As someday it may happen that more Good News must be found,
I’ve made a little list, I’ve made a little list,
Of sources of the best Good News that everywhere is found,
So that none of it is missed, so none of it is missed!
Oh, Lordy, there are tapes and now subpoenas by the score!
And witnesses in hundred lots and documents and more!
And animals and science facts and “Biden gets things done”!
Republicans in disarray—in chaos! Oh, what fun!
Cartoons to make you laugh or cry and weirdness, we insist.
To make sure they don’t get missed, so none of ‘em is missed.
We’ve got ‘em on the list—on our little Good News list,
So they’ll none of ‘em be missed, they’ll none of ‘em be missed.
Gilbert’s original lyrics in The Mikado included
And apologetic statesmen of a compromising kind
Such as — What d'ye call him — Thing'em-bob,
And likewise — Never-mind,
And 'St— 'st— 'st— and What's-his-name,
And also You-know-who —
The task of filling up the blanks I'd rather leave to you.
But it really doesn't matter whom you put upon the list,
For they'd none of 'em be missed — they'd none of 'em be missed!
That part hasn’t changed at all since then, except that nearly all of them now belong to only one party. But as the man implies, that’s all bad news, and we can simply concentrate on throwing the entire Party of plutocracy and White male “Christian” Supremacy out. Or, to a large extent, allowing them to throw themselves under the electric bus.
Maundy Thursday or Holy Thursday (also known as Great and Holy Thursday, Holy and Great Thursday, Covenant Thursday, Sheer Thursday, and Thursday of Mysteries, among other names) is the day during Holy Week that commemorates the Washing of the Feet (Maundy) and Last Supper of Jesus Christ with the Apostles, as described in the canonical gospels.[1]
It is the fifth day of Holy Week, preceded by Holy Wednesday and followed by Good Friday.[2] "Maundy" comes from the Latin word mandatum, or commandment, reflecting Jesus' words "I give you a new commandment."[3] The day comes always between March 19 and April 22, inclusive, and will vary according to whether the Gregorian calendar or the Julian calendar is used. Eastern churches generally use the Julian system.
Maundy (from Old French mandé, from Latin mandatum meaning "command"),[1] or the Washing of the Feet, or Pedelavium,[2] is a religious rite observed by various Christian denominations. The Latin word mandatum is the first word sung at the ceremony of the washing of the feet, "Mandatum novum do vobis ut diligatis invicem sicut dilexi vos", from the text of John 13:34 in the Vulgate ("I give you a new commandment, That ye love one another as I have loved you", John 13:34).
Ah, if only.
This is also seen as referring to the commandment of Christ that believers should emulate his loving humility in the washing of the feet (John 13:14–17). The term mandatum (mandé, maundy), therefore, was applied to the rite of foot-washing on the Thursday preceding Easter Sunday, called Maundy Thursday.
John 13:1–17 recounts Jesus' performance of this act. In verses 13:14–17, He instructs His disciples:
If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have given you an example, that you should do as I have done to you. Most assuredly, I say to you, a servant is not greater than his master; nor is he who is sent greater than he who sent him. If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them.
— John 13:14–17 (NKJV)
Many denominations (including Anglicans, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, Mennonites, and Catholics) therefore observe the liturgical washing of the feet on Maundy Thursday of Holy Week.[1] Moreover, for some denominations, foot-washing was an example, a pattern. Many groups throughout Church history and many modern denominations have practiced foot washing as a church ordinance including Adventists, Anabaptists, Baptists, Free Will Baptists, and Pentecostals.[1]
HOLY WEEK 2022
Pope Francis’ Holy Thursday mass in the Vatican: times, how to watch live online
Pope Francis is due to preside over the Chrism Mass at St Peter’s Basilica on the morning of HolyThursday 2022.
Before the pandemic, Pope Francis had made it a tradition to celebrate the Mass and foot-washing ritual at a prison or detention center, refugee center or rehabilitation facility. This is not on this year’s published calendar, presumably due to covid. Let us know if you know about it.
As a Buddhist novice with the Zen Mission Society temple, Unpukuji, I had to go from Japan to Korea to apply for a Japanese Missionary Visa [sic]. While there, I spent Holy Week in a Jesuit monastery/college that was working closely with the Peace Corps. Good times. I also got to stay in several of the major Buddhist monasteries around the country.
We are also in the Muslim fast of Ramadan, in honor of the fasts of Jesus/Issa in the desert, and Muhammad in his cave. It is on a completely lunar calendar, so that it cycles around the solar calendar from year to year. This year it runs from April 1 to May 1.
The Jewish Passover/Pesakh starts tomorrow and runs for eight days until Saturday April 23. Remember that what we have is enough, Dayenu, and that the Angel of Death is dead.
Buddhist Vesak is coming up or has just been, on the full moon day of the fourth or fifth month in various lunar calendars. It celebrates the birth, enlightenment, and parinibbana (death) of Shakyamuni Buddha, the Bhagavan. It will be on May 6 in several countries, including the US.
Have an Easter hymn. We sing this at Shasta Abbey, too, in our version of a Twelve Lessons and Carols service for Vesak.
Jimmy Carter Trending Again on Twitter
No, he didn’t die. Tweeps always worry when they see old people trending.
It turns out that Rs have run out of new culture war issues, and think that bashing Jimmy Carter for his Christian charity will work for them, in defiance of their clear mandate from Jesus. Twitter is, of course, pointing and laughing, among other things.
That was in Ottawa, Ontario, in 1952, where the reactor did NOT in the end melt down completely, blow up, or release radioactive gases. It just had hundreds of thousands of gallons of radioactive water flooding the core, and just a few melted fuel rods. (Equipment failures plus human errors.)
In those days, Carter was not thinking of running for President. His highest ambition at the time was to become Chief of Naval Operations.
Good News
Elections
It turns out that
- We beat back gerrymandering in this cycle, and may have come out ahead in the House.
- As hpg and others constantly remind us, our prospects in the Senate are excellent. (Remember, repetition is good. I repeat, repetition is good.)
- We are beating back voter suppression in the courts and through GOTV.
- The DOJ started to arrest election terrorists a while back, and is continuing its due diligence on 1/6, subpoenas, and bogus slates of electors so that there will be no surprises when the crooks are put on trial.
- Marc Elias, the ACLU, the NAACP LDF, and others are on top of the states asserting a right to overturn Presidential elections and name their own electors.
- Dems are getting our messages out. Doomsters concentrate on eyeballs and clicks. Democracy? What’s that for?
- Rs are no longer in disarray—It’s total chaos and fog of internal civil war now.
And there’s plenty more where that came from.
Issues
One Year of Biden-Harris
President Biden and Vice President Harris promised to move quickly to deliver results for working families. That’s what they’ve done.
Messages? You want messages? How about
Finish the job.
Завершіть роботу.
Termina el trabajo.
- Over 200 million Americans fully vaccinated in one year. Let’s do more. Finish the job.
-
6.4 million jobs added — the most in any year in U.S. history. Let’s do more. Finish the job.
President Biden’s first year was the greatest year of job creation in American history, with more than 6 million jobs created.
-
The biggest drop in unemployment ever. Let’s do more. Finish the job.
The unemployment rate dropped from 6.2% when Biden took office to 3.6% under President Biden –-- the biggest single year drop in American history. When the President was sworn in, over 18 million were receiving unemployment benefits. Today, only 2 million are—also the biggest single year drop in history.
-
Lowest child poverty rate ever. Let’s do more. Finish the job.
Thanks to President Biden’s American Rescue Plan, experts estimate the lowest child poverty rate ever for 2021. The number of households reporting that they sometimes or often did not have enough to eat also dropped by 32%.
- 5 million more Americans with health insurance. Let’s do more. Finish the job.
-
Took Aggressive Action to Tackle the Climate Crisis. Let’s do more. Finish the job.
President Biden rejoined the Paris Agreement and reestablished U.S. leadership at the global conference on climate change.
-
Electric vehicle sales doubled in one year. Let’s do more. Finish the job.
The Biden-Harris Administration is deploying more clean energy than any administration in history and jumpstarting an electric vehicle future that’s made in America.
-
Confirmed Historic Judges. Let’s do more. Finish the job.
More of President Biden’s lower-court judicial nominees were confirmed in his first year than any president since Kennedy – and the President appointed more Black women on the Court of Appeals than any President ever. And then KBJ to SCOTUS
-
Advanced Racial Equity. Let’s do more. Finish the job.
President Biden signed a Day One Executive Order on advancing equity and racial justice and a separate Executive Order to expand diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility across the federal government. The Administration set a government-wide goal of increasing the share of federal contracts to small disadvantaged businesses, including those owned by people of color, by 50% by FY25 – meaning an increase of $100 billion to these firms over five years. The Administration provided $3 billion in the American Rescue Plan specifically for Tribal communities and Native people and $13 billion in direct investments in Tribal communities through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
Any pol who can’t sell that and the rest of this record and what we can do with full Senate control is in the wrong line of work. To begin with, do not let Rs frame anything. As I have said before, and will again,
Good News Thursday: They Smashed the Overton Window to Flinders
So we get to install a new one, a beautiful, energy-efficient picture window with no more distortions. On every major issue, a majority favors progressive measures, but we have been held back by electoral shenanigans. No more.
Oh, BTW, the R talking points about inflation are bogus. Oil and gasoline prices are both coming down, but EVs are far cheaper. The auto chip shortage will be solved later this year when several new fabs come on line in the US. There are currently issues with the food supply chain that we know how to address.
We will see a gradual ramping up of this messaging as primary season progresses, and the full bore full court press when the general election campaigns all open. And, of course, the anvil-and-anchor throwing at Rs by both sides.
How Low Can You Go? Dept.
CRT! Hit ‘em in the knee! CRT! Hit ‘em in the other knee!
Schadenfreudilicity Dept.
Rudy Giuliani unlocks phones for prosecutors in Ukraine-related lobbying probe
A Spade is a Damned Shovel Dept.
He was identified as one of several oligarch candidates groomed to lead a puppet government in the event of a successful Russian seizure of Kyiv.
In 2019 Ukrainian politician Viktor Medvedchuk, made a political comeback after his party came second in a parliamentary vote. “His pro-Moscow Opposition Platform-For Life party won 13 percent of the vote, allowing US-sanctioned Medvedchuk to return to Ukraine's parliament after more than a decade.” He represented pro-Russian interests including the Donbas, insisting that Crimea was Russia’s. He even has an as yet unseized yacht.
In his 2015 book All the Kremlin's Men, Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar claimed that Putin believed that no question involving Ukraine could be solved without Medvedchuk.
Russia Say It Has Captured More Than 1,000 Ukrainian Marines, Zelensky Offers Prisoner Swap With Putin Ally [Medvedchuk]
Yup, that’s how you get ammunition explosions.
Howitzers, Helicopters, Humvees Headed to Ukraine
An additional $800 million drawdown package of security assistance is on its way to Ukraine. Efforts to get the newly authorized equipment and supplies to the Ukrainian military will begin immediately, said Pentagon Press Secretary John F. Kirby.
This most recent authorization is the seventh drawdown of equipment from DOD inventories for Ukraine since August 2021, Kirby said. About $2.6 billion in security assistance has been provided to Ukraine since the beginning of the Russian invasion on Feb. 24.
According to Kirby, the array of equipment that will be sent to Ukraine as part of the new drawdown package is broad. It includes 18 155 mm Howitzers, along with 40,000 artillery rounds. Also included are the AN/TPQ-36 counterartillery and AN/MPQ-64 Sentinel air surveillance radar systems.
To move Ukrainian troops around the battlefield, the package includes 100 armored Humvee vehicles, 200 M113 Armored Personnel Carriers, and 11 Mi-17 helicopters. The helicopters will augment the five Mi-17 helicopters sent to Ukraine earlier this year.
Additional Switchblade drones, Javelin missiles, medical equipment, body armor and helmets, optics and laser rangefinders, and M18A1 Claymore mines are also included in the package.
The Mi-17 is a Soviet-era ransport helicopter designed in the mid-1970s that can be refitted as a gunship.
There was some backing and filling about these helicopters at DoD yesterday, but they seem to be on their way now. We are getting closer to the big question, Polish MiG fighter jets for Ukraine. If Putin doesn’t order battlefield nukes fired off when these helicopters are used against his forces, that will become another argument for the MiGs.
NYT, 2020: U.S. Charges Russian Intelligence Officers in Major Cyberattacks
Prosecutors said the suspects hacked elections in France, the electricity grid in Ukraine and the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea.
The Justice Department indictment said the suspects were also responsible for developing malware used in attacks on Ukraine’s power grid. The first, on Dec. 23, 2015, infiltrated Ukrainian energy companies, cutting power for hours to more than 200,000 residents in the country’s west.
In a follow-up in late 2016 that targeted the power grid in Kyiv, Ukraine, the suspects used a second piece of malware, called Industroyer, to cut electricity for an hour, the indictment said. The malware, according to experts, posed one of the greatest digital threats to critical infrastructure since Stuxnet, the computer attack by the United States and Israel that took out Iran’s uranium centrifuges in 2009.
They just had another go at the Ukrainian grid.
AP: Ukraine says potent Russian hack against power grid thwarted
“The threat was serious, but it was prevented in a timely manner,” a top Ukrainian cybersecurity official, Victor Zhora, told reporters through an interpreter. “It looks that we were very lucky.”
Ukraine has been under steady Russian cyberattack for the past eight years, with Zhora noting that the attacks have tripled since the invasion when compared with the same period last year.
Western prosecutors blame Sandworm for a series of high-profile cyberattacks including the most destructive, the 2017 NotPetya wiper virus that caused more than $10 billion in damage globally by destroying data on entire networks of computers of companies doing business in Ukraine including those belonging to the shipper Maersk and the pharmaceutical company Merck.
Don’t Confuse Me With Facts Dept.
CDC: Covid cases up; hospitalizations, deaths down to record lows.
Because of vaccinations, obviously. Disinformationists continue to claim that the vaccines are many times more dangerous than the virus. If you see such posts on social media, the Indivisible Truth Brigade advises us not to argue with them and give the bogus claims more oxygen. Just report them. I get messages from Twitter and Facebook when they take action on one or more of my reports. Or downvote them, on platforms that support that, like Quora. Facebook has a “rage” reaction on its Like menu.
Or you can write Truth Sandwiches calling out the hypocrisy of such attacks without naming individuals or repeating the lies directly. Ask us how.
The new White House Covid czar, Dr. Ashish Jha, said that hospitalizations remained very low and that he was not overly concerned. The U.S. State Department ordered some workers to leave Shanghai.
NYT Opinion Dept.
Highly recommended by Lawrence O’Donnell last night.
[article paywalled; read with ctl-A select all, ctl-C copy before the popup appears, paste elsewhere]
A lot of *waves hand* things going on right now are about our insistence that rich people have the same emotions that non rich people have. And while they may have the same working set of emotions, they have different meaning.
The same for our White male “Christian” Supremacists, who insist that us shaming them is toxic tyranny, while them shaming us is good for the whole world.
Your Regularly Scheduled Good News Sources
From our Little List.
Opium Production Ceases as Communities in Mexico’s Golden Triangle Turn to Forestry
Solar Panels That Make Electricity at Night are Finally Here – And They’re Cheap and Don’t Need Batteries
They use thermoelectric generation based on the temperature differences between the panels and the surrounding air.
Go ahead and mine them for more Good News in the comments.
Science! Animals! Weirdness!
Turns Out the Megacomet Is More Than 80 Miles Wide—and It's Headed Our Way
Clickbait headline on real story.
Last year, the monstrous Bernardinelli-Bernstein comet (also known as C/2014 UN271) was discovered by the eponymous University of Pennsylvania astronomers Gary Bernstein and Pedro Bernardinelli. The pair called it the “nearly spherical cow of comets” in their paper about the discovery, but it wasn’t long until the world dubbed it the “megacomet” for being an absolute unit of a space object.
The megacomet is on an interstellar road trip that’ll bring it right through our solar system in 2031. Luckily for us, it’s not expected to get any closer than a billion miles away from the sun, passing between Saturn and Uranus’ respective orbits. In fact, the megacomet is following a 3-million-year-long elliptical orbit—so it’s been a minute since we’ve seen it last.
That’s a long enough lead time for us to organize a lander.
Watch this spacetime.
Mokurai’s collection of Electric Vehicle porn on Pinterest
Every kind of electric vehicle from scooters to spaceships
including the 2022 model cars and 2023 concept cars.
Every Electric Vehicle That's Expected in the Next Five Years
These EVs aren't for sale yet but are in various stages from concept to production—and perhaps a few may never see the light of day.
Science Magazine @ScienceMagazine
My father and my mentor had whole-body neuropathy for years before diabetes stopped their hearts. With better meters and treatments, I have gone 25 years with active type II diabetes without losing normal sensation or developing pain. It is just the same as having a leg “go to sleep” from pressure on blood vessels, and then getting shooting pains when it wakes up again—but non-stop.
170 Fun Facts For Kids – Weird But True!
Porcupines can float.
Lots of animals can float, but not all of them are this funny. In their case, their hollow quills give them extra buoyancy.
Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, a wholesale power supply cooperative with 45 members in four states—Colorado, Nebraska, New Mexico, and Wyoming—announced its intentions to retire the Rifle Station, an 85-MW combined cycle facility in Rifle, Colorado.
The announcement was made on April 5 in conjunction with a filing with the Colorado Public Utilities Commission (CPUC). If approved, the plant would be closed “on or about Oct. 6, 2022,” Tri-State said.
The Rifle plant runs infrequently, according to the cooperative, because “sufficient and lower-cost resources” are available to serve member power requirements. The station reportedly would need “significant investments” to continue operating.
In January, Tri-State reached an agreement with more than two dozen parties on Phase I of its 2020 Electric Resource Plan (ERP), which was before the CPUC at the time. In the settlement, Tri-State agreed to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions related to its wholesale electricity sales in Colorado by 26% in 2025, 36% in 2026, 46% in 2027, and 80% in 2030, based on Tri-State’s 2005 emissions baseline for wholesale sales in Colorado.
Yup. Wind, solar, and storage are beating out gas now.
WattEV’s E-Truck Stop to offer 40 charging bays with 25 MW of power, microgrid and battery storage
Startup WattEV plans to build a 25-megawatt, solar-powered, electric-only public truck stop between California’s Central Valley and Southern California’s bustling ports and shipping hubs.
The 110-acre truck stop will be located at a heavily truck-trafficked highway intersection in Bakersfield, at the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley, near logistics centers run by Amazon and Walmart. It will feature a solar microgrid with battery storage, plus grid energy from PG&E.
WattEV also plans to serve transport customers with its Trucks as a Service (TaaS) offering. The company has already reserved 50 Tesla Semis, and plans to place more orders with other OEMs. WattEV says its TaaS business model will generate initial demand for charging by offering a solution to transporters that is financially viable while enabling shippers to meet their sustainability goals.
Tesla Semis are available with 300 or 500 mile range, for $150,000 and $180,000 respectively.
DTE Energy Will Close Belle River Coal Power Plant Two Years Early
Detroit-based DTE Energy said it will cease all coal use at its Belle River Power Plant no later than December 2028, at least two years earlier than the facility’s previously scheduled 2030 end date.
The Belle River Power Plant comprises two electric generating units, each with a maximum gross design generating output of 697 MW. The 2,200-acre site on which it’s located is in China and East China Townships in St. Clair County, Michigan, and is shared with several other units including a few gas-fired peaking combustion turbines and the coal-fired St. Clair Power Plant. The Belle River units were brought online in 1984 and 1985, respectively.
New Jersey’s Last Two Coal Power Plants to Close within Months
The New Jersey Board of Public Utilities (NJBPU) approved a petition filed by Atlantic City Electric Co. (ACE) that modifies power purchase agreements (PPAs) and power sales agreements (PSAs) between ACE and Chambers Cogeneration Ltd. and Logan Generating Co., the last two coal-fired electricity generation units in New Jersey. Under the agreements, coal-fired generation will cease on or around May 31, 2022, Starwood Energy Group Global LLC, which owns the plants through investment affiliates, said.
The Logan Generating Plant is a 225-MW unit in Swedesboro, New Jersey. It entered commercial operation in September 1994. Logan was among the first commercial-scale pulverized coal plants in the U.S. to use selective catalytic reduction (SCR) technology, and the first to use a plate-type catalyst to reduce NOx emissions.
Ameren to Close 1.2-GW Coal Power Plant by March 2024, 15 Years Early
In a Dec. 14 filing with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, Ameren Missouri announced its intent to retire two 600-MW units at the Rush Island Energy Center 15 years earlier than previously planned due to “changed circumstances since the Remedy Ruling.”
The court’s remedy ruling, delivered on Sept. 30, 2019, requires Ameren to obtain a Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) permit and install flue gas desulfurization (FGD) technology for emissions control at Rush Island. The ruling requires the plant to achieve a sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions limit of 0.05 lb SO2/MMBtu or less on a 30-day rolling average. The judgment set a compliance deadline of March 30, 2024.
Ameren said retiring Rush Island early will have a “much more beneficial environmental impact, on a far shorter timeframe,” than installing wet FGD technology and continuing operations. However, the company said retiring the 1.2-GW facility is not a simple matter. “Potential grid stability and reliability impacts and other downstream effects must be evaluated, and those issues that are identified must be addressed,” it said.
Meet Earendel, the Most Distant Star Astronomers Have Observed
The Hubble Space Telescope has revealed a single star whose light has traveled for 12.9 billion years to Earth, having come from a universe just 900 million years old. It’s currently the most distant star known, and the team has dubbed it Earendel*.
The discovery is a huge jump, as the previous record-holder for more distant star existed in a universe 4 billion years old.
The iconic observatory had some help from nature’s own optics: The vast mass of a foreground cluster of galaxies, sitting just so between us and the distant star, acts like a lens, its gravity magnifying the star’s light thousands-fold. The discovery is published in the March 31st Nature.
Ah, you wait for Webb, starting in June. It is currently cooling toward the instrument operating temperature, 7 K. Then the final fine mirror alignments can be made, with the instruments at full sensitivity, and the flood of new images and data can begin.
This image was taken by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide-Field Camera 3 as part of an observing programme called RELICS (Reionization Lensing Cluster Survey). RELICS imaged 41 massive galaxy clusters with the aim of finding the brightest distant galaxies for the forthcoming NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to study.
Funny or Cry
Look for “cartoon” in the DK image library. Check out DK’s Stories from Comics, too. And various DK authors and commenters provide excellent material all over the place. Twitter and other social media have lots of people compiling this stuff for our edification and enjoyment.
Someday minimum wage workers (going up) will be able to afford used electric cars (going down), and renters will be able to get chargers at home.
Avery Schreiber: I’ve been talking to all of your friends, Monster.
Sweetums: Oh, yeah?
Schreiber: You don’t have any.
The Muppet Show
Are we having fun yet?