It's Called "Micro-evolution"

 

It seems that humans are evolving at rates faster than ever before. Two examples: wisdom teeth and arteries.  Wisdom teeth may be on the way out. An extra artery is becoming more common.

It seems that more and more adults have an extra artery in their arms as humans continue to evolve at a rapid rate, a study has found.

Scientists in Australia believe that humans are undergoing a micro-evolution in which evolutionary changes can be observed over a short period of time.

The artery forms while a baby is in the womb and is the main vessel that supplies blood to the forearm and hand, but it usually disappears during gestation and is replaced by the radial and ulnar arteries. However, some people retain all three.

The investigation by Dr Teghan Lucas of Flinders University in Adelaide, along with Professor Maciej Henneberg and Dr Jaliya Kumaratilake of the University of Adelaide, showed a “significant increase” in the prevalence of the median artery since the late 19th Century.

“The prevalence was around 10 per cent in people born in the mid-1880s compared to 30 per cent in those born in the late 20th Century, so that’s a significant increase in a fairly short period of time, when it comes to evolution,” she said.

“But increasing numbers of cases retain it, so a person can have all three arteries,” the authors wrote. “People born 80 years from now will all carry a median artery if the trend continues.”Dr Lucas said the study demonstrates that humans are evolving at a faster rate than at any point in the past 250 years.

The median artery is not the only example of ongoing human evolution. Many babies are being born without wisdom teeth. Dr Lucas said faces are becoming a lot shorter, with smaller jaws meaning there is less room for teeth.

It's suspected that wisdom teeth are on the way out because we don't gnaw on hard foods much any longer. Our diets have changed. We eat soft foods.

As for the extra artery, if nothing else the medicos say it'll be a welcome source of a spare blood vessel for bypass and other surgeries.

Then there's the possibility that an ability to evolve relatively quickly might just come in handy as our environment evolves rapidly. Probably not fast enough though.  

Pelosi Sets Up Constitutional "Nut Patrol" or "Nancy Bells the Cat"

 

Well, this will have Donald J. Trump drooling into his pillow tonight. House Democrats have unveiled a draft bill to monitor a president's capacity and, if necessary, remove him/her from office.

The commission would be permanent, applying to future administrations, but it's a clear shot at President Trump, whose treatments for the coronavirus have raised questions about their effects on his mental acuity.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), a sharp critic of the president, has fueled those questions in the the days since Trump returned to the White House after three nights in the hospital, floating the idea that Trump's drug regimen — which includes a steroid linked to mood swings — might be affecting his decisionmaking.

"The president is, shall we say, in an altered state right now," the Speaker told Bloomberg News on Thursday.

The Democrats' legislation invokes the 25th Amendment, which empowers Congress to create "a body" which, working with the vice president, can remove a president deemed "unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office."

Help Yourself If You Want 'Em

I rely on a load of websites for information on climate change and related issues. I thought it might be helpful to share some of these bookmarks for anyone interested in learning more about our world and our changing climate.

World Meteorological Organization

American Meteorological Society

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

World Health Organization

National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA)

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)

OECD Environment

UK Met Office

UK Met Office, Hadley Centre

Environment and Climate Change Canada

European Union Environment Agency

UN Food and Agriculture Organization

The Lancet, Planetary Health

Yale Environment 360

Yale Climate Connections

Grantham Research Institute

World Wildlife Fund

World Resources Institute

Nature Climate Change

Grist

350.org

Inside Climate News 

Environmental News Network

Climate Central

Union of Concerned Scientists

Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research

International Military Council on Climate and Security

Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI)

IMCCS - Climate and Security in the Indo-Asia Pacific

The Center for Climate and Security

Future Earth

I think these links provide a fairly comprehensive list of sources of current information on climate change and associated issues. I hope they're of some use to you.

A State of Exhaustion or Just The New Normal?

I was talking with a friend the other day about the latest antics of the Mango Mussolini and what to expect on November 3 when Americans go to the polls.

She's convinced that Trump is going down - badly. His base, she said, is now pared down to the core of what had been Trump's base. Why, the endless lies, the incompetence, the failures? Nope. She figures that Trump is just too exhausting. He's like a kid with a bad case of ADD, frantic and a constant drain on his supporters' (in fact everyone's) energy. It's non-stop and it's exhausting.

It can seem that a state of exhaustion has become our new normal. Whether it's Covid or climate change, a looming and potentially deep recession, soaring inequality or any of the many other social, economic, environmental and political ills, there's only so much people can bear.

August was the hottest August ever. September was the hottest September ever. The past five years have been the hottest ever. The repetition can seem promiscuous. It begs the question "now what?" but there's never an answer. We fall into a gutter of creeping normalcy. Every month is just a continuation of a new normal and a growing sense of inevitability and helplessness. The telling of it becomes more offensive than the fact of it. Climate exhaustion is setting in.

Covid appears to be back, with a vengeance. We seem to be entering the second wave that is standard to respiratory viruses in pandemics past. It's the second wave that's the killer, especially when it arrives in the autumn as we begin gathering indoors and celebrate our main family gatherings.

There are those reluctant to return to a regime of face masks, social-distancing and repeated handwashing. There's a reluctance to accept measures that impede our ability to do as we please, where we please, when we please - a reluctance that morphs into resentment. "Yes, yes, sure, sure, the public, always the public, but what about me, what about what I want, what about my rights?" Covid exhaustion is setting in.

And in the States and beyond, Trump exhaustion is setting in. It was a genuine freak show for a while. "Look what the silly bugger has done now." Only there's nothing novel to it anymore. We're now forced to look on the madness of a terminally narcissistic president, no longer capable of steering the ship of state. He is exhausting.

Maybe exhaustion is our new normal as our discontent yields to resignation. I hope not.

Name that Pox !!!

It's all the rage. Name the Pox, whatever it was that took Donald J. Trump to Walter Reed last year. Not the Covid thing. Way before that. November 16, 2019.

Despite the fact that his health status is of intense concern to the country, he and his administration are not only not being forthcoming with details about his condition; they are doing everything they can to cloak them in mystery.

And according to a surprising new NBC News report concerning a strange visit he made to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center last year, Trump was so worried that personnel there might reveal information about his health that he even insisted on nondisclosure agreements.

It’s important to understand that under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), it’s already illegal to disclose anyone’s medical information without their consent. But Trump was apparently so concerned that someone might reveal something about his visit that he decided the law was not enough, and he needed to threaten everyone with being sued. 

It sounds like the Donald could be poxed up. Maybe that's why Melania sleeps in a separate bed. Maybe that's why he's become about as rational as Al Capone in his final months. Maybe we'll never know.

Militia Thugs Plotted to Kidnap Michigan Governor and Put Her on Trial

 

Six men associated with a right-wing militia have been charged with conspiring to kidnap Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, and put her on trial for treason.

The six men had talked about taking Ms. Whitmer, a Democrat, hostage since at least the summer, according to a criminal complaint filed in federal court and unsealed on Thursday. They met over the summer for firearms training and combat drills and tried to make explosives; they also gathered several times to discuss the mission, including in the basement of a shop in Michigan that was accessible only through a “trap door” under a rug, the F.B.I. said.

The men had surveilled Ms. Whitmer’s vacation home in August and September, and they indicated that they wanted to take her hostage before the election in November, Richard J. Trask II, an F.B.I. special agent, said in the criminal complaint. In July, one of the men said the group should take Ms. Whitmer hostage and move her to a “secure location” in Wisconsin for a “trial,” Mr. Trask said.

...The F.B.I. believed the men were planning to buy explosives this week for their plot. Court records indicated that at least five of the men had been arrested on Wednesday in Ypsilanti, Mich.; it was not immediately clear if the sixth man had been taken into the custody.

The F.B.I. said it had learned about the group by intercepting encrypted messages and because it had undercover agents and confidential informants working with the group. The six men were charged with conspiracy to commit kidnapping, which can carry a life sentence.

...The authorities said that Mr. Fox and Mr. Croft had decided to “unite others” to “take violent action” against state governments that they thought were violating the Constitution and that Mr. Fox was the one to initiate contact with a Michigan-based militia group. The F.B.I. said he had talked of storming the Michigan statehouse with 200 men and trying Ms. Whitmer for treason.

 

Trump's role.

In April, thousands of people gathered at the State Capitol to protest the executive orders she issued shutting down most of the state to help stop the spread of the virus that has now infected more than 145,000 Michiganders and killed more than 7,000.

 President Trump openly encouraged such protests, tweeting, “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!”

The protests featured some signs with swastikas, Confederate flags and language that advocated violence against Ms. Whitmer, including one man who carried a doll with brown hair hanging from a noose. Many in the crowd carried semiautomatic weapons, leading some Democrats in the Legislature to call for a ban on guns in the Capitol.

 

The New York Daily News added a few more details.

“Grab the f---ing Governor. Just grab the b---h,” one of the key suspects, Adam Fox, said in a recorded phone conversation on July 27, according to an affidavit obtained by the Daily News.

“Several members talked about murdering ‘tyrants’ or ‘taking’ a sitting governor,” the FBI wrote in the affidavit. “The group decided they needed to increase their numbers and encouraged each other to talk to their neighbors and spread their message.”

The FBI investigation began in March, when a militia member who later became a confidential informant reported being “concerned about the group’s plans to target and kill police officers," according to the agency.

Investigators also learned that the group had been meeting in remote areas of Michigan to engage in firearms training and tactical drill and once considered sending a bomb to the governor.

As for that bloated orange shitgibbon, Trump, he deserves to be impeached for inciting sedition. 

Sedition is overt conduct, such as speech and organization, that tends toward insurrection against the established order. Sedition often includes subversion of a constitution and incitement of discontent toward, or resistance against, established authority. Sedition may include any commotion, though not aimed at direct and open violence against the laws. Seditious words in writing are seditious libel.  

I don't think there's any question that Trump's incitement of America's violent radical right rises to "high crimes and misdemeanours." The House should bring articles of impeachment now, before the election, lest Trump lose and incite some insurgency or insurrection.

Michigan governor Whitman has also said that Trump is "complicit" in this plot. 

Sad But Possibly True. Will Trump Take the US Out of the Paris Climate Pact on November 4th?

 

It's hard to believe but there's a real possibility that November could become one of the most important months in human history, perhaps the most important.

There's an emerging consensus among the climate science types that, unless Trump and the Congressional Republicans are dislodged in the November 3 elections, it's game over for any chance the world has to avert catastrophic climate breakdown. In other words, this election isn't just about America. It may decide the fate of the world.

The window of opportunity is closing. The world doesn't have four years to waste with Trump in the White House. The man is a menace to life on Earth and nothing less than that. He is like a small tumour that must be removed before it can doom its host.

From E&E News, November, 2019:

"God help us all," said David Hayes, executive director of the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center at the New York University School of Law.

"A second term would be a disaster in general," said Dominick DellaSala, president and chief scientist of the Geos Institute.

"It will not be good," said Andrew Light, who served as a senior adviser on climate change under former President Obama.

Their grim outlook reflects broad concern about the intersection of Trump's reelection and the planetary battle against climate change. A big reason is time. A second Trump term — ending in January 2025 — would overlap with a shrinking window to avert the worst impacts of global warming, including loss of sea ice, more intense heat waves and accelerated sea-level rise.

From The National Observer, yesterday: 

President Donald Trump, who is seeking a second term, has questioned the science of climate change. His administration has revived pipelines that were halted under former president Barack Obama, supported the use of emissions-heavy coal, dismantled 70 environmental rules (and counting), opened up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling and pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement.

“It'll start getting cooler. You just watch,” Trump said in September, a statement that clashes with the scientific consensus.

A Trump victory would mean another four years in which the U.S. makes no progress on climate, Kathryn Harrison (UBC) said.

“If Trump wins ... I think it would be disastrous for the planet, for people’s health.”

From The New Republic, July, 2019: 

The Paris agreement, as currently drafted, is not enough to stave off the worst of global warming, but it was intended to be strengthened periodically—and since Trump announced his intention to pull the U.S. out of the agreement in June 2017, the leadership that was so crucial to the initial negotiations has been absent. The next deadline for more aggressive climate targets arrives at the end of 2020. Thus, Light said, “2020 has got to be an inflection point for the world.”

Michael Mann, a distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State, feels likewise. “Another four years of Trump would probably render futile any efforts to limit planetary warming to 1.5 [degrees Celsius], which is necessary to avert ever-more catastrophic climate-change impacts,” he said in an email. Others think the effort to limit warming to 1.5 degrees is futile no matter the outcome of the election. “[It’s] hard to say four more years of Trump makes impossible something that seems unlikely either way,” Shindell said.

From The Guardian, 27 July, 2020:

The lifetime of the Paris agreement, signed in a wave of optimism in 2015, has seen the five hottest years ever recorded on Earth, unprecedented wildfires torching towns from California to Australia, record heatwaves baking Europe and India and temperatures briefly bursting beyond 100F (38C) in the Arctic.

These sorts of impacts could be a mere appetizer, scientists warn, given they have been fueled by levels of global heating that are on track to triple, or worse, by the end of the century without drastic remedial action. The faltering global effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions and head off further calamity hinges, in significant part, on whether the US decides to re-enter the fray.

“The choice of Biden or Trump in the White House is huge, not just for the US but for the world generally to deal with climate change,” said [Todd] Stern (the US negotiator at Paris). “If Biden wins, November 4 is a blip, like a bad dream is over. If Trump wins, he seals the deal. The US becomes a non-player and the goals of Paris become very, very difficult. Without the US in the long term, they certainly aren’t realistic.”

The US government in practice abandoned any concern over the climate crisis some time ago, with the Trump administration so far rolling back more than 100 environmental protections, including an Obama-era plan to curb emissions from coal-fired power plants, limits on pollution emitted from cars and trucks and even energy efficiency standards for lightbulbs. In an often chaotic presidency, Trump’s position on climate change has been unusually consistent – American fossil fuel production must be bolstered, restrictive climate regulations must be scrapped.

Unswayed by growing alarm among Americans over the climate crisis, Trump is taking this same message to the election. “Biden wants to massively re-regulate the energy economy, rejoin the Paris climate accord, which would kill our energy totally, you would have to close 25% of your businesses and kill oil and gas development,” the president said this month, without citing evidence, as he announced another rollback, this time of environmental assessments of pipelines, highways and other infrastructure.

It's simple. Americans go to the polls on November 3. The following day, November 4, the US withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement comes into effect. If Trump wins and America withdraws, other countries will follow in Trump's footsteps.

Maybe the consensus could magically be rebuilt. Maybe in 2024 the next American president can undo the damage. Maybe, maybe not. 

 

 

 

 

 

The Damage We're Inflicting on Our Young

You might understand climate breakdown. It might cause you a measure of anxiety. But what you're experiencing is on a different plane to how young people are experiencing this threat.

The Lancet, Planetary Health has published a call to action to help young people who have had a peek at the terrible hand we are dealing to them.

Global youth-led climate strikes, federal lawsuits demanding government action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and advocacy by young climate activists such as Greta Thunberg and Isra Hirsi show that youth are anxious about their collective futures. In 2019, in March alone, an estimated 1·6 million school-aged protestors in 125 countries demanded action be taken to combat climate change. Direct effects of the climate crisis on youth are already apparent: the global concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide is the highest it has been in 3 million years, sea levels are continuously rising, and global temperatures are the hottest ever recorded. To compensate, the lifetime carbon dioxide emissions (or carbon budget) of the average young person today will need to be eight times less than that of their grandparents to restrict global warming to 1·5°C, as the limit set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2018.

7

Youth might be more likely than adults to experience ill-effects associated with climate anxiety. They are at a crucial point in their physical and psychological development, when enhanced vulnerability to the effects of stress and everyday anxiety elevate their risk of developing depression, anxiety, and substance use disorders.

8

 Additionally, chronic stress during youth might result in permanent alterations in brain structure and the emergence of psychopathologies later in life.

8

 As such, the stress of a climate crisis during a crucial developmental period, coupled with an increased likelihood of encountering repeated stressors related to climate change throughout life,

2

 will conceivably increase the incidence of mental illness over the life course. However, few attempts have been made to investigate the short-term and long-term effects of climate anxiety on the mental health of youth.

Mental health professionals, policy makers, and advocates need robust evidence to mitigate the effects of climate anxiety and stress on the short-term and long-term mental health of young people. There has never been such a large population of young people globally, nor do we anticipate any reversal of the impacts of climate change. Young people are agents of change, our future leaders, and most likely to succeed in improving planetary health. Thus, making investments to improve their mental health and wellbeing will provide dividends now and in the future.

It's the least we can do. 

 

 

 

Our Indifference is Killing the World

Will we, for that matter can we, turn this around in time? The editorial in the latest Lancet, Planetary Health, focuses on the collapsing populations of wildlife, killed off by humans' voracious appetite for ever more - land, resources, everything.

Global wildlife populations are in freefall. This is the conclusion of a recent WWF report. That might sound like dramatic language but how else should you describe a global situation in which animal populations (mammals, birds, fish, amphibians, and reptiles) have fallen on average by 68% since 1970? To bring this down to the personal, that means all but the youngest among us were born into a world much richer in natural life than the one we now inhabit, and if we don't change course that will be everybody's legacy. This report is one of the latest in a raft of work showing just how severely human activities are impacting life on earth. A common economic refrain is to argue that economic development initially degrades the environment, but then after a time further development begins to reduce degradation—an idea described by the environmental Kuznets curve. Extending this notion, it would be tempting to think that if we wait long enough, wealth creation will resolve most environmental problems. Unfortunately that downturn in environmental damages simply is not happening at any meaningful scale and, as a new UN report shows, the world has failed to meet a single one of the Aichi biodiversity targets that were intended to encourage reductions in biodiversity loss between 2010 and 2020.

Perhaps it is a symptom of increasingly urban lifestyles and a reduction in the proportion of people with a direct and tangible dependence on the natural world that more people are not personally outraged and worried by the decline of nature.

...Beyond a degree of personal insulation from nature, there is also a pervading narrative of progress; that things are changing for the better and that the benefits will gradually spread across the globe. In short, keep doing what we are doing, and all will be well. This narrative, as with the Kuznets curve, suits rich and powerful interests, which gain most from the status quo and have the most to lose from changing it. These examples are illustrative of a wider range of habits of living and thinking which tend to undervalue the importance of nature and separate the majority of people from experiencing ecological loss.

Fortunately, scientific evidence of ecological crisis is beginning to sway public opinion towards an understanding of how bad things are and therefore an openness to how things might need to change. With depressing predictability though the scientific consensus is not going unchallenged and extinction denialism is the latest in a litany of science denial agendas circulating on the internet and social media platforms. Intended to muddy the waters on what is known about, to name but a few, climate change, pandemic risk, vaccine safety, and now biodiversity decline, these agendas aim to win hearts and minds in favour of the status quo. It can seem tempting to discount these claims as ridiculous and ill-founded but they have the potential to be deeply damaging to the political progress needed to make meaningful changes, in this case against ecological loss.

How many of us connect with nature in any meaningful way and, no, a foray to Sobey's doesn't count. In metropolitan areas, where so many of us live, it's not always easy to access wilderness. In my area all you need is a 4X4 or enduro motorcycle and you can head up old logging and forestry roads or remnants of roads and, before long, you're in wilderness. I haven't done that in over a year. Age, I suppose. And sleeping on the ground isn't as much fun as it once was either. The difference between wilderness and something like a provincial or national park is whose territory it is. Where I liked to go the territory belongs to bears, cougars, wolves and all manner of plantlife and birds. A human is a stranger, an intruder which is why bear spray and maybe a rifle with a fast sight are a good idea. 

Maybe our kids or our grandchildren will revive the connection between humans and the wild. Maybe "personal devices" will become boring, declasse, and it will become fashionable to again venture up those precarious roads into the mountains, to shake hands, albeit briefly, with nature.

Isn't "Self Harm" Enough Reason to Remove a President

 

For decades, Donald Trump and the entire Trump Organization have had one asset - the Trump brand. The most unlikely president plastered the name, Trump, on buildings, on airplanes, in casinos, a supposed university, books, wine bottles, steaks, and golf courses. Even his kids are branded. 

Winning (in a way) the presidency four years ago has not been good for the brand.  He's been overexposed, subjected to the sort of scrutiny he avoided for so many years as he established and groomed Trump the Myth.

Serving as president takes a toll on even decent human beings such as Barack Obama.

Trump has also aged but it's hard to tell without removing the makeup and the engineered hairdo. Still there are occasional signs of physical decline as when he has to hold a drinking glass or water bottle with two hands or becomes visibly unsteady negotiating a ramp off a stage. One can only imagine what might emerge if he accidentally tripped into a swimming pool. 

Trump is also showing mental decline, especially when he blurts out "orange" when he means "origin" or can't pronounce "Yosemite." I suspect that's why DJT prefers to go off script on rambling, disjointed monologues. At least he doesn't have to read from a teleprompter. He can stick to monosyllabic words. He can communicate on a Grade 3 level. That's his comfort zone.

Being president is hard. Most get tested. Just in the past couple of decades presidents have had to deal with 9/11, multiple unwinnable wars in the Middle East/South Asia, a truly Great Recession, the rise of hegemonic rivals, an avowedly subversive Congress - it never ends.

What must Trump have thought as the New Year ushered in 2020, the year of his re-election? He had the Gullibillies (wrongly) and the extremely wealthy (rightly) convinced of his brilliance in managing the economy. His base remained devoted notwithstanding his outrages such as separating infants from their mothers and consigning kids to chain link dog kennels with concrete floors. Even that he got away with. He must have felt invincible.

Then, in January, word got out of a strange new virus emanating from the city of Wuhan, China. It was the sort of problem that might throw shade on Trump's "Master of the Universe" charade. It might damage, even derail the economy, the Holy Grail of electoral fortunes.

Trump had some difficult choices to make. He had to choose between his personal interests and the wellbeing of the American people. He decided to go with his gut instincts and those instincts are always focused on what best suits Donald Trump. He would bluff his way through it as he had so often in the past. 

The rest is history, sordid to be sure, but on the record. Each lie succumbed to facts but the base didn't care and, if the base still backed Trump, Congressional Republicans wouldn't dare challenge him at the risk of being primaried out of their own jobs.

You can find the clips of Trump's litany of lies just about everywhere. They make great fodder for Democrat campaign ads. More than enough lies to bury a normal human being but perhaps not the Grifter in Chief.

Trump needed a distraction, something to divert the Gullibillies. He got it when four cops put George Floyd to death on an asphalt street in Minneapolis. For a racist, race-baiting president that was "manna from Heaven." He was going to defend the base against these uppity blacks and their radical leftie supporters. He would not let them endanger white supremacy. He would send in the troops.

To those who harbour the basest instincts - racism, xenophobia, homophobia, anti-Semitism, misogyny, all the "us versus them" fears and anger - the Black Lives Matter protests became a recruiting poster to Trump's tribal America. Lincoln's warning that a house divided against itself cannot stand didn't bother Trump. He saw a means to turn division to his personal advantage. He knew what his base expected - cruelty, violence, ugliness - and he delivered.

Despite his worst efforts, Trump wasn't able to stay ahead of the pandemic. He couldn't escape the numbers. America, that boasted of the best health care system in the world, was beaten by a microorganism smaller than the smallest bacteria - the novel Coronavirus SARS-2, Covid-19. With just four per cent of the global population, the United States logged twenty per cent of the global pandemic deaths. 

All Trump's reassuring lies failed, one by one. True to form he tried to shift the blame. When asked by a reporter Trump replied, "I take no responsibility whatsoever" for the deaths of his people by the tens of thousands. No Responsibility Whatsoever. Instead he claimed that he and his administration should be praised for their efforts in fighting Covid-19. As the deaths mounted, Trump heaped ever more praise on himself.

The American people got to know Dr. Anthony Fauci, the CDC's infectious disease expert. For a while, Fauci was a fixture at the regular White House pandemic briefings. Unlike Trump's stooges within the White House and Congress, Fauci was honest, a sore thumb who stood out from the Cabal of Contrivance. 

It became Fauci versus Trump in many minds, a contest Trump could not hope to win. And so Fauci was sidelined, replaced by the suitably sycophantic Dr. Deborah Birx. Before long she too reached her point of exasperation with Trump's lies and, like Fauci, was sidelined.

As the CDC and its counterparts across the G-7 nations warned - from the outset - the end of summer has brought the dreaded "second wave." During the killer Spanish Flu of 1918-1919, it was the second wave that claimed the bulk of the victims. We were warned it could happen again.

Trump, however, had an election to fight. He utterly failed to prepare the U.S. for a second wave, perhaps imagining he could will it away. Trump kept up the bravado, staging a succession of rallies at which there was neither social distancing nor face masks.

At one big rally, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, former presidential aspirant, Herman Cain, attended representing Black Voices for Trump.  Within a week Cain was diagnosed with Covid-19 and admitted to hospital. A month after the Tulsa rally, Herman Cain was in the ground. His death presaged the arrival of Covid-19 in the White House itself.

The Tulsa rally was a watershed event. Prior to the rally, six members of Trump's advance team tested positive. At the rally, attendees were required to sign a waiver releasing the Trump campaign from liability should they contract the virus. A few Secret Service agents assigned to the rally contracted the virus forcing Trump's then campaign manager, Brad Parscale, who had traveled to Tulsa with the agents to self-quarantine.

The Presidential Pandemic continued to claim victims at a gradual pace until last month when it was announced that Trump aide and confidante, Hope Hix, had tested positive.  It's believed she may have infected Donald and Melania Trump while aboard Air Force One. The rest is history. Since then the Covid-19 virus has cascaded among the staff and visitors to the White House. Trump's White House has been transformed into a Plague Den. 

Trump staged two receptions for Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, at which there were few masks and no social distancing. A number of attendees tested positive including the president of Barrett's alma mater, Notre Dame, a couple of Republican senators, even the Admiral of the US Coast Guard. That Coast Guard admiral then attended a session of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That sent the entire Joint Chiefs into precautionary, self-isolation. Good thing no foreign power is looking to poke America in the eye with a sharp stick.

Most recently Trump's utterly dishonest and nasty press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, contracted the virus followed by two and then three of her staff. Now Trump's own Prince of Darkness, Stephen Miller, is positive. The White House is said to be deserted, the West Wing personnel either under treatment or working from home. The whole place is in need of a thorough disinfecting.

And amidst the carnage what is Trump's response? He's again downplaying the virus, claiming it's no worse than the flu and telling the American people to just get over it. As this Kabuki Theatre grinds on, Trump's poll numbers are sinking. Yet he can't seem to help himself. He seems incapable of staunching the damage. It's self-harm and Congressional Republicans are getting very, very nervous.

Is it possible that Trump is just looking for an out? Has he had enough? Is he throwing in the towel? 

Donald Trump is beyond erratic. Yesterday he announced that negotiations for another round of Covid relief funding would be suspended until after the election. The reaction was swift and negative. Today, less than 24 hours later, Trump has reinstated the negotiations. This is a guy in pinball mode.

He's unpredictable, unreliable, erratic. Even Team Trump can't pretend this guy is competent.  He should have been ousted months ago but Pence was never up to that, not with Congress full of GOP bootlickers. 

Perhaps the Republicans, including Veep Pence, know there's no use removing Trump now. They've left it too late. The GOP is in terminal Thelma and Louise mode. At this point they're just along for the ride.

Fauci, "It Could Have Been Prevented"

 

I think it's a safe bet that Anthony Fauci won't be on Donald Trump's Christmas card list this year.

Fauci, commenting on the recent wave of Covid-19 infections in the Trump White House, said "it could have been prevented."

During a virtual discussion hosted by American University’s Kennedy Political Union, Fauci was asked for his advice to students whose relatives have been reluctant to listen to public health experts. “That’s a tough one,” he acknowledged before suggesting that they “take a look at what happened this week at the White House” if they need concrete evidence that the virus is not a hoax.

“It’s an unfortunate situation when you see something like that, because that could have been prevented,” Fauci said.

Though he did not reference Trump directly, Fauci also said the pandemic had demonstrated the risks of “divisiveness and rancor and politicization” when it comes to communicating crucial public health messages.

 

Trump's 'Prince of Darkness' has Covid-19

Stephen Miller is the latest Trump aide to have contracted Covid-19.  Miller is the guy who makes Trump look like your nice uncle. His frau, Katie Waldman, the press secretary to Mike Pence, had a bout of Covid-19 in early May.

What'll It Be - Door "A", Door "B", or Door "C"?

Among climate journalists, author and New Yorker columnist, Elizabeth Kolbert, stands out as one of the best. Her latest piece, "Three Scenarios for the Future of Climate Change" is a measured and important read.

Kolbert's message is "choose your poison." There are three general outcomes to choose from and, like it or not, not choosing is a choice.

She laments that we didn't heed James Hansen's warnings when he appeared under oath before Congress in 1988. If we had, the best options might not have slipped through our fingers. Instead we doubled down on the fossil energy economy.

Instead, during that [three decade] interval, some two hundred billion metric tons of carbon have been spewed into the atmosphere. (This is roughly as much CO2 as had been emitted from the start of the Industrial Revolution to that point.) Meanwhile, trillions of dollars have been sunk into coal-burning power plants, oil pipelines, gas pipelines, liquid-natural-gas export terminals, and a host of other fossil-fuel projects that, in a saner world, would never have been constructed. And global temperatures, as everyone can by now attest—though some still refuse to acknowledge—have continued to rise, to the point where the sweltering summer of 1988 no longer stands out as particularly hot. The nineteen-nineties were, on average, warmer than the eighties, the aughts hotter than the nineties, and the past decade hotter still. Each of the past five years has ranked among the warmest on record.

Kolbert writes that the future for a millennium, perhaps more, will be fixed by the decisions and actions we take by the time today's toddlers become adults. Let that sink in. 

What’s technically referred to as “dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system” and colloquially known as “catastrophe” is warming so dramatic that it’s apt to obliterate whole nations (such as the Marshall Islands and the Maldives) and destroy entire ecosystems (such as coral reefs). A host of scientific studies suggest that a temperature increase of two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) or more would qualify. A great many studies suggest that warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) would be enough to do the trick. At current emissions rates, the 1.5-degree threshold will be crossed in about a decade. As Drew Shindell, an atmospheric scientist at Duke University, told Science, “No longer can we say the window for action will close soon—we’re here now.”

The author's fantasy solution is what she calls the "Blue Skies" option where all the nations set aside their considerable differences and humanity pulls together. Kolbert points to a study by the IEA that America could produce twice as much energy as it needs from offshore wind farms. But would the emerging economies and the Third World go for it?

Bending the emissions curve globally is an even more formidable challenge. Leaders of many developing nations point out the injustice in asking their countries to forgo carbon-based fuels just because richer nations have already blown through the world’s carbon budget. India, which will soon overtake China as the world’s most populous country, gets three-quarters of its electricity from coal, and that proportion has, at least until recently, been growing. 

Her second scenario sees emissions continue to grow to 2050 which would be devastating to the poorest and weakest nations and their peoples and would force the affluent nations into a sort of managed-dystopia.

In this scenario, by 2050 a temperature increase of two degrees Celsius would, for all intents and purposes, be locked in. Developed nations would have constructed storm-surge barriers to keep out the sea and erected border walls to keep out refugees. They would also have started to air-condition the outdoors. Developing nations, meanwhile, would have been left to fend for themselves. To a certain extent, all of this is already happening. A study published in 2019 by Noah Diffenbaugh and Marshall Burke, both of Stanford University, found that in the past fifty years warming had slowed economic growth in those parts of the world which have emitted the least carbon, perhaps by as much as twenty-five per cent. “Not only have poor countries not shared in the full benefits of energy consumption, but many have already been made poorer (in relative terms) by the energy  consumption of wealthy countries,” the two wrote. Qatar, one of the world’s hottest countries and also one of the richest, already cools its soccer stadiums and its outdoor malls.

 The third, and worst, scenario is a world so destabilized by climate breakdown that it is plunged into global warfare.

This, too, already seems, to a certain extent, to be taking place. A significant body of research suggests that the Syrian civil war was caused, at least in part, by a drought that pushed more than a million people out of their villages. The war, which has claimed some four hundred thousand lives, has, in the course of nearly a decade of bloodshed, involved the U.S., Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkey. Future droughts in the Middle East are apt to be even more severe and prolonged, as are droughts in other volatile regions, like the Horn of Africa. It doesn’t seem that it would take too many more Syrian-scale conflicts to destabilize large swaths of the globe. At the very least, climate change “will endanger the stability of the international political order and the global trading networks upon which American prosperity rests,” Michael Klare, an expert on resource competition and a professor at Hampshire College, has written. “As conditions deteriorate, the United States could face an even more perilous outcome: conflict among the great powers themselves.”

Climate wars already exist and they're spreading. That's inevitable if only due to our broken hydrological cycle distorting fresh water access in already water-stressed regions. Factor in magnifiers such as overpopulation, drought, food insecurity and famine and you have a formula for wars of subsistence that, in an era of hegemonic transition and rivalry, can easily draw major powers into conflict.

In his 2013 book, Cosmopolitan War, Cecile Fabre, (All Souls College, Oxford) sets "violation of subsistence rights" as a legitimate casus belli.

Violations of subsistence rights (to the material resources we need to lead a minimally decent life) provide victims with a just cause for war, partly because severe mass poverty undermines collective interests in collective self-determination, but also on the deeper grounds that threats to one's life, of which starvation is one, warrant defensive killing. The claim holds not merely when the rights violations take the form of a wrongful action, but also (more controversially) when they take the form of a wrongful omission...  The right to wage a subsistence war is held not merely by states whose populations suffer unjustly from severe poverty and which are not themselves responsible for that predicament, but also (controversially) by responsible states as well as by victims themselves. The chapter ends with an account of the grounds upon which individual affluent members of affluent communities who are derelict in their duty to the very poor are legitimate targets in war. It argues that some of those members are not protected by the principle of non-combatant immunity. 

Concluding her essay, Elizabeth Kolbert, doesn't see much reason for optimism.

 My experience reporting on climate change, which now spans almost twenty years, has convinced me that the most extreme outcomes are, unfortunately, among the most likely. As the warnings have grown more dire and the consequences of warming more obvious, emissions have only increased that much faster. Until the coronavirus hit, they were tracking the highest of the so-called pathways studied by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. If this continues, the I.P.C.C. projects that, by the end of this century, global temperatures will have risen by almost eight degrees Fahrenheit.  Let’s just say that at that point no amount of outdoor air-conditioning will be sufficient.

A few years ago, I interviewed James Hansen for a video project that I was working on. Hansen retired from NASA in 2013, but he has continued to speak out about climate change—and to get arrested protesting projects like the Keystone XL pipeline. He was blunt about the world’s failure. When I asked him if he had a message for young people, he said, “The simple thing is I’m sorry we’re leaving such a fucking mess.”

As I wrote earlier we have to make a choice and one of the options is infinitely better than the others. Our current approach - ignoring the hard questions - is a choice and one we will regret. 

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Will Gaslighting Carry the Day on November 3rd? In Post-Truth America, Does It Matter?

 

When it comes to gaslighting there's no master of this dark art like El Presidente, Donald Trump, and it could be his best hope for winning re-election.

Gaslighting, in which someone denies the reality that other people are experiencing—has become a greater threat than ever. Throughout a year of tragedy and strife, including the coronavirus pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests, we’ve seen leaders and other public figures force people to doubt their experiences and thoughts. These manipulators don’t just ignore data and evidence; they deny their very existence.

How do we navigate what philosopher Kathleen Higgins describes as the post-truth era, where there is no longer even an expectation that politicians or pundits will be honest? This issue, we hope, will serve in some measure as an antidote to the poison of gaslighting and other forms of mendacity. Never has it been more important to understand the science of deception and what can be done to combat it.

Human perception is inherently subjective. 

We may believe that we are thinking in an open-minded way, but most people latch onto ideas that reinforce their own preconceived beliefs—even if doing so prevents them from literally seeing new solutions. Such ingrained implicit bias has served us well in the course of evolution, but in the modern era it more often than not leads us astray.

The Malignancy of Social Media 

Nowhere are our failings at objective reasoning more exploitable than on social media. Facebook and other platforms enable the spread of misinformation that sows social unrest—in particular, meme culture has been shown to propagate lies and increase polarization. We users are the unwitting vectors of this threat. (Watch our short documentary on the making of a deepfake video at https://bit.ly/3itSiek for a close look into another way that technology enables deceit.)

Malicious foreign agents invade those same platforms, and hackers could go further and tamper with vulnerable voting systems in this country, endangering the very processes of democracy. Civic life suffers because of these malevolent forces. Turmoil, anxiety and a sense that society is in jeopardy make people susceptible to conspiracy theories and the kind of polarization where winning an argument is more important than understanding opponents’ viewpoints.

Although the human mind comes equipped with built-in obstacles to objective thinking, it doesn’t mean we have to give in to ignorance and bias. Douglas T. Kenrick and his co-authors offer simple interventions that can make us more open-minded, scientific thinkers. In fact, scientists can look to philosophy to aid in some self-examination about how much, in the hands of subjective creatures, the tools of science can ultimately discover.

The common theme in many of these seemingly abysmal examinations of the state of our societal affairs is a heartening bright spot. By just being aware of how we perceive information, we can protect ourselves from disinformation and gaslighting. We don’t have to agree, but at least we’ll be anchored in what is real and what is not.

Where the author goes wrong is in overlooking the fact that many Trump supporters, his base in particular, don't mind gaslighting when it comes from their leader. They don't care how many lies he tells. Their bond is tribal. 

There is an abundance of evidence that Trump has failed to "make America great again," at least for the Gullibillies. He's certainly done well by the already well-heeled but, again, that doesn't matter to the faithful. Their bond is tribal.

Tribalism requires little more than a nurtured grievance and an identifiable 'enemy,' real or imagined. Pretty much any straw man will do. It's a "you're either with us or you're against us" paradigm that casts anyone not like-minded as an enemy or at least unreliable, untrustworthy.

In 2017 the New York Magazine asked whether democracy could survive tribalism.

Over the past couple of decades in America, the enduring, complicated divides of ideology, geography, party, class, religion, and race have mutated into something deeper, simpler to map, and therefore much more ominous. I don’t just mean the rise of political polarization (although that’s how it often expresses itself), nor the rise of political violence (the domestic terrorism of the late 1960s and ’70s was far worse), nor even this country’s ancient black-white racial conflict (though its potency endures).

I mean a new and compounding combination of all these differences into two coherent tribes, eerily balanced in political power, fighting not just to advance their own side but to provoke, condemn, and defeat the other.

I mean two tribes whose mutual incomprehension and loathing can drown out their love of country, each of whom scans current events almost entirely to see if they advance not so much their country’s interests but their own. I mean two tribes where one contains most racial minorities and the other is disproportionately white; where one tribe lives on the coasts and in the cities and the other is scattered across a rural and exurban expanse; where one tribe holds on to traditional faith and the other is increasingly contemptuous of religion altogether; where one is viscerally nationalist and the other’s outlook is increasingly global; where each dominates a major political party; and, most dangerously, where both are growing in intensity as they move further apart.

The project of American democracy — to live beyond such tribal identities, to construct a society based on the individual, to see ourselves as citizens of a people’s republic, to place religion off-limits, and even in recent years to embrace a multiracial and post-religious society — was always an extremely precarious endeavor. It rested, from the beginning, on an 18th-century hope that deep divides can be bridged by a culture of compromise, and that emotion can be defeated by reason. It failed once, spectacularly, in the most brutal civil war any Western democracy has experienced in modern times. And here we are, in an equally tribal era, with a deeply divisive president who is suddenly scrambling Washington’s political alignments, about to find out if we can prevent it from failing again.

Tribalism, it’s always worth remembering, is not one aspect of human experience. It’s the default human experience. It comes more naturally to us than any other way of life.

Healthy tribalism endures in civil society in benign and overlapping ways. We find a sense of belonging, of unconditional pride, in our neighborhood and community; in our ethnic and social identities and their rituals; among our fellow enthusiasts. There are hip-hop and country-music tribes; bros; nerds; Wasps; Dead Heads and Packers fans; Facebook groups. (Yes, technology upends some tribes and enables new ones.) And then, most critically, there is the Über-tribe that constitutes the nation-state, a megatribe that unites a country around shared national rituals, symbols, music, history, mythology, and events, that forms the core unit of belonging that makes a national democracy possible.

...Tribalism only destabilizes a democracy when it calcifies into something bigger and more intense than our smaller, multiple loyalties; when it rivals our attachment to the nation as a whole; and when it turns rival tribes into enemies. And the most significant fact about American tribalism today is that all three of these characteristics now apply to our political parties, corrupting and even threatening our system of government.

... There is no neutral presidency here, and so when a rank tribalist wins the office and governs almost entirely in the interests of the hardest core of his base, half the country understandably feels as if it were under siege. Our two-party, winner-take-all system only works when both parties are trying to appeal to the same constituencies on a variety of issues.

Our undemocratic electoral structure exacerbates things. Donald Trump won 46 percent of the vote, attracting 3 million fewer voters than his opponent, but secured 56 percent of the Electoral College. Republicans won 44 percent of the vote in the Senate seats up for reelection last year, but 65 percent of the seats. To have one tribe dominate another is one thing; to have the tribe that gained fewer votes govern the rest - and be the head of state - is testing political stability.

...One of the great attractions of tribalism is that you don’t actually have to think very much. All you need to know on any given subject is which side you’re on. You pick up signals from everyone around you, you slowly winnow your acquaintances to those who will reinforce your worldview, a tribal leader calls the shots, and everything slips into place.