Water, What Is It Good For?

Oh, who needs clean water, I mean that stuff isn’t good for anything at all, right? It’s not as if life is dependent on it or anything, after all, we can adapt to drinking toxic sludge.

U.S. President Donald Trump is expected to sign a measure on Wednesday aimed at rescinding a major Obama administration water regulation and direct an end to the government’s defense of the rule, a Trump official briefed on the plan said on Friday.

Trump is expected to direct the Environmental Protection Agency to withdraw the Waters of the United States (WOTUS) rule, which expands the number of waterways that are federally protected under the Clean Water Act.

The rule was finalized by the EPA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in May 2015, and was blocked by a federal appeals court pending further court challenges.

The rule has faced intense opposition from Republicans in Congress, farmers and energy companies.

Critics contend the rule vastly expands the federal government’s authority and could apply to ditches and small isolated bodies of water. The EPA under President Barack Obama said the rule protects waters that are next to rivers and lakes and their tributaries “because science shows that they impact downstream waters.”

Full story here.

The Trump Regime is also busy attempting to hasten the death of everything in every way possible. Here’s reading:

Former member of Trump’s EPA transition team suggests air pollution doesn’t kill people. 4.2 million people died prematurely from air pollution in 2015.

Trump’s EPA policies risk more Alzheimer’s cases, doctors warn. Two new studies support findings that polluted air causes dementia.

Trump’s allies have some of the worst environmental voting records in Congress.

There’s much more here.

Oh, Those Pro-Protesters, At It…Wait.

Credit: YouTube.

Credit: YouTube.

It’s not protesters causing trouble, it’s a cop. Again. In this case, there’s a 13 year old who is damn lucky to be alive. Let’s see what caused this shining example of “to protect and serve” to boil over, shall we?

Protests erupted in Anaheim, California on Wednesday after an off-duty LAPD officer dragged a 13-year-old boy across his yard, pulled a gun on the boy’s friends, and pulled the trigger.

According to an eyewitness, the confrontation began after a young girl walked across the lawn of an off-duty officer, who responded by calling her a “cunt.” Thirteen-year-old Christian Dorscht reportedly tried to defend the girl.

Cellphone video then shows the unnamed cop grabbing and pulling Dorscht by the arm. As a group of young people wearing backpacks looks on, the officer drags Dorscht for a few yards. Moments later, three boys rush the officer, pushing him into nearby bushes to free Dorscht. Seemingly uninjured, the cop gathers himself and drags the 13-year-old through the shrubs. After one boy tries to punch him, the officer reaches into his waistband and pulls out his gun. Everyone backs away, but the officer fires anyway. Nobody was struck by the bullet.

Oh, well, a kid cut across his lawn. Yes, that’s such an extraordinarily unusual and heinous action! There’s no such thing as the cliche of an adult, generally an old curmudgeon, shaking their fist and yelling “damn kids, get off my lawn!” Obviously, such a horrible act forced this upstanding officer to spit “cunt” at her, and what on earth was a 13 year old boy thinking, trying to defend her? Goodness, such awful behaviour, oh my yes.

Approximately 300 protesters —including young people — gathered in the streets Wednesday night, as news of the incident spread. They reportedly blocked major avenues and intersections in Anaheim, home of Disneyland, and some protesters marched to the unnamed officer’s house. People yelled “Whose streets, our streets” and “Hands up, don’t shoot” as they marched, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Some of the demonstrators threw rocks at police observing the fray, while a few people banged on the doors of the officer’s home. Riot police were eventually called to block off protesters.

Oh, I’m sure that just completely justified calling in riot cops. Having been face to face with riot cops more than once, I can say that no, protests don’t justify their presence in any way. You have a bunch of hyped-up authoritarians swaddled in battle armor, just itching to use all those nifty, lethal toys.

So, what happened to the key players, like the cop, who was an adult, at least technically, who called a young girl a cunt, assaulted a 13 year old boy, and pulled his gun and fired? Oh, nothing much, but those evil, meddling kids?

Dorscht, who sustained a line of bruises on his neck, was arrested and brought to the Orange County Juvenile Hall for battery and making criminal threats against the officer. A 15-year-old involved in the initial confrontation was also arrested for assault and battery.

According to Anaheim Police Sgt. Daron Wyatt, the officer was not arrested but was removed from the field for three days. The LAPD is currently investigating the matter.

Oh, I’m sure they are “investigating”, if that means getting stories straight, shuffling paperwork, and purging evidence. In the meantime, two victims have been dumped into the maw of the SoCal juvenile justice system, which is a remarkably ugly one, as these systems go. As for those wicked protesters, 24 of them, including 6 minors, were arrested and charged for resisting arrest, battery, and refusing to disperse. Remember, cops are the good guys!

Via Think Progress.

Arizona Goes for Full Protest Suppression.

Women's March on Washington (Photo: Sarah Burris/RawStory).

Women’s March on Washington (Photo: Sarah Burris/RawStory).

The myth of professional protesters continues to be spread by rethugs, and Arizona rethugs have passed legislation which would allow the cops to seize the assets of anyone who attended a protest which turned violent in any way, along with the power to arrest those who planned the protest, although they did not commit any violent acts. The rethugs are extremely unhappy with The Resistance, and are doing everything they can to shut it down. We are all going to have to stiffen our spines and our resolve, and refuse to back down in the face of blatant rights violations.

The Republican-controlled Arizona Senate has passed a bill that would let law enforcement officials seize the assets of people who participate in protests that turn violent — even if those people had nothing to do with any violent incidents.

[…]

The bill would allow police to seize assets of anyone who attended a peaceful protest that happened to turn violent, and it also gives cops the power to arrest people who planned the events, even if they did not personally commit violence.

State Sen. John Kavanagh (R-Fountain Hills), who supported the bill, explained to the Arizona Capital Times that it’s aimed at curtailing the activities of “professional protest” groups whose goal is to start riots and damage private property.

“You now have a situation where you have full-time, almost professional agent-provocateurs that attempt to create public disorder,” said Kavanagh, a former police officer.

Bald-faced fucking liar. :spits: I’d like to see this flaming asshole address all the violence at Black Lives Matter protests, as the violence was all perpetrated by cops. I’d like to see this asspimple address the overwhelming violence committed by cops against all those at Standing Rock. Fuck you, Kavanagh. People are marching and protesting and protecting because it’s the only recourse we have. It’s not like we can look to our government for help.

Via Raw Story.

Marriage Equality Reduces Teen Suicides.

CREDIT: AP Photo/Seth Wenig.

CREDIT: AP Photo/Seth Wenig.

A new study reveals something remarkable: marriage equality cuts down on teen suicide. This shows just how much social justice issues matter, and that they can be, all too often, a matter of life or death. LGB teens are prone to suicide, given that they often find themselves with no support system, no safety net, and see a bleak future in which they can all too easily envision never being accepted, and never having the same human rights as other people.

A new study found some stunning results: After same-sex marriage became legal on a state level, the rate at which young people attempted suicide in that state dropped significantly.

Published this week in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, the new study used data from the hundreds of thousands of students who participated in the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS) between 1999 and 2015. Researchers from Johns Hopkins University, Harvard University, and Boston Children’s Hospital looked at 32 different states that legalized same-sex marriage in that span of time and found a consistent drop in teen suicide attempts in each state after marriage equality arrived.

Overall, the suicide rate attempt among all high school students dropped 7 percent in the year after marriage equality arrived in a state. For students who identified as gay, lesbian, bisexual or who were still questioning their orientation — a group whom the suicide attempt rate is much higher — the drop-off in suicide attempts was 14 percent after the arrival of marriage equality.

Because the effect was specific to each state as it legalized marriage equality, it cannot be dismissed as mere correlation. In fact, during the same span of time, suicide rates in the country were actually increasing across almost all age groups.

[…]

Regardless, the study offers a profound addition to the wealth of research already documenting the impact of what psychologists call “minority stress.” For example, a study published earlier this month in Australia found that LGB people who had strong social support and affirmation had normative rates of depression and anxiety, while only those who experienced rejection or had past experiences of trauma experienced higher rates. Several other studies in the U.S. have found that simply living in more conservative communities can have a negative impact.

Republicans, who so often tout themselves as being so very “pro-life”, but could not care less about the lives or health of women, and support the death penalty, are also staunchly against marriage equality. The fact that equality helps to maintain life is one which will, no doubt, not sway them in the least. For all their claims of pro-lifery, they don’t seem to be the least bit concerned with LGBT people dying. It’s rather difficult to not get the feeling they are cheering behind closed doors, so I imagine this news will be met with a renewed determination to kill marriage equality. Seeing as the Trump Regime is all set to rescind the Obama administration’s guidance protecting transgender students, which is little more than a license to harass and bully transgender kids, I’m sure an uptick in violence against transgender people and suicides will be seen. This is not a good. This is evil, absolutely evil, repulsive behaviour that any decent person should be ashamed of, and be willing to fight against, tooth and nail. Once again, the rethuglicans prove they are people who are pro-death, and they will go to any length to ostracize those they deem subhuman, and hope they will be driven to death, one way or another.

Full stories at Think Progress: one, two.

Homeland Security: Department of Lies.

Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly speaks at news conference as cars enter the United States from Mexico at the San Ysidro Port of Entry on February 10. CREDIT: AP Photo/Denis Poroy.

Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly speaks at news conference as cars enter the United States from Mexico at the San Ysidro Port of Entry on February 10. CREDIT: AP Photo/Denis Poroy.

Homeland Security, also known as the department of official lies and bullshit, is now spewing out lies about all those awful aliens. The manipulation is so blatant as to be pointless, outside of the Cult of Trump. Look at that photo, the choice of location! That’s a location I know very well, having been across it and back more times than I could ever count. One thing is sure – most all those cars lining up to head back into SoCal contain U.S. citizens. Mexico is a very popular place. I get the idea behind having the press conference there was to scare idiots though, “oooh, looky, an unsecured border! Hordes of aliens could come pouring in!” The bullshit is deep enough to choke on.

A Department of Homeland Security memo authored by Secretary John Kelly asserts that “criminal aliens routinely victimize Americans and other legal residents.”

The memo, entitled “Enforcement of the Immigration Laws to Serve the National Interest,” creates a new federal office meant to work with those victims.

“Accordingly, I am establishing the Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE) Office within the Office of the Director of ICE, which will create a programmatic liaison between ICE and the known victims of crimes committed by removable aliens,” Kelly writes. “To that end, I direct the Director of ICE to immediately reallocate any and all resources that are currently used to advocate on behalf of illegal aliens to the new VOICE Office, and to immediately terminate the provision of such outreach or advocacy services to illegal aliens.”

Sigh. Bullshit is not strong enough. Lies is not strong enough. This is not based on any factual information whatsoever. Immigrants, legal or illegal are less likely to commit crimes, particularly so in the case of people who are illegal. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why. Way back when, I worked with a whole lot of people who were illegal, and they were law abiding to the core. One thing they did not want was the attention of cops. What this new “office” will do is give hateful bigots the equivalent of a wet dream, allowing for a brand new level of harassment.

Data indicates undocumented immigrants are no more likely to commit crimes than American citizens, and are actually less likely to be criminals in some cases.

The literature is summarized in a 2015 Cato Institute report entitled, “Immigration and Crime — What the Research Says.” Here are some key findings from studies cited in the report.

— One study found that “roughly 1.6 percent of immigrant males 18–39 are incarcerated, compared to 3.3 percent of the native-born.” The study found the disparity in census data spanning three decades — from 1980 to 2010.

— Another found that the phased rollout of the Secure Communities (S-COMM) immigration enforcement program didn’t reduce crime in affected communities. S-COMM “led to no meaningful reduction in the FBI index crime rate,” researchers found. If undocumented immigrants were more likely to commit criminal acts, you’d expect to see crime rates decrease as undocumented immigrants were removed from communities. That wasn’t the case.

— Another study “looked at 159 cities at three dates between 1980 and 2000 and found that crime rates and levels of immigration are not correlated,” the CATO report says, summarizing the findings.

— Another “looked at a sample of 150 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) and found that levels of recent immigration had a statistically significant negative effect on homicide rates but no effect on property crime rates.” Yet another study found that an influx of immigrants is actually correlated with decreases in homicide and robbery rates.

— A study that looked looked at 103 different MSAs from 1994–2004 found that “the weight of the evidence suggests that immigration is not associated with increased levels of crime. To the extent that a relationship does exist, research often finds a negative effect of immigration on levels of crime, in general, and on homicide in particular.”

Last month, Richard Pérez-Peña of the New York Times alluded to some of the aforementioned research, writing, “several studies, over many years, have concluded that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than people born in the United States. And experts say the available evidence does not support the idea that undocumented immigrants commit a disproportionate share of crime.” Pérez-Peña’s report is entitled, “Contrary to Trump’s Claims, Immigrants Are Less Likely to Commit Crimes.”

While citizens don’t have reason to fear undocumented immigrants more than they would any other person, the two memos distributed by Homeland Security on Tuesday makes gives undocumented immigrants good reason to by fearful of anyone with a badge.

Oh yes. There will be much more reason to fear. As if non-white people didn’t already need to be scared to death of cops.

As ThinkProgress covered in another post, Kelly’s memos detail “an implementation plan to hire thousands more immigration officials, make more criminal offenses punishable by deportation, allow local law enforcement officials to carry out federal immigration duties, and make it easier to prevent entry to asylum-seeking children who show up at the southern U.S. border.”

Oh good, even more reason to fear cops! Neatly buried under all the fear-mongering is the ginormous waste of money this will be.

Full story at Think Progress.

Arctic Hysteria.

A still from Arke’s 1996 video Arctic Hysteria shows the artist naked and crawling across a photograph of Nuugaarsuk Point in Greenland. Photo courtesy of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Acquired with funding from Anker Fonden 
Poul Buchard/Brøndum & Co.

A still from Arke’s 1996 video Arctic Hysteria shows the artist naked and crawling across a photograph of Nuugaarsuk Point in Greenland. Photo courtesy of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Acquired with funding from Anker Fonden 
Poul Buchard/Brøndum & Co.

Most people have never heard of Pia Arke, which is a shame, because she was an artist who took on one huge subject: the colonial takeover of indigenous peoples by those who termed themselves “explorers” and “discoverers”. There’s a great deal of horror inherent in any indigenous peoples experiences with colonialism. Unsurprisingly, indigenous women got the worst of it.

In the spring of 1995, Danish-Greenlandic artist Pia Arke was digging through the archives of New York City’s Explorers Club. She was searching for maps, ethnographic images, and scientific miscellany that she could repurpose into collages that confront Greenland’s colonial past. Arke knew early 20th-century adventurers often, by turns, demeaned and romanticized her Inuit ancestors. Even so, one photo from American explorer Robert E. Peary’s collection shocked her: a native woman, topless and screaming, restrained by two fur-clad and seemingly untroubled white men. A curator told Arke the woman could have been suffering from a madness called Arctic hysteria.

More than 20 years later, Arke’s mesmerizing film Arctic Hysteria, which she created the year after she found that dark photo, was looping endlessly in an alcove at Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Situated in a small town along the Baltic Sea about 50 kilometers north of Copenhagen, the Louisiana Museum enjoys the kind of international acclaim that makes it a dream exhibit space for most artists. Arke’s work was part of last year’s star-studded exhibit Illumination, which featured such luminaries as Ai Weiwei, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall, and Gerhard Richter. The flashiest Arke piece on display was Legende I-V, a series of five collages of Greenlandic maps and sepia-toned family snapshots layered with imported commodities such as rice, sugar, and coffee. Legende I-V is physically imposing—it dominated an entire gallery wall—and hauntingly beautiful. The foodstuffs function both symbolically and texturally, the photographs evoke the warmth of kinship, and the cartographic lines of Greenland, stamped with place names referencing colonial explorers (Peary Land, Humboldt Glacier, and Kane Bassin, for example), loom insistently over everyone.

Arke’s Arctic Hysteria is equally magnetic. The performance, which lasts six minutes, is silent and consists almost entirely of one scene: Arke crawling naked across a giant black-and-white photo of Nuugaarsuk Point, a spit of land at the terminus of a C-shaped bay. The artist lived there, outside the small town of Narsaq, Greenland, with her parents and siblings in the late 1960s. In the video, Arke strokes the artificial landscape, rolls across it, and sniffs it like an animal. Then she methodically rips the entire thing to shreds, gathers the curled shards of paper, and lets them fall across her shoulders and thighs. The intimacy of the performance and the title’s historical allusion are classic Arke.

[…]

Historical context points to alternative interpretations. Inuit women labored at the very bottom of the social hierarchy on Peary’s expeditions and in his camps, expected to sew, fish, carry wood, and submit to the Americans’ sexual desires. Peary, for example, fathered two sons with his Inuit laundress, Ahlikasingwah. His navigator, Robert Bartlett, viewed one woman’s hysteria as simple protest, or “pure cussedness.” Accounts described women who seemed intent on escape or dissent leaping over the ship’s railings or shouting for a knife. Expedition member Donald MacMillan recounted finding a woman named Inawaho naked and screaming, presumably unaware of her surroundings and out of her mind. But as soon as MacMillan pulled out his camera, Inawaho hurled huge chunks of ice at him and later begged him to destroy the photos. Were these women, in fact, crazy? Or were they reacting perfectly rationally—even bravely—to their circumstances?

You can read and see more here.

The Rich Are Different: Buying Access to the President.

Donald Trump speaks to supporters at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida. CREDIT: AP Photo/Gerald Herbert, File.

Donald Trump speaks to supporters at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida. CREDIT: AP Photo/Gerald Herbert, File.

It’s a very old saying, the rich are different. It’s true, they are, by virtue of money, and the power money purchases. If they are different as people, it’s because money allows them to be arrogant, compassion free, unethical assholes without consequence. No, not every rich person on the planet is a truly shitty person, but they are rare birds in the flock of the rich. Rich people are accustomed to getting their way, using the time-honored method of greasing palms and opening doors with wedges of cash and promises. Now that we have someone in the white house who wouldn’t know an ethical behaviour if it bit him on the balls, the slime trail of the rich is visible from space.

According to a New York Times piece published on Saturday, Trump’s son Eric told the newspaper that Mar-a-Lago admits about 20 to 40 new members each year. Considering that Mar-a-Lago raised its initiation fees to $200,0000 after Trump’s presidential inauguration, that’s up to $8 million dollars coming in from new members per year. And that doesn’t include taxes or the $14,000 charge for each member’s annual dues.

Trump and his closest advisers have repeatedly denied there’s anything improper about Trump’s members-only club in Palm Beach. They say it doesn’t amount to paying for access to President Trump because the club is social, not political. And they argue the powerful people who pay for membership have other avenues of communicating with the president.

That’s an argument? I fail to see it.

“He has not and will not be discussing policy with club members,” White House spokesperson Holly Hicks said in a statement provided to the New York Times.

But reporting from the Times and from Politico suggests otherwise.

Real estate executive Bruce Toll told the New York Times that he does occasionally discuss national policy issues — specifically, Trump’s plans to increase spending on infrastructure projects — when he sees Trump at Mar-a-Lago. According to Toll, Trump sometimes receives advice from other club members about what he should do policy-wise.

Developer Richard LeFrak, a close friend of Trump’s, recounted a discussion at Mar-a-Lago last weekend during which Trump asked him for help with the proposed border wall between the United States and Mexico. Trump was unhappy with the projected cost of the wall, wanted to come up with a way to build it more cheaply, and suggested that the head of the Department of Homeland Security would give LeFrak a call to talk about it.

And according to an audio tape obtained by Politico from one of Trump’s New Jersey clubs that was also published on Saturday, Trump has asked his club members for their guidance selecting his cabinet appointees.

“We were just talking about who we [are] going to pick for the FCC, who [are] we going to pick for this, who we gonna accept — boy, can you give me some recommendations?” Trump said to a member, according to the tape.

[…]

This weekend, Trump is planning to use Mar-a-Lago to meet with potential candidates he’s considering to fill the National Security Adviser position recently vacated by Michael Flynn.

Of course, it’s not unusual for world leaders to surround themselves with rich and powerful people. But it is unique to be able to pay $200,000 for entry into a private club where multiple sources close to the president have confirmed he’s at his most relaxed and ready to mingle.

Applications to Mar-a-Lago have surged since Trump won the presidency.

Democratic lawmakers in both the House and the Senate have demanded more information about who holds a membership at Mar-a-Lago and how closely they have been vetted. The urgency increased after last weekend, when Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe discussed a potential North Korea crisis in full view of the diners and waiters at his club.

Trump has spent the past three weekends at Mar-a-Lago even though he promised during the campaign that he would “rarely leave the White House.”

The system of government in the States has always been susceptible to corruption, it’s not the most well thought out system. I would say that no sitting president has ever been as open to corruption, and so willing to embrace it in full view of the public at large as the Tiny Tyrant. Donny isn’t capable of governing, he isn’t even capable of running a proper business, and hates being in the white house, acting as president. No, he only feels capable when he’s immersed in the foul cronyism of the monied, who he can slither over to for ‘advice’ on how to president, as he is utterly bankrupt when it comes to the little things, like intelligence, planning, and knowledge.

Via Think Progress.

“Generals, dictators, we have everything,”

President Donald Trump, living alone inside the White House, often hungers for friendly interaction as he adjusts to the difficult work of governance. At his clubs, he finds what’s missing.

That showed last November at a cocktail and dinner reception celebrating longtime members of his Bedminster, New Jersey golf club. Deep into the process of meeting potential Cabinet nominees, the president-elect invited partygoers to stop by the next day to join the excitement.

“We’re doing a lot of interviews tomorrow — generals, dictators, we have everything,” Trump told the crowd, according to an audio tape of his closed-press remarks obtained by POLITICO from a source in the room. “You may wanna come around. It’ll be fun. We’re really working tomorrow. We have meetings every 15, 20 minutes with different people that will form our government.”

For Trump, the “Winter White House” of Mar-a-Lago offers him more than a warm and gilded setting outside of Washington, D.C. — it puts the isolated president back in the mix with his club family, where friends said he feels most like himself.

“So, this is my real group,” Trump said at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, on November 18, according to the audio tape. “These are the people that came here in the beginning, when nobody knew what this monster was gonna turn out to be, right?”

He added: “I see all of you. I recognize, like 100 percent of you, just about.”

[…]

Turning to a longtime club member that night, he said: “We were just talking about who we [are] going to pick for the FCC, who [are] we going to pick for this, who we gonna accept — boy, can you give me some recommendations?”

The supportive crowd ate it up as the relaxed Trump, in his element, gave them a close-up view of how he was setting up the government. “You are the special people,” he told the crowd of about 100 members, who mingled around a sushi station served by a waiter wearing a camouflage “Make America Great Again” cap.

Politico has the full story on this, and it should upset the hell outta people. It upsets me, and it’s fucking infuriating. The only thing that matters to Trump is being the center of attention, and that attention is best when people are paying obscene amounts of money to be one of the Tiny Tyrant’s “friends.” The special people – filthy rich lickspittles. Obviously, the rest of us don’t matter in the flaky crust of Trump’s manufactured reality.

Killing Ourselves Harshly.

CREDIT: Pexels

CREDIT: Pexels.

We are in a hell of a lot of trouble in regard to climate change, and all the denials are simply going to push us over the cliff, so to speak. If a concerted effort is not made, right now, we will have successfully condemned our species, and many others, too. Other species are already suffering for our disregard, and we are now feeling the effects ourselves, and yet the denial continues. America’s role in climate denial looms large, with the current regime obstinately fixated on denial. I don’t care much that those peddling denial don’t care for the term denier, it fits, and I’ll keep using it until the denial stops, although I won’t be holding my breath on that score. It doesn’t surprise me when older people take a nosedive into denial. What does surprise me is all those who have children and deny, deny, deny. I’d think they might care at least a little bit, about their descendants. Here’s the Oh Fuck roundup:

Two years ago this month, in a well-publicized and much lampooned political stunt, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) brought a snowball to the Senate floor to highlight the “unseasonable” cold and cast doubt on climate change.

The Republican lawmaker would have been hard-pressed to find a snowball anywhere in his home state this past weekend.

Oklahoma just endured a spell of exceptionally hot weather. Mangum, Oklahoma saw temperatures close to 100º F, setting a state record. The average February high in Mangum is 56º F.

It is extremely unusual to see such sweltering temperatures in the dead of winter, but climate change is loading the dice for record-breaking heat. Here, the human fingerprint is clear. Carbon pollution traps heat, warming the planet. This, in turn, shifts the entire distribution of temperatures.

[…]

Many people may welcome a temperate day in February, but warm weather in normally cold months disrupts ecosystems. Trees may bloom after an unseasonably balmy spell — and then suffer frost damage when cold weather returns. Flowers may blossom and shed their petals before bees arrive to pollinate them. These minor destabilizations have a ripple effect, impacting flora, fauna, and the industries built around them.

Full story here.

A crack in Antarctics’s Larsen C ice shelf has grown sharply in recent months. CREDIT: NASA.

A crack in Antarctics’s Larsen C ice shelf has grown sharply in recent months. CREDIT: NASA.

The Arctic and Antarctic are seeing an accelerated collapse of both sea and land ice.

When you add in Trump’s aggressive agenda to undo both domestic and global climate action, we are facing the worst-case scenario for climate change — and one new study finds that the worst case is “societal collapse.”

The unprecedented drop in global sea ice we reported on last month has continued. Arctic sea ice reached a new record low, the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) reports.

Full story here.

The Power Must Not Be Questioned!

Stephen Miller, policy adviser to President-elect Donald Trump arrives at Trump Tower in New York, Monday, Jan. 9, 2017. CREDIT: AP Photo/Evan Vucci.

Stephen Miller, policy adviser to President-elect Donald Trump arrives at Trump Tower in New York, Monday, Jan. 9, 2017. CREDIT: AP Photo/Evan Vucci.

As most everyone is aware, Stephen Miller did the media dance all of Sunday, spreading bullshit far and wide. It’s no secret that the Tiny Dictator is displeased with Spicer, and tweeted happily about Miller’s performances. Those performances should disturb the hell out of everyone with a brain and the ability to use it.

Senior White House Policy Advisor Stephen Miller raised plenty of eyebrows on Sunday as the perused the talk-show circuit talking about cases of voter fraud (that don’t exist) and Steve Bannon’s lack of involvement in drafting executive orders (which, according to most reports, is the exact opposite of the truth).

But perhaps his most alarming statement was in reference to the federal judges in Washington rejecting President Donald Trump’s Muslim ban.

“I think that it’s been an important reminder to all Americans that we have a judiciary that has taken far too much power and become in many cases a supreme branch of government,” Miller told John Dickerson of CBS News, as first noted by Will Saletan of Slate. “The end result of this, though, is that our opponents, the media, and the whole world will soon see, as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.”

Emphasis mine. This is the boot stomp of authoritarianism, the herald of a regime which wants no dissent whatsoever, from anyone. What’s even more frightening is the amount of people willing to go along with it. Elsewhere I wrote: I think there’s a place for the very worst truth of all: it does not take much to normalise the most monstrous of behaviours, and it takes very little indeed to make people willingly join in said behaviours. The time and place is now.

Think Progress has the full story.

Oh, that fucking wall.

An agent of the border patrol, observes near the Mexico-US border fence, on the Mexican side, separating the towns of Anapra, Mexico and Sunland Park, New Mexico, on January 25. CREDIT: AP Photo/Christian Torres.

An agent of the border patrol, observes near the Mexico-US border fence, on the Mexican side, separating the towns of Anapra, Mexico and Sunland Park, New Mexico, on January 25. CREDIT: AP Photo/Christian Torres.

The projected cost for President Donald Trump’s border wall continues to rise, and Trump has no good plan to contain it.

On Thursday, Reuters reported that the border wall will be much more expensive than the $10 billion figure Trump repeatedly cited during his campaign or the $12–$15 billion cited by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) last month.

“Trump’s ‘wall’ along the U.S.-Mexico border would be a series of fences and walls that would cost as much as $21.6 billion, and take more than three years to construct,” Reuters reported, citing a U.S. Department of Homeland Security document the outlet obtained.

And it could end up costing even more than that.

“Bernstein Research, an investment research group that tracks material costs, has said that uncertainties around the project could drive its cost up to as much as $25 billion,” Reuters reports.

On Saturday morning, Trump responded to that news by assuring Americans that costs of constructing the wall will come “WAY DOWN” as soon as he gets involved in the negotiations.

<Tweets snipped.>

But Trump’s citation of the reduced cost of F-35s should give no one confidence he’ll be able to bring down the exorbitant cost of his border wall.

That’s because on January 30, Trump took credit for cost cuts to the fighter jets that were already put in place before he got involved. A Washington Post fact-check gave Trump’s claim that he was responsible for cutting $600 million from the F-35 program “Four Pinocchios.”

[…]

Trump has repeatedly taken credit for deals that were in the works long before he won the election or became president. For instance, he’s overstated his role in deals with Intel, General Motors, Fiat Chrysler, Ford, and Sprint to take credit for saving American jobs.

[…]

Last year, Reuters reported that U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents don’t think the type of border wall Trump has long supported is necessary for national security. Instead, they seek better equipment and technology.

Not only is this wall idea the epitome of idiocy, people tend to forget a different cost of such idiocy – the high cost imposed on animals, the environment, and various ecologies. This sort of arrogant assholery is little more than a chest-pounding display of cruelty, a game for bully boys. Unfortunately, such people don’t much give a shit about the planet which gives them life, or the diversity of life on our earth, which has no use for the concrete idiocy of naked apes intent on warring with their neighbours. You can read a bit about this high cost here.

Full story at Think Progress.

Jesus Wept.

CREDIT: AP Photo/Evan Vucci.

CREDIT: AP Photo/Evan Vucci.

Oh, we are so very fucked. People in Iran are extremely upset with the Tiny Dictator, and there’s excellent reason for them to be. If Donny really wanted to do something about potential terrorists, he’d shut up, resign, and go back to watching teevee in Florida, at Mar a whatever it is. Unfortunately, he’s super busy, watching teevee in the white house. Seems to be where he gets all his information from, seeing as he doesn’t read, and his supposed intelligence briefings last around 20 minutes, while he’s preoccupied with super important shit, like how to be rude to a department store on twitter. Then there’s more teevee watching, and tweeting. Tweeting on his personal account, because apparently the POTUS account is beneath him. Or maybe it just reminds him of how fucking incompetent he is, and that he has no business in government of any kind.

On Friday morning, President Trump cited a Lawfare article in an attempt to build a case that the three judges U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit made a bad decision Thursday evening when they declined to reinstate his Muslim ban.

Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump

LAWFARE: “Remarkably, in the entire opinion, the panel did not bother even to cite this (the) statute.” A disgraceful decision!

Indeed, the Lawfare article in question — entitled “How to Read (and How Not to Read) Today’s 9th Circuit Opinion” — does mention that the Ninth Circuit’s opinion didn’t cite a statute pertaining to “Suspension of entry or imposition of restrictions by President,” a statute that “forms the principal statutory basis for the executive order.”

But had Trump read the article, he would’ve seen that the author — Benjamin Wittes, editor in chief of Lawfare and a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution — concluded that the court actually made the right decision.

[…]

Wittes concludes his piece by blasting the Trump administration’s “incompetent malevolence.”

“Eventually, the court has to confront the clash between a broad delegation of power to the President — a delegation which gives him a lot of authority to do a lot of not-nice stuff to refugees and visa holders — in a context in which judges normally defer to the president, and the incompetent malevolence with which this order was promulgated.”

Instead of coming across the passage he tweeted out from reading the article, it appears Trump was alerted to the Lawfare piece by watching Morning Joe.

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“For a sense of what is happening outside, he watches cable, both at night and during the day — too much in the eyes of some aides — often offering a bitter play-by-play of critics like CNN’s Don Lemon,” the Times reported.

Lifting material from TV news for a tweet is far from unprecedented for Trump. As Fortune reported on February 2, “At least five times since he took office… Trump has tweeted about policy ideas and thoughts that seem directly related to news that was being shown on channels such as Fox News.”

Among the instances are a tweet Trump posted threatening to pull federal funding from public colleges that came minutes after a discussion of the same topic on Fox & Friends, another where the president threatened to send “the Feds!” into Chicago that came on the heels of a discussion of violence in Chicago on The O’Reilly Factor, and a tweet blasting Chelsea Manning as “ungrateful traitor” that came just minutes after she was called the same thing on Fox News.

Really, it’s bad enough he is such an ignorant idiot, he could at least try to pretend he’s somewhat informed. The full story is at Think Progress. As if all this wasn’t quite bad enough, “contempt of cop” is going to get a whole lot worse. Trump wants stormtrooper protections, bigly yuuuge ones.

In a vague executive order signed at the official swearing-in ceremony for new Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Trump instructed Sessions to work with Congress to establish “new Federal crimes, and increase penalties for existing Federal crimes” to protect law enforcement officers.

More signalling than substance, the order gives executive agencies a broad directive for change without naming specific policy preferences. But you don’t need a divining rod to see where Trump is pointing his team.

Republicans have already embraced the idea of extending hate crimes protections to police officers. Trump’s rhetoric both before and after his election win made clear he will default to the side of police in any dispute with the public they serve. And three recent high-profile, ambush-style killings of police officers — one committed by a Trump fan and Confederate flag enthusiast in Iowa — have generated a sense of political urgency around officer safety.

Yet rather than deterring such rare and devastating assassinations, Thursday’s order lays down fertilizer for a frightfully dank new crop of routine police abuses.

Oh yes. Anyone who has ever had experience with cops knows how much they love tacking on any fucking charge they can think of, even given no reason whatsoever. This is not going to go well, and of course, it’s going to impact people of colour the most. Full story at Think Progress.

Let the War Crimes Begin…

President Donald Trump looks at a figurine given to him by a group of county sheriffs, Tuesday, Feb. 7, 2017, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington. CREDIT: AP Photo/Evan Vucci.

President Donald Trump looks at a figurine given to him by a group of county sheriffs, Tuesday, Feb. 7, 2017, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington. CREDIT: AP Photo/Evan Vucci.

The Tiny Dictator, who must apparently be appeased with toys and baubles, spent some time talking with airline people, and mouthing off about how great war crimes are. Whether or not he actually understands that what he was spewing does indeed constitute war crimes, anyone’s guess. It’s getting fucking darker by the day, and I’m afraid people are just going to start letting go and slipping under. I’m seriously trying not to, but it’s getting difficult holding your head above the never ending, rising tide of shit.

After talking about the condition of American airports, Trump said, “We spent 6 trillion dollars in the Middle East. We’ve got nothing. We never even kept even a little tiny oil well. I said, ‘Keep the oil.’”

Trump suggested that the oil proceeds could fund a major government infrastructure project. “We’ve spent 6 trillion dollars in the Middle East. We have nothing, and we have an obsolete plane system, obsolete airports, obsolete trains, we have bad roads. We’re going to change all of that folks. You’re going to be so happy with Trump. I think you already are.”

Plundering a country’s natural resources is a war crime according to the Hague Conventions, which prohibits destroying or seizing an enemy’s property, and according the Geneva Conventions, which simply states, “pillage is prohibited.” The U.S. is a signatory to both.

Trump claims to have been against the Iraq War from the beginning — he wasn’t — but argues that once the U.S. went in, the military should’ve pillaged Iraq’s oil.

During Trump’s first speech to CIA agents last month, he said, “We should’ve kept the oil… maybe you’ll have another chance.”

Think Progress has the full story.