Spruce Pine, NC was hit hard by Helene flooding. Photo by Spencer Bost.
Northeast of here, near the the little town of Spruce Pine, NC, there is a mine that provides key minerals used in the manufacture of microelectronics (NPR):
Semiconductors are the brains of every computer-chip-enabled device, and solar panels are a key part of the global push to combat climate change. To make both semiconductors and solar panels, companies need crucibles and other equipment that both can withstand extraordinarily high heat and be kept absolutely clean. One material fits the bill: quartz. Pure quartz.
Quartz that comes, overwhelmingly, from Spruce Pine.
“As far as we know, there’s only a few places in the world that have ultra-high-quality quartz,” according to Ed Conway, author of Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization. Russia and Brazil also supply high-quality quartz, he says, but“Spruce Pine has far and away the [largest amount] and highest quality.”
Conway says without super-pure quartz for the crucibles, which can often be used only a single time, it would be impossible to produce most semiconductors.
Very quickly after the remnants of Hurricane Helene blew through WNC, rumors flew that some bad guys (the gummint and/or rapacious industrialists) wanted to steal people’s property to mine lithium (used in batteries for devices like my PHEV). From here the rumor spread to other storm-impacted areas. There is a lithium mine scheduled to reopen near the town of King’s Mountain, so there is a kernel of truth behind the rumor.
Someone else may have a better explanation, but my speculation is that in a disaster-driven game of “telephone” somehow quartz from Spruce Pine and lithium from King’s Mountain became lithium under Chimney Rock (and everywhere a storm hit) and conspirators were off to the races.
Daniel Dale also recognizes how a kernel of truth powers these fantasies.
Ha! I notice the Trump campaign did not include the rest of the segment, in which I explained how Trump had “taken a kernel of truth and spun it into something not even resembling reality anymore.” Here’s part one. https://t.co/uVPWnyFaxrpic.twitter.com/eYcRvJJp15
New reveleations yesterday from Bob Woodward’s forthcoming book, “War,” out just in time for the fall of the American empire. An MSNBC pundit last night wryly observed that the first two outlets to report it are based in England (that is, beyond Donald Trump’s immediate reach should he win a second term next month), The Independent and the Guardian.
Mark Milley, the US Army general who Donald Trump appointed as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, now says the current Republican presidential nominee is a “fascist to the core” and says no person has ever posed more of a danger to the United States than the man who served as the 45th President of the United States.
In perhaps an unprecedented (time to retire that term?) move, a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff asked to meet with the new U.S. attorney general. Milley urged Merrick Garland post-Jan. 6 to investigate domestic extremists and far-right militias. Woodward describes Milley as “deeply convinced” that despite the failure of the attempted coup, Trump remained “a danger to the country.”
“He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is now the most dangerous person to this country,” Milley told Woodward directly. “A fascist to the core,” Milley repeated.
Mark Milley, a retired US army general who was chair of the joint chiefs of staff under Donald Trump and Joe Biden, fears being recalled to uniform and court-martialed should Trump defeat Kamala Harris next month and return to power.
“He is a walking, talking advertisement of what he’s going to try to do,” Milley recently “warned former colleagues”, the veteran Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward writes in an upcoming book. “He’s saying it and it’s not just him, it’s the people around him.”
Woodward cites Steve Bannon, Trump’s former campaign chair and White House strategist now jailed for contempt of Congress, as saying of Milley: “We’re gonna hold him accountable.”
So, they’d like to recall Milley to service simply to try him before a kangaroo court and jail him. Or worse.
Trump’s wish to recall and court-martial retired senior officers who criticized him in print has been reported before, including by Mark Esper, Trump’s second secretary of defense. In Woodward’s telling, in a 2020 Oval Office meeting with Milley and Esper, Trump “yelled” and “shouted” about William McRaven, a former admiral who led the 2011 raid in Pakistan in which US special forces killed Osama bin Laden, and Stanley McChrystal, the retired special forces general whose men killed another al-Qaida leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, in Iraq in 2006.
Milley was able to persuade Trump to back down, Woodward writes, but fears no such guardrails will be in place if Trump is re-elected.
Woodward reports Milley receiving “a non-stop barrage of death threats” since retirement in 2023.
A month ago, I suggested that, handed power again, Trump would go full “Off with their heads!” A year ago, we looked at a Christian nationalist, Stew Peters of “The Stew Peters Show.” Appearing with Trump inner circle members at a ReAwaken America event in Las Vegas, Peters argued per a Right Wing Watch report:
“We are going to see extreme accountability,” Peters asserted. “Maximum accountability. We are going to have permanent accountability, with extreme prejudice!”
Every one of Peters’ violent threats was met by wild cheers from the audience.
Some liberals will argue that this is “just rhetoric,” that nobody is answering these calls. & yet one answer is Jacksonville; another is bomb threats shutting down schools for having queer books; another is schools without books at all. https://t.co/dMi3IG99DN
What may be most alarming is the lack of alarm among Americans in general, much less mobilization. Trump’s MAGA foot soldiers? They hunger to be led by their man-child-king. The rest seem blissfully unaware that the Party of Trump has abandoned democracy save for going through the motions.
“This is the nightmare scenario that to millions of Americans is unfathomable but realistically possible,” Bennett Gershman, a former New York prosecutor and law professor at Pace University, told Salon. “It is also the scenario that millions of Americans look forward to with glee and the opportunity for retribution against the enemies of Trump.”
What’s a little pogrom if the tree of Trumpism needs watering?
First, they’ll come for the immigrants, etc.
Threatening to hang Mike Pence wasn’t grisly enough. Trump and his mob will want blood.
Trump is a fascist to the core. Who among us will be the last to know?
[You might want to knock some doors and/or make some calls this weekend.]
In an exciting and personal rematch from last year, 128 Grazer and 32 Chunk faced off again in the final round of 2024’s Fat Bear Week contest.
And this year, embattled mama bear 128 Grazer has retained the crown of the most popular fat bear in the annual online competition, which is observing its 10th anniversary this year.
Grazer more than doubled Chunk’s vote count, garnering 71,248 votes to her male rival’s 30,468 votes. The nature site Explore.org administers the online voting, which saw a final tally for the weeklong contest of 1,041,124, according to the site around 9:30 p.m. ET Tuesday.
The contest is held by Katmai National Park & Preserve to promote public awareness about the wild brown bears of Alaska. Like scenic drives to see the changing leaves, it’s become a popular fall ritual in the United States and around the world.
She’s the first female bear to win it and it was a grudge match:
128 Grazer and 32 Chunk are developing quite the history between them, and it’s not all in the manmade, online brackets-style competition, either.
Grazer has “a long, straight muzzle and conspicuously blond ears,” according to Explore.org. More important than her looks, though, she’s “a highly defensive” mother bear who has raised three litters. She’s given a lot of respect and a wide berth by other bears.
But sometimes accidents of nature and the intentions of rivals intervene in the life of a mother bear.
In July 2024, both of her first-year cubs were swept over the Brook Falls, where the Katmai bears gather to fatten up on salmon ahead of their winter hibernations, according to Explore.org. The rushing water in the Brooks River swept her cubs toward Chunk, currently the most dominant male bear on the river.
As large, male bears sometimes do, Chunk went on the offense. And as mother bears do, Grazer went on defense for her cubs. But Chunk was able to injure the cub nearest to him before Grazer could stop him. That cub later died from its injuries, Explore.org and Katmai said.
The surviving cub, called 128’s Spring Cub, was a contender in the 2024 Fat Bear Junior contest held in late September. That contest was won by 909Jr., a “large-bodied nearly 4-year-old female cub.”
Don’t mess with Mama Bears.
There’s a message in there somewhere.
Update:
Last week, a 200-year-old oak tree that was damaged by Hurricane Ida fell in Audubon Park. Arborists found bee hives inside the tree and called beekeepers to safely relocate the bees before the tree was removed. The bees left behind a gift for our three black bears – honeycomb! pic.twitter.com/t9a1fgYq2c
I think these are pretty good. It’s hard to know if they’re breaking through he cacophony of news and social media noise. But if they do I think they’re effective with the discrete groups they’re trying to appeal to.
I know most of you don’t punish yourselves by going on Truth Social. I do it so you don’t have to. Considering all that’s going on in the election I thought you might wants to know some of what Trump’s talking about when he’s just with his cult. I’ve just cherry picked a few from the last couple of days.
Sure, he sounds totally stable. A perfect person to handle the nuclear codes.
Elon Musk has more than 250 Billion (with a B) dollars. He could spend a hundred billion of it on this election and still be the richest man in the world. Anything he spends in these last couple of weeks amounts to the change you or I might find in the couch cushions. His fortune is essentially infinite.
In the final weeks of the presidential campaign, the richest man in the world has involved himself in the U.S. election in a manner unparalleled in modern history.
Elon Musk, seen over the weekend jumping for joy alongside former President Donald J. Trump at a rally in Butler, Pa., is now talking to the Republican candidate multiple times a week.
He has effectively moved his base of operations to Pennsylvania, the place that he has recently told confidants he believes is the linchpin to Mr. Trump’s re-election.
He has relentlessly promoted Mr. Trump’s candidacy to his 201 million followers on X, the social platform formerly known as Twitter that he bought for $44 billion and has used to spread conspiracy theories about the Democratic Party and to insult its candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris.
Above all, he is personally steering the actions of a super PAC that he has funded with tens of millions of dollars to turn out the vote for Mr. Trump, not just in Pennsylvania but across the country. He has even proposed taking a campaign bus tour across Pennsylvania and knocking on doors himself, in part to see how his money is being used.
Taken together, a clear picture has emerged of Mr. Musk’s battle plan as he directs his efforts to elect Mr. Trump with the same frenetic energy and exacting demands that he has honed at his companies SpaceX, Tesla and X.
Gosh, I wonder what he’s going to want in return?
Mark Cuban on why Elon Musk supports Trump:
“If you're the wealthiest person in the world and you have control…you're the puppet master of the president, the most powerful person in the world…that is the definition of power corrupts” pic.twitter.com/JiPtoPWq9b
After a reporter’s publication of hacked Trump campaign information last month, the campaign connected with X to prevent the circulation of links to the material on the platform, according to two people with knowledge of the events. X eventually blocked links to the material and suspended the reporter’s account.
That’s right. Elon Musk censored material about Trump in coordination with the Trump campaign.
How good is the U.S. economy these days? So good that Republicans are pretending the numbers are fake.
GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump has long held a lead over his Democratic rival on economic issues, but lately the gap has narrowed. In the spring, when President Joe Biden was still on the ticket, Trump held a roughly 12-point edge on the economy. Today, Trump remains ahead of Vice President Kamala Harris, but she’s cut that margin in half.
This is remarkable. For most of the past decade, voters overwhelmingly trusted Republicans more on economic issues. They’ve been bummed about the economy during the Biden-Harris administration, often citing the economy or inflation as their top issue.
So how has Harris narrowed the gap?
Trump probably hasn’t helped his case by pitching ever-higher global tariffs, which would probably be passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. Independent economic analyses have also found that the rest of his agenda (mass deportations, politicizing the Federal Reserve, etc.) would probably worsen inflation and depress growth. The downstream consequences of these policies are not always intuitive, however, so they might not have influenced voters’ perceptions of Trump’s economic agenda all that much.
Trump’s struggles to remember his pitch might have played a role, too. At a recent Michigan event, for instance, a voter asked how he’d keep auto manufacturing jobs in the state. He responded with a rant about a nonexistent “Michigan man of the year” award he apparently hallucinated receiving.
Meanwhile, Harris has managed a “pivot” on the economy. Her policy approach has been directionally similar to Biden’s (she has proposed higher taxes for the wealthy, manufacturing subsidies, a more generous child tax credit, punishing greedy corporations, and so on). Her tone or word choices so far appear more successful than Biden’s, though. As Ben Mathis-Lilley recently wrote in Slate, Harris has subtly shifted public discourse away from past “inflation” and toward a more forward-looking discussion of the “cost of living.”
But the biggest reason for Trump’s shrinking lead on the economy may have little to do with either candidate: The U.S. economy is just doing spectacularly well.
According to the polling, most people still believe it’s terrible even if more people think that Harris will be acceptable as the steward of it over that failed, orange ignoramus. But I think we know that if the orange ignoramus wins, it will suddenly be great because he will take credit for everything that’s happened. He always does.
In 1984, Reagan declared that it was morning in America with much worse numbers than we have now. The inflation we had just been through had been truly horrific with high unemployment on top of it. But people were sick of feeling bad after the years of Vietnam and Watergate and oil shocks and cultural turmoil. Maybe we’re running a little late on that but are getting there. God, I hope so because if Trump wins, the whole thing is going to fall apart.
In every losing campaign’s postmortem the analysts insist that the candidate should have gone where he or she did not. There were many complaints about Vice President Al Gore spending time in California late in the race when he should have been stumping in Florida and I’m sure everyone recalls that Hillary Clinton was excoriated for taking Wisconsin and Michigan for granted in 2016 by failing to hold events there in the closing days of the campaign. Certainly, it’s a general rule of thumb that in close elections, the candidates are supposed to live in the battleground states, especially in the final weeks to eke out every last vote in the electoral college.
So why in the world is Donald Trump holding rallies in the blue enclaves of California, New York and Colorado in the month of October? As far as we can tell, the swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada are all close and various combinations of those states will be required to get to 270 electoral votes. And yet Trump will be wasting time in these other states for reasons that are obscure.
One explanation that’s been offered is that Trump just wants to have rallies in highly populated areas because he gets bigger crowds simply because of the population density and he just loves those bigger crowds. After all, he’s not going to win New Jersey but he had a giant rally there last summer that he can’t stop bragging about. (I think the size of the crowd in his mind is probably up to a million people by now but it was actually about 30-40,000.)
As New York boy, Madison Square Garden has no doubt always been on his bucket list. And it is a natural choice since it was the site of a famous America First Nazi rally in 1939 featuring a huge picture of George Washington surrounded by Nazi flags. It’s the perfect place for a sequel. I’m sure very fine people will be in attendance.
Coachella is renowned as a major music festival and Trump likes to say he draws more than Elvis or Springsteen so if he manages to get a good crowd he can brag about that on a loop too. And Aurora Colorado is the site of the alleged migrant “invasion” taking over the town and threatening everyone with MK47 Mutant rifles so he figures the optics will be awesome.
“Choosing high-impact settings makes it so the media can’t look away and refuse to cover the issues and the solutions President Trump is offering. We live in a nationalized media environment and the national media’s attention on these large-scale, outside-the-norm settings increases the reach of his message across the country and penetrates in every battle ground state.”
Maybe they’re right. But a whole lot of money, time and effort will go into those three events, things that are precious resources in the last weeks of the campaign all for what amounts to an experiment. Sometimes you get the feeling that Trump is just in a YOLO frame of mind and nobody can stop him.
After all, Trump may just see himself in a win-win situation. If he manages to eke out an electoral victory, it will naturally be the greatest victory the world has ever seen. And if he loses, it will also be the greatest victory the world has ever seen except it will have been stolen by the Democrats. Everyone in America knows that he believes these are the only two possibilities.
And he has persuaded the official Republican party to parrot his fatuous disclaimer that he will accept it if it’s “free and fair.”
.@PabloReports: Mr Speaker, do you commit to observing regular order in the certification process of the 2024 election, even if Harris beats Trump?
MIKE JOHNSON: Well of course — if we have a free, fair, and safe election we're gonna follow the Constitution, absolutely pic.twitter.com/IsASJnIyYD
And who decides that it was a free and fair election, one might ask? Well, first it will be Donald Trump and we know it can only be free and fair if he wins. He has said that outright:
Trump and his henchmen are working overtime to suppress the vote and may have enough saboteurs in place in some places to delay the counts and disallow some legal votes if things don’t go their way. But it’s is inevitable that he will contest the results regardless of the evidence. .
The Electoral Count Reform Act (ECRA) foreclosed some of the shenanigans from 2020 and put in place some other procedures that will make the casesgo quickly and fit within the deadlines. Even the Supreme Court is required to comply within a certain period of time if they’re dragged into it, which is not unlikely.
But there may be ways that Mike Johnson, if he remains Speaker of the House, can have some input into this as well which may also explain why Trump is doing the two big rallies in New York and California. There are some very tight House races in those two states that may very well be decisive as to whether the Republican Mike Johnson or the Democrat Hakeem Jeffries, currently the minority leader, will be the speaker in the next Congress.
The Manhattan Borough President posted the following on Thursday:
If you’re confused that Trump is doing a rally at MSG…this is about CONGRESS.
There are 7 competitive house races in NY, they will likely determine the majority. Trump needs control of the House to contest electors.
If that scares you (it should), then help us win these races.
The new congress is always sworn in on January 3rd so the speaker will be seated before the day the electoral votes are counted on January 6th. And that day could unfold in very different ways depending on who has the gavel.
You’ll recall that Mike Johnson, then just another GOP congressman, wrote a Supreme Court brief in 2020 that had the court agreed to take it up could have overturned the election results. When asked if he would do the same this time, he told Politico that his narrow concern at the time had to do with legislatures being usurped by officials who changed the rules to accommodate the pandemic and that it was no longer operative since the legislatures have made all the rules this time.
That does not answer the question as to whether he would file a different amicus brief on another issue such as the hysterical complaints this cycle that undocumented immigrants are voting, which they are not. But if the Trump people are able to gin up enough chaos around this issue, it’s possible that Johnson could decide to take some action.
But Politico asked the big question to which they had no answer: “Does Johnson believe that the Electoral Count Act itself is constitutional and binding on Congress? Trump’s allies in 2020 said it was not, and Johnson has not made his position clear.” Once could also ask if Johnson thinks the ECRA, which reformed the original and somewhat archaic law, is as well. Can any of us feel confident that he won’t say it isn’t?
All of this is to say that Trump seems to have a Plan B in mind if he loses the election again and he wants to make sure he’ll have a Republican House and Senate on January 6th, 2025 just in case they want to contest the transfer of power again. It’s almost as if he’s looking forward to it.
Remember, his campaign manager Chris LaCivita made it clear that they were prepared to contest all the way. He said, “It’s not over until he puts his hand on the Bible and takes the oath…. It’s not over on Election Day. It’s over on Inauguration Day, ‘cause I wouldn’t put anything past anybody.” I assume the Democrats understand this and are prepared for everything, right?
Charlie Warzel is feaking out over the “depravity and nihilism” of MAGA’s hurricane lies:
Even in a decade marred by online grifters, shameless politicians, and an alternative right-wing-media complex pushing anti-science fringe theories, the events of the past few weeks stand out for their depravity and nihilism. As two catastrophic storms upended American cities, a patchwork network of influencers and fake-news peddlers have done their best to sow distrust, stoke resentment, and interfere with relief efforts. But this is more than just a misinformation crisis. To watch as real information is overwhelmed by crank theories and public servants battle death threats is to confront two alarming facts: first, that a durable ecosystem exists to ensconce citizens in an alternate reality, and second, that the people consuming and amplifying those lies are not helpless dupes but willing participants.
This is nothing new. For the right, truth is no longer an American value. It hasn’t been for decades. MAGA types know spreading propaganda and lies is wrong and they don’t care. They simply have more channels for spreading it, and they’ve done so with glee since the days of pass-it-on emails.
It is difficult to capture the nihilism of the current moment. The pandemic saw Americans, distrustful of authority, trying to discredit effective vaccines, spreading conspiracy theories, and attacking public-health officials. But what feels novel in the aftermath of this month’s hurricanes is how the people doing the lying aren’t even trying to hide the provenance of their bullshit. Similarly, those sharing the lies are happy to admit that they do not care whether what they’re pushing is real or not. Such was the case last week, when Republican politicians shared an AI-generated viral image of a little girl holding a puppy while supposedly fleeing Helene. Though the image was clearly fake and quickly debunked, some politicians remained defiant. “Y’all, I don’t know where this photo came from and honestly, it doesn’t matter,” Amy Kremer, who represents Georgia on the Republican National Committee, wrote after sharing the fake image. “I’m leaving it because it is emblematic of the trauma and pain people are living through right now.”
Kremer wasn’t alone. The journalist Parker Molloy compiled screenshots of people “acknowledging that this image is AI but still insisting that it’s real on some deeper level”—proof, Molloy noted, that we’re “living in the post-reality.” The technology writer Jason Koebler argued that we’ve entered the “‘Fuck It’ Era” of AI slop and political messaging, with AI-generated images being used to convey whatever partisan message suits the moment, regardless of truth.
Truthiness captured the ethos back in 2005. But its accelerant is the creation of infotainment platforms
… that offer financial and attentional incentives to lie and enrage, and to turn every tragedy and large event into a shameless content-creationopportunity. This collides with a swath of people who would rather live in an alternate reality built on distrust and grievance than change their fundamental beliefs about the world …
So much of the conversation around misinformation suggests that its primary job is to persuade. But as Michael Caulfield, an information researcher at the University of Washington, has argued, “The primary use of ‘misinformation’ is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”
There’s little new about this phenomenon since the days when my father forwarded conservative pass-it-on spam with as many as 75 non-blind-copied addresses attached from multiple forwards. What’s changed is the reach of the lies. Their purpose is the same as 20 years ago:
Pass-it-on spams don’t ask people to write their congressman or senator. They don’t ask people to get involved in or contribute to a political campaign. Or even to make a simple phone call. No. Once you’ve had your daily dose of in-box outrage, conservative reader, all these propaganda pieces ask is that you “pass it on” to everyone you know. So now that you’re good and angry — and if you’re a Real American™ — you’ll share it with all your friends so they’ll get and stay angry too.
Warzel concludes:
What we’re witnessing online during and in the aftermath of these hurricanes is a group of people desperate to protect the dark, fictitious world they’ve built. Rather than deal with the realities of a warming planet hurling once-in-a-generation storms at them every few weeks, they’d rather malign and threaten meteorologists, who, in their minds, are “nothing but a trained subversive liar programmed to spew stupid shit to support the global warming bullshit,” as one X user put it. It is a strategy designed to silence voices of reason, because those voices threaten to expose the cracks in their current worldview. But their efforts are doomed, futile. As one dispirited meteorologist wrote on X this week, “Murdering meteorologists won’t stop hurricanes.” She followed with: “I can’t believe I just had to type that.”
Burning witches didn’t stop people from experiencing misfortune or illness, but that’s where this is headed. The explanation for the behavior is as I’ve written before (in fact, over 30 years before). The New York Times is finally on the same page:
“It helps them to regain some measure of control and sense of order at a time when everything feels quite bleak and hopeless,” said Jennie King, who oversees climate disinformation research and policy at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank that studies online platforms.
The intensity of Helene and Milton’s one-two punch has been difficult to fathom. For many, it has been easier to blame human villains.
Having a diabolical someone to blame is more comfort than admitting shit happens.
