My guy, how do you post links to the fucking Heritage Foundation and the Carnegie Endowment with a straight face?

Environmental Radicalism. In a similar vein, Executive Order 14008 claims that America must achieve “significant short-term global reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and net-zero global emissions by mid-century or before.” This approach to “climate change” and “environmental justice” will impose tens of trillions of dollars in costs on the economy, with much of the burden falling on the poor, farmers, and small businesses, lowering the standard of living for all Americans, with negligible environmental benefits.

Debasing Science. Not every government-spanning initiative by the Biden Administration has required an executive order. A memorandum from the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the White House Council on Environmental Quality in November 2022 called on the federal government to use Indigenous Knowledge (IK), which is associated with tribal communities and cultures

This isn’t evidence, its a right-wing screed.

A handful of hydrogen bombs could wipe all live off the face of the earth, but we need to have 100x that in our arsenal set to a hair’s trigger, just in case.

People clap like seals when they see the “Jill Stein was seated with Putin” picture, but lose their fucking minds whenever someone posts

And don’t you dare ask where Kamala’s getting her money.

Inside Kamala Harris’ Reenergized Web of Silicon Valley Investors, Billionaires and Power Brokers

You’re simply not allowed to talk about the congealing mass of neocons and techbros that surround the Democratic Party. Because that might hurt their electoral chances. And winning is literally all that matters, even if it means bringing in the exact same posse of crooks, hawks, and freaks that surrounded Trump during his first four years in office.

The US is spending $1.7T over the next thirty years to completely overhaul its nuclear arsenal.

But don’t worry, I’ve got a Beretta in my holster and a shotgun under the bed.

Biden has been firmly left of Obama

He campaigned by co-opting a number of Bernie’s platforms in 2020 and immediately abandoned them on taking office.

What makes you say Biden has been more conservative?

He cut back a bunch of progressive social programs on the back end of COVID, then ratcheted up military and police spending and sent big financial kickbacks to a bunch of morbund corporate interests. His DOJ has fixated on drug crime and immigration crime, while going nearly blind to financial crime and civil rights abuses. O&G drilling surged on his watch, particularly on public lands. He’s been steadily privatizing everything from the post office to the space program.

Dude’s to the right of Ronald Reagan.

no one’s certain this will be cost-effective either

One of the great sins of nuclear energy programs implemented during the 50s, 60s, and 70s was that it was too cost effective. Very difficult to turn a profit on electricity when you’re practically giving it away. Nuclear energy functions great as a kind-of loss-leader, a spur to your economy in the form of ultra-low-cost utilities that can incentivize high-energy consumption activities (like steel manufacturing and bulk shipping and commercial grade city-wide climate control). But its miserable as a profit center, because you can’t easily regulate the rate of power generation to gouge the market during periods of relatively high demand. Nuclear has enormous up-front costs and a long payoff window. It can take over a decade to break even on operation, assuming you’re operating at market rates.

By contrast, natural gas generators are perfect for profit-maximzing. Turning the electric generation on or off is not much more difficult than operating a gas stove. You can form a cartel with your friends, then wait for electric price-demand to peak, and command thousands of dollars a MWh to fill the sudden acute need for electricity. Natural gas plants can pay for themselves in a matter of months, under ideal conditions.

So I wouldn’t say the problem is that we don’t know their cost-efficiency. I’d say the problem is that we do know. And for consumer electricity, nuclear doesn’t make investment sense. But for internally consumed electricity on the scale of industrial data centers, it is exactly what a profit-motivated power consumer wants.

They know voters would be turned off by the more accurate message: vote for me and we can turn the steering wheel of this massive machine slightly left for 4 years

That’s exactly the message they’ve been running on since 2008.

Obama’s “the long arc of history bends towards progress” speech was this practically verbatium. And it was popular precisely because it was seen as modest and achievable. The problem is that Obama didn’t achieve it. He spent eight years treading water from the Bush Era, during which he normalized a bunch of the illegal, unconscionable, and ultimately detrimental practices of the Bush Administration before handing the reins over to… Donald Trump.

History didn’t bend towards progress. It whipped directly back in the face of those enthusiastic moderates. But the only lesson it appears to have taught them is that even Obama was too ambitious and too extreme, despite bending over backwards to appease moderate Republicans. So Biden stepped in as an even more conservative version of Obama. Two years into office, he too gets hit with a backlash, which the party took to conclude they were too radical under Biden.

Now we’ve got Harris, a candidate who has fallen fully in line with the Cheney family on litany of domestic and foreign policy issues. Will this turn voters off? Will it prove that the Cheneys are too left-wing for the American voter? Only time will tell.

So seven “small” reactors over the next eleven years ……

Is more than we’ve built in the last 40. And, assuming energy demands continue to accelerate, I doubt they’ll be the last seven reactors these companies construct.

Don’t spend this enormous sum of resources and manpower on a system we will - in the best case scenario - never use.

Instead, invest the effort in building domestic surpluses of clean energy, transportation, and housing, recycling the existing surplus of consumer waste, and repairing damage to the domestic ecology so as to increase the survivability of the human species into the next century.

The answer when facing opposition isn’t to throw up your hands and declare it too difficult. Keep pushing

That is, unfortunately, not the message that modern liberals seem to adhere to.

Side note, don’t fucking blame marginalized people when things go sideways.

But it’s the American Way.

It’s been on a run over the last month, coming off a $12/share low and screeching towards a $32/share high.

Movement like this is absurd, given the near nonexistent changes in actual business activity around the equity. Either its being pumped and dumped by speculators or used as a back door around campaign finance donations or who even knows what. But the degree to which the SEC is turning a blind eye on this nonsense is one more data point in the “Rich People Play By Different Rules” connect-the-dots game.

I don’t think they’re even building many.

You might want to read the article.

Making policies that help the community, and actually getting them passed, is what will make the difference.

We can’t pass any policy anywhere in the country without bipartisan support and the blessing of the courts. Since the Republicans are in opposition and the courts are stacked with cranks, that means the best we can promise is that one day we’ll have a Democrat Supermajority capable of passing compromise legislation with its more right-wing members.

Sorry, but these are just the rules, which are immutable and which we must abide by no matter how much pain they cause to our constituents.

Also, please note that conservatives are fully unbound by these rules. They can and will inflict incalculable harm on you if any single branch is in their control. There is, unfortunately, nothing liberals can do about this because interrupting the harm caused by the rules-breakers would be against the rules.

So the message we need to bring to black voters is that they only have themselves to blame if things get worse. It’s cake or death and we’re all out of cake.

No one is on their side. Will Kamala change that? Honestly, probably not. Tim Walz has a better chance of that.

Glances at Walz’s record during the Minnesota BLM protests

Oof. I would not bank on it.

The staggering price is…

$1.7T, per the article. The scope of the project is so big that businesses are trying to groom kids into their fields at the elementary school tier, because the demand for future military industry complex jobs will be so huge.

It goes on to note the scope of the project, in terms of human labor demands, ecological impacts, community economic impacts, and brain-drain on neighboring industries.

Maybe I should have read the article

:-/

Generally speaking renewables + storage are the cheapest way of generating non-polluting power.

At variable scale, based on time of year and weather. Nuclear is much better for base-load, particularly at the scale of GWs. You know exactly how much electricity you’re going to get 24/7, and the fuel costs aren’t exposed to a market that can vary by 150-300% annually.

Crazy how quickly we’ve gone from “Nuclear is a dead technology, it can’t work and its simply too expensive to build more of. Y’all have to use fossil fuels instead” to “We’re building nuclear plants as quickly as our contractors can draft them, but only for doing experiments in high end algorithmic brute-forcing”.

Would be nice if some of that dirt-cheap, low-emission, industrial capacity electricity was available for the rest of us.

Biden won by only 78,000 votes despite his large +4.5% popular vote lead.

The magic of the Electoral College. 2024 is expected to get even worse, as states like California and Texas lean harder left than at any point in recent history, but California can’t yield any more EC votes than it already does and Texas Dems will still be a point or two shy of winning the state under the most Dem-leaning models.

Swing states are all that matter. And once they’ve swung far enough (as in the case of Virginia and Colorado and Florida) they stop mattering again.

Optimism is fine, hopium is not.

Be an optimist. Be a pessimist. It doesn’t matter. The folks with the biggest thumbs on the scales are mega-donors, media magnets, and the majorities on various state and federal courts. At some point, you have to realize that your vote matters far less than there’s. It’s a rich man’s country, we just live in it.

You managed to Vote Early, but you have completely skipped the bit on Voting Often.

Even the executive being separate from the head of the legislative branch is uncommon everywhere else.

The Presidential System (as distinct from the Prime Ministerial System) is common throughout Latin America and West Africa. Incidentally, it is also a governmental structure more vulnerable to coups and similar violent takeovers, as the President being in conflict with the Legislature often leads to these snap power grabs rather than more well-defined transitions of power after elections.

The US idea that the different branches would have checks and balances against each other was rendered pointless the moment the first political parties were developed.

Well, that’s another big difference between the US system and systems in countries with more settled populations. Regional parties (the Scottish National Party being a large and distinct block of voters in the UK, the uMkhonto weSizwe as a Zulu nationalist group in South Africa, the Taiwan Solidarity Union as a Taiwanese nativist faction, or Otzma Yehudit in Israel which draws its doctrine from a single ultra-nationalist Rabbi Meir Kahane) can all exist in parliamentary systems in a way that a Mormon Party or a Texas Party or an African-American Party has failed to materialize in the United States.

The idea of checks and balances doesn’t work when you’re forced into coalition with one of the two dominant (heavily coastal) parties to have any sway in Congress or within the Presidential administration. And that goes beyond just “Voting for President”. The Democrats don’t nominate bureaucratic leaders (Sec of State, Attorney General, etc), the President does. This gives enormous influence to a singular individual who functions as both Party Leader and National Leader.

Compare this to Brazil or Germany or India or Israel, where power-sharing agreements between caucusing parties encourage the incoming Prime Minister to choose from the leaders of aligned party groups to fill cabinet positions. There’s an immediate payoff to being the head of a small but influential partisan group under the PM system in a way that the American system doesn’t have.

Now, do you want Anthony Blinken or Janet Yellen to have to hold a Congressional seat and act as Secretary of State or Secretary of Treasury? Idk. I’ve seen Brits scoff at this system as being its own kind of mess. But I can imagine a country in which a Yellen-equivalent head of the Liberals for Better Economic Policy Party has half a dozen seats and Blinken’s Americans for NATO Party has half a dozen seats, and this is what Biden needs to be Prime Minister, so he appoints them to his cabinet as a trade-in for their support.

I’m sure Democrats will blame everyone but themselves

It’s definitely going to be the fault of

• Jill Stein, for winning a critical swing 0.4% of the vote

• Muslim Voters, because they secretly approve of the genocides in the Middle East and hope Trump will do them even harder

• Evil Foreign Governments, the root cause of everything bad on the internet. They want a Trump Presidency because he will cause US foreign policy to become weak, soy, and too friendly to foreigners