I was going to do a themed post about elections and Dems bouncing back, but I think I’ll just post random good news that I came across.
But OK, first let’s look at election news:
Good election news, current and future
I was worried when Deb Haaland left the House with its oh so slim majority to go take care of our Interior. But the voters of New Mexico didn’t let us down and Deb’s seat stays blue.
Part of our losses in 2020 were due to Hispanic voters being swayed by Trumpspeak. Some experts are seeing the Latinx vote coming home.
We need to work as hard as we possibly can, but it doesn’t look hopeless, and that is great gnus.
Also, people are turning away from that guy and from Trumpism. Here in California, they can’t get any traction at all. What worked 20 years ago ain’t working now.
Bears, Fox News and ‘Houdini’: Newsom escaping as Republicans fail to break momentum
Newsom has two advantages. First, he is pretty popular right now, with 57% of voters saying they do not want him recalled. Also, running against him is a clown car of idiots with the leading candidate running with a bear and the others one degree or more away from The Crazy. Also, there are darn few Republicans remaining in California. (McCarthy and Nunes are outliers. We don’t claim them.)
They’ve always said that whatever starts in California eventually happens everywhere, so there’s that. Let’s hope the extinction of the GOP that happened in California spreads far and wide.
Things aren’t going smoothly in evangelical land, either. Let’s take a look at Liberty University.
An Evangelical Battle of the Generations: To Embrace Trump or Not?
For years, there was an adage around Liberty University that if God split Jerry Falwell in half, you would have his sons Jerry and Jonathan.
Jerry Jr. inherited his father’s desire to be a force in American politics, and his post as Liberty University president, while Jonathan inherited his father’s gift for evangelical uplift and became pastor of his church.
Now, 14 years after Jerry Falwell Sr. died and nine months after Jerry Jr. was ousted in a scandal, Liberty is enmeshed in a debate that could have profound implications for the nation’s religious right: Whether it should keep nurturing Jerry Jr.’s focus on politics and maintain its high-flying role in the Republican Party, or begin to change its culture and back away from politics, an approach increasingly favored by younger evangelicals.
I’m wondering if younger evangelicals are leaning a bit more left than their parents? They don’t seem to be young Trumpers, so that’s a big plus.
Biden is always good news
Who guessed Joe Biden had a temper? From one president who didn’t give a crap about details, or anything, really, we now have a president who is obsessed with details, and don’t come unprepared for questions like “how with this affect the factory workers?” or you’ll get the blunt end of Joe Biden.
As Mr. Biden settles into the office he has chased for more than three decades, aides say he demands hours of debate from scores of policy experts.
Quick decision-making is not Mr. Biden’s style. His reputation as a plain-speaking politician hides a more complicated truth. Before making up his mind, the president demands hours of detail-laden debate from scores of policy experts, taking everyone around him on what some in the West Wing refer to as his Socratic “journey” before arriving at a conclusion.
Those trips are often difficult for his advisers, who are peppered with sometimes obscure questions. Avoiding Mr. Biden’s ire during one of his decision-making seminars means not only going beyond the vague talking points that he will reject, but also steering clear of responses laced with acronyms or too much policy minutiae, which will prompt an outburst of frustration, often laced with profanity.
Let’s talk plain English here, he will often snap.
Oh, and Major is no longer in the dog house. And he’s getting a cat buddy!
Biden family dog Major returns to the White House and will get a new feline friend
President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden have confirmed that their dog Major is back at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. after being sent to an off-site training "to help him adjust to life in the White House" earlier this month.
"He's back, yeah," Jill Biden said in an interview clip released Friday on NBC's "Today" show. "He is such a sweet loveable dog, he really is."
In other news
UK reports zero daily Covid deaths for the first time since July
Britain on Tuesday reported zero daily deaths from Covid-19 for the first time since July 30 last year despite a recent rise in cases linked to the Delta variant.
Tuesday's zero daily deaths came after the government reported just one Covid death across the UK on Monday, a public holiday.
Official death figures are typically lower at weekends and holidays because of a lag in reporting.
The milestone comes after Britain moved forward with plans in recent months to unlock its economy.
The government imposed a tough lockdown in January during a second wave of cases and deaths that followed the emergence of a more transmissible variant.
Also, say goodbye to “Brazil variant” or “UK variant”. They are going to be given Greek letter names now.
Covid-19 variants to be given Greek alphabet names to avoid stigma
Coronavirus variants are to be named after letters of the Greek alphabet instead of their place of first discovery, the World Health Organization has announced, in a move to avoid stigma.
The WHO has named four variants of concern, known to the public as the UK/Kent (B.1.1.7), South Africa (B.1.351), Brazil (P.1) and India (B.1.617.2) variants. They will now be given the letters Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Delta respectively, to reflect their order of detection, with any new variants following the pattern down the Greek alphabet.
The decision to go for this naming system came after months of deliberations with experts considering a range of other possibilities such as Greek Gods, according to bacteriologist Mark Pallen who was involved in the talks.
That’s good because I do not want to be fighting the Zeus virus.
REPURPOSING MINING WASTELANDS
Toxic Coal Waste Could Be the Key to Our Clean Energy Future
Coal waste is a source for rare-earth minerals that we currently import from China. A current shortage of these elements is one factor that is keeping auto production lower than demand.
At an abandoned coal mine just outside the city of Gillette, Wyoming, construction crews are getting ready to break ground on a 10,000-square-foot building that will house state-of-the-art laboratories and manufacturing plants. Among the projects at the facility, known as the Wyoming Innovation Center, will be a pilot plant that aims to takes coal ash—the sooty, toxic waste left behind after coal is burned for energy—and use it to extract rare earths, elements that play an essential role in everything from cellphones and LED screens to wind turbines and electric cars.
Extracting rare earths from this waste could help the U.S. meet a resource need while also solving an environmental problem. While the conventional rare earth ores mined today in places like China contain higher concentrations of these metals than coal waste does, the latter often contains relatively high concentrations of heavy rare earths like dysprosium that are harder to find in conventional ores. Scientists at the DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory, which has been studying how to extract rare earths from coal waste since 2014, have already demonstrated that mixtures of them can be recovered at a “very high purity” in a laboratory setting, said Maryanne Alvin, the rare earth and critical minerals technology manager at the National Energy Technology Laboratory.
Extracting rare earths from this waste could help the U.S. meet a resource need while also solving an environmental problem.
And while nobody knows exactly how much rare earth material there is hiding in coal ash piles, waste ponds, and acid mine drainage sites around the country, Alvin says that in the Appalachian region alone, an estimated 6,000 metric tons of rare earths flow through acid mine drainage sites each year. The United States’ annual rare earth demand stands at around 12,000 to 13,000 metric tons.
How abandoned strip mines are being rescued by a field of sweet-smelling purple plants
The ruined soil that is left behind from a strip mining operation turns out to be perfect for growing lavender.
Jocelyn Sheppard hasn’t always been a lavender and honey farmer. For more than a decade, she was the founding partner of a consulting firm that did market research, business planning and grant writing for tech startups and nonprofits. But something came up at work that pulled her into a completely different world.
“I was hired to write a grant to explore the feasibility of growing lavender on reclaimed coal mine land,” Sheppard recalls, “When the grant was winding down, I had the idea that this would be great as a commercial opportunity.”
This year, Sheppard’s notion became a reality in Boone County, W.Va. Her new company, Appalachian Botanical, is now a 35-acre lavender farm and apiary located in the bowl of an old strip mine.
Appalachia’s people have a lot of problems brought on by poverty and unemployment. Sheppard is giving people with addictions and criminal records good jobs and it is making a difference. Click the link above to meet Adam Mitchell, former drug dealer and addict who is now a line supervisor at Appalachian Botanical.
Oh, and if that isn’t enough, the mine owners aren’t allowed to return their land to the state until it has recovered enough to grow things, and this effort is handling that, too. Win-win-win.
Here’s another former drug dealer who was given a second chance
A judge swore in a lawyer who was once a drug dealer in his courtroom 16 years ago
(Click the link for all the feels)
(CNN)It was a Friday afternoon when Edward Martell, dressed in a dark purple suit and bow tie, stood in front of Judge Bruce Morrow's courtroom. With one hand raised, the new lawyer was sworn into the State Bar of Michigan.
Sixteen years ago in that same Wayne County courtroom, Martell stood in front of Morrow and pleaded guilty to selling and manufacturing crack cocaine.
Good news confetti
Vax hesitancy is slowly going away.
From the Schadenfreude files, a boat harasses another boat that is flying rainbow flags. The harassing boat catches fire and the passengers get rescued by the rainbow-ers.
Moses Lake boaters allegedly harassed another group over gay pride flags. Then their boat burst into flames. And Kossack AdmiralNaismith put it to music: From the Kos Songbook: The Wreck of the SS Homophobic Gordon Lightfoot would be proud.
More schadenfreude
Trump ends blog after 29 days, infuriated by measly readership
And here is an example of why Gavin Newsom isn’t going to be recalled:
Zero Textbook Cost
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In a review of over 179,000 letter grades, the ZTC degree program boasts a 3.1% increase for ZTC students, compared to non-ZTC students.
It’s about time. I’m sick of book publishers changing a tiny thing in their textbook and requiring students to purchase a new book instead of buying a used one or checking a title out of the library. It’s a racket.
That’s all I have for today. See you all in July!