ancianita
ancianita's JournalIf Anyone Wants To Watch GA Vote Tracking Online
No page refresh is needed for these two.
The GA vote count sequence is mail, early, then same day votes.
The New York Times Live Vote Tracker
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/01/05/us/georgia-elections
The ABC News Live Vote Tracker, Including County Map
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/georgia-senate-runoff-election-results-2021/story?id=74588101
The NYT/ABC numbers differential is probably logistics related.
Governor Cuomo Briefing January 5 2021
Day 311New: The UK variant covid strain is an even greater threat.
The problem: much higher infection rate, which requires mandates on testing. Also,
-- vaccinations are not keeping up with covid, nevermind all its variants
-- incompetent, do-nothing political leadership continues to exacerbate Americans' covid situation
-- Azar's and Redfield's do-nothing incompetence and silence are justification for states to act
Solution: If the US won't act, NY will act. It will refuse entry to all those with the new variant.
DISCUSSIONS ON CLIMATE CRISIS -- FINAL POST ON THE PROBLEM
Previous posts:
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1017628074
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100214775507
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100214783130
(RE the bolded problems list: any bolded problems without sources/info are left to the reader to initiate discussion; the problems are so vast that I can only try to wrap my head around those that might help solve the others. )
3. Our Human inertia
— human ignorance
For all the ignorance we see result in politics, and from the designs of Austrian austerity neoliberal scarcity economics policies -- easily shown by
a. the defunding and starvation rations of public education for future generations,
b. media for-profit tabloid “news”,
c. paywalls, etc. ...
One future and unnecessary contributor of ignorance to keep in mind is the latest form of imiseration capitalism — unregulated, non-existent broadband access.
While reports vary, anywhere from 21 million to 162 million Americans don't even have broadband access,
so they don't know about the issues many Americans and the world are aware of -- like the latest bird and insect die-offs in the West, or ground and water pollutions that affect their food quality and health access, or their jobs, or the lack of.
Corporate scarcity marketing through news and social media only adds to humans' general inertia.
That it's broadband's for-profit fault, not humans'.
— to maintain ignorance, the manufacture of consent based on misplaced doubt, denial, conspiracy & misplaced dissent,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_denial#Lobbying
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/morning-agriculture/2019/09/20/democrats-highlight-usdas-buried-climate-studies-750784
No matter the media — publishing, Internet, TV or radio — drama, conflict-driven stories of prurient interest are more profitable than substantive information or data;
finger pointing to the closest visible “culprits” is easier than actually seeing the “invisible hand” whose owners are findable.
— which in turn invites cognitive errors in discourse, and
— the maintaining of ideology;
— Public Inertia and Mobilization
Social inertia is a given.
Any climate lawmaking and policies have to assume that the 71 million who drag on society in all things personal and social, and handicap the collective will, no matter what has to happen to them to snap them out of their stupidity — all lawmaking, funding and projects MUST just proceed as if they understand and approve. Were future suffering generations to come back in time, they’d kill this population and the rest of us for allowing them any place at the climate table, where, in the name of “freedom” or “budgets,” or ideologies, they press the rest of us to eat media and street drama, press us into confused derails that lead to the unmitigatable extinctions of everyone at the whole table.
Human inertia comes from austerity capitalism's “invisible hand,” a networked reality of agents that climate mitigators must penetrate and change.
4. Our Value, Money & Wealth
— tax havens, central banks, money, investor networks;
The world GDP is $100 TRILLION per year.
Half of that GWP
is so-called consumer spending by the prosperous, meaning non-essential buying of things that degrade the biosphere.
Even the productive half of GWP, food, health and housing are overheating the world.
Who enacts the world’s economy?
Who are the ones who make it go, who theorize, implement, administer and defend it?
Those who make laws.
Lawmakers (when not fundraising, politicking at their publics) get their ideas from others, mostly
— think tanks, academics, MBA professors, economics depts, and their students;
— WTO, stock markets,
— all the laws and bureaucrats administering the laws,
— police and military enforcing them;
— the CEO’s of all companies;
— shareholder associations, pension funds, individual shareholders, hedge funds, financial firms, banks, insurance, re-insurance companies.
Central banks are the biggest central problem.
https://www.bloombergquint.com/global-economics/charting-the-global-economy-contraction-becomes-common-theme
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/markets/stocks/news/morgan-stanley-goldman-declare-global-recession-is-under-way/articleshow/74679639.cms?from=mdr
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/markets/forex/surging-us-dollar-is-next-big-headache-for-world-economy/articleshow/74698208.cms?from=mdr
https://www.simplifiedshiksha.com/imf-confirms-global-recession-2020/
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/markets/forex/surging-us-dollar-is-next-big-headache-for-world-economy/articleshow/74698208.cms?from=mdr
The Bank of International Settlements will do whatever the central banks decide to do re climate change investment. BIS appears to be the final word, but it’s a rubber stamp on what the Big Twelve of the centrals
decide to do.
Finance and its international legal enablers are actor networks that add up to about 8 million people.
But the actors with agency can make the rest choose to do things differently.
That will be brought up in the “Work” segment of this series.
Who matters most in the 8 million actor network?
The top twelve central banks
and government legislators who make the law,
and make those laws on value and wealth stick — no ifs or buts — permanently,
such that climate change costs get paid by the 8 million who abandon responsibility to the Biosphere in favor of wealth building.
When government legislators enforce new, pro-biosphere finance law, the 8 million and actors with agency can no longer hide in extrajudicial bubbles, nor will capitalists be allowed to cast off their 'collateral damage' for the rest of humanity and the Biosphere to mop up.
— international cooperation and coordination;
5. Earth Dynamics & Ecosystems Within
— heat waves,
— 4-season intensification,
— drought, desertification,
— deforestation,
— air, fresh water, land depletion,
— Antarctic/Greenland snow and ice melt,
It’s not that people can’t move, they can and would. It’s the stress of the permanence of that change on humans for hundreds to thousands to millions of years, that will
a) stress smaller land base use for humans on Earth, and
b) make lowering the average global temperature harder because of
c) an intense drive to force more fossil burning.
Say sea level goes up one centimeter from Antarctic/Greenland glacial melt.
That’s equal to 3,600 cubic kilometers (miles) of water; 600 times as much as all the oil pumped every year.
Antarctic glacial basins, mainly Victoria and Totten (part of 70 out of 100 in Antarctica) hold ice that’s sliding downhill faster, through moulins (melt rivers way bigger than the Amazon's flow) and will soon deposit many thousands of cubic kilometers (miles) of melted ice to raise sea levels 2 meters to 6 meters, flooding all coastal cities including New York, London, Singapore, LA, Honolulu, Seattle, Boston, Bangkok, all of Bangladesh. Oceanic rise will displace 10% of the world’s population and disrupt 20% of the world’s food supply.
It’s time for lawmakers and central banks to decide to organize and pay for what geoengineers know has to be done since yesterday.
— fresh water source depletion,
— ocean acidification,
— soil death,
— ecosystem death,
— Anthropocene 6th Extinction,
Recent extinctions include the
Saudi gazelle,the Japanese sea lion, the melomys,
the vaquita porpoise, the Alagoas foliage-gleaner, the cryptic treehunter,
Spix’s macaw, the po’ouli, the northern white rhino,
the mountain tapir, the Haitian solenodon, the giant otter,
Attwater’s prairie chicken, the Spanish lynx, the Persian fallow deer,
the Japanese crested ibis, the Arabian oryx, the snub-nosed monkey,
the Ceylon elephant, the indris, Zanzibar’s red colobus,
the mountain gorilla, the white-throated wallaby, the walia ibex,
the aye-aye, the ficuna, the giant panda, the monkey-eating eagle, and
an estimated two hundred more species of mammals,
seven hundred species of birds,
four hundred species of reptiles,
six hundred species of amphibians, and
four thousand species of plants.
99% of all meat alive is humans plus domesticated beasts — cattle, pigs, sheep, goats.
Wild creatures are 1% of the meat alive.
20% of the fish now in oceans are wild fish.
The current rate of extinctions compared to geological norms is now several thousandfold faster.
It’s called the 6th Great Extinction.
Thus we humans are the start of the Anthropocene — the most obvious examples of things done by humans that cannot be undone, which are ocean acidification and deoxygenation so profound that the first will massively accelerate the second.
What humans cannot undo are the Anthropocene's clearest demarcation,
which means the damage will be in the fossil record for as long as Earth lasts.
Evolution and speciation will be restored in less than 20 million years.
— human death …
Final thoughts on The Problem.
Climate crises, much more than covid-19, will render current ideologies and politics irrelevant to future generations.
Which is a good thing.
The sooner we put all ideologies and politics in service of the Future, the more assured of a livable future our descendants will have.
Earth first.
Our only doom is to give up.
On to The Work this Thursday…
Chris Hayes On The Criminal Call and the Real Context
For Trump, the criminal call is no one-off, rule of law and the nation don't matter.
For us who live in reality, nipping authoritarianism is now core to our work, with time and the Constitution on our side.
BREAKING: Nancy Pelosi Elected House Speaker
Newly elected and returning members have taken the oath of office and the full House of Representatives has voted.
Speaker Pelosi won 216 votes to Kevin McCarthy's 209 votes.
The Honorable Nancy Pelosi is Speaker of the House for the third time.
House Dems Signal Bolder Action by Weakening Self-Imposed Austerity Rules
From Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on FB:One of the first votes I ever cast broke with my party. I voted against a package of House rules that strangled transformative legislation for working people and climate.
Now, the Congressional Progressive Caucus has pushed these critical rule changes in House negotiations.
One of the first deep lessons I learned in the House is that process IS policy. If we passed Medicare for All, Green New Deal, and other big policy under these old rules, then it could be weaponized into austerity legislation - required to include insane tax hikes or service cuts.
So these rule changes are a big deal and not only on healthcare.
They are structural changes in the House that level the playing field for a full SUITE of flagship legislation, locks in that field for the next two years, and establishes precedents for after.
This was not easy. And to be 💯% honest, it was hard while we were fighting for this to be targeted and marred as some sellout-enemy of the people over a late tactical disagreement over one floor vote. Also a bummer to see figures excuse comments like “f- her and f- anyone who protects her.” That’s not tone, that’s violence.
On one hand, I am no stranger to abusive rhetoric and know that taking knocks comes with being an elected official. But as someone who prioritizes movement-building and winning, creating something joyful that people actually want to be a part of is an important organizing principle.
BUT, let us celebrate this achievement! We need the energy of celebration to keep pushing!
These rule changes are a BFD. Breaking austerity mindset and rules, especially on climate, is a major tenet of the Green New Deal.
We will learn, build, uplift and advance together.
💜 Happy new year
From the article:
In practice, the new section means legislation that fits within the two broad new categories doesn’t need to comply with appropriations limits affecting discretionary programs, or pay-as-you-go rules for measures affecting tax revenues and “direct spending,” otherwise known as mandatory programs.
There is no reason, frankly, for any of the PAYGO rules to still exist. Any voter who is both obsessed with deficits and still believes against all evidence that Democrats are chiefly responsible for them is lost to the party to begin with. And in any case Democrats cannot properly address the country’s challenges while meeting PAYGO rules, given that Republicans are intransigent on tax increases for the wealthy. It’s far easier to get Republicans to trade spending priorities than to get them on the bad side of their donors and supply-side ideology...
the good part is that not only are COVID relief and climate change two of the most crucial policy needs in the coming year (alongside healthcare), a wide variety of spending programs can fit under that rubric:
But the new exemptions are so broad that it’s possible wide swaths of a $1.5 trillion infrastructure package similar to one that passed the House over the summer could be spared, for instance. That measure contained new spending and tax incentives for clean energy programs and financing, water and wastewater infrastructure and more.
The new language stipulates that “measures to prevent, prepare for, or respond to economic, environmental, or public health consequences resulting from climate change” wouldn’t be considered deficit-spending that requires offsets.
Unity -- progressives, moderates and establishment Democrats -- gets America moving.
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2021/01/02/house-dems-signal-bolder-action-by-weakening-self-imposed-austerity-rules/
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Gender: Do not displayHometown: New England, The South, Midwest
Home country: USA
Current location: Sarasota
Member since: Sat Mar 5, 2011, 12:32 PM
Number of posts: 36,017
