If you live in Aridzona? MOVE

If you can't admit you're in the most socialistic state in the nation (you are), or even if you can, but know your neighbors, and more importantly, your state legislature, can't or won't, you need to move.

That's as BuRec says MAJOR new water cuts are coming. And, per this piece, as Aridzonans aren't close to meeting the self-mandated cuts of a year ago.

The best way of reducing water in Aridzona? (Not that it's going to meet these targets.)
1. Fallowing ALL FARMS. ALL.

2. People moving. Sorry, and with family there. Aridzona's not close to meeting its current water cut targets and people living in arguably the most socialist state in the nation aren't adjusting.

2A. The federal government refusing to guarantee new mortgages in Aridzona. Ed Abbey was 127 percent right on this: "Growth for growth's sake is the theology of the cancer cell." Dear Leader probably could have figured out a way to do something about this in the Great Recession. Truly make homeowers "whole" if they moved back to where the water is, and refusing to buy loans on new developments until the feds signed off on water supply.

Besides, it's not just getting hotter (and more humid) it's getting more unhealthy. Ever acre of fallowed farmland is another acre of agrichemical dust blowing into Phoenix. That's not to count the Salton Sea, which will never be "fixed" and which the Imperial Irrigation District is using as a smokescreen, in my opinion.

Prer Ed Abbey, as illustrated by the IID, this "growth culture" isn't going away. We need to kill it dead.

Aridzona could easily stand to lose 2 million people, and not all from Phoenix. Tucson could lose a few hundred thousand; Central Arizona Project water takes yet more energy to pump it past Phoenix to there, and further uphill to boot. Yuma could lose some people. The Vegas exurbs on both sides of the river. Vegas itself could stand to lose half a million. The godawful monstrosity called St. George, Utah, needs to lose at least half its population.

Texas Progressives talk state GOP, Uvalde, environment

State GOP convention

The Trib has a roundup of major platform planks which doesn't even note that the Rethugs shifted even further rightward on adult gay rights. Well, wait, that was in a second piece that noted the Rethugs called being gay or lesbian "an abnormal lifestyle choice," along with claiming Biden's win was illegitimate and booing Big Schmuck John Cornyn for trying to pass a weak tea gun control bill at the federal level even as he backs away from it. A third piece's header nails it: "Texas Republicans meet in a climate of mistrust, conspiracy and victimhood."

==

Much of the above stands in contrast to last Sunday having been Juneteenth, which gives an opening to teach actual history. (Unfortunately, it's not during the school year.) After two years of COVID hiatus, Juneteenth returned to Comanche Crossing at Lake Mexia.

==

Is a coverup fix on over Uvalde? Will Alito et al use fake originalism to further gut gun control?

Off the Kuff wrote about the utter uselessness of DPS at Uvalde, and the ongoing effort to keep secrets about what did happen by those who were there.

==

SocraticGadfly has a pair of environmental postings. First, he extends a heaping helping of summer schadenfreude to all the Californians who moved to Austin and elsewhere in the last 18 months and are learning about real Texas summer. Second, he remains opposed to an Ike Dike both on its own grounds and as part of general boondoggling by the Corps of Engineers.

Meet the yucca whisperer.

Meet the do-nothings at Chevron and the RRC, trying to ignore saltwater blowouts in the Permian.

The Texas Signal warns of the "endgame" for reproductive rights and abortion access.

The Observer reports that abortion activists are nonetheless still hard at work doing what they do.

Texas 2036 worries we are not preparing for the kind of droughts that are to come.

Reform Austin points out how much of Greg Abbott's border "mission" turns out to be arrests for marijuana possession.

D Magazine connects Texas' anti-abortion laws to greater trauma with miscarriages.

Russia-Ukraine, Week 13B: Who IS the Institute for the Study of War?

Wondering just that issue, the Quincy Institute profiles the Institute for the Study of War, the eminences grisé behind Nat-Sec Nutsacks™, and the bottom feeders of information dispensed to the mainstream media, on the Russia-Ukraine war. "A Case Study in American Propaganda" is about right. The first three grafs will summarize that issue:

A Russian is on an airliner heading to the US, and the American in the seat next to him asks, “So what brings you to the US?” The Russian replies, “I’m studying the American approach to propaganda.” The American says, “What propaganda?” The Russian says, “That’s what I mean.” 

If you don’t get the point, I can help. A few weeks before I heard this joke, I heard a Russian make the point explicitly: Yes, Russia’s state-controlled media is full of propaganda, but at least most Russians are aware of that and take the prevailing narrative with a grain of salt; Americans, in contrast, seem unaware that their own prevailing narratives are slanted.

I think there’s some truth to this, and I think the Ukraine war is a case in point. I don’t just mean that mainstream media’s coverage of the war is biased (though I think it is, as tends to be the case during wars). I mean this coverage exemplifies the difference between American and Russia propaganda—and so helps explain the difference, asserted by that joke, between American and Russian attitudes toward propaganda.

Read the whole thing. And, it's by Robert Wright, whose "everything is nonzero" I generally loathe, and which I think is a cheap knockoff, whether consciously deliberate or not, of Idries Shah's "no twosiderism." But, this is good. Wright, whether he actually believes it or is just using a rhetorical trope, says he thinks the problem is all due to America having a more complicated media ecosystem in a liberal democracy rather than being more gullible than Russians. I wouldn't be so sure of that.

He goes on to note how much the ISW is cited by big media punditry. And, how much it gets big bucks from the military industrial complex.

The bias side? Nothing that sticks out like a sore thumb. Rather, Wright notes that much of it is in ISW's "framing" of what both Russia and Ukraine are doing on the ground, a framing it willingly passes on to the MSM.

Again, read the whole thing.

But, take Wright with a grain of salt. As someone who does NOT fully know the workings of American media, he's too generous to most national media. The ISW is an extension of the DC establishment, so, for many "national security" reporters, citing it uncritically is all about "access." Or with even big newspapers perhaps continuing to be short-staffed in this area, about forced shortcutting. Look at political reporters whose idea of a story any more is half a dozen Tweets linked by connecting and explanatory paragraphs.

Russia-Ukraine, week 13: Peter the Great and no 'Putin price hike'

Tsar Vladimir I reportedly, according to the Washington Examiner, is riffing on Peter the Great and threatening Estonia. But, Tom Rogan, noting that "flypaper" troops from the 82nd Airborne are there, undercuts himself with hinting that Putin is sane enough not to actually do anything. He then goes to Pushkin to claim, with normal American exceptionalism, that Putin is "a sick man in his troubled bed." Yes, there have been recent claims that Putin has health problems, but if that's what Rogan meant, they're all still just rumors. And Rogan is a nat-sec nutsack with one foot fully in East Wingnutistan to boot, so discount him for those reasons.

Besides, as Warmonger Joe continues to ignore the suggestions to push for a negotiated peace by the Goldilocks Three Bears of Kissinger, NYT and Chomsky (plus Pope Francis), Ukraine's hopes continue to fade. Luhansk is likely going to be lost soon. Meanwhile, Zelensky, as much a weathervane as Warmonger Joe, or as much a would-be NATO colonial serf, per Tsar Vladimir above, is now interested in joining NATO after all, or at least getting candidate status, after earlier disavowing that. As for Russia blockading Black Sea ports? Britain used food as a blockade weapon 110 years ago, including after WWI was done. The winners write history.

And, with the above paragraph? No, Warmonger Joe, this is NOT "Putin's price hike." Your flunkies are getting pushback even on MSNBC.

Coronavirus Week 112C: Blame Neanderthals?

That's the angle from this piece, which says that 1 in 6 people inherited at least one copy of a Neanderthal gene that makes people more subject to respiratory infections.

Color me skeptical. 

And, the easy way to check this would be to compare Africans, or even African-Americans (and Afro-Brits, etc.) to Caucasians. African-Americans and Afro-Brits will have some Caucasian genes, on average, but they'll still be much lower than Caucasians are, obviously. And, while not controlling for all environmental issues, using African-Americans et al, instead of native Africans, would control for COVID rates, and largely control for international contacts, etc.

Plus, one could move on to this coming winter's flu season and compare its death rates as well.

Color me skeptical right now.

Color me further skeptical of Professor James Davies' claims because:

1. His ratio is actually "could be as many as 1 in 6" which means he doesn't know more precisely;
2. He offers no information, at least in this piece, about how much more susceptible this gene makes people;
3. He offers no information as to whether this is a global susceptibility issue with all respiratory infections, or worse with some types than others.

And, that's just off the top of my head. He's a professor of genomics, so he knows that well enough. He's not a professor of infectious disease.

Coronavirus Week 112B: Blame Jessica Wildfire?

I'm coming closer to unsubscribing from Jessica Wildfire's "OK Doomer" Substack. I saw it via one of her Medium posts a few months back, and signed up for it, just by email address, though, not my direct Substack account of my own. Her Medium stuff's gotten a bit more uneven since then, and her Substack lives up to its title, not just as a play on "OK Boomer," but on its own. 

She's at least gotten close to playing footsie with scientism and with antivaxxerism both in a recent post. She believes COVID has caused an uptick in car crashes, is going to cause an uptick in plane crashes, talks about SADS without actually looking it up (and an antivaxxer nutter channels the head nutters on that issue in comments) — for the facts, I linked to Orac in a comment, and also, in apparently expecting science to "answer everything," confuses science and scientism. Her Medium stuff isn't so bad, which is why I clicked to actually subscribe to her Substack. But, the last three or four posts, starting with claiming monkeypox can spread asymptomatically (it does, technically, but it's not the normal, contra her implications), and ignoring there was a monkeypox outbreak nearly 20 years ago, got me started.

Besides, contra her, contra others, and contra my tentative blog post of a couple of weeks ago, on COVID, re Worldometers, this IS really not more than a blip. It may be a big blip, not a small one, but I'll still call it a blip. Daily new cases are somewhat higher than they were at the START of summer ago, even with CDC pivoting away from case-based metrics, tis true. But, the bulge is smaller than the late-summer one of one year ago, and appearing to go back down.

Death rate? Even lower than it was at the bottom of the dip early last summer. What that means, if we have a lower death rate even though we have a moderately higher case rate, is clear. COVID is becoming less deadly. About one-fifth as deadly, per rough estimates. It's a partial herd immunity from a mix of vaccines and boosters, plus infections in both the vaccinated and unvaccinated. 

For more background, as I blogged a couple of weeks ago and as numbers continue to support, COVID is becoming less and less deadly. That's especially true if the "cases don't matter" have trickled down to local hospitals, as I also blogged a couple of weeks ago.

And, while I will admit the major media isn't perfect, titling the whole post as "media gaslighting" even while you engage in scientism is no bueno in my book either. And, no, contra your subheading, respectfully, with a post like this, you're not a "slinger of hard truths."

For more on how bad this tenure-track college prof is, see Part 1 and Part 2 of an in-depth overview.