More squander.  From Jalopnik.

Strategic Oil Reserves So Low, The U.S. Risks Damaging The Salt Caverns Where We Stash Our Emergency Oil

In the late 1970s, probably 1979, I was taking a high school chemistry class.  One day the whole class, and classes across the region took a standardized chemistry test.  My teacher, Mr Serpas, showed us a t-shirt that would go to the person who scored the highest in the class.  It was a brown shirt (this was the 70s) with a big picture of a guy from perhaps the 1700s or 1800s with a big head of curly hair.  Maybe a bit like Bach or Isaac Newton.

I scored the highest in the class and got the t-shirt. I wore it a lot.  The picture on the front was (by my recollection all these years later) Jean Claude Emile Baptiste Litre, the person the litre is named after.

This morning I looked it up on a whim.  I was a bit off on the name.  It also seems there was never any such person.  It was all an elaborate prank.  I guess someone who made the t-shirts from the River Parishes high school chemistry survey that year fell for it.  And I guess I did too, at least until today.

Claude Émile Jean-Baptiste Litre

And it has been retracted. But not after being picked up by the press and quoted in congressional testimony.  The things wrong with this paper are too numerous to summarize here. But read it yourself.  It’s got lots of numbers but it is pretty layman-friendly.  Upshot: covid mRNA vaccines are very effective and very safe (but nearly everyone knows this already).

Guest post: A terrible academic paper has fueled renewed anti-vax journalism – it must be retracted

I always assumed that if you already had a gas car, the best thing to do environmentally, was to just keep it.  After all it takes lots of energy to make a car.  A new study says: nope.  It’s better for the climate if old gas cars are just scrapped and swapped for EVs.  When you factor in the costs (and death tolls) of droughts, floods and heatwaves accumulate these sorts of solutions would seem to be attractive.  Perhaps they always were.  From Inside EV.

The Results Are In: Scrapping Your Gas Car For An EV Is Better For The Climate

I saw this documentary a few months ago and I keep thinking about it.  It’s only 40 minutes long and very well done.  If you think you know what happened in the Watergate Scandal, you need to watch this.

The Martha Mitchell Effect

On a somewhat personal note, during a recent surge in rotavirus cases, I became sick.  It quickly spiralled and I ended up spending a week in the ICU.  According to the docs I’m very lucky to still be here.

This week the Trump FDA decided to remove rotavirus vaccines from its list of recommended childhood vaccines, along with COVID and others.  People need to understand that our government is (literally) trying to kill us.  I wish I was joking.  From WSJ via Raw Story.

‘Thanks, Dr. Trump’: Wall Street Journal editors bash Trump’s anti-vaccine crusade

Was at the self checkout at a local supermarket.  It was only for 15 items or less and we had maybe 18 items.  But the full service checkout lines were jammed up with people with carts full of stuff.  I wondered if the system would let us scan more than 15 items.  If not I figured I would just pay in two batches.

We also bought two sandwiches and a pint of coleslaw at the deli.  The guy making the sandwichs stuck labels on the polystyrene clamshell containers and told us we could take two bags of chips that came with the sandwiches, a lunch special.  So we did.

Halfway through checking out an alarm goes off.  I noticed there is an overhead video of us scanning and bagging groceries.  Two green boxes on the screen highlight me putting the two small bags of chips directly in our shopping bags.

A woman who worked at the store came over and asked: why didn’t you scan those chips? (but in a nice, even tired, way).  They came with the sandwiches. Well, you still have to scan them.  Ok, doesn’t really make sense, but whatever.  The woman used her badge, overriding the AI shoplifting detector, and let us finish bagging. I never did scan the chips.

I saw in the news that they were tearing down the old Lindy Boggs Medical Center in midtown New Orleans.  I have to admit I didn’t know where this was at first.  It had been abandoned since Katrina.  I learned this was the old Mercy Hospital, where I was born.

Most people of my generation know Lindy Boggs as a member of the US House of Representatives from Louisiana, or more likely as Cokie Roberts mom.  But she only held that seat because her husband, Hale Boggs, went missing in a mysterious airplane crash in Alaska.

At the time of his disappearance, Hale Boggs was the House Majority Leader, probably the most powerful person in Washington.  He was a long time Democrat, but had shifted his views, especially on race, to line up with LBJ’s Great Society programs.

He was also notably a member of the Warren Commission, which investigated the JFK assassination.  He was said to have disagreed with its findings and made himself unpopular with J. Edgar Hoover.  He was also at odds with the president, Nixon.

Hale Boggs plane crashed in October 1972, just a few months after the Watergate Scandal broke. I still remember the news of his disappearance but I was all of 9 years old at the time. It was a big mystery and people expected the wreckage would be found in the spring after the snow in Alaska melted. But no wreckage was ever found.  And Boggs faded from the public memory, especially given the events of those years.

If it weren’t for the recent demolition of the Boggs hospital I don’t think I would have thought about Hale Boggs and his disappearance again.  You would think the strange disappearance of such a powerful man in such times would be remembered, at least by the conspiracy theory crowd, if nothing else.  But today, reading the Wiki pages, his disappearance is more suspicious than ever.  Maybe it’s time to look for that plane wreckage again.

Hale Boggs

So let me see.  Billionaires are building huge, noisy, polluting buildings in a most secretive way.  Mostly unchallenged reports are that they will be using vast amounts of water and electricity.  The owners publicly state part of the goal is to eliminate huge numbers of jobs.

The only real paying customer today seems to be government surveillance organizations.  One billionaire has already cashed out making himself the world’s first Trillionaire, before ever showing a nickel of profit or even explaining what these data centers are supposed to be used for.

I’m trying to think of one positive thing to say about the current big data center boom.  Perhaps construction jobs, but they are temporary. Unpopular?  I’m wondering why they aren’t even more unpopular.  From Wired.

How Data Centers Broke American Politics

The Baffler on the Texas mega-gas station / convenience store.

Leave It to Beaver