Drug prices finally negotiated down; Global warming & our broken DoJ

After decades of drug companies screaming and howling that they will be destroyed, the US government under Biden has finally been able to negotiate lower prices for a few commonly used drugs. The new prices kick in in 2026. Price reductions range from 38% to 79%.

 Medicare would have saved $6 billion, if the lower prices had been in effect in 2023. As usual, the whole endeavor is shrouded in opacity as drug companies desperately try to keep prices jacked up as high as possible as long as possible. The NYT comments:

It is impossible to tell how much the new prices will save Medicare for each individual drug subject to negotiations. The federal government does not disclose the net prices it pays for medications, which take into account the billions of dollars in discounts the program receives.

Medicare’s Part D program covers most of the costs of prescription drugs that seniors take at home. Approximately nine million Part D beneficiaries took at least one of the first 10 medications subject to negotiations in 2022, according to federal estimates. Some will see direct savings at the pharmacy counter as a result of the negotiation program.

The prices the Biden administration announced were made possible by the Inflation Reduction Act, a climate, health and tax bill signed by Mr. Biden in 2022 that granted the health and human services secretary the authority to negotiate on behalf of Medicare.

A person can rest assured that if DJT were elected in 2020, the drug price negotiations would have never taken place because as we all know, unregulated markets always do everything better than government intervention. Heck, DJT would never have allowed drug price negotiating in any law he could veto. And, one can credit the Democrats for fighting to get drug price negotiations in any law that passed congress. And, lest there by any shred of confusion, all House and Senate Republicans opposed the Inflation Reduction Act:

Congressional Republicans strongly opposed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) when it was passed in 2022. Every Republican in both the House and Senate voted against the IRA. Republicans argued it was a "reckless spending spree" that would harm the economy and waste taxpayer money. They claimed it would not effectively reduce inflation, despite its name. Many objected to the climate and clean energy provisions, viewing them as an expensive and ineffective "Green New Deal".

But since the bill was passed and spending started, some Republicans have taken credit for the law when spending in their state or voting districts started. One source commented:

Hall of Republican Clean Energy Hypocrisy

Not a single Republican in Congress voted to support the Inflation Reduction Act, a key pillar of the Biden administration's affordable clean energy plan. And yet, many are happy to cheer the IRA-funded projects that are benefitting the communities they represent. Read more below and select a Representative to read about their newfound support for clean energy, in their own words.

The shameless hypocrites:

Their comments in opposition of the IRA and then

later in support of local spending are cited for each hypocrite

_______________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________

The costs of global warming are significant and increasing. One estimate is that economic cost in the US is running at about $150 billion/year. Other costs include a worse climate that people have to live in (that gets no economic value) and species that go extinct (they get no economic value). As usual, energy sector companies that have advocated for decades for continuing pollution and global warming deny, distract and impede efforts to do something serious, e.g., a carbon tax. The Hill writes about people wanting the DoJ to file lawsuits against pro-pollution companies for the damage they help cause:

Survivors of “climate disasters” are calling on federal prosecutors to bring fossil fuel companies to court.

The over 1,000 signatories of Thursday’s letter to the Department of Justice lived through wildfires, floods and heat waves caused or exacerbated by the burning of fossil fuels.

Major oil companies have “known since the 1950s about the dangers posed by burning fossil fuels,” they wrote.

“Instead of acting responsibly on their own scientists’ warnings, they waged a decades-long disinformation campaign to muddy the science and confuse and mislead the public.”

Though scientists at fossil fuel companies like Exxon projected current levels of planetary heating with startling accuracy, the industry spent decades fighting climate science, and currently contests federal regulation and financial tools that seek to slow it.

The letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland comes amid a wave of nationwide pressure against the industry. 

On the civil front, there is the a wave of “climate superfund” legislation or lawsuits — from seven states, 35 cities and Washington, D.C. — that seek to hold the industry responsible for the costs of climate change.

In May, House and Senate Democrats referred their own investigation of the industry to the Department of Justice, with Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) calling on Garland to “investigate big oil for its decades long disinformation campaign to mislead the American public.”

Given Garland's stunning fear of doing anything that might make MAGA angry, it seems unlikely that he will do anything. The polluters will continue to make as much money from pollution as possible. If DJT gets re-elected, we all know how that will play out.

A study commissioned by Consumer reports commented on the burden to individuals:

So a new report commissioned by Consumer Reports and conducted by ICF, a global consulting firm that conducts climate studies for businesses and governments, might snap some of us to attention. Its finding: If humanity does not act swiftly to limit it, climate change will cost a typical child born in 2024 at least around $500,000 over the course of their lifetime—and possibly as much as $1 million—through a combination of cost-of-living increases and reduced earnings.

That’s in 2024 dollars, meaning each newborn will lose the current purchasing power of those amounts. Add in inflation and the actual amount they’ll lose over their lifetimes will be much larger.

The study also says those costs will be significantly lower if we act quickly to reduce global carbon emissions.

That speaks for itself. The Republican Party still considers global warming to be a hoax or something not important or urgent. So, both DJT and the GOP will continue to fight tooth and claw for more pollution and more costs that global warming will impose on average people, while wealthy elites just turn on their air conditioners. 

It still smells

The MSM's double standard?; DJT's outrageous behaviors

Sometimes, the mainstream media looks to be biased in favor of authoritarianism. The AP reports about a recent example:

At least three news outlets were leaked confidential material from inside the Donald Trump campaign, including its report vetting JD Vance as a vice presidential candidate. So far, each has refused to reveal any details about what they received.

Instead, Politico, The New York Times and The Washington Post have written about a potential hack of the campaign and described what they had in broad terms.

Their decisions stand in marked contrast to the 2016 presidential campaign, when a Russian hack exposed emails to and from Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta. The website Wikileaks published a trove of these embarrassing missives, and mainstream news organizations covered them avidly.

Politico wrote over the weekend about receiving emails starting July 22 from a person identified as “Robert” that included a 271-page campaign document about Vance and a partial vetting report on Sen. Marco Rubio, who was also considered as a potential vice president. Both Politico and the Post said that two people had independently confirmed that the documents were authentic.

“Like many such vetting documents,” The Times wrote of the Vance report, “they contained past statements with the potential to be embarrassing or damaging, such as Mr. Vance’s remarks casting aspersions on Mr. Trump.”  

The Times said it would not discuss why it had decided not to print details of the internal communications. A spokesperson for the Post said: “As with any information we receive, we take into account the authenticity of the materials, any motives of the source and assess the public interest in making decisions about what, if anything, to publish.”  

Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for Trump’s campaign, said over the weekend that “any media or news outlet reprinting documents or internal communications are doing the bidding of America’s enemies.” 

It’s also easy to recall how, in 2016, candidate Trump and his team encouraged coverage of documents on the Clinton campaign that Wikileaks had acquired from hackers. It was widespread: A BBC story promised “18 revelations from Wikileaks’ hacked Clinton emails” and Vox even wrote about Podesta’s advice for making superb risotto.

Brian Fallon, then a Clinton campaign spokesperson, noted at the time how striking it was that concern about Russian hacking quickly gave way to fascination over what was revealed. “Just like Russia wanted,” he said.

So in 2024 it is OK for the NYT, WaPo and Politico to withhold the juicy bits from the leaked documents because of potentially embarrassing or damaging content for Vance and/or DJT. But in 2016, the MSM freely blasted out everything that was damaging to Hillary, helping to put DJT in power. What happened here?

Does anyone notice DJT's shameless hypocrisy in his 2016 vs 2024 mindset, or it is just me? 

Q: Is this 2016 vs 2024 story a nothingburger, or is it evidence that the MSM is pro-authoritarian biased, stupidly incompetent or both?

____________________________________________________________________

____________________________________________________________________

Random news bit:

Donald Trump said on his Elon Musk interview that he might leave the country if he loses the upcoming US presidential election. He said he would go to Venezuela to hide out. Does this make him a bigger flight risk? Is it possible this could have cause his bail to be revoked?

____________________________________________________________________

____________________________________________________________________

Regarding DJT's outrageous behaviors: For some reason, two bits of what is standard news about DJT sparked deep anger in me. Why today? Who knows. Anyway, my anger is directed at DJT, the entire Republican Party and DJT's emotional support billionaires, Elon Musk in this case. 

In the first bit, The Hill reports that a Democratic political group filed a lawsuit claiming that DJT violated campaign finance law by virtue of his 2 hour "interview" with Elon Musk on X: 

The Democratic organization End Citizens United filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) on Tuesday over former President Trump’s interview with tech billionaire Elon Musk.

Trump spoke with Musk on social media platform X, which Musk owns, on Monday night for roughly two hours after their conversation was delayed by technical difficulties. In its complaint on Tuesday, End Citizens United alleged that the interview was a corporate contribution that violated campaign finance laws.

“The Donald Trump-Elon Musk campaign rally hosted on X wasn’t just an incoherent diatribe of lies marred by technical difficulties, it was a blatantly illegal corporate contribution to Donald Trump’s campaign,” End Citizens United President Tiffany Muller said in a statement.

“This brazen corporate contribution undermines campaign finance laws and would set a dangerous precedent for unfettered, direct corporate engagement in campaigns. The FEC must investigate this corporate-funded campaign event and hold Trump, his campaign, and X Corp. accountable,” she added.

The complaint notes that federal campaign finance law prohibits corporations from making contributions to federal candidates, who cannot accept the contributions. It said that the “conversation” between the former president and Musk “amounted to a virtual campaign event for Donald J. Trump financed by X.”

That is infuriating. If Harris had done the same, DJT and the GOP would be howling in self-righteous outrage about the horrible breaking of sacred laws.

Also infuriating, the courts are not going to hold DJT or Musk accountable any time soon, if ever. The radical Republican USSC hates campaign finance laws as undue burdens on "free speech."More importantly, the UUSSC secretly hates campaign finance laws as undue burdens on corruption because they impose some transparency on bribery. If this winds up at the USSC, one can see the applicable law likely falling as an unconstitutional burden on "free speech."

The 2nd bit, is an item from Reuters about DJT holding the courts in utter contempt and never, ever, accepting an adverse ruling against him:

NEW YORK, Aug 14 (Reuters) - A New York judge declined for a third time to step aside from the case in which Donald Trump was convicted of charges involving hush money paid to a porn star, dismissing the former U.S. president's claim of conflict of interest related to political consultancy work by the judge's daughter.

As he did in April and in August 2023, Justice Juan Merchan in a decision released on Wednesday denied a request by Trump's lawyers that he recuse himself from the first case involving criminal charges against a former U.S. president. Merchan is scheduled to sentence Trump on Sept. 18.

"Defendant has provided nothing new for this Court to consider. Counsel has merely repeated arguments that have already been denied by this and higher courts" and were "rife with inaccuracies and unsubstantiated claims," Merchan wrote in the ruling, dated Aug. 13.[DJT's utter contempt for the court and the rule of law cannot get much clearer than this]

A spokesperson for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office declined to comment. 

"The Highly Conflicted Judge should have long ago recused himself from this case," Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement.

Trump was found guilty by a jury on May 30 on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records for having covered up former personal lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen's $130,000 payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels to avert a sex scandal before the 2016 U.S. election.

Two months later, his lawyers made their third request that Merchan step aside, arguing that his daughter's work for a political consultancy that has counted Democratic campaigns among its clients - including the unsuccessful bid by Kamala Harris for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination - posed a conflict of interest.

That 2nd bit about DJT asking for the 3rd time for the judge to step aside due to an alleged conflict of interest is well beyond an insulting outrage. DJT himself operates with no ethical concerns, including actual, blatant conflicts of interest. But here he howls in sanctimonious moral outrage when there is even a faint whiff of an appearance of a conflict he has no basis to howl about. His shameless hypocrisy is off the charts.

Q: Is Germaine being irrational or too wuss for having been triggered by DJT and the toxic combination of his authoritarianism, constant mendacity, ghastly corruption, contempt for the rule of law, and hypocrisy?

Gaza updates; About the weakness of free speech

1. The NYT reports that Netanyahu undermined efforts to get a ceasefire:

For weeks, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has denied that he is trying to block a cease-fire deal in Gaza by hardening Israel’s negotiating position. Mr. Netanyahu has consistently placed all blame for the deadlocked negotiations on Hamas, even as senior members of the Israeli security establishment accused him of slowing the process himself.

But in private, Mr. Netanyahu has, in fact, added new conditions to Israel’s demands, additions that his own negotiators fear have created extra obstacles to a deal. According to unpublished documents reviewed by The New York Times that detail Israel’s negotiating positions, Israel relayed a list of new stipulations in late July to American, Egyptian and Qatari mediators that added less flexible conditions to a set of principles it had made in late May.

Doubts have also been raised about Hamas’s willingness to compromise on key issues, and the group also requested its own extensive revisions throughout the process, while ceding some smaller points in July. But the documents reviewed by The Times make clear that the behind-the-scenes maneuvering by the Netanyahu government has been extensive — and suggest that agreement may be elusive at a new round of negotiations set to begin on Thursday.

Now that Israel assassinated the lead Palestinian negotiator and he has been replaced by a hard line Hamas operative, the chances of a ceasefire seem to be fairly low, maybe 10% in the next 6 months. Chances of a two-state peace solution in the next 2 years seems to be about nil, maybe 0.1% chance.

2. The NYT reports about the humanitarian situation in Gaza:

An area that Israel has designated as a humanitarian zone and has ordered hundreds of thousands of civilians to go to has become an overcrowded “hell,” where food and water are scarce and safety is not guaranteed, according to some of the displaced Palestinians there.

“The truth is that this area is anything but humanitarian,” said Kamel Mohammed, a 36-year-old sheltering in a tent with nine family members. He added, “Our life in these camps is like hell.”

Mr. Mohammed described the humanitarian zone, a once-vacant strip of coastal land known as Al-Mawasi, as a “barren sand desert” crammed with displaced families that offers “no sense of safety.” The high cost of materials and the lack of assistance have forced many families to share tents, he said.

It is beyond me how Palestinians can afford to pay for anything. Their country and economy have both been blown to smithereens. Where do they get any money at all?

3. The US-built humanitarian aid pier for Gaza relief has faced numerous challenges, and failed to deliver nearly as much aid as had been planned. The US military announced that the pier will "soon cease operations," less than two months after its installation. So much for that effort.

__________________________________________________________________

__________________________________________________________________

The greatest weakness of secular democracy arguably is the intractable, unsolvable free speech problem, i.e., dark free speech (lies, slanders, crackpottery, etc.) vs honest speech. We have trouble even talking honestly about free speech.[1] Over the millennia, no one has found an effective way to neuter dark free speech without empowering authoritarian demagogues from rising to power. The best that humans can manage is to limit the constant damage and threat. The problem can never go completely away as long as humans are human. 

 

A Vox article discusses the weakness of free speech rights in the US:

For most of American history, free speech did not exist in the United States.

Dissidents were commonly thrown in prison, often for many years, when the government disagreed with their views. Near the end of World War I, the great union leader Eugene Debs was sentenced to 10 years in prison for giving a speech opposing the draft, and his conviction was upheld by a unanimous Supreme Court. In 1951, as Sen. Joseph McCarthy was ramping up his witch hunts against suspected communists, the Supreme Court blessed his and similar efforts by upholding the convictions of several individuals who did nothing more than try to organize a (wildly unsuccessful) Communist Party in the United States.

This suppression of free expression wasn’t restricted to unpopular political ideas. Under the federal Comstock Act — which made it a crime to mail any “thing” for “any indecent or immoral purpose” — and similar state laws, anti-sex crusaders prosecuted authors, artists, booksellers, and art gallery owners alike for distributing pretty much anything that touched on the topic of sex.

All of that is to say the kind of First Amendment freedoms that most Americans take for granted, and especially freedom of speech and the press, aren’t as baked into the law as one might think — and are actually quite fragile. The Supreme Court didn’t meaningfully enforce that amendment until the 1960s, when it handed down a pair of decisions protecting political agitators and guaranteeing freedom of the press. And the protections enshrined in those decisions could easily disappear overnight if the Court loses its current, pro-free speech majority [apparently, 6 of the 9 are pro-free speech at present, while Alito, Thomas and Gorsuch are anti-free speech].

So, if Trump wins, and if he gets to fill just two more seats on the Supreme Court, Americans could swiftly lose First Amendment rights that have been secure for nearly six decades.

Looming over all of this is the Federalist Society, the powerful association of right-leaning and far-right lawyers that played an enormous role in selecting Trump’s first term judges — and that is likely to play a similar role in any future Republican administration.

For many years, the legal right embraced the Holmesian view of the First Amendment. Indeed, if anything, Republican lawyers and judges tended to view the First Amendment even more expansively than their Democratic counterparts, because they often used the First Amendment to attack campaign finance laws.

Since Trump left office, however, many of the Federalist Society’s conferences and events have descended into increasingly paranoid complaint sessions about “cancel culture” and “wokeness.” In 2022, the society’s annual lawyer’s convention featured no less than four panels complaining about the fact that Federalist Society members sometimes feel unwelcome at law schools and in various institutions within the legal profession due to their conservative views.

The Vox article is quite long and goes into a lot of interesting history and analysis. This is just one more thing to be aware of as part of the stakes in the 2024 election.

Footnote:

1. This essay includes discussion about good vs bad free speech and why we have a hard time just talking about this so far unsolved problem:

Our usual debate over the extent of free speech takes for granted the value of free speech. We argue over the boundaries or limits of what can be said but pass over the importance of what is said within those bounds. This leaves us with a peculiar sense of why speech matters: We imply that it's valuable because its restraint would undermine our freedom, which is a way of avoiding the question more than of answering it.

This disinterest in the value of free speech, sometimes amounting to a refusal to define it, appears to be rooted in the principles of our liberalism, which enshrines free speech as one right, perhaps the principal right, among the rights that deserve protection in a liberal society. To guard such a right, it seems, one must not specify the value of how it will normally be used lest by such definition society destroy what it wants to protect. For by discussing the value of free speech one would expose less-valued or valueless speech to disdain, or worse, prohibition.

A society that understands itself in terms of rights must above all protect its boundaries in the definition of rights rather than concern itself too much, or at all, with what is within the protected territory. Thus, the protection of unlimited, or nearly unlimited, speech eclipses our view of worthy speech. To recover some idea of worthy speech, and therefore also of why free speech matters, we will need to challenge our liberalism for its own good, and to expose its more-than-simply-liberal aims and character. And to see these is ultimately also to grasp what speech is for, and why it is important.  

Two questionable consequences can be seen to emerge from Justice Jackson's Barnette opinion. First, he denied that there is any constitutional fixed star of political orthodoxy in the very act of declaring the political orthodoxy of free speech. The "very purpose of a Bill of Rights," he said, "was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy." Are not those subjects declared to be beyond controversy thereby made orthodox? The implication is that free speech must be regarded as sacred and hence has no value that can or needs to be disputed. This is a proposition I am disputing here. [that is my point about the value of honest vs dark speech -- the value of something here needs to be disputed, and it is dark free speech] 

.... But all free speech does not have equal value; speech that attacks free speech has less value than speech that explains it, endorses it, and practices it. Free speech needs to define itself in order to address its enemies.

This raises questions. What is the value of dark free speech?** Why does it get just as much legal protection as honest speech? When it is normalized for some people, why to they often respect comforting dark free speech more than discomforting honest speech?  In view of plagues like essentially contested concepts, tribalism, self-interest and clashing moral values, is there any reasonably objective way to at least mostly distinguish the honest from the dark? For example, can objectively provable facts be used at least sometimes to distinguish truth from lies? (I think so, at least sometimes)

** Dark free speech explicitly excludes defamation, child pornography, false advertising, etc., because that kind of speech is not free and can be banned or punished by law.

Global warming update

An interactive NYT article (not paywalled) discusses how close in time we are to potential environmental tipping points that once past, are probably unstoppable:

Right now, every moment of every day, we humans are reconfiguring Earth’s climate bit by bit. Hotter summers and wetter storms. Higher seas and fiercer wildfires. The steady, upward turn of the dial on a host of threats to our homes, our societies and the environment around us.

We might also be changing the climate in an even bigger way.

For the past two decades, scientists have been raising alarms about great systems in the natural world that warming, caused by carbon emissions, might be pushing toward collapse. These systems are so vast that they can stay somewhat in balance even as temperatures rise. But only to a point.

Once we warm the planet beyond certain levels, this balance might be lost, scientists say. The effects would be sweeping and hard to reverse. Not like the turning of a dial, but the flipping of a switch. One that wouldn’t be easily flipped back.

When corals go ghostly white, they aren’t necessarily dead, and their reefs aren’t necessarily gone forever. Too much heat in the water causes the corals to expel the symbiotic algae living inside their tissues. If conditions improve, they can survive this bleaching. In time, the reefs can bounce back. As the world gets warmer, though, occasional bleaching is becoming regular bleaching. Mild bleaching is becoming severe bleaching.

Scientists’ latest predictions are grim. Even if humanity moves swiftly to rein in global warming, 70 percent to 90 percent of today’s reef-building corals could die in the coming decades. If we don’t, the toll could be 99 percent or more. A reef can look healthy right up until its corals start bleaching and dying. Eventually, it is a graveyard.

This doesn’t necessarily mean reef-building corals will go extinct. Hardier ones might endure in pockets. But the vibrant ecosystems these creatures support will be unrecognizable. There is no bouncing back anytime soon, not in the places corals live today, not at any scale.

When it might happen: It could already be underway.

In the ground beneath the world’s cold places, the accumulated remains of long-dead plants and animals contain a lot of carbon, roughly twice the amount that’s currently in the atmosphere. As heat, wildfires and rains thaw and destabilize the frozen ground, microbes get to work, converting this carbon into carbon dioxide and methane. These greenhouse gasses worsen the heat and the fire and the rain, which intensifies the thawing.

Like many of these vast, self-propelling shifts in our climate, permafrost thaw is complicated to predict. Large areas have already come unfrozen, in Western Canada, in Alaska, in Siberia. But how quickly the rest of it might defrost, how much that would add to global warming, how much of the carbon might stay trapped down there because the thawing causes new vegetation to sprout up on top of it — all of that is tricky to pin down.

“Because these things are very uncertain, there’s a bias toward not talking about it or dismissing the possibility, even,” said Tapio Schneider, a climate scientist at the California Institute of Technology. “That, I think, is a mistake,” he said. “It’s still important to explore the risks, even if the probability of occurrence in the near future is relatively small.”

When it might happen: The timing will vary place to place. The effects on global warming could accumulate over a century or more.

The colossal ice sheets that blanket Earth’s poles aren’t melting the way an ice cube melts. Because of their sheer bigness and geometric complexity, a host of factors shapes how quickly the ice sheds its bulk and adds to the rising oceans. Among these factors, scientists are particularly concerned about ones that could start feeding on themselves, causing the melting to accelerate in a way that would be very hard to stop.

In Greenland, the issue is elevation. As the surface of the ice loses height, more of it sits at a balmier altitude, exposed to warmer air. That makes it melt even faster.

Scientists know, from geological evidence, that large parts of Greenland have been ice-free before. They also know that the consequences of another great melt could reverberate worldwide, affecting ocean currents and rainfall down into the tropics and beyond.

When it might happen: Irreversible melting could begin this century and unfold over hundreds, even thousands, of years.

The NYT article also discusses tipping points for (1) the breakup of massive west Antarctic ice sheets, (2) a sudden shift in the West African Monsoon, (3) loss of Amazon rainforest, and (4) shutdown of Atlantic ocean currents. This is truly scary stuff. 

Radical right authoritarian politics and global warming

Fortunately, the sharp minds at Project 2025 have this issue well in hand. The Republican elites deny global warming is real or if it is real, it's not serious, or if it is serious, we have lots of time to begin to think about it and act, or if we don't have lots of time to start to think or act, then why worry because it's already too late.

See the logic there? It's impressive to say the least. I feel reassured already. ☹️ OK, not reassured.

Crackpot facts and reasoning

about global warming

The three pillars of

climate science denial

More crackpots

The invention of anti-gravity

Yes, Exxon did know, denied it anyway

 and still denies it today

Internal documents and reports indicate that ExxonMobil has historically downplayed the risks associated with climate change and delayed action to address it.

ExxonMobil's internal research accurately predicted the impacts of global warming due to fossil fuel emissions as early as the 1970s.

Global warming update; Gaza update; Project 2025 training videos leaked

Nunatsiaq News reports on a heat wave in the Arctic region:

Heatwave hits Nunavut with ‘astounding’ temperatures

A heatwave is hitting Kitikmeot and Kivalliq communities this week bringing temperatures above 30ᵒ C (86ᵒ F), twice as high as the average temperature for these regions at this time of year.

The Government of Nunavut issued a public health advisory for two communities Wednesday where the most extreme conditions are expected. Kugluktuk is expected to see a high of 33ᵒ C on Friday, while Kugaaruk’s forecast high is 26ᵒ C that day, according to Environment Canada.

“It’s astounding temperatures,” said Stephen Berg, a meteorologist with Environment Canada, in a phone interview Thursday.

Baker Lake, for instance, has had only eight days where temperatures reached 30ᵒ C since the start of record keeping in 1946, Berg said.

Before moving east toward Nunavut, the mass of hot air caused record-breaking temperatures in Northwest Territories, including Fort Good Hope which saw temperatures as high as 35.7 C on Wednesday.

Relief is expected in Nunavut after the weekend with gradual cooling over the next week, Berg said.

With climate change hitting the Arctic more rapidly than the rest of the world, this might be a good time to think about infrastructure that will help mitigate the effects of future heatwaves, said Dr. André Corriveau, Nunavut’s acting chief public health officer, in a phone interview Thursday.

I feel bad for the people of Kugluktuk and other affected towns. They're not used to this global warming stuff.

__________________________________________________________

__________________________________________________________

The WaPo reports (not paywalled):

An Israeli strike on a school sheltering displaced Palestinians killed at least 93 people in the Gaza Strip on Saturday, civil defense authorities said, deepening global scrutiny of Israel’s conduct of the war more than 10 months into its campaign to eliminate Hamas.

Gaza civil defense spokesman Mahmoud Bassal said the al-Taba’een school in Gaza City was housing about 6,000 displaced Palestinians when the bombs struck around 4:30 a.m. He said at least 11 children and six women were among those killed, with at least 54 injured and dozens missing.

Video from the scene showed scores of bodies wrapped in sheets and blankets laid in the schoolyard after the strike, as women crouched over corpses in grief. The strike was one of the single deadliest bombings of the war, and Bassal said the toll was expected to rise. “The recovery operations are indescribable,” he said in an interview.

The Israel Defense Forces said the strike targeted Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants it claimed were operating a command and control node from within the school, accusing the group of using civilians as human shields.  

An Israeli military official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in line with IDF protocol, said that three precision munitions struck a prayer hall, which he said was used by militants, on the ground floor of the three-story school building. Residents said the facility had been converted into a shelter for Gazans forced to flee their homes.

The Middle East horror is endless. The commentary from US officials is an embarrassment. 

__________________________________________________________

__________________________________________________________

ProPublica reports about videos leaked from Project 2025 headquarters:

One centerpiece of that program is dozens of never-before-published videos created for Project 2025’s Presidential Administration Academy. The vast majority of these videos — 23 in all, totaling more than 14 hours of content — were provided to ProPublica and Documented by a person who had access to them.

The Project 2025 videos coach future appointees on everything from the nuts and bolts of governing to how to outwit bureaucrats. There are strategies for avoiding embarrassing Freedom of Information Act disclosures and ensuring that conservative policies aren’t struck down by “left-wing judges.” Some of the content is routine advice that any incoming political appointee might be told. Other segments of the training offer guidance on radically changing how the federal government works and what it does.

In one video, Bethany Kozma, a conservative activist and former deputy chief of staff at the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Trump administration, downplays the seriousness of climate change and says the movement to combat it is really part of a ploy to “control people.”

“If the American people elect a conservative president, his administration will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere,” Kozma says.

In the same video, Kozma calls the idea of gender fluidity “evil.” Another speaker, Katie Sullivan, who was an acting assistant attorney general at the Department of Justice under Trump, takes aim at executive actions by the administration of President Joe Biden that created gender adviser positions throughout the federal government. The goal, Biden wrote in one order, was to “advance equal rights and opportunities, regardless of gender or gender identity.”

Sullivan says, “That position has to be eradicated, as well as all the task forces, the removal of all the equity plans from all the websites, and a complete rework of the language in internal and external policy documents and grant applications.”  

In a video titled “The Political Appointee’s Survival Guide,” Max Primorac, a former deputy administrator at USAID during the Trump administration, warns viewers that Washington is a place that “does not share your conservative values,” and that new hires will find that “there’s so much hostility to basic traditional values.”

By traditional values, Mr. Primorac means support for kleptocratic authoritarianism*, legalized bigotry, forced social and legal acceptance of Christian fundamentalism, and bizarre fixations on (i) controlling everyone's sex lives, and (ii) turning all non-heterosexual people into heterosexual people by force. Yup, Project 2025 is just studded with sparkly traditional values.

One of those sparkly traditional values is crackpot denial of climate science and global warming. 

* Some form of mixed kleptocratic dictatorship, kleptocratic plutocracy and kleptocratic Christian theocracy with Christian Sharia law implemented by a White, heterosexual male Christian Taliban. 

COVID update; Fun and interesting headlines; From the tyranny files

RETRACTED: NPR reported yesterday that the CDC officially classifies COVID as endemic, no longer a pandemic. Endemic means it is similar to the flu and vaccinations need to be given periodically. I suspect new vaccines will come out about every 12 months. (this information is false and misleading)

The NYT reports that researchers are starting to get a handle on the impacts of long COVID:

About 400 Million People Worldwide Have 

Had Long Covid, Researchers Say

The condition has put significant strain on patients and society — at a global economic cost of about $1 trillion a year, a new report estimates

The authors evaluated scores of studies and metrics to estimate that as of the end of 2023, about 6 percent of adults and about 1 percent of children — or about 400 million people — had ever had long Covid since the pandemic began.

The authors cited studies suggesting that only 7 percent to 10 percent of long Covid patients fully recovered two years after developing long Covid. They added that “some manifestations of long Covid, including heart disease, diabetes, myalgic encephalomyelitis and dysautonomia are chronic conditions that last a lifetime.”

The report cited estimates that between two million and four million adults were out of work because of long Covid in 2022 and that people with long Covid were 10 percent less likely to be employed than those who were never infected with the virus. Long Covid patients often have to reduce their work hours, and one in four limit activities outside work in order to continue working, the report said.

______________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________

Trump Has Started to Piss Off White Supremacists - Donald Trump’s campaign strategy has shockingly lost support with a key part of his voter base -- darned picky White supremacists . . . . grumble, grumble . . . . . . now they're gonna vote for Harris . . . . . . no, wait, . . . . . never mind, they'll still vote for DJT, along with the Nazis, crackpots, cranks and freaks

Americans don't like Project 2025 - a significant number of Americans disapprove of it and closely associate it with Trump, despite his concerted attempts to distance himself from it -- darned picky Americans and their inconvenient democracy . . . . grumble, grumble . . . . . . now they're gonna vote for Harris, maybe 

Report: Trump calls Harris a "bitch" -- darned Harris . . . . grumble, grumble . . . .

Harris Leads Trump in Three Key States, Times/Siena Polls Find -- the Times/Siena poll is ranked #1 out of several hundred polls that 538 analyzed and ranked -- darned Harris . . . . grumble, grumble . . . .

______________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________

The radicalization of the Republican Party from a mostly pro-democracy party to a purely aggressive, vindictive, pro-tyranny party is basically complete. The corrupt dictator DJT owns and runs it. Business Insider reports about how the Repubs are going to do things if the GOP controls congress:

Marjorie Taylor Greene said a GOP-led House would probe firms that stopped donating to Republicans. She said some "big corporations" and lobbyists have ceased donations after the Capitol riots. Greene also accused the corporations of "corporate communism."

Speaking on former Trump adviser Steve Bannon's "War Room" podcast, Greene accused unnamed businesses of "corporate communism." .... "There is going to be investigations coming," Greene added. "And there should be. There definitely should be, because the way corporations have conducted themselves, I've always called it corporate communism." Greene also advised big businesses to "lawyer up" and focus on "customer service" instead of politics.  

It's unclear [as usual] what investigations Greene wants to conduct. She also did not provide a list of corporations that she wanted the GOP to investigate [also normal]. A spokesperson for Greene did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment. [the KYMS propaganda tactic]

KYMS = Keep Your Mouth Shut -- usually observed in the face of inconvenient questions about the usually incredibly stupid or authoritarian things that prompted the questions in the first place

What is striking here is two things. First is the sheer irrational incoherence emanating from Repub elites like MTG (and DJT). On the one hand she clearly wants corporations to give big piles of cash, i.e., "free speech", to Repub politicians and their authoritarian party. But on the other, she complains about corporations being involved in politics.

The other striking thing is that at least some corporations seem to be not donating as much free speech to kleptocratic authoritarianism as the kleptocratic authoritarians want. That is a good sign, assuming the phenomenon is real.