Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Not all heroes wear capes.

We still have time to mess this up!

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

Meanwhile over at truth Social, the former president is busy confessing to crimes.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

In my day, never was longer.

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

Infrastructure week. at last.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

The GOP couldn’t organize an orgy in a whorehouse with a fist full of 50s.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

Everybody saw this coming.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

The GOP is a fucking disgrace.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

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Saturday Morning Open Thread: Well, Yeah…

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233Comments

  1. 1.

    debbie

    Everyone worries about Manchin, but what about AOC’s dismissal of the infrastructure package as too small and her call to instead spend $10 trillion?

  3. 3.

    JMG

    @debbie: My guess is that she’s saying stuff like that to create the image of a compromise for wavering moderates. I’m sure it’s her sincere opinion, but AOC’s shrewd enough to know it’s also a nonstarter, and she wouldn’t bring it up without a motive.

  4. 4.

    John S.

    @debbie: To be fair, the current infrastructure proposal probably does fall short in some areas — but it’s a good start.

    Manchin is a narcissist who is enjoying the newfound power he has, and his watering down of legislation serves no real purpose other than getting attention.

    AOC is also quite the self-promoter, and while she probably thinks she is helping to move the Overton window left, she needs to learn a little bit about the art of the possible — which hopefully she will because she’s very smart, and a great voice for Democrats to have.

    Making the perfect (or even the better) the enemy of the good is an unwise philosophy to live by. But being a preening dick just to get attention is so much worse.

  5. 5.

    Princess

    @debbie:  Call me when AOC is the deciding vote for passage of something. She’s negotiating; that’s what her constituents elected her to do. So, at this point, is Manchin.

  6. 6.

    germy

    The American Jobs Plan is going to build America's economy from the middle out, not the top down.

    — Secretary Pete Buttigieg (@SecretaryPete) April 9, 2021

  11. 11.

    germy

    What exactly is the republican plan?

    A simple question to critics: if you don’t like the President’s American Jobs Plan, where’s your alternative? Or, do you think America’s lead pipes, slow broadband, crumbling VA hospitals, cracked roads, old bridges, etc., are fine the way they are? https://t.co/Nn0MrSc0ng

    — Ronald Klain (@WHCOS) April 5, 2021

  13. 13.

    Immanentize

    @germy: That is a good line of Pete’s.

    And hello All!  It’s supposed to reach the mid-70s here near Boston today!?

  16. 16.

    Gin & Tonic

    So for those who recall Adam’s post the other night about Russian troop movements in areas bordering the Russian-occupied provinces of Ukraine, here’s a story: Ukr counterintelligence intercepted conversations in which Russian military commanders are ordering “DNR” forces to fire on their own positions within occupied Donetsk oblast, hoping to provoke war. Story here, unfortunately only in Ukrainian or Russian.

  17. 17.

    Benw

    @debbie: I’ll take a young POC saying we should do more for ppl over an old white dude saying we should do less

    the kids are alright

  19. 19.

    Immanentize

    @Gin & Tonic: What is the goal?  The whole of Ukraine?  Isn’t this more likely to rally NATO and the US?  Move us closer again?  Or was this just planned with the expectation that the Former Guy would win and they can’t stop what was planned?

  20. 20.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    I just started reading Isabel Wilkerson’s CASTE, which is about the underlying structures of racism in the US. It promises to be an informative and depressing read. But as I look at, say, Tucker Carlson talking about “white replacement” it feels like the book is being acted out in front of me.

    In another kind of book news, I zoomed with me editor yesterday about a draft I’m working on. She suggested a bunch of stuff that’s both intimidating and exciting to think about doing. Maybe I need a ghost writer.

  23. 23.

    artem1s

    DeWimp is already positioning himself to reject any rail infrastructure money.  The Ohio GOP really, really wants to keep the blue leaning metro areas along I-71 separated.  Also, too the Xtian Taliban dominated suburban bedroom communities want to keep their kids away from those ‘urban’ centers.  Thanks Mike. Really looking forward to falling even further behind the rest of the country economically and getting into the top tiers of jobs lost overseas!

  31. 31.

    germy

    @Dorothy A. Winsor:

    She said it was depressing, but very true and she wanted our nephew to read it.

    She’s a book sharer.  The books I buy tend to stay in my library.  She has the opposite philosophy: she wants to spread the word when she finds an important book.

  32. 32.

    MomSense

    @John S.:

    She was very supportive of Bernie’s 1 trillion infrastructure proposal during his campaign.  Same for the sunshine movement.  They are political and working  their constituencies for clout and contributions.

  34. 34.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    @Immanentize: Lordy. It’s delicate to do. I think my heart is in the right place but I still have a lot to learn about gender identities that young people take for granted. So I need to tread carefully and check in with someone who’s maybe 16.

    My editor talked about how her third grader matter-of-factly told her about gender issues in his class and what pronouns some kids used and how some kids weren’t sure. My reference points are more like Cat in “Madame Secretary” and Mo in “Zoey’s Incredible Playlist.” I’m old.

  35. 35.

    Danielx

    Maybe it’s too early, but I need to know: is ‘fuck those guys’ a rotating tag line, and if not, why?

  36. 36.

    Zinsky

    Isn’t it refreshing to have intelligent, articulate people in charge of federal agencies again?  Mayor Pete is going to be awesome in this role!  Thanks, Anne, for an uplifting post on this beautiful, sunny Saturday morning!

  37. 37.

    sab

    @Immanentize: I had come around to marginal sympathy for JK Rowling and then after actual information input this month I am back to being furious with her. Beyond thinking she was misinformed to thinking she was lying to us. Grrrr.

  39. 39.

    Betty Cracker

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: Our 22-year-old tries to keep us in the loop, poor thing. It’s honestly pretty fascinating, and it occurred to me recently that younger folks’ approach to gender politics might have a shot at making more headway than the successive waves of feminism of my mother’s generation and then mine. The kids aren’t radically remodeling the house; they’re burning it to the fucking ground, and maybe that’s for the best.

  40. 40.

    Gin & Tonic

    @Immanentize: If I could predict Putin’s idea of strategy, I’d probably have a good job.

    The idea, I think, is simply unrest. He can’t take all of Ukraine militarily, despite the fact that NATO will not be of significant assistance no matter what. But I think they want escalation and are looking for a pretext, and probably testing Blinken/Biden here.

  41. 41.

    Frank Wilhoit

    @John S.: The art of the possible cannot exist without the art of the necessary (nor vice versa).  Far too often, the marker of what is necessary is never even laid down before attempting to commence “negotiations”, which can only take place in a vacuum if the parameters are not established first.

  43. 43.

    Cheryl Rofer

    @Immanentize: @Gin & Tonic: Here’s an alternative thought: Putin sees the international criticism of his treatment of Alexei Navalny as a plot to undermine his government. He’s said as much. So he is retaliating.

    I know this sounds like a bad joke, but I had a conversation with a Ukraine expert about it yesterday. Here’s the start of the thread:

    I was going to make a full post out of it and point out some more general truths about understanding the enemy, but I didn’t have time. Maybe later today.

  45. 45.

    Ksmiami

    @John S.: he will get no buy in from Republicans and end up the most hated man in Washington so I really don’t understand the angle.

  46. 46.

    Nelle

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: My husband is reading it aloud to me while I do handwork.  It’s a bit overwhelming at times.  This country has tolerated and elicited vile behavior throughout its history.  Such behavior is as American as the more noble impulses we prefer to celebrate.  Nothing changes until we deal with truth, rather than dreaming our myths.

  47. 47.

    Cameron

    @Cheryl Rofer: Is the idea of Ukraine joining NATO being floated again?  That would certainly provoke a hostile response, from Putin or pretty much any Russian leader.

  48. 48.

    New Deal democrat

    @Gin & Tonic: If Russia seriously wanted to invade Ukraine, the perfect time to do it was in 2019 or 2020, while Trump was President, since there would have been virtually no US pushback. So why wait until there was a competent US President, with decades of experience on the foreign affairs committee of the Senate?

    Which made me wonder if Russia’s saber rattling wasn’t in response to American moves since Biden became President. Remember, Biden very strongly indicated there would be consequences for Putin’s interference on behalf of Trump.

    And indeed there seem to have been some US moves since January designed to let Russia know that the US was Not Happy, and it was time for some Consequences. Modern bombers were moved into Norway, and NATO advisers were sent at least temporarily to Ukraine. Probably there have been other more covert moves to retaliate against Russia and alter the status quo.

    If that’s the case, then Russia’s upping the ante with Ukraine looks like a strong countermove in a high-stakes game of chess.

  49. 49.

    The Dark Avenger

    @debbie: She doesn’t have the power in the House that one member of the Senate has to block legislation.  I’m more worried about the Radical Centralists who don’t want funding for the military cut,  and believe in untouchable corporate tax cuts.

  50. 50.

    Kay

    The political angle on this is kind of interesting:

    Each of Doyle’s books has reached the top of the best-seller lists. “Untamed” has sold more than two million copies. After reading it, the singer Adele posted, “It’s as if I just flew into my body for the very first time.” Oprah Winfrey called Doyle one of the “awakened leaders who are using their voices and talent to elevate humanity.” The Biden campaign sought Doyle’s help reaching suburban women: “Glennon is their knight in shining armor,” a campaign staffer said.

    There’s been endless discussion of the various groups that aligned with Trump, but very little on our side. The Biden campaign were quietly reaching women who weren’t necessarily ‘political’ but were progressive and anti-Trump. I wondered where “we can do hard things” came from.

  53. 53.

    Baud

    @Betty Cracker:

    Our 22-year-old tries to keep us in the loop, poor thing

    They keep adding letters and symbols to LGBT. It’s like they have no respect for addled old brains.
    .
    .
    .
    .
    j/k if that needs to be said.

  54. 54.

    lowtechcyclist

    Fed Chair Jay Powell said today that his commute home takes him past a “substantial tent city” of homeless Americans

    Some jurisdictions unfortunately have reacted to such encampments by evicting the homeless people from the place they’ve congregated, whether or not there’s any better place for them to go.

    Some people are simply horrible, and unfortunately some of them are in positions of authority.

    Even if we do nothing more to help homeless people get their lives on track again (which we should), this sort of response just plain has to stop.

  55. 55.

    Brachiator

    @debbie:

    Everyone worries about Manchin, but what about AOC’s dismissal of the infrastructure package as too small and her call to instead spend $10 trillion?

    This seems to be a consistent complaint of some of the lefties. More, more, more spending. It actually gets tiresome since their complaints are never tied to any concept of managing the economy.

    But as noted, as long as she votes for the Biden plan, no worries.

  56. 56.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Dorothy A. Winsor:

    My editor talked about how her third grader matter-of-factly told her about gender issues in his class and what pronouns some kids used and how some kids weren’t sure.

    The deepest wisdom is here.  Approach this like a child.  Children have no trouble with gender issues.  You were born a boy but you’re really a girl and you want to turn into a girl?  You’re not really a boy or a girl?  Sure.  That stuff is in fairy tales all the time.  It’s not complicated.  That’s really the thing.  It’s actually pretty simple, at least for everyone except the people figuring out themselves.  And he/she/they cover all the pronouns anybody’s really going to get emotional about.

    Now, the actual politics part of gender politics?  In a fantasy world where physical transformations are likely a lot easier?  HOOOOOO boy.  My suggestion is that you treat that the way you would want misogyny issues treated, whatever way that is.

    @sab:

    I had come around to marginal sympathy for JK Rowling

    I hadn’t.  She goes out of her way to shit on trans people when she could just… keep her mouth shut.  She doesn’t have to keep saying negative things about trans women.  She’s choosing to, over and over, and then trying to go wide-eyed and “Who me?  I’m just asking questions!  I’m the victim here!”

    Besides, she really revels in one of the most bad-faith arguments ever, that trans women take away cis women’s rights by moving into women’s spaces.  The history of women’s rights has been a fight to NOT be locked into women’s spaces, you mean-spirited, bigoted harridan!  (uh, her, not you.)  And taking a major homophobic political/medical figure’s name as her pen name?  That is some hardcore ‘When people show you who they are, believe them’.

    Alas, it wasn’t much of a surprise.  I had already noticed that the Potter books are mean-spirited as Hell.  Then I just had to realize the whole pureblood/muggle thing isn’t about racism, it’s about British class politics.

  57. 57.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Benw:

    the kids are alright

    the “kid” in question is in her thirties, and the old white guy is one of the main reasons the Dems are in a position to do anything at all

    @MomSense: that’s not entirely fair. They’re also deeply wrapped up in their own vanguardism. You can never catch up to them.

  59. 59.

    Mai Naem mobile

    I can tell you IRL I actually notice the degradation of the roads/freeways in Phoenix . In the big scheme of things Phoenix is a young city so I’ve always figured that was the reason the streets were pretty decent.  I’ve never seen this level of crappy roads.  Yes, our population has exploded but COVID cut back on cars on the streets drastically. Also we still have parts within the metro area(not way out exurbs) which have septic when they should have city sewer services. Those families don’t have the $7-$15K to bring out the city sewer to their properties. And then there’s water saving stuff that could be done . There are tons of real world needs that would make a difference.

  60. 60.

    Cheryl Rofer

    @Cameron: @New Deal democrat: LOL you guys. Alexander Clarkson, the person I was talking to in that Twitter exchange, keeps up to the moment on happenings in Ukraine.

    There has been some talk within Ukraine about NATO. The chairman of the NATO Military Committee recently visited. I can’t find anything about more military advisors, if you mean the guys on the ground who work with the fighting force.

    That undoubtedly irritates Russia and probably is some part of Putin’s motivation. But Putin has said that he regards Navalny as solely Russia’s issue and others should butt out. He and his associates really do see that sort of thing – talk about human rights within Russia – as an effort to undermine his government. And if there’s one thing he wants, it’s to stay in power.

  61. 61.

    zhena gogolia

    @Baud:

    I always learn the new ones in my church, even before the university. My church is cool. Wish we could get together again.

  62. 62.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Baud: I know you’re joking but I’m quite serious when I say I can’t keep up. Not that at my age and marital status it’s a problem or anything. Besides, I really don’t care who or what they consider themselves to be, it’s none of my business anyway. All I have to do is remember to refer to people as they want me to.

    That’s not so hard, is it? Well, not yet anyway.

  65. 65.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Dorothy A. Winsor:

    I just started reading Isabel Wilkerson’s CASTE, which is about the underlying structures of racism in the US. It promises to be an informative and depressing read. But as I look at, say, Tucker Carlson talking about “white replacement” it feels like the book is being acted out in front of me.

    Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns was the nonfiction book I’ve learned the most from in the last decade or so.  I’ll have to go to my library’s page and reserve Caste if they’ve got it, which they probably do.

  66. 66.

    Baud

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    Yeah, I don’t care because … I don’t care.  I mean, I care about people being treated with dignity and respect, but as long as the good faith rethinking of gender issues is still fluid, I’m not all that interested in trying to get a handle on the details.

     

    ETA: It’s more hypothetical than real at this point, but I’m bad with names so I’m concerned about being bad with remembering who wants to called what, especially when it comes to electronic communications.

  67. 67.

    MomSense

    @sab:

    I have a psychological hypothesis about some of the contributing factors to middle aged women’s embrace of TERFDOM that I’m still working through.

  68. 68.

    Nelle

    @OzarkHillbilly: I’m getting sort of cranky about the rate of change lately.  Especially when people insist that I care about identity as much as they do.  I’m fine with whatever anyone chooses.  But please, don’t insist that I be on top of all the currents of the topic.  Also, too, cranky about the changes and upgrades to my devices.  And the north wind gusting a chilly rain.  Not cranky about the three year old granddaughter upending a bowl of cereal all over the table, chair, and floor.  She’s so cute in her braids today.

  70. 70.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Baud: but I’m bad with names so I’m concerned about being bad with remembering who wants to called what, especially when it comes to electronic communications.

    I’m horrible that way and have just resigned myself to my future embarrassments. I’m already rehearsing my apologies.

  71. 71.

    Betty Cracker

    @Frankensteinbeck:

    The history of women’s rights has been a fight to NOT be locked into women’s spaces, you mean-spirited, bigoted harridan!

    I agree Rowling’s anti-trans crusade is terrible, but the above statement is an oversimplification of a really complex issue, IMO.

  73. 73.

    lowtechcyclist

    @germy:

    What exactly is the republican plan?

    To punch down on trans and nonbinary kids, keep Those People from voting, keep people riled up about immigrants, BLM, and bogus issues like Dr. Seuss.

    Get back in power, cut taxes on the rich, tear up regulations, and wait for the Miracle of the Free Market to magically fix everything.

  74. 74.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Nelle: Especially when people insist that I care about identity as much as they do.

    I just tell them they’re right, I don’t care as much as they do because it’s not an issue for me. They are what they are, that’s all I need to know. Then I tell them not to worry too much about it as I’ll be dead soon enough anyway.

    ETA and hopefully next wkend I get to see my newest granddaughter for 3 whole days. Between MawMaw and PawPaw my son and his wife will be lucky to hold her.

  75. 75.

    Nelle

    @lowtechcyclist: The Warmth of Other Suns is a masterpiece of structure, sentence level style, and interwoven content.  So far, I don’t sense that about Caste, but she doesn’t have the aid of the narrative flow of journeys.  This is a complex and tough comparison/contrast.  And a hard and necessary bit of writing.

    I’ve heard it criticized as not being exhaustive about caste in India, but India is there for comparative reasons, as are the Nazis.  The focus and intent is to get Americans to look at their harsh realities with a different lens.  And the reality that American racism was, in some instances, going too far for even the Nazis in the beginning, is more than sobering.  Side by side comparisons are a gut punch, even when one knows the material intellectually.

  77. 77.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Dorothy A. Winsor:

    I admit, I took great joy in putting a minor but frequently appearing character in You Can Be A Cyborg When You’re Older who I never refer to with any pronoun at all.  Fidget does sleep in the girls’ dorm, but there are only two dorms and the boys’ dorm is packed.

    Most of my friends are trans, and the first trans character I put in, I asked my friends how they wanted it handled… and they wanted her to be able to change, and it was instantly accepted and never an issue again.  She was just a girl.

  78. 78.

    Cheryl Rofer

    @New Deal democrat: Cranny’s tweets are about equipment, not motivation. Which is fine and interesting but says nothing about motivation.

    As to its being a countermove, yes indeed. Putin is moving against the undue interference of the US and Ukraine in Russia’s internal affairs.

    Many motives on Putin’s part seem possible. I’m adding one more. It’s the most dangerous because it’s the most likely to lead to escalation.

    Grand geopolitical aspirations are not the only reason wars are fought.

  79. 79.

    Cameron

    @Gin & Tonic: I don’t put much stock in RT, which is why I’m surprised to find Scott Ritter writing there.  Hopefully all parties will be satisfied with rattling their sabers and it doesn’t go any further.

  80. 80.

    Brachiator

    @lowtechcyclist:

    Fed Chair Jay Powell said today that his commute home takes him past a “substantial tent city” of homeless Americans

    In Southern California, there was a significant encampment at Echo Park in the Los Angeles area. And not too long ago I had to take the bus to go to a medical appointment. It was sad to see aggregations of tents popping up in various communities, sometimes in the middle of commercial areas. There has been a surge in homelessness and I don’t know whether government resources have simply been overwhelmed.

     

    Some jurisdictions unfortunately have reacted to such encampments by evicting the homeless people from the place they’ve congregated, whether or not there’s any better place for them to go.

    Even if we do nothing more to help homeless people get their lives on track again (which we should), this sort of response just plain has to stop.

    The problem is that mass tent cities are neither safe nor sanitary. It’s not even like a campsite where there is reliable water, restrooms or latrines. And as the numbers increase, the living conditions become worse.

    There are also some homeless communities in some forest areas above Los Angeles. These places are fire threats, along with the other problems.

    We have got to find a better way than just letting people stew in unhealthy and dangerous living conditions.

     

  82. 82.

    WereBear

    @Brachiator:

    We have got to find a better way than just letting people stew in unhealthy and dangerous living conditions.

     
    This started when Reagan closed mental health hospitals and never funded the community centers that were supposed to take their place.

    Addressing that reason for people not being able to take care of themselves will make a giant difference. And we should drop our incarcerated population while we’re at it… pretty quick transition.

    The second giant slice of the problem is how barriers to independent living keep getting higher. Try to save up enough to move into an apartment, when one slip sucks up all one’s money, and also the required credit checks and proof of employment and everything else…

    People with jobs live in their cars now. And they are not considered homeless.

  83. 83.

    MomSense

    For fans of Gentleman Jack, Surann Jones was in a detective procedural drama called Scott and Bailey which is currently airing on HULU.

  84. 84.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Baud:

    I’m going to be in a Zoom call on Tuesday, with three online friends I’ve known for 20-25 years.  One is the mother of a transgender (F to M) child who insists on “they/them” pronouns. The human being/progressive in me is totally on board with their choice. The English language nerd in me is freaking out. I know that’s petty and might be interpreted as bigoted. I hope — I think — I’m not. But if I refer to my friend’s child (singular) as “they/them” (plural), what verb form do I use? I’m probably making a mountain of a molehill here, but it seems to be a rather fraught issue, and I’m really nervous about being inadvertently offensive.

  85. 85.

    NotMax

    Weekend watch.

    18 minutes from the vault: Documenting what is now recognized as a shameful misstep in our history. For wartime propaganda produced by the federal government, which one would expect to be a waterfall of rah-rah, avoids painting an unabashedly rosy picture. Found it a nugget of interest to learn that the voting age in the camps was 18.

  87. 87.

    NotMax

    @SiubhanDuinne

    Rather than struggle with verb tenses, why not use the kid’s name? Victor (or as the case may be, Victoria) is, rather than saying they is.

  88. 88.

    taumaturgo

    @WereBear:  This is the Dems negotiating among themselves on behalf of the donors. If the Dems were united they would be fighting for a larger bill, but since the opposition is solidly against Biden’s proposal, the conservative, centrists Dems step in the role of the GQP to protect the donors.

  89. 89.

    RandomMonster

    @SiubhanDuinne: I can understand how “they/them” might take a little practice to get used to when speaking about someone you know. I already use they/them in technical writing when referring to, say, a generic user of the product, and in that context the pronouns sound natural (at least to my ear).

  91. 91.

    Sure Lurkalot

    @Ksmiami:

    end up the most hated man in Washington so I really don’t understand the angle.

    Well, to be fair, 1/6/21 CHANGED HIM.  How could we have a violent insurrection without something to insurrect against? BOTH SIDES!

  94. 94.

    Brachiator

    @WereBear:

    “They/them” is an utterly grammatical choice that I’ve used for years.

    “They/them” is ungrammatical when referring to a single person, but we have all become used to it.

    I suppose that there will be further modifications to the language, but I just try to roll with it.

  98. 98.

    CaseyL

    @WereBear: I have, too, when I wasn’t sure of the gender of the person I was referring to.

    I decided to de-gender my speech habits decades ago, and using “they/them” was a lot easier than using “s/he, him/her,” especially when speaking.

  99. 99.

    Villago Delenda Est

    Reagan’s foul reactionary minions decided that infrastructure maintenance could wait and they moved the funding for it to building B-1 and B-2 bombers among other things MIC related. Joe, Pete, and Pete are trying to do 40 fuckin’ years of neglect.

  100. 100.

    NotMax

    @SiubhanDuinne

    Yeah. We autumn chickens don’t exactly turn on a dime anymore. Takes a while to circumnavigate the ponderous obstacle a lifetime of ingrained usage has built up. It’s all good.

  103. 103.

    Baud

    @Sure Lurkalot:

    I don’t have a clue what his strategy is.  But people are spreading misinformation if they’re saying he’s trying to reduce total infrastructure spending.  IF that’s his ultimate goal, there’s no evidence of it yet that I’m aware of.

  104. 104.

    cain

    @germy: ​
     
    It’s always the same plan – more tax cuts to the top 1-2%. It’s the only plan they have. Not only that a tax cuts with absolutely no stipulations. Just keep throwing tax dollars at them. Cuz you it’s worked beautifully for the past 35 years. Also Christianity.

    These people don’t even have a thought behind it. They just believe in coasting on shit and give money to their friends. They could care less. The only time they might wake up if their market leadership falls and the captains of industry feel very threatened in which case it would likely be a military exercise not trying to compete.

  106. 106.

    Cheryl Rofer

    @oatler.: Shaun Walker is a pretty good Russia analyst. Distracting from internal problems is another possible motive. As Walker quotes Mark Galeotti about Putin’s press conference, Putin is not coming up with any new solutions to Russia’s problems or providing new goals.

    They are distributing their vaccine to other countries, but there have been problems. Slovakia says that some of what they’ve received isn’t up to the claims for it. Not clear whether that is a bad batch or an overall problem. And people in Russia aren’t getting as much vaccine as they’d like.

    Distraction from internal problems may be another motivation for Putin to cause trouble around Ukraine. It’s not the same thing as striking back at countries that Putin feels are undermining Russia, though.

  107. 107.

    gwangung

    @NotMax: Well, it’s a good thing that the young ‘uns are tolerant of us codgers as we fumble our way around. A few stumbles, particularly when we don’t see folks very often, are tolerated…

  108. 108.

    cain

    @artem1s: ​
     
    It’s going to be just like marijuana – the state is going to watch as every state that took infra dollars having rebounding strong economy while they flitter away – even more people will leave the state for those other states because of jobs reducing the amount of money they have.
    At some point, the people will have to face the reality that they have utterly fallen behind and hopefully vote to Democratic. The GOP is never going to change they are rigid old white racist people and do not actually have any policy ideas.

  109. 109.

    Almost Retired

    Has Biden said anything further about lowering the age for Medicare to 60?  Asking for a friend.  It has nothing to do with my nym or my 1961 birth year.  A friend asked….

  110. 110.

    cain

    @Betty Cracker:

    Speaking of dogs, I met the foster dog yesterday – a lab/dachshund mix – a short compact dachshund body with a lab face. Very cute, all black dog – which will fit in well with my all black cats. I’m bringing her home tomorrow – and we’ll see how well it works out with the velociraptors.

    Also fun week! I was surprised to know that my mortgage got paid off – I am completely debt free and I only owe taxes. :-)

  112. 112.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Almost Retired: like you, the fact that I’m 53 and self-insured is in no way, shape or form related to my newfound enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders and his own newfound enthusiasm for incrementalism

    The Vermont Independent is urging Democrats to force Medicare to enter into negotiations with drug companies and use that revenue to pay for a huge expansion of the entitlement program. Sanders, who chairs the Senate Budget Committee, is aiming to lower Medicare’s eligibility age from 65 to 55 or 60 years old and expand the program to cover dental work, glasses and eye surgeries as well as hearing aids

    (just kidding, I still hate that fucker)

  114. 114.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: more seriously, while I recognize that I am out of step with most of the US population on politics (among other things), I’m really surprised Dems don’t push Medicare/Aid expansion and a public option more aggressively.

  115. 115.

    J R in WV

    @germy: ​

    What exactly is the republican plan?

    RWNJs: “Continue to suffer and die without health-care, living homeless on the streets, drinking lead-contaminated water, become mentally unstable, and donate to me because you can’t tell what I support, which is your miserable life and early death.”

    That’s the Republican Plan!

  117. 117.

    NotMax

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Think it’s more a case of not juggling more balls at once than one is assured can handle. COVID has pride of place for now, the virtual bowling ball in the panoply being kept in motion.

  119. 119.

    Fair Economist

    @Brachiator: They/them *is* grammatical and has been used for individuals of indeterminate gender, and sometimes even when the gender is known, since forever in English. The rule that they/them can never be used for an individual is yet another case of grammarians inventing rules for English that don’t really exist.

  120. 120.

    J R in WV

    @Frankensteinbeck: ​

    …taking a major homophobic political/medical figure’s name as her pen name? … ‘When people show you who they are, believe them’.

    Alas, it wasn’t much of a surprise. I had already noticed that the Potter books are mean-spirited as Hell. Then I just had to realize the whole pureblood/muggle thing isn’t about racism, it’s about British class politics.

    I dunno if there’s much difference between Brit class hatred and US racism.

    I was amazed to learn people with red hair (“Gingers”) are almost universally despised in England, then shocked to learn later that the “Ginger” hatred was based upon the higher tendency of Irish to have red hair.

  121. 121.

    H.E.Wolf

    @SiubhanDuinne: The English language nerd in me is freaking out. I know that’s petty and might be interpreted as bigoted. I hope — I think — I’m not. But if I refer to my friend’s child (singular) as “they/them” (plural), what verb form do I use?

     
    Might it help to frame the singular/plural question you’re asking about, as similar to addressing one person directly, as: “You are”?

    [Note: gross oversimplification of linguistics ahead.]

    As we all know, English has morphed away from “Thou art” (2nd person singular/singular) over time.

    The “you” used to be 2nd person plural; and the verb has stayed plural, even as “you” has acquired a singular meaning in addition to a plural one.

    To give a professional grammarian a headache, remind them that the Quakers (of my grandfather’s generation, at any rate) used to say “Thee is” on occasion. We grandkids could tell when our grandfather was feeling especially fond of us, because he would “thee” us. :)

    [And then there’s “you all”, “y’all”, and “all y’all”….]

  122. 122.

    Fair Economist

    @cain: The horrible, disgusting strategy of modern state GOP parties is to cripple their states’ economies so young and educated people leave and the remainder become more conservative in their distress. Sadly, they’ll be delighted if they can turn down great infrastructure investments and make their residents worse off.

  123. 123.

    Brachiator

    @Fair Economist:

    They/them *is* grammatical and has been used for individuals of indeterminate gender, and sometimes even when the gender is known, since forever in English.

    “They/them” used to be plural, not singular, when describing persons.

    But, as I noted, language changes.

  125. 125.

    NotMax

    @J R in WV

    For skimming the surface of historical context on class distinction, see: The Admirable Crichton.

    (And proverbial light bulb just illuminated that Kryten in Red Dwarf shares qualities with Crichton.)

  126. 126.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @NotMax: sure, but I was more thinking long term. Post-Obama Dems have talked a lot about “building on the ACA”, but it seems to me this is a specific thing that would sell well to the middle-aged people who dominate elections.

    and… it almost happened

    n time, the bill appeared stuck: a handful of Democrats wanted the ACA to pass, but they opposed this one popular provision. A group of five progressive Dems and five not-so- progressive Dems — what was briefly described at the time as the “Team of Ten” — spent several days working out a compromise. The agreement was relatively straightforward: the “public option” would be removed from the legislation, and in its place, the Medicare eligibility age would be lowered from 65 to 55.
    It was a major breakthrough, both politically and substantively. As Jonathan Cohn explained at the time, “People between the ages of 55 and 64 have a notoriously hard time buying coverage on their own, since their age and higher incidence of disease makes them the sorts of high medical risks insurers don’t want to cover.”
    There was just one problem: Joe Lieberman balked. In fact, the Connecticut senator drew a line in the sand: if Democrats didn’t kill the “public option” and the Medicare-at-55 provision, he’d kill the entire reform initiative. Left with little choice, Democratic leaders grudgingly made the changes Lieberman demanded, and the idea quietly faded soon after.
    Bernie Sanders, however, appears eager to bring it back to the table.
    I mention this history from 2009 because it’s easy to imagine some describing the Vermont senator’s Medicare idea as excessively liberal. But if, 12 years ago, centrists Democrats such as Arkansas’ Mark Pryor, Nebraska’s Ben Nelson, and Montana’s Max Baucus saw this as an acceptable, mainstream proposal, there’s no reason contemporary officials should feel any differently now.

    In fairness, and if memory serves, Lieberman was not the only troll in the caucus on this, just the one willing (and delighted) to be the public face of opposition. But… fucking Pryor and Nelson were on board…. Cohn has a book on the ACA coming out soon, and I’ve already pre-ordered it.

  127. 127.

    Ruckus

    @germy:

    Figure out the way to pay zero taxes, sell absolute crap at highly inflated prices, have so much money they don’t know how to count it all, hate what is rapidly getting to be or is over half the country’s population, creating a dystopia of epic proportions so they can imagine themselves as the elite, which they will never be because they are total shit human beings. And they know it.

  129. 129.

    Feathers

    @Brachiator:  And it was both singular and plural before that. You can find singular they in both Austen and Shakespeare. What changed was the grammar pedants who came along with the massive expansion in literacy that came in the 19th c. and insisted that English grammar rules follow Latin forms rather than the good old mongrel rules that had stood for nearly a millennium. Now people are wisely insisting that language describe people accurately, and not force people into unwanted public identities because of verb disagreements.

  130. 130.

    J R in WV

    @Brachiator: ​

    @WereBear:

    “They/them” is an utterly grammatical choice that I’ve used for years.

    “They/them” is ungrammatical when referring to a single person, but we have all become used to it.

    I suppose that there will be further modifications to the language, but I just try to roll with it.

    Actually, I googled the historical usages of “they/them” and found that it has been an accepted singular pronoun for centuries:

    Examples of the singular “they” being used to describe someone features as early as 1386 in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and also in famous literary works like Shakespeare’s Hamlet in 1599.

    “They” and “them” were still being used by literary authors to describe people in the 17th Century too – including by Jane Austin in her 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice.

    Then more recently in the Oxford Dictionary:

    In the eighteenth century, grammarians began warning that singular they was an error because a plural pronoun can’t take a singular antecedent. They clearly forgot that singular you was a plural pronoun that had become singular as well.

    I will have a little trouble tracking new and specific pronouns, as I also have trouble with names. People I meet once a year will always need to remind me of their names and pronouns if non-standard. To use an unfortunate older term for common usage…

  131. 131.

    Brachiator

    @J R in WV:

    I was amazed to learn people with red hair (“Gingers”) are almost universally despised in England, then shocked to learn later that the “Ginger” hatred was based upon the higher tendency of Irish to have red hair.

    I’ve read this as well, but it is also noteworthy that there have always been redheads among the British nobility. Henry 8 and Lizzie Number 1 both had red hair. Some of this may have come from the Norman invaders, and maybe in the more ordinary folk, from the Danish Vikings. Lots of red hair among Scots, with an overflow into Northern England.

    ETA: Of course, the Normans came in part from Vikings, so it all goes round and round.

  134. 134.

    NotMax

    Le sigh.

    Just checked USPS site. Gleefully anticipated package, though still marked for arrival as Saturday, April 10th now carries the dreaded “your package will arrive later than expected but is still on its way” addendum. Apparently taking a vacation in Texas.

  135. 135.

    Ruckus

    @Betty Cracker:

    The kids aren’t radically remodeling the house; they’re burning it to the fucking ground, and maybe that’s for the best.

    You have to ask yourself, is the old way working?

    Have your answer?

    Sometimes you basically have to start over, if you’ve been living in the same house for hundreds of years and the wiring is bad, the pipes are lead, the windows are broken, the floors are so out of level it’s hard to walk, because no one ever changed anything, fixed anything, modernized anything, and still thinks that it’s perfect. 

    In a world of 8 or 9 billion people, the old ways when the same concepts really didn’t support 1 or 2 billion humans are not working and will not work. We need to recognize the one human trait of always being comfortable in our own little world isn’t valid any longer, it’s not just our little world any more.

    The structure, the hate, the theft, the lying to make those work to the advantage of the few, absolutely fucks the masses. And we have masses. It isn’t right, it isn’t fair, it isn’t humanity. There will always be haves and have nots, but the haves don’t need nearly as much and the have nots could stand a bit more. Hate for hates sake doesn’t work, has never worked, but it works even less as there are more people.

  138. 138.

    Doug R

    @Immanentize: Feels to me like Putin is probing US/Biden intel and resolve. Russian hospitals are full of Covid patients, a war now would probably backfire on him.

  139. 139.

    Brachiator

    @Feathers:

    And it was both singular and plural before that. You can find singular they in both Austen and Shakespeare. What changed was the grammar pedants who came along with the massive expansion in literacy that came in the 19th c. and insisted that English grammar rules follow Latin forms rather than the good old mongrel rules that had stood for nearly a millennium.

    Yeah, yeah, yeah, rules of grammar are mere “pendantry.”

    Shit, most people don’t even know the supposed mongrel rules unless they go on a google search. I have said that usage tends to win out, no matter what any set of rules say. But good old mongrel grammar was often haphazard to non-existent, until more formal literary culture developed.

    Now people are wisely insisting that language describe people accurately, and not force people into unwanted public identities because of verb disagreements.

    As I said, whatever works. A lot of the search for new and better descriptors is provisional and experimental. Fine by me.

  140. 140.

    Geminid

    The Gallup poll showing a decline of Republicans and an increase of Democrats is borne out by a comparison of two Wason Center polls of Virginia registered voters. Virginia has no registration by party, so the poll asked for self-identification. The November 2019 poll showed identification as Democrat at 34%. The February 2021 poll showed that 37% said they were Democrats. Independents went from 30% to 33%, and Republicans fell from 31% to to 25%, a decline of 6 points, almost one in five.

  141. 141.

    Ruckus

    @NotMax:

    My gas bill travels less than 10 miles, was put in the mail box the evening of March 31, hopefully to arrive before the due date, April 8.

    It hasn’t arrived yet. The electric bill, which also travels less than 10 miles, sent at the same time, arrived April 7.

    I don’t think we can say that shitforbrains absolutely, completely destroyed the USPS but effectively he did. He took a relatively working concept and fucked it up rather well, if fucking it up was his goal. Why is beyond comprehension, other than just plain stupidity and hate.

    But then with conservatives stupidity and hate seem to be their only guiding lights.

  142. 142.

    Sister Golden Bear

    @Brachiator:

    “They/them” used to be plural, not singular, when describing persons.

    But, as I noted, language changes.

    It does indeed. Singular they/them has been used for a long, long time in English  (Shakespeare used it). The first written example is in 1375, and as the OED’s history notes, it’s likely that it had been commonly used before then.

    It’s only in the 17th Century that grammarians began warning that singular they was a mistake. As the OED notes “They clearly forgot that singular you was a plural pronoun that had become singular as well. You functioned as a polite singular for centuries…. Singular you has become normal and unremarkable. Also unremarkable are the royal we and, in countries without a monarchy, the editorial we: first-person plurals used regularly as singulars.”

    @SiubhanDuinne: Singular they uses the same verb form as plural they (or for that matter, the singular royal we, or the singular they we use when we don’t know someone’s gender), e.g. “Someone left their phone behind. What were they thinking. I bet they’re missing it. Do you think that they will come back for?”

  144. 144.

    James E Powell

    @Sister Golden Bear:

    I never bothered to look it up, but I always though the thou/you in English was like the tu/vous in French. And that the English/American colonists just dropped because they were in a hurry or something.

  145. 145.

    Feathers

    @Betty Cracker: ​
     This. I remember the initial online fights, before TERF was even a term, and it really was radical feminists that one was dealing with. I understood the theoretical basis and issues behind what they were saying, and thus had some sympathy.* However, the battle lines quickly hardened to a point where it wasn’t about women’s shelters or other specific places, but the right of trans people to exist at all. Which isn’t an option, really.

    *On the women’s shelters argument, I brought up that women’s domestic violence shelters already had very high security standards, couldn’t we trust them to do the screenings they already do, and make sure there were both (mostly) trans-friendly and (enough) woman only shelters for people who needed them? That the answer was a vicious attack told me what I needed to know. Now the problem is that setting aside a cis woman only shelter or support group (assuming all trans shelter needs are met) is seen as terrible and transphobic. I’m old enough to have been through this sort of resorting of priorities before, and am confident it will all sort out (on the left). I’m on the side of trans acceptance, but this can really be awful.

  148. 148.

    Doug R

    @Baud:

    They keep adding letters and symbols to LGBT. It’s like they have no respect for addled old brains.

     

    I wish we’d shift to sexual or gender spectrum. That rainbow flag is a great idea, we need to run with it.

  149. 149.

    NotMax

    @Ruckus

    And some mock me for traveling all the way into town to pay such bills in person, clutching a receipt in hand as I leave. Except the electric bill now that the company has shuttered their payment office. That I now pay at any branch of the local bank which accepts those payments (and get them to waive the one dollar ‘convenience fee’ every time).

    ISP provider (cable company) opened a new payment office in town as opposed to in their business office in the far outskirts. Accept payment there now only via automated kiosk. Which has to be manned by an employee as it “likes cash and credit cards but has a problem dealing with checks,” a situation quite different from when one could walk up to the counter and interact with an employee there. Took only five tries of feeding the check into the slot for the machine to acquiesce to accepting payment on last visit. And that’s using the preferred method of inserting a blank check. If there’s writing on it, fuhgeddaboutit.

    My impression is the main purpose of the new office is to sell phones. Literally two walls of them on display.

  150. 150.

    Another Scott

    ICYMI, a very well-done takedown – Eric Boehlert’s PressRun – Maggie Haberman, and when Trump access no longer matters.

    Nobody in journalism rode the Trump wave quite like New York Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman, who was toasted by the media for her dogged sleuthing.

    “She’s the queen of political journalism,” Vanity Fair proclaimed. She “may be the greatest political reporter working today,” Elle announced in a 5,000-word profile. And the Times itself worked hard branding Haberman, hyping her Trump coverage as “one of the most astonishing runs in the history of American journalism.”

    […]

    (via TheRealHoarse)

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  152. 152.

    RaflW

    The one part of Biden’s overall budget that I oppose is his 1.5% increase for defense. FFS that bloated monster needs no more!

  153. 153.

    Geminid

    @Major Major Major Major: I think high speed rail has a place in new transportation infrastructure, but I would not try to replace the bulk of air transport with it, as some advocate. There are already ways to substantially reduce air transport’s carbon footprint, such as biofuels and carbon neutral petroleum. And Airbus is now working on plans for hydrogen powered airplanes (The European Union is planning on making hydrogen a key part of it’s general decarbonization program).

  155. 155.

    Doug R

    @Major Major Major Major: I don’t like bus-only or 6 or more lanes. Lane’s empty most of the time while traffic is crawling in the other 2 lanes.

    HOV with 2 or even 3 or more is a much better balance. You want the lane full moving no more than 40 mph than the other traffic, any faster and you’re asking for T-bone collisions.

  159. 159.

    JaneE

    Or, do you think America’s lead pipes, slow broadband, crumbling VA hospitals, cracked roads, old bridges, etc., are fine the way they are?

    For decades the actions of the GOP have been saying that they are not only fine the way they are, but they hope to have them deteriorate even more.  When the American people are so disgusted by their current state that they will allow any amount of corruption and self-dealing and deliberate cost overruns, then they will allow just enough to fatten the pockets of their friends without actually fixing anything.

  162. 162.

    Geminid

    @NotMax: Hydrogen certainly is scary. But I think Airbus was serious when they announced this program. And if a plane crashes, it won’t make much difference to the passengers if it’s carrying hydrogen or kerosene.

  165. 165.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @J R in WV: … the “Ginger” hatred was based upon the higher tendency of Irish to have red hair.

    Which in turn has fook-all to do with the Irish and everything to do with coppertopped Norsemen finding the Emerald Isle a more hospitable and lucrative target for plunder, murder, alcoholism and, shall we say, other extracurricular activities.

    Everywhere you find red hair – from western Russia (including Ashkenazic Jewry) to France to the Netherlands to Germany to Czechia to (swelpmeDog) Anatolia and Sicily – you can be sure some Viking was busy, mmmm, extending the geographical reach of the Scandinavian genome. :^D

  167. 167.

    J R in WV

    @Geminid:

    … carbon neutral petroleum …

    Is that like “Clean Coal” … ? As non-existent as phlogistron… Joe Manchin’s favorite Green Energy tool… clean coal~!~

  168. 168.

    Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes

    @Feathers:

    I’ve learned that I am evil beyond description because I’m one of those hateful people that disagree with puberty blockers for minors, placement of trans women in women’s DV shelters and competition of trans women in organized women’s sports over the age of 14.  It isn’t good enough, it seems, to respect and embrace the diversity of  adult living and relationship choices or to make a solid effort on knowing/using pronouns.

    The trans activist community really needs to step up on the issue of empathy for abused women, recognition of why juvenile brain development is such a thing that minors don’t generally get to make “forever stuck with” decisions, and to offer up solutions on women’s athletic scholarships. Come up with something that isn’t a line of incomplete or poorly studied bullshit, and I’ll revisit it.

    All of this makes me a TERF, apparently, and indicates that some sort of Hitlerian eliminationist ideas exist on my part with regard to the trans female community.

    As Billy Bats says in Goodfellas, “go get your shine box”.

  169. 169.

    Another Scott

    @New Deal democrat: Putin needs dollars and euros, so he wasn’t going to do anything more to further endanger finishing the Nordstream 2:

    Nord Stream 2, a gas pipeline that would connect Russia and Germany under the Baltic Sea, has become a rare thing in today’s Washington: a bipartisan bête noire.

    Last month, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called it “a bad deal” and warned that “any entity involved in the Nord Stream 2 pipeline risks U.S. sanctions and should immediately abandon work on the pipeline.” Meanwhile, two leading Republican lawmakers wrote a piece in Foreign Policy urging President Joe Biden to “stop dragging his feet” and impose sanctions on “all vessels and companies currently working to complete the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.”

    With the project around 95 percent complete, time is running short to stop it. But the solution most are pushing for—sanctions—is not the answer.

    That’s because there are only two players capable of killing Nord Stream 2: the Russian and German governments. As Washington has escalated sanctions against the pipeline, many international companies have backed out. If Nord Stream 2 were just a “commercial project,” as Berlin maintains, the risk of U.S. sanctions would have almost definitely halted it by now. But the Russian and German governments have stepped in to keep the project afloat. Russia redeployed a pipe-laying ship, the Akademik Cherskiy, from the Pacific to the Baltic to work on Nord Stream 2, replacing a Swiss vessel. And in Germany, the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, where the pipeline makes landfall, set up a foundation to shield German contractors from sanctions.

    So, to achieve its objectives, Washington will need to change minds in the Kremlin or the German chancellery. Moscow, which is racing to finish the project despite sanctions against one of its vessels, is unlikely to cooperate. For Russian President Vladimir Putin, Nord Stream 2 would provide continued leverage over Europe—the European Union relies on Russia for around 40 percent of its gas supplies—while also weakening Ukraine, which currently earns billions of dollars by clipping transit fees for the exports that cross its territory. That leaves altering Berlin’s calculus as Washington’s only hope for squashing the project.

    […]

    All of this suggests that Washington’s best hope of scuttling the pipeline is stalling its completion past September. The way to do that is not by sanctioning German companies—which could well produce the opposite effect. It is through quiet negotiations with Berlin, encouraging the German government to throw just enough sand in the gears to delay the project. Call it a truce: In exchange for Berlin’s placing a moratorium on pipeline construction and regulatory approvals through the end of the year, Washington would agree not to sanction any German companies for the same time period.

    Cutting such a deal would require reviving an art all but lost during the Trump administration: diplomacy. Biden has committed to doing just that. Here’s his chance.

    Vlad will cause trouble, lots of trouble, but it will be deniable Little Green Men and he won’t “invade” Ukraine until that is somehow finished. He’s trying to thread a needle here – a needle that is very tiny.

    As I’ve mentioned before, I think Russia Duma elections are playing a big part in Putin’s thinking. Those have to take place before September as well.

    tl;dr – there are genuine political power and hard currency considerations driving Putin. It’s not just picking a fight with Biden for show.

    FWIW.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  170. 170.

    catclub

    @Ruckus: I think you and NotMax are old codgers who could do ACH utlity payments via your bank – NOT autopay any amount the utility submits-

    but are stubbornly sticking to checks.

     

    Ask me how I know.

  172. 172.

    Geminid

    @Geminid: Airbus’ hydrogen fueled aircraft probably will not fly until 2040. But we could shift air transport to carbon neutral fuels by 2030 if we wanted. That might require 10% increases in fuel cost every year, but it could be done. And aviation engineers are have not reached the point of diminishing returns on fuel efficiency.

  173. 173.

    Ruckus

    @Major Major Major Major:

    If CA just had reasonable passenger train service with it’s own line it would be far better. To go from LA to SF by train is, well impossible. You ride a bus from LA’s Union Station to Bakersfield, there is one line to Martinez that is the major freight line and the passenger train gets to use it as long as it doesn’t interfere with the freight traffic. The vast majority of the time you sit on sidings as the freight goes by. Second, Martinez is the most westerly train bridge over the bay. So from Martinez you take a bus. The biggest problem with high speed a high speed train in CA is that property is expensive, parts of the terrain are not cheap to build high speed rail on, if people want to go fast they take a flight. Or drive 80mph, playing with the truck traffic. I would like to see high speed rail in CA, I like trains and have used them in the US and in Europe. Europe is much better. I don’t expect to see ground broken in my lifetime for any better rail system in CA than what exists today.

  175. 175.

    sab

    @NotMax: Seriously? Look what regular old  jet fuel did to the twin towers in NYC. How could hydrogen be worse. ( About ten years agoI made a comment like yours to an auto engineer who had a home-made hydrogen fueled car. He laughed and reminded me that I was driving a car with ten gallons of gasoline in its tank.)

  176. 176.

    NotMax

    @catclub

    I want that immediate paper receipt. Too many experiences of kerfuffle in the past which only brandishing that served to quash.

  178. 178.

    James E Powell

    @Another Scott:

    Haberman was never anything but the most favored outlet for Trump’s inner circle. She wrote what they told her and her bosses though it was all gold, Jerry, gold!

    In her relations with readers, she has always been a thin-skinned asshole who refuses to take responsibility for her or her employer’s bullshit.

    And people should be throwing her “deeply flawed candidate running a flawed campaign” remark in her face every day.

  179. 179.

    Brachiator

    @Major Major Major Major:

    My hot take on rail and road infrastructure is that we should be adding bus lanes to highways instead of replicating California’s failure to build high speed rail.

    California high speed rail is becoming a vanity project. It is already admitted that it will never really reach high speeds because it will have to stop in podunk places like Bakersfield.

    But the idea is to create another Belmont Learning Complex fiasco. Spend so much money that you have to complete it, even if it serves no real purpose.

    Isn’t there a proposal to build high speed rail from Los Angeles to Las Vegas?

    In Los Angeles, there is a dedicated busway on the 110 freeway. Quite good, but still under-used. And there is a dedicated light rail track along the 105 freeway. Quite excellent.

  180. 180.

    Major Major Major Major

    @Ruckus:

    The biggest problem with high speed a high speed train in CA is that property is expensive, parts of the terrain are not cheap to build high speed rail on, if people want to go fast they take a flight. Or drive 80mph, playing with the truck traffic.

    So you’re saying a bus lane along the highway would be a great solution ;)

  181. 181.

    Ruckus

    @catclub:

    I only pay the gas, electric and my rent by check. The rent check goes in the drop box at the complex office, SCE and SCG don’t actually use easy pay processes other than giving them my bank info or paying a sub contractor a fee every month. Every other bill I pay I use actual modern computer processes. I pay with my phone at the grocery store and anywhere else I shop. If my utility companies would join the 21st century, I would actually appreciate it.

  183. 183.

    J R in WV

    Many years ago, on our (so far) only trip into France, we were eating lunch in Toulouse at an open-air cafe, when a local train came through the downtown square. It was nearly silent, beautiful, running right in the streets. Europe has the transit tools we wish we still had here.

    We stayed in a tiny town in the SW French countryside, the small hotel “warned” us about the trains coming by just across the road. It was two electric cars, the loudest part was the crossing bell while the gate was down. Ding, Ding, ding — well, actually clang, clang, clang but not very loud… while the train was nearly silent. Especially compared to unit trains rolling through town at 70 MPH.

    A point here is that small rural French towns have train service, like every two hours until midnight or so. Amazing to a traveler from the primitive nation in the colonies across the Atlantic! Probably a couple of train changes to get to Paris! No autos necessary.

  185. 185.

    Steeplejack (phone)

    @NotMax:

    Jesus Christ, just pay on line. Based on your posts here, you have some presence on Facebook, or at least you visit that site. Your privacy/security threat there is exponentially worse than paying a bill on line.

  186. 186.

    Brachiator

    @Uncle Cosmo: ​
     

    Which in turn has fook-all to do with the Irish and everything to do with coppertopped Norsemen finding the Emerald Isle a more hospitable and lucrative target for plunder, murder, alcoholism and, shall we say, other extracurricular activities.

    Also, some evidence that British women liked Scandinavian men because they were rugged, handsome, and most important, they bathed regularly.

  188. 188.

    J R in WV

    @Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: ​

    …why juvenile brain development is such a thing that minors don’t generally get to make “forever stuck with” decisions…

    I’m pretty sure “puberty blockers” are not a “forever stuck with” decisions… merely putting off the time at which such a decision must be made while the juvenile attempts to learn enough to make such a decision more wisely.​

  190. 190.

    NotMax

    @Steeplejack

    I have no presence on Facebook, never have had one, and take umbrage at being so tarred.

    ;)

    Okay, I’m out of step, but DO NOT TRUST online banking. Prefer to deal with a live person over futzing with a web site any day of the week.

  192. 192.

    Steeplejack (phone)

    @NotMax:

    If you have visited Facebook, they are hoovering up your data. If you have not, why are you posting Facebook links here if you haven’t viewed them?

  193. 193.

    NotMax

    @NotMax

    Will add that the link I gave above is the first time have ever interacted in any way, shape or form with Facebook. And that only because I couldn’t readily find the appropriate clip elsewhere.

  195. 195.

    Ruckus

    @Major Major Major Major:

    No, I’m not. It would probably be used, there are, as you know, a variety of income ranges in CA, as there are everywhere. If there was high speed rail LA to SF, how many people do you think could afford to take it that would? If you have money, you fly, even with the crap you have to go through with flying, it’s faster. High speed rail, do you see that going up the peninsula into SF itself? I don’t, the political battle to emanate domain the land would take decades and cost political capital that no one has. So that means it goes up the east bay side and you are still stuck having to rent a car or take a bus. And the rental business doesn’t do the current train in Martinez. I’ve taken the bus/train to NorCal several times, because I have the time and enjoy the ride. But twice I’ve had to sit by the side of the road when the bus either stops because of mechanical or to pick up the passengers from one of the other busses going to Bakersfield with mechanical to actually board a train. There aren’t enough passengers to run the train up the hills out of Union Station to Bakersfield and the time to take a passenger train up to there would be longer than the bus ride because of the freight trains.

    An aside, the train is about half the price of a flight to NorCal, driving costs about the same and takes less time than the train, and you have a car when you get there. I’d like to see high speed trains, I just don’t think it would be worth the billions it would cost, even if it would be cleaner, likely take about the same time as total door to door flying and could be fun.

  196. 196.

    Sister Golden Bear

    @Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Essentially you’re arguing for forced puberty, just as anti-abortionist are really forced birthers.

    In both cases, time is not neutral. In both cases it’s forcing women (and) men to live with unwanted life-long effects.

    There’s no reputable science data showing problems. In fact puberty blockers are routinely used for cisgender girls undergoing  “premature puberty” to delay it until a more appropriate age. But I don’t see any outrage over that. 

  198. 198.

    Stacib

    @lowtechcyclist: I loved The Warmth of Other Suns. Ida Mae’s story was my grandmother’s remembrance, too. All of it, the sharecropping, the sneaking out of the South, living on “the low end” in Chicago because that was the only place we were allowed, and then finally moving into newly opened areas south of 63rd. Ida Mae even lived close to where my folks bought – less than 2 miles.

  199. 199.

    Ruckus

    @Major Major Major Major:

    It’s the right of ways. Trains require it, Europe is used to it and so it works. The US is about private property (unless you raise cattle and want free ranges to feed them) and the trains, especially in the western half don’t go well with the geography. Also Europe is used to gasoline prices a lot higher than we are and the taxes which comprise a good portion of those prices are used for road and train needs. We started to come of age as a large country with far fewer people/sq mile than Europe, and much difficulty connecting cities with tracks or roads because of the terrain, the Rockies, the Sierra Nevada range, SF Bay/The Delta.

    I’m not saying we shouldn’t change or don’t need to, just that changing is very expensive, at a time when we have a lot of things that need spending on and we have a political party that would love for things to revert for everyone else to Neanderthal times.

  201. 201.

    Jay

    @Ruckus: 

    When the GVRD mused about LRT, it was always attacked a too expensive, too challenging, as GM still owns all the street level right of ways, from when they murdered the trolly systems.

    30 years later, I sit in a 22nd floor, affordable apartment, in a 30 floor building, overlooking a LRT stop, watching the towers go up, and on the horizon, can see every LRT stop on the lines, ( 5 now), by the clusters of apartment and office towers,

    In a place that had nothing taller than 3 stories, before LRT arrived.

    From here, I can drive to Kamloops, ( or take an express bus), in less time than driving to the airport, and taking a plane, for way less money, even though it is over “The Highway from Hell”.

    There are rail lines to Kamloops. They move freight. Takes 3 1/2 hours, at low speed. Car/Bus, 4 1/2 hours, air, 6.

    If we had real HSR here, it would take 2 hours.

  202. 202.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @sab: About ten years agoI made a comment like yours to an auto engineer who had a home-made hydrogen fueled car. He laughed and reminded me that I was driving a car with ten gallons of gasoline in its tank.

    Rupture a fuel tank full of liquid hydrogen and it (i) evaporates very quickly at any temperature admitting human life and (ii) once evaporated heads upward at flank speed. The one dangerous situation is when the rising gas is trapped in the airframe on its way up, and some form of passive venting can be designed in in case of an emergency.

    Rupture a fuel tank full of kerosene (jet fuel) and the (mostly still) liquid soaks into anything porous while the vapor remains near the ground in a fuel-air mix ready to be ignited by any stray spark or flame and fully capable of igniting the vapor being released by kerosene-soaked material & thence the remaining liquid.

    I think I’d take my chances with H2. (ETA: And a lot of folks who spent their last instants on earth in a Ford Pinto that had just been rear-ended might well agree.)

  203. 203.

    Steeplejack (phone)

    @Major Major Major Major:

    Late back to this thread, but I also wanted to thank you for synchronistically helping me get off my ass and get signed up with Zelle.

    One of my last check payments was rent, and I had been dithering about changing it. And then in February my landlord had a big problem with mail delay, so, aided by your comment about your rent, I did a little research, decided on Zelle and even convinced the landlord to go along with them. So I paid this month’s rent with no problem and am looking forward to the electronic future.

  204. 204.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @J R in WV: Europe has the transit tools we wish we still had here. ​

    Yup. And it only took general impoverishment and the destruction of a yooooge chunk of their railbeds and rolling stock, in the course of a minor unpleasantness roughly 80 years ago, to provide them the opportunity to “build back better.”

    Be careful what you wish for…

  205. 205.

    Chyron HR

    @Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
    It’s strange how you started off with “they’re all men pretending to be women so they rape my wife in the bathroom” and then backpedaled to “lol medical concerns” when everyone accurately called you a shithead.  It’s almost as thought you’re just arguing the most transphobic position that you think you can get away with.​

  206. 206.

    hotshoe

    @Brachiator:
    I don’t know why you insist on this mistaken view of history, but it really bugs me. It’s not just problematical for trans persons, it’s also just plain sexist.

    “You might have a sentence like ‘if a student comes to see the teacher, he must bring his homework’, where he is supposed to refer generically to males and females,” explains Dr Emma Moore.
    “There’s lots of psychological studies that show when people hear that generically, they don’t hear it as gender neutral – they do just think about men.”

    And the other solution which pedants wish us to use: “he or she” — in every case “he or she” is cumbersome, stupid-sounding and unnecessary.

    Obviously the correct way to phrase that, inclusively, not male-privileged, is:
    ‘if a student comes to see the teacher, they must bring their homework’

    “They/them” is the older form for singular third person; the attempt by grammarians to insist that it must only be used for plural third persons is much more recent (roughly, 1700s) — and their pedantic pronouncements ruled over many generations of schoolchildren since, but not over such proper English authors such as Jane Austen.

    There is no excuse for being unwilling to include unspecified (female) persons in your discourse by speaking as if third person singular must default to “he” rather than the correct “they”.

  207. 207.

    sab

    @Sister Golden Bear: I know a boy who was getting puberty blockers at age eight, because his cancer chemo treatments completely screwed up his hormones and he was already going into puberty at eight years old. The medical profession has lots of experience with puberty blockers that havenothimg to do with trans issues

    ETA When I learned ( just recently) that the issue was puberty blockers and not hormones, I negan to suspect that Rowling has been less than homest woth is in her public comments.

  208. 208.

    sab

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: I haven’t read Harry Potter books, since childless, busy and too old when they came out ( and I had to go to boarding school and hated it to the point where reminders are stressful) but I love her adult stuff, “Casual Vacancy” and the Cormoran Strike books.

    Having actually read the most recent Strike book, I think the hostile reviews were pretty dishonest. It’s okay to hate a book, but don’t invent stuff in a critical review just to be nastier and jump onto the current press band wagon.

  209. 209.

    Ruckus

    @hotshoe:

    I’m still trying to figure out, after decades of not having any answer whatsoever, why we have to assign gender to people in the first place. It is a nice thing to know what your gender is but it seems like humans have not really figured out that it’s actually not all that important. We make it necessary, by the “rules of civilization” to assign gender and in general decided that gender is dependent upon having or not having a penis. In reality it seems to be rather superfluous to use that as an identifying label. I am, by that definition a male and yet I know women taller than me, stronger than me, etc. So the point is that I normally pee standing up? I provide the information that creates a male or female human and yet I can’t create that life and that makes me superior? It follows the same twisted logic that says that whites are superior to people of color. And yet a lot of our advances in so many areas of our current world were accomplished by women or women of color. The person that figured out mRNA is a woman, the mRNA which many men of science said meant nothing and it may end up being a cornerstone of health of the human race.

    What I’m saying is that I see gender as a scientific thing that is interesting for sure, is far more flexible than science or especially humans have given it in the past, and has been used more as a weapon than a changeable, adjustable, wandering scientific term. We have made gender into a supposedly solid defined thing through language and society and it is anything but that.

  210. 210.

    Another Scott

    @Uncle Cosmo:

    Interesting old paper on LH2 at OSTI.gov:

    p.18

    It is known from the experience that a hydrogen-air gas cloud evolving from the inadvertent release of hydrogen upon the failure of a storage tank or a pipeline liberates only a small portion of its thermal energy contents in case of an explosion, which is in the range between 0.1 and 10 %, in most cases 40 %, or liquid oxygen spilled onto asphalt [Zabetakis 1967]. The ignition of premixed LH2 with condensed air significantly enhances burning rates with a
    large variation. The flame will become wider and taller, and the radiated energy increases [Urano 1986].

    Yeah, most times LH2 isn’t a major safety concern, but there appear to be cases at the tail end of the distribution (like the last paragraph) that could be quite scary.

    [eta:] Grr!!  FYWP ate about 4 paragraphs of that quote, even on cleaning it up twice.  Click on the link for the PDF.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  211. 211.

    Ruckus

    @Uncle Cosmo:

    The problem is that hydrogen solves a societal problem in one of most elegant, difficult and expensive ways possible. Creating it as a fuel for individual vehicles is an answer to a problem that really doesn’t exist. Getting hydrogen into cars is expensive and won’t get much cheaper if at all, when scaled up. The cars are/will be far more expensive due to the fuel cell and the mobil storage of the fuel, let alone the production/delivery of the fuel on the scale that we currently distribute gasoline. If there were no alternatives it might be an answer to some question. But there is an alternative for individual powered transportation.

  212. 212.

    Sister Golden Bear

    @sab: Right? None of the drugs involved in trans-health care were invented for us, they were invented for cisgender people.

    Estrogen therapy? For cisgender women experiencing menopausal difficulties.

    Testosterone blockers? For the 1 in 10 cisgender women who have polycystic ovary syndrome. (A friend of mine is on the same dosage for her PCOS as her trans wife is.)

    Testosterone? Used for cisgender boys who don’t go through puberty naturally.

    Puberty blockers? Used for cisgender kids who are starting puberty far too early because of various medical issues.

    Exactly the same drugs. It’s only a problem when trans people take them.

    And yes, I’m salty right now. Sorry, the Bible humpers and the TERFs are busy killing off all the nice trans people, and now there’s just us pissed off cockroach mutherfuckers. I don’t make the rules.

    @Ruckus:

    We have made gender into a supposedly solid defined thing through language and society and it is anything but that.

    Truth. It’s also worth noting that there are — and have been since recorded history — societies that have more than two genders. Three, four, even five; and there may be societies that have more that I’m not remembering offhand

    That said, these societies can also simultaneously have rigidly defined roles for each their genders, even as they have more flexibility about sex and gender. (‘Course biological sex ain’t always straightforward either, but that’s a ‘nuther conversion. I’ll just note that roughly 2 in 100 people are intersex, which itself has numerous variations.)

  213. 213.

    sab

    @Sister Golden Bear: Are you angry at me? I have learned so much from you. I have a trans-niece, and I just learned a trans step-grand-son.

    In a lot of families ( mine) we have to tiptoe around these issues because the politics/emotions make information conversations impossible. And there is not a lot of information out there in general circulation.

    Then we get misinformation from people we trust when we shouldn’t have trusted them.

  215. 215.

    sab

    @Sister Golden Bear: My sister’s former sister in law, immigrating from China in 1980s, encountered her first American transgender person teaching her English as Second Language class. We thought she would be upset ( communist China was very prudish). She said no big deal. Traditional Chinese mythology is full of all sorts of interesting gender permutations.

  216. 216.

    Geminid

    @J R in WV:  “Clean coal” is an idea whose time has come and gone. With photovoltaic and wind electrical generation reaching cost parity with the cheapest fuel for thermal generation, coal generation plants are dinosaurs. New Mexico is shutting down the Four Corners coal electrical generation plant and replacing it by building out infrastructure to harness the state’s plentiful wind and sun. This is a key part of the energy transition package Governor Michelle Luhan Griffen pushed through the New Mexico legislature in 2018.

    Few other coal plants will be around for more than a few years, especially with more states requiring safer storage of ash. And if a cluster of childhood thyroid cancer in Iredale County, North Carolina, is shown to be related to coal ash sent out as landfill from Duke Power’s Lake Norman plant, the elimination of coal elecrical generation will happen that much more quickly.

    The carbon dioxide scrubbing dveloped to clean coal emissions will still be used, but on flue gas from concrete and steel production and in other industries.

    “Carbon neutral” fuel, air transport and heavy land transport may be different story. It may have value in the clean energy transition. But numerous articles on carbon neutral fuels, and on direct-air capture of carbon dioxide are available. With a some research, you could judge feasibility and and value as well as I. Probably better, as you have working experience with technology, and with rocks also.

    An article by British climate scientist Miles Allen has an interesting big picture view of so-called carbon-negative technologies. Allen served on the working group that produced the U.N. IPCC report of 2018, calling for a world-wide carbon-neutral economy by 2050 just to stabilize atmospheric CO2 at 450 parts per million. Miles Allen’s article was published in the February 2019 The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, titled “A Green New Deal: the View from Across the Pond.” Allen said that even with more trees, better farming practices, etc., he thought that substantial deployment of carbon negative techology would be needed to achieve the IPCC goal.

  217. 217.

    dnfree

    @SiubhanDuinne: 

    Pronoun-wise, I read somewhere that “you” used to be the plural form for second person, and “thou” was the singular. Or something like that. Anyway, we have gotten used to “you” being either plural or singular, and we can get used to “they” being either one also.

  219. 219.

    Geminid

    @Geminid: Actually, the article I referenced from the February 2019 The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is titled “The Green New Deal: a View from Across the Atlantic.” The author’s name is Myles Allen.

  222. 222.

    Robert Sneddon

    @Another Scott: ​
      Hydrogen as a fuel has a lot of other issues that tend to get elided over in the glossy brochures and PowerPoint presentations. Hydrogen is known as the escape artist of the periodical table, able to leak through gasketed joints that would retain other gases. Joints really have to be metal-to-metal and the precision machining required for that costs a lot compared to the engineering for storage and transport of liquid fuels and even other fuel gases such as natural gas.

    There’s hydrogen embrittlement, the gas causes metal piping to lose strength over time unless it’s overengineered to start with. If liquid H2 is desired for fuel you run into the wonderfully geeky engineering problem of ortho and para forms of hydrogen and the heat energy generated when the H2 molecules flip states.

    Right now the only mainstream source of bulk hydrogen production is steam reduction of natural gas which produces H2 and CO2 with the latter being released into the atmosphere which is not Green. There’s lots of talk about renewables providing bulk hydrogen by electrolysis of water or other methods but no actual bulk manufacture of H2 from renewables is occurring anywhere right now or even in the foreseeable future.

  223. 223.

    Geminid

     

     

    @Robert Sneddon: There is an Irish electrical cooperative based in Valencia, Ireland that is working on a proposed array of offshore wind generators powering electrolytic hydrogen production. Valencia is on Ireland’s western coast, far away from the West European power grid, so this coast’s ample wind generation potential may need to be converted  to hydrogen. This form of concentrated energy may or may not contribute to the de-carbonization of Western Europe’s economy. But the EU is planning on significant use of green hydrogen as fuel, and this multi-county electrical co-op seems to be serious.

    Advances in materials sciences affecting electrical generation, transmission, storage and efficiency will be a play a part in the clean energy transition tbat is under way. These and other factors will make the energy outlook in 2025 very different from today.

  224. 224.

    Robert Sneddon

    @Geminid: ​
     

    They’re ‘talking’ about hydrogen production from wind, they’re ‘proposing’ hydrogen transportation via pipelines, they’re ‘planning’ hydrogen as a major fuel source in the future. Right now nearly all hydrogen production for all industrial purposes involves steam reduction of LNG and the release of CO2 into the atmosphere.

    Like I said, glossy brochures and PowerPoint presentations.

  225. 225.

    Geminid

    @Robert Sneddon: Well, despite people’s big talk, nothing ever happens, does it?…until it does happen.

    I hope we both get to see the energy economy of 2030.

  226. 226.

    Bill Arnold

    @Steeplejack (phone)
    Thanks for linking that thread. Scary; these need more publicity.
    Re
    RITESH TANDON, ETAL. v. GAVIN NEWSOM, GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA, ETAL. ON APPLICATION FOR INJUNCTIVE RELIEF
    Large indoor at-home gatherings are in no way comparable to auditable public places, and we all know full well that at lot of SARS-CoV-2 spread spread occurs at such gatherings, be they religious or secular.
    The dissent is obviously correct, and the majority would have embarrassed themselves, were they capabable of embarrasement. The majority’s opinion will kill a lot of people. The court’s legacy is mass death, here.

  227. 227.

    Robert Sneddon

    @Geminid: ​

    I hope we both get to see the energy economy of 2030.

    It will be gas, replacing the oil-based energy economy of the 20th century and the coal of the 19th century. There will be lots of nice pictures in the news of wind turbine farms and solar panels and no mention of the anonymous grey buildings connected to a gas pipeline and a grid switch, each containing a gigawatt or so of quick-start combined-cycle gas turbine power plant which actually keeps the lights on when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine (currently here in the UK, we have about 25GW of wind turbines installed both on-shore and off-shore. They are, as I type this, producing 3.12GW of electricity according to online sources. We are generating over 11GW of gas-fired CCGT power at the moment.)

    The really curious thing most energy commentators haven’t noticed is how many of the big gas producers and exporters are developing nuclear power for home energy provision, countries like Russia and the UAE. It’s almost as if they know the demand for gas will increase over the coming decades and they’d rather sell their gas for hard cash than burn it for their own energy needs.

  228. 228.

    Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony

    @hotshoe: I think most of us think ‘they’ is ungrammatical because every English teach we ever had TOLD us it was ungrammatical. That isn’t revising history. It IS our history. Insisting that wasn’t our collective middle age or older experience is rather pointless.

  231. 231.

    Geminid

    @J R in WV: Well, I was agreeing with you on the basic point that “clean coal” is no solution, but making the point that the technology for scrubbing flue gases has it’s place in decarbonizing other industrial proccesses. Especially cement production, which accounts for 8% of the world’s CO2 output.

    And I thought you were lumping “carbon neutral fuels” in with clean coal, as a spurious solution to the problem of carbon emissions. The value of carbon neutral fuels is not yet proven, but they may be a useful component in the clean energy transition, especially in air and heavy land transport.

    I guess I was trying to interest you in the topic. Your experience in technology and practical geology gives you a good base of knowledge to judge the various aspects of carbon capture and sequestration involved in current initiatives.

    The Myles Allen article in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists provides a good assessment of the general problem of combating climate change, along with an interesting view of the value of negative carbon technologies.

  233. 233.

    Original Lee

    @Sister Golden Bear: I’ve been told by friends living in Belgium that standard practice there is for therapists to use reversible drugs (such as puberty blockers) as necessary, until the patient is 24/25 years old. The as necessary is because sometimes patients are already mostly through puberty by the time they realize they are probably trans gendered, and it is considered better (healthier in the long term) to finish.

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