Tonight, voters in Idaho, Oregon, Nebraska, and Pennsylvania will select nominees for this November's midterm elections in over a dozen important contests. The main event will take place in Pennsylvania, where the state Supreme Court undid the GOP's congressional gerrymander earlier this year, scrambling the playing field in House races across the state. We have a rundown on all the key battles, and we'll be live-blogging the results starting at 8 PM ET at Daily Kos Elections. |
Today’s comic by Jen Sorensen is Bourgeois bubbas:
• Preet Bharara ponders an independent run for New York attorney general’s post.
• Didn’t they make a movie about this?
Octopuses are “aliens” which evolved on another planet before arriving on Earth hundreds of millions of years ago as “cryopreserved” eggs via a process known as panspermia, radical new research has suggested.
The extraordinary claims were made in a report entitled Cause of Cambrian Explosion – Terrestrial or Cosmic? which was co-authored by a group of 33 scientists and published in the Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology journal. [...]
“[Octupuses have a] large brain and sophisticated nervous system, camera-like eyes, flexible bodies, instantaneous camouflage via the ability to switch colour and shape are just a few of the striking features that appear suddenly on the evolutionary scene.
Note: The publisher has removed the scientific paper on alien octopuses from its website.
• You know that worst-case climate-change scenario scientists developed? Some of them now think they may have underestimated how bad it could be.
MIDDAY TWEET
• As if the food wasn’t bad enough: Naked man streaks down aisle of Alaskan Airlines flight.
• Tom Wolfe dead at 88:
Tom Wolfe, an innovative journalist and novelist whose technicolor, wildly punctuated prose brought to life the worlds of California surfers, car customizers, astronauts and Manhattan’s moneyed status-seekers in works like “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” “The Right Stuff” and “Bonfire of the Vanities,” died on Monday in a Manhattan hospital. He was 88. [...]
His talent as a writer and caricaturist was evident from the start in his verbal pyrotechnics and perfect mimicry of speech patterns, his meticulous reporting, and his creative use of pop language and explosive punctuation.
“As a titlist of flamboyance he is without peer in the Western world,” Joseph Epstein wrote in the The New Republic. “His prose style is normally shotgun baroque, sometimes edging over into machine-gun rococo, as in his article on Las Vegas which begins by repeating the word ‘hernia’ 57 times.”
• Tesla battery in South Australia greatly slashes grid service costs: A report by McKinsey and Co. claims that Tesla's 100 Megawatt/129 Megawatt-hour battery has now reduced grid service costs by 90%, taking over a 55% share of the state's Frequency Control Ancillary Services (FCAS). Tesla’s Horsndale Power Reserve Battery Energy Storage System (HPR) performed so well that adding a second battery is now considered not as necessary as previously thought. Ancillary services are speciality operations that stabilize the grid by facilitating a continuous flow of electricity to ensure supply always equals demand. Even though the HPR only provides 2 percent of power capacity in South Australia, it has captured a huge hunk of the revenue from ancillary services and saved customers an estimated $35 million in just four months of operation. Obtaining 100 percent of our electricity from renewable power sources has long generated objections and ridicule from critics who have delivered a constant refrain that solar and wind’s intermittency make them inappropriate for such “impossible” dreams. More news like this from Australia could soon dry up those complaints completely.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Emoluments from China, but lol yolo nothing matters. Sean's pillow talk with Donald (because Melania won’t do it). Cohen -> Qatar -> Steele dossier. $1M from Federalist Soc. to inaugural slush fund, funneled through a law firm. Thanks for the tip, Rudy!
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