Stephan: This may be a first report of what is going to become a major technological trend. In my remote viewing future studies people describe something like this, only smaller.
The ST-40 spherical tokamak fusion reactor Credit: Tokamak Energy
Oxford-based UK tech firm Tokamak Energy has reached a milestone in privately-funded fusion research after its ST-40 spherical tokamak reactor reached a temperature of 100 million °C (180 million °F), which it says is the threshold for commercial fusion energy.
For over 75 years, the promise of a practical fusion reactor has remained frustratingly out of reach, with the promise of one seemingly being just a couple of decades down the line for decades now. However, the implications of such a reactor technology and its ability to supply humanity with a practically unlimited supply of cheap, clean energy is such a game changer that scientists and engineers continue to pursue it.
The principle behind nuclear fusion is relatively simple. Just take hydrogen atoms and subject them to the kind of heat and pressures found inside the Sun long enough for them to fuse together to form heavier atoms and they release enormous amounts of energy in the process.
Unfortunately, this is a classic example of something like a violin, which is easy […]
Stephan: I took note today that Thom Hartmann apparently agrees with me about the Supreme Court, one of the three institutions upon which the American government is based. Hartmann agrees the highest court in the land has become a corrupt body. He lays this view out in some detail, and I think this should be taken very seriously. If we have a corrupt Supreme Court it follows that we will have corrupt decisions. To a democracy, this is a form of social cancer. To correct it I would start with the impeachment of Clarence Thomas who has been so blatantly corrupted by his wife, Ginny, that it is a national embarrassment, or should be. I think it should also be recognized that a large part of this corruption is another of criminal Trump's legacies.
Associate Justices Barrett and Thomas along with criminal Trump Credit: official White House photo by Andrea Hanks
So now, as expected after decades of taking big bucks for her rightwing work on behalf of America’s oligarchs, we learn that the wife of Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, Ginny Thomas, was in Trump’s January 6th “rally” up to her eyeballs.
Let’s just say it right out loud: the US Supreme Court is corrupt. And Americans know it.
And Senators Murphy, Blumenthal, Booker, Coons, Durbin, Gillibrand, Hirono, Klobuchar, Markey, Sanders, Whitehouse, Warren, Leahy, Menendez, Casey, Duckworth, and Van Hollen tried to do something about — an effort blocked by Republicans.
No other federal court in the nation would allow a defendant in a case before them to fly a judge on a private Gulfstream luxury jet to a luxury hunting retreat in Louisiana and then, a week later, watch as that judge rules in that defendant’s favor.
But Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia did exactly that when Dick Cheney was sued for allegedly lying about his secret […]
Stephan: Saudi Arabia which the United States virtually created in the modern sense, and supported for decades, under the aspiring despot Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has taken a different turn, as the murder and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi made clear. Along with Xi of China, bin Salman, has been exploring ways to alter the fundamentals of the current economic order. This report is an early datapoint on this emerging trend.
Saudi and Chinese officials are in talks to price some of the Gulf nation’s oil sales in yuan rather than dollars or euros, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter.
The two nations have intermittently discussed the matter for six years, but talks have reportedly stepped up in 2022, with Riyadh disgruntled over the United States’ nuclear negotiations with Iran and its lack of backing for Saudi Arabia’s military operation in neighboring Yemen.
Nearly 80 percent of global oil sales are priced in dollars, and since the mid-1970s the Saudis have exclusively used the dollar for oil trading as part of a security agreement with the U.S. government, according to the Journal.
The talks are the latest in an ongoing effort by Beijing both to make its currency tradeable in international oil markets and strengthen its relationship with the Saudis specifically. China previously aided Riyadh in construction of ballistic missiles and consultation on nuclear power.
Conversely, the Saudi-U.S. relationship has been increasingly frayed in recent years. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman […]
Stephan: American public education has for decades been a target for manipulation by willfully ignorant often fundamentalist Christian people who do not like facts and want only their fantasies and lies to be taught to children. Call it what it is, brainwashing. Critical Race Theory, which isn't even taught below the university level, is the current focus, but far from the first such effort. Long before CRT there was anti-evolution activism, the utterly distorted history about what happened to Native Americans, and lies about women's rights. This excellent article traces this militant stupidity down to the present day. This is one of the reasons Americans, particularly in Red states, are so poorly educated and are so far behind socially.
A book stand in Dayton, Tennessee, during the July, 1925, Scopes trial. Credit: Getty
In 1925, Lela V. Scopes, twenty-eight, was turned down for a job teaching mathematics at a high school in Paducah, Kentucky, her home town. She had taught in the Paducah schools before going to Lexington to finish college at the University of Kentucky. But that summer her younger brother, John T. Scopes, was set to be tried for the crime of teaching evolution in a high-school biology class in Dayton, Tennessee, in violation of state law, and Lela Scopes had refused to denounce either her kin or Charles Darwin. It didn’t matter that evolution doesn’t ordinarily come up in an algebra class. And it didn’t matter that Kentucky’s own anti-evolution law had been defeated. “Miss Scopes loses her post because she is in sympathy with her brother’s stand,” the Times reported.
In the nineteen-twenties, legislatures in twenty states, most of them in the South, considered thirty-seven anti-evolution measures. Kentucky’s bill, proposed in 1922, had been the first. It banned teaching, or countenancing the teaching of, “Darwinism, […]
Stephan: I don't know how much clearer it could get that the Republican Party is trying to rig elections by limiting access to people who tend to vote Democratic, largely people of color. What surprises me is how little citizen pushback there has been on this. In the civil rights era, people would have been in the streets.
When voters arrived at their polling place on March 1 in Azle, Texas, a small city outside of Fort Worth, they saw a framed, printed sign with standard voting instructions: no phones, printed materials allowed. Taped to it was another handwritten sign that read: “Sorry — No Democrat voting (not staffed).”
More than 170 election workers in the county dropped out at the last minute, Tarrant County Democratic Party Chair Allison Campolo told The Intercept. The party did not know how many voters had been stopped from voting at the county’s Azle location that day. Across the state, Campolo said, both parties had trouble finding election workers on primary day. But Tarrant County experienced “an extreme number of last minute drop offs of available election judges.”
According to the Texas Tribune, more than a dozen polling locations in Tarrant County were closed for several hours due to staffing shortages among election judges. Texas is one of several states — also including Missouri, Maryland, and Colorado — to employ election judges to open and run poll locations, manage poll workers, and settle disputes. […]
