Texas Progressives: Last roundup of 2022 for Bum Steer Austin

Austin is Texas Monthly's Bum Steer for 2023. 

Related to that, the Observer notes the rent is too damned high for UT students. It's too damned high for anybody, for that matter, at $2,000 a month.

SocraticGadfly wished a merry fucking Christmas to Robert Jeffress for cavorting with Belial.

Off the Kuff compared Beto's performance in Harris County in 2022 to his performance in 2018 and Joe Biden's in 2020.

Paradise in Hell once again channels Donald Trump.

The Current looks at the causes and effects of pandemic fatigue.

The Texas Signal casts a wary eye at the forthcoming legislative session.

Robert Rivard laments how easy it is for bad cops to get hired by one law enforcement agency after another.  

The Monthly covers the feds looking at Llano's book banning.

Block Club Chicago and Borderless Magazine followed 10 of the thousands of Venezuelan migrants sent to Chicago as part of Texas Gov. Abbott's political stunt this year.

Two Texas businessmen were leaders in pushing to Trump the idea that state legislatures could overturn presidential (or other, I presume) election results.

"Whatever it takes" is NOT an answer for the Russia-Ukraine war.

The Fed says those older workers are staying retired, and that could have interest rate implications.

A Bad Trip with the Toad Shaman

The Observer's longform is informative, sad, scary, and hilarious in the sense to the the 2021 state constitutional amendment sent to the public by the Lege, over public health measures restricting COVID church services, now being used by New Age wingnuts to start "churches" devoted to smoking toad venom:

Entheogenic churches seem to be spreading rapidly in Texas. Ian Benouis, an Austin-based attorney, says he has helped organize dozens such “medicine churches,” which use bufo or other psychedelic substances such as ayahuasca or kambo. He explained that the state provides the best legal protection in the country for these types of churches because a 2021 amendment to the Texas Constitution prohibits the state or local government from limiting the services of religious organizations. An entheogen is a psychoactive substance, usually derived from a plant, that induces altered states of consciousness for religious or spiritual purposes. Many researchers prefer that term to psychedelic when referring to substances like bufo.

Beyond that hilarious petard hoisting, the scary part is that this is toad venom, is poisonous, and unlike LSD, psilocybin or ayahuasca, has rarely been studied. And, per the piece, it is NOT "ancient medicine" of Sonoran Indians, which makes the provenance of what fake churches are peddling an additional issue.

And, per the piece, the Comcaac Indians, the self-name for what outsiders call Seri, themselves seem a mix of New Agey projectionism and self-marketing over that:

Rodrigo Rentería-Valencia, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Central Washington University, said he thinks bufo is essentially a marketing tool for some Comcaac people. 

“The use of bufo, in my opinion, became a platform for certain Comcaac individuals to be able to offer a market to non-Indigenous people that are in this New Age thing to explore a ‘spiritual dimension’ in a ‘real indigenous context,’” Rentería-Valencia said. He specializes in indigenous societies in the Sonoran Desert. “Right now, the Comcaac people are an extremely hot commodity in Mexico,” he said.

They've got the right to make money off dumb, Westernized but would-be escaping Whites (or Blacks, Hispanics, etc.) but caveat emptor!

And, they may have need for that. Long resistant of Spanish/Mexican incursion, their isolation, and their traditional-world social integrity, seem to be crumbling.

My year in books

Thanks to a library card at the nearest large library, I smashed my Goodreads reading challenge with room to spare. Take a look at what was on my list. I hit 130-plus books, with probably one-third of them being 5-star, and maybe one-sixth being 1-star.

Texas Parks and Wildlife butthurt over prairie chicken

Unlike nearly a decade ago, when the oily Kenny Boy Salazar ran the Department of the Interior, this time, Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, whether current Comptroller Glenn Hegar was backing it like judge-gaslighting Susan Combs back then on the dunes sagebrush lizard ...

The lesser prairie chicken has now officially been listed under the Endangered Species Act.

And, TPWD is butt-hurt. And lying.

Per that dunes sagebrush lizard, especially with the fracking boom taking off in the Permian after the timespan of the first link, its condition only worsened. "Voluntary conservation efforts" did nothing.

That's why folks like Center for Biological Diversity sued Fish and Wildlife again, after it was discovered that some of its staffers were in cahoots with Combs et al.

Colorado River sound and fury, symbolizing nothing, in Las Vegas

Plenty of talk from state-level and lower-level water folks 10 days ago, from all seven member states of the Colorado River Compact, in Las Vegas, but no action.

Upper Basin states still want Lower Basin states to take more of a water haircut. Lower Basin states, like wingnut Aridzona, continue flooding land for alfalfa — for Chinese and Arab owned dairying, among other things, but Aridzona by god will give Xi Jinping himself a fucking hug rather than cut one acre-foot of water, especially if the Californicators in California stand to benefit.

And BuRec? Plenty of hand-wringing:

“I can feel the anxiety and the uncertainty in this room and in the basin,” said Camille Calimlim Touton, commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation.

But not much else.

This Pro Publica piece makes that clear. That starts with Touton, though "feeling the pain," refusing to comment further about it.

Will she actually do anything by Jan. 31? Or will it be another head fake, like last summer?

She won't do anything because, per her Wiki, she's a political hack. (Congresscritter staffer for years, starting with Harry Reid. Nuff ced.)

And, per the first link, she shot herself in the foot with last summer's head fake:

Some state officials here blame the Biden administration. When it became clear this summer that the federal government wasn’t ready to impose unilateral cuts, the urgency for a deal evaporated, they said.

So, in Vegas, nobody's showing their hole card.

And, much of the low-hanging fruit's already been harvested. As a reader told High Country News editor Jonathan Thompson on his Substack:

Finally, it is true that we in Las Vegas were able to reduce water use while almost doubling our population over 20 years. However, this involved a one-time rebuilding of the entire valley’s wash system to capture and recycle all the water we used to let runoff. Now that it is done, we can’t repeat this feat for the next population increase. It is easy to cut back the first time (when starting with a wasteful system), but is progressively harder as system develops more efficiency 

Sascha Horowitz Las Vegas, Nevada

Very true.

That said, as I've noted before, Thompson himself is as much problem as solution.

Finally, as the Post story notes, there WILL BE a potential "nature bats last" fix for the Lower Basin.

In recent years, the worry of "dead pool" has been more at Lake Powell. Well, if it hits dead pool, and in an unmanaged way, hoe long before Mead hits dead pool?

And, all of this shows how laughable New Mexico neolib environmental journalist John Fleck is.

Coronovirus Week 130: When Republicans eat their future

Yasmin Tayag at the Atlantic has a stark piece about the COVID death gap between Republicans and Democrats, with the biggest takeaway being how that gap INCREASED after the arrival of vaccines. She cites Strangeabbott's early banning of all vaccine mandates here in Tex-ass early on, or now, Florida Man DeSatan's vaccine investigations committee, as among the most dire examples of this.

The numbers? By political affiliation, a death cap of 1.6 percentage points (not percent) pre-vax, to 10.4 percent now. This is a self-genocide.

And, it occurs as 2021 life expectancy has declined again, to a 26-year low. And, as that's not just due to COVID, but also due to "white working class" woes that Trump and Trumpism were supposed to address like drug and alcohol problems. (Cirrhosis and chronic liver disease, as one joint cause, are now in the top 10 causes of death.)

Interestingly, re the racism of many such "white working class" people (not all, but many, and no apologies to the spirit of the late Leo Lincourt) Black and Hispanic men did NOT have such declines — probably because they've already been hardened to life's woes felling all Whites, and more Black and Hispanic women.

Back to the first link — Tayag says that behind COVID, but again on issues largely related to public health, the red-blue life expectancy gap goes back to the 1990s. She mentions tobacco taxes (tho they're high enough in red Tex-ass), gun issues (aye) rejection of Medicare expansion under Obamacare and more.

Sidebar: I'm fine with this for one reason, or rather, two closely related ones. The "young-eating" should happen, ideally, close to but before age 65, for one thing, or age 66 and change, for another thing.

But, not much younger. Pay into Medicare and Social Security, but feel free to die off before you use them. Helps solvency.

Sidebar two: For the other half of tribalists, a friendly reminder that average daily cases, while having a small recent bump, remain relatively low, and average daily deaths remain low.