Author Archives: Prokippxv

Obamacare is Probably Safe, But It’s Not a Slam Dunk

Mother Jones

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I was chatting with a friend this weekend about what Republicans will do if they manage to win total control of the government in 2016. Will they abolish the filibuster and repeal Obamacare? I think the odds are low. At a guess, I’d put the chances of winning total control at p=20%, the conditional odds of abolishing the filibuster at p=50%, and the conditional odds of then repealing Obamacare at p=50%. (Why so low for repeal? Because by 2017 there are going to be a lot of people benefiting from parts of Obamacare; at least a few Republicans will recognize that you really can’t repeal just the unpopular bits; and the health care industry will have spent billions of dollars committing itself to operating within the framework of the law.) So that’s about a 5% chance that Obamacare dies in 2017. Not zero, but not very significant either.

But what about 2015? What if Republicans win the Senate later this year? Paul Waldman surveys the landscape and notes that House and Senate Republicans are offering very different campaign visions of what to do about Obamacare:

See the difference? The senators accept that the ACA is law and are thinking about how they’d like to change it. The House members are coming up with another way to make a futile, symbolic shaking of their fists in the general direction of the White House. And this may offer a clue to how legislating would proceed in a Republican Congress. The House, still dominated by extremely conservative Republicans for whom any hint of compromise is considered the highest treason, could continue to pass one doomed bill after another, while the Senate tries to write bills that have at least some chance of ever becoming law.

And that would be just fine with Barack Obama. If he’s faced with both houses controlled by the opposition, there’s nothing he’d rather see than them fighting with each other and passing only unrealistic bills that he can veto without worrying about any backlash from the public.

Allow me to be a bit more pessimistic. Even if they lose the Senate, Democrats will still have the filibuster available to them, and they’ll use it. And as Waldman says, Obama can veto anything he doesn’t like.

But there are two wild cards here. First, the usual way that you get difficult provisions passed is by tacking them onto must-pass legislation. Pentagon appropriations bills are the traditional favorites. Depending on the provision, this might require monkeying around with the reconciliation rules, but Republicans have few scruples about that. So the odds are that we’ll end up with yet another series of showdowns. Maybe not huge debt-ceiling style showdowns, but big fund-the-military type showdowns. And the question is who wins.

And that brings up the second wild card: will Democrats stay united in defense of Obamacare? After watching Dems scatter like frightened children over the nomination of Debo Adegbile to lead the Justice Department’s civil rights division, and then scatter again when the NRA started mau-mauing them over Vivek Murthy’s nomination as Surgeon General—well, you have to wonder, don’t you? Add in the fact that Democrats have been running away from Obamacare for months, and it’s hardly unrealistic to think that they might be less than adamantine when it comes to a showdown over protecting Obamacare while Fox News is pillorying them nightly as playing politics with our brave troops in order to save a failed health care policy.

As it happens, I’d say the odds of caving in are fairly low. Even if Republicans win the Senate, they’d need eight or nine Democrats to defect in order to break a filibuster. And Obama isn’t running for anything. He can afford to hold out.

Still, it’s not a slam dunk. Republicans won’t be able to repeal Obamacare if they win the Senate later this year, but there’s a chance they could do it some damage. It all depends on how willing Democrats are to defend their principles. Unfortunately, that’s always a thin reed.

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Obamacare is Probably Safe, But It’s Not a Slam Dunk

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The Latest Technology in Cheap Energy Storage Is Manufactured with Pasta Makers

A startup based in Manhattan called Urban Electric Power is taking a stab at the energy storage problem. And rather than just store energy, the company is going one step further, by manufacturing completely non-toxic batteries rather than the usual corrosive chemical-filled variety.

One big problem with renewable energy—including wind, solar and wave energy—is storing it. If we could stock up on energy when the sun is shining brightly or the wind is blowing, then we could continue to produce power at night or during windless days. Stored energy can also offset demand for energy at peak times, when utility companies have to ramp up production.

Urban Electric Power is approaching this issues by updating an old battery technology. Energy.gov explains:

Inexpensive, non-toxic and widely available, zinc has long been known to be an excellent electricity storage material because of its high energy density. Invented more than 100 years ago, the zinc anode battery is still used today. Yet, for all its benefits, zinc has one major shortcoming — dendrite formation develops over the battery’s life, causing the battery to short after a few hundred cycles.

Basically, researchers have hit a roadblock when attempting to tap into zinc’s energy-storying potential because of that material’s annoying tendency to clump up. To get around this problem, Urban Electric Power designed a simple solution: just stir the zinc. Scientific American reports:  

The key to preventing that degradation turns out to be flow. In the case of Urban Electric, that means little propellers attached by magnets to the bottom of the plastic container holding a series of zinc–manganese dioxide pouch cells. The fans circulate a fluid that keeps the flaws from forming, and the ions flowing in and out of the electrodes. That fluid also turns out to be cheap: water. The convection from a little bit of water flowing around the pouch cells prevents the formation of tiny fibers on the zinc electrode, known as dendrites, that kill off a typical alkaline battery. “We use very little flow,” Banerjee says. “It’s really just stirring.”

The design is so simple that the creators use little more than homemade pasta makers, restaurant-grade stirrers and rolling pins to make the chemical materials, SciAm adds.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Underwater Kites Can Harness Ocean Currents to Create Clean Energy 
We Don’t Have to Choose Between Fossil Fuels and Green Energy

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The Latest Technology in Cheap Energy Storage Is Manufactured with Pasta Makers

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Crowdfunded science suggests that coal-hauling trains cause air pollution

Crowdfunded science suggests that coal-hauling trains cause air pollution

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Coal dust is blowing off rail cars and over neighborhoods located near train tracks that are used to haul coal in the Pacific Northwest.

Air monitors placed near the tracks in a Seattle residential area detected spikes in large particles of pollution when coal-hauling cars chugged by. They also picked up an increase in diesel particulate matter. These preliminary research findings suggest that plans to increase the amount of coal hauled from mines in Montana and Wyoming to proposed new shipping terminals in Washington and Oregon will worsen air pollution.

How do we know this? Because 271 people donated $20,529 through the research-focused crowdfunding site Microryza to help buy air monitors and pay for the labor of researchers and a technician.

The work was led by University of Washington atmospheric sciences professor Dan Jaffe. He released the preliminary findings on Monday. A paper with the research results is still under peer review, but Jaffe said he felt he owed it to his donors to release his findings as soon as they were available.

From KUOW:

“We did find an increase in large particles in the air when coal trains pass by and it does suggest that it’s coal dust and it’s consistent with coal dust from those trains,” said the UW scientist, Dan Jaffe. …

Jaffe gathered air quality samples at two sites next to train tracks in the Northwest. He tested 450 trains as they passed — roughly 10 percent of which were carrying coal.

A spokesperson for BNSF Railway raised questions about the crowdfunded research: “How is it being done? How is it being funded? What standards are in place? Who is involved in that? So [crowdfunding] is a really new concept when it comes to scientific research.”

This highlights a challenge that scientists will face when they pursue crowdsourced funding: Donors will desire quick results, but the peer-review system takes time.

Jaffe, though, isn’t worried about it. “I’ve published over 120 papers in the scientific peer reviewed literature,” he said. “I know the drill. If I didn’t feel our results would hold up to peer review scrutiny there’s no way I’d be releasing them now.”


Source
Coal Dust From Trains Adds To Pollution, New Research Finds, KUOW
Do coal and diesel trains make for unhealthy air? A project funded by over 270 individuals via microryza.com, Jaffe Research Group

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Crowdfunded science suggests that coal-hauling trains cause air pollution

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Chicago makes it easier to put solar panels on roofs

Chicago makes it easier to put solar panels on roofs

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More solar is on its way.

The Windy City is blowing red tape and roadblocks out of the way for new solar-panel owners.

It used to take a month to receive a city permit needed to install a small solar array. That’s being reduced to one day. Meanwhile, the price of the permit is falling 25 percent to $275. These improvements are thanks to a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy.

“It will encourage more and more people to have solar here in the city of Chicago on a residential and commercial level,” Mayor Rahm Emanuel said as he announced the changes at a solar event. “It will be cheaper, quicker and more efficient for people to put solar in.”

Chicagoans can apply for their permits through a new website, Chicago Solar Express.


Source
SPI Chicago: Second City gets a second chance with solar, PV-Tech
Chicago to make it faster, cheaper to add solar power, Chicago Tribune

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Chicago makes it easier to put solar panels on roofs

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5 Foods to Watch Out for During the Government Shutdown

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5 Foods to Watch Out for During the Government Shutdown

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Quiz: All The Words That Aren’t Fit to Print in the New York Times

Mother Jones

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The Gray Lady has her standards, at least. For as long as anyone has kept track, the New York Times has enforced a strict policy of avoiding language it deems offensive while jumping through hoops to explain why. While cursing is permitted in excerpted works of fiction, in the paper’s news sections, f-bombs, s-words, racial slurs, and off-color terms such as “screw,” are strictly non grata. (The one exception: The 1998 publication of the NSFW Starr Report.)

No one—even Joe Biden—is exempt. In the hands of the Times copy desk, “cocksuckers” becomes “Offensive Adjective Inappropriate for Family Newspaper“; “fuck you money” is “forget you money“; and “slutbag” is euphemized as just one of “several vulgar and sexist terms” uttered by New York mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner’s spokeswoman. If—to borrow a trope that really ought to be banned—the Eskimos have 100 words for snow, the New York Times has at least 100 ways to say “fuck.” None of them use the word “fuck.”

Can you read between the lines to figure out which words the Times copy desk considered unfit to print in the quotes below? Give it your best fucking shot:

var quiz = jQuery(‘#quiz_container’).quiz(‘0AswaDV9q95oZdDlmanhkZDd0TVhVcGRSQjlqdzQwNUE’); //your published spreadsheet key or URL goes here
Like this quiz? Wanna build your own? Check out our open-source quiz builder here!

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Quiz: All The Words That Aren’t Fit to Print in the New York Times

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Anti-Keystone activists keep the heat on

Anti-Keystone activists keep the heat on

Dozens of activists young, old, and in between walked 100 miles, from Camp David in Maryland to the White House, to call attention to their campaign for climate action and Keystone rejection. The Walk for Our Grandchildren, which wrapped up over the weekend, was one of many climate actions being coordinated all around the U.S. this summer.

Jay Mallin captured the highlights on video:

Some of the marchers also got themselves arrested at the D.C. office of Environmental Resources Management, a consulting firm that worked on the State Department’s much-criticized draft environmental impact statement on the Keystone XL pipeline. Time reports:

Once inside ERM’s office, six locked arms in metal pipes labeled “No KXL,” blocking the elevator doors. When asked to leave, those that did not wish to be arrested set up a protest outside, and watched about 50 of their colleagues taken into custody for unlawful entry. Police brought in bull cutters to cut off the metal arms.

Jay Mallin captured images of this protest too, this time in photographs:

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Rebecca Solnit’s Stories Within Stories

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The Faraway Nearby

By Rebecca Solnit

Viking

Some years ago, I visited my father at a nursing home in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Forty years earlier, after my parents divorced, he’d moved out there, remarried, got a good job selling insurance, played golf, developed diabetes, heart disease, and then Alzheimer’s. Bea, his second wife, warned me that he might not recognize me, his third son, and that he would tire quickly. We timed my visit around dinner, the high point of the day. I’d come to say goodbye.

I could count on one hand the number of times I’d seen him since he left my mother, my brothers, and me, age three. But he was dying, and I needed to make this visit. We had about 45 minutes together, most of it taken up with my father’s monologue, stories inside of stories that made sense to him, about people I never knew and places I’d never seen. But as it got closer to the time for me to leave, there came a moment when he paused, took a closer look at me and said—so fast I almost missed it, as if it wasn’t really meant for me—”I love you.” I held his hand, and remembered all the times I’d wished he’d been there to say that. And then my father disappeared back into his stories. Three weeks later, he died.

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Rebecca Solnit’s Stories Within Stories

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The State of Immigration Reform in the House: "Who the Hell Knows"

Mother Jones

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The immigration reform debate has heated up again this week on Capitol Hill, but a flurry of activity in the House on Wednesday ended with no clear path forward for comprehensive reform. In the words of Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), a member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and co-chair of the Congressional Border Caucus, “Who the hell knows what’s going to come out of the House?”

This morning Grijalva and other members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, all Democrats, met with President Obama at the White House to discuss reform. Later in the day, Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the House minority leader, held a press conference with four members of the Congressional Border Caucus, including Grijalva, who voiced their concerns about the Senate bill’s $40 billion-plus border security measures and urged a more humanitarian approach. Meanwhile, from Dallas, former president George W. Bush, whose own immigration reform efforts fell short in 2007, urged Congress to reach a “positive resolution.” But the day’s most-anticipated event was a closed-door meeting of House Republicans who are unlikely to heed the ex-president’s advice.

Republicans emerging from Wednesday’s meeting indicated that they still plan to take a piecemeal approach, passing a series of law enforcement-centric bills through committees rather than a comprehensive bill mirroring the Senate’s. “Today House Republicans affirmed that rather than take up the flawed legislation rushed through the Senate, House committees will continue their work on a step-by-step, common-sense approach to fixing what has long been a broken system,” Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio), the House speaker, said in a joint statement with other Republican leaders. (The House’s bipartisan “Group of Seven,” which includes three Republicans, has been working on a comprehensive bill but has yet to unveil it after a series of delays.)

Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, told reporters that Republicans remained concerned that the Senate bill’s border security measures don’t go far enough because they would not have to be implemented before up to 11 million undocumented immigrants are granted provisional legal status. As the Senate bill stands, Goodlatte said, Republicans worry that President Obama could unilaterally delay border security measures in a manner similar to his decision last week to delay the Affordable Care Act’s employer mandates. But any efforts to further restrict their path to citizenship could be a deal-breaker for Democrats, many of whom think the Senate bill is already too conservative and have decried such proposals as “poison pills.”

On Wednesday morning, before Obama’s meeting with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, the White House released a report playing up the Senate bill’s economic benefits. Grijalva kept the details of the White House meeting under wraps at Pelosi’s press conference. “We all had an understanding with the president that the consequences of much of the very honest and blunt discussion was going to stay private,” he said.

Rep. Filemon Vela (D-Texas), who resigned from the CHC last week in protest of its support for the Senate immigration bill despite the border security measures, was also at the press conference but did not attend the White House meeting. Asked if Vela’s resignation was a sign of further splintering to come on the left, Grijalva said simply, “No.”

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The State of Immigration Reform in the House: "Who the Hell Knows"

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