Midday open thread: Navy launches biofueled ships; billionaire doesn't get voter anger
Today’s comic by Ruben Bolling is Super-Fun-Pak Comix, featuring the dragon with bitchy resting face & more...
• Unemployment compensation applications rose to the highest level since July: For the week that ended January 16, the Department of Labor reported that seasonally adjusted initial claims for unemployment compensation rose to 293,000, 10,000 more than the previous week, and the highest level since the tally for the week ending July 4, when it was 296,000. For the comparable week of 2015, the count was 301,000. The four-week running average, which many economists consider a better measure because it smooths out the volatility in the weekly figures, was 285,000. The question is whether this marks a trend or is just a blip in a labor market that has shown steady growth for two years, though 2014 was a better year than 2015.
Other metrics are mixed. December retail sales—affected by warmer than usual weather—were flat, manufacturing contracted at its fastest pace since 2009, consumers have gained from lower oil prices, but the oil industry itself has laid off at least 100,000 workers since mid-summer. Come Friday, the Conference Board will announce its leading indicators index for the month, and it’s expected to be slightly down overall. Come next Friday, the first report on fourth-quarter growth in inflation-adjusted gross domestic product will be released. Forecasts are all over the place, but it would not be surprising to see that annualized growth reported at one percent or lower, which would put overall real GDP growth for 2015 at well below 2 percent, a weak showing.
• U.S. Navy launches its first partially biofuel-powered aircraft carriers: The Navy put to sea Wednesday with the first carrier strike group powered in part by a biofuel mix made from beef fat. The Navy in 2010 promised a “Great Green Fleet” would soon be in the offing. The fuel mix has a ways to go: It’s currently 10 percent biofuels and 90 percent oil. It was aiming originally for a 50-50 mix, but that proved too expensive. The Navy bought 77 million gallons of the 10 percent mix last year for its ships off the West Coast at $2.05 a gallon. In a demonstration of the fuel mix in 2012, the cost was $26 a gallon, which caused such an outcry in Congress that a bill was passed requiring that no biofuel could be purchased that wasn’t competitively price with oil.
• Maverick surgeon claims Chinese team has transplanted a monkey’s head: Sergio Canavero, who has gained notoriety in the scientific community for his transplant work, announced that Xiaoping Ren at Harbin Medical University carried out the head transplant on a monkey that they kept alive for 20 hours after the operation. Canavero is looking for the money to carry out a head transplant on a 31-year-old Russian patient, Valery Spriridonov, who has a genetic muscle-wasting disease. Mark Zuckerberg is one of Canavero’s targets for financing the surgery. Seven papers on Canavero’s experiments on animals and human cadavers, carried out with Chinese and South Korean scientists, will appear in the next few months in the journals Surgery and CNS Neuroscience & Therapeutics. Some critics have complained that making these announcements before the papers appear is a form of science by public relations.
• Billionaire at Davos can’t figure out why there is so much disgruntlement over income inequality.
• Buffalo Bills hire first female assistant coach in NFL’s 96-year history:
Kathryn Smith broke a glass ceiling on Wednesday when she became the first full-time female coach in the 96-year history of the NFL.
After working in the league for the past 13 years, Smith is now the special teams quality control coach for the Buffalo Bills.
• Denmark breaks its own world record in wind-powered electricity generation: The Danes, who have been in the forefront of wind turbine design and installations for 25 years, generated electricity equal to 42 percent of what the nation consumed in 2015. That’s up from the 39 percent (another record) they generated in 2014. U.S. wind-generated electricity is 4.4 percent. Iowa is the state that does best in terms of percentages: nearly 30 percent in 2015.
• In lieu of flowers: The family of self-described Jewish cowboy and chiropractor Jeffrey Cohen, who died at 70 last week, noted for his obituary: “Jeffrey would ask that in lieu of flowers, please do not vote for Donald Trump.”
• On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Winter Is Coming jokes are coming. Greg Dworkin helps us game out the ballots to be cast by NH’s undeclared voters. Would Flint’s water crisis have gone differently in a rich town? Vann Newkirk discusses environmental injustice in CA & everywhere.
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