with long-range transmission of electric power. Emrod, a New Zealand startup company, is now testing a wireless power transmission link, and working with Powerco, the second-biggest power distributor in the country, to field it.

The scheme is based on a microwave link with a transmitter and relays, feeding into a "rectenna" -- a "rectifying antenna" that converts microwave energy into electrical power. All the elements look like big squares on poles. The microwave transmission is in the Industrial, Scientific, & Medical band of the radio spectrum, where wi-fi and bluetooth signals reside as well. The beam is guarded by a "low power laser safety curtain" that interrupts the beam if a bird, drone, or helicopter strays into the beam. The power densities are comparable to the bright Sun at noon; it's not like anyone would be fried wandering into the beam, but it wouldn't be wise to stay in it, either.

The prototype system will be capable of delivering "only a few kilowatts" of power, but can easily be scaled up. Emrod founder and serial entrepreneur Greg Kushnir says: "We can use the exact same technology to transmit 100 times more power over much longer distances. Wireless systems using Emrod technology can transmit any amount of power current wired solutions transmit."

Emrod says the system works in any atmospheric conditions, including rain, fog and dust, and the distance of transmission is limited only by line of sight between each relay, giving it the potential to transmit power up to hundreds of kilometers, at a fraction of the infrastructure costs, maintenance costs, and environmental impact a wired solution imposes. Efficiency of the transmission system itself is very good; the limiting factor on efficiency is the transmitter conversion, which is no better than 70%. The company sees their technology as useful for reaching small off-grid establishments. A truck-mounted system would be useful in emergencies.

[MON 22 MAR 21] THE WEEK THAT WAS 11

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: One Adam Server, writing in THEATLANTIC.com ("Biden Chooses Prosperity Over Vengeance", 15 March 2021), considered US President Joe Biden's declared commitment to "bipartisanship", and suggested that it doesn't exactly mean what it is commonly thought to mean.

As a starting point, take Donald Trump's erratic rule over the USA. It is a truism that the Right elected Trump to "own the Libs" -- the Right denies that, but they were only too quick to proclaim, in response to any real or perceived excess on the Left: "This is why Trump won." Trump's virtue, his sole virtue to those who voted for him, was his willingness to step on the Liberals, and the Liberals were only getting what was coming to them. Trump, as Trump himself continually pointed out, was the only protection they had against the despicable Libs.

Contrast that with Joe Biden's first months as president: reversing many of Trump's edicts, of course, but also raising to first priority a vaccination push, along with a generous stimulus / aid bill, the American Rescue Program (ARP). Biden wants to get along with Republicans in Congress, but he can rest no great hopes on that. His real agenda is to show that he wants the government to work for all Americans.

Certainly ARP is not enough, and doing more will be difficult. Efforts to institute programs to help low-income Americans, bolster the labor movement, and in particular guarantee voting rights will encounter resistance. Ironically, trying to guarantee voting rights to all Americans is, in the fading era of Trump, denounced as a partisan exercise.

Nonetheless, Biden's effort to make America prosperous again is on the right track. To be sure, the US economy was doing well under Trump, but the Trump economy was merely following the same trajectory as it had during the second Obama Administration. To the extent Trump was in control of the process, it was mainly in ensuring the ongoing concentration of economic power in the hands of the wealthy.

All economic booms come to an end sooner or later, and when it did in 2020, Trump was found lacking. Trump's political machine was dependent on religious Rightists who wanted to turn back the clock; xenophobes who wanted to Make America Whiter Again; and extremists who simply wanted to destroy government. They all failed, because the Trump Administration had no substantial agenda other than to punish the Left, and tax cuts for the rich. As Serwer writes:

QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

Trumpism was based on a view of the world as a zero-sum game: between Right and Left Americans, between the US and other nations, between whites and nonwhites. Trump told his fans that if Biden won, they would lose. It is Biden's task to show them that isn't true. The ARP is a big step in that direction -- and it's popular, with a Pew poll indicating that 70% of Americans support the bill, including 63% of "lower-income Republicans and Republican leaners."

Unfortunately, no Republican members of Congress voted for it, and instead raised a fuss about the withdrawal from publication of a few old tactless Dr. Seuss books. Just as significantly, ARP originally had a provision for raising the minimum wage -- but it had to be deleted, with the Republicans decidedly against it. In the meantime, across the USA, GOP-run states are attempting to raise obstacles to voting. One state representative told CNN: "Quantity is important, but we have to look at the quality of votes as well." -- "quality" in this context obviously meaning "white".

That does not amount to a winning formula, and does not suggest there is any sympathy for bipartisanship among GOP politicians. Joe Biden is making a great leap of faith, believing that Americans will reward a party that is trying to make all their lives better, and not just set one side against the other while enriching the privileged. This is expressing far more confidence in the decency and sensibility of the Republican base than Trump and his stooges ever contemplated.

Will it work? Among the hard-core Trump defenders, who spread a confused mix of malicious lies about Biden on social media, it won't. The reality is that they represent only about half of Trump voters; the other half voted for Trump just for the fun of it, finding his malign-clown act amusing. Should they simply stop voting, it will serve Biden's interests well enough.

* As reported by Associated Press on 19 March, a Michigan restaurant owner was arrested for contempt of court after months of defying pandemic-control measures. Marlena Pavlos-Hackney had to remain in jail until she paid $7,500 USD and authorities confirmed that Marlena's Bistro & Pizzeria in Holland, Michigan, was really closed. Ingham County Judge Rosemarie Aquilina said: "She has put the community at risk. We are in the middle of a pandemic,"

Poland-born Pavlos-Hackney, 55, was ignoring caps on restaurant capacity and wasn't enforcing mask rules. Her food license was yanked on 20 January; she stayed open. The court finally decided they'd had enough, and ordered her arrest. Aquilina said: "You have selfishly not followed the orders. ... This is the wrong way to get publicity. It's the wrong way to be a good citizen."

It is understandable that people don't like the government interfering in their making a living, but almost 17,000 Michiganders have died of COVID-19. In court, when Judge Aquilina asked Pavlos-Hackney if she would pledge to tell the truth, there was no reply. Aquilina did not take kindly to that: "I know you want to control this room, but this isn't Burger King. When the sign changes to Burger King, you can have it your way. Right now this is my courtroom, and you will answer my questions."

* It took a couple of days for Colorado to dig out of last week's snowstorm. One Kreg Lyles, of Aurora -- an eastern suburb of Denver -- got enthusiastic about the job, and put together a 3.5-meter (12-foot) tall snow owl, with three days of work.

In the town of Berthoud, directly south of us here in Loveland, a group put together a snow chapel that was not as imaginative, but similarly impressive. We're supposed to get some more precipitation, but I don't believe we'll be buried in snow here again this season.

* As discussed in an article from REUTERS.com ("Dwarf Planet Ceres Is 'Ocean World' With Salty Water Deep Underground", by Will Dunham, 10 August 2020) Ceres, the largest body in the asteroid belt, appears to have a big reservoir of salty water under its frigid surface. Researchers working with data from NASA's Dawn space probe, which came to within 35 kilometers of the surface of Ceres in 2018, has helped give a more detailed understanding of the asteroid.

Ceres has a diameter of about 950 kilometers (590 miles). Researchers focused on the 92-kilometer (57-mile) wide Occator Crater, formed by an impact in Ceres' northern hemisphere about 22 million years ago. The crater has two bright areas, being salt crusts left by liquid that percolated up to the surface and evaporated. The liquid, they concluded, originated in a brine reservoir hundreds of kilometers wide buried about 40 kilometers (25 miles) below the surface; the impact created fractures, allowing the salty water to escape as "cryovolcanism", meaning volcanoes oozing icy material.

Planetary scientist and Dawn principal investigator Carol Raymond says: "This elevates Ceres to 'ocean world' status, noting that this category does not require the ocean to be global. In the case of Ceres, we know the liquid reservoir is regional scale, but we cannot tell for sure that it is global. However, what matters most is that there is liquid on a large scale."

[MON 29 MAR 21] THE WEEK THAT WAS 12

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: On Monday, 22 March, one Ahmad Aliwi al-Issa, a Syrian refugee, went to a King Soopers supermarket in Boulder, Colorado, and killed ten people with an AR-15-type assault rifle, one of the dead being a cop. The shooter was wounded in the leg and arrested. A few days later, he was moved out of Boulder County jail because of threats against him.

This followed a shooting rampage in Atlanta, Georgia, on 16 March, that left eight people dead. The shooter, one Robert Aaron Long, targeted massage parlors and spas, saying he was trying to deal with his "sex addiction". Six of the dead were Asian women, suggesting a link to the upsurge of attacks on Asians in the US, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Boulder shootings hit closer to home: Boulder is not that far south down the road from here in Loveland, Colorado, and I shop at a King Soopers. It could have just as well have been here. Of course, it's led to a push for tougher gun-control laws -- and the prospects are better than before of something being done.

In somewhat related news, police in North Carolina conducted a drug raid, and found the target had a Glock 19 9-millimeter pistol with a 50-round drum magazine -- convincingly disguised as a Nerf toy gun, that fires foam darts. This would be black humor, but it raises the possibility of other criminals using similar disguises, and of nervous police shooting someone carrying a super-soaker water gun. Things are out of control.

* Donald Trump took a belligerent attitude in his foreign policy while he was in the White House -- often towards America's allies, not always to America's adversaries. Joe Biden has chosen to also take a belligerent approach, but much more consistently towards America's adversaries, not to America's allies. Biden called Russian President Vladimir Putin a "killer", much to Russian anger, and in a press conference added that Chinese President Xi Jinping "doesn't have a democratic ... bone in his body." Biden says the two authoritarian leaders think "autocracy is the wave of the future", and that democracies are obsolete.

One Elbridge Colby -- a Pentagon staffer during the Trump Administration -- writing in THE WASHINGTON POST, described the Biden approach as "global, muscular liberalism", or GML for short. Colby judged GLM as naive, saying that the USA no longer had the power to throw its weight around in such a way, that Biden would be better to focus on the China threat, and not worry much about the Russians or North Korea or the Taliban.

It is not clear if Colby was a Trump man when he was at the Pentagon, but he certainly sounds like he was one. Trump was an advocate of cynical and self-serving politics, packaged as "realpolitik", but it was hard to see much serious purpose in it. If it's only about practicalities, the question is then: "To what end?" It is less a question of what we can expect to accomplish, than what we want to accomplish. We have to have the right direction before we can do anything at all.

Why should taking on Chinese authoritarianism mean ignoring Russian authoritarianism? Does it really buy us anything to meekly accept Russian provocations, or provocations from anybody else? Or just the sensible way of doing business with the world? If lines have been crossed, why not protest? It's not like that implies any specific responses; those can be considered as circumstances dictate. REUTERS.com cited a former US official, speaking anonymously, saying that Biden's challenges to Russia were limited, just what could be done:

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Dan Fried, a former US diplomat on the Europe beat, added that Putin is:

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In other words, it is in America's interests to be prudently assertive. GML is by no means going to work perfectly, but it stands to work better than the spineless alternatives. Besides, Joe Biden knows perfectly well that looking tough goes over well with the voters. It often may not amount to much more than theater, but theater is an important component of international relations, not to mention electoral politics.

* Donald Trump, having been booted off social media, announced that he would start his own social-media service. That announcement was met with loud hoots of derision on Twitter: Trump is a bungler, he's unlikely to go much of anywhere with the exercise. He's in irreversible decline.

He has also been peddling the story, popular among his fans, that the 6 January 2021 attack on Congress was, in so many words, a "nothing burger". Good luck with that. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been trying to put together a commission to investigate 1-06, but Congressional Republicans are not being cooperative -- demanding an "impartial" commission that would, for instance, investigate Leftist "Antifa" agitators. It's clear the Republicans just want to derail the commission.

Pelosi is not stupid and absolutely not weak-willed; she's got the good cards, and she knows it. If the Republicans won't call out Trump's attack on Congress, she plans to put together a group of Democrat Members of Congress who will come up with a report on 1-06, release it to the public, and pass it on to the Department of Justice for action. That shouldn't take too long. [ED: Unsurprisingly in hindsight, it did take a long time.] Once the DoJ takes action against Trump, things are going to get very noisy.

The decay of Trump is reflected in the disarray of his stooges. One Sidney Powell, a lawyer, had been spreading wild stories about the gaming of voting machines used in the 2020 elections -- and incidentally, had tried to persuade Trump to invoke martial law to deal with the "election fraud". Voting-machine maker Dominion Voting Systems, in response to Powell's baseless accusations against their products, sued her for $1.3 billion USD. Her lawyers replied to the court:

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In other words, Powell was spreading ridiculous falsehoods -- but that was okay, because nobody with any sense would believe them. They said that with a straight face?

The Right continues to cling to Trump. Trump issued a list of prominent Republicans with his seal of approval, including Senators Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, and Ron Paul; Governors Ron DeSantis, and Kristy Noem; as well as general pest Sarah Huckabee Sanders. In response, the snarky Rick Wilson of the Lincoln Project labeled the list: AMERICA'S LEAST WANTED.

The weakness of the far Right was further demonstrated by laws passed by the state of Georgia to discourage voting. They were absurd, capable of accomplishing little but helping to push a new Voting Rights Act through Congress, being described as a "solution in search of a problem". The satirical website THE ONION often misses the mark, but hit the target with a jab at Senator Cruz: "Ted Cruz Decries Voting Rights Bill As Shameless Power Grab By American People To Control Country!"

Is there really any long-term potential to the far Right? One Chris Swasey tweeted, with reference to Ted Cruz:

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* THE DAILY SHOW sometimes sadistically assigns comedienne Desi Lydic to binge-watch Fox News, with DesiL now dishing out the truth about Joe Biden, as this edited-down transcript shows:

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One Twitter commenter suggested that DesiL, being pretty and blonde, might end up being hired by Fox News for a prime time slot. I replied: "No, because she's not a Braindead Barbie."

* It is now commonly accepted that humans are hosts to large numbers of different microorganisms, most of them benign or even beneficial. As discussed in an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("These Bacteria Have Adapted To Life In Your Nose" by Amanda Heidt, 27 May 2020), these "commensals" tend to specialize: the microbes in our gut help us digest food, for example, while those on our tongue and skin can guard against invading pathogens. Now researchers have found beneficial bacteria in our nose as well. This "nasal microbiome" may protect against chronic sinus inflammation or allergies.

To conduct the study, researchers co-led by Sarah Lebeer, a microbiologist at the University of Antwerp in Belgium -- took samples from the noses of 100 healthy people. The researchers then compared the microbes they found with those from hundreds of patients with chronic nasal and sinus inflammation. Of the 30 most common types of microbes the team discovered, one group stood out: antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory bacteria called Lactobacillus. These were up to 10 times more abundant in the noses of healthy people.

Lactobacilli are anaerobic -- they don't need oxygen, and don't get along with it well -- and typically live in oxygen-poor areas, so Lebeer was surprised to see them in an organ that gets plenty of fresh air. However, a closer look revealed that the particular strain her team found in human noses has genes called "catalases" that safely neutralize oxygen, making them unusual among lactobacilli. Under a microscope, the researchers could also see tiny, hairlike appendages called "fimbriae" that anchor the bacteria to the nose's inner surface. Lebeer thinks the microbes may also use the hairs to bind to receptors on skin cells inside the nose, with the cells sealing up in response. With fewer cells open, allergens and pathogens have a harder time getting inside them.

Lebeer is still not certain that Lactobacillus really does protect against disease. Further testing is troublesome, because the human nose is very different from the noses of lab animals such as mice. In addition, some experts are doubtful that the lactobacilli the team found are particularly adapted to the human nose. Jens Walter, a microbiologist at University College Cork in Ireland, points out that the mouth is also home to millions of lactobacilli, and they could have ended up in the nose via sneezing. Walter finds the research interesting, but wants to see more.

Over the longer run, Lebeer hopes to develop therapeutics using nasal probiotics. Sinus conditions have few treatments, and chronic conditions that must be continually treated raise the risk of generating antibiotic-resistant bacteria. She believes that it might be better to introduce benign strains of bacteria that are not antibiotic-resistant. As a first step, Lebeer has developed a nasal spray containing the Lactobacillus microbes her team isolated. The lactobacilli safely colonized the patients with no ill effects.