We're Blowin' it

Droughts will get worse, and there's a good probability we'll see a double/triple/fourple whammy of drought-then-flood-then-drought cycling in fairly quick succession.

We've fouled the nest, we may not be able to stop the worst of the consequences for having fouled the nest, which means that taking it all together, we're on track for the human species to go extinct sooner than we'd hoped.

Global soil moisture in ‘permanent’ decline due to climate change

A new study warns that global declines in soil moisture in the 21st century could mark a “permanent” shift in the world’s water cycle.

Combining data from satellites, sea level measurements and observations of “polar motion”, the research shows how soil moisture levels have decreased since the year 2000.

The findings, published in Science, suggest the decline is primarily driven by an increasingly thirsty atmosphere as global temperatures rise, as well as shifts in rainfall patterns.

Consequently, the researchers warn the observed changes are likely to be “permanent” if current warming trends continue.

An accompanying perspective article says the study provides “robust evidence” of an “irreversible shift” in terrestrial water sources under climate change.

The drying out of soil “increases the severity and frequency” of major droughts, with consequences for humans, ecosystems and agriculture, explains Dr Benjamin Cook, an interdisciplinary Earth system scientist working at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University, who was not involved in the research.

He tells Carbon Brief:

“Droughts are one of the most impactful, expensive natural hazards out there, because they are typically persistent and long lasting. Everything needs water – ecosystems need water, agriculture needs water. People need water. If you don’t have enough water – you’re in trouble.”

Drying soil

Every year, around 6tn tonnes of water cycles through Earth’s land surface. When rain falls on land it gets held up in soil, wetlands, groundwater, lakes and reservoirs on its journey back to the oceans.

Soil moisture forms a critical part of the Earth’s system, helping to irrigate soil, cycle nutrients and regulate the climate.

The amount of water contained in the soil is sensitive to a range of factors, including changes in rainfall, evaporation, vegetation and climate – as well as human activity, such as intensive agriculture.

The research points to a “gradual decline” in soil moisture levels in the 21st century, kickstarted by a period of “sharp depletion” in the three years over 2000-02.

Specifically, the researchers find the depletion of soil moisture resulted in a total loss of 1,614bn tonnes (gigatonnes, or Gt) of water over 2000-02 and then 1,009Gt between 2002 and 2016.

(For context, ice loss in Greenland resulted in 900Gt of water loss over 2002-06.)

Soil moisture has not recovered as of 2021, according to the research, and is unlikely to pick up under present climate conditions.

Joint-lead author Prof Dongryeol Ryu, professor of hydrology and remote sensing at the University of Melbourne, explains to Carbon Brief:

“We observed a stepwise decline [in soil moisture] twice in the past two decades, interspersed within a continuously declining trend in soil moisture. We haven’t seen this trend earlier, so that is why this is very concerning.”

Ryu explains the decision to analyse changes to soil moisture on a global scale meant the researchers could confirm trends difficult to see in smaller geographic datasets:

“The unique thing we found through analysing these larger-scale measures is that – even if we have seen widely fluctuating ups and downs in precipitation and increasing temperature – the total water contained in the soil, as soil moisture and groundwater, has been declining gradually from around the beginning of this century.“

The maps below illustrate soil moisture changes in 2003-07 and 2008-12 against a 1995-99 baseline, as estimated by the ERA5-Land reanalysis dataset. The areas marked on the map in brown saw a drop in soil moisture and the areas marked in blue an increase in soil moisture.

The top map shows soil moisture depletion across large regions in eastern and central Asia, central Africa and North and South America over 2003-07. The lower map shows that “replenishment” in the years that followed occurred in relatively small parts of South America, India, Australia and North America.

Climate change

Ryu says the researchers “suspect that increasing temperature played an important role” in the decline in terrestrial water storage and soil moisture in the 21st century.

The study points to two factors driving gradual depletion of soil moisture over the last quarter century: fluctuations to rainfall patterns and increasing “evaporative demand”.

Evaporative demand refers to the atmosphere’s “thirst” for water, or how much moisture it can take from the land, vegetation and surface water.

Studies have highlighted how global evaporative demand has been increasing over the last two decades globally, impacting water availability, hurting crops and causing drought.

The new study notes that “increasing evaporative demand driven by a warming climate” suggests a “more consistent and widespread trend toward drying as temperatures rise”.

Ryu says the “very unusual” drop in water moisture observed over 2000-02 could be attributed to low levels of rainfall globally, which coincided with the “period when evaporative demand started increasing”.

Another – less pronounced – period of rapid soil moisture decline seen over 2015-16 can be attributed to droughts triggered by the 2014-16 El Niño event, Ryu notes.

Ryu says the study findings indicate that soil moisture can no longer bounce back from a dry year, as it has in the past:

“It used to be that when precipitation goes up again, we recover water in the soil. But because of this increasing evaporative demand, once we have strong El Niño years – which lead to much less rainfall for a year or two – it seems that we are not recovering the water fully because of increasing evaporative demand. Because of that – even if we have a wet year following dry years – the water in the soil doesn’t seem to recover.”

Cross-validation

Measuring changes in global soil moisture has historically presented a challenge to scientists, given the lack of comprehensive and direct observations of water in soil.

The researchers attempt to reduce this uncertainty by corroborating the ERA5-Land reanalysis dataset from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) with three geophysical measurement datasets.

ERA5’s land surface modelling system uses meteorological and other input data to estimate water within the upper few metres of the soil.

These figures were compared with data collected by the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission – a joint satellite mission between NASA and the German Aerospace Center.

Running since 2002, the GRACE mission tracks changes to the Earth’s gravity by collecting data on groundwater depletion, ice sheet loss and sea level rise. These observations have revealed a persistent loss of water from land to the ocean.

The scientists also cross-reference the ERA5 reanalysis data with a century-old dataset that measures fluctuations in the rotation of the Earth as the distribution of mass on the planet changes.

(The redistribution of ice and water, such as melting ice sheets and depleting groundwater, causes the planet to wobble as it spins and its axis to shift slightly. This is known as “polar motion”.)

The third set of measurements the scientists use is global mean sea level height, which is collected by satellites.

To extract soil moisture changes from this set of data, the researchers subtracted other components of sea level rise from the overall total – including Greenland ice melt, Antarctica ice melt, the impact of increasing sea surface temperature (which expands water volume) and the contribution of groundwater.

This process of elimination left researchers with an estimate of the contribution of soil moisture to global sea level rise.

The study notes that both the sea surface height and polar motion observations “support the conclusion that the abrupt change in soil moisture is genuine”.

Ryu says using global average sea level rise and “Earth wobble” to track water redistribution on land is the “main innovation” applied in the paper.

He adds the value of “reverse engineering” the ERA5 dataset is to understand how to enhance land surface modelling in the future:

“By explaining all the contributing factors to this measurement, you can understand the process. And if you understand the process, you can actually predict what’s going to happen in the future if any of these factors change in a certain manner.”

NASA’s Dr Cook says the “corroborating evidence” supplied by the paper offers a “really strong case that there has been a large-scale decline in soil moisture in recent decades”.

However, he says the relatively short reference period of the study means that identifying the cause of the decline is less clear cut:

“Whether [the decline] is permanent or not is much more uncertain…On these timescales, internal natural variability can be really, really strong. Attributing this decline to something specific – either climate change or internal variability – is much much more difficult.”

Sea level rise

A notable finding in the study’s sea level rise analysis is that terrestrial water storage may have been the dominant driver of sea level rise in the early 21st century.

Specifically, the paper notes that the decline in terrestrial water storage over 2000-02 – when soil moisture plummeted – led to global average sea level rise of almost 2mm annually.

The researchers note this rate of sea level rise is “unprecedented” and “significantly higher” than the rate of sea level rise attributed to Greenland ice mass loss, which they note is approximately 0.8mm a year.

Prof Reed Maxwell, a professor at the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University, who was also not involved in the study, says the researchers’ efforts to compare soil moisture with other global water stores was “novel” and “opens the door to future study of a more holistic global water balance”.

‘Creeping disaster’

The paper notes that land surface and hydrological models require “substantial improvement” to accurately simulate changes in soil moisture in changing climate.

Current models do not factor the impacts of agricultural intensification, nor the ongoing “greening” of semi-arid regions – both of which “may contribute” to a further decline in soil moisture, it states.

Writing in a perspectives article published in Science, Prof Luis Samaniego from the department of computational hydrosystems at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research says that it is “essential” that next-generation models incorporate human-caused influences such as farming, large dams and irrigation systems.

The study posits that the “innovative methods” for estimating changes in global soil moisture presented in the study provide opportunities to “improve the present state of modelling at global and continental scales”.

More broadly, advances in scientific understanding of changes to soil moisture can help improve the world’s preparedness for drought.

Drought is often described as a “creeping disaster” – because by the time it is identified, it is usually already well under way,

Paper author Ryu explains:

“Unlike a flood and heatwaves, drought comes very very slowly – and has prolonged and delayed consequences. We better be prepared earlier than later, because once drought comes you can expect a long period of consequences.”

Dr Shou Wang, associate professor at the Hydroclimate Extremes Lab and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, who was not involved in the study, says the research findings are “crucial” for advancing understanding of the “potential drivers and dynamics” of “unprecedented hydrological extremes in a warming climate”. He tells Carbon Brief:

“This is breakthrough work that uncovers the drivers of hydrological regime changes, which are leading to unprecedented hydrological extremes such as compound and consecutive drought-flood events.”

Today's Onion

ICYMI

Meet Tennessee State Representative Paul Sherrell (R - Pokacuzzin County).

Mr Sherrell has proposed bringing back lynching as a form of punishment for certain crimes in The Volunteer State.

Fouling The Nest

This is from The Guardian, which is a bit leftie (see Media Bias / Fact Check), but it seems pretty consistent with practically everything else we've been hearing.

the total mass of plastics on this planet

is now greater than

the total mass of mammals on this planet

The Guardian:

The cocktail of chemical pollution that pervades the planet now threatens the stability of global ecosystems upon which humanity depends, scientists have said.

Plastics are of particularly high concern, they said, along with 350,000 synthetic chemicals including pesticides, industrial compounds and antibiotics. Plastic pollution is now found from the summit of Mount Everest to the deepest oceans, and some toxic chemicals, such as PCBs, are long-lasting and widespread.

The study concludes that chemical pollution has crossed a “planetary boundary”, the point at which human-made changes to the Earth push it outside the stable environment of the last 10,000 years.

Chemical pollution threatens Earth’s systems by damaging the biological and physical processes that underpin all life. For example, pesticides wipe out many non-target insects, which are fundamental to all ecosystems and, therefore, to the provision of clean air, water and food.

“There has been a fiftyfold increase in the production of chemicals since 1950 and this is projected to triple again by 2050,” said Patricia Villarrubia-Gómez, a PhD candidate and research assistant at the Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC) who was part of the study team. “The pace that societies are producing and releasing new chemicals into the environment is not consistent with staying within a safe operating space for humanity.”

Dr Sarah Cornell, an associate professor and principal researcher at SRC, said: “For a long time, people have known that chemical pollution is a bad thing. But they haven’t been thinking about it at the global level. This work brings chemical pollution, especially plastics, into the story of how people are changing the planet.”

Some threats have been tackled to a larger extent, the scientists said, such as the CFC chemicals that destroy the ozone layer and its protection from damaging ultraviolet rays.

Determining whether chemical pollution has crossed a planetary boundary is complex because there is no pre-human baseline, unlike with the climate crisis and the pre-industrial level of CO2 in the atmosphere. There are also a huge number of chemical compounds registered for use – about 350,000 – and only a tiny fraction of these have been assessed for safety.

So the research used a combination of measurements to assess the situation. These included the rate of production of chemicals, which is rising rapidly, and their release into the environment, which is happening much faster than the ability of authorities to track or investigate the impacts.

The well-known negative effects of some chemicals, from the extraction of fossil fuels to produce them to their leaking into the environment, were also part of the assessment. The scientists acknowledged the data was limited in many areas, but said the weight of evidence pointed to a breach of the planetary boundary.

“There’s evidence that things are pointing in the wrong direction every step of the way,” said Prof Bethanie Carney Almroth at the University of Gothenburg who was part of the team. “For example, the total mass of plastics now exceeds the total mass of all living mammals. That to me is a pretty clear indication that we’ve crossed a boundary. We’re in trouble, but there are things we can do to reverse some of this.”

Villarrubia-Gómez said: “Shifting to a circular economy is really important. That means changing materials and products so they can be reused, not wasted.”

The researchers said stronger regulation was needed and in the future a fixed cap on chemical production and release, in the same way carbon targets aim to end greenhouse gas emissions. Their study was published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology

There are growing calls for international action on chemicals and plastics, including the establishment of a global scientific body for chemical pollution akin to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Prof Sir Ian Boyd at the University of St Andrews, who was not part of the study, said: “The rise of the chemical burden in the environment is diffuse and insidious. Even if the toxic effects of individual chemicals can be hard to detect, this does not mean that the aggregate effect is likely to be insignificant.

“Regulation is not designed to detect or understand these effects. We are relatively blind to what is going on as a result. In this situation, where we have a low level of scientific certainty about effects, there is a need for a much more precautionary approach to new chemicals and to the amount being emitted to the environment.”

Boyd, a former UK government chief scientific adviser, warned in 2017 that assumption by regulators around the world that it was safe to use pesticides at industrial scales across landscapes was false.

The chemical pollution planetary boundary is the fifth of nine that scientists say have been crossed, with the others being global heating, the destruction of wild habitats, loss of biodiversity and excessive nitrogen and phosphorus pollution.

Michigan Shooter

“LOL I’m not mad at you. You have to learn not to get caught.”

WaPo: (pay wall)

Parents of Mich. school-shooting suspect in custody as police investigate possible accomplice
The pair, who were located after a tip, were found hiding in a commercial building, police said.

The fugitive parents of a 15-year-old boy accused of fatally shooting four classmates at a Michigan high school were taken into custody overnight, after they were found hiding in a commercial building in Detroit, police said in a news conference early Saturday.

Jennifer and James Crumbley were located after a tip from the local community, and were taken into custody unarmed and “without incident,” Detroit police chief James White said. It came after an extensive search for the pair involving K-9 units, local law enforcement and the U.S. Marshals Service.

They each face four counts of involuntary manslaughter, after being criminally charged in an extraordinarily rare move to hold parents accountable when a minor uses their weapon in a school shooting.

The pair “did not break in” to the building, but “were aided,” White said, adding that police were investigating one other person that may have assisted the couple.

He thanked the community, saying “it was a tip that led us to this location,” and that officers responded “in a matter of minutes,” arriving on scene at 10.30 p.m. local time on Friday.

Chief Deputy Mike McCabe, from the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office, said the arrest had happened after “a 911 call from a business owner that observed the suspect vehicle in his parking lot on Bellevue near Jefferson in the city of Detroit.”

“A female was observed near the car by the business owner. When he called 911 she fled on foot,” he added in an emailed statement.

White told reporters that police had found “video of one of the two fugitives entering the building,” and that police had quickly “set up a perimeter” at the location.

When asked about the pair’s emotional state as they were taken into custody, White said they were “very distressed” and that one of them left the scene with their head bowed.

Detroit police said that the Crumbleys were turned over to the Oakland County Sheriff’s department who were on the scene and would be transported to a jail in Oakland County, Michigan. Oakland police said the couple could be arraigned after 9 a.m. Saturday.

Attorneys for the Crumbleys had earlier said the couple left town the night of the shooting “for their own safety,” adding that they would return to be arraigned.

However, White told reporters on Saturday: “This isn’t indicative of turning themselves in, hiding in a warehouse.”

Four students aged between 14-17 were killed in the shooting, which took place Nov. 30 and appears to be the deadliest episode of on-campus violence in the United States in more than 18 months. Seven others were wounded.

Community vigils have been held to honor the victims: Tate Myre, 16, Madisyn Baldwin, 17, Hana St. Juliana, 14 and Justin Shilling, 17.

The suspect, Ethan Crumbley, faces a slew of charges as an adult — with one count of terrorism causing death, four counts of first-degree murder, seven counts of assault with intent to murder and 12 counts of possession of a firearm.

- snip -

The morning of the fatal shooting both parents were summoned to a meeting by school administrators after a teacher found a troubling note in Ethan’s desk, McDonald said. It contained a drawing of a semiautomatic handgun pointing at the words “The thoughts won’t stop. Help me.”

The note included a drawing of a bullet with the words “blood everywhere.” There was also a drawing of a bloody figure with two gunshot wounds, McDonald said, and another drawing of a laughing emoji.

Ethan altered the note, McDonald said, scratching out the most disturbing parts of it by the time the meeting with his parents began shortly after 10 a.m. on Tuesday Nov. 30. McDonald said the teen brought his backpack to the counselor’s office and noted that at no point did his parents ask about the recently purchased gun. McDonald said neither the Crumbleys nor school officials searched the teen’s backpack.

- more -

Let me offer my heartiest congratulations to a "conservative" SCOTUS, the GOP, and every dog-ass member of Congress who's ever taken one fucking dime in blood-soaked NRA money - the dream vision of America they've been striving for these many years is finally in full flower.

BTW - "You have to learn not to get caught" has to be the hallmark phrase of this fucked up era we're living in right now.

By The Way

It's not unreasonable to conclude that a significant number of people who voted for Glenn Youngkin are people who buy into the whole thing about how elections are rigged, and you can't trust the people who count the votes, and there's rampant voter fraud goin' on, and blah blah blah.

So let's ask them if they can be really sure their guy won.

And now that their guy is in the executive mansion, will they go along with him if he says something like, "We got lucky this time, but maybe we should think about suspending elections until we can be really really really sure we're able to do it right" ?

We just might be so terribly fucked.

About That Anthony Kennedy Thing

This whole mess just gets worse.

Josh Marshall, TPM, cites an email he got from a former federal public corruption prosecutor …:

I am deeply concerned that the Kennedy retirement will put the rule of law and our democratic institutions at graver risk than ever before. The President of the United States is the subject of a serious federal criminal investigation into (1) whether he conspired with a foreign adversary to help him win a narrow electoral college victory; and (2) whether he has obstructed that very investigation by, among things, firing the FBI director in charge of the investigation. The President will now be able to choose the person who, in a very real sense, may be the ultimate arbiter of whether or not he and others are ever held accountable.

Consider that the Supreme Court may be called upon to decide, for example, whether the President can pardon himself or others to protect himself, whether a sitting President can be indicted, whether a sitting President can be compelled to testify before a federal grand jury, whether the appointment of the Special Counsel somehow violated the Appointments Clause (as some conservatives absurdly assert), and whether a President can ever obstruct justice. Even beyond the Mueller investigation, the Supreme Court may be called upon to decide whether the President’s acceptance of significant foreign funds through his businesses violates the Emoluments Clause. We have no idea how Justice Kennedy would have ruled on these questions (he hasn’t exactly distinguished himself in the last two days). But we have no doubt how a Trump appointee will. Never before has the selection of a Supreme Court nominee been so thoroughly compromised by the President’s profound personal interest in appointing a judge the President can count on to protect the President. This is DEFCON 1 for the rule of law in this country.

Democrats in the Senate seem to have missed this point, or are too feeble to effectively prosecute the basic conflict of interest case. Instead, they have fallen back on the “McConnell rule” as a justification to delay a vote. Make no mistake, the treatment of Judge Garland and the theft of President Obama’s nomination power was an outrage and a terrible precedent. But Democrats should not endorse it. They should not let McConnell’s mendacity become the norm. It should stand on its own in history as the flagrant abuse of power that it was. In any event, Democrats have a much stronger case to make: no vote should be taken until after the Special Counsel has submitted a report to Congress, or closed the investigation of the President. A President under federal criminal investigation for stealing an election should not be able to nominate the person who may decide his fate. There will be a cloud over the legitimacy of this nomination unless and until the cloud of the Mueller investigation has been lifted.


Wondering why Trey Gowdy and Jim Jordan (et al) are trying so hard to turn up the heat - trying get Mueller to wrap it up right now, &/or branded as the bad guy?

Then there's this too - Say Hello to Your Boy. A Special Guy.

The Times has a fascinating article tonight on the Trump White House’s courtship of Justice Anthony Kennedy, building a relationship and rapport to make Kennedy comfortable retiring on Trump’s watch and ahead of the 2018 midterm election. One particular detail grabbed my attention: Justice Kennedy’s son Justin was the global head of real estate capital markets at Deutsche Bank and a key lifeline of capital to President Donald Trump.

Here’s how the Times tells it …

But they had a connection, one Mr. Trump was quick to note in the moments after his first address to Congress in February 2017. As he made his way out of the chamber, Mr. Trump paused to chat with the justice.

“Say hello to your boy,” Mr. Trump said. “Special guy.”

Mr. Trump was apparently referring to Justice Kennedy’s son, Justin. The younger Mr. Kennedy spent more than a decade at Deutsche Bank, eventually rising to become the bank’s global head of real estate capital markets, and he worked closely with Mr. Trump when he was a real estate developer, according to two people with knowledge of his role.

During Mr. Kennedy’s tenure, Deutsche Bank became Mr. Trump’s most important lender, dispensing well over $1 billion in loans to him for the renovation and construction of skyscrapers in New York and Chicago at a time other mainstream banks were wary of doing business with him because of his troubled business history.

As many of you will remember, Deutsche Bank isn’t just any bank. As I noted in the first post I wrote about Trump’s ties to Russia and Vladimir Putin back on July 23rd, 2016, by the mid-90s, every major US bank had blackballed Donald Trump. as the Times put it in 2016, “Several bankers on Wall Street say they are simply not willing to take on what they almost uniformly referred to as ‘Donald risk.'” None would do business with him. With one big exception: Deutsche Bank.

So it may not be quite as sinister as I'm prone to think it is, but we're constantly learning about shit going on that Cult45 needs to hide, and that justifies a pretty high level of cynicism, if not outright paranoia.

The New Economy

...which isn't new at all - this shit's been going on for 40 years.

Axios:

Very few Americans have enjoyed steadily rising pay beyond inflation over the last couple of decades, a shift from prior years in which the working and middle classes enjoyed broad-based wage gains as the economy expanded.

Why it matters: Now, executives of big U.S. companies suggest that the days of most people getting a pay raise are over, and that they also plan to reduce their work forces further.

Quick take: This was rare, candid and bracing talk from executives atop corporate America, made at a conference Thursday at the Dallas Fed. The message is that Americans should stop waiting for across-the-board pay hikes coinciding with higher corporate profit; to cash in, workers will need to shift to higher-skilled jobs that command more income.

Troy Taylor, CEO of the Coke franchise for Florida, said he is currently adding employees with the idea of later reducing the staff over time "as we invest in automation." Those being hired: technically-skilled people. "It's highly technical just being a driver," he said.
The moderator asked the panel whether there would be broad-based wage gains again. "It's just not going to happen," Taylor said. The gains would go mostly to technically-skilled employees, he said. As for a general raise? "Absolutely not in my business," he said.
John Stephens, chief financial officer at AT&T, said 20% of the company's employees are call-center workers. He said he doesn't need that many. In addition, he added, "I don't need that many guys to install coaxial cables."

Because of the changes coming, AT&T is pushing employees to take nano-degree programs to prepare them for other jobs — either at AT&T or elsewhere.

Well And Truly Fucked

Wanna know how fucked up this joint is?  How well and truly fucked we are?

WaPo, Travis Anders:

The Florida House of Representatives was in session on Tuesday considering several issues. These included a motion to debate a bill banning the sale of assault weapons in the aftermath of the mass shooting that killed 17 people last week at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., and a resolution declaring pornography a public health risk.

The House chose not to consider the gun-control bill.

It later passed the resolution claiming that porn is dangerous.

And this, from the Tamba Bay Times, Jeffrey Solocheck:

With the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High shooting still looming large, its students in the Capitol to lobby for gun controls, the Florida House overwhelmingly passed a measure Wednesday its sponsor said aimed at bringing "light" to the schools.

The bill (HB 839) would require all public schools to post the state motto, "In God We Trust," in a "conspicuous place."

What Was That, Anyway?

Raw Story

President Donald Trump’s White House was caught completely unprepared for Saturday’s false alarm about a missile attack on Hawaii, said Politico.

The news about the potential attack “sent White House aides scrambling” as they frantically called federal agencies trying to find out what to do and how to respond, raising serious questions about their preparedness for an actual attack — nearly a year into Trump’s presidency.

“President Donald Trump’s Cabinet has yet to test formal plans for how to respond to a domestic missile attack, according to a senior administration official,” wrote Politico’s Eliana Johnson. “John Kelly, while serving as Secretary of Homeland Security through last July, planned to conduct the exercise. But he left his post to become White House chief of staff before it was conducted, and acting secretary Elaine Duke never carried it out.”
The last I heard, it took 38 minutes before Hawaiian officials got their shit together enough to go public and withdraw the warning.

38 minutes.

I get the feeling there was a buncha guys hiding in the basement waiting and checking their watches, until finally one guy says, "I didn't hear a boom - I think there woulda been a boom by now - anybody hear a boom? Anybody?"

So this is where we are now. We have a government run by assholes who apparently think it's OK to make everybody live at the broken end of the bottle all the fucking time.

Working poor - don't get too comfortable with that Medicaid. You're kids are expensive, and we've got better people to spend that money on.

Middle class - don't bitch to us about conditions and wages - we let you work here and pay you just enough to keep you from getting together and coming to our gated communities to fuck us all up.

That false alarm in Hawaii could be real next time - you'll need to trade in your Social Security and Medicare to pay even more for a military that you're required to venerate, but will never ever be used in any way that benefits anyone but multinational rentiers.

What do you mean you don't like it? This is what you voted for, dumbass - it's not like nobody told you this is what we intended to do all along.

Today's Tweet

We are so fucked.

Sadly, the Roy Moore pedophilia accusations have successfully distracted from Roy Moore being a batshit lying homophobic Constitution-hating misogynist fake-Christian racist.

— John Fugelsang (@JohnFugelsang) December 10, 2017

 

45* Fading Away

It's a tough gig. And I promise I'm not just sitting around taking shots, but General, don't you guys have - you know - helicopters and stuff?

The people who know something about disaster planning know there's no such thing as normal.

And they know that a good Hurricane Response and Recovery Plan can survive anything except an actual hurricane.

One of the reasons they know that one really important concept comes partly from the truly shitty lessons they had to learn on the fly after Mt St Helens blew up in 1980.

They had a good long run-up; they spent weeks working out all the little details; they had National Guard troopers ready to roll with all the gear and goodies they could imagine.

Then the mountain covered the area with a cubic kilometer of dirt and rocks and vegetation and critter parts, plus the first installments of almost a million tons of ash. Suddenly all the maps are wrong, and nobody knows where anything is or how to get there even if they did.

So I'm not counseling patience in the face of people suffering and dying. This thing has been a clusterfuck of the highest order; there's no excuse for it; and if the guy in charge is worth a shit, he stands up and he takes the heat.

But we don't have that guy in charge.

Now, I hope I'm just being a little paranoid here, but I've been wondering for a while - is 45* really the president?

I have a bad sick feeling that he heads for the golf resort every weekend because he's being told to stay out of the way.

Today's Fuckery

Charlie Pierce, Esquire:

Manchester NH -- The entire Charlatans Cotillion that took place on the campus of St. Anselm’s College on Tuesday ended with a barefaced obvious lie from a barefaced obvious liar, which is entirely in keeping with the hearing held here by the Presidential Advisory Committee on Election Integrity, a body that is nearly as nauseating as it is ridiculous.

While the hearing was going on, the Campaign Legal Center released a copy of an internal Heritage Foundation email that it had obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. It was addressed to Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. The name of the sender was blacked out, but the content of the email took the committee’s entire threadbare claim to any legitimacy at all and fed bloody gobbets of that claim to the wolverines.
- snip -

This, of course, is the commission led by vice chairman Kris Kobach, the Secretary of State of Kansas, a guy who’s based his entire political career on knuckling immigrants and inventing tales of voter fraud, even as he keeps getting swatted upside his head in various courts. The commission is larded with people like Hans von Spakovsky and J. Christian Adams and Ken Blackwell, all of whom have been enthusiastic pitchmen for the voter-fraud mythology ever since they slimed into the public eye. What we got on Tuesday was a visit to a fantastical world so detached from actual reality that the Hubble couldn’t pick it up, a universe of non-fact and ideological incest so round and complete that it was like wandering into something from Gulliver's Travels.

It's obvious to anybody carrying around a living thinking brain in his skull that the Voter Fraud thing is an attempt to suppress Dem votes by dog-whistling the message to the rubes that POC have to be pushed back into the shadows, so the noble white man can retain his rightful place defending the honor of the womenfolk and - goddamit I get tired of this shit.

Also obvious: the play right now is for the Repubs in congress to stall as long as they possibly can, in the hope that enough Dem voters can be fucked outa their franchise by Kris Kobach, while the state-level Repubs continue wiring the districts under the protection of a SCOTUS that seems to be going along with it all.

Think Progress:

In a victory for Republicans, all the Republican members of the Supreme Court joined a pair of orders handed down Tuesday, staying a lower court decision which struck down two Republican-drawn districts. All four of the Court’s Democrats would have denied the stay.

Tuesday evening’s orders are the latest development in a long, winding challenge to Texas’ gerrymandered maps. You can read a summary of the many twists and turns in this case, as well as the legal issues before the Supreme Court, here.

The crux of the case is that, last month, a three-judge panel of federal judges held that two Texas congressional districts were illegally drawn — the first because it was intentionally drawn to dilute Hispanic votes, the second because it was drawn with too much reliance on race.

And the theft of Garland's seat on the court comes into sharper focus.

Where The Fuck Are We?

Colbert's question - Have we come to the point where colluding with a foreign power in an attempt to effect the outcome of our elections is a Left vs Right thing?

It's of some import to remember that while 45*'s approvals are in the mid- to high 30s overall, for people self-identifying as Republican, that approval number is still in the mid- to high 80s.

We can cheer and feel hopeful as more "rock-ribbed establishment" Repubs bail on the party and squawk about it, but 45*'s core constituency (as low-life and bottom-of-the-barrel as we know them to be) will likely stay with him for as long as they see him as the guy who went up there to Washington and showed all them buttheads a thing or two.

Because: The point of the exercise for an awful lot of "conservatives" is simply to make liberals mad enough to cry. There's almost literally nothing else to it for some of these mooks.

Corollary: If their guy does something that makes you mad or scared or whatever, then you're a liberal, and nothing you say matters because nothing you say can be the truth because you're a liberal, and liberals are always wrong, and we win again. All this winning!

But the real kicker is that we can't go on trying to see any of this thru our filter of the Presumption of Regularity.

45*'s hardcore supporters aren't really the ones who put him there, but they're convinced they did exactly that, so they're the ones who have to be convinced he has to go. And we can't sway people who are Fact-Hostile to the point where they've become immune to reason. We have to fight the mechanisms that propagate that hostility - and I don't know how to do that.

"Turbo-Fucked" is a pretty apt descriptor for what we are right now.

Goin' Back

The Atlantic:

Recently, 43 disabled protesters were arrested outside of Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell's office, and the clips went viral on social media. Since then, activists have kept up the pressure on the Republican health bill with similar actions across the country. For this short documentary, The Atlantic traveled to the heart of the disability rights movement in the San Francisco Bay Area to learn why some people with disabilities fear the Republican health plan. Mary Lou Breslin of the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund says cuts to Medicaid could ultimately cost 3 million people with disabilities their freedom, and erode "40 years of hard won gains by the disability rights movement."

This documentary was produced as a project for the USC Center for Health Journalism's California Fellowship.

Taking an axe to Medicaid will prob'ly not leave all of these folks without some kind of coverage - it will just make sure that the Rent-Seekers and Profit-Takers will collect even more tax dollars than they're getting now.

The GOP is using that reliable scare-word, "Socialism", so they can change Medicaid to something that's more lucrative for their buddies and their in-laws.  Which equates to an effort to morph the thing into "Socializing Cost in order to generate Private Profit".

It's weird because the guys who're always bitching about the incompetence and inefficiency of Da Gubmint are the ones who're taking one of the very few federal programs that is actually cost-effective, and making it grossly inefficient by trying to shoehorn it into a business model based almost solely on an ideological belief - which obviously doesn't work for such things - which is why we hit on the idea of Medicaid in the first fuckin' place.

We've tried this All-Things-Privatized before. The whole world has tried this before - it was called Monarchy (aka: Daddy State - in one form or another).

240 years ago, some smart guys figured out that that was a pretty fucked up way to do things if the point of the exercise is to live your life without having to pay rent on the air you breathe, and the water you drink, and the dirt you grow your own food in.

And yet, for reasons passing understanding, the rubes who're always yelling "American Exceptionalism" are the ones enthusiastically buying into the plan to take us back to Government-By-Class-Based-Economic-System, to which the US was founded to be the fucking exception.

AHCA

75% of us are on record saying we don't want ACA repealed. We want it fixed and strengthened.

What's the big bugbear according to Business "conservatives"?  Uncertainty.  

You really can't make a case that AHCA does anything at all to make Americans feel more certain. Especially the way the Repubs are going about it.

But, hey at least they've given us a chance to see it before they jam it up our collective ass. 

The AHCA was released today - in all it's 142 page glory.

I haven't slogged all the way thru it yet, but so far, it's a little like the old bit about watching the original Star Trek - everybody knows the young guy you don't recognize (usually a Red Shirt) will be dead before the opening credits.  And 4 or 5 minutes after that first commercial, you'll know the gist of the story because there's only a handful of themes (kinda like this little blog here), and it always works out just fine for the Executive Elite (not at all like this little blog).  Which frees you up so you can go do something worthwhile - like picking fly shit outa your pepper shaker.

Anyway, so it is with practically everything these GOP boneheads come up with.  They put a nice face on it, but it's pretty much always about taking tax dollars from you and me, and putting them into the pockets of their in-laws, their lobby pals, and their campaign contributors.

It's money laundering. Why do you think the GOP in congress is doing nothing about 45*?  When it comes to washing money, he's one of the best - they're too busy taking lessons from this jagoff.

If you wanna know about a problem here in USAmerica Inc, look to who benefits from the continuing existence of the problem, or who profits from "solving" it. 

If you work it just right, you can get a 2-fer, like The War On Drugs and Coin-Operated Prisons.

AHCA is off to a good start in that regard. The Insurers get to go back to the bad ol' days of a Pick-n-Choose customer base, plus they get to siphon bunches of dollars out of the Treasury by playing in the High Risk Pool.  And that's just the shit I can see from here.

The rich get richer and the rest of us get fucked with our pants on.

Down We Go

CNN:

The two agencies that protect the country's coast lines and its residents, NOAA and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) are still without leaders -- positions that must be appointed by President Donald Trump and confirmed by the Senate.

"That should scare the hell out of everybody," retired US Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré told CNN. "These positions help save lives."

Honoré knows all too well the value that leadership plays during a crisis, as he commanded Joint Task Force Katrina. He coordinated military relief efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

--and--

But according to Honoré, things could be anything but orderly. "These operations will not function as they should with temporary people doing the jobs." 

"Just look back to Hurricane Katrina to see how important leadership was. If someone is slow in making decisions it can be costly -- imagine having no one at all," Honoré said, referring to the criticism and eventual resignation of then-FEMA director Mike Brown over the bungled response after Katrina hit.

We'll see how it shakes out, of course, but is anybody really expecting good things? This is another play to Privatize (I think - prob'y), as per the usual shit the GOP is always trying to pull:

1) Fuck up the system of Federal Response and Aid to natural disasters

2) Point at it and say, "Oh look, that whole FEMA thing's fucked up"

3) Have your son-in-law's buddies step in and collect a shit-ton of tax dollars for doing something it would've cost a third of a shit-ton of tax dollars to get it handled by somebody who actually knows what the fuck they're doing.

How sure are we that those buddies of the son-in-law aren't working for a shell company?

- with a mailing address in Panama?

- that hides the fact that somebody's raking in nice fat profits from the misery of average Americans?

And how sure are we that those tax dollars aren't being funneled to a bunch Russian Oligarchs?

This is not governance - this is a fucking robbery.

Oops

"Well, you know - he's gettin' on in years..." Wink wink. Nudge nudge. Say no more.

NO.

This is what's normal now. Just going thru the motions by rote, with no regard for the substance underpinning the symbolism.

Pathetically hilarious.
Did he forget? Dementia?
Unpatriotic?
Or was he expecting the Russian anthem?#TuesdayThoughts#TuesdayMotivation pic.twitter.com/eOcdYS0r7P

— BrooklynDad_Defiant! (@mmpadellan) April 18, 2017

But it won't matter. The Right Radicals will rationalize it as another well placed jab at the Libtards. Anything that makes The Left crazy or mad enough to cry is a good thing. Anything.

For a large contingent of GOP Wingnuts - mostly driving that party now - there is no longer any clear delineation between their leader and the country he's leading. And that's a very bad sign.

This shit just gets worse.

What A Yahoo

Meet the newest member of 45*'s National Security Council.

Gov Perry's in charge of the US Nuclear Arsenal, and now he gets to help make the decisions on what we'll be using them for.

Yeah - that fuckin' guy.

It Gets Worse

The Daddy State approacheth.

“A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention with the possible exceptions of handguns and Tequila.” 

--Mitch Ratcliffe

Quincy Larson at Free Code Camp:

Soon every mistake you’ve ever made online will not only be available to your internet service provider (ISP) — it will be available to any corporation or foreign government who wants to see those mistakes.

Thanks to last week’s US Senate decision (update March 28: and today’s House decision), ISPs can sell your entire web browsing history to literally anyone without your permission. The only rules that prevented this are all being repealed, and won’t be reinstated any time soon (it would take an act of congress).

ISPs can also sell any information they want from your online activity and mobile app usage — financial information, medical information, your children’s information, your social security number — even the contents of your emails.

They can even sell your geolocation information. That’s right, ISPs can take your exact physical location from minute to minute and sell it to a third party.

You might be wondering: who benefits from repealing these protections? Other than those four monopoly ISPs that control America’s “last mile” of internet cables and cell towers?

No one. No one else benefits in any way. Our privacy — and our nation’s security — have been diminished, just so a few mega-corporations can make a little extra cash.

I'll take exception to that last bit - about how nobody benefits in any way.  My basic skepticism (ie: my cynical - tho' perfectly justifiable - paranoia) is waving flags like it's laundry day at Redneck Central Headquarters.

This looks a whole lot like standard Political Duplicity - privacy snoops disguised as profiteers to give the illusion of separation from Officialdom, so nobody in government is accountable to voters for the inevitable fuckery.

And the bonus is that the ISP cartel can peddle our information to Da Gubmint (aka: the Lunker Customer everybody's always gunnin' for, so you know it'll happen), which will confer upon us the supreme privilege of paying them to fuck us over - again.

Cronies get richer

Congress Critters get re-elected

We get fucked

'Twas ever thus with the Radical Right, and ever thus 'twill be.

Anyway, privacy is pretty much the whole banana in a free state, and there seems to an even fuckier fuckery afoot.

Roe v Wade is based on the concept of a Consitutional Right To Privacy. If this ISP thing stands up to challenge in the courts, kiss that one good-bye. And then it's really open season on everybody's rights across the board.

Now, I realize I'm pretty close to the Slippery Slope Fallacy, but these things happen step-by-step, so I'm just trying to follow it out to the logical extreme. And it's not like we haven't seen some of this shit already. The bullshit SCOTUS ruling on Voting Rights comes to mind.

So how's that Gorsuch appointment looking now?