It's not a counterpunch, guys. The pope didn't throw a punch. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/12/u...

history.state.gov/historicaldo...

One of the arguments from the right is that this oil shock won't impact us, because we are a net exporter of oil. However, this pretty clearly shows we are part of a global oil system - if more oil is being exported from the US, prices will rise here too.

i will vote for any candidate who offers up this slogan

This is *terrible* policy -- terrible economically, terrible ecologically, terrible politically.

So funny to see conservatives accidentally make the case for single payer health insurance...
www.aei.org/articles/the...

An excellent reference. Tom McLaughlin recently passed away - huge loss for the community.

When we would give tours of our reactor, we would show people a fuel pin and ask them how much they think it's worth. People would often guess thousands of dollars, but of course the real answer was 12 cents.

It's really a case where you need a professional to do the crit safety analysis and trained folks to do the handling of the SNM.

One of my roles at NCERC is training young crit safety professionals and doing hands on demonstrations with them with real nuclear material.

But others are not as straightforward. You can have cases where if you add water to a solution, you can either increase or decrease the reactivity.

Geometry is also tough - sometimes bundling things together is better and sometimes it's worse.

In crit safety, we have an acronym for all the things that impact criticality, MAGIC MERV:
Mass
Absorption
Geometry
Interaction
Concentration

Moderation
Enrichment
Reflection
Volume

Some are pretty straight forward - more mass or higher enrichment, higher reactivity.

To expand on this - criticality safety is also non-intuitive. Sometimes something that seems safe actually makes the system closer to critical. And with uranium, you can be very close to critical and not know it because the spontaneous neutron emission rate is so small. @nuclearanthro.bsky.social

I have a new demand Dems should add to budget negotiations:

Grounding of every federal passenger plane. All of them.

The feds don't even use them for "take NTSB investigator to crash site," feds who do real work have to fly commercial. The fed planes are used solely for upper management vacations.

Jared Kushner Solicits Funds for His Firm While Working as Mideast Envoy

The corruption of the Trump Administration remains so massive while also being so obvious that people just don’t know what to do. If Kushner was merely shaking someone down for $5,000 using his govt role, there’d be an outcry. But do it for $5,000,000,000 and mostly there’s 🤷‍♂️

#TrumpCorruptionWatch

Hegseth: "We will keep pushing, keep advancing. No quarter, no mercy for our enemies."

No quarter is the refusal to take prisoners and instead just execute everyone. It's been considered a war crime for over a century.

The quoted tweet is, among other things, a devastating indictment of Politico. No one there is capable of recognizing it or feeling shame, but still.

(1) The accused declared, ordered, or otherwise indicated that there shall be no survivors or surrender accepted; (2) The accused thereby intended to threaten an adversary or to conduct hostilities such that there would be no survivors or surrender accepted; (3) It was foreseeable that circumstances would be such that a practicable and reasonable ability to accept surrender would exist; (4) The accused was in a position of effective command or control over the subordinate forces to which the declaration or order was directed; and (5) The conduct took place in the context of and was associated with hostilities.

✋ Former USG war crimes lawyer here.

Apropos of SecDef's remarks this morning:

Denial of quarter—even the declaration of no quarter—is a war crime.

And recognized as such by the US Government.

From DoD's Manual for Military Commissions.

Humanity heating planet faster than ever before, study finds Researchers identify sharp rise to about 0.35C every decade, after excluding natural fluctuations such as El Niño

It doesn’t matter whether the rate of global warming is increasing. It’ll never cease to amaze me that people don’t care that it’s happening at all. It should be the most alarming thing ever.

So according to the WSJ a US Senator conspired with another country to manipulate the US into starting a war, am I getting this right

I'm sorry, if you're going to make a big show about how you've got a Department of WAR helmed by a Secretary of WAR and staffed by WARfighters, it's totally inane to then claim that your massive bombing of a foreign country constitutes something other than a war.

Netanyahu Calls Iran Strikes Necessary To Prevent War He Just Started

From last year theonion.com/netanyahu-ca...

1) Unnecessarily endangering American,Israeli, and Iranian lives.
2) Violation of the UN Charter and arguably the US Constitution.
3) Likely to have lasting and dangerous consequences.