tingilinde

bagley

 

 

 

important to remember

The MAGA lies about Haitian immigrants and the "eating pets" messages are very deliberate.  They're meant to distract voters from the fact they have little to offer that's positive.  

There's no plan to raise income for anyone but the rich, no plan to make housing affordable, nothing to protect healthcare and social security, nothing for climate change, nothing to stand with allies, and nothing to help Ukraine. There is a tariff plan and the hateful fascism of Project 2025.

It's telling that none of the Republicans in the house and senate has condemned the stochastic terrorism Trump and Vance are spewing.

 

 

trump's healthcare plan

He has a plan - he tried it before and almost got it.

snip

...

The problem is not that Mr. Trump can’t think up a way to put his values into action. The problem is that when he and other Republican leaders produce plans with actual details, they horrify the American people.

Mr. Trump’s health care values have been on full display for years. In 2017, Republicans controlled Congress, and their first major legislative undertaking was a bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Every time they drafted something, independent experts would point out that their plan would toss tens of millions of people off their health insurance, jack up premium costs and slash benefits for those with ongoing health problems.

After months of wrangling, Mr. Trump and Republican lawmakers voted a bill through the House to repeal the A.C.A. That night, Mr. Trump hosted a party at the White House to celebrate their big step toward taking away health care from millions of people.

A.C.A. repeal then moved to the Senate. Republicans had the majority, so if they all stuck with Mr. Trump, the A.C.A. would die. As senators gathered to vote, nearly all of the Democrats — including Kamala Harris, then a senator from California — remained standing, too anxious even to sit down. We murmured stories about who would be affected by this vote: the uncle who had cancer and would lose coverage, the kid diagnosed with a heart anomaly whose parents wouldn’t be able to find new insurance, the college students who would just go without coverage and hope they didn’t fall on ice or get in a car accident. We felt the weight of people’s lives on the line.

As the votes rolled in, we could see that Mr. Trump was on track to win. Our last hope was John McCain. When Mr. McCain put his thumb down, he saved the Affordable Care Act. That one vote made the difference for millions of Americans between losing and keeping their health care coverage.

...

 

 

a neat way to control a prosthesis

Implanted magnets

snip

...

Restoration of dexterous motor control after an amputation is challenging in the field of prosthetics and often relies on transduction of electrical signals from the brain to control bionic limbs. Gherardini et al. have now developed a myokinetic interface involving the implantation of magnets within muscle groups of the residual limb of a transradial amputee and a prosthesis device controlled wirelessly. Muscle deformation due to voluntary contraction was harnessed for dexterous bionic hand control through a direct control strategy and with the aid of a pattern recognition algorithm, enabling the user to carry out functional tasks such as picking up and grasping fragile objects as well as tying shoelaces

...

a tip of the hat to  Sukie

 

on the megatsunami

There are several general pieces on last year's megatsunami.  Greg points to what I think is the best.

snip

...

Their analysis of an initial high-energy seismic signal, combined with satellite images of a missing rock patch along a cliff along Dickson Fjord, allowed them to trace the direction of the landslide as it picked up glacier ice and became a mixed rock-ice avalanche before it reached the water. The resulting megatsunami run-up was more than 200 meters (650 feet) near the water entry point and an average of 60 meters (200 feet) along a 10-kilometer (6 miles) stretch of the fjord.

...

The paper in Science is paywalled, but worth the read if you have access.

 

 

 

gop lawmakers on lies, hate and stochastic violence

They're for it as long as it's from Trump and Vance.  This sort of thing in pure tin-pot dictator behavior. 

a tip of the hat to Dan

 

om's third eye concept

Om Malik on where digital cameras are going.

 

shields down

People are getting sick from other things than Covid than they were before the pandemic. 

a tip of the hat to Roland

 

most people are better off than they were four years ago

The evidence is solid

a tip of the hat to Dan, who adds:

The plain truth of this furious commentary may not make a difference, unfortunately. For one thing, aggregate statistics don't persuade people who haven't been told the truth, and are constantly goaded to fear everything. As Noah observes, the income and wealth gap between the ultra-rich and everyone else has continued to soar during the Biden administration. America's oligarchs are flaunting their power over everyone else. Cartels and monopolists control industry after industry. The hedge-fund and private-equity looters have gone unchecked, doing incalculable harm to communities across the nation. Inflation has been real, and painful, even though it was a global phenomenon and the U.S. had the lowest inflation among industrialized economies (among the things our news media have almost never bothered to report). Tens of millions of Americans are still a paycheck or two away from financial ruin. That's angst-inducing stuff. The Biden administration is pushing pro-labor and pro-consumer policies (notably including real antitrust enforcement), which take time to be noticed in the aggregate. It's fair to say that the Democrats have been incompetent at telling the public about the very real progress – and that the press, for whatever reason, hasn't cared to notice.

 

this year's Ig Nobels

This one is better than the last few