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Thanks for the feedback, Bull.
I can understand the struggle.
Normally, I don't waste my time but
this one piques my curiosity.
Wonder if the speech lasts more than 10 minutes.
I doubt I'll listen to any of the commentary when it's over.
What a mess.
Guess I should get up and do something.
Or sit and do another crossword puzzle.
Hope you're having a "chamber of commerce" day.
Enjoy.
Dang, Bull. You gave away the end. Guess I'll skip the whole thing...
NAH!
Hope the national embarrassment makes an obvious fool out of himself with Kneepads Cacklepuss chortling in the background.
Are you going to watch?
Hope all is well in your piece of paradise.
Here's to another day of God's good Earth.
Glad you liked it, Mr. G.
One of Goodwin's better ones.
Today and tomorrow will be in the mid 60s.
Hope you get to share the joy.
Summer is on the way.
Trump and MAGA...
Nikki Haley’s complete ignorance of her own party is why Trump is the last candidate standing
By Michael Goodwin Published March 2, 2024, 8:45 p.m. ET
(Personally, her being a female minority is NOT a selling point with me. Plus which, I'm not voting for a stupid, ignorant twit who doesn't know the Civil War was fought to end slavery. She can go straight to hell.)
Hallelujah. Great news, Larry. Thank you. Here's to the great state of Georgia...
YW and GM to you, Larry.
The Louisville bridge story fascinates me especially the rescue. So glad the truck driver and her rescuer are alive and safe. Part of my fascination stems from my love of Highway Thru Hell. I'd like to see footage of them pulling the semi off the bridge. The rescue folks have a lot of intestinal fortitude coupled with topnotch engineering ability. God bless 'em.
It wasn't the truck driver's fault...
Heads should roll over Gemini, therapy culture = sad kids and other commentary
By Post Editorial Board Published March 1, 2024, 4:56 p.m. ET
Centrist: Heads Should Roll Over Gemini
“It’s increasingly apparent that Gemini is among the more disastrous product rollouts in the history of Silicon Valley,” thunders Nate Silver at Silver Bulletin. The AI’s results are “heavily inflected with politics” that render it “biased” and “inaccurate” — and Google’s explanations are “pretty close to gaslighting.” Indeed, the programming involved “deliberately altering the user’s language to produce outputs that are misaligned with the user’s original request — without informing users of this,” which “could reasonably be described as promoting disinformation.” Google should “pull the plug on Gemini” and “provide the public with a thorough accounting of how it went so wrong, and hire, terminate or reposition staff so that the same mistakes don’t happen again.” If not, “Google should face immediate regulatory and shareholder scrutiny.”
Social critic: Therapy Culture = Sad Kids
Is “the emergence of therapeutic parenting,” which “encourages children to forsake resilience for introspection at every turn,” producing “a nation of happy, well-adjusted kids?” So asks Mary Harrington at UnHerd in a review of Abigail Shrier’s book “Bad Therapy.” The answer? Nope. Parents “giving children endless meaningless choices while constraining their options to the sanitised and risk-free” yields “an explosion of psychic distress at home and bad behaviour in schools.” No wonder: Kids are “simultaneously under- and over-parented” by “adults who both want to be involved in every detail of their children’s lives but who shrink from being seen as authority figures.” The answer? “Less tech, more agency, better boundaries.” Moms and dads must fight “deep-seated fears” about “being hated for saying ‘no.’?”
Libertarian: Baseless ‘More Counselors’ Push
As “public schools have more staff than ever and with enrollment projected to continue declining for years to come, the last thing they need is 77,000 more counselors,” argues Aaron Garth Smith at Reason. “Legislators in states such as Minnesota, New York, and Virginia are introducing bills aimed at getting schools closer to meeting the 250-to-1 student-to-counselor ratio recommended by the American School Counselor Association.” But that advice, based on “a back-of-the-envelope calculation” that researcher Kenneth Hoyt “did in a short column” in 1955, has “no empirical basis.” Add in “the question of mission creep and whether public schools should be delivering mental health services at all.” This campaign, “using a baseless metric,” simply “undermines ASCA’s credibility and those pushing their narrative.”
Conservative: Putin’s Idea of a Fair Peace
Under Russia’s demands for a peace deal with Ukraine, Moscow “gets to decide the size and strength of the Ukrainian military, and it promises to not start another invasion,” notes National Review’s Jim Geraghty. Yet “Vladimir Putin insists that Ukraine is not a real country, claims that the entire concept of independent Ukrainian identity was a plot by ‘the Polish elite’.?.?. and that Ukraine has no right to exist as an independent nation.” Hmm: “If Ukraine were forced, at gunpoint, to sign a deal like this, who among us is willing to say, ‘Well, Putin would never start an unprovoked war of territorial aggression against Ukraine for a fourth time’?”
Eye on Albany: Redistricting Amendment Sham
New York’s original 2012 anti-gerymandering law created the Independent Redistricting Commission and banned the Legislature from changing the IDC’s districts by more than 2%; then “New Yorkers enshrined the IRC and anti-gerrymandering rules in the state Constitution in a 2014 referendum, but the text left out the two-percent rule,” observes the Empire Center’s Cam Macdonald. Keeping the 2% rule “out of the Constitution, which lawmakers can’t easily supersede, indicates the dealmakers did not intend the limitation to be permanent.” And the Legislature, this year granted itself the right to break the rule. “Any voter who believed in 2014 that a legislature in 2024 would abide by its stated rules got played.” The lesson: “the next time lawmakers offer to amend their Constitution,” get “the whole deal in writing.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
https://nypost.com/2024/03/01/opinion/heads-should-roll-over-gemini-therapy-culture-sad-kids-other-commentary/
20 new rules of politics Democrats have given us
By Victor Davis Hanson Published March 1, 2024, 12:17 p.m. ET
The Left has created new rules for national politics. Here are 20 precedents they have established for America in the future:
1. When in control of the Senate, demand the end of the filibuster; when not, don’t.
2. Call for the end of the Electoral College — but only if it appears to recently favor the candidate of the opposition.
3. In an election year, change any state balloting laws deemed unhelpful through administrative fiat or court order to favor your political candidate.
4. Seek to flip electors from voting in accordance with the popular vote count in their states; indict as an insurrectionist any of the opposition who dare do the same.
5. Raid the home of any opposition ex-president who removed classified files; exempt any sitting president of your party who did the same.
6. Swarm the private homes of, and then bully and intimidate, any Supreme Court officials, politicians or citizens you oppose.
7. Appoint two special counsels: one to go after the current chief presidential opponent in an election year; the other to exempt and excuse the sitting president for the very crimes charged against his rival.
8. Lobby to remove any oppositional president through the 25th Amendment; smear anyone as ageist who suggests a cognitively challenged sitting resident of your party should be subject to similar invocations of the 25th Amendment.
9. Exempt thousands of arrested rioters from charges of 120 days of arson, looting, injuring 1,500 law enforcement officers, and assault — but only if they are radical supporters of your party.
10. Excuse any demonstrator or rioter for desecrating public monuments and cemeteries or shutting down bridges and freeways, or swarming and disrupting the Capitol Rotunda — but only if they agree with you and/or are pro-Hamas. Otherwise, ensure the charged face lengthy prison sentences.
11. Try to pack the Supreme Court — but only if justices you don’t like are in a majority.
12. Seek in an election year to remove a presidential opponent from state ballots for crimes for which he has never been charged, much less convicted of.
13. First target a presidential opponent, and then change, warp, or redefine laws to convict him. Weaponized prosecutors should always indict their political opponents in jurisdictions where they are guaranteed like-minded justices and jury pools.
14. Violate the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution (the prohibition of “excessive fines”) by having sympathetic judges level multimillion-dollar fines to bankrupt the opposition candidate during a presidential campaign. The more there is no victim of a crime, the higher should be fines leveled for “damages.”
15. Open the border by destroying all the protocols and executive orders of a predecessor president. Then welcome 8 million illegal aliens to “surge” into America on the premise that a new constituency might support agendas that American citizens do not. Then call the nonexistent border “secure,” while blaming a predecessor president for having left it secure.
16. Have local prosecutors invent criminal acts of an opposition national presidential candidate in efforts to make it impossible for him to campaign for the presidency.
17. Use the FBI to hire out social media auditors to censor any news deemed problematic for the correct presidential candidate.
18. Hire a foreign national to concoct a smear dossier about one’s opposition political nominee. Ensure the FBI also uses and pays the foreign national to spread untruths among the media and administrative state.
19. On the eve of any major national or midterm election, ensure a president drains the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to lower gasoline prices.
20. On the eve of any major national or midterm election, ensure a president promises to cancel billions of dollars in contracted federal student loans.
https://nypost.com/2024/03/01/opinion/20-new-rules-of-politics-democrats-have-given-us/
Driver pulled from truck dangling from Louisville bridge over Ohio River in dramatic scene
By Alyssa Guzman Published March 1, 2024, 1:27 p.m. ET
(Woman driver... Two other cars were involved. No telling whose fault it was. I am glad she survived. My hat's off to Firefighter Bryce Carden. Video at the link.)
Heartstopping video shows the moment a semi-truck driver was rescued after her big rig crashed through a bridge guardrail in Kentucky — leaving it dangling precariously over the Ohio River.
The unidentified driver was crossing the Clark Memorial Bridge northbound around noontime Friday when the Sysco truck shifted lanes and went through the barrier.
Dramatic photos show the majority of the truck hanging over the bridge, with the cabin parallel to the river below.
Firefighter Bryce Carden rappelled down to the dangling cab to pull the woman to safety, according to WLKY.
The daring rescue, which Fire Chief Brian O’Neill told reporters was a “once-in-a-career” type of event, took around 40 minutes.
A driver was rescued from a semi-truck dangling over the Ohio River after an accident on a Louisville, Kentucky bridge.
WDRB
The truck was moving northbound on the bridge when it apparently crossed the lane and crashed through the bridge’s guardrail, according to reports.
Fox News
A dramatic video shows a first responder being lowered to the semi truck in order to lift the driver to safety.
Fox News
The Clark Memorial Bridge is currently closed to traffic, according to reports.
Fox News
“She held it together amazingly,” O’Neill said. “She held it together like a champ, but I will tell you once she hit solid ground, she let those emotions go.”
Carden said the driver was “super calm” and so was he — because he “knew they had me on the top side.”
“She was just praying, she was praying a lot, and I was praying with her,” he said of the woman. As for himself, the firefighter of six years said: “At the moment, you don’t think about it, after the debrief, it hits you. At the run, the training takes over.”
The semi was in a dangerous position and firefighters worried it could “shift at any moment” as it was pinned between one of the banisters and concrete, according to O’Neill.
Firefighters were able to talk to the woman, who was “shaken up,” but was found to be in stable condition. She was taken to the hospital as a precaution.
Two other vehicles were involved in the crash, which were in “pretty bad shape,” O’Neill said. One of the victims was sent to the hospital and was in worse condition than the semi driver. .
The bridge has been shut down in both directions as Louisville first responders continue working.
The Sysco truck is still hanging off the bridge and authorities are working to figure out how to remove it.
The crash is under investigation.
https://nypost.com/2024/03/01/us-news/driver-pulled-from-truck-dangling-from-louisville-bridge-over-ohio-river/
Nolte: Joe Biden’s Seth Meyers Appearance Bombs with Young Viewers
JOHN NOLTE 1 Mar 2024 3:55
(I never watch the SOTU speech but I will this year. Matter of fact, I can hardly wait for the 7th. Let the nation see what a mess this piece o'garbage is.)
Same day as the Fool on the Hill's SOTU address...
You cannot make this stuff up.
#SlamTheScam 2024
National “Slam the Scam” Day is designated by Social Security’s Office of the Inspector General to raise awareness of government imposter scams, which continue to spread across the United States. Slam the Scam Day is Thursday, March 7, 2024, as part of National Consumer Protection Week, which takes place this year from March 3-9.
https://www.ssa.gov/scam/resources.html
omg How the hell did the driver manage to do that?
Sure hope he(she?) lives to tell the tale.
I'm a big fan of Highway Thru Hell and Heavy Rescue 401.
This is worse than anything I've seen on those shows.
Godspeed to all involved.
Kathy Hochul Moves Forward with Plan to Prioritize Illegal Immigrants for NY State Jobs
WARNER TODD HUSTON 29 Feb 2024 3:19
New York’s Democrat Gov. Kathy Hochul is moving forward with her plan to retool the Civil Service Commission to put illegal aliens at the head of the line for state jobs.
At the end of January, Hochul approved a plan for the state to hire 4,000 illegal aliens for entry-level state jobs. Not only is the state preparing to put illegals at the head of the line, but the plan Hochul approved eliminates several requirements for illegals to be eligible for the jobs.
The rules requiring applicants to take the civil service exam and to have a high school diploma have been eliminated.
(Can't pass a civil service exam and no high school diploma... not exactly the creme de la creme of humanity. We don't need these people. They entered ILLEGALLY. Kick 'em the hell out. Don't reward them with taxpayer-funded jobs that should go to qualified American citizens.)
The aim is to get illegals into state jobs faster once they get approved work permits.
The Civil Service Commission approved the plan on January 18, according to Spectrum News:
New York Governor Kathy Hochul Is Moving Forward With Her Plan To Hand Illegal Immigrants Thousands Of The Best Jobs In The City
— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) February 28, 2024
New York Is Even Changing Their Laws To Give Illegals Government Jobs. They’re Dropping High School Diploma & English Proficiency Requirements 🤯… pic.twitter.com/QroEilYnyq
No wonder boys are turning toward conservative beliefs — it’s rebellion against parents’ woke ideology
By Rikki Schlott Published Feb. 28, 2024, 5:34 p.m. ET
(Jezer-Morton does not get the Mother of the Year award. Her poor sons. They deserve better than having her for a mother.
BTW... where's their father? Did he bail on the bitch or is so whipped he won't stand up for his sons?)
“Can we keep our sons from conservative politics?”
That’s the question writer Kathryn Jezer-Morton posed in a recent column for New York Magazine’s The Cut.
“In her son’s case, I wouldn’t bet on it,” New York Times columnist Ross Douthat shot back on X.
He’s right.
Jezer-Morton is facing an age-old conundrum of parenthood: Kids rebel against their parents’ politics.
Except, in 2024, the classic trend is being inverted.
In a column for The Cut, Kathryn Jezer-Morton asks whether parents can prevent their sons from sliding to the right.
Progressive parents are desperately trying to keep their boys from becoming conservative, rather than the other way around.
Teens go against the grain, and the most rebellious thing a young person coming up in this ultra-progressive era — when left-wing politics are shoved down their throats by their schools, marketing campaigns and celebrities — can do today is swing right.
While Jezer-Morton’s concern that her 10- and 13-year-old sons are becoming “oppressors” before her eyes might be hyperbolic, she’s right that Zoomer boys are moving right.
A 2023 survey of 12th graders by University of Michigan found that, while American girls are headed leftward, their male counterparts are twice as likely to identify as conservative than liberal, as they tack toward a new, edgy kind of anti-woke politics.
Is it any wonder Jezer-Morton’s kids might be doing the same, considering she admits to political finger wagging?
As she writes, “My voice raises as I start lecturing a teen about why he needs to recognize the importance of the history of Indigenous people.”
But, rather than open her mind to the possibility that her boys and other young men like them might have legitimate disagreements with her worldview, Jezer-Morton chalks their concerns up to an irrational victim mindset.
“For young men to experience the … narrative of success, they feel they need to start from a position of disempowerment,” she writes. “Blaming women for their troubles is an easy route to that position.”
Jezer-Morton, author of columns headlined Does Anyone Feel Like an Actual Adult? and My Mom Is Selfish. Do I still Have to be a ‘Good Daughter’?, laments that her son is using terms like “sigma” and “looksmaxxing” — controversial slang thrown around in incel forums on the likes of Reddit and 4Chan.
She also says her boys present “TikTok-based information” at the dinner table.
Sounds like being overly online might be the real enemy here, not conservative politics.
The author’s best bet in her shadowboxing fight would be to get her kids off social media, where unknown influences — as well as toxic influencers like Andrew Tate — can take hold of kids.
Jezer-Morton admitted seven years ago, in another column for The Cut, that her then-3-year-old son would say “show me your eyes” when she was scrolling on her phone rather than being present with her toddler.
Call me crazy, but it seems like it might be her own addiction to social media that’s causing her to demonize her kids.
“When you spend your days reading infographics reminding you that being silent means being on the side of the oppressor, having a flesh-and-blood oppressor-in-training eating your spaghetti and meatballs can feel like a waking nightmare,” she writes.
Jezer-Morton also reflects on her time teaching at a local college where, she says, “hetero boys” are “imagining their enemies” and experiencing “a fake problem” of cancel culture and victimhood.
“For young men, and straight white men in particular, to feel like valid participants in the storytelling of selfhood, they feel the need to start from a place of grievance, because otherwise there’s no way to bounce back and beat the odds,” she writes.
She flatly dismisses the possibility that boys could be reacting to some legitimate concerns.
But, considering Jezer-Morton has spent time on a campus recently, surely she’s noticed that a certain demographic is legitimately falling behind.
Some 60% of college students are female, meanwhile boys were seven times more likely to drop out during the pandemic.
Brookings Institute senior fellow Richard Reeves tactfully points out in his 2022 book “Of Boys and Men” that men are actually facing some unprecedented challenges — including falling behind in standardized testing and prematurely leaving the workforce in droves.
Saying as much isn’t reactionary. In fact, men account for seven in ten opioid deaths and four in five suicide deaths.
Perhaps hearing out some grievances, rather than waving them away as “reactionary and unformed pseudo-ideologies” would allow parents and sons to actually learn from one another.
Respect is a two-way street.
To Jezer-Morton’s credit, she is correct about one thing: Continuing to push her own politics on her kids is only going to make matters worse.
By some metrics, boys and men are legitimately falling behind, as Richard Reeves argues in his 2022 book.
“Coming down too hard risks playing right into the paranoid hands of masculinist discourses of male disempowerment,” she warns. “It might feel dangerous to let a teenager argue that sexism works both ways, but it’s far more consequential to make him feel like that position is forbidden.”
She’s right that parents should let kids explore ideas, even those that offend their sensibilities.
The more shrilly that woke parents plead, the further right their offspring will go.
But, whatever their politics, any parent truly concerned about their child being swept up in ideology should be questioning whether the real enemy is competing viewpoints — or allowing their children to construct a worldview on TikTok and YouTube.
https://nypost.com/2024/02/28/opinion/boys-are-turning-conservative-to-rebel-against-woke-parents/
FWIW It's working fine for me on my ancient Lenovo with Win7 using an Edge browser and a super slow internet connection.
Go figure.
Good luck to you Dave.
Thanks, fuagf. Gives me something to think about. < g >
Take care.
The 29th. My first grandnephew's 3rd birthday.
He's 12.
Very cool day to be born.
White House says Biden ‘doesn’t need a cognitive test’ as prez says docs ‘think I look too young’
By Steven Nelson Published Feb. 28, 2024 Updated Feb. 28, 2024, 5:55 p.m. ET
(Wonder how much the team of "doctors" was paid for this assessment.)
WASHINGTON — President Biden “doesn’t need a cognitive test,” the White House’s top spokesperson said Wednesday after the chief executive joked that his doctors “think I look too young” upon his return from his annual physical.
“There is nothing different than last year,” the 81-year-old president said at an afternoon event focused on policing and crime as he brushed off public concern about his age as he seeks a second term.
“Everything’s great,” Biden added.
The more than two-hour-long medical appointment was conducted by a team of 20 doctors who determined the president is so mentally sound that no test was needed, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at the regular White House briefing.
“The president doesn’t need a cognitive test. That is not my assessment, that is the assessment of the president’s doctor, that is also the assessment of his neurologist,” Jean-Pierre said.
“He passes a cognitive test every day — every day — as he moves from one topic to another topic, understanding the granular level of these topics. You saw him talking about fighting crime today, tomorrow’s he’s going to the border,” she added.
In public remarks this month, Biden on three occasions claimed to have conversed recently with long-retired and deceased leaders of Germany and France. He and compounded the errors by mixing up the leaders of Mexico and Egypt at a bellicose press conference after denying that he’s suffering cognitive decline.
Special counsel Robert Hur reignited questions about Biden’s mental fitness in a blistering report released Feb. 8, finding that Biden should not face criminal charges for decades of allegedly mishandling classified records in part because no jury would convict him due to perceived senility.
Hur wrote in his report that his team “uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency” but that “Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Biden’s physical was not announced in advance, nor was it on the presidential schedule given a day ahead of time to the White House press corps — and only became public when Biden shouted to reporters on the White House lawn, “I’m going to Walter Reed to get my physical” Wednesday morning.
In the afternoon, presidential physician Dr. Kevin O’Connor released a six-page report following Biden’s appointment at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland.
The report contained little new information, but said Biden “did note some increased left hip discomfort with recent activity” as the result of “mild arthritic changes” that are “contributing to his stiffened gait,” which the report says “remains stiff, but has not worsened since last year.”
The written assessment made passing mention of cognition-adjacent evaluations.
“An extremely detailed neurologic exam was again reassuring in that there were no findings which would be consistent with any cerebellar or other central neurological disorder, such as stroke, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s or ascending lateral sclerosis, nor are there any signs of cervical myelopathy,” O’Connor wrote.
“The exam did again support a finding of peripheral neuropathy in both feet. No motor weakness was detected.”
Biden is the oldest-ever sitting president, and in a break from historical precedent, O’Connor has never been allowed to take journalists’ questions on his health.
Presidential doctors generally address the press in times of medical crises, but on some notable occasions they have fielded questions in the White House briefing room after performing physical exams.
Then-President Gerald Ford’s physician Dr. William Lukash held a press conference in 1976 to describe his evaluation of the commander-in-chief — at one point disclosing that Ford had previously had surgery for hemorrhoids but passed an anal proctoscopy.
Then-President Donald Trump’s physician Dr. Ronny Jackson — now a Texas Republican congressman — gave a more than hour-long briefing on Trump’s health in 2018, though he turned heads by saying at one point that “if [Trump] had a healthier diet over the last 20 years, he might live to be 200 years old.”
Polls show that voters are more concerned about Biden’s age than they are about that of Trump, 77.
An ABC News/Ipsos poll this month found that 86% of US adults said Biden is too old for another term while 59% said that both Biden and Trump are too old.
A New York Times poll in November found 71% of swing-state voters say Biden is “too old to be an effective president” compared to 39% who said the same of Trump.
A Wall Street Journal poll released in September found that 73% of registered voters believed Biden was too old, versus 47% who said so of Trump.
https://nypost.com/2024/02/28/us-news/biden-heads-to-annual-physical-as-hunter-arrives-for-impeachment-deposition/
Happy to help you any time, Sir G.
Would hate to lose you. Take care.
In red and in bold. < g >
Gremlins. That's the technical explanation.
This stuff is not easy to fix. So many interconnecting functions.
Sounds like this problem was a renegade server.
Man vs. Machine.
Fortunately, it looks like our intrepid Dave won this battle.
Enjoy being reconnected on our beloved IHub.
Good suggestion. You're back!
Good to see you, Mr. G.
Does anyone have Gmenfan's email address? Please write to him and tell him IHub is up.
Brightspeed (Dumbspeed) won't let me reply to his email. Thanks.
@pos_stock_hoarder @Flobewan @SkeBallLarry
@Gmenfan
Greetings, Dave. I see the green message is gone.
No 419 problems for me at this point.
Now to go back to using preview.
Thanks again for the good work.
Hope you get some time off for a reward.
Now... if only the rest of the Octogenarians would follow suit.
One down. Many more to go.
Is it time to revolutionize the toilet?
By Jacqui Palumbo, CNN Published Feb 27, 2024 12:23 PM EST | Updated Feb 27, 2024 12:26 PM EST
(Seems like the White House and Congress would be good places for these. They generate a lot of feces.
I think I'll pass though.)
(CNN) — Consider the toilet — that humble porcelain bowl that spirits away our waste several times a day. It’s not a piece of technology that often gets flashy updates (though dual flushing, seat warming and electronic bidet features can certainly elevate it), nor is it a darling of the design world.
But toilets are in desperate need of an upgrade — as is our entire approach to sewage, according to the many designers, environmental engineers and sanitation experts hoping to bring about a paradigm shift.
Flushing our waste is, well, wasteful, accounting for nearly a third of indoor water use in US homes, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In many parts of the world, the use of water toilets has become increasingly fraught as climate change ushers in extreme droughts and flooding, which backs up sewers and overflows septic tanks. In disaster zones, or places without access to running water, the need for innovation is even more urgent.
Rethinking how we deal with waste may also present an opportunity: Our excrement can be converted into renewable heat, electricity and fertilizer.
“Waste is not waste, it’s a resource,” said Arja Renell, a Finnish artist and architect who brought the topic to last year’s Venice Architecture Biennale as the curator of her country’s pavilion. She wasn’t an expert in the field, but had been alarmed to learn that some of Venice’s wastewater is flushed directly into its canals and wanted to demonstrate a circular approach to sanitation: the “dry” toilet.
Known as a “Huussi” in Finnish, the dry toilet separates urine from stool and is ventilated to keep odors out — In Finland, dry toilets are particularly prevalent in rural summer cottages, Renell told CNN in a video call. Users layer the contents of the toilet’s bin with peat or sawdust after doing their business; once full, they move the excrement to a larger airtight container over the course of several months so that any microorganisms die out.
The remaining material, rich in nitrogen and phosphorus, can be used as natural fertilizer rather than the usual greenhouse gas-emitting synthetic kind.
The dry composting method will be familiar to those with off-grid homes. In the US, dry compost toilets have long been built as alternatives to flush toilets in rural homes that aren’t connected to a sewage system, or by people who can’t afford to install a neutralizing septic tank, which can cost thousands of dollars. Kelsey McWilliams, an environmental engineer who builds circular sanitation systems around the country with her company Point of Shift, said the need for sustainable solutions will only grow in drought- or flood-stricken areas.
Environmental engineer Kelsey McWilliams became “hooked” on sanitation solutions after participating in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation "Reinvent the Toilet Challenge" while at the University of Delaware, she said. (Kelsey McWilliams/Point of Shift via CNN Newsource)
“There are multiple states right now where people are working on changing the current building codes to allow not only compost toilets, but more innovative solutions for people who want them,” she told CNN. “Septic tanks are great — they served a purpose. They’re a very old type of technology, and they still generally protect our wells from human waste and bacteria. But there are better solutions.”
Expanding the use of dry compost toilets poses formidable challenges, however, from state- or county-level regulations right down to personal preferences. They can be difficult to install in urban settings and hard to maintain in anything larger than a single-family home. There’s also the matter of time: Waiting up to a year for waste to be safely recycled will deter many people — and the ick factor may be hard to shake.
“It’s asking people to care about something that they’re biologically attuned to be averse to,” McWilliams said.
Disappearing act
But what if your poo could, for the most part, disappear from your toilet? That’s the question being asked by Change:WATER Labs, a startup led by scientist and entrepreneur Diana Yousef which is patenting an evaporative material that aims to reduce the volume of waste build-up by as much as 97% in a single day.
“We have developed a technology that we lovingly term ‘shrink wrap for crap,’” Yousef explained on a phone call.
Change:WATER Labs’ low-cost and entirely waterless portable toilet, dubbed the “iThrone,” stores human waste in a pouch lined with the proprietary material. What’s left still needs to be collected and treated — it’s recycable, but not neutralized — but only needs to be retrieved once every one to two months, Yousef said. (Imagine a porta-potty after that long, for context.)
Since receiving funding in 2018 from the Humanitarian Grand Challenge, an international acceleration award, the iThrone has been piloted in vulnerable communities without access to safe sanitation in Uganda and Panama. Change:WATER Labs hopes to scale up the project. Last year, the WHO and UNICEF’s Joint Monitoring Programme estimated that around 3.5 billion people — 43% of the world’s population — have no access to a toilet or latrine connected to wastewater treatment or safe disposal. Nearly a billion of those people use unsafe pit latrines or buckets, or defecate in the open.
The iThrone is a “shrink wrap for crap,” quickly reducing the volume of human waste for use in communities who don't have access to safe sanitation. (Courtesy ChangeWater via CNN Newsource)
“When you shrink the waste at the point of production, essentially, you do a better job of containing it hygienically, so it cleans up communities.” Yousef said. “But then on top of that you are not using, or polluting, any water.”
Though the current version of the iThrone doesn’t yet put excrement to good use, future versions may be able to turn evaporated moisture from urine or feces into potable water, or convert the remaining stored waste into renewable energy, according to Yousef, who said the product will “get more sophisticated” with time.
“I don’t think anyone living in a house with a flush toilet is within five or 10 years of saying, ‘Yeah, I want to give that up,’” she said. “But there are so many other applications. And they’re not all just for low-income or distressed, fragile populations. There’s public sanitation, green building, transportation. And there are so many places where people are tied to septic tanks.”
The system uses a proprietary material to shrink waste and is currently being tested in Panama. (Courtesy ChangeWater via CNN Newsource)
Upcycling waste
In cities with developed sewer systems, radical change may take place out of sight. As California deals with worsening drought, for example, San Francisco now requires new buildings larger than 100,000 square feet to have onsite wastewater recycling systems. Local startup Epic Cleantec, which built the city’s first graywater reuse system in the luxury high-rise Fifteen Fifty, is bringing its system to residential developments, corporate campuses, factories and hotels around the state.
At a new coastal development in the Swedish city of Helsingborg, meanwhile, a traditional sewage plant has been completely revamped into an innovative new treatment facility called RecoLab (which is short for “Recovery Lab”). A striking, building that ventilates high in the air, to keep odors at bay, RecoLab connects to every building in the new district through a three-pipe system that separates and recycles water containing human waste (or blackwater) from low-water vacuum-based toilets, graywater from bathtubs and washing machines, and organic matter from food disposal systems. By 2030, when the housing development is complete, RecoLab will serve 2,500 residents.
“When you’re ‘source-separating’ the wastewater, it’s the same principle as when you’re separating plastic from metal — it’s easier to recycle,” explained Amanda Haux, business developer at RecoLab.
“Ninety-four percent of the wastewater in our cities is actually very easy to clean,” she said, but mixing in blackwater contaminates what could be a reusable resource.
As with dry composting toilets, RecoLab extracts nitrogen and phosphorus from human waste — as well as from food compost — and turns them into fertilizer pellets at a nearby factory. Biogas from recycled waste is converted into heating, while recycled water is used in the community swimming pool. As of now, the plant does not recycle graywater, due to strict Swedish government regulations on repurposing wastewater for drinking. But Haux is hoping that will change, particularly in municipalities where water shortages may become more common due to climate change.
To demonstrate the project’s circularity, Haux hopes to eventually open a rooftop garden and restaurant on RecoLab’s premises, using its recycled fertilizer and water to grow ingredients. “The purpose is to raise awareness about wastewater as a resource. We shouldn’t hide it away in our cities,” she said. “This is actually a low-hanging fruit when we’re talking about circulation.”
At the Venice Biennale, Renell invited Haux to talk about RecoLab in a fall seminar on new approaches to waste. The humble dry toilet and a large-scale urban sewage system may be at opposite ends of the spectrum, but they are both solutions to the same problem.
“So many people get so excited about this topic,” Renell said. “Of course, the urban scale feels a bit more daunting, but even within that, there are these amazing examples going on.”
“Going to the toilet needs to be quite simple,” Renell said. “If we want to compete with the the current system, we need to provide something equally easy.”
https://www.accuweather.com/en/climate/is-it-time-to-revolutionize-the-toilet/1626015
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Sen. Mitch McConnell will step down as Republican leader in November
By Josh Christenson Published Feb. 28, 2024, 12:28 p.m. ET
Mitch McConnell, the longest-serving Senate leader in history, and one of the most powerful, announced Wednesday he will step down from that position after the November elections — and suggested he may retire at the end of his current term in 2027 to hand off to “the next generation of American leadership.”
“I turned 82 last week, and the end of my contributions are closer than I prefer,” a visibly emotional McConnell (R-Ky.) said on the Senate floor. “I’m filled with heartfelt gratitude and humility for the opportunity.”
“When I got here, I was just happy if anybody remembered my name,” added McConnell, apparently referencing a flub by Ronald Reagan during a 1984 visit to Kentucky, during which the Gipper called him “Mitch O’Donnell.”
“If you would have told me forty years later that I would stand before you as the longest serving Senate leader in US history, frankly I would’ve thought you lost your mind,” the minority leader went on.
“To serve Kentucky in the Senate has been the honor of my life, to lead my Republican colleagues has been the highest privilege.”
McConnell’s decision to step away from leadership punctuates a powerful ideological transition underway in the Republican Party, from Reagan’s brand of traditional conservatism and strong international alliances to the fiery, often isolationist populism of former President Donald Trump.
The octogenarian faced down brief and unsuccessful challenges to his leadership position, most notably by Florida Sen. Rick Scott last year, and struggled to weather recent turmoil over spending packages with military aid for Ukraine that split the Republican conference.
“Nearly every Republican Senator under the age of 55 voted NO on this America Last bill,” Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) said on X after a funding measure with Ukraine aid sans border provisions passed the Senate earlier this month.
“15 out of 17 elected since 2018 voted NO,” he noted. “Things are changing just not fast enough.”
Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-SD) would be next in line for the leadership position, followed by conference chairman John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), who is seen as a potential uniter of factions within the GOP caucus.
“Barrasso is a good medium: he knows how to wrangle the Senate being in leadership, pull the Trump line when necessary and is fiscally conservative — which is appealing in a time where Americans are struggling under the failure of Bidenomics,” one Republican aide told The Post.
The aide added, however, that Scott could make “another run for the hard right of the caucus” and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) may also make a bid.
“Whoever it is,” a second GOP aide said, “we will be working hard to extract lots of guarantees and concessions for conservatives from them.”
McConnell is also the lone remaining member of Republican congressional leadership to not endorse Trump’s 2024 White House bid.
While McConnell boosted Trump’s first-term legacy by helping steer all three of his Supreme Court nominations through Senate confirmation, the two have been estranged since the minority leader refuted Trump’s claim that voter fraud cost him the 2020 election.
Following the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, McConnell assigned blame and responsibility to Trump and said that he should be held to account through the criminal justice system for his actions.
McConnell’s critics insist he could have done more, including voting to convict Trump during his second impeachment trial. McConnell did not, arguing that since Trump was no longer in office, he could not be subject to impeachment.
Ahead of last Saturday’s South Carolina primary, Donald Trump Jr. told reporters he anticipated McConnell being replaced as Senate GOP leader in the near future in favor of “guys like a [populist] J.D. Vance [of Ohio], people who are willing to actually call out sort of ‘the club.'”
“I think that’s so important,” the former first son added.
Aides said McConnell’s announcement was unrelated to his health. The Kentucky senator had a concussion from a fall last year and two public episodes where his face briefly froze while he was speaking.
Instead, McConnell cited the recent death of his wife’s youngest sister as a moment that prompted introspection.
“As I have been thinking about when I would deliver some news to the Senate, I always imagined a moment when I had total clarity and peace about the sunset of my work,” McConnell said. “A moment when I am certain I have helped preserve the ideals I so strongly believe. It arrived today.”
While McConnell’s critics within the GOP conference had grown louder, their numbers had not grown appreciably larger, a marker of McConnell’s strategic and tactical skill and his ability to understand the needs of his fellow Republican senators.
McConnell endorsed Reagan’s view of America’s role in the world and the senator has persisted in the face of opposition, including from Trump, that Congress should include a foreign assistance package that includes $60 billion for Ukraine.
“I am unconflicted about the good within our country and the irreplaceable role we play as the leader of the free world,” McConnell said.
Against long odds, he managed to secure 22 Republican votes for the package now being considered by the House.
“Believe me, I know the politics within my party at this particular moment in time. I have many faults. Misunderstanding politics is not one of them,” McConnell said. “That said, I believe more strongly than ever that America’s global leadership is essential to preserving the shining city on a hill that Ronald Reagan discussed. For as long as I am drawing breath on this earth I will defend American exceptionalism.”
McConnell succeeded Bill Frist of Tennessee as leader of the Republican conference in January 2007 and has won all eight elections since.
He cultivated his power base through a combination of care and nurturing of his members, including understanding their political imperatives. After seeing the potential peril of a rising Tea Party, he also established a super political action committee, The Senate Leadership Fund, which has provided hundreds of millions of dollars in support of Republican candidates.
“I love the Senate,” McConnell said in his speech.
“It has been my life. There may be more distinguished members of this body throughout our history, but I doubt there are any with more admiration for it.”
But, he added, “Father Time remains undefeated. I am no longer the young man sitting in the back, hoping colleagues would remember my name. It is time for the next generation of leadership.”
There would be a time to reminisce, McConnell vowed, but not today.
“I still have enough gas in the tank to thoroughly disappoint my critics and I intend to do so with all the enthusiasm to which they have become accustomed.”
With Post wires
https://nypost.com/2024/02/28/us-news/sen-mitch-mcconnell-will-step-down-as-republican-leader-in-november/
Pressed (and held) "exit". Presto! I have HD on DirecTV.
You da MAN, Bull-zee.
Thank you.
Thanks, Dave. I know you folks will get the 419 issue fixed.
You do not have an easy job however as we used to say in my COBOL mainframe days...
If it were easy, anybody could do it.
Good luck and hang tough.
Hi Dave. Just caught the 419 error note above. FWIW. I seem to get them more often when I use preview than when I don't.
Thanks. I'll try it later. About to log out, clean up the machine, shut down, and start again.
I keep getting a page expired when I try to PM.
My DirecTV service was finally restored around 9:00 this morning.
The phone message said it was a satellite positioning problem.
Not a good few days for modern communications.
P.S. As far as censorship by DirecTV goes... the majors -- ABC, CBS, & NBC -- were all unavailable to me until this morning.
They're about as libtarded as media can get.
Take care.
Thanks for your good work, Dave.
I missed this place.
Edit: I keep getting "419 PAGE EXPIRED" when I try to PM
About to log off again, delete all my browsing history, shut down, and start again.
From the horse's azz... finally:
Hi Dave. A heads up... Just got a second "page expired" message (error 419 I believe).
Got the first one of the day when I tried to post on one of the boards.
The second one that just happened occurred when I tried to send a PM.
Easy to recover what I typed. So, no big deal in the overall scheme of things.
'Tis slow indeed. Speaking of dial up...
I have a working rotary phone in the kitchen
True confession time: There's a spy phone sitting next to me.
Saves me from picking up spam calls.
Life is good for Miss 20th Century.