It turns out that as a result of anthropogenic climate change, the tundra is turning into a real-world version of the fire swamp.

There has been an upsurge in smoldering fires persisting through the winter to reemerge in the spring:

The bitterly cold Arctic winter typically snuffs out the seasonal wildfires that erupt in this region. But every once in a while, a wildfire comes along that refuses to die.

These blazes, known as “zombie fires” or “holdover fires,” can burrow into the rich organic material beneath the surface, such as the vast peatlands that ring the Arctic, and smolder under the snowpack throughout the frigid winter.

With the Siberian Arctic seeing record warm conditions in recent weeks and months, scientists monitoring Arctic wildfire trends are becoming more convinced that some of the blazes erupting in the Arctic this spring are actually left over from last summer.

………

The drying and burning of Arctic peatlands has major consequences for the planet as a whole. Northern peatlands contain more stored carbon than rainforests do, Waddington said. He compared fires that smolder during the winter without flames, only to reignite in the spring, to scenes from the fire swamp in the 1987 comedy “The Princess Bride,” which features bursts of flame emerging from underground.

(emphasis mine)

This would be cool, if it weren’t presaging the destruction of the world.

Teardown and repair website iFixit has just posted what its CEO Kyle Wiens says is “the most comprehensive online resource for medical repair professionals.” The new database contains dedicated sections for clinical, laboratory, and medical support equipment, in addition to numerous other categories of devices. It also provides more than 13,000 manuals from hundreds of medical device manufacturers.

Wiens says the effort began with a crowdsourcing campaign to collect repair information for hospital equipment, with a focus on “ventilator documentation, anesthesia systems, and respiratory analyzers — devices widely used to support COVID-19 patients.” But the effort grew from there, spanning more than two months as iFixit added dozens more staff members to the project; began talking to more biomedical technicians, doctors, and nurses about their day-to-day needs; and started collecting and cataloging information from libraries and other sources.

“Hospitals are having trouble getting service information to fix medical equipment — and it’s not just a COVID-19 problem. We’ve heard countless stories from biomedical technicians (biomeds, for short) about how medical device manufacturers make their jobs more difficult by restricting access to repair information,” Wiens writes in iFixit’s blog post about the new database. “Thanks to travel limitations, the problem is bigger than ever. Manufacturer service reps can’t keep pace with the growing demand for repair of critical hospital equipment. Even if they could, they can’t respond as quickly as the biomeds, already at the front lines.” 

Needless to say, OEMs hate right to repair, because it cuts out a profit stream.

To them, I say, f%$# you, without lube.

While I am sure that members of the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) and their consultants thought that it was a good idea to pick a “moderate” candidate to replace Katherine “Katie” Hill.

I can just imagine the consultants extolling an uninspiring and timid candidate, Christy Smith, who opposes Medicare for all, takes PAC money, and is squishy on climate change, and in a special election, one where bringing out the base is paramount, she gets demolished by double digits.

I understand why members of the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) favor uninspiring candidates who do not make waves; because they don’t make waves, they rake in the bucks, and require massive bucks in an attempt to make the sow’s ear into a silk push.

And the consultants, and their friends in the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) get a percentage of the media buy.

Ka Ching.

Unfortunately, it also means that you lose elections, but those consultants need to make their payments on their Tesla Model X’s.

Wow. Identical twins drank from the same glass, 1 got Covid and the other is totally fine. Don’t have the article handy but, if you google “2 girls 1 cup”, it should come up.

— Mike Ellis (@TheOnlyMike_E) May 12, 2020

Public service announcement DON’T GOOGLE THIS if you do not understand the reference.

Just don’t.

The man leading Sweden’s coronavirus response says the country’s elevated death toll “really came as a surprise to us.”

Dr. Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s state epidemiologist, appeared on “The Daily Show with Trevor Noah” on Tuesday, when he described the country’s controversial approach.

“We never really calculated with a high death toll initially, I must say,” he said.

“We calculated on more people being sick, but the death toll really came as a surprise to us.”

As of Tuesday, Sweden reported more than 2,700 COVID-19 deaths and more than 23,000 infections. That death toll is far higher than its Nordic neighbors’ and many other countries that locked down.

This was pretty much a lead pipe cinch from day one.

Covid-19 is ferociously contagious, and not particularly amenable to treatment,  so if you have more cases, you have more deaths.

Q.E.D.

This is a good thing. It is clear that this deal smells to high heaven:

ICANN, the nonprofit that oversees the Internet’s domain name system, has given itself another two weeks to decide whether to allow control of the .org domain to be sold to private equity firm Ethos Capital. The decision comes after ICANN received a blizzard of letters from people opposed to the transaction, including California Attorney General Xavier Becerra.

Becerra’s letter was significant because ICANN is incorporated in California. That means it’s Becerra’s job to make sure that ICANN is living up to the commitments in its articles of incorporation, which promise that ICANN will operate “for the benefit of the Internet community as a whole.”

Becerra questioned whether ICANN was really doing that. “There is mounting concern that ICANN is no longer responsive to the needs of its stakeholders,” he wrote.

………

California’s attorney general pointed to several specific concerns about the transaction. One was the shadowy nature of the proposed buyer, Ethos Capital. “Little is known about Ethos Capital and its multiple proposed subsidiaries,” Becerra writes. Ethos Capital, he said, has “refused to produce responses to many critical questions posted by the public and Internet community.”

Ethos Capital’s plan is to buy the Public Interest Registry (PIR) from its current parent organization, the nonprofit Internet Society. To help finance the sale, Ethos will saddle PIR with $300 million in debt—a common tactic in the world of leveraged buyouts. Becerra warns that this tactic could endanger the financial viability of the PIR—especially in light of the economic uncertainty created by the coronavirus.

………

Becerra ends his letter with a warning: “This office will continue to evaluate this matter, and will take whatever action necessary to protect Californians and the nonprofit community.”

This whole thing smells of self-dealing, which is contrary to US non-profit law, California non-profit law, and ICANN’s own rules.

Shut it down.

pic.twitter.com/0PmTiu6kXp

— Eoin Higgins (@EoinHiggins_) April 3, 2020

It’s funny because it’s true.

Italy is one of the countries hardest hit by the corona virus.

One of the hardest hit cities in Italy is Nembro.

Now the Mayor of Nembro and the CEO of a chain of Italian clinic have done an analysis of excess deaths indicating that in Italy, where testing and reporting is FAR more extensive than in the US, deaths from Covid-19 are at least 4 times more than reported.

It should be noted that in unsettled situations like wars and plagues, excess deaths is the generally the best way to get accurate numbers:

Nembro, one of the municipalities most affected by Covid-19, should have had – under normal conditions – about 35 deaths. 158 people were registered dead this year by the municipal offices. But the number of deaths officially attributed to Covid-19 is 31.

In Nembro the almost deserted streets, the absent traffic, a strange silence is sometimes interrupted by the siren of an ambulance that carries with it the anxiety and worry that fill the hearts of all in these weeks. In Nembro every member of the community continuously receives news that he never wanted to hear, every day we lose people who were part of our lives and our community. Nembro, in the province of Bergamo, is the municipality most affected by Covid-19 in relation to the population. We do not know exactly how many people have been infected, but we know that the number of deaths officially attributed to Covid-19 is 31. We are two physicists: one who became an entrepreneur in the health sector, the other a mayor, in close contact with a very cohesive territory, where we know each other very well. We noticed that something in these official numbers did not come back right, and we decided – together – to check. We looked at the average of the deaths in the municipality of previous years, in the period January – March. Nembro should have had – under normal conditions – about 35 deaths. 158 people were registered dead this year by the municipal offices. That is 123 more than the average. Not 31 more, as it should have been according to the official numbers of the coronavirus epidemic.

The difference is enormous and cannot be a simple statistical deviation. Demographic statistics have their «constancies» and annual averages change only when completely «new» phenomena arrive. In this case, the number of abnormal deaths compared to the average that Nembro recorded in the period of time in consideration is equal to 4 times those officially attributed to Covid-19. If a comparison is made between the deaths that have occurred and the same period in previous years, the anomaly is even more evident: there is a peak of «other» deaths in correspondence with that of the official deaths from Covid-19.

It may be that some of these from other causes that occurred because of an overloaded healthcare system, but the overwhelming majority of those excess deaths are from Covid-19.

These numbers also set the fatality rate at an absolute minimum of 1%.

Not good.

Corporate raider Carl Icahn has announced that he going short in a big way on commercial real estate.

Private equity has gone big into commercial and rental real estate, and so I am not surprised that ht thinks that this is unsustainable:

Billionaire investor Carl Icahn told CNBC on Friday he expects the U.S. commercial real estate market will crumble, much like the broader housing market collapse of 2008.

“You’re going to have this blow up, too, and nobody’s even looking at it,” Icahn said on “Halftime Report.”

Icahn said he is shorting the commercial mortgage bond market and it’s his “biggest position by far.”

Short selling is a bet against stocks or bonds, with shorts borrowing shares from an investment bank and selling them in hopes that the asset will lose value. If it does drop, shorts buy the shares back at a cheaper price and return them to the bank, turning a profit on the difference.

Icahn’s short is specific to credit default swaps, or “CDS,” which are assets that back mortgages of corporate offices and shopping malls. Icahn said the housing market bubble of 2008 has “happened all over again” due to loans made in 2012 to shopping malls and more.

Look out below.

Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joseph Dunford, retired a few months ago, and now has secured a lucrative sinecure with Lockheed-Martin hawking the F-35 mistake jet:

In 2015, things weren’t looking great for the Marine Corps’ F-35B fighter jet. Reports from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and Department of Defense inspector general had found dozens of problems with the aircraft. Engine failures, software bugs, supply chain issues, and fundamental design flaws were making headlines. The program was becoming synonymous in the press with “boondoggle.”

Lockheed Martin, the program’s lead contractor, desperately needed a win.

Luckily for Lockheed, it had a powerful ally in the commandant of the Marine Corps, General Joseph Dunford. Five years later, Dunford would be out of the service and ready to collect his first Lockheed Martin paycheck as a member of its board of directors.

………

On September 30, 2019, Dunford, the military’s highest ranked official, stepped down from his position as chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He had served in the Marine Corps since 1977, working his way up to the highest tier of the armed services over 42 years.

Just four months and 11 days later, he joined the Pentagon’s top contractor, Lockheed Martin, as a director on the board.

In announcing Dunford’s hire, a January press release from Lockheed Martin quotes CEO Marillyn Hewson: “General Dunford’s service to the nation at the highest levels of military leadership will bring valuable insight to our board.”

Dunford’s consistent cheerleading of the F-35 and his subsequent hiring at its manufacturer create the perception of a conflict of interest and raised the eyebrows of at least one former senior military official.

“Here he is having been an advocate for it, having pressed it, having pushed for it … and now he’s going to work for the company that makes the aircraft, that just, to me, stinks to high heavens,” retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as special assistant to Colin Powell when he led the Joint Chiefs, told POGO.

This should be illegal.

Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger has ordered all Confederate-related paraphernalia to be removed from Marine Corps installations, his spokesman confirmed on Wednesday.

………

The document did not say when all of the Confederate-related paraphernalia needed to be removed by.

Berger’s spokesman confirmed to Task & Purpose that the commandant had sent a directive to his senior staff ordering all installations to get rid of symbols of the Confederate States of America.

The adoration of people who tried to destroy the United States by some of the military needs to be nipped in the bud.

First, I now have an explanation as to why some of the more ordinary statements about inequality and the like were booed by the debate crowd, it is likely that Bloomberg bought a significant portion of the tickets, because they cost in excess of $1,700:

Candidates on the debate stage were markedly rowdier on Tuesday — and they weren’t the only ones. Throughout the night, the audience seemingly was, too.

In moment after moment, including when Sen. Bernie Sanders pressed former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg on the overwhelming support he receives from billionaires, the audience responded effusively with boos. Notably, in several instances, the reaction seemed to favor Bloomberg, who was once again confronted by multiple candidates over issues including “stop and frisk” and alleged sexist comments.

The apparent support for Bloomberg from the crowd raised questions about whether there was an outsized presence of his supporters in the audience, given the extensive cheers he seemed to garner at the event compared to the Nevada debate. Speculation on Twitter was only amplified by a local news article that went viral, which claimed tickets started at a whopping $1,750 to $3,200 for donors looking to sponsor a package of events, including the debate. An update was later published to indicate that these ticket options were removed from the Charleston County Democrats’ website.

This is actually kind of reassuring. My first take was that South Carolina Democrats were a bunch or retrograde morons.

Bribery and corruption actually sounds better.

My second take is that Buttigieg’s sneering attack on 60’s revolutionary politics was effectively an attack on the Stonewall riots:

After Sanders responded by calling for nuance in US views toward foreign leaders — and by tying his views on Cuba to former President Barack Obama’s stance on the country — Buttigieg argued against Sanders’s position and claimed it demonstrates why the senator is unfit to be the Democratic presidential nominee:

The only way you can [restore American credibility] is to actually win the presidency, and I am not looking forward to a scenario where it comes down to Donald Trump with his nostalgia for the social order of the ’50s and Bernie Sanders with a nostalgia for the revolution politics of the ’60s. This is not about what coups were happening in the 1970s or 80s, this is about the future. This is about 2020.

(emphasis mine)

The, “Revolution politics of the ’60s,” ended the Vietnam war, gave us civil rights, and was the genesis of the gay rights via among other things, the Stonewall Riots.

Buttigieg would never have served in the military, or married his husband without those pesky 60s revolutionaries.

Seriously, Mayor Mayo is a poster child for unconscious privilege.

Speaking of privilege,  Chris “Tweety” Matthews’ grilling of Elizabeth Warren about her challenging Bloomberg on his treatment of women, because Matthews cannot imagine believing the woman, is one for the ages:

During the presidential debate in South Carolina on Tuesday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren used some of her speaking time to remind voters that former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg allegedly once told a pregnant employee of his to “kill it”—“it” as in the fetus. Longtime MSNBC host Chris Matthews was, by all indications, appalled by what he heard. But it wasn’t the part about Bloomberg’s alleged discrimination that seemed to disgust him—it was that Warren was making such a fuss about how she believed the woman was telling the truth.

Why does Tweety have a job?

If Bloomberg can’t handle being asked by Warren how many NDAs he’s had signed, just imagine when Trump offers him a box to stand on and asks him how it feels to have to spend $4 million per friend.

—Matt Taibbi

 Tru dat.  At least Trump knows how to attack back.

This is some more commentary regarding L’affaire Roger Stone, specifically, Donald Trump’s tweet criticizing the sentence that the prosecutors recommended, the subsequent amended (reduced) sentencing recommendation that came straight from Barr’s office, and the withdrawal of the entire prosecution team in protest.

William Barr actually gave an interview stating that Trump’s tweets make it difficult for him to do his job.

In what is a profoundly depressing, is that the mainstream press has presented this as an example of the integrity of the Attorney General, and nothing could be further from the truth.

Even right wing knuckle dragger Laura Ingraham understood what was being said, “Barr was basically telling Trump, ‘don’t worry, I got this’.”

Barr is telling Trump to shut the f%$# up while he finishes the coverup.

This is not occurring in isolation, Barr is looking to sabotage the case against Michael Flynn in the sane way.

William Barr is not, and has never, functioned as an Attorney General.

He is Donald Trump’s consigliere, just as he was George H.W. Bush’s consigliere and covered up Bush’s role in Iran Contra.

I do not believe that William Barr needs to resign as AG, I believe that he needs to be frog-marched out of the Department of Justice in handcuffs.

Following the clusterf%$# that used to be known as the Iowa caucuses, Troy Price, the head of the state Democratic Party has resigned:

Troy Price, the beleaguered chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party, resigned on Wednesday, a week after overseeing the chaotic Iowa caucuses that embarrassed the state and national party and left Democrats open to accusations of incompetence by President Trump’s re-election campaign.

The Iowa Democratic Party failed to report any results from its first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses on Feb. 3 until the next afternoon. When it did report results, they were filled with errors. Even once the Iowa Democratic Party released what it said were full results, errors remained in the tabulations, and the campaigns of the two victors, former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., and Senator Bernie Sanders, have both asked for a partial recanvass of the results.

Mr. Price, 39, has been the public face of the Iowa caucus debacle, as he has struggled to offer reassuring explanations about the integrity of the caucus reporting process and final results.

“While it is my desire to stay in this role and see this process through to completion, I do believe it is time for the Iowa Democratic Party to begin looking forward, and my presence in my current role makes that more difficult,” Mr. Price wrote in a letter to party officials. “Therefore, I will resign as chair of the Iowa Democratic Party effective upon the election of my replacement.” The party said its State Central Committee would elect an interim chair on Saturday.

How could one human being screw this up so badly?

The answer is that it takes a village:

In a conference call with his central committee two days after the caucuses, Mr. Price was pressed by two members over the appearance of cronyism because of his friendships, dating to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, with a senior adviser to Mr. Buttigieg who is married to the founder of the company that developed the caucus app. (The New York Times was provided with a call-in number for the call.)

“We have seen the pictures of you, Troy, with app developers and people with the Buttigieg campaign, and that’s concerning,” said Holly Brown, a committee member. She told Mr. Price he should not be involved in a planned post-mortem of what went wrong. “We’d like to have you removed from this,” she said.

………

Sean Bagniewski, the chairman of the Democratic Party in Polk County, which includes Des Moines, said the coziness between state party leaders, vendors and candidates did not originate under Mr. Price. “I think it’s been this way for quite some time,” he said. “It’s kind of like the little families that control petroleum countries. You’ve got access to resources that everybody wants, and you kind of become your own little kingdom of consultants and advisers.”

It ain’t just Iowa.

Given the fraught nature of the whole affair, the (relative) transparency and candor is remarkable, particularly when compared to the US response to its shoot down of Iran Air Flight 655 (Denials for years, and giving the reckless captain of the Vincennes a medal), and the 50+ year French coverup of their shoot down of Air France flight 1611.

It’s a tragedy, but in the aftermath, the Iranian government has behaved relatively well:

After maintaining for days that there was no evidence that one of its missiles had struck a Boeing 737-800 minutes after it took off from Tehran on Wednesday with 176 people on board, Iran admitted early on Saturday that its military had shot down the passenger jet by mistake.

The military blamed human error. In a statement, it said Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 had taken a sharp, unexpected turn that brought it near a sensitive military base. Hours later, though, an Iranian official walked back that claim.

“The plane was flying in its normal direction without any error and everybody was doing their job correctly,” Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ airspace unit, said during a televised news conference later Saturday. “If there was a mistake, it was made by one of our members.”

In a post on Twitter, Iran’s foreign minister, Mohamad Javad Zarif, apologized but appeared to also blame American “adventurism” for the tragedy, writing: “Human error at time of crisis caused by US adventurism led to disaster.”

President Hassan Rouhani said on Twitter that Iran “deeply regrets this disastrous mistake.”

………

A commander of the aerospace division of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in Iran, Amirali Hajizadeh, said on Saturday that he accepted responsibility for the plane’s downing minutes after takeoff in Tehran, according to Iranian state TV.

In a televised address, he gave more details about the sequence of events that he said had led to the disaster. He said it had been misidentified as a cruise missile, and was shot down with a short-range missile.

He also said that the Iranian missile operator had acted independently because of “jamming.”

“I wish I was dead,” Mr. Hajizadeh was quoted as saying by local news outlets. “I accept all responsibility for this incident.”

He said that whatever decision the Iranian authorities made, “I will accept with the arms open.”

It turns out that 25% of Americans cannot afford proper healthcare:

Millions of Americans – as many as 25% of the population – are delaying getting medical help because of skyrocketing costs.

………

Finley is one of millions of Americans who avoid medical treatment due to the costs every year.
‘I live on the street now’: how Americans fall into medical bankruptcy
Read more

A December 2019 poll conducted by Gallup found 25% of Americans say they or a family member have delayed medical treatment for a serious illness due to the costs of care, and an additional 8% report delaying medical treatment for less serious illnesses. A study conducted by the American Cancer Society in May 2019 found 56% of adults in America report having at least one medical financial hardship, and researchers warned the problem is likely to worsen unless action is taken.

Dr Robin Yabroff, lead author of the American Cancer Society study, said last month’s Gallup poll finding that 25% of Americans were delaying care was “consistent with numerous other studies documenting that many in the United States have trouble paying medical bills”.

The free market mousketeers think that all they need to do is unleash the market.

The market is unleashed. That is why everything is crap.

If I think that beef is too expensive, I can have chicken or beans.

I cannot not opt for medical treatment.

Healthcare is coercive by nature, take this or you die.

Benyamin Netanyahu is trying to pass a bill through the Knesset granting him immunity for the corruption charges for which he has been indicted.

His incredible toxicity is why Israel will have to hold its 3^rd election in a year, because he is, to quote Mel Brooks, “Incredibly Guilty.”

So Netanyahu is desperate to get a get out of jail free card:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Wednesday that he would ask the Israeli parliament to grant him immunity in three criminal cases, tying up further the already lengthy legal proceedings against him in a political system that has been gripped by deadlock for the past year.

Netanyahu’s immunity request to the Knesset would shield him from prosecution at least while he remains in office. It also pitches the country’s political establishment against the legal system ahead of an unprecedented third general election in less than a year. That election is set for March 2.

………

In November, Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit concluded that there was enough evidence to prosecute Netanyahu in three cases involving allegations that he and his wife, Sara, accepted more than $260,000 worth of luxury goods in exchange for political favors and that he interceded with regulators and lawmakers on behalf of two media companies in exchange for positive news coverage.

Seriously, this man is a cancer on Israeli body politics.

Cue Freddie Dalton Thompson

We just assassinated Iranian general Qassem Suleimani at the Baghdad airport.

In addition to being a fairly blatant example of wagging the f%$#ing dog, it’s also calculated to escalate the situation.

Additionally, it has already generated greater solidarity in Iran:

This is batsh%$ insane:

The White House said Donald Trump ordered an air strike that killed powerful Iranian general Qassem Suleimani in Baghdad in the early hours of Friday, in a dramatic escalation of an already bloody struggle between Washington and Tehran for influence across the region.

Suleimani, who ran Iranian military operations in Iraq and Syria, was targeted while being driven from Baghdad airport by local allies from the Popular Mobilisation Units (PMU). The deputy head of the PMU, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandes, a close Suleimani associate, was also killed in the attack.

“General Suleimani was actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region,” a Pentagon statement said. “This strike was aimed at deterring future Iranian attack plans. The United States will continue to take all necessary action to protect our people and our interests wherever they are around the world.”

Minutes before the statement Trump tweeted a US flag without comment. Later, the White House put out a statement saying the strike was a “decisive defensive action” carried out “at the direction of the president”.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, ordered three days of mourning and vowed that the US would face “severe revenge” for the killing.