I'm still here, I haven't been posting because it feels like writing a term paper for a class I don't like. However, if we still have a country in the future, I'll be glad I have a record of things that happened. There has been riding to the lake. We did not go today due to rain, tomorrow will be good. This is from last time, the light was good.
So, as we all know the Ugly Bill from Hell passed, there is so much evil in that bill. They've capped the amount of money people can borrow for medical or law school at $50,000 a year, thus ensuring that only the uber wealthy can get an education. We probably have enough lawyers, but we certainly do not have enough doctors.
Texas officials are mad as wet hens because they did not get enough warning about the land hurricane that parked over two river forks that form the Guadalupe river. Massive flooding and death ensued. Maybe the warnings were late because the administration fired the guy whose job it was to notify the public of forthcoming disasters. Perhaps this was exacerbated by the fact that the DOD turned off data from the satellite that allows NWS to look inside a hurricane and see what it's doing. Maybe they shouldn't have done this at the start of hurricane season. Maybe it's because half the NWS was laid off.
Project 2025 also dislikes the NWS. They think weather prediction science is tied to evidence of climate change, and we can't discuss that under any circumstances. This screen scrape is from their manifesto about how things will be. They are referring to the weather service.
Not only was Medicaid cut, so was Medicare. It's because of this: Because of a statutory requirement to automatically impose budget cuts
when legislation increases the deficit, the Big Beautiful Bill would
require automatic sequestration cuts across the board, something that
has been confirmed by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) but has been
largely absent from the debate over the bill. Medicare is one of the
programs that will face the axe, and the damage sums to $490 billion
over the next ten years, starting in the next fiscal year that begins in
October. While many of the safety-net cuts in the bill are delayed to help Republicans with their re-election campaigns, the Medicare cuts must begin next year.
The article I cut and pasted from is here.
The Supreme Court has allowed ICE to remove the eight migrants who were kept in Djibouti while their court case dragged on and drop them off in Southern Sudan, where they quite likely will be killed. I feel so much safer. Read about it here.
47 appears to have cut off munitions to Ukraine again. Russia is bombing the snot out of Ukraine. Meanwhile the EU and NATO are clutching their pearls.
Ultimately, none of this may matter in the least. From this article we learn the following: The study’s main finding is both surprising and alarming: since 2016, a sustained increase in surface salinity has been detected in the region between the polar and subpolar gyres of the Antarctic Ocean. This change in water composition suggests that the deep ocean circulation in the Southern Hemisphere—known as the SMOC—is not only being altered, but has reversed. That is, instead of sinking into the depths, surface water is being replaced by deep water masses rising to the surface, bringing with them heat and carbon dioxide (CO₂) that had been trapped for centuries. This is bad. There's nowt to be done for it, unfortunately. And then there is the weakening of the AMOC, which appears to be slowing down. Then I wonder, how long before NOAA is forced to take this web page down.
That's it! That's all the doom I can stand for one day.
The one failsafe in the Constitution is the rule of law. For better or worse the final arbiter is the Supreme Court, so long as it is not partisan (e.g.Bush v. Gore and numerous cases since) or corrupted (e.g. Clarence Thomas). The lower U.S. District Courts have continued to function consistent with the Constitution, but have now been usurped by the Supreme Court. America has a convicted felon as President who will never serve a day in jail for his crimes and should have rightfully been disqualified. So long as the Supreme Court does not enforce the rule of law that Constitutional failsafe fails. We are there.
ReplyDeleteIt's so disheartening to see ow fast this country crumbled. Though, not really fast as the main players have been planning and working toward this for decades. A slow creep until they finally reached this point. If history is any guide, the next several decades are going to be horrible.
ReplyDeleteI read a comment yesterday from a MagaT suggesting the failure of the agencies to provide the necessary warnings was due to a "holdout from the Biden administration", and not because of the cuts to those agencies. The mental gymnastics they must do to ensure that the current administration is not at fault in any way is mind boggling.
ReplyDeleteApparently, Abbott has asked for federal assistance and Noem has indicated that Trump will sign off on the request.
Thanks for the link to the article about Medicare cuts. I go on Medicare next year, fantastic timing (NOT). I knew that Medicaid was being cut, of course, but nothing about Medicare. What a disaster.
ReplyDeleteWhat a tragedy in the Texas Hill Country. When I worked as an editor for a travel imprint, the only job I ever had that married my joint degree in writing and mapmaking, I used to travel to Comfort and Kerrville in the Hill Country several times a year to visit the map making facility. In those days ancient maps were still painstaking made by hand. It was a beautiful art, carried out by large numbers of people, and I am thinking of all those people now, and the unimaginable loss their community has endured. I cant help but feel all the cuts to the National Weather Service staff created this perfect storm of catastrophe, no pun intended, and there will be more examples of mother nature showing her response to our human hubris. I, too, am grateful to have your record.
ReplyDelete*forgive typos, I should proofread!
ReplyDelete