We wrote our first story at the New York Times about a possible partnership between Merck and J&J for manufacturing on January 21st, that was when it published. So, in my understanding is that talks between those companies had been in the works before that even in terms of sort of the corporate discussions between them. So could you help explain how it is that the Biden administration deserves credit for bringing these two together when it looks like the discussions had been underway long before you guys got here.”

One of the most highly regarded books of the 20th century was Ernest Becker’s “The Denial of Death.” Winner of the 1974 Pulitzer Prize, the book is regarded as a classic for its analysis of how human beings deny their mortality.

But there is something people deny more than mortality: evil. Someone should write a book on the denial of evil; that would be much more important because while we cannot prevent death, we can prevent evil.

The most glaring example of the denial of evil is communism, an ideology that, within a period of only 60 years, created modern totalitarianism and deprived of human rights, tortured, starved, and killed more people than any other ideology in history. //

Why is it important that everyone know what communism did?

Here are three reasons:

First, we have a moral obligation to the victims not to forget them. Just as Americans have a moral obligation to remember the victims of American slavery, we have the same obligation to the billion victims of communism, especially the 100 million who were murdered.

Second, the best way to prevent an evil from reoccurring is to confront it in all its horror.

The fact that many people today, especially young people, believe communism is a viable—even morally superior—option for modern societies proves they know nothing about communism’s moral record. Therefore, they do not properly fear communism—which means this evil could happen again.

And why could it happen again?

That brings us to reason No. 3. The leaders of communist regimes and the vast number of people who helped those leaders torture, enslave, and murder—plus the many more people who reported on their neighbors for saying something objectionable to the communists—were nearly all normal people. Of course, some were psychopaths, but most were not. Which proves that any society—including free ones—can devolve into communism or some analogous evil. //

If you don’t hate communism, you don’t care about, much less love, people.

In truth, the left and its Democrat Party are the most ideologically rigid entities in the western world. It meets disagreement with force, not open-mindedness or debate. It has a habit of “othering” people and you or a group you belong to may go from the toast of the town to being an “other” very quickly. Your acceptability only goes as far as your usefulness.

This is made all the more dangerous by the fact that the left is the establishment now. //

The right is the counter-culture on both a countrywide and global level. We are the real “Resistance.” We’re the rebels, surrounded by a force whose primary goal is domination and subjugation. It is now as it was at our founding, and our Constitution is the barrier between us and the people who would see their way be the way for everyone and to punish those who refuse to go along with their rules.

This should excite the right. Rebellion is in our blood and the idea that we’re actually the new idea on the block is a message that should resonate with everyone, especially the young who are drawn to dynamic ideas and revolutionary thinking.

It’s clear the left’s thinking is old hat, flawed, and boring. The ideas that it wants to institute don’t work and the people generating enthusiasm about it seem plastic and fake.

The right should run with this idea and make sure we focus our speeches, talking points, and more around it.

We’re the revolution, not them.

Many nuclear advocates wonder at the success of renewable energy, particularly wind and solar. By this I don’t mean their technical success in terms of their share of energy (around 4%), but rather their popularity (check this recent IMechE research).

Here’s the thing. The renewable energy industry understands the power of symbols; the nuclear industry doesn’t. //

Now let’s play the same Pinterest game with nuclear. Here, we get danger yellows, warnings about radioactivity, gas masks, meltdowns, skulls and a biological hazard sign. Symbols of nuclear in popular society are of the terror of nuclear war, fallout and apocalypse. //

Even though the nuclear industry uses more neutral images for their logos (typically plays on electrons orbiting a nucleus), the dominant symbols in the public’s mind are those thrown up by Pinterest. Is this the industry’s fault? Not entirely, but saying the nuclear industry hasn’t been successful at deploying symbols is probably giving them too much credit. They haven’t really even tried (at least since the “golden era” of the 50’s and 60's). //

Why has the nuclear industry’s branding sucked so badly up to now? That question requires a long answer I don’t have space for here. I liked energy comms expert Jeremy Gordon’s summary: the nuclear industry stopped dreaming.

https://www.fluent-in-energy.com/post/creativity-a-games-changer

The outcome of Brnovich — if the Arizona statutes are upheld as not violating Section 2 — will provide the “go-ahead” to conservative state legislatures to adopt “ballot integrity” legislation prior to 2022 and 2024 with confidence that the Supreme Court will sustain such legislation so long as the statutes are race-neutral even if they have what some consider a disproportionate impact on minority voters.

The Supreme Court’s role in the judiciary is to chart the course or lower courts to follow — not to step into an electoral maelstrom and attempt to sort out the claims of the competing parties on incomplete and contradictory factual records.

Potentially the two biggest issues that will be directly implicated by the outcome of today’s case will be the degree to which states are going to be allowed to require voter identification and engage in signature matching on absentee ballots without worrying about Democrat lawyers like Marc Elias trying to tie up the election process in court proceedings raising due process and Voting Rights Act claims.

Most often, businesses are forced to cut jobs, which is why the Congressional Budget Office reports that raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour nationwide would result in 1.4 million lost jobs in a few short years.

The policy would harm younger, less-educated, and otherwise marginalized workers the most—some of the same populations that have been hardest hit by the pandemic.

Wage mandates would also result in exploding costs for essential goods as employers pass new labor costs on through higher prices.

Under a $15 minimum wage, child care costs would rise by thousands of dollars—21% on average, and by more than 30% in 10 states.

Food prices would also increase, including an estimated 38% increase in fast-food prices.

Another unintended consequence is increased automation. Some companies, such as Amazon, have achieved a $15 minimum wage by automating jobs that produce less than $36,000 per year in value (the cost to employers, with taxes, of a $15-per-hour job).

Replacing more workers with self-ordering kiosks, automated customer service systems, and robots won’t produce more good-paying jobs for low-wage workers. //

Job losses of 1.4 million is only a starting point for the Democrats’ proposed tax on workers.

That’s because lawmakers can’t create good jobs or higher incomes simply by mandating them into existence. Opportunities and income growth come from workers achieving the education and experience necessary to help them produce more value.

Cutting off the bottom rungs on the career ladder through a $15 national hourly minimum wage and threatening employers with new taxes on entry-level and low-skilled jobs will do far more harm than good for workers and the American economy.

There are ways, however, that lawmakers can help workers achieve higher incomes without taking away others’ jobs and incomes or taxing employers who provide jobs.

Congress should reduce regulatory burdens on businesses, eliminate unnecessary licensing restrictions for employees, expand nontraditional education options, and keep taxes low on employers and employees alike.

There was a very definite 'Atomic Dream' during the industry's beginnings in the 1950s. It was an intoxicating vision in which science leads to progress and abundance, and it was surrounded by incredibly strong and enduring icons. Marie Curie. Albert Einstein and E=mc^2. For 100 years the symbol of the atom has represented pure science and genius itself.

The PIME audience saw in another case study how IBM brought its invisible and highly complex Watson artificial intelligence 'to life' using an atom-like animation.

Why doesn't the nuclear industry use its own icons? Did it, at some point, actually give up on its own dream?

That could be why the leading icons for nuclear energy are the ones given to it by popular culture – cooling towers, the radiation symbol and its three notorious accidents.

Today the atomic age icons seem stale. Industry doesn't know how to connect to them and it hasn't developed any replacements. But are the values of nuclear energy really so different now to what its icons used to represent? Doesn't nuclear energy still sometimes still trade on science, progress and abundance? Aspiration to development is a very strong motivator in the many countries bringing in nuclear energy for the first time.

The Brazos Electric Power Cooperative filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on March 1, 2021 after receiving a bill from ERCOT totaling $2.1 billion after ERCOT raised the price of wholesale electric power to $9,000 per megawatt hour during the February 2021 winter storm that hit Texas. //

Brazos Electric Power Cooperative Executive VP Clifton Karnei was a ERCOT board board member until Feb. 25; when the cooperative received a $2.1 billion bill from the manager of Texas’ power grid. //

Karnei was on the ERCOT board when the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued a report urging Texas’ power grid to winterize. The 357-page report detailed nine separate findings that showed exactly what happened inside ERCOT’s power grid that left millions without power for so long.

According to the FERCE report, the single largest problem during the cold weather event was the freezing of instrumentation and equipment.

A belching coal plant is easy to identify as a probable greenhouse gas polluter. Coal emissions are point source pollution—like a chemical spill in a stream, the pollution can be traced back to a specific activity at a precise place.

But is measuring the carbon produced at a power plant the best way to monitor emissions? A team of scientists recently took a different approach to estimating carbon dioxide: the bottleneck method. Instead of considering the pollution emitted only at the end use, burning phase of fossil fuel use, the researchers considered all phases: mining, transport, refining, and burning.

Their study identified the worst emissions offenders, and the results were surprising: oil and gas pipelines. The researchers noted that the companies enabling greenhouse gases emissions are most at risk of climate mitigation lawsuits. //

The bottleneck analysis showed that 9 of the top 10 carbon polluters were oil and gas pipelines (47% and 44%, respectively), while a coal mine took the remaining spot in the top rankings. In comparison, point source methods revealed that the top 10 polluters were oil pipelines (eight spots) and coal mines. //

For natural gas, the biggest emissions came from pipeline transport. The sheer length of pipelines—the Transcontinental Gas Pipeline (Transco) alone branches into more than 16,900 kilometers (10,500 miles) of pipeline from Texas to New York—means there are lots of places to emit gas.

“Especially for older pipelines and pipeline networks, you get leaking. And methane is a pretty severe greenhouse gas,” said Pearce. He noted that fixing or not fixing leaks can be an economic decision for pipeline owners—minor leaks might cost more to repair than the loss of gas into the air.

The news media fluffed Biden in unimaginable ways, making the bed they now have to lie in. You see, when you give a politician a pass on everything, do no investigative reporting on him, and essentially worship at his feet to defeat the orange man, that politician will not respect you when the time comes to press him on an issue. Biden feels completely comfortable snubbing the press, and they have no one to blame but themselves. //

Philip Melanchthon Wegmann
@PhilipWegmann
I asked @PressSec why the White House hasn't released virtual visitor logs. Isn't that important for transparency? Wouldn't it be easy?

@PressSec: "He's meeting with members of the Senate virtually today. There, I've released it for you. What else would you like to know?"

Anita Kumar
@anitakumar01
There are no citizen petitions or schedules for the president and vice president posted online. The White House comment line is shut down. The White House won't release virtual visitor logs. Biden has yet to hold a news conference of his own. https://

An optimist’s dreams of an atom-powered future. //

There’s one thing I’m certain “Walt Disney” doesn’t make you think of: nuclear power.

But maybe it should.

It may surprise you to know that Walt Disney dreamed of an atom-powered future. And he wasn’t alone. //

But Walt Disney didn’t just dream. If there was one thing that made him successful in life, it was his belief that you could make your dreams come true. This belief culminated in plans to power his new Disney World Florida megaproject with its own nuclear reactor. He even got permission to build one.

Walt Disney died in 1966 before Disney World was complete, and somewhere along the way the plans for a small nuclear reactor were abandoned. //

Evidence of Disney’s atomic dreams is still visible today: the original concept of Disney’s Tommorowland parks was to showcase nuclear technology. Perhaps the greatest example of Disney’s nuclear legacy is the educational movie, titled Our Friend, the Atom, commissioned in 1957 by Mr Walt Disney himself (there is also an accompanying book).

The movie is incredibly positive about the future of nuclear power, predicting that nuclear will displace dirty fossil fuels as the way we produce electricity but also as a means to power our ships, planes and rockets (you could say Disney predicted ‘deep decarbonization’ with nuclear).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PwllA-CyJU

A [poor] human driver might do what the Tesla did and maintain or increase speed while the BMW was attempting to pass — an aggressive pass, sure, but hardly anything that unusual. A decent driver would have, again, let off the throttle, let the BMW pass, and then, ideally, gotten out of the passing lane.

So, in this example that was sent to me specifically as an opportunity for me to finally redeem myself and give Autopilot some of the praise that it desperately craves, I’m afraid I’ve failed. I’ve failed because I can’t praise Autopilot here — it is driving like an idiot, and if this is what’s being shown as examples of Autopilot “saving lives,” then I think we’d be better off fending for ourselves, thanks.

Germany now generates over 35% of its yearly electricity consumption from wind and solar sources. Over 30 000 wind turbines have been built, with a total installed capacity of nearly 60 GW. Germany now has approximately 1.7 million solar power (photovoltaic) installations, with an installed capacity of 46 GW. This looks very impressive.

Unfortunately, most of the time the actual amount of electricity produced is only a fraction of the installed capacity. Worse, on “bad days” it can fall to nearly zero. In 2016 for example there were 52 nights with essentially no wind blowing in the country. No Sun, no wind. Even taking “better days” into account, the average electricity output of wind and solar energy installations in Germany amounts to only about 17% of the installed capacity. //

The question is, whether it makes sense at all to depart from the tried-and-proven model of a stable electricity system based on continuously functioning sources, a large percentage operating in base load mode.

If we want the system to be largely CO2-free, then the only available option is nuclear energy.