And There It Is

We're coming up on 3 weeks since Gen Surovikin was seen in public.

My crystal ball has been in the shop since I got the friggin' thing, but I'm thinking the odds that the guy is still in one piece are getting pretty slim.

Vlad Putin is nothing if not an old school Soviet-style NewSpeak authoritarian asshole.

A Missing Russian General Is ‘Taking a Rest’ a Top Lawmakers Says

Gen. Sergei Surovikin, the commander of the Russian Aerospace Forces, has not been seen in public since a short-lived mutiny of mercenaries on June 24.

Gen. Sergei Surovikin of Russia, a onetime ally of the Wagner chief who hasn’t been seen publicly since a short-lived mutiny last month, is “taking a rest,” one of the country’s top lawmakers said Wednesday, when pressed by a reporter.

“He is unavailable right now,” the lawmaker, Andrei Kartapolov, the head of the Russian Duma’s defense committee, added in a video posted on the Telegram messaging app before hurrying away from the reporter.

General Surovikin, the chief of the Russian Aerospace Forces, was considered to be an ally of Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner mercenary company, whose forces mounted the brief insurrection in June aimed at toppling Russia’s military leadership, before standing down in a deal with the Kremlin.

In the days since then, intense speculation has surrounded General Surovikin, who skillfully pulled out Russian forces from Kherson amid Ukraine’s counteroffensive last year and has often been dubbed “General Armageddon” for his ruthless tactics.

The New York Times reported that U.S. officials believe General Surovikin had advance knowledge of the mutiny but do not know whether he participated. In the hours after the rebellion began, the Russian authorities quickly released a video of the general calling on the Wagner fighters to stand down. He hasn’t been seen in public since.

In the video, General Gerasimov was receiving a report from the Russian Aerospace Forces, which are run by General Surovikin. But the person giving the update in the footage was General Surovikin’s deputy, Col. Gen. Viktor Afzalov.

General Surovkin’s location is just one of the many mysteries that have arisen since the mutiny. Despite a deal announced by the Kremlin, under which Mr. Prigozhin would depart Russia for Belarus and avoid prosecution, the mercenary tycoon appears to remain in Russia.

The Kremlin disclosed earlier this week that Mr. Prigozhin and his top commanders met with President Vladimir V. Putin five days after the mutiny, raising many questions about what sort of deal had been struck with the former insurrectionists.

According to the Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, during the meeting the fighters pledged their loyalty to Mr. Putin, who in turn discussed “further employment options and further combat uses” for the Wagner fighters. Mr. Peskov did not give any additional details of what was agreed to.

General Surovikin led Russian forces in Syria while Mr. Prigozhin’s Wagner group fought there. When Moscow appointed General Surovikin to lead Russian forces in Ukraine last year, Mr. Prigozhin praised him as the best commander in the Russian military.

But in January, Mr. Putin transferred command of Ukraine operations to General Gerasimov, handing the reins to someone Mr. Prigozhin regularly pilloried as an incompetent paper-pusher.

Mr. Prigozhin said his revolt was aimed at getting rid of General Gerasimov and his counterpart, Defense Minister Sergei K. Shoigu. Mr. Shoigu has made many appearances in public in the days since the uprising, in what has been interpreted as a sign of Mr. Putin’s endorsement.

The questions about General Surovikin’s whereabouts came as another incident roiled the ranks of the Russian military.

A former Russian submarine commander, Stanislav Rzhitsky, who had been serving as the deputy director of Krasnodar’s mobilization office, was found gunned down in the southern Russian city early this week.

On Tuesday, the day after the body was found, Ukrainian military intelligence said on its official Telegram account that Rzhitsky had commanded a submarine that was involved in missile attacks on Ukraine.

Today's Nerd Thing

The JWST has been in place and functional for a year, and we're getting our money's worth.

Rho Ophiuchi, the star-forming region closest to Earth

JWST keeps finding cosmic gems, black holes and surprising galaxies

NASA is marking the anniversary of the James Webb Space Telescope’s scientific debut with the release of a spectacular new image

The James Webb Space Telescope was designed to tunnel deeper into space and farther back in time than any previous observatory, with the audacious goal of seeing the very first galaxies that lit up the young universe. Creating pretty pictures was always a pleasant but ancillary feature of having this amazing new piece of hardware out in space.

Today, 365 days after NASA unveiled the mission’s first batch of data and images, it’s clear that the JWST can produce the hard science and the beauty shots with equal aplomb. NASA is marking the first anniversary of the JWST’s scientific debut with the release of a new image, demonstrating the telescope’s ability to re-envision the universe. The dramatic, somewhat hallucinatory image captures the dynamism of the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth, where planetary systems like our own could be in the initial stages of forming.

“The telescope is working better than we could have possibly hoped for,” said NASA astrophysicist Jane Rigby, who earlier this month became the senior project scientist for the JWST.

The scientific community was a little conservative in planning their agenda for the first year of observations, but this next year of science will take full advantage of what the telescope can do, Rigby said. “We’re getting bolder in year two.”

The JWST’s journey around the sun has not been without speed bumps. The first year of scientific operations included a brief pause in data collection for safety reasons and a heart-stopping collision with space dust that forced project managers to fly the observatory more or less backward from now on.

But the scientists working with the telescope’s downloaded data are thrilled by its performance as it peers into the infrared portion of the spectrum, gathering light that can’t be collected by its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope.

The big headline so far is that the JWST has seen lots of surprisingly bright galaxies in the early universe. This proved to be a bit befuddling.

No, the JWST did not disprove the big bang theory. Cosmology has not gone the way of phrenology. But the observations of so much light coming from the early period of galaxy formation led to a lot of head-scratching. Observation and theory have not been perfectly aligned.

“I think there is a tension,” said physicist Massimo Stiavelli, the JWST mission head at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. “This is undeniable, because things are different from what we thought they would be.”

The JWST was conceived in the late 1980s as the successor to the yet-to-launch Hubble, but suffered many years of delays and near-death encounters with budget-minded lawmakers. It’s a $10 billion investment. It is not designed with the kind of modular features that would enable replacement parts if something went screwy.

Also it’s way out in deep space, in a gravitationally stable orbit around the sun called L2 that keeps it roughly a million miles from Earth. NASA doesn’t currently have spaceships to carry astronauts to L2 and back.

All this reinforces the joy among scientists that the telescope works as planned.

For a telescope of this design, a year is a big deal. The telescope’s mirrors have to remain extremely cold and can’t be pointed anywhere near the sun, so don’t expect to see any pretty JWST images of Venus. But a full orbit gives the telescope a chance to cover most of the universe.

JWST, which launched on Christmas morning 2021, has actually made one-and-a-half orbits, but the first six months were devoted to deploying its huge array of gold-coated hexagonal mirrors and a sprawling sun shade to keep them cool, as well as fine-tuning its instruments.

The light gathered by those mirrors carries information about multiple layers of the universe, from the farthest, dimmest, barely perceptible galaxies to more flamboyant galaxies in the foreground and star-forming clouds of dust and gas within our own Milky Way. And it’s looked at our immediate neighborhood, the solar system, returning poster-worthy pictures of Jupiter and Saturn that are jammed with scientific data.

The early universe is where the JWST has done its most interesting and, at times, puzzling investigations. The goal is to understand how the early universe evolved, how galaxies formed and how we got to where we are — on a planet orbiting a star on one of the spiral arms of a large galaxy.

“Our home is the Milky Way,” said Brant Robertson, a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of California at Santa Cruz. “That is a galaxy. It’s a beautiful galaxy. We can take pictures from the inside. But it begs the question: How did it get here? How did it form?”

This cosmic archaeology is why the JWST was built in the first place. One strange feature of the universe is that light is eternal. It gets fainter but it’s still there, including the most ancient light, heavily shifted into the infrared portion of the spectrum by the expansion of space that’s been happening since the big bang. Astrophysicists can use the JWST to scan for extremely high-redshift galaxies, digging ever deeper into the past.

Robertson co-wrote one of two recent papers that describe the most distant galaxy yet detected and confirmed by the JWST, named JADES-GS-Z13-0. It was found at redshift 13.2, which corresponds to about 320 million years after the big bang. There are claims of possible galaxies at higher redshifts, but they await confirmation, he said.

Asked what the galaxy looks like, he said: “It’s a smudge.”

But what if you could somehow get in a spacecraft and transport yourself through various wormholes into the distant past and hover right next to that galaxy. Then what would it look like?

“If you could be right up next to it, the galaxy itself would be very blue to your eyes, because it’s forming stars,” Robertson said. “It would be a very blue sparkler in the early universe.”

A puzzle about early galaxies

Right away, astronomers looking at the JWST data on the early universe spotted something that defied expectations: a lot of oddly bright galaxies.

Brightness is an approximation for mass. Very bright galaxies, therefore, would normally be assumed to be very massive. But galaxies need time to grow. The theorists had previously worked out a general timeline for the evolution of early galaxies, and the ones detected by the JWST look at first glance remarkably mature for their age.

The JWST may be telling scientists that galaxy formation in the early universe was somehow more efficient than previously known.

“There’s some tweaking we need to do in our theories for how those very early galaxies formed and grew their stars,” said Jeyhan Kartaltepe, an astrophysicist at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

“Nothing we’ve seen makes me think we’ve broken cosmology,” Rigby said. “What it is telling us is that galaxies got their act together earlier than we gave them credit for.”

Counterintuitively for those of us who are not astrophysicists, black holes could be another factor in the luminosity of those early galaxies. Although by definition a black hole is a structure with such an intense gravity field that even light cannot escape, the region around a black hole can glow as gas and dust become superheated falling toward the event horizon.

Last year Rebecca Larson, at that time still a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, saw something peculiar as she scrutinized data from an extremely distant galaxy named CEERS 1019. It emitted that light more than 13 billion years ago — back when the universe was just getting rolling, and galaxies were small, ill-formed gaggles of hot, young, bright-blue stars.

Larson was puzzled by the unusually bright light coming from the core of CEERS 1019. “What the heck is this?” she thought.

What she guessed it to be — correctly — is a supermassive black hole. The galaxy, though young, had already managed to grow a black hole that scientists estimate to have a mass equal to 10 million suns. A report from Larson and her colleagues describe this as the earliest active supermassive black hole ever detected.

Excitement over exoplanets

What the past year has also started to show is that the JWST is, in the words of astrophysicist Garth Illingworth, a “spectroscopic powerhouse.” It has proved to be spectacular at picking through the spectra of the light it gathers, which carries information about the object being observed.

That ability yielded one of the telescope’s first major discoveries: carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a giant planet, WASP 39b, orbiting a distant star. The planet itself isn’t visible with current technology. But as it passes in front of, or behind, its parent star, the changes in starlight encode information about the atmosphere of the planet.

Until the JWST, no one had made a definitive detection of carbon dioxide in an exoplanet’s atmosphere, said Knicole Colon, a NASA astrophysicist.

“The first time we saw the spectral signature of that feature, it was just beautiful,” she said. “It hit us in the face. Here’s this whopping signal, which was fantastic.”

To be clear, scientists looking at spectra are looking at graphical presentations of data, not actual images. Larson, who found the supermassive black hole, was so transfixed by the spectral signature of a central bright region in that galaxy that, as she put it, “I never thought to go look at the actual images from JWST.”

That’s when Kartaltepe showed her the image of the galaxy obtained by the telescope. Strikingly, the galaxy had three bright spots, with a particularly bright spot right in the middle. That was Larson’s supermassive black hole.

“I just started crying,” she said.

Today's Keith

It's Comeuppance Day!!

Praising By Faint Damnation

Tommy Tuberville may be dumb as a mud fence, but his handlers aren't.

And Tommy Tuberville may not be the racist asshole he seems to be, but there're lots of people who wear the label "Racist Asshole" like a merit badge, and they all think he's one of their own.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville refuses to agree white nationalists are racist

Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) said that the definition of a “white nationalist” is a matter of “opinion” during a television interview Monday night in which he was given the opportunity to clarify remarks from this spring, when he appeared to be advocating for white nationalists to serve in the U.S. military.

During the CNN interview, Tuberville repeatedly said that he rejects racism but pushed back against host Kaitlan Collins when she told him that by definition white nationalists are racist because they believe their race is superior to others. Tuberville at one point in the back and forth characterized white nationalists as people who hold “a few probably different beliefs.”

The interview resurrected another controversy for the first-term senator, who has been in the news mostly for stalling scores of senior military nominations in an attempt to stop a Defense Department policy that helps ensure access to abortions for service members and their families.

Asked to clarify his comments on white nationalists in the military, Sen. Tommy Tuberville's response: pic.twitter.com/deTfS4XKnR

— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) July 11, 2023

In a May interview with a local public radio station in Alabama, Tuberville, a former football coach, criticized Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin for his efforts “to get out the white extremists, the white nationalists” from the military. Tuberville said it was part of an effort to politicize the armed services and accused Pentagon leaders of “ruining our military” and driving away supporters of former president Donald Trump.

Tuberville subsequently told reporters that he looks “at a white nationalist as a Trump Republican,” adding: “That’s what we’re called all the time.”

Defending white nationalists, Tommy Tuberville fears a military that is ‘going wrong’

On Monday night, Collins pressed Tuberville on whether white nationalists should be allowed to serve in the military, offering a definition of a white nationalist as someone who “believes that the white race is superior to other races.”

“Well that’s some people’s opinion,” Tuberville said.

Asked for his opinion, Tuberville said: “My opinion of a white nationalist, if someone wants to call them white nationalist, to me, is an American. It’s an American. Now if that white nationalist is a racist, I’m totally against anything that they want to do because I am 110 percent against racism.”

Tuberville then accused Democrats of using the term to push “identity politics,” which he said is “ruining this country.”

Collins continued to press Tuberville on whether white nationalists should be able to serve in the military, saying they are people who believe “horrific things.”

“Well that’s just a name that has been given,” Tuberville said of white nationalism.

Collins told him, “it’s a real definition.”

“If you’re going to do away with most White people in this country out the military, we’ve got huge problems,” Tuberville responded.

“It’s not people who are White. It’s white nationalists,” Collins said.

“That have a few probably different beliefs, they have different beliefs,” Tuberville said. “Now if racism is one of those beliefs, I’m totally against it. I’m totally against racism.”

Earlier in the interview, Tuberville cited his coaching experience at Auburn University and elsewhere.

“I was a football coach for 40 years and had the opportunity to be around more minorities than anybody up on this Hill,” Tuberville said.

“A white nationalist is racist, senator,” Collins said.

“Well that’s your opinion, that’s your opinion,” Tuberville said.

He added: “I’m totally against any type of racism.”

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “[w]hite nationalist groups espouse white supremacist or white separatist ideologies, often focusing on the alleged inferiority of nonwhite persons.”

“Their primary goal is to create a white ethnostate,” the group says on its website. “Groups listed in a variety of other categories, including Ku Klux Klan, neo-Confederate, neo-Nazi, racist skinhead and Christian Identity, could also be fairly described as white nationalist.”

Military leaders have long worried about extremist views in their ranks.

A study by the Center for Strategic International Studies found that 6.4 percent of all domestic terror incidents in 2020 involved active-duty or reserve personnel, more than quadrupling the tally from the previous year. Hate groups actively target troops to become recruits while encouraging their own extremists to join the military ranks.

The presence of many military veterans at the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol further alarmed senior Pentagon officials and prompted Austin to create a counter-extremism working group in April 2021.

BTW, WaPo - maybe you could ask the Senator to name a kind of politics that isn't "identity politics".

OK - But For How Long?

Here I am saying it again - 

For 35 years, the smart guys have been warning us that this shit was headed our direction.

For the last 5 or 6 or 8 years, the western half of this country has caught fire regularly in the summer, and then, when the rain finally shows up - a year or ten later - they get smashed with floods and mudslides because there's no vegetation to help the dirt hold all the water.

This year, the fires in Canada have made it inconvenient (and maybe a little scary) for the Cocktail Party Set from Boston to Atlanta, and now flash floods have come to the states where they love to exile their bratty little legacy puke offspring for a month every summer, so all of a sudden, the Press Poodles are all over it.

Here's my question: It's finally becoming fashionable to be worried about the negative effects Climate Change is bound to have on the New York Social Calendar, so what can we expect a bunch of privileged little Tinker Bells to do about it?

And my next question: How long before the Poodles get tired of running the storries?

These fuckin' people.

Climate Disasters Daily? Welcome to the ‘New Normal.’

Around the United States, dangerous floods, heat and storms are happening more frequently.

Catastrophic floods in the Hudson Valley. An unrelenting heat dome over Phoenix. Ocean temperatures hitting 90 degrees Fahrenheit off the coast of Miami. A surprising deluge in Vermont, a rare tornado in Delaware.

A decade ago, any one of these events would have been seen as an aberration. This week, they are happening simultaneously as climate change fuels extreme weather, prompting Governor Kathy Hochul of New York, a Democrat, to call it “our new normal.”

Over the past month, smoke from Canadian wildfires blanketed major cities around the country, a deadly heat wave hit Texas and Oklahoma and torrential rains flooded parts of Chicago.

“It’s not just a figment of your imagination, and it’s not because everybody now has a smartphone,” said Jeff Berardelli, the chief meteorologist and climate specialist for WFLA News in Tampa. “We’ve seen an increase in extreme weather. This without a doubt is happening.”

It is likely to get more extreme. This year, a powerful El Niño developing in the Pacific Ocean is poised to unleash additional heat into the atmosphere, fueling yet more severe weather around the globe.

“We are going to see stuff happen this year around Earth that we have not seen in modern history,” Mr. Berardelli said.

And yet even as storms, fires and floods become increasingly frequent, climate change lives on the periphery for most voters. In a nation focused on inflation, political scandals and celebrity feuds, just 8 percent of Americans identified global warming as the most important issue facing the country, according to a recent NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll.

As climate disasters become more commonplace, they may be losing their shock value. A 2019 study concluded that people learn to accept extreme weather as normal in as little as two years.

“This is not just a complicated issue, but it’s competing for attention in a dynamic, uncertain, complicated world,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

Lilian Lovas, a 77-year-old lifelong Chicagoan, said she has seen climate change affect her hometown, but that she avoids the news in order to stay positive.

“It used to get so cold here in the winter but now we only get a couple real bitter days a year,” she said. “I vote and do my part but things are really out of my hands.”

Kristina Hengl, 51, a retail worker in Chicago, said she wasn’t so sure the weather extremes were anything that hadn’t happened before.

“I’m not a scientist so it’s hard for me to make a judgment call,” she said, before offering an inaccurate explanation. “Our planet has always had changes and this may be just the cycle of life. You have to consider that deserts used to have lakes, Lake Michigan wasn’t always a lake.”

In spite of the growing alarm among climate scientists, there are few signs of the kind of widespread societal change that would reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are dangerously heating the planet.

“Even though storms and other extremes of the climate are happening, if they are at a distance, we just as soon pretend it doesn’t affect us, because we don’t want to do the things that are needed to deal with this threat,” said Paul Slovic, a professor at the University of Oregon who specializes in the psychology of risk and decision making.

“More and more people recognize climate change as a problem, but they don’t like the solutions,” Mr. Slovic added. “They don’t want to have to give up the comfort and conveniences that we get from using energy from the wrong sources, and so forth.”

Last Thursday, on what researchers say was the hottest day in modern history, a record number of commercial flights, each one emitting more planet-warming gasses, were in the air, according to Flightradar24.

As wildfires and sea level rise wipe out communities from California to North Carolina, residents continue to rebuild in disaster-prone areas.

And while more electricity is being generated by wind, solar and other clean energy, the world is still largely powered by fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal, the primary sources of planet-warming emissions.

The cumulative effects of all those greenhouse gases are now on terrifying display around the globe. The planet has warmed by an average of 1.2 degrees Celsius compared with preindustrial levels, fueling a dizzying array of extreme weather events.

Studies show that the deadly flooding in Pakistan last year, the heat dome that baked the Pacific Northwest in 2021 and Hurricane Maria, which battered Puerto Rico in 2017, were all made worse by climate change.

“Climate change is here, now,” said Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s not far away in the Antarctic and it’s not off in the future. It’s these climate change fueled extreme weather events that we are all living through.”

Weather disasters that cost more than $1 billion in damage are on the upswing in the United States, according to a Climate Central analysis of data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In 1980, the average time between billion-dollar disasters was 82 days. From 2018-22, the average time between these most extreme events, even controlled for inflation, was just 18 days.

“Climate change is pushing these events to new levels,” said Bernadette Woods Placky, chief meteorologist at Climate Central. “We don’t get breaks in between them to recover like we used to.”

Human activity has had such a significant impact on the planet’s ecosystems and climate that scientists are now discussing whether to declare that Earth has entered a new interval of geologic time: the Anthropocene.

And with emissions still rising globally, scientists are warning that there is only a short amount of time to drastically change course before the effects become truly catastrophic.

“This is the last slap upside the head we’re going to get when it might still matter,” said Bill McKibben, a longtime climate activist. “It’s obviously a pivotal moment in the Earth’s climatic history. It also needs to be a pivotal moment in the Earth’s political history.”

In the United States, climate change is a partisan issue, with many Republican leaders questioning established climate science, promoting fossil fuels and opposing renewable energy.

Climate scientists and environmentalists hold out hope that each new hurricane and hailstorm could nudge Americans toward action.

A survey of adults this spring found a majority are now concerned about climate change and support federal action to combat global warming and promote clean energy, according to a recent survey by Yale.

Even in Florida, a state that has grown more conservative in recent years, a growing number of residents believe humans are causing climate change, including a record number of Republicans, according to a survey by Florida Atlantic University.

“The polling data has shifted over the last few years, and I would bet that it’s going to lurch again,” Mr. McKibben said. “At a certain point, if you see enough fires and floods, who are you going to believe?”

Here Comes The Hot

If it's not arrived where you are yet, sit tight - it's coming.

We're already in record-setting territory for hot weather - July 3-5 being the hottest days ever recorded, and possibly the hottest days in 125,000 years.

So it's here whether you know it or not. And whether you're willing to acknowledge the reasons or not, it's fucking hot.

So, of course, we crank up the AC. One word: don't.

Typical HVAC systems are designed and engineered to operate effectively within a range of "normal" temperatures.

• A heat pump will keep you snug and toasty at 72°F as long as the outside air temperature isn't below about 35°F.
• On the other side, your AC will keep you cool at 72°F as long as the outside temp is below about 100-105°F.

The gear is made to work with temperature differentials of about 40 or 50°F tops.

So if the outside temperature gets down to (eg) 20°F, the heat pump can't extract enough warmth from the cold air - it can only heat the air going into your house by 40 or 45 degrees, so it's going to blow cold air. At that point, either the Auxiliary Heat kicks in (ie: electric heating coils), or the system goes to gas or heating oil of whatever.

Likewise, the AC is going to struggle hard trying to cool the outside air by more than about 35-40 degrees. So if the outside temp is about 90 or so, then it shouldn't be a big deal, but as it gets up around 105°F, you're putting a lot of unproductive (and likely harmful) stress on your system. Which is bad for the power grid, and requires more power to be generated, which contributes to greenhouse warming, which is at the root of the problem in the first fucking place.

Don’t crank down your thermostat when it’s hot out. Do this instead.

If you’re seeking relief from the scorching summer heat, resist the urge to dramatically turn down your thermostat.

“Definitely don’t do that,” said Jennifer Amann, senior fellow in the buildings program at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, a nonprofit group. “It’s not going to really cool your home any faster.”

10 steps you can take to lower your carbon footprint
She and other experts say cranking down your thermostat will only strain your air conditioner, which already has to work harder when it’s hot out. It also increases your energy use, placing more pressure on the electricity grid and potentially contributing to blackouts or brownouts during periods of high demand.

This summer is already shaping up to be historically hot, increasing the chances this year will be Earth’s warmest on record. The extreme weather is raising concerns about power grid failures and exposure to dangerous heat.

Here’s how to set your thermostat to stay safe and save energy during hot days. Adjusting the temperature one degree warmer, for example, can typically yield energy savings of 1 percent, experts say.

“Particularly, in the middle of a hot day it can really help avoid reliability issues on the grid,” Amann said.

Setting your thermostat low doesn’t cool your home faster

Your home air-conditioning system doesn’t work like a water faucet, said Shichao Liu, an architectural engineering professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts.

When the indoor temperature is warmer than what your thermostat is set to, your system turns on, he said. But setting the thermostat really low doesn’t increase your air conditioner’s cooling capacity.

“People think, ‘If I make the thermostat set point 60, I’ll get more cooling than a set point at 70,’ but that’s not correct,” Liu said. “You get the same amount of the cooling.”

If you set your thermostat to a temperature that exceeds your air conditioner’s capacity, the system will keep running as it tries to cool your home to that point, he said. And continuously running your air conditioner guzzles energy and can shorten the life span of your system.

Best temperature when it’s hot

One study conducted on the University of Georgia’s campus in Athens in summer 2014 found people reported feeling comfortable in indoor temperatures anywhere between 71 to 77 degrees Fahrenheit.

“If a person was in their house and they’re going to be there all the time, they could maybe turn up to 76 or 77 or so,” said Thomas Lawrence, a professor of practice emeritus at the University of Georgia who co-wrote the peer-reviewed paper. The study’s results suggest “most people will be fine with that.”

“People should realize that if it’s really hot outside, having it at 77, 78, or even more, on the inside for a little while still feels good,” he said.

Best settings when you’re out

And when you’re not at home for extended periods of time, Amann suggested setting your thermostat 5 to 10 degrees warmer than what would normally be comfortable for you.

Programming your thermostat to a higher temperature for eight hours a day could result in annual energy savings of as much as 10 percent on heating and cooling, according to the Energy Department.

“If everybody who is away from home has set their thermostat so that they’re saving at least 5 percent of their cooling, then across all of the houses that can really make a difference in addressing that peak load,” Amann said.

Manage your AC in peak hours
When you do a temperature setback matters, Amann said.

“The most critical times to be thinking about really managing your AC load is in those peak hours in the middle of the day, those really hot afternoon hours” when electricity demand is high, she said. “That’s when it can be particularly important to do a setback if you can.”

Keep in mind, though, that air conditioners are also critical for dehumidifying, which is a major part of keeping you feeling physically cool and comfortable.

Other cooling methods

When it’s really hot out, you can feel warmer indoors even though your thermostat is set to a temperature that’s usually comfortable for you, Liu said. Instead of dialing down the temperature, use other approaches to stay cool, he said.

Ceiling fans, for example, can be a huge help, and typically require little energy to run.

“People don’t realize how much more comfortable they can be if they used their fans strategically,” Amann said.

Other tips include:

• Make sure your blinds or shades are closed during the hottest parts of the day, particularly if you don’t have updated windows.
• Avoid using appliances such as dishwashers, ovens, stovetops and dryers, which can make spaces hotter and more humid and force your air conditioner to work harder.
• Open and close windows to help increase air circulation and ventilation, particularly at night.

It Can't Always Be A Republican

... but somehow, it's always a Republican. And it kinda makes sense that it's always a Republican, cuz how else are these buttheads going to get laid if they don't force somebody into it?

Jesus take me now.

Seriously - would you

have sex with this putz

if you didn't have to?

North Carolina GOP House speaker 'engaged in group sex with people seeking political favor': lawsuit

The Republican speaker of the North Carolina House of Representatives is being accused of using his position to secure sexual favors.

As WSOC-TV reports, a new lawsuit filed by former Apex City Councilman Scott Riley Lassiter claims that North Carolina House Speaker Tim Moore had an affair with Lassiter's wife, Jamie Liles Lassiter, "despite knowing that she was married to Plaintiff."

When Lassiter confronted his wife about this, she confessed to the affair and said that she feared ending it would anger Moore, whom she feared would try to put her out of a job.

The couple have since separated and are in the process of getting a divorce.

In addition to the alleged affair with Lassiter's wife, the lawsuit also says that Moore "engaged in group sex with other people seeking political favor," writes WSOC-TV.

An attorney representing Moore denied the accusations and felt confident that a full court hearing would refute Lassiter's charges.

"I look forward to meeting Mr. Lassiter in the courtroom," they said. "We are confident the Speaker will be vindicated."

Jamie Liles Lassiter also denied the allegations and accused her estranged husband of highlighting it in the lawsuit as an act of revenge for their impending divorce.

"Our marriage was a nightmare, and since I left him it has gotten worse," she said. "We are reaching the end of our divorce process and this is how he’s lashing out.”

The Buck Stops

Here's a flash: The GOP signed their souls over to Trump. He has control over "the base" so he can practically dictate who runs in certain races and who doesn't, and he's got a solid strangle hold on the small donor fund-raising. Throw in what I'm pretty sure he collects from the Russian mob, and whatever help he gets from the rest of Putin's gang, and you've got a party that's not getting back to "normal" any time soon probably ever.

I haven't found solid confirmation, but it's being reported that he's bumping the price he charges Republicans to use WinRed.

The party committed to using WinRed as their main vehicle for general public fund-raising about 4 years ago. He takes a cut by way of a company (Revv) that one of his lackeys set up. As little as half of the money sent in by Mom and Pop ends up going to either the GOP or the GOP's candidates.

Anyway.

Republicans Are Losing Money Because of Trump

Six top GOP donors stopped giving money to the Michigan or Arizona Republican parties because of their perceived support for the discredited claim that the 2020 presidential election was rigged against Donald Trump, according to a new report.

One former Michigan donor, real estate tycoon Ron Weiser, told Reuters it is "ludicrous" to claim Trump won the state in 2020, as supporters of the former president are continuing to do.

Trump is currently running to be the 2024 Republican presidential nominee, with polling giving him a commanding lead over Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is his closest rival. Concerns about the former president's impact on fundraising are likely to help DeSantis, who is attempting to convince voters he's the party's best bet for returning to the White House after the November 2024 election.

In November 2020, Joe Biden defeated Trump by 306 electoral college votes to 232, resulting in him being inaugurated as president the following January. Trump is continuing to insist the contest was "rigged" against him, though this claim has been repeatedly dismissed in court and by independent legal and election experts.

Reuters reported that six former donors had stopped giving to Republican parties in Michigan and Arizona over their backing of candidates who questioned the 2020 election's legitimacy and what they regard as extreme positions on other issues, such as abortion.

Referring to the Michigan GOP's support for election conspiracy theorists Weiser, who used to chair the party, commented: "I question whether the state party has the necessary expertise to spend the money well."

In Arizona, Jim Click, from a family of longstanding GOP donors, told Reuters that "it's too bad we let the right wing of our party take over the operations," and said he would switch to backing individual candidates rather than the state Republican party.

According to campaign finance filings the Arizona GOP had just $50,000 in its state and federal bank accounts on March 31, down from nearly $770,000 four years ago. Filings also show the Michigan GOP had around $116,000 in its federal account on March 31, compared to almost $867,000 on the same date in 2021.

Newsweek reached out to the Michigan and Arizona Republican parties via email, and Donald Trump via the press contact form on his official website for comment.

A number of Arizona Republican candidates in the 2022 midterms endorsed Trump's claims of electoral fraud including Kari Lake, who lost the state gubernatorial election to Democrat Katie Hobbs. Lake is still refusing to concede.

Republican Kristina Karamo lost her bid to become Michigan secretary of state, which would have given her substantial influence over how the 2024 presidential election is conducted. Karamo had falsely claimed Trump really won the 2020 election in Michigan and blamed the January 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol on "Antifa posing as Trump supporters."

Both Sides Don't

It's a slow-moving, not-quite-boiling-over civil war?

OK, let's take a look at who's at war, and against what &/or who.

Republicans are at war against:

• Mickey Mouse
• Barbie
• Science
• Big Bird
• Mr Potato Head
• The green M&M
• Asian-American muppet
• Dr Seuss
• Women
• Voting rights
• Labor rights
• Equal justice
• Democracy

Dems are waging war against:

• Inflation
• Climate Change
• Poverty
• Medical bankruptcy
• Environmental damage
• Unfair taxation
• Predatory lending
• Inequality & inequity
• Police brutality
• Exclusion
• Fascism, theocracy & plutocracy

Don't bring that Both Sides bullshit in here.

Today's Tweet

Private equity buys up housing at record rates. Housing costs skyrocket.

Private equity invests billions in the health care industry. Costs explode.

Hedge funds and private equity firms buy up half the nation’s daily papers. Reporters are laid off in droves.

See the pattern? pic.twitter.com/b2qo7C2FPW

— Robert Reich (@RBReich) July 7, 2023