Tech Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself, Con't

"Free speech" supporter Elon Musk is permanently banning journalists critical of him on Twitter, saying that tweeting publicly available information and videos involving him violate Twitter's rules, which he made up last night.

 

Twitter suspended the accounts of roughly half a dozen prominent journalists on Thursday, the latest change by the social media service under its new owner, Elon Musk.

The accounts suspended included Ryan Mac of The New York Times; Drew Harwell of The Washington Post; Aaron Rupar, an independent journalist; Donie O’Sullivan of CNN; Matt Binder of Mashable; Tony Webster, an independent journalist; Micah Lee of The Intercept; and the political journalist Keith Olbermann. It was unclear what the suspensions had in common; each user’s Twitter page included a message that said it suspended accounts that “violate the Twitter rules.”

The moves came a day after Twitter suspended more than 25 accounts that tracked the planes of government agencies, billionaires and high-profile individuals, including that of Mr. Musk. Many of the accounts were operated by Jack Sweeney, a 20-year-old college student and flight tracking enthusiast who had used Twitter to post updates about the location of Mr. Musk’s private plane using publicly available information.

Last month, Mr. Musk had said he would allow the account that tracked his private plane to remain on Twitter, though he said it amounted to a security threat. “My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk,” he said in a tweet at the time.

But he changed his mind this week, after he claimed a car in which one of his sons was traveling was accosted by a “crazy stalker.” On Wednesday, Mr. Musk tweeted that any account that posted “real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation. This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info.”

Some of the journalists whose accounts were suspended had written about the accounts that tracked the private planes or had tweeted about those accounts. Some have also written articles that have been critical of Mr. Musk and his ownership of Twitter. Many of them had tens of thousands of followers on the platform.

Mr. Musk did not respond to a request for comment and Twitter did not respond to an email for comment. In a tweet, Mr. Musk said Twitter’s rules on “doxxing” — which refers to the sharing of someone’s personal documents, including information such as their address — “apply to ‘journalists’ as well as everyone else.” He did not elaborate.

“Tonight’s suspension of the Twitter accounts of a number of prominent journalists, including The New York Times’s Ryan Mac, is questionable and unfortunate,” said Charlie Stadtlander, a spokesman for The Times. “Neither The Times nor Ryan have received any explanation about why this occurred. We hope that all of the journalists’ accounts are reinstated and that Twitter provides a satisfying explanation for this action.”

A representative for The Post did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Kristine Coratti Kelly, a CNN spokeswoman, said the suspensions were “concerning but not surprising” and that “Twitter’s increasing instability and volatility should be of incredible concern for everyone who uses” it. In an appearance on CNN after his account was suspended, Mr. O’Sullivan said Twitter’s actions could intimidate journalists who cover companies owned by Mr. Musk.

“I was disappointed to see that I was suspended from Twitter without explanation,” Mr. Webster, whose account was suspended, said in an emailed comment. He added that he had tweeted about the Twitter account that tracked Mr. Musk’s private plane before his suspension.

Mr. Binder, the Mashable journalist, said that he had been critical of Mr. Musk but had not broken any of Twitter’s listed policies.

After his suspension from Twitter, Mr. Sweeney turned to Mastodon, an alternative social network. After Mastodon used Twitter to promote Mr. Sweeney’s new account on Thursday, Twitter suspended Mastodon’s account. As some journalists shared the news of Mastodon’s suspension, their own accounts were suspended.

Mr. Musk, who purchased Twitter in October for $44 billion, had said that his takeover would expand free speech on the platform and allow more people to participate in the public conversation. In recent weeks, he allowed some banned users to return to the platform, including former President Donald J. Trump, who was barred from his account after the Jan. 6, 2021, riots on Capitol Hill.

 

So, understand that if you've ever posted public information about someone else, or shared a video with people besides yourself in it, Twitter can now ban you at any time.

 

Who these policies will actually be enforced against will solely be the category of people who criticize Elon Musk and his friends, of course. But expect a lot more journalists and liberal activists to get permanent bans in the days and weeks ahead, and expect a lot more to move to competitors like Mastodon.

I'm at https://universeodon.com/@Zandarvts myself. Drop on by.

Last Call For The Manchin On The Hill, Con't

West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin is getting a consolation prize for the failure of his legislation to significantly reduce environmental regulations for the coal, gas, and nuclear industry earlier this year by taking the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission hostage in the final days of the 117th Congress.

 

Angered by a pre-election presidential swipe at the coal industry, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) has taken a hostage. Revealingly, that hostage is a chief architect within the executive branch of energy permitting reforms, which is supposedly a top priority of Manchin’s. (He recently sponsored a reform package that Republicans blocked.)

Late last week, Politico reported that Manchin would not hold a nomination hearing for Richard Glick, the current chair of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). Glick’s term expired in June, and without confirmation by the end of the year, he would have to step down from FERC, leaving the agency deadlocked between Democrats and Republicans.

That could stall out the work FERC is doing on accelerating the electricity transmission build-out, which is generally seen as among the biggest challenges to the green transition. If more transmission lines cannot be built to move renewable energy from where it is produced to where power is needed, much of the clean-energy benefits from the Inflation Reduction Act will be lost, and hundreds of millions of tons of greenhouse gases that could be avoided will be emitted per year.

Manchin conditioned his support for the IRA on getting a vote for his permitting reform bill. Ultimately, he pulled the package from the continuing resolution to fund the government in September because it didn’t have the votes. Manchin has talked about adding permitting reforms to the defense policy bill, which passes Congress every year.

The permitting package Manchin introduced earlier this year included electric transmission reforms that would give FERC “siting authority” to approve the construction of transmission lines (even over objections of regional planners) if they are deemed in the national interest. FERC has no such preemption authority now for transmission; it does have it for natural gas pipelines. The permitting bill would also allow FERC to undertake all environmental reviews for transmission projects, and to allocate the costs of such projects unilaterally.

This would hand FERC a considerable amount of power, which would all go to waste if the agency mired in gridlock because the chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee—Manchin—refused to confirm its leader in a fit of pique. Even without new powers, Biden’s FERC is actively working to accelerate transmission permitting, which Manchin’s maneuver would also hamper.

The situation calls into question whether Manchin cares all that much about bolstering domestic energy production, or if he is more myopically interested in getting particular fossil fuel projects in West Virginia approved and built, over local objections. At any rate, it’s hard to say he’s a sincere believer in improving transmission build-out, when he’s stalling its biggest champion in the government.

Manchin spokesperson Sam Runyon would only give the Prospect a brief one-line statement about the Glick nomination and its impact on permitting reform, one he has given other outlets. “The Chairman was not comfortable holding a hearing,” Runyon said in an email.

 

So no, Manchin will get his pound of flesh, and if he's still the Chair of the Senate Natural Resources Committee, he can continue to block the nomination of a FERC head for another two years by denying any Biden appointment a confirmation hearing. Biden may have won a major battle getting his Green New Deal passed, but it looks like America will be paying the Manchin toll on that road for a long time to come.

Trump Cards, Con't

 No really.  Trump cards.

The grifter-in-chief has now discovered NFTs.

The indictments cannot come quickly enough.

Welcome To Gunmerica, Decade Of Death And Destruction Edition

Ten years after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary, school shootings and open carry are even more prevalent as America stocks up for a war against itself.

Marking a decade since the Sandy Hook school massacre, President Joe Biden said Wednesday the United States must do more to tackle the nation's gun violence epidemic and people should have "societal guilt" for taking too long to address it.

Biden said in a statement that 10 years ago, on Dec. 14, 2012, "the unthinkable happened," when 20 young children and six educators were killed at the elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. Survivors "still carry the wounds of that day," he said.

“We should have societal guilt for taking too long to deal with this problem. We have a moral obligation to pass and enforce laws that can prevent these things from happening again,” he said. “We owe it to the courageous, young survivors and to the families who lost part of their soul ten years ago to turn their pain into purpose.”

The president touted the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act that he signed into law in June, the most sweeping legislation aimed at preventing gun violence in 30 years. Passed after mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, the legislation provides grants to states for “red flag” laws, enhances background checks to include juvenile records, and closes the “boyfriend loophole” by keeping guns away from unmarried dating partners convicted of abuse. It will also require enhanced background checks for people ages 18 to 21 and funding for youth mental health services.

"Still, we must do more," Biden said. "I am determined to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines like those used at Sandy Hook and countless other mass shootings in America."

Banning assault weapons has been at the top of Biden's agenda this year, though it faces uncertain legislative odds due to opposition from Republicans in Congress. Then-President Bill Clinton signed the first and only U.S. assault weapons ban into law in 1994, but it expired in 2004.

Blue states will enforce the BSCA. Red states will not. They'll take the money for it and just give it to police departments to buy them more weapons to use against us. Besides, the Roberts Court will find a case to eliminate gun safety legislation nationwide, and unfettered access to firearms and ammo in all 50 states and DC (well, maybe not DC) will make the next Sandy Hook massacre look quaint.

No, what Sandy Hook marked in American history was the end of gun regulation. I laid out the path ten years ago.

If you want to stop guns, go after the manufacturers and the lobbyists. Period. Guns are a product, sold in the US. They have arguably the most powerful product lobby on Earth. You're going to need to start with them.

That time has come. 

Ten years later, even with a mortally wounded NRA, that battle has absolutely been lost. 

Welcome to Gunmerica.

Last Call For Equal Opportunity Offender

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton ordered a list of all transgender Texans in the state in June. He never got it because the Texas Department of Public Safety wanted to know exactly why it was needed, but gosh, nobody seems to know exactly why a Republican AG in a state like Texas would want a list of all transgender folks in the state, least of all Ken Paxton's office.

 

Employees at the Texas Department of Public Safety in June received a sweeping request from Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office: to compile a list of individuals who had changed their gender on their Texas driver’s license and other department records during the past two years.

“Need total number of changes from male to female and female to male for the last 24 months, broken down by month,” the chief of the DPS’s driver license division emailed colleagues in the department on June 30, according to a copy of a message obtained by The Washington Post through a public records request. “We won’t need DL/ID numbers at first but may need to have them later if we are required to manually look up documents.”

After more than 16,000 such instances were identified, DPS officials determined that a manual search would be needed to determine the reason for the changes, DPS spokesman Travis Considine told The Post in response to questions.

“A verbal request was received,” he wrote in an email. “Ultimately, our team advised the AG’s office the data requested neither exists nor could be accurately produced. Thus, no data of any kind was provided.”

Asked who in Paxton’s office had requested the records, he replied: “I cannot say.”

The behind-the-scenes effort by Paxton’s office to obtain data on how many Texans had changed their gender on their license came as the attorney general, Gov. Greg Abbott and other Republican leaders in the state have been publicly marshaling resources against transgender Texans.

 

Yep. It's a complete and total mystery. Bonus enigma points:

Paxton’s office bypassed the normal channels — DPS’s government relations and general counsel’s offices — and went straight to the driver license division staff in making the request, according to a state employee familiar with it, who said the staff was told that Paxton’s office wanted “numbers” and later would want “a list” of names, as well as “the number of people who had had a legal sex change.”

 

Surely small government, free speech, and civil liberties loving Texans like Paxton would never dream of using a list like that against citizens of the Lone Star State, especially targeting the people on that list as enemies of the Republic of Texas.

Right?

The Road To Gilead, Con't

Six months after Dobbs and the death of Roe v Wade, anti-abortion lunatics are furious that tens of thousands of women, medical staff, and abortion advocates and activists haven't been put in state prisons yet, and they are doing everything in their power to change that even as Republicans realize that abortion cost them dozens of races across the country last month.

The largest anti abortion organization in Texas has created a team of advocates assigned to investigate citizens who might be distributing abortion pills illegally.

Students for Life of America, a leading national antiabortion group, is making plans to systematically test the water Erin Brockovich-style in several large U.S. cities, searching for contaminants they say result from medication abortion.

And Republican lawmakers in Texas are preparing to introduce legislation that would require internet providers to block abortion pill websites in the same way they can censor child pornography.

Nearly six months since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, triggering abortion bans in more than a dozen states, many antiabortion advocates fear that the growing availability of illegal abortion pills has undercut their landmark victory. Now they are grasping for new ways to crack down on those breaking the law.

Antiabortion advocates had hoped the June decision would significantly decrease the number of abortions in the United States. But abortion rights activists have ramped up efforts to funnel abortion pills — a two-step regimen of mifepristone and misoprostol that is widely regarded as safe — into states with strict new bans, working with rapidly expanding international suppliers as well as U.S.-based distributors to meet demand.

Now many conservatives are complaining that the abortion bans are not being sufficiently enforced, even though much of the illegal activity is happening in plain sight, as abortion rights advocates seek to reach women in need. Leaders interviewed on both sides of the debate had not heard of any examples of people charged for violating abortion bans since Roe fell, a crime punishable by at least several years in prison across much of the South and Midwest.

“Everyone who is trafficking these pills should be in jail for trafficking,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, who has started to speak with Republican governors about the prevalence of illegal abortion pill networks. “It hasn’t happened, but that doesn’t mean it won’t.”

Abortion bans include penalties only for people involved in facilitating illegal abortions, not for the pregnant women themselves.

The push on the right for enforcement reflects the extent to which both sides of the abortion battle are recalibrating after a tumultuous year that has challenged many long-held assumptions about the politics of the issue — and left the state of abortion access in the United States hard to assess. Interviews with more than 30 of the most influential advocacy group leaders, policymakers and litigators on the abortion issue found that far from settling the decades-old abortion question, the fall of Roe has triggered a major new phase of combat set to play out over the next few years in courtrooms, state capitals and the next presidential election.

 

The real issue is that at some point, any Republican 2024 hopeful is going to have to come out and say they are going to ban abortion medication nationwide, and that's going to get them destroyed in the general election.

The best example of the disconnect is here in Kentucky, where Rand Paul easily won reelection by smashing Charles Booker by 20+ points, but the state's constitutional amendment eliminating the right to an abortion lost by almost 5 points.

Republicans finally caught the car they were chasing, and they are getting dragged all over the road now. And don't believe them when they say they won't criminalize women getting abortions, because they are absolutely going to and they have lied about every other aspect of this.

Politics aside, abortion restriction states are killing women and children anyway.

New research released Wednesday adds to a growing body of evidence showing a link between more restrictive abortion policies and higher rates of maternal and infant mortality.

The analysis comes from the Commonwealth Fund, an independent research organization focused on health policy. It found that strict restrictions on abortion are associated with poorer access to health care for pregnant people and infants, which in turn raises the risk of negative outcomes such as mental health challenges and death.

According to the report, states that heavily restricted abortion access in 2020 had maternal death rates that were 62% higher than they were in states where abortion was more easily accessible.

The disparity may be aggravated by state-level changes after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, the report says.

People of color, those who are uninsured and those who live on low incomes or in underserved areas already face additional risks that threaten their lives during pregnancy, such as difficulty accessing consistent pre- and post-natal care, said Dr. Laurie Zephyrin, the senior vice president for advancing health equity at the Commonwealth Fund.

"Then, on top of all that, you're adding this variation in abortion services, reproductive health services, by states," Zephyrin said. "We're just adding on to an already fractured system."

62% higher rates of infant and mother mortality, and that was before Dobbs. And of course, the people suffering the most are Black women.

The cruelty is the point.

Ron's Gone Wrong, Con't

Not content with his rapidly improving poll numbers over Donald Trump out this week, Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis is calling for a state Supreme Court grand jury investigation into vaccine makers for "criminally misleading" Floridians into believe vaccines are safe, which is an amazing amount of fascist bullshit even for Ron DeSantis.

 

At a roundtable he convened of Covid vaccine skeptics and opponents — including his own surgeon general — he formally called on the state Supreme Court to impanel a grand jury to investigate whether pharmaceutical companies criminally misled Floridians about the side effects of vaccines, a position at odds with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

DeSantis was a major booster of the vaccines last year and once called them lifesaving, but he later turned against them, mirroring a shift in conservative Republican opinion. By January, he refused to say if he even got a booster, and that prompted Trump — whose Operation Warp Speed led to the rapid development of the vaccines — to take a thinly veiled shot at him, albeit not by name, for being “gutless.”

The decision by DeSantis to now investigate the vaccines was widely panned by those in Trump’s orbit.

“Prior to this, his position was identical to Trump’s, and he advocated the efficiency and safety of vaccines. That’s his record,” said Roger Stone, a longtime adviser to Trump and an outspoken critic of DeSantis.

“This is a shot across the bow. We know exactly what Ron is up to,” said another Trump adviser who spoke more bluntly, but on the condition of anonymity to be able to speak freely.

“The fact is, we’ve seen this coming for a year, ever since Ron started to get anti-vax,” the Republican said, explaining the governor's opposition to the vaccine. “Yes, there’s a portion of our base that is anti-vax and some people could walk away from Trump over it. That’s why Ron is doing it. It’s so transparent.”

Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Trump, said in a written statement that that “after China unleashed this deadly virus onto the rest of the world, President Trump’s administration worked tirelessly to secure medical equipment to save the lives of Americans who were infected."

"Operation Warp Speed was a once-in-a-lifetime initiative that gave people the option of utilizing therapeutics if they wished to do so," he added. "He also fought against any attempt to federalize the pandemic response by protecting every state’s right to ultimately decide what is best for their people because of the unique challenges each state faced.”

Those familiar with DeSantis’ thinking downplayed the political ramifications, pointing out that he was one of the first high-profile Republicans to challenge expert opinions and health care professionals when it came to the Covid response, from his decision to reopen the state and schools early to banning vaccine and mask mandates to hiring Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, who has been criticized for questioning vaccines in far-right social media channels.

DeSantis was also an early public critic of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease specialist, during the pandemic who became anathema to conservatives in 2020, even as Trump resisted pressure to oust him (while still often criticizing him).

“This isn’t about 2024. This is about what DeSantis believes in,” said one Republican who was not authorized to speak publicly on his behalf.

 

Oh, by the way, not only are the Covid vaccines safe, they have saved 3.2 million lives so far. 

And yes, that last statement in the article there is an absolute lie, because if DeSantis's dog and pony show here is absolutely designed to tie Trump to Biden, Fauci, and the vaccine and use it to destroy him in 2024.

The Trumpies are already upset over this and calling DeSantis a hypocrite.

But if there's any group in America immune to charges of hypocrisy, it's Republican primary voters.

 

In any fair universe, this would be the end of DeSantis. Nothing, of course, is fair.  In fact, House Republicans and more than a few Democrats want the same kind of investigation into Covid's origins.

Bipartisan legislation to create a Sept. 11-style independent panel to investigate the pandemic response by both the Trump and Biden administrations appears stalled on Capitol Hill, despite a 20-to-2 vote in favor of the measure by the Senate health committee. Backers say their last hope for passage is to tack it onto an upcoming spending bill, the final major must-pass piece of legislation of the current Congress.

The commission would be created as part of a sprawling bill called the PREVENT Pandemics Act. The measure would also make the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention a Senate-confirmed position and take other steps to improve pandemic preparedness, including increasing coordination among public health agencies and addressing supply chain deficiencies.

There has been no vocal opposition to the bill, but it has been in limbo since it passed the health committee in March — a victim of inertia and a lack of White House support.

There is no companion measure in the House, where Republicans are planning their own pandemic-related investigations once they take control of the chamber next month. More significantly, President Biden has not taken a public position on the bill, and the White House is privately resisting it, according to an official familiar with the measure, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss its status.

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, who has focused his efforts on judicial nominations and the president’s agenda, has not brought the legislation up for a floor vote. The White House declined to comment.

 

So yeah, odds are they are going to get it. DeSantis is jumping on it first, so when House Republicans start their own probe, they will be "following his lead".

They should be following him to the dustbin of history.

Last Call For A Life And No Death Situation

As one of her final acts before fellow Democrat Tina Kotek is sworn in, Oregon Democratic Gov. Kate Brown is commuting the sentences of all of the state's 17 death row inmates to life without parole.

Gov. Kate Brown announced on Tuesday afternoon that she would commute the sentences of all 17 individuals on Oregon’s death row to life in prison without the possibility of parole, the latest in her end-of-term string of clemency decisions.

“I have long believed that justice is not advanced by taking a life, and the state should not be in the business of executing people — even if a terrible crime placed them in prison,” Brown said in a statement sent out in a press release.

“This is a value that many Oregonians share,” Brown said.

Oregon has not executed anyone on death row for a quarter century and Brown continued the moratorium that former Gov. John Kitzhaber put in place in 2011. Governor-elect Tina Kotek, who like Brown and Kitzhaber is a Democrat, is personally opposed to the death penalty based on her religious beliefs and said during the campaign that she would continue the moratorium.

Voters have gone back and forth on the death penalty over the years, abolishing and reinstating it repeatedly. Voters’ most recent decision on the death penalty was in 1984, when they inserted it into the state Constitution.

Oregon is one of 27 states that authorizes the death penalty, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

 

Not everyone is pleased by this.

Randy Lee Guzek was convicted in 1988 and sentenced to death for Rod and Lois Houser, of Terrebonne. Sue Shirley, the Housers’ daughter, said Tuesday she was aware of the governor’s decision to commute Guzek’s sentence, but had not heard from the state directly.

“I’m horrified and outraged and I don’t know what this means,” Shirley said Tuesday. “Will true life be true life?”

Shirley noted that Guzek has been resentenced four times over the past 24 years as the Legislature has changed rules, though his death penalty sentence has been repeatedly upheld.

“All I know is that we never get to have a say,” she said Tuesday. “Forty-eight jurors have said the just sentence was the death penalty, but that’s been a moving target. The Legislature has changed the rules time and time again and it’s just been a nightmare.”

But Oregon has effectively ended the death penalty in the state and hasn't executed anyone in nearly 25 years.

 

In 2019, the Legislature passed a bill that limited the crimes that qualified for the death penalty by narrowing the definition of aggravated murder to killing two or more people as an act of organized terrorism; intentionally and with premeditation kilIing a child younger than 14; killing another person while locked up in jail or prison for a previous murder; or killing a police, correctional or probation officer.

More than two years have passed since the Brown administration dismantled Oregon’s death row, a move that acknowledged the effective end of capital punishment in the state.

Brown said in her statement Tuesday that commuting the sentences of people currently serving on Oregon’s death row was consistent with what she described as lawmakers’ “near abolition” of capital punishment.

“Unlike previous commutations I’ve granted to individuals who have demonstrated extraordinary growth and rehabilitation, this commutation is not based on any rehabilitative efforts by the individuals on death row,” Brown said. “Instead, it reflects the recognition that the death penalty is immoral. It is an irreversible punishment that does not allow for correction; is wasteful of taxpayer dollars; does not make communities safer; and cannot be and never has been administered fairly and equitably.”

 

Governor Brown could not be more correct. The death penalty is a barbaric relic that never should have been allowed in this country, and overwhelmingly it has been used against Black folk to deliver the ultimate sanction without warrant or evidence.

 

Actually being pro-life means getting rid of capital punishment.

Hot New Fusion Cuisine

Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have apparently achieved a breakthrough in fusion technology: getting more energy out of a fusion reaction than was put into it, known as ignition.

Scientists studying fusion energy at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California announced on Tuesday that they had crossed a major milestone in reproducing the power of the sun in a laboratory.

Scientists for decades have said that fusion, the nuclear reaction that makes stars shine, could provide a future source of bountiful energy.

The result announced on Tuesday is the first fusion reaction in a laboratory setting that actually produced more energy than it took to start the reaction.

“This is such a wonderful example of a possibility realized, a scientific milestone achieved, and a road ahead to the possibilities for clean energy,” Arati Prabhakar, the White House science adviser, said during a news conference on Tuesday morning at the Department of Energy’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. “And even deeper understanding of the scientific principles that are applied here.”

From an environmental perspective, fusion has always had a strong appeal. Within the sun and stars, fusion continually combines hydrogen atoms into helium, producing sunlight and warmth that bathes the planets.

In experimental reactors and laser labs on Earth, fusion lives up to its reputation as a very clean energy source, devoid of the pollution and greenhouse gases produced by the burning of fossil fuels and the dangerous long-lived radioactive waste created by current nuclear power plants, which use the splitting of uranium to produce energy.

There was always a nagging caveat, however. In all of the efforts by scientists to control the unruly power of fusion, their experiments consumed more energy than the fusion reactions generated.

That changed at 1:03 a.m. on Dec. 5 when 192 giant lasers at the laboratory’s National Ignition Facility blasted a small cylinder about the size of a pencil eraser that contained a frozen nubbin of hydrogen encased in diamond.

The laser beams entered at the top and bottom of the cylinder, vaporizing it. That generated an inward onslaught of X-rays that compresses a BB-size fuel pellet of deuterium and tritium, the heavier forms of hydrogen.

In a brief moment lasting less than 100 trillionths of a second, 2.05 megajoules of energy — roughly the equivalent of a pound of TNT — bombarded the hydrogen pellet. Out flowed a flood of neutron particles — the product of fusion — which carried about 3 megajoules of energy, an energy gain of 1.5.

This crossed the threshold that laser fusion scientists call ignition, the dividing line where the energy generated by fusion equals the energy of the incoming lasers that start the reaction.

“You see one diagnostic and you think maybe that’s not real and then you start to see more and more diagnostics rolling in, pointing to the same thing,” said Annie Kritcher, a physicist at Livermore who described reviewing the data after the experiment. “It’s a great feeling.”

The successful experiment finally delivers the ignition goal that was promised when construction of the National Ignition Facility started in 1997. When operations began in 2009, however, the facility hardly generated any fusion at all, an embarrassing disappointment after a $3.5 billion investment from the federal government.

 

And they didn't just get a bit more energy out of it, they got 50% more energy out of it, meaning that this is an honest-to-goodness real advancement in power. I know it's kind of basic, but a fusion experiment that didn't release enough energy to cover the cost going in wasn't of much use to anyone, and that's where the fusion lab has been for the last 13 years.

Until last week.  That was the big obstacle, and they cracked it wide open.

So what does that mean now?

I wouldn't expect commercially available fusion power in my lifetime, to be honest.  Maybe in Millennial or Gen Z years. But it's a start, and a big one.

And that's if we don't splatter ourselves all over history with fusion weapons in the interim, which given the state of humanity today is a very real outcome down the line. Someone's going to decide that nuclear blast damage without all the nasty plutonium fallout is a really good idea and worth pursuing.

But yeah, this is a huge step in humanity, one of those Civilization game-level milestones on the tech tree.

This is a big one, folks.  Trust in that.

Going All Judge Mental, Con't

I've been saying for months now that conservative judges weren't going to stop taking rights away from marginalized groups like women, Black folk, the LGBTQ+ community, and more in the wake of Dobbs and the death of Roe v Wade. They were never going to just give up and stop there, and wouldn't you know it, they're going after contraception after all.

Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee to a federal court in Texas, spent much of his career trying to interfere with other people’s sexuality.

A former lawyer at a religious conservative litigation shop, Kacsmaryk denounced, in a 2015 article, a so-called “Sexual Revolution” that began in the 1960s and 1970s, and which “sought public affirmation of the lie that the human person is an autonomous blob of Silly Putty unconstrained by nature or biology, and that marriage, sexuality, gender identity, and even the unborn child must yield to the erotic desires of liberated adults.”

So, in retrospect, it’s unsurprising that Kacsmaryk would be the first federal judge to embrace a challenge to the federal right to birth control after the Supreme Court’s June decision eliminating the right to an abortion.

Last week, Kacsmaryk issued an opinion in Deanda v. Becerra that attacks Title X, a federal program that offers grants to health providers that fund voluntary and confidential family planning services to patients. Federal law requires the Title X program to include “services for adolescents,”

The plaintiff in Deanda is a father who says he is “raising each of his daughters in accordance with Christian teaching on matters of sexuality, which requires unmarried children to practice abstinence and refrain from sexual intercourse until marriage.” He claims that the program must cease all grants to health providers who do not require patients under age 18 to “obtain parental consent” before receiving Title X-funded medical care.

This is not a new argument, and numerous courts have rejected similar challenges to publicly funded family planning programs, in part because the Deanda plaintiff’s legal argument “would undermine the minor’s right to privacy” which the Supreme Court has long held to include a right to contraception.

But Kacsmaryk isn’t like most other judges. In his brief time on the bench — Trump appointed Kacsmaryk in 2019 — he has shown an extraordinary willingness to interpret the law creatively to benefit right-wing causes.

This behavior is enabled, moreover, by the procedural rules that frequently enable federal plaintiffs in Texas to choose which judge will hear their case — 95 percent of civil cases filed in Amarillo, Texas’s federal courthouse are automatically assigned to Kacsmaryk. So litigants who want their case to be decided by a judge with a history as a Christian right activist, with a demonstrated penchant for interpreting the law flexibly to benefit his ideological allies, can all but ensure that outcome by bringing their lawsuit in Amarillo.

And so, last Thursday, the inevitable occurred. Kacsmaryk handed down a decision claiming that “the Title X program violates the constitutional right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children.”

Kacsmaryk’s decision is riddled with legal errors, some of them obvious enough to be spotted by a first-year law student. And it contradicts a 42-year-long consensus among federal courts that parents do not have a constitutional right to target government programs providing contraceptive care. So there’s a reasonable chance that Kacsmaryk will be reversed on appeal, even in a federal judiciary dominated by Republican appointees.

Nevertheless, Kacsmaryk’s opinion reveals that there are powerful elements within the judiciary who are eager to limit access to contraception. And even if Kacsmaryk’s opinion is eventually rejected by a higher court, he could potentially send the Title X program into turmoil for months.

 

Title X is the main vehicle through which government entities fund birth control at clinics and  practices across the country. Family planning services are vital, and here we have a lunatic judge saying no adolescent in America can even get birth control unless specifically approved by parents. Just like the entire flap about school boards, parents, not experts like doctors, now make choices for teen health.

 

And we know at the college age level, Title X contraception improves the graduation rate of women by 10-12%.  Requiring parental permission for that is awful.

Of course, if there's no right to contraception, then requiring consent for birth control before anyone in America has sex means once again, women have no right to their own bodies.

And that's the point.

Last Call For Insurrection Investigation, Con't

Josh Marshall's crew over at Talking Points Memo are publishing the January 6th related texts from former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, and while some have been published, TPM has gotten their hands on the bulk of the texts and is running a major expose on Meadows and the GOP January 6th conspiracy.

 

The messages you are about to read are the definitive, real-time record of a plot to overturn an American election.

TPM has obtained the 2,319 text messages that Mark Meadows, who was President Trump’s last White House chief of staff, turned over to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack. Today, we are publishing The Meadows Texts, a series based on an in-depth analysis of these extraordinary — and disturbing — communications.

The vast majority of Meadows’ texts described in this series are being made public for the very first time. They show the senior-most official in the Trump White House communicating with members of Congress, state-level politicians, and far-right activists as they work feverishly to overturn Trump’s loss in the 2020 election. The Meadows texts illustrate in moment-to-moment detail an authoritarian effort to undermine the will of the people and upend the American democratic system as we know it.

The text messages, obtained from multiple sources, offer new insights into how the assault on the election was rooted in deranged internet paranoia and undemocratic ideology. They show Meadows and other high-level Trump allies reveling in wild conspiracy theories, violent rhetoric, and crackpot legal strategies for refusing to certify Joe Biden’s victory. They expose the previously unknown roles of some members of Congress, local politicians, activists and others in the plot to overturn the election. Now, for the first time, many of those figures will be named and their roles will be described — in their own words.

Meadows turned over the text messages during a brief period of cooperation with the committee before he filed a December 2021 lawsuit arguing that its subpoenas seeking testimony and his phone records were “overly broad” and violations of executive privilege. The committee did not respond to a request for comment on this story. Since then, Meadows has faced losses in his efforts to challenge the subpoena in court. However, that legal battle is ongoing and is unlikely to conclude before next month, when the incoming Republican House majority is widely expected to shutter the committee’s investigation. Earlier this year, Meadows reportedly turned over the same material he gave the select committee to the Justice Department in response to another subpoena. These messages are key evidence in the two major investigations into the Jan. 6 attack. With this series, the American people will be able to evaluate the most important texts for themselves.

Meadows has not, thus far, responded to multiple requests for comment. The texts Meadows provided to the select committee encompass the period from election night in 2020 through President Joe Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2021. It is not clear which, if any, texts Meadows withheld from the committee, but the text message log offers multiple hints it is only a partial record of his conversations. There are discussions that clearly lack prior context and messages where participants indicate there is further communication taking place on encrypted channels.

But despite the seeming gaps, Meadows’ text record is still incredibly revealing. Some of the contents of the log were published in “The Breach,” a book about the Jan. 6 attack that I co-wrote with Denver Riggleman, a former Republican congressman and senior technical adviser to the committee. In our book, Riggleman described how he and his fellow committee investigators dubbed Meadows’ text log “the crown jewels” because they served as the “road map to an insurrection.” Along with the text messages that appeared in “The Breach,” some of Meadows’ messages have also been revealed by media outlets. The Washington Post published his exchanges with Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Some of Meadows’ conversations with Fox News personalities and other members of the media were disclosed by the select committee. CNN and I have published Meadows’ conversations with some Republican members of Congress including; Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY), Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA), and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). Additionally, CNN has published Meadows’ texts with Fox News personality Sean Hannity and his messages from the period directly surrounding the Jan. 6 attack. However, there’s more. So much more.

TPM is kicking off this series with an exclusive story showing that the log includes more than 450 messages with 34 Republican members of Congress. Those texts show varying degrees of involvement by members of Congress, from largely benign expressions of support for Trump to the leading roles played by Reps. Jim Jordan (R-OH), Jody Hice (R-GA), Mo Brooks (R-AL), and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) in the plot to reverse Trump’s defeat. We reached out to all these legislators, and will be detailing their roles and responses to our questions in the first installment of the series, which is coming later today.

 

Those files begin with today's installment, posted here. 

One message identified as coming from Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) to Meadows on January 17, 2021, three days before Joe Biden was set to take office, is a raw distillation of the various themes in the congressional correspondence. In the text, despite a typo, Norman seemed to be proposing a dramatic last ditch plan: having Trump impose martial law during his final hours in office.

Mark, in seeing what’s happening so quickly, and reading about the Dominion law suits attempting to stop any meaningful investigation we are at a point of � no return � in saving our Republic !! Our LAST HOPE is invoking Marshall Law!! PLEASE URGE TO PRESIDENT TO DO SO!!Ralph NormanRN

The text, which has not previously been reported, is a particularly vivid example of how congressional opposition to Biden’s election was underpinned by paranoid and debunked conspiracy theories like those about Dominion voting machines. Norman’s text also showed the potentially violent lengths to which some congressional Republicans were willing to go in order to keep Trump in power. The log Meadows provided to the select committee does not include a response to Norman’s message.

Reached via cell phone on Monday morning, Norman asked TPM for a chance to review his messages before commenting.

“It’s been two years,” Norman said. “Send that text to me and I’ll take a look at it.”

TPM forwarded Norman a copy of the message calling for “Marshall Law!!” We did not receive any further response from the congressman.

Based on TPM’s analysis, Meadows received at least 364 messages from Republican members of Congress who discussed attempts to reverse the election results with him. He sent at least 95 messages of his own. The committee did not respond to requests for comment. Some of Meadows’ texts — notably with Fox News personalities and a couple members of Congress — have already been made public by the committee, media outlets, and in the book “The Breach.” However, the full scope of his engagement with congressional Republicans as they worked to overturn the election has not previously been revealed.

 

It's going to take a while to chew through all this, but keep in mind, January 6th Chair Bennie Johnson has all but said that Trump, Meadows, Rudy, and others will be referred to Merrick Garland for prosecution as part of the J6 Committee's final report coming next week.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

I understand that the Southern Poverty Law Center can be hyperbolic at times, but bird-dogging the Manhattan chapter of the NY Young Republicans Club's gala where white nationalist club president Gavin Wax declared "We want total war" is absolutely notable.

 

A collection of radical right figures including white nationalists and ultranationalist European leaders gathered in Manhattan for the New York Young Republicans Club’s (NYYRC) annual gala Saturday night, where that group’s president declared “total war” on perceived enemies.

“We want to cross the Rubicon. We want total war. We must be prepared to do battle in every arena. In the media. In the courtroom. At the ballot box. And in the streets,” NYYRC president Gavin Wax declared to a room full of supporters at 538 Park Ave., an event venue on New York’s Upper East side.

“This is the only language the left understands. The language of pure and unadulterated power,” Wax added.

At the five-hour event, which Hatewatch reporters attended, white nationalists Peter and Lydia Brimelow of VDARE hobnobbed with Steve Bannon, a former Trump adviser and White House official. Donald Trump Jr. was also in attendance.

Republicans publicly lauded members of an Austrian political party founded by World War II-era German Nazi party members. Racist political operative Jack Posobiec shared jokes across a table with Josh Hammer, the opinion editor of Newsweek. Multiple recently elected GOP congresspeople applauded Marjorie Taylor Greene, who told the NYYRC crowd in the event’s closing remarks that the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol would have succeeded if she had planned it and that the insurrectionists would have been armed.

“Then Jan. 6 happened. And next thing you know, I organized the whole thing, along with Steve Bannon,” Greene said, referring to allegations that she had led reconnaissance tours of the Capitol for soon-to-be insurrectionists in the days prior to the violence.

“I will tell you something, if Steve Bannon and I organized that, we would have won,” she said, as attendees erupted in cheers and applause. “Not to mention, it would’ve been armed.”

 

Sitting Republican members of Congress are not only in attendance of this who's who of hate crimes, but calling for more armed revolution and sedition against the United States. 

 

We fended them off in November, but they still have a lot of power and eventually they're going to find a way to use it to set off a war that might not be stopped in my lifetime. 

And I don't know what else to do but say "They want a war, and they want to kill those who they see as enemies, and that means millions of Americans. maybe tens of millions" and we as a collective country continue to go back to arguing about the NFL instant replay rules.

Maybe it's safer that way, but not for much longer.  Eventually the violence is going to come full stop, instead of just random attacks, and we're going to have to find a way to stop it.

And even after all that's happened in the last six, seven years now, we're still not ready as a country to even begin the conversation we need to have.

Getting Out Of A Space Jam

NASA's unmanned, proof-of-concept Orion mission to the moon was an unqualified success as the Orion capsule splashed down in the Pacific on Sunday afternoon.

 

NASA completed a significant step Sunday toward returning astronauts to the lunar surface with the successful completion of a test mission that sent a capsule designed for human spaceflight to orbit the moon and return safely to Earth.

The Orion spacecraft, which had no astronauts on board, splashed down in the Pacific Ocean at 12:40 p.m. Eastern off the Baja California peninsula of Mexico under a trio of billowing parachutes.

Orion’s homecoming came 50 years to the day after the Apollo 17 spacecraft landing on the lunar surface in 1972 at the Taurus-Littrow valley, the last human mission to the moon. And it heralded, the space agency said, a series of upcoming missions that are to be piloted by a new generation of NASA astronauts as part of the Artemis program.

The flight was delayed repeatedly by technical problems with the massive Space Launch System rocket and the spacecraft. But the 26-day, 1.4 million-mile mission went “exceedingly well,” NASA officials said, from the launch on Nov. 16 to flybys that brought Orion within about 80 miles of the lunar surface and directly over the Apollo 11 landing site at Tranquility Base.

“From Tranquility Base to Taurus-Littrow to the tranquil waters of the Pacific, the latest chapter of NASA’s journey to the moon comes to a close. Orion, back on Earth,” NASA’s Rob Navias said during the agency’s live broadcast of the event.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said it was “historic because we are now going back to space, to deep space, with a new generation.” The successful mission augurs a new era, he added, “one that marks new technology, a whole new breed of astronauts, and a vision of the future.”

Now that the spacecraft is safely home, NASA will immediately begin to assess the data gathered on the flight and prepare for the Artemis II mission — which would put a crew of astronauts on the spacecraft for another trip in orbit around the moon. NASA hopes that mission would come as early as 2024, with a lunar landing to come as early as 2025 or 2026. That would be the first time people walk on the moon since the last of the Apollo missions.

 

Any manned mission to another planet in our Solar System was going to require us going back to Luna as a testing ground, and Orion proved we can test the testing ground in the next few years.  It's exciting to see us getting back to exploring space in my lifetime, and yeah, the next big step is that Mars landing I hope I get to see.

Great job, NASA.

Oh, and I'm damn glad to see Bill Nelson as NASA admin. Like John Glenn and Mark Kelly, Nelson was an astronaut himself before joining the US Senate, and now he's been running the rocket show for 18 months. Orion is a great feather for his cap.

Here's to more success.

Last Call For The New McCarthyism, Con't

Putative incoming House Speaker Kevin McCarthy says he will subpoena dozens of FBI, CIA, NSA and other intelligence officials under oath before the House Intelligence Committee for the "possibly criminal act" of signing a letter in 2020 calling the NY Post Hunter Biden laptop story disinformation. The NY Post's Mark Moore can barely contain his glee at the prospect that they will get revenge.

House Minority Leader ​Kevin McCarthy has ​vowed to subpoena 51 former intelligence officials who called The Post’s Hunter Biden expose Russian disinformation in the wake of the “Twitter Files” revelations about how the social media colossus censored the reporting. ​

The California Republican — who is expected to become speaker when the GOP takes control of the House of Representatives in January — said what Twitter did with The Post’s bombshell October 2020 report was “egregious.”

“Those 51 intel agents that signed a letter that said the Hunter Biden information was all wrong, was Russia collusion, many of them have a security clearance,” McCarthy said on Fox News’ “One Nation” on Saturday.

“We’re going to bring them before a committee. I’m going to have them have a hearing​,​ bring them and subpoena them before a committee. Why did they sign it? Why did they lie to the American public?” he said.

Former CIA Director John Brennan and ex-National Security Council Director James Clapper were among a group of former intelligence officials who signed a statement days after the expose, claiming it “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” 

McCarthy questioned the move. “Why did you use the reputation that America was able to give to you … but use it for a political purpose and lie to the American public?” he said on Fox.  

McCarthy and his nutjob House GOP caucus don't actually care about any of the real problems facing the American public right now, they just want to promise their audience buckets of blood and the fantasy that "Democrat" officials will be marched off to jail.

Now, you can definitely argue that plenty of folks on the left sold that "fantasy" to us about Trump and his inner circle in orange jumpsuits, but the difference is the latter actually should happen because they actually broke laws, and God willing, it'll come to pass.

Warren Terrah: Old School Edition

It took most of my lifetime, but the US finally has the Libyan bombmaker responsible for building the explosive device that downed Pam Am Flight 103.

A Libyan intelligence official accused of making the bomb that brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 in an international act of terrorism has been taken into U.S. custody and will face federal charges in Washington, the Justice Department said Sunday.

The arrest of Abu Agela Masud Kheir Al-Marimi is a significant milestone in the decades-old investigation into the attack that killed 259 people in the air and 11 on the ground. American authorities in December 2020 announced charges against Masud, who was in Libyan custody at the time. Though he is the third Libyan intelligence official charged in the U.S. in connection with the attack, he would be the first to appear in an American courtroom for prosecution.

The New York-bound Pan Am flight exploded over Lockerbie less than an hour after takeoff from London on Dec. 21, 1988. Citizens from 21 different countries were killed. Among the 190 Americans on board were 35 Syracuse University students flying home for Christmas after a semester abroad.

The bombing laid bare the threat of international terrorism more than a decade before the Sept. 11 attacks. It produced global investigations and punishing sanctions while spurring demands for accountability from victims of those killed.

The announcement of charges against Masud on Dec. 21, 2020, came on the 32nd anniversary of the bombing and in the final days of the tenure of then-Attorney General William Barr, who in his first stint as attorney general in the early 1990s had announced criminal charges against two other Libyans intelligence officials.

The Libyan government initially balked at turning over the two men, Abdel Baset Ali al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, before ultimately surrendering them for prosecution before a panel of Scottish judges sitting in the Netherlands as part of a special arrangement.

The Justice Department said Masud would appear soon in a federal court in Washington, where he faces two criminal counts related to the explosion.

U.S. officials did not say how Masud came to be taken into U.S. custody, but in late November, local Libyan media reported that Masud had been kidnapped by armed men on Nov. 16 from his residence in Tripoli, the capital. That reporting cited a family statement that accused Tripoli authorities of being silent on the abduction.

In November 2021, Najla Mangoush, the foreign minister for the country’s Tripoli-based government, told the BBC in an interview that “we, as a government, are very open in terms of collaboration in this matter,” when asked whether an extradition was possible.

 

Biden administration played hardball and got their man. Let's hope Al-Marimi isn't the last. 

As a personal aside, I was in middle school when the Lockerbie bombing happened. Poppy Bush had easily won the 1988 contest and Reagan was too annoyed because it was interrupting his last Christmas as President, ironically asking reporters if shutting down all air traffic would have been the right thing to do.

They didn't get the bastards.  Joe Biden did, almost 35 years later.

Remember that.