Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed a catalyst that “essentially reverses” the combustion of ethanol, directly converting carbon dioxide into ethanol, discussed in a publication in ChemistrySelect.

~~
~~

“We’re taking carbon dioxide, a waste product of combustion, and we’re pushing that combustion reaction backwards with very high selectivity to a useful fuel,” Rondinone said. Ethanol is the same type of alcohol found in alcoholic beverages but is also widely used as an additive to motor fuel. It’s commonly sourced from plant material.

The researchers are also enthusiastic about the industrial replicability of the setup, as the technique uses low-cost materials and can be performed in room temperature.

The development is shifting paradigms in fuel use, introducing a way of having “renewable” greenhouse gases. Carbon dioxide takes up 65 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, belched out primarily by fossil fuel and industrial processes. Carbon capture is the most commonly used technology to regulate emissions by keeping it from reaching the atmosphere by turning carbon dioxide and particulate combustion residue into solid waste—a waste-to-waste process. Catalytic conversion of waste carbon dioxide presents a waste-to-fuel alternative that is truly valuable to us today.
(more)

INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES teach their officers how to respond in case of exposure: Admit nothing, deny everything, make counter-accusations. While perhaps good advice in the amoral context of espionage, these are not, or should not be, words to live by for those who take part in democratic politics. Yet when Republican Donald Trump was outed as a serial abuser of women, first by his own words and then by testimony from a lengthening list of alleged victims, he responded with tactics worthy of the Russian ex-KGB man Vladi­mir Putin, whose leadership he so admires. Mr.?Trump branded the women liars and blamed “the establishment and their media enablers” for the purported smear.

One reason to believe the charges is Mr. Trump’s own repugnant boast, captured on videotape in 2005 and first reported a week ago by The Post’s David A. Fahrenthold, about how he likes to “grab” women by their private parts and force himself on them, as an exercise of his “star” power. Lacking the decency to take responsibility for this, beyond a thin layer of apology in a thick sandwich of excuse-making, Mr. Trump went on to compound verbally the insult he already inflicted on his victims, through his conduct, with predictable attacks on their veracity, motives and, of course, appearance. Thus did the GOP nominee further confirm his unfitness for the White House, as well as the cravenness of those elected leaders in his party who continue to endorse him.

And then Mr. Trump, speaking Thursday in West Palm Beach, Fla., escalated: Beyond merely denying the truth of the allegations about his treatment of women, he recast them as evidence that U.S. democracy itself is no longer legitimate. Follow the logic here, if you can: The country is under the control of a conspiracy, involving not just his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, and the media, but also the entire political “establishment,” Republicans included, in league with unnamed international banks, whose goal is to enrich themselves by controlling “the central base of world political power . . . right here in America” and imposing “radical globalization and the disenfranchisement of working people.” Mr. Trump, and the “movement” he heads, are all that stand in the way of this evil cabal. This election, therefore, is no ordinary political contest but “a crossroads in the history of our civilization that will determine whether or not we the people reclaim control over our government.” Ergo, the cabal will destroy Mr. Trump by “slander” — unless the people stand up and resist “a small handful of global special interests rigging the system.”

This language — which he read from a prepared text fed into a teleprompter — is inflammatory beyond any demagoguery Mr. Trump had offered previously. Coupled with his repeated warnings, echoed by his followers, that the Democrats may be cooking up Election Day fraud, the speech seems to prepare the ground for resistance in the increasingly likely event that things don’t go his way Nov. 8. Indeed, anyone who agrees that the alternative to a Trump victory is civilizational disaster, the fruit of a “sinister deal,” as Mr. Trump put it in another Florida speech, would feel obligated to deny the legitimacy of a Clinton victory, should it occur. Trump-for-President is not a campaign to redeem American democracy or even to “take it back,” as Mr. Trump puts it; it has morphed into a campaign of destabilization.
(more)

IN THE gloom and ugliness of this political season, one encouraging truth is often overlooked: There is a well-qualified, well-prepared candidate on the ballot. Hillary Clinton has the potential to be an excellent president of the United States, and we endorse her without hesitation.

In a moment, we will explain our confidence. But first, allow us to anticipate a likely question: No, we are not making this endorsement simply because Ms. Clinton’s chief opponent is dreadful.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is dreadful, that is true — uniquely unqualified as a presidential candidate. If we believed that Ms. Clinton were the lesser of two evils, we might well urge you to vote for her anyway — that is how strongly we feel about Mr. Trump. But we would also tell you that was our judgment.

Fortunately, it is not.

We recognize that many Americans distrust and dislike Ms. Clinton. The negative feelings reflect in part the bitter partisanship of the nation’s politics today; in part the dishonest attacks she has been subjected to for decades; and in part her genuine flaws, missteps and weaknesses. (IOW she's a human being. B_USA)
(more)

A progressive advocacy group is launching an advertising campaign accusing Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, who also is the Republican vice-presidential nominee, of allowing voter suppression after state police raided the offices of a voter registration program aimed at signing up African Americans.

Patriot Majority USA will place the ads on black-oriented radio stations and in print and online with black newspapers throughout the state starting Saturday, said the group’s director, Craig Varoga. Patriot Majority is affiliated with the Senate Majority PAC, a super PAC that supports Democratic candidates.

On Oct. 4, one week before the state’s deadline to register to vote, state police raided the Indianapolis office of the Indiana Voter Registration Project, seizing computers, cellphones and records. The state police launched an investigation in late August after elections officials in Hendricks County, a suburb of Indianapolis, alerted authorities to some applications that seemed amiss. A spokesman for the state police told local news media that “at least 10” applications were confirmed to be fraudulent.

Varoga estimates that 45,000 people, most of them African Americans, might not be able to vote on Nov. 8 because their applications were seized during the raid. The group has asked the Justice Department to investigate, and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, an advocate for voting rights, sent a letter to Indiana Secretary of State Connie Lawson asking her to take steps to ensure that eligible voters who signed up through the voter registration drive will not be disenfranchised.
(more)

It has been confirmed that Donald Trump is directly being fed and is repeating Putin lies and propaganda at his rallies under the disguise of making America great again.

Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald uncovered an instance of Trump reading propaganda directly from Putin at a recent campaign rally in Pennsylvania. The Russians took a story that Eichenwald wrote and turned into a “John Podesta email” that hours later Trump read on stage at his rally.

Eichenwald wrote that Putin is directly feeding lies to Trump:

The Russians engage in a sloppy disinformation effort and, before the day is out, the Republican nominee for president is standing on a stage reciting the manufactured story as truth. How did this happen? Who in the Trump campaign was feeding him falsehoods straight from the Kremlin?

The Russians have been obtaining American emails and now are presenting complete misrepresentations of them—falsifying them—in hopes of setting off a cascade of events that might change the outcome of the presidential election. The big question, of course, is why are the Russians working so hard to damage Clinton and, in the process, aid Donald Trump? That is a topic for another time.

Every American should be troubled by this development. Putin has moved beyond dabbling in the election by hacking the DNC to using his Trump puppet to inject Russian propaganda into US media. It should be noted that emails that Wikileaks is leaking are being falsified by the Russian government, so the information that is being put out there as leaked news may not be accurate.
(more)

MOSCOW (The Borowitz Report)—Calling the Republican nominee’s behavior “completely indefensible,” the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, cancelled a joint campaign appearance with Donald Trump on Monday.

Putin, who had been scheduled to campaign alongside Trump at a rally in Columbus, Ohio, said that he would make no joint appearances with the billionaire for the remainder of the campaign.

“As the father of two daughters, I cannot condone or defend Mr. Trump’s behavior,” the Russian leader said in a curt official statement.

~~
~~

Appearing on CNN, Trump’s campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, attempted to downplay the Putin defection by claiming that Trump still has the support of many other totalitarian dictators.

At Sunday night’s debate, Donald Trump twice threatened to throw Hillary Clinton in jail should he win the election. Putting Clinton in jail has been a recurring theme in Trump’s campaign: For months, “lock her up” has been a popular chant at Trump events — most notably at the Republican National Convention this summer.

Besides being illegal, that’s a really, really bad idea. I should know: I saw the same thing happen up close in Sri Lanka in 2010, when I was working as a reporter for a local English-language newspaper, the Sunday Leader.

I arrived in Sri Lanka in August 2009, just three months after the Sri Lankan government declared victory in its bloody, 26-year-long counterinsurgency against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a Tamil separatist group that pioneered the use of suicide bombers in the 1980s. Sri Lanka’s president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, was being hailed across the country as a national hero for finally crushing the much-hated separatists.

Although he had several years left in his term, Rajapaksa called an early presidential election shortly after I joined the paper, confident that he could cruise to an easy victory. That’s when an unexpected challenger emerged — Gen. Sarath Fonseka, Sri Lanka’s top military leader, who nursed a personal vendetta against the president for, as he saw it, hogging all the credit for the victory.
(more)