In Case You Missed It, December 12th, 2020
Trump Has Listed the Fewest Endangered Species of Any President Ever
Every nation France has defeated in a war
Okay, but, what is a suburb?
XKCD
Great Scot! Scotland Gives Its Snowplows—All of Them—Hilarious Names
Brexit stockpiling causing 10-mile tailbacks in Calais
Carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel in the Korean Peninsula
How the Fascists Rewrote Spanish National History
‘A Big Disappointment’: Trump Is Still Flirting With The Idea Of Firing Barr
The 6,000-Year History of Medical Cannabis
From Gizmodo, Brian Kahn:
Trump Has Listed the Fewest Endangered Species of Any President Ever
There are many ways to remember President Donald Trump’s environmental legacy, none of them good. But among his most destructive will be his utter disregard for the natural world, and there’s no clearer symbol of that than the Endangered Species Act.
Trump will leave office as the stingiest user of the Endangered Species Act in history, and it’s not even close. Though his administration could have some massive change of heart in the coming weeks, it seems more likely it will be doling out pardons for cronies or the president himself instead of species pushed to the brink of extinction.
The Endangered Species Act was whipped up in 1973, after a few precursors in the 1960s. Its goal is to ensure “better safeguarding, for the benefit of all citizens, the Nation’s heritage in fish, wildlife, and plants.” Presidents have used it for all manner of species large and small, stationary or mobile. Ten presidents have had a chance to declare species endangered or threatened using the act and its precursors. But Trump has “the worst record since the act was passed,” said Noah Greenwald, the endangered species director at the Center for Biological Diversity. The numbers bear that out.
Fish and Wildlife Services data shows Trump has approved an average of roughly five species per year for Endangered Species Act protections over his four years in office. By comparison, Obama declared roughly 42 species per year endangered or threatened over eight years. George W. Bush clocked in at a little over seven per year, which was the former nadir prior to Trump.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration can also list marine species and those that migrate to the sea. With those added in, Greenwald said, that brings Trump up to about six per year, still below George W. Bush before even factoring in his use of NOAA listings. (Sad airhorn noise)
Meanwhile, a backlog of 500 species has accrued awaiting decisions as to whether they’ll be approved for listing. That backlog predates Trump, but Greenwald said that the Obama administration came up with a plan to start to clear it out only for the Trump administration to kick it to the curb.
The Trump administration has also delisted a number of species. For some, there was a genuine reason to do so because they had recovered, and really that’s the goal of the act. But for others, reasons were more in line with Trump handing out favors to the oil and gas industry. Greenwald pointed to the American burying beetle, which was downgraded from endangered to threatened, a status that carries fewer protections.
“The Independent Petroleum Association of America, the IPAA, they petitioned to delist the American burying beetle because one of the places they occur is Oklahoma over the Permian Basin,” he said, referring to a prime fracking region. With the downlisting, Greenwald said, “they gave the oil and gas industry a giant exemption. Under the act, a threatened species doesn’t automatically get ‘take protections,’ protections against harm, killing, [or] harassment. They have to put in place a special rule in order for those protections to be applied. And what they did in Oklahoma is, they said the only places that are covered are conservation areas.”
Trump also gutted the act itself , making it harder to protect species in the first place. In doing so, he undercut one of the nation’s bedrock environmental laws, which is unfortunately all too in line with what he’s done to others, from the National Environmental Policy Act to the Clean Air Act .
“It’s just a huge loss of opportunity to have spent four years giving handouts to industries who want to be able to exploit public lands and beings instead of focusing on where we need to be using [the] Endangered Species Act, which is such a strong tool for preventing extinction,” said Addie Haughey, the director of legislative affairs for Earthjustice. “Almost every species that has been put under the protection of the Endangered Species Act is still with us, and that’s not a coincidence because the law works.”
Going forward, the incoming Biden administration will have plenty of work to do , but reversing Trump’s Endangered Species Act damage should be high on the list. Haughey noted Congress also has bills on the table to reverse Trump’s rulemaking along with a slew of other bills and amendments to other major conservation laws such as the Migratory Bird Protection Act. Really, that speaks to the fact that the environmental laws are like nails that hold the frame of a house up. Trump has torn out so many of the nails, and the whole structure of the natural world risks collapse without support.
“This isn’t supposed to just be a hospital emergency room where we leave species, and they’re there forever. This is about recovering those species, and that takes real investment.”
President-elect Joe Biden could also pick up the Obama plan to speed up review. Greenwald said the best thing it could do on that front is get politics out of the decision-making and let scientists work on declarations free from interference, something that’s hardly only been an issue with the Trump administration. There’s also a need to fund programs to help species recovery, whether it’s protecting more land, restoring habitat, or enforcing violations of the act; otherwise, declarations will just be wasted.
“This isn’t supposed to just be a hospital emergency room where we leave species, and they’re there forever,” Haughey said. “This is about recovering those species, and that takes real investment.”
As a former park ranger, I would, of course, love to see this done because protecting nature is my jam. But if you can’t get super stoked about a wolf in the snow existing just for its own sake, may I also remind you without nature, we also perish. Right now, the biosphere is in a state of decline unseen in human existence with up to 1 million species at risk of extinction. Neither the Biden administration nor any other future president can save them all. But they can set the world on a more sustainable course.
“It’s really about saving ourselves as much as it’s about saving species,” Haughey said.
Every nation France has defeated in a war
Note from Bob: What amuses me here is that the same map could serve almost as-is, for "Every nation that has defeated France in a war". Or... "Every nation that Great Britain has defeated in a war" or "Every nation that has defeated Great Britain in a war". There have been a lot of wars....
From Motor Trend, Alexander Stoklosa:
Great Scot! Scotland Gives Its Snowplows—All of Them—Hilarious Names
These so-called "gritters" can be followed live on a real-time online tracker
In Scotland, there is no NORAD Santa Tracker —instead, children (or, well, anyone) there can follow along with the Trunk Road Gritter Tracker , a real-time, Scotland-wide snowplow tracer. It's true.
We have no on-the-ground reporting to confirm whether or not Scotland's children feel any jealousy toward American children over all this. After all, tracking snowplows as they shove cold precipitation around Scotland's roads seems like the winter-stuff-to-track equivalent of a Nintendo Game Boy Color. The NORAD "This-Santa-Tracker-Brought-To-You-By-the-Cold-War-Military-Industrial-Complex" version is like a brand-new PlayStation 5.
- BFG Big Friendly Gritter
- For Your Ice Only
- Gangsta Granny Gritter
- Gritallica
- Gritter Thunberg
- Grit Expectations
- Grits-N-Pieces
- Grittle Mix
- Gritty Gonzalez
- Gritty Gritty Bang Bang
- Ice Buster
- Ice Destroyer
- Ice Queen
- Lew-Ice Capaldi
- License to Chill
- Luke Snowwalker
- Mr Plow
- Mrs McGritter
- My Name'5 Doddie
- Nitty Gritty
- Plougher O'Scotland
- Polar Bear Explorer
- Ready Spready Go
- Rumble
- Sandy The Solway Salter
- Salty
- Scotland's Bravest Gritter
- Sir Andy Flurry
- Sir Grits-A-Lot
- Slippy McGritty
- Snowball
- Snow Destroyer
- Snowkemon Go
- Spready Mercury
- Sprinkles
- The Golden Great Gritter
- The Snow Solution
- Yes Sir, Ice Can Boogie
From The Guardian, Lisa O'Carroll:
Severe delays as businesses try to get goods into Britain before a potential no-deal Brexit on 1 January
Brexit stockpiling is causing 10-mile lorry queues and delays of up to five hours in Calais, it has emerged, as hopes of a trade deal fade.
Sources close to the president of the Hauts-de-France region said there had been 50% more heavy goods vehicles on the approach roads to the French port and Eurotunnel in the past three weeks.
“November and December are always busy months, but extreme stockpiling because businesses are trying to get goods into the UK before 1 January is the main cause,” the source said.
“Normally we have about 6,000 trucks, but now it is about 9,000. It shows the extreme of the consequences of Brexit whether there is a deal or not. Trucks are having to slow down all along the A16 back to Dunkirk with delays of up to 17km.”
The delays in crossing the Channel are causing acute problems in the UK. Honda and Jaguar have had to halt production temporarily because of parts shortages, and it emerged on Friday that Ikea had been besieged by complaints because of what it called “operational challenges” as shipments of its flatpack furniture are held up at clogged ports.
The tailbacks give a glimpse of things to come next year when customs, standards and immigration checks will kick in on both sides of the channel.
Eurotunnel said it believed delays on the British side would continue for the next three weeks. Its contingencies centre on the worst-case scenario of a no-deal Brexit involving up to 7,000 lorries queuing in Kent.
Boris Johnson and the European commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said on Friday they were unlikely to reach a post-Brexit trade deal by Sunday.
Hauts-de-France leaders have been planning for Brexit congestion since the first threat of no deal in 2018, when the regional president, Xavier Bertrand, made a furious speech in the European parliament warning of a “dark scenario ”.
The French authorities calculated at the time that a two-minute delay at the port or the Eurotunnel gateway would lead to queues of 27km on either side, so slow-moving queues of 17km will be read in some quarters as an achievement.
Tailback traffic is also quickly caused by security incidents, with the continuing issue of migrants trying to board lorry trailers.
“We are seeing several hundred trucks above forecasts on midweek days,” a Eurotunnel spokesman said. Recent company figures show traffic 11% up on last year for November.
Eurotunnel said contingency plans, also modelled since 2018, meant it could move traffic on to the trains quickly. “We expect it to be like this for the next three weeks with some tailing off as we get close to Christmas and then drop off in the first week of January,” the spokesman said, adding that there would be less travel than usual because of Covid restrictions.
“Lots of companies have said their production for the first two weeks will stop because of the nervousness of what is coming so that will have an impact and we also believe the authorities are going to be lenient in the first few days after 1 January.”
The drive to stockpile flows from the fact that customs, regulatory and agrifood checks will be introduced deal or no deal because the UK is leaving the single market. Further disruption is expected over the weekend in Kent with a live test of Operation Brock, the no-deal traffic contingency plan for the M20, put in place on Friday night.
The UK is hoping to mitigate the impact by phasing in checks over six months, but businesses have voiced concerns that the customs software and the special electronic Brexit passports for international freight drivers to get into Kent will not be ready in time for Brexit day.
A House of Lords committee wrote to Michael Gove on Thursday to say it was “not confident that all necessary technological, physical and welfare arrangements will be in place in time to avoid or mitigate disruption”.
It raised concerns voiced by software experts that some key customs systems are only going live at the end of the month while others are still in development and testing.
In the letter Sandip Verma, the chair of the EU goods sub-committee, criticises the “default expectation” of the government “that everything will be ready”, which is “reflected in the worrying lack of contingency preparations”, including failure to get all traders ready, including SMEs that cannot afford customs agents.
Note from Bob: We live in Calais in the summer, when Yuma is just t-o-o-o-o hot. Now seems to be a very good time not to be in Calais...
Carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel in the Korean Peninsula
How the Fascists Rewrote Spanish National History
National origin stories can be the stuff of fancy. Francoist Spain also showed how quickly those stories could be rewritten
National myths are subject to revision , sometimes remarkably quickly. Beginning in the mid-1930s, fascist Spain overturned its own foundational story extraordinarily rapidly, and against existing scholarly consensus. This revisionist project extended throughout the nation’s tumultuous mid-twentieth century.
Classical studies researchers Aarón Alzola Romero and Eduardo Sánchez-Moreno explore these topsy-turvy shifts in how Spanish scholars interpreted the Iberian Peninsula’s Iron Age (c. 800 BCE–50 CE). From the turn of the twentieth century to the mid-1930s, historians and archaeologists called the people who lived there “Iberians,” postulating a non-Indo-European culture, unlike most of the rest of Europe. The distinctiveness was a point of pride to modern Spaniards.But, as Alzola Romero and Sánchez-Moreno argue, with the ascension of the fascists under Francisco Franco, who began his rebellion against the Spanish Republic in 1936, Spain’s official history was brought into line with myths of “Aryanism” and “pan-Celticism,” creating an Indo-European past that sat neatly alongside Nazi German mythology. Spain’s Iron Age ancestors were reimagined as a southeastern extension of a unified people who swept through Europe. The specifically racial connections to fanciful Aryans/Celts would become the new, official, point of pride.
Under Franco, write Alzola Romero and Sánchez-Moreno, a “pan-Celtic” model “was forged on multiple fronts: political, archaeological, linguistic, art historical, folkloric.” Francoist “representations of Spain’s Celtic origins” went against “much of the existing archaeological and palaeolinguistic evidence at the time,” but nevertheless became the official version of history because the fascists controlled not just the state but academic and heritage institutions as well.
The fascists’ conception of Spain, based on a racial and cultural unity, also suppressed regional differences, as in the Basque country and Catalonia. Making all of Spain “Celtic” whitewashed the complexities and differences, the multi-ethnic mosaic underlying centuries of migration. “In order to achieve this, the Spanish national myths had to be rewritten.”
It’s important to note that not everybody fell into line: “a number of scholars refused to conform to these gross distortions of the past and denounced—with varying degrees of vociferousness—the illegitimate manipulation of the country’s history.”
What’s so remarkable, as Alzola Romero and Sánchez-Moreno detail it, is just how quickly this all happened—and how just as swiftly the national history was rewritten once again after 1945. The myth of Aryan connections, of a Europe-wide Celtic unity, came up against the definitive defeat of the Nazis and their specious racial notions at the end of World War II.
With the Axis as a model quite literally in ruins, Franco’s archeologists and historians revised the past once again. The Celtic mythology was swept aside to concentrate on a later period of Spain’s history. In the post–World War II era, Spain’s glorious past was specifically transformed into a Catholic one, uniting a deeply reactionary church with a deeply reactionary state. The Celts were replaced by myths of the Reconquista against the Moors and the globe-spanning Catholic empire founded by Ferdinand and Isabella.
Wherever you go, “glorious pasts” are largely fictional. Spain shows how easy it has been to rewrite such national fictions to match current conditions and current needs.
‘A Big Disappointment’: Trump Is Still Flirting With The Idea Of Firing Barr
President Donald Trump on Saturday continued to lash out at Attorney General Bill Barr who appears to have been on thin ice lately after a report landed earlier this week and suggested the attorney general has been working to keep quiet a federal probe involving Hunter Biden, the son of Trump’s Democratic rival Joe Biden who became President-elect after winning last month’s election.
Trump shared a tweet from a sympathizing conservative columnist and radio host Todd Starnes who recently backed the President’s false election fraud claims. Starnes’ tweet suggested on Friday that Barr should be “fired by the end of business today,” if a Wall Street Journal report that said the attorney general had known and kept quiet since the spring about an investigation that involved the younger Biden proved to be true.
The probe which was launched in 2018, predates Barr’s tenure at attorney general — but led to a meltdown from Trump on Friday.
Rumors began swirling last week that Trump was considering firing his attorney general after Barr told the Associated Press in an interview that he had not seen evidence of widespread fraud that would overturn the results of the Nov. 3 election, which Trump decisively lost to Biden.
When asked about his confidence in the attorney general, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office last week that he would need to be asked the question again “a number of weeks from now,” in order to arrive at a decision about his traditionally loyal ally.
His complaint at that time was that Barr “hasn’t done anything,” and that the Justice Department hadn’t “looked very hard” to corroborate Trump’s false declarations of election fraud in battleground states he had lost.
Trump’s rage now extends to being kept in the dark about a probe involving Biden’s financial and business dealings in two investigations in Delaware and Manhattan.
Hours after a firing off the first tweet suggesting a Barr dismissal could be afoot, Trump followed up with a fresh attack on his attorney general, raking Barr through the mud over why the attorney general hadn’t revealed “the truth to the public” in an effort that he said had cost Republicans at the polls.
The accusations, clumsily lurch miles ahead of an investigation that has not drawn conclusions about the younger Biden, and appears to implicate the President-elect who is not involved in either of the investigations.
Trump’s suggestion that news of the probe would have benefited him in the polls are somewhat predictable arguments. Such an effort was central to his impeachment, when in July 2019, during a now famous call, Trump attempted to extort the Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky to dig up dirt on Biden’s son and announce an investigation.
Trump and his Republican allies in Congress further intensified pressure to smear Biden and his son in October, urging Barr to appoint a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden as his father rose in the polls.
When asked at the time whether he supported the call for a special prosecutor, Trump told Fox News that he wanted action from Barr before the election saying “he’s got to act fast,” and adding, “this has to be known about before the election.”
The Justice Department however, maintains guidelines urging officials to avoid making obvious steps that would bring an investigation into public view that could impact or give the appearance of attempting to sway the outcome of an election.
Before the Wall Street Journal reported of Barr’s efforts to keep the probe quiet, Barr is reportedly had no intentions of vacating his post early — although those plans are likely now up in the air as Trump has taken pains to exact revenge on those he had seen as disloyal in his dwindling days in office — firing Defense Secretary Mark Esper and DHS cybersecurity official Chris Krebs just last month.
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The area that I grew up in had the largest wolf population in the lower 48. In the 1950s they were driven out on frozen lakes by plane and shot from the plane. They did not dare try that over an Indian reservation because there was a good chance the wolves would shoot back.
To this day there is NO hunting of wolves on our reservations.
Love the Scot's and their naming of snowplows..
Is Brexit ever going to be settled?
My final comment, Trump is a frickin' moron.
I have seen fox yet wolves around this area I think are rare.The alligator use to be almost wiped out until they protected them. They came back with a bang. Now they let hunting of them once in a while and patrol the rivers keeping an eye out.
1 January.
Theoretically.
... but since there's still no agreement... and nobody wants "no deal"... who knows?
Some are pretty funny.
Spanish Fascism was no myth to Ernest Hemingway whose masterpiece novel was For Whom The Bell Tolls, that tells the tale of an American who joined the loyalists to fight those Fascists in the late 1930s, nor was it to Dr. Norman Bethune, a Canadian doctor who went there and invented the portable medical blood bank to service the wounded soldiers of the International Brigade who battled against the Fascists, before he went on to China where he became a hero that every Chinese school child learned about, nor was it a myth to my uncle Johnny, my mother's brother, who joined the International Brigade to fight the Spanish Fascists, and who survived it to go on as a Canadian Army soldier fighting the Nazis in Holland.
My uncle Johnny
I first visited Spain before the fall of fascism. On a motorcycle.
The Guardia Civile frowned constantly, as they verified my papers for the zillionth time. You could feel the brute force waiting for the slightest excuse...
I was in Spain in the late 1960s, spent time in Madrid, Toledo, Malaga, and I watched a bullfight in Marbella.
I always wanted to go to Spain. Maybe one of these days.
So much to see... Plan on at least a month.
My first visit was about a week, in Madrid, in '69.
Absolutely. For example, I wish I had visited Barcelona and Seville.
I / we have been back several times. The Alhambra...
Holy smoke. It was around then that I was there. I spent time in the Prado - SO many great masterpieces by some of the world's most famous artists. I can particularly remember walking into a room and seeing on a wall a large portrait of the Clothed Maja, then I turned around and on the opposite wall was a matching portrait of the Naked Maja. Ah, but the El Grecos, Goyas, Picassos...
Did you see the "Clock Room" in the Palace? It was best not to be there "on the hour" or you could be deafened.
2 stories of my adventures in Madrid:
I wandered around one day with a camera, one I had borrowed from a client because it was much better than the one I had at the time - a Leica M2 that I loaded with Kodachrome, to take coloured slides. I saw a really interesting building that had an open gate to a courtyard, so I went in and started taking pictures, when 2 policemen ran up to me and asked me what I was doing there. Apparently it was Madrid's main police station. When I showed them I was a Canadian tourist and did not realize what the building was, and offered them each a couple of Canadian cigarettes, they gratefully let me go on my way.
Throughout that whole tour of Spain, Gibralter and Morocco I was really careful about what I drank, always from a sealed bottle. One day our group had dinner at the top floor luxurious dining room of the Plaza Hotel (If I've remembered the name right - but anyway the best hotel in Madrid) where I was told Adolph Hitler ate when he was in Madrid. On the crisp pure white tablecloth the settings were in magnificent china, silver flatware and crystal goblets. The waiters were dressed in tuxes. They poured ice water in one of the crystal goblets for each setting, and I thought, this water has to be okay. Afterwards, fortunately there was a doctor on our tour who had pills for what I suffered from that water, or else from the way I felt I would have spent the rest of the trip in a hospital.
Do you have any interesting memories from your week in Madrid?
The Prado is one of the three best museums I've seen, along with The Hermitage in St Petersburg, and of course the Louvre.
I remember barras a tapas con tinto... and a Mexican telling a Spaniard about majority rule over pronunciation and usage. (We've taken some Spanish classes in Yuma. It's worse than English / American!)The Alhambra is the star of our later visits.
I've not been to the Hermitage or the Louvre, although I've been through art museums in London and in some American cities (looking mostly for J.M.W.Turner's works that were mostly in the Tate and National museums in London), but of all, to me the Prado was the greatest.
Trump Has Listed the Fewest Endangered Species of Any President Ever
That was so that his sons aka Beavis and Butthead could go hunting.
Logical...
I read that they did it even when it was still an endangered species and they just did not give an F because they would face no consequences thanks to daddy.
Yes. One of the boys shot a protected animal, but it was OK because he brought a super-special (super-expensive) hunting license... ... after the shooting...