White House aides privately estimate they may need to deliver as many as 100 Democratic votes to ensure an eventual debt limit deal can pass the narrowly divided House, two people familiar with the matter told POLITICO.Regime media see the situation in a predictable way.
The informal projection is driven by lingering doubts among Biden officials over House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s ability to convince the vast majority of Republicans to back a bipartisan agreement — and the expectation that dozens of the GOP’s most conservative members are poised to rebel against any sign of a compromise.
McCarthy urged members to make sure vulnerable lawmakers would have plenty of campaign money from GOP coffers — even pledging that they would not be outraised by their opponents in the 2024 election cycle, the people said of the meeting, which took place at the Capitol Hill Club. (McCarthy’s office declined to comment.)From the communist wing, Common Dreams antique Richard Eskow pours more scorn on the corporatist Democrats than on Republicans as a class.
The overture reflects the GOP’s determination to stay unified behind spending cuts even as the nation heads toward the brink of a default, despite a rapidly approaching deadline, a White House suddenly eager to compromise and a Democratic-led effort to push a petition that could force a vote on raising the debt ceiling over McCarthy’s objections.
After refusing to negotiate for months, President Biden’s aides last week offered the GOP substantial concessions on the federal budget — including a freeze on spending for two years — that nonpartisan estimates have projected could cut deficits by as much as $1 trillion over the next decade.
House Republicans do appear willing to drop some provisions in a bill the chamber approved last month to raise the debt ceiling, especially a call for Biden to abandon his student loan forgiveness program and to cancel some green energy tax credits. But they’re also determined to push for more concessions that weren’t even in that legislation. Not only have they ruled out Biden’s proposals to increase revenue by closing tax loopholes — traditionally a part of bipartisan deals to lower the deficit — but they are also insisting on increasing spending on the military, homeland security and veterans services while cutting funds for domestic programs. That would be a change from how a similar standoff was resolved in 2011, when the last bipartisan bill to raise the debt limit and cut spending passed — the Budget Control Act, which affected defense and nondefense budgets equally.
“The off-ramp here is to solve the problem, to spend less than we spent last year,” McCarthy told reporters Wednesday. “That’s not that difficult. They still want to spend more. You cannot do that. No household will do that.”
The ultra-right wing of the far-right Republican Party seems willing to let the government default if it doesn’t get what it wants, but House Democrats have already sent a very different signal.Far right on top? That's not how the populist Freedom Caucus see things.
“We're willing to discuss freezing spending,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) told reporters. “That's an inherently reasonable position many in our party might even be uncomfortable with, but President Biden recognizes we're in a divided government situation.”
“Many in our party”? Jeffries can’t seem to hide his contempt for his own party’s left. But then, why should he bother? He knows that, unlike the right, House progressives always tend to fall in line. As Semafor’s Joseph Zeballos-Roig writes, “If Biden does manage to strike a deal with McCarthy, it seems unlikely Congressional Democrats would really vote to reject it and throw the stability of the entire global economy into question.”
Right. They’re the responsible ones—that is, the ones who always seem to lose. It’s a monkey-house hierarchy, with the far-right on top and the left on the bottom: Democrats always cave under Republican pressure, and progressive Democrats always cave under conservative Democratic pressure. Neither the Democratic Party leadership nor its left wing have figured out how to fight these tactics, despite decades of experience—and, in this case, despite legal workarounds for the debt ceiling threat.
The conservative rebellion is a mirror of sorts to what President Biden is confronting on his left flank, with many Democratic lawmakers similarly skeptical of concessions.That article also mentions the usual gimmicks of spending caps and un-appropriating money that hasn't yet been spent, and otherwise engaging in wishful thinking that scores out as "deficit reduction." I'm not impressed, and I bet, short or long term increase in the debt ceiling notwithstanding, there will be no regular order budget; rather the usual October nonsense of short-term or year-long continuing resolutions will again be the outcome. It starts with Dementia Joe's proposed "compromise," which is all tax increases and none of it is serious.
The unrest on both fringes is raising new questions not just if a deal can be struck — but whether it could then even pass Congress in time to avoid a potential default on June 1.
Now, researchers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, have developed an Air-gen device that yields electricity from contact with water droplets that pass through its porous material. In this way, the Air-gen technology creates “a spontaneous and sustained charging gradient for continuous electric output” that “opens a wide door for the broad exploration of sustainable electricity from ambient air,” according to a study published on Wednesday in Advanced Materials.In the way of research, this idea came about as a consequence of lessons learned pursuing a different line of research.
“One day we may get clean electricity literally anywhere, anytime by using Air-gen technology (i.e., the concept of ‘ubiquitous powering’), because air humidity is 24/7 continuous and everywhere,” Jun Yao, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at UMass Amherst and senior author of the study, said in an email to Motherboard.
“The initial discovery was made back in 2020 and was really a serendipitous one—we found that Air-gen made from a specific material called protein nanowires synthesized by a type of bacterium called Geobacter can continuously produce electricity from air humidity,” Yao said.Don't hope to power your home computer, let alone your space heater, any time soon. "The microscale device was able to produce continuous energy equivalent to several hundred millivolts for a test period of a week, which is much longer than other air generator concepts that had a one-time power output that lasted no more than 48 hours." Scaling up is possible, but will it ever be commercially sensible?
“But that time, we considered the effect exclusive to this specific material (although we had some initial intuition/indication that the effect may expand to other materials as well),” he continued. “The current work is based on our initial intuition, which then leads to the discovery of this ‘generic’ Air-gen effect working with literally all kinds of materials. So it turns an initially narrow window to a wide-open door for broad potential/impact.”
Indeed, the results revealed that practically any material could become an Air-gen device provided it was perforated with tiny holes measuring 100 nanometers or fewer. At this scale, the holes are big enough to allow water to pass through an upper chamber into a lower chamber, but are small enough that the droplets make contact with the material as they move down through the holes. As a consequence, a charge imbalance is created in the device because the water droplets increase the charge of the upper layer by soaking it as they move into the lower chamber.
“A general understanding is that the energy density is low (which can be intuitively understood that the air is very thin), so a single-layer of Air-gen has no way to compete with other power sources (e.g., solar, wind) for matched power volume,” Yao explained. “However, the beauty is that air is diffusive and filled in the entire vertical space, which means that we can stack many layers of air-gen devices in the vertical space to improve power (without taking up additional space footprint).”I wonder what's involved in the special tooling to perforate material with such small holes, or if there's a way of doing the same sort of work with some sort of permeable membranes.
“So in principle, Air-gen can be more space efficient” than other power sources, he continued. “Moreover, they can be engineered into varied form factors and neatly blend into the environment (even without one’s notice)” versus the example of “a solar panel that exclusively takes up space.”
As long as fools like the people who used to run Hamline University are around, we will need to keep worrying about assholes like DeSantis running the country. Places like Hamline write his The Woke are Destroying Us scripts for him.We're at this pass because the poobahs of Hamline, and a few other so-called institutions of higher education, have compromised their integrity. "You get the ongoing Charlie Foxtrot that is Hamline University."
Whatever one thinks of Mr. Biden and his faculties, we all have a knowledge problem, to some extent, of our own making. Instead of demanding clear goals and functioning markets to get us there, we millions of creative Americans question whose knowledge is greatest and allow the so-called best and brightest to attempt the whole job themselves. This, too, is a fatal conceit.That belief probably started when people more attuned to the workings of the weather and the motions of the planets claimed to have some Special Connection to the Gods, from which emerged the Clerisy and the Technocracy.
Cooperation, interaction, and trade across a vast number of people is required. Not even a presidential administration can duplicate the efforts of so many involved players, or even know who every player is.That's addressing the actually existing power grid, which the environmentalist wackos running the presidency would like to entangle in green tape. At least you have known unknowns there. Artificial intelligence? That's the paradigm of unknown unknowns.
For an administration so invested in influencing resource use so that the right stuff gets produced in the right amount for the right folks—whether it's microchips, metals, energy, vehicles, or any of the things legislatively deemed as "infrastructure"—it's fruitless to simply assemble the brightest and best, find a consensus, and mandate a solution be applied to all economic agents.
The more the administration uses a command-and-control approach to dictate how firms go about achieving reductions, the more it relies on its own knowledge rather than the collective ingenuity of the "vast majority" of people. It assumes Biden officials know more than anyone else about solving this problem, not only now, but in the future.Look, this is folk wisdom: you don't animate a broom to carry water until you understand how to turn it off, and there's an old joke about computer scientists asking their supercomputer if God exists that it would be wise to know.
Chicago commuter operator Metra has become the third entity to sue over the Surface Transportation Board’s approval of the Canadian Pacific-Kansas City Southern merger.Metra's immediate objection is to the possibility of freight train interference, something they have lots of experience with as a tenant at Chicago Union Station and on several of the lines they operate.
In a single-page filing with the board, Metra notified the STB today (Wednesday, May 17) that it had initiated a suit on May 12 in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, seeking review of the March 15 decision creating Canadian Pacific Kansas City. Metra’s court filing calls the board’s decision “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, an otherwise not in accordance with law or supported by substantial evidence.” It offers no specifics.
The language is identical to earlier suits filed by Union Pacific [see “Union Pacific challenges STB’s Canadian Pacific-Kansas City Southern merger decision,” Trains News Wire, May 5, 2023] and the Coalition to Stop CPKC, a group of Chicago suburbs [see “Chicago suburbs sue over CPKC merger,” News Wire, May 12, 2023].
The suit asks that the appeals court send the matter back to the STB “to correct its legal deficiencies.”
Metra strongly opposed the merger, contending it will have a negative effect on commuter operations on two lines shared with CPKC, and sought significant conditions to mitigate those impacts. None were granted.In today's railroading, the most direct route between cities is not necessarily the fastest route, particularly as traffic builds.
Perhaps most significantly, the commuter agency asked for dispatching control over the two shared routes. They are currently dispatched by the freight railroad in an agreement dating to the demise of the former owner, the Milwaukee Road. In a post-merger press conference, STB Chairman Martin J. Oberman said the board did not order the change “because we do not think the data requires it or supports it, and it would cause us, in effect, to break a contract.” [see “Metra, Chicago suburbs see few concerns addressed …,” News Wire, March 15, 2023].
Metra’s opposition reflects, among other issues, disagreement with traffic modeling used by CP and KCS in their merger application. Metra’s own modeling indicated post-merger traffic growth would “break the rail system” on a single-track portion of the direct CPKC route between Minneapolis-St. Paul and Kansas City, leading trains to be rerouted through Chicago, to the detriment of the Metra Milwaukee-North and Milwaukee-West lines.That direct route, which runs along the west bank of the Mississippi River from the Twin Cities to the Quad Cities by way of La Crescent, Minnesota, and Dubuque, Iowa, was a freight-only secondary line for much of The Milwaukee Road's recent history, but now it competes with Burlington's, er, BNSF's, similarly indirect line from the Twin Cities to Kansas City by way of Galesburg and Quincy. The traffic volume? It approximates to a busy operating session at the Fox Valley O Scalers, which models a portion of the line from La Crescent to Green Island, Iowa, back in the day when meat trains out of southwestern Minnesota and western Iowa got onto the line at Marquette, Iowa.
Communities nationwide depend on federal aid to build and support basic public infrastructure and to help every resident access what they need for their and their family’s health, well-being, and success. By slashing this aid, the House Republican bill would badly harm our communities, and that’s a bad deal for all of us.Her salary depends on lobbying for more public assistance, and that "bad deal" makes more sense when so viewed.
State and local governments would be forced to slash funding for programs that people and communities rely upon every day. The harms done would include more crowded classrooms, even fewer families able to afford child care, new parents lacking the help they need to feed their babies properly, malfunctioning water facilities, and less in funding for homelessness services and substance use treatment.Predictably, she's also got something positive to say about hiring more revenooers, under the misapprehension that they will audit the tax returns of high net worth individuals more assiduously.
No state would be spared. High-population states like California and New York would see very large dollar cuts of up to $170.9 billion and $144.7 billion, respectively. Less populous and more rural states, meanwhile, would feel deep pain relative to the size of their budgets. For example, the cut of up to $8.3 billion in federal funding for West Virginia over ten years is roughly 1.5 times the size of the entire state budget in fiscal year 2024.
The harm from these service cuts comes in addition to the millions of people from whom the bill would take away health coverage, food, and cash assistance if they don’t meet onerous work requirements.
How fast and harsh was the #PneumoniaFront that hit Milwaukee today? According to the temperature clock at Rockwell Automation, it dropped 20 degrees in less than a half hour! @fox6now @FOX6Weather pic.twitter.com/347BnSr3sx
— Brian Graham 📺 (@blitzgrambo) May 16, 2023
With Bud Light, the importance of celebrating the womanhood of a man vamping as a Tween Audrey Hepburn was seen as paramount to updating and “freshening” the brand’s image, which its vice president of marketing Alissa Heinerscheid publicly worried was too “fratty.” That is, it appealed to all the wrong kinds of people — namely, those who drink Bud Light — and Ms Heinerscheid, as one of the anointed (to borrow from Thomas Sowell), was bent on correcting that particular bit of consumer violence. To do so, she was going to liberate the beer from its “fratty” image, granting it license to identify as the Queer pilsner it always knew itself to be. Ms Heinerschied’s bold vision — to take Bud Light into the 21st century, where it was free to live its own truth and become its best self — resulted in a collapse of market share, and a leave of absence for both herself and her boss, David Blake.That's where content-free critical studies gets you. Wokies, weirdos, and psychos are miserable, so too must you be, dear Normal.
In the case of Miller Lite, driven to celebrate Women’s History Month as all domestic beers must necessarily do, the identity group against whom historical violence had been committed, and who therefore required 90 seconds of corporate-crafted redress, was women — from one perspective an ironic counter to Bud Light’s ads, which seemed to suggest women are especially powerful and beautiful only, or maybe especially, when they’re really men.
Today, the very notion of a light beer being less filling — and lower in calories — runs afoul of the Fat Studies battalion of the Social Justice army of activists. The violent implication of such a campaign — that people are being directed, by current social discourses on body image, to watch their calories in order to maintain a body that, champions of Fat Studies would argue, is oppressive and onerous — doesn’t promote “body positivity,” which is personal, subjective, experiential, and so, real. That such a campaign also doesn’t promote type 2 diabetes and heart disease is likewise true, but let’s not nitpick. This is after all very serious business.I repeat, though, the wokies worst fear is being laughed at. Good. Laugh them into oblivion.
At its core, the radical skepticism is the point: to reduce every argument to the oppressor / oppressed binary, then contend that the only way to battle such a permanent state of enslavement for the now nearly infinite number of marginalized bodies on the intersectional scale (though it is illegitimate to conceive of these as individuals, because doing so would concede that individuals exist, and with them, individual rights), is to adopt a critical consciousness that allows you to understand how to understand your own complicity in the overarching oppression, to keep interrogating it, and to reach a culture-wide consensus of critical consciousness — a new hegemony — in which “inclusivity” (or now, “belonging”) is required, and cannot allow for anything outside itself to be granted legitimacy.
I think it important to display our collective exhaustion and disgust with the politicization of every last bit of the culture, and to make those who are true believers at the very least feel a portion of the exasperation they cause those to whom they presume to lecture. It’s not until the left ceases to feel emboldened to pursue its agenda openly and without worry of any serious backlash that we can even begin to re-orient the country toward its Founding and Framing. Rejecting such ads may seem like an insignificant act. And indeed, there are those out there whose role is to make you believe that — mocking you for puny gestures and your silly boycotts.Don Surber, in a similarly long post covering similar ground, concurs. "If it is so unimportant, why did the left rally behind it? Conservatives won this round. They will win more because this boycott showed them how to win." "It" referred to Bud Light; Miller Lite are now in similar trouble. "Conservatives can fight and win on social issues."
Laugh back at them. Refute them. Reject them. And reject their premises entirely. The quickest way to cease ceding ground is to fight for every inch. This is what the left has always known and done.
Now, it’s our turn.
The head coaching carousel in the NBA is underway, and the competition for hiring the best coach is starting to seriously heat up.I'll take no position on whether the Bucks' window of championship opportunities is starting to close (Wisconsin fans are touchy about that, particularly with a quarter century of Packer quarterback play good enough for ... all of two Super Bowl wins) or whether that early exit might have reflected a Miami Heat squad that got hot at the right time.
Don’t believe me?
Check this out…the best three records over the last three seasons belong our Milwaukee Bucks, the Phoenix Suns, and the Philadelphia 76ers – those are also three teams looking to hire their next head coach.
Maybe this is me being over dramatic, but I have yet to be thrilled or impressed with the list of interviewees the Bucks have brought in.
That list includes…Scott Brooks – No thanks, Mark Jackson? Nah. Kevin Young? Again, no. James Borrego? Ummm, not at all.
See a trend here? A lot of “No’s.”
You fired one of the most winning coaches in the association, and your list of interviews includes guys, with respect, nowhere near coach Bud’s level.
As an organization, why fire Bud only to look to hire someone a level or two, maybe three below his?
I like the term “hidden curriculum” a lot. It typically refers to the unspoken expectations in a given field that new entrants are expected to know, even if they were never formally taught. Someone not knowing the “hidden curriculum” can result in having a much harder time than the folks who do know it.The expectations are only "unspoken" if nobody speaks them. You'd think that we could have an institution to do that work. We could call it a "school." People at Inside Higher Education might take an interest in that task. Sadly, no.
Access to academia’s hidden curricula is uneven, though it tends broadly to correlate with race and parental backgrounds. Higher education isn’t the only industry with unwritten rules, though; part of the reason that so many professional athletes are the children of other professional athletes, I suspect, is that they’re raised knowing the unwritten rules. Others don’t. The recent concern about “nepo babies” in show business probably reflects their similar insider knowledge and, in that case, connections. When you grow up in an industry, you learn some of its rules by osmosis. That doesn’t guarantee success, but it helps.Let's let slide his confessions to being clueless about home improvement. As a class, academicians generally can't carry water for a patternmaker. Higher education's failure to inculcate that knowledge, though, is self-inflicted.
As educators, you’d think we’d be uniquely attuned to hidden curricula. You’d think we’d go out of our way to fill in those knowledge gaps, since sharing knowledge is the point of our industry. And sometimes we do. But we can do much better, and if we’re serious about equity and social mobility, we have to do better.But ... is anybody surprised, the column being posted in the house organ for all wokeness, all the time, that it neglects the most obvious design flaw.
This is where access-oriented colleges have a different task than the elites. The most exclusive places tend to skew heavily toward the children of the rich and powerful. The cultures in those places reflect that. The students from elite backgrounds know the unwritten rules of the class they expect to (re)join upon graduation; they don’t have to be told. (Scholarship students often run into an uncanny sense that things aren’t quite what they seem, but it isn’t obvious why.) That allows elite colleges not to spend too much time or energy on these issues. But access institutions bring in students who haven’t been exposed to the same unwritten rules. The rules they’ve learned are often quite complex in their own ways, but they’re built around a different reality. This is where academic advising, career advising and informal asides from professors can make a world of difference.That most obvious design flaw? Treating those "unwritten rules" as manifestations of "privilege," sometimes "unearned" privilege.
In the research of which I have been a part for more than 20 years, it is clear that evangelical students at public institutions feel routinely scrutinized if not dismissed for their beliefs. This form of silencing is not the same marginalization that occurs for racially and religiously minoritized students. Across the United States, for example, Muslim students are forced to pray in stairwells on campuses because dedicated spaces have not been made available to them or are not located near enough to their classes.Ist's nicht ein Haufen Mist? You say, "As a Moslem ..." and the Diversity Weenies will move heaven and earth to accommodate you, or progressive-stack your position in discussion, or equip campus restrooms with foot baths, or otherwise take steps to not give offense. You say "As a Christian ..." and the weight of Privilege Shaming, as summarized in that second paragraph, might land upon you.
Even so, evangelicals often feel as though their voices are compromised in the academy—that bringing up their religious point of view will lead to them being labeled as anti-intellectual, noncritical, overly biased and even stupid. Add to that the complications evangelicals have with initiating friendships on campus, with many nonevangelicals questioning the evangelicals’ intentions with sharing their stories: Are you interested in a genuine friendship with me or are you trying to coerce or convert me?
Of course, these experiences must be understood in light of the national conversation about Christianity and its influence in society and the academy. How does Christianity privilege evangelical students in the academy? Beyond academic calendars based on Christian holidays or buildings that resemble churches sprinkled throughout college campuses, Christianity often has been and continues to be used as a means for oppressing students who identify as non-Christian, making them feel like they don’t belong on campus.
Given these complexities, is it any wonder why we need offices of diversity, equity and inclusion on college campuses? In my research experiences with these offices, I’ve found that many DEI experts help evangelicals express themselves authentically, even as they hold privileges and unearned influence in society. Although helping evangelical students should and may not be the primary focus of their work, these experts also equip all students—and often educators—with the skills needed to communicate effectively across differences.Don't you love that "privileges and unearned influence?"
Titled "Bad $#!T to Good $#!T," the video announces an initiative from Miller Liteto transform previous sexist beer advertising into fertilizer that female brewers will use to grow hops.I'm not sure what's more amusing, the notion that shredded glossy paper somehow works as a soil additive, even after a few months in the compost pile, or whether the message indirectly confirms Undeniable Truth of Life No. 24. The Examiner story concludes with an excursion into the Culture Wars. "'Miller Lite said to Bud Light, 'hold my beer,' and decided to create a new ad campaign straight out of early 2010s 'I hate all men' feminism to sell a drink to customers they hate,' according to another tweet."
Comedian Ilana Glazer features in the video, which debuted for Women's History Month, and opens up about how Miller Lite is on a mission to make up for beer not always doing "right by women."
"Here's a little-known fact, women were among the very first to brew beer ever. From Mesopotamia to the Middle Ages to Colonial America, women were the ones doing the brewing," Glazer informs the public. "Centuries later, how did the industry pay homage to the founding mothers of beer? They put us in bikinis."
As the video continues, Glazer walks through a room of beer ads featuring scantly clad women and declares all the material "s***."
"It's time beer made it up to women," according to Glazer. "So today, Miller Lite is on a mission to clean up not just their s*** but the whole beer industry's s***."
"Miller Lite has been scouring the internet for all this s*** and buying it back so that we can turn it into good s*** for women brewers. Literally 'Good $#!T.'"
The former advertisements featuring content deemed derogatory toward women would be turned into compost, which would then be fed to worms and would end up as fertilizer, according to the video.
"That good s*** helps farmers grow quality hops," a female farmer says in the video.
"Which is then donated to women brewers to make their own really good s***," a female brewer adds.
Those who want to help can send in beer advertisements they find featuring women deemed as "bad s***" to Miller Lite, and the material will be turned into "good s***," according to the video.
"So here's to women," Glazer ends the video. "Because without us, there would be no beer."
In the wake of the Miller Lite video's resurgence, many on the Right appear to mistake the Women's History Month video, which is marked on YouTube as "unlisted," as an effort to out-"woke" Bud Light.
