How the US Supreme Court swung the House Republican
And other great things I found on the net this week
Judge Roberts blanches at the hypocrisy. The others, not so much
Republicans are currently forecast to win control of the House by a small margin. [Stop Press: at the time of writing the odds had been revised to 50:50] If that projection holds, it will be no overstatement to say that the conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court took control of the House of Representatives for Republicans.
In February, by a 5–4 vote, SCOTUS suspended the Voting Rights Act’s ban on racial gerrymandering. For decades, the VRA prohibited states from drawing congressional maps that dilute the votes of racial minorities by depriving them of a fair opportunity to elect their preferred representatives. Sensing an ally in the judiciary, red states brazenly violated this principle during the latest round of redistricting. In states like Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Texas, Republican lawmakers packed racial minorities into as few districts as possible. These lawmakers then carved up remaining minority communities, distributing them throughout majority-white districts. …
An early test came when voting rights advocates filed a lawsuit against Alabama’s new congressional map, which packed most Black residents into a single, sprawling district, then sprinkled the rest throughout overwhelmingly white districts. Again: It’s hard to think of a clearer example of illegal racist redistricting. The map was so egregious that a three-judge district court with two Donald Trump appointees struck it down in January, writing a meticulous 225-page opinion rigorously applying the VRA. (The case is called Merrill v. Milligan.) Alabama promptly asked the Supreme Court to halt the decision.
Five and a half minutes you’ll never get back
I didn’t want them back! These are lovely paintings — or I thought do. I’d never heard of the guy before.
Alex Katz archive of images here.
From the sublime to the ridiculous
OK — well maybe the other way around.
I’m not particularly a soccer fan but one day YouTube had its way with me and showed me this video. Since then it’s managed to snare me with Messi and Ronaldo. But nothing beats first love. I accept that this guy might not have been quite as effective for his side as Messi or at least for as long, but he’s way more fun to watch. His Latin exuberance is simply a joy to behold. The soundtrack also helps. Enjoy!
OK — this was the sublime one!
The old form of corporate social responsibility: RIP
Interesting article by Bill Janeway.
As scientific discovery supplanted mechanical tinkering as the basis for economically meaningful innovation in the late nineteenth century, the required research funding was supplied by the corporations that the Second Industrial Revolution (steel, railroads, mass production) had spawned. “In firms such as American Telephone & Telegraph, General Electric, U.S. Steel or DuPont,” write David Mowery and Nathan Rosenberg in Technology and the Pursuit of Economic Growth, “the development of a strong central office was closely associated with the establishment or significant expansion of a central research facility.”
By allocating their monopoly profits to scientific research and development of technological applications, these corporations extended their market power while also serving a larger, social purpose. Before World War II, this purpose was not being met by the US government, which, starting in the Lincoln administration, had provided federal research support only for the agriculture sector. By 1940, the US government was allocating more research funding to agriculture than to all the constituent agencies that would make up the post-war Department of Defense.
But it wasn’t to last.
#SkinInTheGame
The power of the vortex (of spin)
Telling Tennant’s Story: another review
I wrote about this excellent book last week. Go out and buy it! And here’s an interesting review I ran into from Alice Springs.
A Nuclear Renaissance?
A depressing article which has all the right instincts — which is to take nuclear on its merits, not on the hype or the panic. But although the article is ‘spun’ as possible good news on the nuclear front, it gives you its history of how it went off the rails as the Next Big Thing in energy. There’s some evidence that safety regulation is excessive, but this article argues that the problem was mostly just cost. That the technology was overhyped. It then asks whether small modular reactors might be the breakthrough technology. It says they might be, but there are plenty of potential cost difficulties that might be hard to solve. And some set-backs that are reminiscent of the previous larger scale technology.
The gamble was simple. Manufacturers assumed that as the nuclear industry scaled up, construction and operating costs would drop until the actual startup cost would reflect the artificially low price they were offering to utilities. General Electric and Westinghouse together took on more than a billion dollars of losses over the mid-1960s, offering utilities nuclear power at fixed costs that would be competitive with coal-fired plants.
But expenses never did drop. The manufacturers had far underestimated the costs of constructing the reactors and of getting the power plants up and running, while dramatically overestimating how much electricity the plants could generate. …
Luckily, the innovations of the last twenty years offer some solutions. Much of the renewed excitement around nuclear has been thanks to the introduction of small modular reactors (SMRs). …
Small modular reactors have yet begun commercial construction in the United States (China became the first country to connect one to its grid last December). So it is difficult to know just how much of a barrier our regulations will prove to be in the long term. But with the NRC’s first-ever certification of an SMR design in July, we are starting to get a sense of where things might be headed.
Early signs warn of serious challenges to come. On the regulatory side, the NRC took three and a half years to complete its safety certification for NuScale Power’s SMR design. Throughout this process, NRC’s out-of-date regulatory framework forced NuScale to apply for seventeen exemptions, each of which required its own set of robust technical justifications. Many of these were palpably absurd — one exemption, for example, involved a control room staffing requirement that was put in place for much larger light-water reactors.
Unfortunately, the NRC is not the only source of NuScale’s troubles. Much like Westinghouse and General Electric in the 1970s, NuScale drastically underestimated its costs and construction times from the outset. Estimated costs for its first scheduled project have already doubled, from three billion dollars to six. And the completion of that project has been pushed back by three years to 2030, leading a number of utilities to back out of the deal. The company has overpromised and underdelivered.
Rachael Perkins: great LNL interview
Having watched Perkins’ harrowing First Australians, get ready for some more harrowing TV on Australia’s frontier war. I loved, just loved Perkins’ manner. It’s quietly passionate as one can imagine, yet very matter of fact. Not an ounce of histrionics.
A well-argued piece on the trans madness
In case you need yet more on the gruelling upshot of a particular ‘comms’ strategy.
What began as an informal social and economic pressure campaign has crossed over into a formal effort by coercive state agencies to restrict freedom of expression, assembly, and conscience. In Norway, a feminist organiser named Christina Ellingsen could face up to three years in prison for tweeting that males who identify as women cannot be lesbians or mothers, because this statement violates Norway’s newly expanded hate crime laws. In Canada, a human rights tribunal entertained the complaints of a trans-identified male against religious-minority women who refused to provide intimate hair-removal services. Professors like Selina Todd and Kathleen Stock have needed security to accompany them on their own university campuses after voicing concerns about proposed reforms to the Gender Recognition Act. In England, police have investigated ordinary citizens for tweeting salty limericks or displaying ‘transphobic’ stickers.
