Monarch Butterflies & Radical Right Governance

Monarch butterflies

The New York Times reports on the state of affairs in the cash-strapped Environmental Protection Agency, which is unlike the cash bloated Department of Defense:

The monarch butterfly is threatened with extinction, but will not come under federal protection because other species are a higher priority, federal officials announced Tuesday. ..... But their numbers have been decimated by climate-change-fueled weather events and pervasive habitat loss in the United States.

“We conducted an intensive, thorough review using a rigorous, transparent science-based process and found that the monarch meets listing criteria under the Endangered Species Act,” Aurelia Skipwith, the director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said in a statement. “However, before we can propose listing, we must focus resources on our higher-priority listing actions.” As part of the decision, monarchs’ status will be reviewed each year by the agency and conservation efforts will continue.

Federal protection would have helped, Dr. Oberhauser said. But officials said Tuesday they do not have the money or resources to protect all the species that need it.

“We have to work within the funding resources that we have,” said Lori Nordstrom, assistant regional director for ecological services for the Fish and Wildlife Service’s Midwest region. (emphasis added)

This is what the leadership of the radical right GOP has been working toward for decades. As we all know, the radical right hates government generally. Agencies like the EPA are especially hated because it sometimes impairs revenues flowing to companies and rich people. Instead of blatantly getting rid of government functions that most Americans approve of, like the EPA, the radical right simply starves the agencies for cash and slowly strangles the function to death. That way the American people do not understand what is going on and the GOP leadership escapes a lot of blame and public blowback.

The radical right operates by heavy reliance on dark free speech to distract, deceive, divide and then betray the American people. Among the GOP leadership, there is great rejoicing over the fate of the monarch butterfly and dozens of other species the EPA does not have the budget to try to protect. Once those species are extinct, there's nothing left for people to get upset about. That is how the radical right operates day to day. Profit first, foremost and only. That's the modern GOP leadership.

A bit of context

1. In December 2017, the GOP passed a tax cut law. No democrat in congress voted for it. Over 80% of the tax cut benefits went to the top ~10% of earners. That new law added about $1 trillion/year to the federal debt. The radical right howls in outrage that due to the debt, the federal government cannot spend money on domestic programs like the EPA, food stamps, etc. Nonetheless, the GOP finds ways to massively deficit spend for rich people and special interests. 

The radical right goal is simple: Starve domestic spending into non-existence, while money gushes up to the rich and powerful, making them richer and more powerful and the rest of us less rich and less powerful.

2. My estimate of the net tax gap (tax that is owed minus what was paid) is that it is running at about $700 billion/year. My estimate is based on extrapolation of detailed tax data analyses from 2001 and 2006, showing that the gap was increasing by $19 billion/year starting from about $290 billion. The IRS disputes that and estimates that the tax gap is 'only' about $400 billion/year. Since the IRS refuses to do another detailed analysis, I'm sticking with my estimate. The IRS knows how to prove me wrong but it doesn't have the guts to do so. That is because the GOP would damage the IRS more than it already has. (the GOP hates the IRS -- taxes are theft)

Independent analysis indicated that for every extra dollar that congress gives the IRS for enforcing tax law, the treasury would get about $4 dollars in extra collected taxes. Every year, the IRS pleads for a bigger budget to shrink the tax gap. Every year the GOP (and to a lesser extent, democrats who have been bought by lobbyists) in congress blocks money to do that. Therefore, every year, tax cheats in America get a gift of about $700 billion from the tax-hating radical right GOP (and some corrupt democrats). The IRS is simply denied the budget it needs to collect taxes from tax cheats.

So, when the radical right GOP leadership screams in outrage about federal debt and too much domestic spending, just ignore it. That's just dark free speech and hypocrisy intended to poison our minds and keep us deceived and thus powerless.

What Biden is in For

The Grim Reaper is grimly reaping, 

and enjoying every moment

Salon writes in an article entitled Mitch McConnell's dark pivot: Wreck the economy — and sabotage Biden's presidency:

Mitch McConnell, however, appears to be moving on to his next mission: kneecapping Joe Biden.

The Senate majority leader is doing what everyone who actually learns from history predicted he would, and deliberately sabotaging the American economy, in a belief that voters will blame the incoming Democratic president for the disaster and not the Republican senators who are actually responsible.

On Tuesday, a bipartisan group of congressional leaders proposed a compromise coronavirus relief bill, worth about $900 billion. The bill is meant to rescue the economy from what is likely to be a disastrous winter, as lockdowns tighten and people stay home in the face of rising cases of COVID-19. It falls far short of the $3 trillion relief package that the Democratic-controlled House passed in May — a bill that was ignored by the Senate — but is substantially better than anything McConnell has proposed. It's also better than nothing, which is what McConnell's actions so far have amounted to.

Unsurprisingly, however, McConnell's reaction to this carefully drafted and dramatically announced bill was to blow a big, fat raspberry, refusing to even look at it.  

"We just don't have time to waste time," McConnell told reporters, even though he has been wasting time since May, pretending he intends to pass a real relief bill while actually focusing the Senate's precious time on cramming as many Trump appointees onto the federal bench as he can.

McConnell is as shameless a liar as Trump, even if he's less theatrical about it. He is clearly in no hurry to pass a stimulus bill and, frankly, is behaving like a man who hopes no bill gets passed at all.

This is what the radical right planned and did to Obama from the moment he won election.[1] The GOP hated his guts and they still hate his guts. The radical right GOP has no interest in compromise. Not one shred of interest. Biden is going to get exactly the same treatment, no compromise, no cooperation and no bipartisan help. None at all. 

Footnote: 

1. Jane Mayer wrote this in 2017 about what Obama faced from the authoritarian radical right GOP:

"The highlight of the Koch summit in 2009 was an uninhibited debate about what conservatives should do next in the face of electoral defeat. As the donors and other guests dined [...] they watched a passionate argument unfold that encapsulated the stark choice ahead. . . . . Cornyn was rated the second most conservative republican in the Senate . . . . But he was also, as one former aide put it "very much a constitutionalist" who believed it was occasionally necessary to compromise in politics.

Poised on the other side of the moderator was the South Caroline Senator Jim DeMint, a conservative provocateur who defined the outermost antiestablishment frings of the republican party . . . . Before his election to congress, DeMint had run as advertising agency in South Carolina. He understood how to sell, and what he was pitching that night was an approach to politics that according to historian Sean Wilenz would have been recognizable to DeMint's forebears from the Palmetto state as akin to the radical nullification of federal power advocated in the 1820s by the slavery defender John C. Calhoun.

. . . . Cornyn spoke in favor of the Republican Party fighting its way back to victory by broadening its appeal to a broader swath of voters, including moderates. . . . . the former aide explained . . . . "He believes in making the party a big tent. You can't win unless you get more votes."

In contrast, DeMint portrayed compromise as surrender. He had little patience for the slow-moving process of constitutional government. He regarded many of his Senate colleagues as timid and self-serving. The federal government posed such a dire threat to the dynamism of the American economy, in his view, that anything less than all-out war on regulations and spending was a cop-out. . . . . Rather than compromising on their principles and working with the new administration, DeMint argued, Republicans needed to take a firm stand against Obama, waging a campaign of massive resistance and obstruction, regardless of the 2008 election outcome.

As the participants continued to cheer him on, in his folksy southern way, DeMint tore into Cornyn over one issue in particular. He accused Cornyn of turning his back on conservative free-market principles and capitulating to the worst kind of big government spending, with his vote earlier that fall in favor of the Treasury Department's massive bailout of failing banks. . . . . In hopes of staving off economic disaster, Bush's Treasury Department begged Congress to approve the massive $700 billion emergency bailout known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP.

Advisers to Obama later acknowledged that he had no idea of what he was up against. He had campaigned as a post-partisan politician who had idealistically taken issue with those who he said "like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states." He insisted, "We are one people," the United States of America. His vision, like his own blended racial and geographic heredity, was one of reconciliation, not division." (emphasis added)

Regarding That Russian Computer Hack: It's a Whopper

A diatom - this has nothing to do with the Russian hack

About a week ago, reports of a Russian hack appeared (discussed here). The Russians hacked both US government agencies and the top level security company FireEye. The scope of the hack is becoming clearer. This one was a whopper. Russian dictator and president for life Putin cynically speculated that rogue Russian patriots must have done it because his government would never do such dastardly deeds. 

Yeah, righ. And I saw a big flock of flying pigs yesterday. Honest. Meanwhile, the president remains rightly focused on subverting the election using a novel crackpot ploy called idiocy. That effort is paying handsome rewards as money flows into the president's pockets.

The New York Times writes:

The scope of a hack engineered by one of Russia’s premier intelligence agencies became clearer on Monday, when some Trump administration officials acknowledged that other federal agencies — the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and parts of the Pentagon — had been compromised. Investigators were struggling to determine the extent to which the military, intelligence community and nuclear laboratories were affected by the highly sophisticated attack.

United States officials did not detect the attack until recent weeks, and then only when a private cybersecurity firm, FireEye, alerted American intelligence that the hackers had evaded layers of defenses.

It was evident that the Treasury and Commerce Departments, the first agencies reported to be breached, were only part of a far larger operation whose sophistication stunned even experts who have been following a quarter-century of Russian hacks on the Pentagon and American civilian agencies.

About 18,000 private and government users downloaded a Russian tainted software update — a Trojan horse of sorts — that gave its hackers a foothold into victims’ systems, according to SolarWinds, the company whose software was compromised. 

The National Security Agency — the premier U.S. intelligence organization that both hacks into foreign networks and defends national security agencies from attacks — apparently did not know of the breach in the network-monitoring software made by SolarWinds until it was notified last week by FireEye. The N.S.A. itself uses SolarWinds software. 

A government official, who requested anonymity to speak about the investigation, made clear that the Homeland Security Department, which is charged with securing civilian government agencies and the private sector, was itself a victim of the complex attack. But the department, which often urges companies to come clean to their customers when their systems are victims of successful attacks, issued an obfuscating official statement that said only: “The Department of Homeland Security is aware of reports of a breach. We are currently investigating the matter.”

Ah, yes, the good old tried and true "mistakes were made" defense by the DHS. People are reassured for sure. No doubt.

Did I mention that the president remains focused on subverting the election? Well, he is. That's where his only concern lies. Ditto for our incompetent nincompoop, radical right GOP.

Anyway, US experts are now trying to assess who got information stolen, how much and what it was. For some US agencies, this was a repeat performance. For example, this was the second time in recent years that Russian intelligence agencies had hacked the State Department.[1]

Those Russkis are sneaky. You let your guard down and the next thing you know they're rummaging through your porn stash and your instagram posts of your junk to your underage girlfriend. Those playful Russki elves. (sorry elves, no disrespect intended)

An expert at FireEye commented: “We think the number who were actually compromised were in the dozens. But they were all the highest-value targets.” That is reassuring by golly. Only the highest value targets were ripped off. Wonderful.

Footnote:

1. Radical right cabinet member, Mike (the Christian Crusading Crook) Pompeo, commented to the hard hitting far right propaganda and lies source Breitbart Radio Propaganda Services, Ltd. that there had “been a consistent effort of the Russians to try and get into American servers, not only those of government agencies, but of businesses. We see this even more strongly from the Chinese Communist Party, from the North Koreans, as well.” As the NYT wryly pointed out (fact check alert), it is the Russkis who have been the most effective hackers, not the Chinese or North Koreans. Good 'ole pompous Pompeo. He's the polydactyl porcine promulgator of prevarication, peroxide 'n poison, and the foremost nincompoop in the federal government. Huzzah!! We've just been lied to. Again.

Another diatom

Undercover cops dressed as Santa and his elf fight crime at a California shopping center

 

(CNN)Cops dressed as Santa Claus and his elf jumped into action when they saw car being stolen, said police in Riverside, California.

The undercover police officer and detective were outside a busy shopping center on Thursday as part of a holiday enforcement program when they saw three men in the process of stealing a Honda CR-V in the parking lot, according to a post on the Riverside Police Department's Facebook page.

Two suspects ran when they saw the police but were quickly apprehended, according to the post.

Police video of the incident showed the officer in his elf costume ordering one of the suspects to get on his knees at gunpoint.

A second suspect resisted arrest, according to police, before the detective dressed as Santa rushed over to help.

"Get him Santa," someone yelled off camera as he grabbed the suspect from behind and forced him on the ground.

One of the suspects was identified and later released and the second was arrested for possession of illegal drugs and resisting arrest, police said.

The third suspect was able to drive away in the SUV and abandoned it nearby.

Police said they have identified the third suspect and will arrest him on car theft charges in the near future.

The police were at the shopping center as part of a program to crackdown on retail theft.

They arrested three people, including a woman, who allegedly walked out of the story with a cart full of merchandise and a man accused of stealing expensive Lego sets worth $1,000, police said.

A police spokesman said it was the first time the department has used an undercover Santa.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/12/us/santa-cops-california-trnd/index.html

The First Vaccine Shipments Go Out

One pallet of 12 boxes on the forklift.

Maybe 6-7 pallets on the left.

The New York Times photo above shows the beginning of the vaccine distribution process.

It looks like 12 big boxes are on that forklift.

From personal memory: Each big box contains up to 5 smaller boxes and ~80 lb of dry ice.[1] Each smaller box contains 195 vials. Each vial can vaccinate 5 people for vaccination once. That amounts to 4875 vaccinations per small box. Each person needs two vaccinations for full (~95% ) immunity, one vaccination elicits ~80% immunity. 

Therefore if my recollection is right, that one forklift contains enough vaccine to inoculate 58,500 people once.

If 320,000,000 people in the US are to get vaccinated just once, that would require 5,470 forklifts. If they get two doses, that would require 10,940 forklifts.  

Footnote: 

1. "Each vaccine shipping box weighs about 80 pounds and holds up to 4,875 doses of vaccine. There are five doses per vial. The vials are packed in flat boxes about the size of a small pizza box, each of which holds 195 vials. As many as five of these are stacked together in a reusable, insulated cardboard box that is topped with 50 pounds of dry ice."

Sandra Lindsay, critical care nurse on Long Island New York

(one of the first to get vaccinated in the US)

How to spread Christmas cheer in a pandemic, according to a happiness expert

 By adjusting our mindset and attitudes, we could make it a Christmas like no other

It's undeniably been a tough year and one many will be happy to move on from. But as we approach Christmas, however different it might be this year, it's important we take stock of the positives where we can.

"I’m certain it doesn’t have to be a miserable Christmas. It can be a time for reflection, rest, connection and creating new memories that could make it a Christmas like no other. Christmas 2020 isn’t cancelled," says psychotherapist and author of Ten Times Happier, Owen O’Kane.

By adjusting our mindset and attitude towards doing Christmas differently this year, we can turn it into a positive experience and, when we feel happy and content, it's easy for that festive cheer to become contagious.

Here's Owen's tips to help us spread Christmas joy this year, even in the midst of a global pandemic.

ACCEPTANCE. IT IS WHAT IT IS.

"It’s understandable that there will be a degree of disappointment with the situation we find ourselves in this Christmas but we must accept it. If we fixate on how it should be, how you want it to be or what will happen next, it leads to increased levels of distress. Living in the present moment, accepting things as they are and taking everything one step at a time makes it easier to feel hopeful. It will also help you enter the spirit of joy and goodwill during the festive period," says Owen.

Action: Be grateful and mindful of what you do have this Christmas. That might be something fundamental like a roof over your head, good health or food on the dinner table. It might be a smaller detail like the fact that having less people in the house might lead to deeper conversation, or how not having to travel on Christmas Day means you have time for a local walk. Over the Christmas period, make a daily list of what you do have as opposed to focusing on what you don't have this year.

CONNECT WITH PEOPLE WHO BRING YOU JOY, ANY WAY YOU CAN

This year, we may be spending more time at home with certain people than we are used to – and this can be hard on relationships. It's not a fault, it's just a different way of spending time together that needs some adapting to. Owen calls this, making "healthy boundaries".

"Have a strategy of who you will connect with, even if it is a phone call or Zoom. Connect with the voices that lift your spirits. Take breaks or find a distraction when you are with people who overwhelm you. Likewise, spend more time with the people at home who cheer you up."

Action: When taking a break, read a good book that you know will lift your mood – one you've read before or a recommendation from a trusted friend.

BREAK FREE FROM TRADITION

"Traditions and Christmas go hand-in-hand which, unquestionably, will create challenges this year. The reality is that some of the normal traditions like family visits, shopping, meals, church services and even Father Christmas might need a review of sorts. Rather than focus on the loss of some of the usual traditions, try to create new ones that bring a sense of happiness, connection, hope and fresh beginnings. In essence, try to live the meaning behind the season, whatever your religious or spiritual beliefs," says Owen.

Action: Could you try a new meat or side as part of your Christmas dinner? Or perhaps you could decide to go meat-free this year! Is there a new game you could play, a walk you could squeeze in or film you could watch?

DECK THE HALLS

"Every piece of research on low mood tells us that light, colour and sparkle help improve mood. In some Nordic traditions, Christmas lights stay in place until the end of January to create a sense of optimism and hope in the midst of winter. Perhaps this Christmas is the year to bring some extra light and colour into your home. It will serve as a reminder that you can create light in life’s darker moments. It will also cheer up your neighbours, and hopefully create a domino effect of positive energy," says Owen.

Action: Get crafty and make your own Christmas decorations you can adorn with lights (LED ones, if possible – they are better the the planet). Try making your own fresh foliage wreath – here's our how-to guide.

EVERYTHING COMES AND GOES – AND THERE ARE LESSONS TO BE LEARNT

"During a crisis period it can feel like the situation will never end. Although this Christmas will be different, it will come and go. Likewise, the COVID-19 pandemic will eventually pass. We know that the development of vaccines, treatments and rapid testing is improving daily and that better days will come. This Christmas, try to focus on this time as a temporary period in our history which will provide many life lessons."

Action: Make a list of all the positive personal realisations or lessons you have learnt during this difficult year. Maybe you have rekindled your love for a hobby or sport? Maybe you have realised that having a few weekends free from socialising is better for your mental health? Or maybe you have been able to spend more quality time with those you live with or save a bit of money by not commuting?

ALLOW HOPE TO RELEASE POSITIVE CHEMICALS

"Christmas is a Christian tradition but of course synonymous with hope. Whatever your culture, belief or tradition, I encourage you to embrace hope this Christmas. Hope changes the chemistry of our brains; it will enable you to cope better and it’s contagious. If you can look for hope, you will find it. It is allowing yourself to stay open to the possibility that tough periods end; they always do."

Action: Make a personal mantra you can repeat in your head every time you start to feel a bit low or hopeless. Something like: 'When this is all over, I'll hug my family, go on holiday and be more grateful for the small things' or 'Difficult years serve the purpose of making the good years even better.'

IT'S ALL UP TO YOU...

"Christmas 2020 will be etched in your memory for a long time, that’s for sure. Remember you have a choice what memories you create," concludes Owen.

https://www.countryliving.com/uk/wellbeing/a34795719/spread-christmas-cheer-pandemic-happiness-expert/