…all just a little bit [DOT 5/1/23]

welcome to groundhog day...

5/1/23 SplinterRIP 28

…round & around they go

As we approach the anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack, it’s been grimly amusing to see that the party of insurrection can’t even manage the orderly transfer of power to itself. Rarely does karma play out so neatly.

Kevin McCarthy nurtured the spirit of reactionary nihilism in the Republican Party, first by trying to harness the energy of the Tea Party for his own ambition, and then by his near-total capitulation to Donald Trump. Now the chaotic forces he abetted have, at least for the moment, derailed his goal of becoming House speaker, subjecting him to multiple public humiliations at what was supposed to be his moment of triumph.

It is still possible that McCarthy will manage to eke this thing out by making even more concessions to the growing bloc of Republicans who oppose him. It is not possible, however, that he’ll emerge, in any real sense, as a leader.

…of which more, anon

…is it possible lessons will be learned…I’m gonna go with yes…will they be the wrong ones at the expense of the ones that might get us all to a mythical land of progress…well…based on form

Trump’s fundraising in recent years has raked in eye-popping sums. During the 2020 cycle he raised $882m, and another $500m since then. But the savings have been depleted by Trump spending on his own legal defenses, on Melania Trump’s personal designer, and on helping the January 6 rioters.

In recent years, the Trump team and its close allies have worked off an ever-expanding web of at least a dozen similarly named Pacs and committees. Typical examples: the “Trump Save America Joint Fundraising Committee” and the “Save America Joint Fundraising Committee”.
[…]
The most prolific entity over the current cycle has been the Save America leadership Pac, which raised about $111m and has about $21m left over post-midterm. But federal rules prohibit Trump from using leadership Pac funds for his campaign because leadership Pacs exist to support other candidates. It can, however, be used to support the large rallies that are a central campaign strategy.

Various Super Pacs hold another $57m, and though those can be used to support Trump’s campaign or attack his opponents, the Pacs legally cannot coordinate with the campaign.

In total, that means about $78m of the $95m on hand as of 28 November cannot be directly used for Trump’s campaign.

Still, that isn’t stopping the former president from trying to move money from leadership Pacs to Super Pacs via a legally questionable shell game. On 3 October, the Save America leadership Pac made a $20m contribution to Make America Great Again, Inc because the latter can spend more freely.

But that caught the attention of legal observers who say the move clearly violated “soft money” provisions of the Federal Election Campaign Act. On 14 November, the campaign finance watchdog Campaign Legal Center (CLC) filed a complaint with the FEC.
[…]
Moreover, Trump seems to be circumventing the Super Pac rules that prohibit coordination with his campaign.

…the signs aren’t good

The new committee that will act as Trump’s official fundraiser is “Donald J Trump for President 2024”. Filling it with funds from the usual sources, however, may prove more difficult than in the past.

That’s because low-dollar donations that fueled previous campaigns – some of which were raised through questionable recurring payments plans – seem to be dwindling. The Trump Save America Joint Fundraising Committee has fused his Save America leadership Pac and official candidate committee.

The joint committee boasted about its $24m haul from July to September, but it spent $22m to get there, records later showed. All told, his Pac network ran $13m in the red over the three-month period leading up to the midterms, fuelling speculation of small-donor fatigue.

Moreover, the campaign showed $111m in receipts prior to the election, and is down to about $95m post election as its spending exceeds its fundraising.

[…] DeSantis faces a similar predicament as Trump. He has raised an enormous amount of money through his state-level Pac, but that can’t be transferred to a federal campaign. [Suarav] Ghosh [director of federal campaign finance reform for the CLC] said he suspects DeSantis will try to transfer the money to a Super Pac, as Trump did.

That could prompt another complaint from the Campaign Legal Center, but it’s unlikely to go anywhere: with an equal number of Democratic and Republican commissioners, the agency has been stuck in partisan gridlock for years.

“These are serious violations because the federal system is designed to be insulated from spending outside of limits,” he said. “But the FEC rarely enforces the laws, and in the case of Trump they have a particularly awful track record, so I don’t expect that they’re going to change here. Obviously I hope they do as this is a clear violation, but we recognize what we’re up against.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/03/trump-war-chest-2024-presidential-campaign

…still

…you can’t deny the schadenfreude alone makes the whole spectacle the most fun it feels like politics has been in fair old while

…getting back to where I started out…& leaving aside the part where it seems unpleasantly like whoever ultimately lays hands on that gavel is going to be playing whac-a-mole with it more than banging out legislation

Unable to corral his caucus for what is usually an easy vote, there is no chance McCarthy would be able to get them on board for hard ones, like keeping the government open or raising the debt ceiling to avoid plunging the country into default. His best-case scenario is that he’d be a fragile figurehead, a hostage to the hard right and constantly in danger of defenestration. And even that scenario looks increasingly out of reach.

…whether or not the runners & riders are capable of switching horses mid-stream…it’s hard not to see it as a product of so many backing the wrong one

McCarthy’s approach to the far right has always been one of indulgence. Despite his own apparent lack of ideological conviction, he recruited many of the Tea Party candidates elected to the House in 2010. As Robert Draper, the longtime chronicler of the Republican Party, wrote in 2011, they represented “McCarthy’s more entrepreneurial approach to politics: seize upon a trend (in this case, government phobia), put all your money on it and then work hard to make the trend last.” McCarthy persisted in this approach as the Tea Party evolved into Trumpism, earning Trump’s patronizing sobriquet: “My Kevin.”

[…] Trump is a major reason the Republican House margin is as small as it is; voters rejected many of Trump’s handpicked candidates, as well as the party’s broader election denialism. And though Trump himself has endorsed McCarthy, many of his disciples are hostile to anyone associated with the Republican establishment.

As The Times reported, of the 20 lawmakers who, as of this writing, have voted against McCarthy, 17 were endorsed by Trump in 2022. Five of them are freshmen — these are people who are part of Trump’s remaking of the Republican Party. Arizona’s Eli Crane, for example, is a former contestant on the business reality show “Shark Tank,” where he pitched bottle openers made of dummy .50-caliber bullets. (“Shoot open some bottles in the manliest way possible,” says an ad for the product.) Florida’s Anna Paulina Luna, an ally of the Trump die-hard Matt Gaetz, is a veteran and former swimsuit model who built a career as a conservative rabble-rouser, most recently running Hispanic outreach for the right-wing outfit Turning Point USA. These people seem to be crafting brands as much as political careers, meaning they benefit from high drama and have little need to work their way through Republican institutions.

The movement these characters are part of — one McCarthy hoped would carry him to power — isn’t simply ideological. It’s also a set of defiant, paranoid, anti-system attitudes, and a version of politics that prioritizes showboating over legislating. That’s why McCarthy has found himself unable to negotiate with the holdouts. There are no real policy stakes, no concessions he can make on issues. The anti-McCarthy faction’s demands are largely about power and visibility, and whenever he meets those demands, they move the goal posts.
[…]
One of the most amazing aspects of the House Republican crackup has been watching Greene’s angry exasperation as her shot at real power is imperiled by attention-seeking hard-liners. “They’re proving to the country that they’re just destructionists,” she said on Sunday. It was the embodiment of the Twitter meme: “‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.”
[…]
McCarthy’s Republican opponents are right in surmising that he believes in nothing and will yield under pressure; the evidence is his inability to stand up to them. His mistake was convincing himself that a party obsessed with dominance would reward submission.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/04/opinion/kevin-mccarthy-speaker-race.html

…so…fair play on the popcorn

…it’s a thread, by the way…there was some thinking alike among the like-minded

…but…it’s not a one-ring circus

…I don’t know how many of you watched inception…though I’ll wager it’d be more of you than read jeff noon’s vurt which nobody has yet convinced me isn’t the kimba to its simba…but this whole groundhog day routine feels less like a spinning wheel than a sinking spiral

How do we know that the architects of a pro-Trump rally that spiraled into insurrection were right-wing extremists? They said so themselves, according to newly released witness interviews from the House select committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
[…]
Thousands of pages of documents made public in recent weeks portray promoters of the Stop the Steal movement as backstabbing rivals who viewed one another as “crazies,” “extremists,” “nutty,” and “white supremacist.” The documents include a text exchange in which former senior Trump adviser Hope Hicks, while watching the Capitol rioting unfold, lamented, “We all look like domestic terrorists now.”
[…]
The documents offer glimpses into other aspects of national right-wing organizing: leaders’ proximity to power, a tolerance for violent rhetoric, fierce infighting, and the role of “grifters” who make their living by stoking conservative outrage. The committee traces this mobilization to Trump, going back to a 2015 campaign-trail interview with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to show how Trump “normalized” the extremist factions that later rallied supporters to march on the Capitol.
[…]
Conservative planners, who themselves used fiery rhetoric to promote the lie of a stolen election, say they fought a losing battle to keep “crazies” at bay, a reference to even more strident voices such as Ali Alexander, Alex Jones, Roger Stone and various militant movements. Kremer, who obtained the rally permit only to see the event “hijacked” by more-extreme figures, said she cried when she was shown the final speaker roster.
[…]
A central theme of the committee’s report is that Trump ushered fringe ideologies into the mainstream. The report traces that process in part to a 2015 appearance by then-candidate Trump on Infowars alongside Alex Jones. The significance of a presidential contender praising Jones, according to the report, “should not be underestimated.”

“His appearance with Jones normalized InfoWars, welcoming its conspiracy-minded audience into Trump’s base,” the report said.
[…]
The interviews spell out the importance of anti-lockdown activism in connecting like-minded influencers and providing a blueprint for harnessing right-wing grievances. Those existing networks helped to turn Stop the Steal into a force multiplier for the conspiratorial movements that would go on to storm the Capitol.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/01/03/capitol-riot-extremists-select-committee/

…along with quantities of misplaced pride that threaten to achieve critical mass

…apologies if it feels like greeting the day by getting smacked in the face with a wet fish…but…for the record…the implausible quantity of at-least-probably-people-not-bots who hit the like button for that bit of backwards-facing navel-gazing…is less than for this awkward bit of fence-sitting that seems to try to borrow greta’s joke for a spot of low-key endorsement of andrew tate’s worldview

…which is about twice what he got for this bit of dystopian memery

…&…to swing back around to why I went off on a this-fucking-guy tangent in the first place…rather than fly off on the many other available tangents offered by conjecture about what modern day parallels to that trio of fictional futurescapes might say about either where they intersect or the olympic levels of…call it self-unawareness…implied by that particular asshole throwing that out there…it’s also many multiples of what it pulled last time he belched out another of these noxious brainfarts

…& why do I bring that shit up? …well…it’s sort of a parallel for this, it seems to me

…see now…it feels like kevin’s ongoing embarrassment wouldn’t be as amusing if that shit hadn’t passed…not to mention the added leverage you’d have to assume that scenario would afford the fuck-it-all folks

The motion to adjourn ultimately passed in a narrow 216-214 vote, handing Republicans a win. GOP Reps. Andy Biggs (Ariz.), Lauren Boebert (Colo.) and Matt Gaetz (Fla.) and Rep.-elect Eli Crane (Ariz.) were the only Republicans to oppose the measure.

https://thehill.com/homenews/house/3799700-these-four-house-republicans-voted-against-adjourning-amid-speaker-fight/

…oh…& don’t forget about MT greene

“In raising the reward for information about the pipe bomb suspect from $100,000 to as much as $500,000, the FBI and our partners are seeking to encourage the American public to take a fresh look at our Seeking Information website, which includes images and video of the suspect, the suspect’s backpack, the suspect’s shoes, the explosive devices, and a map of the route the suspect walked the night the pipe bombs were placed,” the bureau said.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/feds-boost-reward-500k-information-capitol-pipe-bomber

…you know…while we’re speculating about stuff

…so…much as it’s hard not relish the flaming tailspin the world’s richest twitter troll is failing to pull out of…there’s a common denominator between the demands of the intransigent malcontents in the house, the wannabe martian’s pet warping of anything his access to twitter’s confidential data can allow to be confabulated…&…what passes for reality to a whole mess of people who can’t stomach the real deal

Trump’s interest in making himself the center of literally everything led to the creation of a concept called Trumpism, the tactics Trump used to hold power. That is distinct from MAGAism, the specific political appeal Trump made to the base-commentariat. Trumpism was Trump attacking opponents and doing mean tweets. MAGAism is the web of nationalism, racial politics and disdain for the establishment in service of which Trump was tweeting. Both exist outside of Trump — and since Trump’s ouster from the White House, both have been deployed by other Republicans and right-wing personalities to their own ends.
[…]
It’s not surprising that those anti-McCarthy votes also come from a number of people established in right-wing media. Reps.-elect Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.) and Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) are all at the center of the opposition, appealing to and intertwining with the base-commentariat. McCarthy managed to bring Greene onboard, but she wasn’t able to lure those allies into agreement, given the opportunity for attention that opposition offered.
[…]
Over the course of Trump’s presidency, Hannity, unquestionably part of the base-commentariat, revealed himself to be part of the Trump loyalist faction of that group. His support for Trump came before his bolstering of the base-commentariat in keeping with his long-standing fungibility when access to power availed itself. When Trump became the establishment — triggering some opposition from the rest of the base-commentariat by definition — Hannity stood with the new establishment. So, his broadcast Tuesday offered the lambasting of McCarthy opponents that Reschenthaler expected.

Carlson’s didn’t. He is now the Fox News ambassador to the base-commentariat, whether Hannity knows it or not. So Carlson excoriated McCarthy as a creature of the establishment, which Gaetz was quick to amplify. Backing McCarthy is a way to bolster existing Republican power, but bucking McCarthy is a way of demonstrating opposition to the untrustworthy establishment (Trump’s “swamp”) just as the base-commentariat expects.

McCarthy’s challenge, then, is the challenge of the Republican Party nationally. There is no way to corral the base-commentariat, because it is defined in part by its inability to be corralled. When even Trump is having to learn this lesson, certainly McCarthy will. There’s little he can offer the right-wing fringe in his party, because their acquiescence to him trades power with the base-commentariat for power in the House — and the former offers a lot more power. To become speaker, McCarthy may end up needing support from moderate Democrats, the sort of deal that is anathema to the base-commentariat, if not to Republicans broadly. Securing a leadership post by working with Democrats would further erode his support with his party’s right-most element, imperiling his ability to bring them along on other critical votes he’ll need, given his narrow majority.

This is the terminus of a path the GOP has been walking for at least a decade-and-a-half. Once a Republican base that operated in symbiosis with right-wing media became large enough to wield majority power — a growth stoked by Trump — the prospect of managing a House conference increasingly elected by the base-commentariat became much shakier.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/01/04/republicans-mccarthy-speaker-house/

All this is shocking but not surprising — a phrase that has achieved meme status in recent years for a reason: We’re living in the age of the scam.
[…]
Why are there so many liars these days? Why are we willing to trust them, and even to become them?
[…]
The former president, too, got elected by lying — conjuring up facts and figures to paint him as wealthier than he was when it came to the public and poorer than he was when it came to the IRS; inventing tales about immigration or trade or NATO to stoke voters’ anger and fear; accusing his opponents of corruption when he was really the one flirting with a foreign adversary.

And when he didn’t get elected, he turned to the “big lie” that the whole thing was rigged.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/01/04/george-santos-scam-explained/

…&…as recognizable as so much of that sounds…not to mention ridiculous…the contagion isn’t short of vectors…some of which even offer a thin veneer of legitimacy if you haven’t been paying attention…I mean…whatever the actual fuck happened to newsweek […seriously, y’all…if one of the co-owners of a company is still CEO of a firm who’ll be defendants in a case alleging mismanagement of that company…during a period the latter firm already plead guilty to money laundering its way through…that can only be the shitshow equivalent of one of those fractals chaos theory is known for] …given that some might still mistake it for a brand with some residual reputation for competent reporting…however vestigial it may be in reality…you could draw another fractal with the layers of irony in just this paragraph

The Twitter Files have revealed in stunning detail a largely successful bid by the U.S. national security apparatus to manipulate public opinion at a mass scale by imposing a censorship regime on social media platforms.

https://www.newsweek.com/twitter-files-tip-iceberg-needed-church-style-committee-opinion-1770948

…&…some people prefer to pour gasoline on a dumpster fire

The social media platform banned political advertising in 2019 after its then chief executive, Jack Dorsey, declared that reaching people with political messages should be “earned, not bought”.

Twitter has signalled a reversal of that policy, announcing it plans to “expand the political advertising we permit in the coming weeks”. In a post on Twitter’s safety account, the company said it would align its advertising policy with that of TV broadcasters and other media outlets.

The post added that Twitter would ensure, as with any policy change, “our approach to reviewing and approving content protects people on Twitter”. However, Musk has recently reinstated controversial accounts, such as those belonging to Donald Trump and Andrew Tate, despite pledging initially that such moves would be adjudicated by a “content moderation council” that has since fallen by the wayside.

There will be an immediate change for restrictions on “cause-based” advertising, which it defines as ads that encourage people to take action on issues such as social inequality and economic growth. According to a Twitter advertising policy page, cause-based ads that target users in the US will no longer face restrictions such as a ban on using political terms like “conservative” or “liberal”.

…it’s a predictable outcome…of sorts

About 70% of Twitter’s top 100 advertising clients were not spending on the platform as of mid-December, according to research firm Pathmatics.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jan/04/elon-musk-twitter-to-relax-restrictions-on-political-advertising-as-revenues-drop

…still…credit where credit’s due…sort of…they seem to have been right about “the storm is coming”

California declares state of emergency over ‘truly brutal’ storm [Guardian]

…although…their explanation for that sort is about as coherent as the whole GQP clusterfuck…&…much in the same sort of way…the fallout is destructive

Atmospheric rivers are hugely influential for California’s weather and water supplies. They cause the state’s heaviest rains and feed the biggest floods. They drive its cycles of dry and wet, famine and feast. But they also cause a large share of the state’s levee breaches and debris flows.

One atmospheric river can be enough to flood homes, down power lines and wash away hillsides and highways. But when several sweep ashore in a matter of days or weeks, as appears to be happening this week, the potential damage is multiplied.
[…]
It is still unclear how global warming might be affecting the likelihood for atmospheric rivers to crash into California in rapid-fire clusters. Another study last year found that in nearly four out of five years between 1981 and 2019, half or more of all atmospheric rivers that affected the state were part of an atmospheric river “family,” or a rapid parade of storms.

Still, the warmer atmosphere’s increased capacity for holding moisture is reason enough for California officials to prepare for more catastrophic rain events today and in the future

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/03/climate/california-flood-atmospheric-river.html

…speaking of the future…& places associated with rain

The Amazon has been called “the lungs of the earth” because of the amount of carbon dioxide it absorbs — according to most estimates, around half a billion tons per year. The problem, scientifically speaking, is that these estimates have always depended on a series of extrapolations. Some researchers use satellites to detect changes that indicate the presence of greenhouse gases. But the method is indirect, and clouds can contaminate the results. Others start with individual tree measurements in plots scattered across the region, which allows them to calculate the so-called biomass in each trunk, which, in turn, allows them to work out how much carbon is being stored by the ecosystem as a whole. But it’s hard to know how representative small study areas are, because the Amazon is almost as large as the contiguous United States, with regional differences in rainfall, temperature, flora and the extent of logging and agriculture. (One study even warned of the risk of “majestic-forest selection bias.”)
[…]
In a healthy rainforest, the concentration of carbon should decline as you approach the canopy from above, because trees are drawing the element out of the atmosphere and turning it into wood through photosynthesis. In 2010, when Gatti started running two flights a month at each of four different spots in the Brazilian Amazon, she expected to confirm this. But her samples showed the opposite: At lower altitudes, the ratio of carbon increased. This suggested that emissions from the slashing and burning of trees — the preferred method for clearing fields in the Amazon — were actually exceeding the forest’s capacity to absorb carbon. At first Gatti was sure it was an anomaly caused by a passing drought. But the trend not only persisted into wetter years; it intensified.
[…]
When Gatti published her findings in Nature in 2021, it sparked panicked headlines across the world: The lungs of the earth are exhaling greenhouse gases. But her discovery was actually much more alarming than that. Because burning trees release a high proportion of carbon monoxide, she could separate these emissions from the total. And in the southeastern Amazon, air samples still showed net emissions, suggesting that the ecosystem itself could be releasing more carbon than it absorbed, thanks in part to decomposing plant matter — or in Gatti’s words, “effectively dying more than growing.” The first time I spoke to Gatti, she repurposed a lyric by the Brazilian crooner Jorge Ben Jor. How could this be happening, she asked, in a “tropical country, blessed by God/and beautiful by nature”?
[…]
The consensus used to be that ecosystems are merely a product of prevailing weather patterns. But in the 1970s, the Brazilian researcher Eneas Salati proved that the Amazon, with its roughly 400 billion trees, also creates its own weather. On an average day, a single large tree releases more than 100 gallons of water as vapor. This not only lowers the air temperature through evaporative cooling; as Salati discovered by tracking oxygen isotopes in rainwater samples, it also gives rise to “flying rivers” — rain clouds that recycle the forest’s own moisture five or six times, ultimately generating as much as 45 percent of its total precipitation. By creating the conditions for a continental swath of evergreens, this process is crucial to the Amazon’s role as a global “sink” for carbon.

Many scientists now fear, however, that this virtuous cycle is breaking down. Just in the past half-century, 17 percent of the Amazon — an area larger than Texas — has been converted to croplands or cattle pasture. Less forest means less recycled rain, less vapor to cool the air, less of a canopy to shield against sunlight. Under drier, hotter conditions, even the lushest of Amazonian trees will shed leaves to save water, inhibiting photosynthesis — a feedback loop that is only exacerbated by global warming. According to the Brazilian Earth system scientist Carlos Nobre, if deforestation reaches 20 to 25 percent of the original area, the flying rivers will weaken enough that a rainforest simply will not be able to survive in most of the Amazon Basin. Instead it will collapse into scrubby savanna, possibly in a matter of decades.

Much of the evidence for this theory — including Gatti’s air-​sample studies — emerged thanks to a groundbreaking initiative led by Nobre himself. When Nobre started trying to forecast the impact of deforestation back in 1988, he had to do it at the University of Maryland, because his home country lacked the computing power for serious climate modeling. Brazil was so strapped for resources that foreign researchers even dominated Amazon fieldwork. But Nobre spearheaded a program that, in the words of a Nature editorial, “revolutionized understanding of the Amazon rainforest and its role in the Earth system.” Established in 1999 and known as the Large-​Scale Biosphere-​Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia, or L.B.A., it united disciplines that usually did not collaborate, bringing together chemists like Gatti with biologists and meteorologists. While funding mostly came from the United States and Europe, Nobre insisted that South Americans play leading roles, thus giving rise to a whole new generation of Brazilian climate scientists.

Until recently, Nobre was working under the assumption that the Amazon would not become a net source of carbon for at least another few decades. But Gatti’s research is not the only sign that, as he put it to me over Skype, “we are on the eve of this tipping point.” The rain machine is slowing. Droughts used to come once every couple of decades, with a megadrought every century or two. But just since 1998 there have been five, two of them extreme. The effect is particularly acute in the eastern Amazon, which has already lost a staggering 30 percent of its forest. The dry season there used to be three months long; now it lasts more than four. During the driest months, rainfall has declined by as much as a third in four decades, while average temperatures have risen by as much as 3.1 degrees Celsius — triple the annual increase for the world as a whole in the fossil-fuel era. In some parts, jungles are already being colonized by grasses.

Losing the Amazon, one of the most biodiverse ecosystems on Earth, would be catastrophic for the tens of thousands of species that make their home there. Rising temperatures could also drive millions of people in the region to become climate refugees. And it would represent a more symbolic death, too, as “saving the rainforest” has long been a kind of synecdoche for modern environmentalism as a whole. What scientists are most concerned about, though, is the potential for this regional, ecological tipping point to produce knock-on effects in the global climate. Because the Amazon’s flying rivers circulate back over the continent, the impact may already be reaching beyond the rainforest. In 2015, Brazil’s populous southeast was hit by historic water shortages; in 2021, quasi-biblical sandstorms swept the region. If the flying rivers peter out entirely, it could affect atmospheric circulation even beyond South America, possibly influencing the weather as far away as the western United States.

…the western united states currently in the grip of a sequence of meteorological consequences of atmospheric rivers…well…hard to deny that seems to track

But even these consequences pale next to the fallout from putting the Amazon’s carbon back into the atmosphere. For all the slashing and burning of recent years, the ecosystem still stores about 120 billion tons of carbon in its trunks, branches, vines and soil — the equivalent of more than three years of human emissions. If all of that carbon is released, it could warm the planet by as much as 0.3 degrees Celsius. According to the Princeton ecologist Stephen Pacala, this alone would probably make the Paris Agreement — the international accord to limit warming since preindustrial times to 2 degrees — “impossible to achieve.” Which, in turn, may mean that other climate tipping points are breached around the world. As the British scientist Tim Lenton put it to me, “The Amazon feeds back to everything.”

www.nytimes.com/2023/01/04/magazine/amazon-tipping-point.html

…there’s a fair bit more to that piece…& I’m not trying to claim there aren’t plenty of write ups on ecological concerns &/or indications covering just about everyplace…any more than I’d claim they’re the only legitimate concerns

For hospitals, caring for kids isn’t as lucrative as adult health care. As a result, hundreds of pediatrics departments have closed over the past two decades. [NYT]

…but it seems abundantly clear that some people prize their personal delusions beyond humanity…theirs or anyone else’s…& given what they preach about vaccines for things that kill people…maybe we shouldn’t tell them about the bees

The world’s first vaccine for honeybees has been approved for use by the US government, raising hopes of a new weapon against diseases that routinely ravage colonies that are relied upon for food pollination.
[…]
The vaccine, which will initially be available to commercial beekeepers, aims to curb foulbrood, a serious disease caused by the bacterium Paenibacillus larvae that can weaken and kill hives. There is currently no cure for the disease, which in parts of the US has been found in a quarter of hives, requiring beekeepers to destroy and burn any infected colonies and administer antibiotics to prevent further spread.
[…]
American foulbrood originated in the US, and has since spread around the world. Dalan said the breakthrough could be used to find vaccines for other bee-related diseases, such as the European version of foulbrood.
[…]
The US is unusually dependent upon managed honeybee colonies to prop up its food pollination, with hives routinely trucked across the country to propagate everything from almonds to blueberries.

This is because many wild bee species are in alarming decline, due to habitat loss, pesticide use and the climate crisis, fueling concerns around a global crisis in insect numbers that threatens ecosystems and human food security and health.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/04/honeybee-vaccine-first-approved

…never say never is all very well…but forever isn’t what it used to be…& though here & there that might even be a good thing

Scientists have invented a new way to destroy toxic substances known as “forever chemicals” that have become widespread in waterways around the world, presenting risks to human health and biodiversity, reports a recent study. The technique successfully broke down 95 percent of the pernicious chemicals, called perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), in just 45 minutes.

Scientists Destroyed 95% of Toxic ‘Forever Chemicals’ in Just 45 Minutes, Study Reports [Vice]

…when it comes to the forever it’s taken me to get this to deign to post…well…let’s just say the irony that I’d “finished” a version that may or may not have been both shorter & more coherent before technology conspired to make me spend the last hour trying to reverse-engineer something that almost made sense out of the parts of it I managed to resuscitate…without a copy&paste function…have me feeling like I have at least one advantage over mr mccarthy…I’m willing to quit while I’m behind…& at some point even to face the music?

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28 Comments

  2. It’s been fucking hilarious watching MSM jackasses like Mrs Greenspan begging Dems to save the GOPers from themselves.

    I feel closer to how the Dems must feel right now because it is how I feel about management at work. We tried and they told us to “Get lost and go fuck yourselves.”  Ok, fine.  And now when they need us, well, it’s a loud “Go fuck yourselves.”

    • I am fascinated by May-December marriages, although oddly enough it’s usually the woman who is May and the man is December. I know a few people who are in these marriages, and the younger brings fresh ideas and joie de vivre to the relationship and the older brings financial stability, usually. This, I suspect, is the mortar that cements the Greenspans’ marriage. At 76, Andrea Mitchell must seem younger than springtime to Alan Greenspan, who is 96.

      • Men are also allowed to age in society. Like it’s perfectly acceptable for people of all ages to still drool over George Clooney in a very different way than Jamie Lee Curtis is treated.

        I think that also plays into it, as middle aged men are considered attractive at their current ages.

  4. As far as that header image, there’s always the Bret Stephens approach to global warming.

    1. Your science is all wrong.
    2. I’m not saying your science is wrong, I’m saying you haven’t proven anything
    3. OK, your science was proven right four decades ago, but it’s your fault we’re in this mess because when it mattered you weren’t proposing the right solution to something I was fighting against tooth and nail.

    • Again, re: Matt Gaetz, WHERE IS NESTOR? Is anyone still on the trail of the child trafficking charges? Along with focusing on the young women, how about Matt’s extra-judicial “fostering” of a hot young teen whom he picked up in Cuba and moved into his house and put on his payroll? And Nestor’s Dad is alive and well and living in Miami somewhere?

      Forget about George Santos, the way Long Island is going (thanks Jay Jacobs) I could run Faithful Hound as a Republican in that district now and he’d win. He actually is certifiably from the shelter in that district, and with enough donor $ we could move to Sands Point. I don’t know Faithful Hound’s fiscal policies. He’s probably conservative on this, because the more money that isn’t forcibly confiscated  levied from the general citizenry and squandered invested in pay-to-play boondoggles crucial job-creating infrastructure that will be sold off for pennies on the dollar after their unexpectedly rapid collapse the more treats for him.

      Socially, I think he’s very liberal. The more the merrier is his credo, so he wouldn’t be rabidly racist and anti-immigrant. I’ve taught him rudimentary commands in Spanish, like I have for all my dogs, and Better Half is Black so he doesn’t react viscerally to the melanin-blessed among us, like some dogs have been trained to do. In fact, his now-best friend in the building is a black-and-white spotted hound so Faithful Hound could heal our racial divide.

      What’s that? We’d have to move to Washington? I withdraw his nomination.

  6. What if…and hear me out…what if a breakaway group of Dems voted for McCarthy? He becomes Speaker but his own caucus won’t listen to him because he’s irreparably damaged and in cahoots with the other side? Then, the Dems vote in lockstep in the House, the Senate is marginally Democratic and there’s always (well, at least for now) Kamala Harris to break ties, Joe Biden will sign whatever’s put in front of him…

    • I’ve heard people float this & supposedly some spoke of this.  The best one I heard is they would vote for him if he promised to get the Freedom to Vote Act passed.  The most likely scenario though would be just to get promises of Dems running a few committees.

    • That would require some Republicans to be remotely reasonable and cross party lines to vote for reasonable measures.

      There are no reasonable Republicans anymore. It’s a fantasy being floated by a few contrarian centrists that they exist.

      This crew wouldn’t vote to impeach Trump after 1/6 when the only thing on the table was disqualifying him from holding future office. The crazies have drained the tiny few like Cheney from office. They’re gone.

      Any pundit or reporter who treats this as a serious possibility is a waste of time, and odds are their main driver is either narcissism or else a dumb effort at the old game of blaming Democrats for not trying hard enough to understand the GOP.

      It’s on a level of Ross Douthat before 1/6 insisting that Trump wouldn’t try to launch a coup, and then after 1/6 deciding liberals shared the blame.

    • …I believe one of the concessions demanded of him that he capitulated to would make it a lot easier to oust a speaker…so…it might work…but probably not for long enough to make it an attractive proposition

      https://www.npr.org/2023/01/05/1147028286/these-21-house-members-didnt-vote-for-kevin-mccarthy-heres-what-they-want

      …if it only takes a gang of five to send us back to vote-for-a-speaker…& they think what’s going on now qualifies as a worthwhile exercise…that doesn’t bode too well?

      • I read that it’s down to one. Any member can call for a vote of no confidence. And Qevin seems to have agreed to it. So IF he gets to 218, you’re basically looking at a week, tops, before Bobo, Gaetz, or another idiot calls for another vote. Qevin is literally handing blackmail power to every single member..

      • That piece begins fine but ends up as a joke.

        He’s right when he says “what happens when the captors don’t want anything but to cause chaos?” but then goes on to offer up a list of demands and a long rundown of things they say they’re after. That’s not what they want. That’s a list they’re throwing out there to make it look like they have a coherent wishlist.

        It’s been only a couple of weeks since people all over sat down to watch Die Hard. This is the equivalent of Hans Gruber’s list of prisoners he read about in Time Magazine he demanded be released around the world in only two hours.

        I don’t know where Domenico Montanaro gets off claiming things like “They want [government] to be smaller, do less, to spend less” — that’s absolutely not what they want at all. They want a gigantic government that funnels huge amounts of taxpayer money at all of the things they want, along with wild numbers of new laws expanding the government’s control over everyone’s lives.

        He was right at the beginning. This is about chaos.

        • …in the version of the DOT that’s lost to the ether I had a rather better list of the demands from the everyone’s-a-hostage contingent…& whether or not they’re an accurate reflection of their desires…it does seem to be a mostly-accurate accounting of the demands they’ve issued overtly

          …but the NPR one wasn’t paywalled & was easier to find than whatever I had before…so…if it’s not too ironic for words…I went with the path of least resistance

          • Oh, sure, it may well be an accurate list of what they’ve said.

            But it’s like what Hans Gruber sent to the FBI. It’s completely beside the point, and treating it seriously is going to hurt a lot of people. If it gets repeated, it needs to be far more clear that these people are just wiring the building with explosives and hoping to kill a lot of hostages.

            • This is the correct take. There is no plan here. The plan is to generally fuck up everything and there’s no goal at the end of that. It’s monkeys throwing shit at each other until they get bored with throwing shit and wander off or start plucking ticks off each other.

              Always remember the governing principle of Republicans: But what if we just … didn’t?

              • …I’d say there are a couple of broadly discernible motivations…the evergreen CYA…which is probably high on the list for people like gaetz with very plausible criminal allegations hovering over them…& a largely unfounded belief that “I have leverage – that makes me a kingmaker…ipso facto…I rule”

                …neither of which strikes me as incompatible with your definition of the correct take?

    • I read this and thought it was interesting, as well, but I also can’t reconcile cretins like Bobo with this “master plan.” A Gaetz? Sure. He’s slimy as fuck, but he’s got the basic intelligence to understand how pimping for the billionaire class helps him (and he’s not poor — his family’s been grifting in Florida for a LONG time). But Bobo is too stupid to effectively tie her shoes, much less grasp how hard-core libertarianism could benefit her personally (it won’t unless she starts working as a escort again).

      I think there’s a strong implication of a unified plan in the article, and in reality you’ve got a loosely organized group of scumbags sucking at billionaire teats, and a larger group of imbeciles who are useful idiots and are treated as such. The problem now is that the idiots don’t always do what they’re supposed to do, because idiocy doesn’t lend itself to the decision-making process.

    • Right? The MAGAs have been squealing about this plan forever — putting Trump third in line for the presidency so he’d only have to get Vlad to whack the other two, and Bob’s your uncle. I can’t believe they waited two days to nominate him.

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