Real talk Last week President Biden gave a speech that went largely unmarked in the press and it’s really too bad. It may be the best speech he’s ever given and if people saw it it might set their minds at ease a little bit about his prospects in the next election and the following four years. He’s never been much of a speaker but the speeches he’s been making on the threat to democracy are excellent. This is the fourth one he’s given and it’s a sincere effort on his part to which we should all pay attention. After all, while we are all painfully aware of the right wing’s anti-democratic turn, he is the president and it stands to reason he sees this from a different perspective. That he is so determined to sound the alarm should get much more attention than it does. On the heels of a bizarre impeachment inquiry hearing last week in which Republicans House members threw out outrageous smears against him without a shred of evidence and a GOP primary debate that had the candidates yelling at each other like drunk sports hooligans, Biden traveled to Arizona to open the John McCain Institute and Library.
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Do Americans really want this unhinged crook to become president? pic.twitter.com/4ZJqoOIudB — Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) October 2, 2023 This should go well. https://t.co/5vbtIHbiCe — Charlie Sykes (@SykesCharlie) October 2, 2023 According to CNN, Trump has decided that it will be good for him to appear at this trial and sit sullenly at the table with the expression he had on his face for the mug shot because he thinks it makes him look tough. The assumption is that it will help with the fund raising since the mug shot was so successful. Given both his personal history and the recent pattern in white-collar accountability, Trump might understandably be surprised he finds himself in so much trouble. https://t.co/JB3vLz2NVK — Philip Bump (@pbump) October 2, 2023 All of that is incredibly sick, but that’s how the cult works. They love their big, manly criminal Dear Leader.
It’s just as bad as you thought The Guardian reports on the latest “intellectual” vomit spewing forth from the centers of right wing academia: June, rightwing academic Kevin Slack published a book-length polemic claiming that ideas that had emerged from what he called the radical left were now so dominant that the US republic its founders envisioned was effectively at an end. Slack, a politics professor at the conservative Hillsdale College in Michigan, made conspiratorial and extreme arguments now common on the antidemocratic right, that “transgenderism, anti-white racism, censorship, cronyism … are now the policies of an entire cosmopolitan class that includes much of the entrenched bureaucracy, the military, the media, and government-sponsored corporations”. In a discussion of possible responses to this conspiracy theory, he wrote that the “New Right now often discusses a Red Caesar, by which it means a leader whose post-Constitutional rule will restore the strength of his people”.
If the rain comes | They run and hide their heads Brooklyn flooded on Friday. Again. Subway lines shut down as water poured off streets, down stairways and into stations. A niece reported she had to take cabs into the city for work and the basement entry was knee-deep. Nancy Walecki wrote last week at The Atlantic: New York City’s sewer system is built for the rain of the past—when a notable storm might have meant 1.75 inches of water an hour. It wasn’t built to handle the rainfall from Hurricane Irene, Hurricane Sandy, or, more recently, Hurricane Ida—which dumped 3.15 inches an hour on Central Park. And it wasn’t built to handle the kind of extreme rainfall that is becoming routine: The city flooded last December, last April, and last July—an unusual seasonal span. “We now have in New York something much more like a tropical-rainfall pattern,” Rohit Aggarwala, New York City’s environmental-protection commissioner, said yesterday at The Atlantic Festival. “And it happens over and over again.” It happened today.
… is right twice a day Matt Gaetz on the House floor: “It is going to be difficult for my Republican friends to keep calling President Biden feeble while he continues to take Speaker McCarthy’s lunch money in every negotiation.” pic.twitter.com/LXNxi9YMs4 — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 2, 2023 That will make a nice campaign ad, don’t you think? Gaetz didn’t pull the trigger on the motion to vacate. But he told the press on the capitol steps that he still plans to do it later when the full congress is back in town. Stay tuned.
Democrats are being pouty because they don’t have a young, dazzling superstar like Barack Obama to fall in love with. But they will vote and they will vote for Biden because they hate Trump. Negative partisanship is as powerful a motivator as 2008 style adoration.
I will be eternally grateful to all the scientists who made the mRNA vaccines that have saved millions of lives during he COVID pandemic. Today two of them received the Nobel Prize for medicine: Two scientists won the Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for discoveries that enabled the creation of mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 that were critical in slowing the pandemic — technology that’s also being studied to fight cancer and other diseases. Hungarian-American Katalin Karikó and American Drew Weissman were cited for contributing “to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health,” according to the panel that awarded the prize in Stockholm. The panel said the pair’s “groundbreaking findings … fundamentally changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system.” Traditionally, making vaccines required growing viruses or pieces of viruses and then purifying them before next steps. The messenger RNA approach starts with a snippet of genetic code carrying instructions for making proteins.
One of the outcomes of the W3C worldwide technical conference, TPAC, this year, was a suggestion from W3C staff that we consider forming a new Social Web Working Group (WG) for revising the ActivityPub and Activity Streams 2.0 standards. There has been some controversy about this idea, which I wanted to address with a blog … Continue reading A New Social Web Working Group at the W3C
An essential component of Neoclassical microeconomics is the proposition that firms maximize their profits by equating marginal revenue—the addition to total revenue caused by the last unit sold—to marginal cost—the addition to total costs caused by the last unit produced. This proposition plays a fundamental role in all DSGE-based macroeconomic models too, in the form … Continue reading "Profit Maximization in the Real World"
Is McCarthy making deal with Democrats? Rep. Matt Gaetz is planning to attempt to oust Speaker Kevin McCarthy from the role this week after the House leader worked with Democrats to avoid a government shutdown on Saturday. Speaking with CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union,” the Florida Republican said he intends to file a motion to vacate this week, which would force a vote on whether McCarthy will keep his job. “Speaker McCarthy made an agreement with House conservatives in January and since then he’s been in brazen, repeated material breach of that agreement,” Gaetz said Sunday. “This agreement that he made with Democrats to really blow past a lot of the spending guardrails we set up is a last straw.” e added, “I do intend to file a motion to vacate against Speaker McCarthy this week. I think we need to rip off the Band-Aid.