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sposterigmithrilianbirdwatchervitus_wagnerУра, я испытал новую лодку. На Торбеевом озере. Несмотря на то, что сезон еще не начался, совсем бесплатно воспользоваться парк-отелем Торбеево озеро не удалось. За стоянку машины с нас всё-таки денег содрали. Зато правда, потом, когда Ирине надоело фотографировать меня с берега, она пошла в кафе и сидела там в тепле и с едой.
Всё-таки лодка - она. И название ей надо придумывать женского рода.
Перетащить лодку от стоянки до берега в одиночку на тележке от первой попавшейся сумки на колесиках - реально. Но надо бы купить тележку с более длинной ручкой, а то неудобно.
Процесс сборки я подробно показывал вчера. Запощу только фото лодки в распакованном, но ещё сложенном состоянии.
И ее раскладывания
Спуск на воду
А вот мы и у пирса
Перые несколько метров - на веслах, тут мелковато для того чтобы шверт опускать
Ну вот, наконец парус поймал ветер
ии
И ещё
Больше фотографий в моем фотоархиве
Ощунения от этой лодки совершенно не такие, как от паруса на байдарке. Вот говорят "длина бежит, длина бежит", А субъективно эта лодка разгоняется куда быстрее чем "Таймень" с аутригерами. Правда ветер был не очень, какой-то неровный, так что долго кататься я не стал, тем более что дождь собираться начал.
По лодке можно более-менее свободно перемещаться, откренивать. При этом ветре просто смещаешься по банке к наветренному борту и она выравнивается. Вдвоем, правда, уже тесновато будет.
Тент показал себя не очень практичным. Он всё же для весельно-моторного варианта. Но может при сильной волне он всё же будет защищать от заплёскивания воды через нос.
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lawyersgunsmoneyblog_feedThis is the grave of Mamie Till Mobley.
Born in 1921 in Webb, Mississippi, Mamie Carthan grew up in Chicago. Her parents got out of Mississippi shortly after she was born, following the jobs and the relative lack of murderous violence north. They went to Chicago, which in fact did have murderous anti-black violence as its recent race riot had shown, but still, compared to Mississippi…. Her father got a job in the Argo Corn Products plant (I know them for corn syrup today, but I suppose that company produced a lot of products back then). I’m sure it was a hard, tough, low-paying job that was one of the worst in the plant, which was how black employment worked in the North. Still better than Mississippi.
Carthan was an excellent student, which she excelled in partly to avoid chaos at home, which led to her parents divorcing when she was 13. She went to a mostly white school and was only the 4th black girl to graduate from it, so she really was a very bright, intelligent young woman. But there wasn’t much hope for college. She met a man when she was 18. He was named Louis Till. He was a boxer, a rounder, a womanizer. Her parents were horrified. She didn’t care. She married him anyway. They had a son named Emmett. Louis’ behavior did not improve. He beat her. She divorced him. He still would come over and beat her, nearly killing her at least once. She got a restraining order. He violated it. Finally, a judge told him he could either go to prison or the Army. He chose the Army. While in Italy, he was charged and convicted of rape and murder and executed by hanging in 1945. Like a lot of American soldiers, white and black, he saw his time in Europe as a giant rape fest and he did whatever he wanted to these women. Tough stuff. Incidentally, while in prison, he got to know Ezra Pound, in prison for being a fascist scumbag, who included a reference to him in one of his poems. The Army did not tell her why her husband was executed, only that he had been. It took about 10 years for the truth to came out. By that time, she had other things on her mind.
Mamie Till married and divorced twice more in the next couple of years. She and her son were poor. She got a job with the Social Security Administration and then with the Air Force, but these were low paying jobs. Emmett didn’t exactly raise himself, but she worked very long days. So, in 1955, she sent her son to family back in Mississippi for the summer.
On August 28, 1955, Emmett Till was lynched by racist scum for talking to a white woman in a store. He was 14 years old.
It is impossible for me to imagine the level of bravery and composure it took for Mamie Till to demand her son’s brutalized body be displayed for the world to see on TV. I fully understand wanting someone else to do that–someone had to display just what lynching was for the world after all. But me? And for my son? I just can’t imagine. The world blesses her for what she did. For she changed the world. This was one of the key incidents in increasingly national support for the civil rights legislation. Admittedly, that national support lasted precisely until the moment when civil rights leaders suggested that northern de facto segregated schools needed to be integrated too. So that support was always limited. But Mamie Till holds an enormous amount of credit for changing history through her brave and sacrificing actions.
In fact, Till did not stop her activism with the funeral. She became an important civil rights organizer in Chicago and not just about the memory of her son. She was a powerful speaker. As discussed earlier, she was a highly intelligent person and a great student in a world where she didn’t have any options to use that. Now she did. She remarried once more in 1957, to a man named Gene Mobley. She kept the Till in her name for her son and now became Mamie Till-Mobley. The NAACP hired her to become a speaker traveling the country and telling her story. It didn’t go well because she felt the NAACP wasn’t paying her properly and she and Roy Wilkins got in a heated argument over this. Given what I know about Wilkins, I’m going to guess Till-Mobley was probably on the right side here.
Till-Mobley ended up teaching in Chicago public schools, a great way to make the world better. She did a lot of anti-poverty work in Chicago as well. She started a group called the Emmett Till Players, where she would gather black children interested in acting and have them perform the speeches of Martin Luther King. So that’s a cool project for kids. She later went back and a college degree and then a master’s in education administration from Loyola in Chicago, which she completed in 1971.
Till-Mobley spent her later years continued to fight for the memory of her son and all the horrible things that racism caused. In 2003, she published a memoir titled Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime that Changed America. She also pushed for federal civil rights legislation. She was critical in the formation of the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act of 2008 allowed for the reopening of cold cases of murdered civil rights workers before 1970. John Lewis was the major player in Congress behind this bill. That law was not permanent though and was then reauthorized in 2016. I doubt Republicans would vote for such a law today.
But Till-Mobley was not around for that act which she had called for. She died in 2003, at the age of 81.
Mamie Till-Mobley is buried in Burr Oak Cemetery, Alsip, Illinois. This is the same cemetery as her son, but it is a different part of the cemetery. One imagines when he was buried all the way back in 1955, she had better things to think about than where she would be nearly a half-century later.
If you would like this series to visit other women who played key roles in the civil rights movement, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Ella Baker is in Queens and Daisy Bates is in Little Rock, Arkansas. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.
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On Friday, a federal appeals court struck down a nearly 160-year-old federal law prohibiting people from distilling liquor in their own home.
That’s a fairly momentous event in its own right — any claim that a law that’s been on the books since Reconstruction is unconstitutional should be greeted with a heaping spoonful of skepticism. But the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit’s decision in McNutt v. US Department of Justice is particularly significant because it is all but certain to be heard by the Supreme Court, and this case may tempt the Court’s Republican majority to impose restrictions on federal power that have not existed since the early stages of the New Deal.
Although the justices normally get to choose which cases they wish to hear, the Court almost always agrees to hear a case “when a lower court has invalidated a federal statute.”
McNutt potentially raises a question that the Supreme Court resolved in the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, but that many right-leaning lawyers and legal scholars have wanted to reopen for many decades. These Roosevelt-era decisions permit Congress to regulate the American workplace, such as by banning child labor or establishing a minimum wage. They also allow many federal regulations of private businesses to exist, including nationwide bans on whites-only lunch counters and other forms of discrimination.
The Constitution gives Congress sweeping authority over the national economy. But, for a period of several decades beginning in the late 19th century, the Supreme Court strictly limited the federal government’s power to regulate commercial activity that occurs entirely within one state. In Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918), for example, the Court struck down a federal law that sought to ban child labor, on the theory that most child workers’ jobs do not require them to cross state lines.
The Court abandoned this strict divide between national and local economic activity during the New Deal era — Hammer was overruled in 1941. But many prominent conservative legal thinkers, including Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, have called for a return to the more limited approach to federal power that drove the Hammer decision.
McNutt tees up a potential Supreme Court showdown over Congress’s ability to regulate economic activity that occurs within a single state because the new case challenges a ban on alcohol distilling within the home. Most people’s houses do not cross state lines.
That said, there is a wrinkle in the McNutt case that may make it more difficult for justices who want to relitigate the New Deal to do so in this case. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, the Justice Department, which is defending the ban in court, decided not to make its strongest legal argument on appeal — the argument that the ban on home distilling fits within Congress’s broad authority to regulate the national economy. So, if there are five justices who want to overrule some of the Roosevelt-era decisions establishing that Congress’s power over the economy is very broad, they will have to do so despite the fact that the DOJ seems to want to avoid this issue.
But that doesn’t change the fact that the best legal argument for the law at issue in McNutt is that Congress has the power to regulate local distilling under the New Deal decisions. So, if the Supreme Court wants to declare the law unconstitutional, it will be difficult for the justices to ignore that fact.
McNutt is a hugely important case because it involves Congress’s two most consequential powers: the power to regulate the national economy, and the power to tax. Post-New Deal decisions defining these powers are the reason why a wide range of federal laws, including the minimum wage, the federal law guaranteeing that every American can obtain health insurance, and most federal laws barring discrimination, are able to exist. So the stakes are simply enormous every single time the Supreme Court decides to play with these federal powers.
The Constitution contains a laundry list of powers that Congress is allowed to exercise, such as the power to raise armies and the power to establish post offices. A federal law is unconstitutional if it does not fit within one of the powers specifically given to Congress by the Constitution.
That said, many of these powers are extremely broad. Congress’s lawful authority includes the power to tax, the power to spend these tax dollars to “provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States,” and the power to “regulate Commerce…among the several States.” The Constitution also includes a somewhat vague provision permitting Congress to “make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution” laws enacted pursuant to its other powers.
When the Constitution was drafted way back in 1787, its provision allowing Congress to regulate commerce “among the several States” was understood to draw a line between the entire nation’s economy and purely local commerce. In the pre-industrial United States, a farmer located in, say, Iowa, might grow his crops on Iowa land, then transport them to a nearby Iowa town where they were purchased exclusively by other Iowans. Because none of this farmer’s behavior impacted more than one state, it was generally understood to be beyond Congress’s power to regulate.
But all of that changed after the construction of the railroads. In the post-industrial United States, this same farmer’s crops would be shipped to Chicago via the railways, where it would mix with similar grain grown by farmers throughout the Midwest. Then it might be shipped to consumers in many other states, or even overseas.
For about four decades in the late 19th and early 20th century, the Supreme Court tried to maintain a rigid divide between economic activities that were local in character, and those that impacted the entire nation’s economy. Hammer, for example, claimed that the production of goods for sale in an interstate or international market was beyond the reach of Congress, because factory workers typically do not cross state lines while they are producing those goods.
But this distinction proved unworkable. Even if Congress couldn’t regulate factory work directly, for example, its power to regulate the transit of goods across more than one state should allow it to ban any goods that are produced by child workers from traveling across state lines. So the Court largely stopped trying to draw a distinction between commerce that impacts the national economy and commerce that does not during the Roosevelt administration.
In Wickard v. Filburn (1942), the Supreme Court held that Congress’s power to regulate the production of goods includes the power to regulate all goods that are produced in the United States, even if some of those goods are never sold to anyone. Wickard rested on a modern understanding that all economic activity is connected, and that goods are often fungible. If a farmer grows wheat that only they and their family consume, the Court reasoned, that still increases the overall supply of wheat, which makes the overall price of wheat throughout the United States cheaper.
More recently, in Gonzales v. Raich (2005), the Court applied this logic to marijuana. Congress, Raich held, could ban all marijuana production throughout the United States, including marijuana growth by individual producers who consume their own supply, because otherwise local growers would undercut the federal government’s goal of eliminating the nationwide market for marijuana altogether.
Wickard, in other words, established that Congress’s power to regulate the national marketplace for wheat includes the power to regulate all wheat produced in the United States, and Raich reached a similar conclusion regarding marijuana. So it should follow that, in the McNutt case, Congress’s power to regulate distilled liquors includes the power to regulate all distilled liquors, including those that are produced inside the home.
Despite all of this legal history, the Justice Department cites neither Wickard nor Raich in its Fifth Circuit brief in the McNutt case. So, rather than analyzing whether the ban on home distilling is constitutional under those two cases, the Fifth Circuit’s opinion includes a short footnote indicating that the government “forfeited” any claim that Congress may ban home distilling under its broad power to regulate commerce.
Notably, the Justice Department filed its brief in October 2024, when President Joe Biden was in office. So the DOJ’s decision not to raise its strongest legal argument cannot be blamed on the fact that the Trump Justice Department is staffed with many lawyers who share Thomas and Gorsuch’s belief that huge swaths of federal laws regulating private businesses are unconstitutional.
Instead, the Justice Department made a less intuitive argument that Congress may ban home distilling to prevent local distillers from undermining Congress’s ability to tax alcohol.
In fairness, this argument is less silly than it sounds at first blush. As the DOJ argued in its brief, the ban on home distilling was originally enacted in 1868 “shortly after a congressional committee detailed rampant evasion of the spirits tax, including by home distillers.” The law was intended to force liquor producers to create their products openly, in distilleries that could be easily identified by the government and thus taxed.
Recall that the Constitution does not simply permit Congress to levy taxes; it also permits it to “make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution” those tax laws. In Felsenheld v. United States (1902), the Supreme Court indicated that this power to make laws incidental to taxation is quite broad — writing that “in the rules and regulations for the manufacture and handling of goods which are subjected to an internal revenue tax, Congress may prescribe any rule or regulation which is not, in itself, unreasonable.”
Still, Felsenheld is a very old case. And it is far from clear that a majority of the current Court, which often appears eager to shrink the government’s power to regulate private businesses, would deem an outright ban on home distilling to be a “reasonable” way to ensure that federal liquor taxes are collected — even though this ban has been around for more than a century and a half.
The Fifth Circuit, for what it is worth, did include a single sentence in its opinion explaining how a law that’s been around for nearly 160 years could suddenly become unconstitutional. It claimed that “the economics and practicality of at-home distilling today are much different than they were in the nineteenth century, and so is the government’s ability to investigate such activity.” So maybe the fact that the government has more ability to track down home distillers in 2026 than it did in 1868 could allow the Supreme Court to write a narrow opinion striking this law down because the law is no longer needed to serve its original purpose.
But that argument only works if you ignore Wickard and Raich, which permit the government to regulate all alcohol production anywhere in the United States, including within the home.
Again, it’s overwhelmingly likely that the Supreme Court will hear McNutt. The Court almost always reviews federal appeals court decisions that declare a federal statute unconstitutional.
To the extent that the Biden Justice Department wanted to avoid a showdown over whether Wickard and Raich should remain good law by simply ignoring those cases in its Fifth Circuit brief, this strategy is unlikely to work for very long. If the Supreme Court strikes down the home distilling ban on the narrow grounds that it’s not necessary to ensure that liquor is taxed, the federal government could revive the ban at any time by claiming that it’s lawful under Wickard and Raich — and then the courts would have no choice but to consider that argument.
Once McNutt reaches the Supreme Court, moreover, it’s likely that many of the justices will be eager to reconsider Wickard and Raich. Both decisions are very unpopular in Republican legal circles. And two justices, Thomas and Gorsuch, are so hostile to the post-New Deal understanding of federal power that they’ve endorsed the same legal framework that the Court once used to strike down child labor laws.
The question is just how far this Court will go if it does reconsider those two decisions. Again, the New Deal-era insight that Congress may regulate the entire chain of commerce, from the production of goods to their eventual sale to a local consumer, forms the basis for countless federal laws. It is the reason why Congress may regulate the workplace, bar restaurants from refusing to sell to Black customers, or require businesses to construct wheelchair ramps or other accommodations which ensure they are accessible to everyone.
Wickard and similar cases all stand for the proposition that it is so hard for the courts to draw a principled line separating the national economy from local commerce that any attempt to do so will make a hash of the entire project, and require the courts to strike down federal laws for completely arbitrary reasons. If a majority of the justices decide to reconsider those cases, we can only hope that they find some way to limit the scope of their decision.
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This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
There’s a technology sitting idle in garages and driveways across America that provides a solution to its own potential problem. As more and more electric vehicles tap into the grid, their giant batteries add to the system’s load. Timing is also a challenge: When people get home from work and plug their cars in, so too is everyone elsewhere switching on their own appliances, like washing machines and ovens and such.
But instead of being burdens to the electrical system, a clever trick is putting EVs on a trajectory to help save it. More models feature the ability to send their energy back to the grid in times of high demand — a trick known as vehicle-to-grid, or V2G — forming a vast network of backup power across a city. As demand wanes through the night, they charge up, ensuring an EV owner has enough juice to get to work in the morning.
However, a new study warns that for V2G to fully compensate for all those batteries plugging in, the technology needs an assist, in the form of infrastructural improvements like new transformers and transmission lines. That will create a more resilient system and encourage the growth of renewable energy. “You have to upgrade your power system as soon as possible,” said Ziyou Song, an energy systems engineer at the University of Michigan and co-author of a new paper describing the findings. “V2G is really helpful, for sure — 100 percent. But just to some extent, V2G itself cannot resolve the charging demand of so many electric vehicles in the future.”
For this study, the researchers modeled scenarios for the San Francisco Bay Area, projecting how quickly EVs and solar power will be adopted — that is, how much demand will be put on the grid as renewable energy increases. Drilling deeper, they also projected where and when EVs might charge. (As with any modeling, there are some uncertainties here: EV adoption might happen slower or faster than expected, for example. The loss of federal tax credits for buying the vehicles might be reducing demand, but on the other hand, the gasoline price shock from the Iran war might drive more folks to go electric.) They also considered what it would cost to upgrade the grid over the same period.
All told, the modeling found that the cheapest option is to proactively upgrade the grid in anticipation of these changes, instead of doing so in phases over time in reaction to them. Then, as more EVs plug in, the vehicles will be able to draw enough power without the system straining. And with V2G, they’ll form a fleet of batteries that grid operators can tap to meet demand. In other words: EVs can help stabilize the grid, so long as they’re equipped with the technology to provide power in addition to taking it. “V2G plus the proactive power system upgrade will address the entire issue,” Song said.
This, in turn, can help smooth the “intermittency” challenge of renewables. Any grid must constantly balance the amount of electricity it’s generating with what its customers need at any given moment. With fossil fuels, utilities can just burn more gas or coal as demand rises. But renewable energy works differently, because the sun isn’t always shining and the wind isn’t always blowing. That’s why utilities are investing in batteries that store that power for later use: at one point late last month, they met 43 percent of demand in California, or six times the output of Hoover Dam.
The promise of V2G isn’t that it will replace battery farms, but instead to essentially break them up into smaller ones spread across town. If the sun goes down at 5 pm when everyone is getting home and demand is rising, a utility can call on its battery facilities, but also on EVs, to send electricity into the system. (Anyone participating in the program would be paid for that juice.) Alternatively, those vehicles can electrify individual homes, divorcing those abodes from the grid, further reducing overall demand. All of this is good for EV owners, too, as they’re not drawing electricity when it’s most expensive. It wouldn’t just be passenger vehicles, either: Pilot projects are turning electric school buses — and their jumbo batteries — into reliable assets for the grid.
In these early days of V2G, utilities are still working out how to incentivize EV owners to participate, and how much to compensate them for sending power to the grid. The idea is to reach a sort of critical mass, where there’s enough people involved that it won’t matter if some folks choose to opt out. “When you’re operating 3,000, 30,000, 300,000, then any individual customers having different behavior won’t matter,” said Chris Rauscher, vice president and head of grid services at the battery storage and solar company Sunrun, which has been running V2G pilot projects.
The idea is to turn a vehicle from a depreciating asset into a source of income for the owner. One wrinkle, though, is that V2G could reduce the lifetime of a battery, due to the extra cycles of charging and discharging. Still, utilities are already repurposing old EV batteries — which need to be replaced when they drop to 70 to 80 percent of their original capacity — as stationary assets on the grid. “That’s a good way to keep getting value out of them,” said Patricia Hidalgo-Gonzalez, director of the Renewable Energy and Advanced Mathematics Laboratory at the University of California San Diego, who studies the grid but wasn’t involved in the new paper. “The program could even swap the battery for the EV owner. So, say, if you sign up for this pilot where you provide V2G services, after three years, we replace your battery with a new one.”
This tech can be paired with another powerful technique for supporting the grid, known as active managed charging. This opt-in program uses algorithms to stagger when EVs charge at night, instead of them all drawing power at 5 pm. When participants get home, they plug in, but the electrons might not flow until midnight, when most folks are asleep and not using much energy. The system also recognizes when an EV owner leaves for work in the morning, and how much battery they need, so charging switches on with enough time to spare.
Still, even combined, active managed charging and V2G alone can’t fix the grid of tomorrow. “We have to upgrade our power system as soon as possible,” Song said, “because V2G is not a silver bullet.”
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Hahahahaha (White House link).
On his historic trip to Budapest, Vice President JD Vance reinforced a new era of U.S.-Hungary bilateral cooperation in energy, technology, and security. The achievements outlined below advance a shared bilateral agenda rooted in innovation, strategic stability, and long‑term economic and security partnership.
It was historic all right.
Yesterday’s installment of Roy Edroso Breaks it Down is titled “Mr. Popularity” and provides a completely accurate account of Vance’s attempts to help other people with their political campaigns. For example:
VANCE: Hey, Susie! Say hello to your new campaign buddy!
COLLINS: [Screams] VANCE! ROUTINE 12!
[The aides reach behind her desk, grab fire extinguishers, and spray VANCE, driving him back, while COLLINS jumps out a window.
Stenchfinger has yet to comment on Orbán’s loss, but Juicy Divan has claimed the White House expected Orbán to lose (Politico).
We certainly knew there was a very good chance that Viktor would lose that election. We did it because he’s one of the few European leaders we’ve seen who has been willing to stand up to the bureaucracy in Brussels.
The flurry of campaigning on his behalf was the political equivalent of a pity couchjob, I guess.
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lafebersposterig - Поствиборнеmithrilian - Сгорел сарай - гори и хата!birdwatcher - Вакцины помогают не всегдаvitus_wagner - Maiden voyagezakrit_dver - А вот и карательная психиатрия подъехалаpargentum - Фраза. Просто фразаratomira - Днепр 14.04.2026lawyersgunsmoneyblog_feed - Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,117vox_feed - The Supreme Court could legalize moonshine, and ruin everything else12_natali - (no subject)vox_feed - The electric grid’s next power source might be sitting in your drivewaydavid_2_feed - «Не было никаких сомнений, что мы делаем то, что сделал бы сам бог, если бы он был»don_katalan - Российские оккупанты в очередной раз хвастаются ударом дрона-камикадзе Shahed-136 по МОГarpad - Будни Иннернетаpan_netnet - профессор прокофьев в 26 годуpan_netnet - раскрутить энергобесие с первого раза у рептилоидов не получилосьstringbasso - Это Стеффиpan_netnet - В российских регионах массово сокращают закупку лифтов.lawyersgunsmoneyblog_feed - Bubbapestlafeber - Ты кого больше любишь?timeasmymeasure
