The Post-Partisan Emporium

While the experiment delivered 3.15 megajoules of energy output to the 2.05 megajoules it put in, the 192 lasers that produced it required 300 megajoules of energy. Was there really just a breakthrough, and if so, for whom? By Linda Pentz Gunter It was heralded as a major breakthrough. The tantalizing challenge of fusion had been cracked! Yes, the elusive moment when the fusing of atoms would release more energy than had been put in, had finally happened. The National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California had won the fusion race against hot competition both in the US and overseas. This “landmark achievement,” as U.S. energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm, described it, now means that what had been forever decades away — the delivery of electricity powered by fusion — was now……still decades away. The  Washington Post  aptly summed up all the hype in a single sentence: “This was a science experiment more than a demonstration of a practical technology.” T...

Literally Figuratively Judd Garrett Have you noticed lately that the word “literally” has slowly morphed to mean “figuratively”, like when someone says, “I literally died laughing.” They did not actually die. They were speaking figuratively, but they used the word “literally”. This is not merely a common grammatical mix-up that has somehow become adopted into our language like “affected” and “effected” or “then” and “than”. This seemingly innocuous substitution is representative of how our collective mindsets have changed; we are now living in a figurative world, and this figurative world has become our new reality. The literal, the authentic no longer matters. The figurative is the only thing that is important these days. No one is interested in the facts, no one is interested in the truth, we are only interested in the narrative and the spin which only alleges a certain version of the truth. Like literally and figuratively, the word “truth” has replaced the word “opinion”. The expres...

By David Swanson If Democrats threw out the filibuster today and rapidly passed legislation over the next 8 months as if they gave a damn — as if they were, oh, I don’t know, the Supreme Court — and if they put just what they’re increasing the military budget by into their Build Back Better bill, if they put through with majority votes just those items they were elected on that are favored by significant majorities in the country, they’d have done enough by 6 months from now to not lose those elections. And if they kept going, they’d need never lose an election again. The whole premise of keeping the filibuster around to restrain the Republicans is the plan to go on sucking badly for 6 more months in order to lose — combined with the delusion that Republicans are going to be restrained by something that THEY can and will choose to throw out. The Republicans will certainly plan on never losing an election again. Any elections they can’t win or rig, they can ask the Supreme Court to fix ...