The drought is tightening it's grip on the Southwest

The first straw: That was where Lake Mead water  

for Las Vegas used to come from

Two straws (water intakes) are left

The AP writes:

A massive drought-starved reservoir on the Colorado River has become so depleted that Las Vegas now is pumping water from deeper within Lake Mead where other states downstream don’t have access.

The Southern Nevada Water Authority announced this week that its Low Lake Level Pumping Station is operational, and released photos of the uppermost intake visible at 1,050 feet (320 meters) above sea level at the lake behind Hoover Dam.

“While this emphasizes the seriousness of the drought conditions, we have been preparing for this for more than a decade,” said Bronson Mack, water authority spokesman. The low-level intake allows Las Vegas “to maintain access to its primary water supply in Lake Mead, even if water levels continue to decline due to ongoing drought and climate change conditions,” he said.

The move to begin using what had been seen as an in-case-we-need-it hedge against taps running dry comes as water managers in several states that rely on the Colorado River take new steps to conserve water amid what has become perpetual drought. 

“We don’t have enough water supplies right now to meet normal demand. The water is not there,” Metropolitan Water District of Southern California spokesperson Rebecca Kimitch said this week. The agency told some 6 million people in sprawling Los Angeles, Ventura and San Bernardino counties to cut their outdoor watering to one day a week, effective June 1, or face stiff fines.  

The surface level of another massive Colorado River reservoir, Lake Powell, dipped below a critical threshold in March — raising concerns about whether Glen Canyon Dam can continue generating power for some 5 million customers across the U.S. West.

Lake Mead and Lake Powell upstream are the largest human-made reservoirs in the U.S., part of a system that provides water to more than 40 million people, tribes, agriculture and industry in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming and across the southern border in Mexico.  

In Arizona, falling Colorado River levels have prompted an emphasis on conservation and raised fears of reduced water deliveries to desert areas that include metro Phoenix, Tucson, tribal lands and farms.

At Lake Mead, the new pumps are fed by an intake drilled nearer to the bottom of the lake and completed in 2020 to ensure the ability to continue to draw water for Las Vegas, its casinos, suburbs and 2.4 million residents and 40 million tourists per year.

The “third straw” draws drinking water at 895 feet (272.8 meters) above sea level — below a point at which water would not be released downstream from Hoover Dam.  

“Without the third intake, Southern Nevada would be shutting its doors,” said Pat Mulroy, former longtime chief of the Las Vegas-based water authority, who is now a consultant. “That’s pretty obvious, since the first straw is out of the water.”

Once the lakes are drained, most of the American Southwest will revert to dust. The underground aquafers are dropping, so that source of water is going away too. 

Maybe some coastal areas can survive if they can build enough desalination plants soon enough. In California, starting construction usually requires a lead time of about 12-15 years for environmental reviews, bureaucratic red tape and bumbling, and lawsuits. The lawsuits are filed by NIMBYS, eco-freaks who oppose everything and all other malcontents with a complaint(s) and money to pursue it in court. Congress has been broken and gridlocked by the neo-fascist Republicans, so it is not able to help. Given that state of affairs, it’s not clear if there is enough time to avoid major catastrophe. 

We live in interesting times. 

The power of toxic infotainment wars

The New York Time writes:

Tucker Carlson had a problem.

After years in the cable wilderness, he had made a triumphant return to prime time. And his new show, “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” had leapfrogged to the heart of Fox News’s evening lineup just months after Donald J. Trump’s upset victory shattered the boundaries of conventional politics.

Newly planted in Fox’s newly vacated 8 p.m. time slot — previously held by the disgraced star Bill O’Reilly — Mr. Carlson told friends and co-workers that he needed to find a way to reach the Trump faithful, but without imitating Mr. Hannity. He didn’t want to get sucked into apologizing for Mr. Trump every day, he told one colleague, because the fickle, undisciplined new president would constantly need apologizing for.

The solution would not just propel Mr. Carlson toward the summit of cable news. It would ultimately thrust him to the forefront of the nationalist forces reshaping American conservatism. “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” the host and his producers decided, would embrace Trumpism, not Mr. Trump. The show would grasp the emotional core of Mr. Trump’s allure — white panic over the country’s changing ethnic composition — while keeping a carefully measured distance from the president himself. For years, as his television career sputtered, Mr. Carlson had adopted increasingly catastrophic views of immigration and the country’s shifting demographics. Now, as Mr. Trump took unvarnished nativism from the right-wing fringe to the Oval Office, Mr. Carlson made it the centerpiece of “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” 

He began seeking out stories, one friend observed, that were sometimes “really weird” and often inaccurate but tapped into viewers’ fears of a trampled-on American culture. He inveighed against Macy’s new line of hijabs, and devoted a segment to “Gypsy” refugees in a Pennsylvania town who Mr. Carlson said had left “streets covered — pardon us now, but it’s true — with human feces.” (It was not true: Local officials ultimately documented a single instance of a refugee child who had pulled down his pants outside because he couldn’t make it back home in time.) He cataloged, and magnified, overlooked instances of what he cast as growing discrimination against white Americans. Stories about the threat of immigration had long been a feature of Fox. But Mr. Carlson dialed up the intensity, expertly weaving tropes borrowed from the far right into a narrative that would come to define “Tucker Carlson Tonight”: falling birthrates among the native-born, big-city crime, lax immigration policies designed to forcibly alter American society — all engineered or encouraged by a “ruling class” desperate to censor public discussion of its own failures.  

Mr. Carlson’s darkening arc foreshadowed a transformation beginning to sweep through Fox itself. As Mr. Trump fought to build a border wall and keep Muslims out of the United States, Fox’s journalists and right-wing commentators would clash repeatedly over what many longtime staff members saw as a creeping invasion of the news divisions by allies and functionaries of the higher-rated, pro-Trump prime-time hosts. Mr. Carlson would be both instigator and beneficiary of Fox’s civil war. He forged a relationship with Lachlan Murdoch, the Murdoch family’s heir apparent, who would become his most public supporter at Fox. And while Mr. Murdoch and Fox executives have often couched their defense of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” as a protection of free inquiry and controversial opinions, the reality is less high-minded. From the beginning, Mr. Carlson’s on-air provocations have been part of a painstaking, data-driven campaign to build and hold Fox’s audience, according to former Fox executives and employees — an experiment that has succeeded wildly in bolstering Mr. Murdoch’s profit machine against the long-term decline in cable news subscriptions.  

The network’s leadership takes a broader view of Fox’s financial and ratings success. A spokeswoman for the network provided the following statement: “Fox News Media has grown through strategic innovation, redirecting investments in journalism to encompass more than 50 percent of the budget while expanding our footprint beyond one legacy linear network to eight thriving platforms. As a result, we’ve doubled our audience, achieved unrivaled results, and have become the destination that more Democrats and independents choose for their news coverage, while our competitors have lost dramatic levels of viewership. We couldn’t be prouder of our entire team, whose commitment to excellence in journalism and opinion has led Fox News Media to all-time ratings records and delivered the best in class to our viewers.”

Here Faux News exemplifies the neo-fascist elite focus on entertainment, power and profit over inconvenient truth, sound reason and service to the public interest. The tactics are clear, deploy irrational emotional manipulation and crackpot reasoning wrapped in thick clouds of deceit, blatant lies and sleazy slanders. 

For Faux, “strategic innovation” is moving toward entertaining propaganda, lies and deceit posing as honest news. It is a winning strategy. 

A final thought. The NYT commented that Carlson refused to comment for the article. That is standard practice for the radical right and lying grifters. The KYMS tactic (keep your mouth shut) is highly effective in not alienating the base while maintaining the shield of plausible deniability.

Preacher: Teachers “grooming” kids should be beheaded on live TV

 After falsely calling LGBTQ-accepting teachers “groomers,” Jason Graber called for their executions

A fundamentalist Christian preacher is calling for LGBTQ-accepting teachers to be shot in the head or beheaded on live television because he believes the conservative lie that they’re “grooming” kids.

New Independent Fundamentalist Baptist preacher Jason Graber of Sure Foundation Baptist Church in Spokane, Washington made the comments last week during a weeknight service. It’s not clear from the video how many people were in the church that night.

Still, for a guy who’s previously called for the execution of gay people, it’s a sign that he’s taking his fundamentalism in an even more extreme direction.

https://twitter.com/hemantmehta/status/1518564439263531008?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1518564439263531008%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fonlysky.media%2Fhemant-mehta%2Fpreacher-teachers-grooming-kids-should-be-beheaded-on-live-tv%2F

… And apparently… states back East, you know, they’re having all kinds of… this grooming stuff going on in schools today…

… Apparently in schools today, they’re literally grooming the kids to… be just ready to be taken advantage of…

… Any teacher that would… show this type of lewd… I mean, basically what I’ve heard is that
they’re… basically, they’re showing pornographic images to children. To young children. Which is against the law—I’m pretty sure it’s… I think it’s a felony—but, you know what? Preachers need to get up and say… well, teachers that do this, they should be put to death. They need to be taken out and shot in the back of the head. Because they’re… they’re pedophiles!

Any teacher that’s gonna show pornographic images to young children, they are a predator! And the reason that they’re doing that is because they want to take advantage of young children…

… And these teachers, they’re showing these pornographic images to these young children, and literally grooming them, those teachers need to have the fear of God put in them. And you know what? That’s what the government is for. In Romans 13, the Bible talks about that the government’s job is to execute judgment with the sword, okay? So maybe… we need to put aside the guns and we need to get the sword back out. And we need to make these executions public. We need to find these teachers that are showing pornographic images and grooming children, we need to find them, try them, get the television out, we need to get FOX News, CNN, every YouTube channel out there, put it on television. We need to show them being publicly beheaded.

That’s what needs to happen to these people. Because you know what? Otherwise our nation is gonna turn into a literal Sodom and Gomorrah.

He went from the claim that teachers are showing pornographic images to kids (which is a lie), to saying they must be pedophiles (a lie), to saying they should be executed with a gun to the head (WTF…), to saying we should publicly behead those teachers on live television (WTF²).

Somewhere in there, he tried to mitigate his violent fever dreams by saying the government ought to do this, not that vigilantes in the congregation should take it upon themselves, but it doesn’t make this any better. The end result is that he wants liberal teachers, including LGBTQ teachers and their allies, to be murdered by someone… because he blindly accepts the right-wing conspiracy theory that teaching tolerance, inclusion, kindness, and non-whitewashed U.S. history amounts to predatory behavior.

How long will it take before someone in that congregation decides he should take the law into his own hands and make Jesus proud?

https://onlysky.media/hemant-mehta/preacher-teachers-grooming-kids-should-be-beheaded-on-live-tv/?__vfz=medium%3Dstandalone_content_recirculation_with_ads

White Replacement Theory and the erosion of democracy

A warning sign on the street

Context

After the ex-president won the 2016 election, with Putin's probably necessary help, theories about what happened started circulating. One prominent early theory held that many people hated Hillary and/or were miffed at economic stagnation. Also in the mix was an argument that rural folk were indignant over arrogant urban elites looking down their noses at rural bumpkins. They believed the hated urban elites disrespected them and their way of life. Another was that low information voters were being deceived and manipulated by divisive partisan echo chambers like Faux News. Other theories postulated growing acceptance of crackpot, divisive conspiracy theories, e.g., Democrats are lizard people, Democrats want to outlaw all guns, make Christianity illegal and then convert Christians to atheists in re-education camps, etc. 

There was some truth in all of those theories. For example, data indicated that some people really did hate the real and/or Republican propaganda version of Hillary*** and would not vote for her, so they voted for no one or for the ex-president. But researchers probing the mystery of 2016, started to identify a different reason as the possible most important source of support for the ex-president. It was a combination of (i) unease among White people, especially Christian men, about their and privileges rights being subordinated to racial and ethnic minorities, and (ii) unease about a perception of America's weakening place in the world. Theis idea came to be called White Replacement Theory or some variant that gets at the concept such as ethnic antagonism. It is discussed in this interview that NPR broadcast in 2021 with an expert, Kathleen Belew. Republican propaganda played on White fear to help the GOP to create unwarranted distrust, unwarranted intolerance, irrational false beliefs in lies, slanders and nonsense, intractable division and polarization, etc.

*** The GOP propaganda version of Hillary included Pizzagate pedophile, Benghazi murderer and email server traitor. Who could ever vote for that horror?

Unhappy White folks

Some of the research

In a 2018 paper, Status threat, not economic hardship, explains the 2016 presidential vote, Researcher Diana Mutz wrote this:

This study evaluates evidence pertaining to popular narratives explaining the American public’s support for Donald J. Trump in the 2016 presidential election. First, using unique representative probability samples of the American public, tracking the same individuals from 2012 to 2016, I examine the “left behind” thesis (that is, the theory that those who lost jobs or experienced stagnant wages due to the loss of manufacturing jobs punished the incumbent party for their economic misfortunes). Second, I consider the possibility that status threat felt by the dwindling proportion of traditionally high-status Americans (i.e., Whites, Christians, and men) as well as by those who perceive America’s global dominance as threatened combined to increase support for the candidate who emphasized reestablishing status hierarchies of the past. Results do not support an interpretation of the election based on pocketbook economic concerns. .... Candidate preferences in 2016 reflected increasing anxiety among high-status groups rather than complaints about past treatment among low-status groups. Both growing domestic racial diversity and globalization contributed to a sense that White Americans are under siege by these engines of change. 

For the first time since Europeans arrived in this country, White Americans are being told that they will soon be a minority race. The declining White share of the national population is unlikely to change white Americans’ status as the most economically well-off racial group, but symbolically, it threatens some Whites’ sense of dominance over social and political priorities. Furthermore, when confronted with evidence of racial progress, whites feel threatened and experience lower levels of self-worth relative to a control group. They also perceive greater anti-White bias as a means of regaining those lost feelings of self-worth.

Some recent posts here have emphasized (for about the 40th time) the nearly complete loyalty shift among Republican politicians and elites from nobler ideals such as respect for democracy, the Constitution and truth to more base impulses, e.g., (i) urges to neo-fascism, (ii) acceptance of harsh rule by a corrupt, cynical strong man and elites, and (iii) heavy reliance on bitterly divisive propaganda-fueled mendacity, slanders and crackpottery. Fear of White replacement appears to be linked to the Republican Party shift away from democracy. A 2020 research paper by Larry Bartels, Ethnic antagonism erodes Republicans’ commitment to democracy, comments:

Growing partisan polarization and democratic “backsliding” in various parts of the world have raised concerns about the attachment of ordinary Americans to democratic institutions and procedures. I find that substantial numbers of Republicans endorse statements contemplating violations of key democratic norms, including respect for the law and for the outcomes of elections and eschewing the use of force in pursuit of political ends. The strongest predictor by far of these antidemocratic attitudes is ethnic antagonism—especially concerns about the political power and claims on government resources of immigrants, African-Americans, and Latinos. The strong tendency of ethnocentric Republicans to countenance violence and lawlessness, even prospectively and hypothetically, underlines the significance of ethnic conflict in contemporary US politics.

Most Republicans in a January 2020 survey agreed that “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” More than 40% agreed that “a time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands.” (In both cases, most of the rest said they were unsure; only one in four or five disagreed.) I use 127 survey items to measure six potential bases of these and other antidemocratic sentiments: partisan affect, enthusiasm for President Trump, political cynicism, economic conservatism, cultural conservatism, and ethnic antagonism. The strongest predictor by far, for the Republican rank-and-file as a whole and for a variety of subgroups defined by education, locale, sex, and political attitudes, is ethnic antagonism—especially concerns about the political power and claims on government resources of immigrants, African-Americans, and Latinos. The corrosive impact of ethnic antagonism on Republicans’ commitment to democracy underlines the significance of ethnic conflict in contemporary US politics. 

The support expressed by many Republicans for violations of a variety of crucial democratic norms is primarily attributable not to partisan affect, enthusiasm for President Trump, political cynicism, economic conservatism, or general cultural conservatism, but to what I have termed ethnic antagonism. 

The single survey item with the highest average correlation with antidemocratic sentiments is not a measure of attitudes toward Trump, but an item inviting respondents to agree that  “discrimination against whites is as big a problem today as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.”

White replacement and illegal immigration already is and will be   

a major focus of Republican propaganda in the 2022 elections

Inflation and this issue will probably be key factors in the Democrats 

losing the House and Senate in 2022, assuming they lose