...like trying to starve a people we both have nuclear missiles aimed at...
Best thing you'll see today...😍🐶 pic.twitter.com/S6jvboZayg
— Rex Chapman🏇🏼 (@RexChapman) January 23, 2020
Alice hasn't even taken off yet, and already over 150 orders have been placed for her.Who is Alice?Alice is the name given to the all-electric nine-seat aircraft that Israel startup Eviation Aircraft created early this year. Alice has three electric motors on its tail and one on the tip of each wing. On a single charge, Alice's 3,500 kg battery can carry her 650 miles at 10,000 feet with a cruising speed of 276 miles per hour.The electric plane will reduce direct operating costs by up to 70 percent, which would make the running costs come out to be about $200 per flight hour versus $1,000 for a turboprop, reports NoCamels.
At a press briefing at the World Economic Forum in the Swiss town of Davos, Mnuchin took a swipe at the 17-year-old environmental campaigner for her recommendation that both the public and private sectors should divest from fossil fuels.When asked how that would affect the U.S. economic model, Mnuchin took a swipe at Thunberg."Is she the chief economist? Who is she? I'm confused," he said. Then following a brief pause, he said it was "a joke.""After she goes and studies economics in college, she can come back and explain that to us," he concluded.
Economics is only controversial in the partisan political sphere, not in academics, business, nor in practice.Forty-five top economists from across the political spectrum are calling for the United States to put a tax on carbon, saying it is by far the best way for the nation to address climate change."A carbon tax offers the most cost-effective lever to reduce carbon emissions at the scale and speed that is necessary," the economists wrote in letter published Wednesday evening in the Wall Street Journal. They called climate change a "serious problem" that needs "immediate national action."Nearly every Republican and Democratic chair of the Council of Economic Advisers since the 1970s signed the letter, including Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke and Janet L. Yellen, who are also former chairs of the Federal Reserve. Numerous Nobel laureates in economics also added their names."Among economists, this is not controversial," said Greg Mankiw, who chaired the Council of Economic Advisers under George W. Bush and signed the letter. "The politics is complicated, the international relations is complicated, but the economics is really simple."
Backed into a corner and influence waning, the United States has in recent weeks been promoting a plan to create an autonomous Sunni region in western Iraq, officials from both countries told Middle East Eye.The US efforts, the officials say, come in response to Shia Iraqi parties' attempts to expel American troops from their country.Iraq represents a strategic land bridge between Iran and its allies in Syria, Lebanon and Palestine.Establishing a US-controlled Sunni buffer zone in western Iraq would deprive Iran of using land routes into Syria and prevent it from reaching the eastern shores of the Mediterranean.For Washington, the idea of carving out a Sunni region dates back to a 2007 proposition by Joe Biden, who is now vying to be the Democratic Party's presidential candidate.
Wednesday, at the Davos conference 4,000 miles from Washington, President Trump boasted about his successful obstruction of the House's investigation of his Ukraine shakedown. Speaking of the impeachment trial, he declared: "Honestly, we have all the material. They don't have the material."Trump couldn't have wrapped a neater bow around the rather impressive case that House Democrats have still built, obstruction notwithstanding.
After years of playing third fiddle to solar and wind power, new geothermal plants are finally getting built.Geothermal plants can generate emissions-free, renewable electricity around the clock, unlike solar panels or wind turbines. The technology has been used commercially for decades and involves tapping naturally heated underground reservoirs to create steam and turn turbines.Geothermal accounted for 4.5% of California's electricity mix in 2018 -- about one-fifth the amount supplied by solar and wind, which made up the bulk of California's renewable energy supply.
The percentage of American workers in unions fell to a record low in 2019, extending a long slide that began decades ago and shows little sign of abating.The number of unionized workers slipped to 14.57 million last year from 14.74 in 2018, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said Wednesday in an annual report.As a result, the share of workers belonging to unions dropped to a new post-World War Two low of 10.3% from 10.5%.
Remember Terri Schiavo? She was a beloved daughter, sister and (new) wife when, in 1990, at the age of 26, she had a heart attack. Though she was revived and breathed on her own, Terri sustained significant brain damage and was deemed to be in a permanent vegetative state.A big part of the debate that gripped the U.S. in the mid-2000s about whether to take Schiavo off of life support had to do with her Catholic upbringing. While her husband maintained that Schiavo wouldn't have wanted to live with the aid of a feeding tube, her parents and brother said she would have agreed with Pope John Paul II, who weighed in on her case, that food and water are care, not medical treatment, and are basic to respect fundamental human dignity.But leave those issues aside for a moment. The received view both during and after the debate over Terri's case, especially if you thought that she ought to have her feeding tube removed, was that someone in a vegetative state essentially had the functions of a "vegetable." This turns out to be wrong, but you can be forgiven for thinking so: after all, given the term "vegetative state" that we've all been taught to use.In the 15 years since Schiavo died -- an eternity in the world of medical research and technology -- much has changed. And what has changed should make us totally rethink fundamental questions about patients thought to be "vegetative."Even before Terri died, in fact, folks who were forthright about our limited understanding of the brain and consciousness knew that permanent vegetative state, or PVS, was a sloppy and ill-defined category. In 2002, for instance, certain PVS patients were categorized as being in "minimally conscious state." In 2006, a dramatic study found that a PVS patient could be understood to answer yes or no questions by watching the patient's brain activity on a live scan while asking her to think about playing tennis to answer yes and walking in her house to answer no.In his 2015 book, "Rights Come to Mind," Joe Fins, an attending physician and chief of medical ethics at New York Presbyterian Hospital and Weill Cornell Medical College, tells deeply researched stories of several patients thought to be vegetative but who ended up in a very different place.
There aren't enough homes on the market. The inventory of existing homes for sale last month fell to the lowest level in records dating back to 1982, a potential stumbling block for homebuyers and catalyst for accelerating price gains. "Low inventory remains a problem, with first-time buyers affected the most," said National Association of Realtors chief economist Lawrence Yun.
Even Karl Marx appreciated capitalism's transformative capacity. As George Will writes in this piece from the early 1980s, "Marx got one thing right: capitalism undermines traditional social structures and values; it is a relentless engine of change, a revolutionary inflamer of appetites, enlarger of expectations, diminisher of patience." See, for example, the enthusiastic support many progressive causes currently enjoy among the American corporate world, a phenomenon known as woke capitalism. Will argues: "The Republican platform stresses two themes ... One is cultural conservatism, the other is capitalist dynamism. The latter dissolves the former. Republicans see no connection between the cultural phenomena they deplore, and the capitalist culture they promise to intensify." The GOP takes a far from laissez-faire approach to economics, yet the party is still prone to confuse any critique of capitalism with a leftist plot. But, if it weren't for capitalism's tendency to conserve certain hierarchical social structures, a glance at its contemporary cultural effects could lead one to think it had been designed as an antidote to conservatism itself.In his April 2019 debate with Jordan Peterson on Marxism vs Capitalism, Slavoj Zizek argues that, "What the alt-right obsession with cultural Marxism expresses is the reluctance to confront the fact that the phenomena that they criticize as a Marxist plot--moral degradation, sexual promiscuity, consumerist hedonism--are outcomes of the immanent dynamic of capitalist societies." The debate exposes the problematic expectations surrounding any discussion of capitalism--"one is expected to serve either as an avatar of Western liberal order or a defender of the Soviet Union, as if it were still the year 1972," as Christian O'Brien puts it--and highlights the way in which conservatives tend to rely on a dogmatic defence of free markets. Peterson has never hidden his support for traditional values and his disdain for Marxist ideology. But, in his attempts to combat dangerous ideas, such as the communist abolition of private property, and the notion that government should seize the means of production, Peterson often reduces his analysis to the lowest possible level of resolution--adopting the kind of binary view of economics characteristic of TPUSA. The claim that we must continue to support free markets because of the shortcomings of The Communist Manifesto is simplistic and fails to address modern concerns about free markets.
It's like those polls on evolution where you get down to 14% Darwinists but then 5% has to be discounted because they still believe in God.Nearly half of self-described pro-choice Americans actually support "significant restrictions" on abortion, a new poll finds.Maris Poll's annual survey on abortion, sponsored by the Knights of Columbus, found that 40% of those surveyed identified as pro-life and 55% as pro-choice, with 5% undecided.But when the question was rephrased to ask whether those surveyed would support "significant restrictions" on abortion, 7 in 10 responded that they would. This included 47% of pro-choicers."A notable proportion (41%) of those who identify as pro-choice are more likely to vote for candidates who support restrictions, as are more than 9 in 10 who identify as pro-life (96%)," the survey summary says.
One problem the Republican Party has struggled with for decades has been its inability to distance itself from the bad actors in its midst. For many conservatives, a general conviction that the mainstream media and the left tend to operate in bad faith leads them to embrace any figure deemed a pariah by the media on "enemy of my enemy" grounds. In recent years, the problem has been less the party's inability to distance itself from bad actors as it has been the eager willingness of some in the GOP to embrace grifters, conspiracy theorists and bigots.This week, we saw two striking examples of this phenomenon. The first took place at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where the White House issued a press credential for the trip to Rick Wiles of TruNews. The problem: TruNews is a ludicrously anti-Semitic blog that peddles the absurd notion of a Jewish conspiracy to seize political power to carry out mass murder against American Christians. In recent months, Wiles has repeatedly insisted that Democrats' impeachment effort against the president was part of this "Jew Coup"--because "that's the way the Jews work, they are deceivers, they plot, they lie, they do whatever they have to do to accomplish their political agenda."That's not an isolated example. It's typical of the aggressive anti-Semitism that characterizes the views of Wiles and the bigots who appear with him."This is by far, I think, the most prestigious event in the world," Wiles bragged in his broadcast from Davos. "It's an honor to be here, and we just want to thank President Trump and the White House for extending the invitation to be here. ... There's a lot of people in the news media that are very upset that TruNews is showing up at these places, but it's God's favor on us. Almighty God's favor is on TruNews."The White House has not yet offered an explanation for its decision to credential TruNews in Davos.Then there was the event that took place at the Florida Capitol on Tuesday, at which state Sen. Joe Gruters, who also serves as chairman of the Florida Republican Party, plugged a bill designed to stop big social media companies from allegedly silencing conservative voices.The bill itself, which would expose companies like Facebook and Twitter to civil liability if they censor religious or political speech on their platforms, isn't particularly noteworthy in itself--it's the sort of thing that's trendy among a certain sort of market-skeptical conservatives right now, structurally similar to a federal bill Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley introduced last year. What was particularly noteworthy was who Gruters had there to introduce the bill with him: Laura Loomer, the loony internet conspiracy theorist and self-styled "proud Islamophobe" who has called for a permanent ban on Muslims entering the country, a prohibition of Muslims serving in elected office, and was kicked off most social media platforms last year over her constant inflammatory remarks.