…I know the election is (in at least some senses) over
More than 160 election deniers on the ballot for the U.S. House, Senate and key statewide offices were projected to win their elections as of Wednesday morning. The majority of Republican nominees on the ballot Nov. 8 — 291 in all — had denied or questioned the outcome of the last presidential election, according to a Washington Post analysis. More than 85 were projected to lose so far. About three dozen races remained uncalled as vote counting continued.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2022/election-deniers-midterms/
[…or…if you have better luck with it…here’s the same effort from the NYT…the irony that both put that shit behind a paywall you get for free]
…but…things aren’t exactly settled as yet…for example…seems like the good folks of georgia are…less numerous than might have been hoped
…now I wouldn’t want to assume y’all are familiar with will ferrell’s character in “talladega nights: the ballad of ricky bobby“…but…you know how they say that thing about “when people tell you who they are”?
…it’s entirely possible there’s a logical explanation
For the first time since 2016, one of the most influential groups guiding doctors, trainers and sports leagues on concussions met last month to decide, among other things, if it was time to recognize the causal relationship between repeated head hits and the degenerative brain disease known as C.T.E.
Despite mounting evidence and a highly regarded U.S. government agency recently acknowledging the link, the group all but decided it was not. Leaders of the International Consensus Conference on Concussion in Sport, meeting in Amsterdam, signaled that it would continue its long practice of casting doubt on the connection between the ravages of head trauma and sports.
[…]
Scientists have spent the past decade analyzing hundreds of brains from athletes and military veterans, and the variable evident in nearly every case of C.T.E. has been their exposure to repeated head trauma. Researchers have also established what they call a dose response between the severity of the C.T.E. and the number of years playing collision sports.
[…]
Of the nearly 7,500 papers on concussions that the group identified, the writers of the consensus statement considered only 26, which did not include any of the major research papers on C.T.E.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/08/sports/football/cte-brain-trauma-concussions.html
…but I don’t think even in georgia that that many people play that kind of football…I dunno…maybe they have…esoteric religious practices?
…still…if anyone was in any doubt about how effective that vote suppression business could be…consider the fact that in a choice between these two
…people who are supposedly smart enough to tie their shoelaces & remember to breathe picked…that guy…two-&-a-bit million of them, supposedly…which begs just a whole slew of questions that I’m pretty sure none of us has time to answer today…so you could stick with this kind of thing
…or, indeed, this sort of thing
Our choices are shaped, and even bound, by the histories and institutions we inhabit. And yet they’re still our choices. We are moral agents, responsible for our decisions, even if we can’t fully escape the matrix in which we make them.
And yet so much of the conversation about the modern Republican Party assumes the opposite: that Republican politicians are impossibly bound to the needs and desires of their coalition and unable to resist its demands. Many — too many — political observers speak as if Republican leaders and officials had no choice but to accept Donald Trump into the fold, no choice but to apologize for his every transgression, no choice but to humor his attempt to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election and now no choice but to embrace election-denying candidates around the country.
But that’s nonsense. For all the pressures of the base, for all the fear of Trump and his gift for ridicule, for all the demands of the donor class, it is also true that at every turn, Republicans in Washington and elsewhere have made an active and affirmative choice to embrace the worst elements of their party — and jettison the norms and values that make democracy work — for the sake of their narrow political and ideological objectives.
Those objectives, for what it’s worth, are nothing new. To the extent that the Trump-era Republican Party has an agenda, it is what it has always been: to be a handmaiden to the total domination of capital, to facilitate the upward redistribution of wealth and to strengthen hierarchies of class and status. To those ends, Republicans in Washington have already announced plans to reduce social insurance, cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans and restrict abortion rights.
[…]
Led by Trump and his many acolytes, the Republican Party is poised to plunge this country into political and constitutional crisis over its refusal to share power or acknowledge defeat. We can treat this as some kind of an inevitability, the only possible outcome, given the pieces at play, or we can treat it as what it is: a deliberate choice.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/08/opinion/midterms-republicans-election-denialism.html
…or you could scratch your head about how to square this sort of circle
One of the people who has been working behind the scenes with [Mia] Mottley [prime minister of Barbados] on this is Prof Avinash Persaud, who has been friends with her since the 1980s when they were both studying at the London School of Economics.
Persaud believes the global financial system is simply not set up to deliver on the scale needed to avert climate disaster. He says this puts the burden of climate impacts on the world’s poorest countries, those who are “most pressed to act [and] least able to act”.
[…]
The Caribbean is among the world’s most indebted regions, with debt levels averaging 90.1% of GDP since the beginning of the pandemic. Persaud points out that, across the region, climate shocks and debt continue to feed one another in an unhappy downward spiral.
“We found that 50% of the increase in our [regional] debt could be traced back to some natural disaster that we had to pay for ourselves,” he says.
Persaud was one of the architects of the post-2008 international banking regulation Basel 3, established in the aftermath of the Lehman Brothers collapse. This proved to be a strategy for fiscal stability that effectively overturned decades of neoliberal financial orthodoxy.
“It was a decade of crisis,” says Persaud. He says the solutions promoted by the IMF and the World Bank, such as currency devaluation and rapid debt reduction, meant emerging markets effectively “doubled down” on their vulnerability, increasing the overall level of instability in the system. “People like myself were arguing that we needed a different financial system,” he says, “but no one listened.”
[…]
Central to Barbados’s proposals is the establishment of a climate mitigation trust that would prompt the release of $650bn from the IMF through a mechanism called special drawing rights, which allows members to borrow from each other’s reserves at very low interest rates.
Persaud’s calculation is that if the IMF puts up an initial $650bn, it will stimulate private investment by an additional $2tn, which would get significantly closer to the sums that experts say need to be raised to get on track to stop global heating.
Additional features of the Barbados initiative include giving climate-vulnerable countries access to low-interest, long-term loans for adaptation, natural disaster clauses in all bank loans, and grants for loss and damage that would be funded by a 2% tax on fossil fuel exports, shifting the burden from the poorest people in the world directly on to the polluters.
As questions of climate finance and implementation move centre stage at Cop27, Persaud hopes this blueprint will be recognised as “achievable, practical, as well as meaningful and morally right”.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/09/leaders-urged-to-reform-finance-to-aid-the-poorest-hit-by-the-climate-crisis
…after all
Researchers from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), the University of Applied Sciences of the Industry in Bergisch Gladbach and Greenpeace Germany compared the rate at which the world needed to embrace zero-emissions vehicles with the rate at which major car companies were planning to produce various models.
The report, which focused on 12 carmakers globally, showed some of Australia’s most popular brands – Toyota, Volkswagen and Hyundai/Kia – were on track to make far more petrol and diesel cars than is sustainable if the world is to limit global heating to the Paris climate agreement target of 1.5C.
[…]
“The carbon budget of 53Gt allows for the sale of an additional 315 million ICE [internal combustion engine] vehicles as of 2022,” the report states.
“At the same time, however, projected ICE sales range between at least 645m and 778m vehicles. This represents an overshoot of 105% to 147% compared to the 1.5°C-compatible number of ICE sales.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/10/worlds-biggest-carmakers-to-build-400m-more-vehicles-than-15c-climate-target-will-allow
…we’re all in this together
Climate Trace, a project to measure at source the true levels of carbon dioxide and other global heating gases, published a new report on Wednesday showing that half of the 50 largest sources of greenhouse gases in the world were oil and gas fields and production facilities.
Many are underreporting their emissions, and there are few means of calling them to account.
Oil and gas production can leak methane, and the gas is also frequently flared intentionally, ostensibly for safety reasons but sometimes for convenience. Atmospheric levels of methane, a greenhouse gas about 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide, have been rising strongly in recent years, but countries’ reported emissions of the gas have been found to be much lower than the reality.
[…]
Climate Trace uses evidence from satellites, remote sensors and other sources to monitor emissions globally, using artificial intelligence to build a clear picture of emissions sources around the world. The group’s database provides emissions information from 2015 to 2021 for all countries that are party to the Paris agreement, which encompasses all world nations apart from a handful of failed states.
None of those nations have yet submitted to the UN a full account of their greenhouse gases for 2021, and 52 countries have not submitted any emissions inventories covering the last 10 years.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/09/oil-and-gas-greenhouse-emissions-three-times-higher-than-producers-claim
…even if some people do seem to act like they have access to a different planet
Taunting opponents. Treating employees like dung. Bullying adversaries. Demeaning critics. Craving attention. Refusing to be held accountable. Attracting millions of followers and gaining cult status. Spreading misleading information. Making gobs of money.
Impetuous. Unpredictable. Ruthless. Autocratic. Vindictive.
Remind you of anyone?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/08/trump-and-elon-musk-are-dangerous-narcissists-tailored-to-2022-america
…or at least an alternative reality
Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is cutting 11,000 jobs, more than one in eight staff, after a disastrous collapse in revenue has left the company behind Facebook overstaffed and “inefficient”, the chief executive said in a note to staff.
However, Zuckerberg indicated he planned to continue backing the company’s controversial multibillion-dollar bet on virtual reality, saying the metaverse project was a “high-priority growth area”.
[…]
“Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected,” he said. “Not only has online commerce returned to prior trends but the macroeconomic downturn, increased competition, and ads signal loss have caused our revenue to be much lower than I’d expected. I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that.”
The reference to “signal loss” is thought to relate to Zuckerberg’s long-running dispute with Apple, which in 2021 limited the amount of data, or “signals”, Facebook could gather about the behaviour of iPhone users. That loss, Zuckerberg has regularly said, made it harder for small businesses to use Facebook adverts to profitably acquire new customers.
[…]
Despite widespread criticism of Zuckerberg for the scale of his investment on the company’s virtual reality project, which has resulted in more than $10bn (£8.7bn) being spent on research and development each quarter, he insisted in the note that the pivot remained a “high-priority growth area”, alongside the company’s TikTok-style “AI discovery engine” and its ads and business platforms.
[…]
Meta’s share price peaked in September 2021 at $379, shortly after the Apple system rolled out to all iPhone users. However, in the following months there was one bruising revelation after another, from quarterly earnings reports that demonstrated the immediate harm of the change, to a damaging set of leaks from the whistleblower Frances Haugen, and the company’s largest global outage in years.
Even its October 2021 rebranding, from Facebook to Meta, could not stop the downward trend, and the company experienced its largest stock price drop in January this year, plummeting more than a third in less than four weeks. It now sits at under $100, its lowest level since early 2016.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/09/mark-zuckerberg-meta-to-sack-11000-workers-after-revenue-collapse-facebook-instagram
…it sounds like a joke…but apparently part of the severance package being offered to some of these people is…virtual “real estate” in the metaverse…while another measure they’re planning is to reduce the company’s real real estate holdings…so they’re well on their way to being a case study for the fuck around: find out principle
…anyway…here we find ourselves…& who knows…maybe the smart thing to do is to make friends with an intelligent alien species?
On a cloudy morning, Andrea Humphreys and a group of friends slipped into the waters of the Salish Sea, off the eastern coast of Vancouver Island.
[…]
“People say it’s dark and gloomy here. But when you’ve got lights, you see every colour of the rainbow. It’s incredible. I’ve completed more than 675 dives and I think this is some of the best diving in the world,” she said. The group was also on the hunt for an enigmatic local: the giant Pacific octopus.
Humphreys said that she occasionally spots them sheltering in their dens, but this time, within moments of immersion, the group made the rare sighting of an octopus out in the open.
It quickly approached her friend, grazing its tentacles up against the mask and regulator.
Humphreys started photographing the encounter – until the octopus had turned its attention to her.
“It was just crawling on my camera, crawling on my lips, giving me a hug. These huge tentacles were up over my face and mask,” Humphreys said. “Every time I backed away from it, the octopus just kept coming towards me. And it was just so amazing and inspiring.”
For the next 40 minutes, the octopus stayed close by, inspecting her dive equipment and taking a particular interest in her camera. “It kept changing the lights on my camera system and fiddling with it,” she said.
Throughout the encounter, the octopus maintained its deep red colour, never taking on the greyish tone of a fearful or aggressive cephalopod.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/09/canada-octopus-video-andrea-humphreys
…look…all I’m saying is…these things are smart
…&…well…it turns out that despite a lot of recent anecdotal evidence that might suggest otherwise…lacking a spine does not in fact correlate perfectly with being some kind of a dumbass?
…also…not for nothing…but they keep mentioning that the sea level is rising…so…maybe cephalopod overlords wouldn’t be so bad?
Love this quote. Two of the “handful” are Iran and Algeria. Another one is Yemen which, yes, arguably, is a failed state.
Signatories include Russia, which is now pretty much getting all its income from oil and natural gas exports, and their statistics are unverifiable and subject to the whim of an increasingly ill man, mentally and physically. Another signatory is China, which cannot mine its own coal reserves fast enough and has multiple sweetheart deals with Russia to buy oil and natural gas at low, low prices, while they roam Africa in search of reliable state-owned (by them) sources of petroleum. Then there’s India, also a very large Russia customer, which is not about to let its vast population revert back to the pre-industrial age. Their morbidity rates are off the charts as it is, and those are from dubious and no doubt under-reported numbers provided by their shady government.
Good luck, COP-27. Sadly, the entire planet cannot be Iceland, which gets 85% of its power from renewable sources, chiefly hydropower. Try running Algeria off hydropower.
Today’s headline on the Murdoch-owned New York Post:
TOXIC TRUMP
Quote:
“What Tuesday night’s results suggest is that Trump is perhaps the most profound vote repellant in modern American history,” Podhoretz wrote. “The British political figure Oliver Cromwell once said about other British politicians who had overstayed their welcome and were ruining the country, ‘In the name of God, go!’ Yo, Toxic Trump: Scram.”
Editorial from same issue:
“Trump Is the Republican Party’s Biggest Loser”
“He has now flopped in 2018, 2020, 2021 and 2022.”
“Trumpy Republican candidates failed at the ballot box in states that were clearly winnable. This can’t be what Mr. Trump was envisioning ahead of his ‘very big announcement’ next week,” the editorial board wrote. “Since his unlikely victory in 2016 against the widely disliked Hillary Clinton, Mr. Trump has a perfect record of electoral defeat. The GOP was pounded in the 2018 midterms owing to his low approval rating. Mr. Trump himself lost in 2020. He then sabotaged Georgia’s 2021 runoffs by blaming party leaders for not somehow overturning his defeat.”
Me:
Now let’s get serious. Abortion and the American Taliban had much more to do with Tuesday than Trump. But it amuses the hell out of me to see these assholes attacking each other. And they KNEW he was an asshole. Everything Trump touches dies.
They have to be nimble to pivot quickly if they want to move on from Trump, and they’re struggling because their whole strategy for decades has been attacking things and blocking things. The reality of the 2024 calendar is that a lot of their people have to come together to actually act in a pretty short time. All of their vested interests and billionaire funders have to compromise and come to consensus quickly, and they have little practice doing that.
You can’t rule out a GOP platform of nothing more than demonizing 22 year old student loan recipients, 16 year old trans kids, 12 year old pregnant girls, and 8 year old immigrant kids could win in 2024. And the political press will do everything in its power to pretend they have a real platform — 95% of the NY Times pundits have no ideas at all, and they’re deeply threatened that the country might want to actually engage with ideas.
But it’s not sustainable. Even if the demonization wins, it will collapse and bring them down with it, GOP and press, and they will drown with all of us in the chaos.
They’ve got to move faster than that. They need to pull themselves together in Georgia. The Georgia Republicans moved the runoff date up to December to reduce early voting which favors Democrats, but that also gives Republicans much less time to try to come up with a strategy to elect a potato. And hopefully Stacey Abrams is mobilizing now on behalf of Warnock.
There’s a detailed breakdown of the Republican circular firing squad in WaPo today:
GOP hopes stymied by infighting, Trump, flawed candidates
I’m not entirely convinced that Abortion had the impact we thought it would. If it did, then most of those Republican shitbags would have lost and lost big, rather than taking control of the House and still having a good shot at the Senate. Too many voters collectively shrugged at the possibility of a nationwide abortion ban.
Exit polls shows abortion as equally important to inflation, so it did play a pretty big role. But you’re right, the biggest problem was utter indifference. The voter turnout in Florida was fucking dismal, for example.
I think it definitely did if you look who voted D. The bigger takeaway from this breakdown is if the Dems could do two things at once they would have pushed harder on R’s are coming for your social security and medicare so that group wouldn’t have voted R.
Agree. Val Demings spent all of her advertising saying she was a cop and wouldn’t defund the police. What should have happened is that she should have been hammering the Rick Scott platform of abolishing Social Security and Medicare. Nobody even remembers “defund the police” at this point. Rubio completely ignored it.
Another failure of Val Dmings’s messaging, and I speak from personal experience, is that somehow her campaign got my phone number and I was getting three or four texts a day from them. Fine, I normally just delete them, but they were so persistent I blocked the number. But it didn’t stop. Block. Three more would come in the next day. Block. Three more. Block block block, yet it never stopped. I just got one yesterday, the day after the midterms.
Since she is a former cop, I hope she founds a private security service, I hear those are very popular down in Florida, and restricts her advertising to the flailing/failing G/O Media sites where they can join the thousands of others.
I disagree both because abortion won on the ballot nearly everywhere (even in Kentucky!) but also the economic outlook for Dems should have been putrid and, frankly, Andrew Cuomo’s dumb redistricting was more damaging to the party than $4 gas and inflation.
And sure, some of those pro-Roe voters also split their ticket for Rand Paul, but there’s still the polite fiction of “Well it won’t happen in MY state” and … I think the message is pretty clear that if they try to squash that, it’s not going to go well. They will still try! But they also have to do a biopsy on the giant Trump tumor growing out of their ass right now and figure out if they can do enough chemo on it by 2024.
…I forget the exact details but I’m pretty sure in more than one state people voted for abortion protection ballot initiative stuff while also electing someone who wants to push through a federal ban that would invalidate the protection they presumably thought they were voting for on the other thing
…because people are idiots?
Yeah, but the right-wing mindset is always, ETERNALLY, other people can’t do the thing but if I have to do it, it’s OK because [reasons].
But also, I think unmarried women were close to +40% in favor of Democrats, so I think they understand the stakes just fine. I’ve always been really fascinated by right-wing housewives who look down on the poors because, but for the grace of your woman-disrespecting husband not trading you in for a younger model goes you, darlin’.
The bottom line is there is never a single issue that drives everyone.
In the Democratic takeover of the House in 2018 it was saving Obamacare, but there were also Trump scandals weighing the GOP down among independents, as well as generalized regret among Democratic activists for complacency in 2016.
When the GOP took the House in 2010 it was partly their energy in fighting Obamacare, but it was also due to the sluggish recovery from the 2008 collapse and Obama’s own inertia in dealing with issues.
What tends to matter is not just a laundry list of issues, even when it’s something big like abortion, it’s how well those issues can be packaged into a coherent overall message.
Which is why it’s always worth looking at pundits and outlets less in terms of specific issues and more in terms of how they support or fight the packaging. Alleged anti-Trumpers like David Brooks work overtime to badmouth Democrats for opposing Trump in the wrong ways and deny the value of infrastructure, public education, etc.. The NY Times in general works to support ridiculous GOP narratives of their skill, effectiveness, and ability to reward followers, even as the Times eventually sneers a little at the specifics.
Dems in Disarray is the once and future story forever.
My argument has been they have to use the “Rule of 3” & not just use abortion. The Rethugs were using economy, crime, & homelessness. We have more than 3 we could have used but I would have gone with abortion, social security/medicare, & environment but would be open to something else besides environment (sadly).
https://www.rawstory.com/rule-of-three/
Thanks for the octopus vids, nice palate cleanser after all the election stuff in the news. 🐙
Looks like Zoomers saved the day…
https://hartmannreport.com/p/has-the-fourth-turning-begun
Case in point…
https://crooksandliars.com/2022/11/youngest-dem-congressman-ever-gets
and this is the reason the Zoomers are getting more political than previous generations…
https://komonews.com/news/local/ingraham-high-school-shooting-suspect-expected-in-court-wednesday-north-seattle-public-schools-adrian-diaz-king-county-prosecutors-office-gunman#
I use Zoom all the time.
My computer monitor is so old it doesn’t have a camera function. I’ve never been so grateful. Once the pandemic hit and everyone thought they had to be on Zoom or Google teams or whatever I would have to decline, and say, “No, we’ll do it the way we did [one or two or three] years ago. We’ll talk on the phone and I’ll bring up the sample file and you can walk me through it.” My clients, the people who hire me, are my friends and mostly former coworkers, mind you, and I don’t even want to see them over video, never mind perfect strangers whose private lives should remain exactly that, private.
Ok Mother Nature, you know what to do!
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-ignored-evacuation-order-mar-135846444.html
Fingers crossed!
BETTER YET, Tiffany Trump, the forgotten one, the Prince Edward of that equally dysfunctional clan, is getting married there this weekend. They’ve closed down the Palm Beach Airport so the groom, a legitimate billionaire heir whose wealth is no doubt from many illegitimate sources, his international friends may not make it. The tawdry cast of dingleberries who cling to Trump’s voluminous derrière will probably be there, though, which could possibly make it the most exciting disaster film ever made, one where you root for no one and hope no one survives!
The abortion voting is actually really simple to understand and it’s 100% due to how efficient the “pro-life” assholes are at branding and PR.
Many many women fall into the category of “well I would never have an abortion, but I can’t tell another woman what to do with her body.”
A lot of these women also consider themselves pro-life because they really wish abortion would never happen, despite the fact that their beliefs are literally pro-choice. So when the branding is “republicans* are the pro-life candidates, democrats are the baby murderors!!!!” here we are.
*they’re not, as pretty sure every major religious denomination in the US says you can’t be pro-life if you support capital punishment
If the fucking democrats got their shit together and rebranded it as pro-choice vs forced-birth, it would be more effective.