Wall Street is not a friend to farmers or labor.

This is a magnificent example of how farmers in West Africa have protected themselves from the maniacal greed of the financial markets. Unions and cooperatives that produce strong contracts are absolutely necessary to protect "the little guy." It is time to turn the corner on Wall Street greed. It is wrong and immoral.

December 12, 2020
By Christian Pena

It has been a bitter holiday season (click here) for the maker of foil-wrapped Hershey's Kisses. For nearly a month, a battle has been raging between the Hershey chocolate company and the West African farmers who harvest many of its cocoa beans. And it appears that the long-disenfranchised farmers may have scored a rare win.

The dispute began in November, when cocoa industry traders noticed that an unnamed source had purchased so many cocoa beans in the futures market that prices rose by more than 30 percent.

The close-knit cocoa industry quickly suspected that the buyer was Hershey. But the Coffee and Cocoa Council and the Ghana Cocoa Board were more direct with their accusations when they wrote a letter Nov. 30 to Hershey titled "Abuse of the derivatives market to impoverish the West African farmer." The groups wrote that they "have observed with great concern the actions taken by your company on the New York terminal" and accused Hershey of using "the exchange to take delivery of physical cocoa."

"This is a clear squeeze on the ICE US Exchange and a clear indication of your intent to avoid the payment of the Living Income Differential — LID," they said. The newly introduced LID requires chocolate companies to pay an extra $400 per ton of cocoa beans to address the grave poverty farmers face in West Africa, according to the letter.

The two groups, which are the source of roughly 70 percent of the world's supply of cocoa beans, pushed back against Hershey for having made what they said was an improper purchase....

Very serious sitution along the Great Lakes.

December 10, 2020
By Jake Draugelis

Lansing - A bipartisan bill (click here) has passed the Senate to address rising water levels and shoreline erosion. The bill would provide support for local communities facing rising water levels, coastal erosion, and flooding that have put homes and property at risk, and caused millions of dollars in damages. The bill was cosponsored by Senators Gary Peters (D-MI), Ron Johnson (R-WI), Senators Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), and James Lankford (R-OK).

With lake Michigan matching the record for highest water level ever recorded in 2019, then beating it in 2020, communities in Michigan are facing serious shoreline erosion challenges. Rising waters have destroyed homes and beaches and have even forced residents to relocate. The new bill would establish loans that local governments could access to help mitigate the impact of rising water levels, coastal erosion and other damage caused by natural disasters in a more cost-effective way.

“Michigan’s communities around the Great Lakes continue to be threatened by rising water levels, coastal erosion, and flooding that are wreaking havoc on people’s lives and causing damage to public and private property,” said Senator Peters. “I am committed to ensuring that Michiganders and our beautiful coastlines are protected. I am proud that my bipartisan bill has passed the Senate and I will continue to fight to ensure that it is signed into law as soon as possible so we can provide our communities with the cost-effective and commonsense tools needed to mitigate the effects of these natural disasters.”...

I have never seen the St. Lawrence Seaway so poorly managed as it has been the past four years. The erosion along the Great Lakes is an emergency all by itself. It has never been like this.

February 27, 2020
By Garrett Ellison

Massena - The annual start of navigation (click here) through the St. Lawrence Seaway is being pushed back this spring by efforts to alleviate high water levels on Lake Ontario.
On Wednesday, Feb. 25, U.S. and Canadian Seaway managers announced that oceangoing vessels would not be able to enter the Great Lakes until April 1, a delay of nearly two weeks from March 20, when marine executives wanted to open the shipping lock system....

...The board that decides dam flow-through rates will increase outflows above safe levels for ships until April. The goal is to draw down Lake Ontario as much as possible heading into what’s expected to be another year of record high water levels across the Great Lakes.

High water problems have been felt acutely along the Lake Ontario shoreline. Severe coastal flooding struck in 2017 following a change in lake level management. Flooding struck again last summer, when levels broke an all-time record set in 1918.

While shoreline residents were happy to learn about the efforts to draw Lake Ontario down, the shipping industry is less than enthused. Marine executives said the delay will disrupt commercial supply chains that link Midwest ports to global markets....

Plan the Vote

There have been reports of violence from the right. 

There is a problem in having enough workers to open early voting. There may be budget issues as well. Knowing how forthright elected officials from Georgia have been I do not believe this is to reduce voter turnout. The campaigns should see this as an opportunity to help.

December 8, 2020
By Jane C. Timm

"A passerby (click here) stopped and confronted a supporter with physical aggression," said Henry County Police Captain Randy Lee in a statement later on Saturday, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Four of the 10 most populous counties in Georgia (click here) are reducing the number of locations where people can vote early in the state’s Senate runoff races, prompting outcry from civil rights and voting rights organizations.

In Cobb County, the state’s third most populous county with more than 760,000 residents, election officials have announced five early voting locations, fewer than half of the 11 used for early voting ahead of last month's general election.

Advocates warned that the reduction of early voting sites will particularly harm Black and Latino voters in the state by making it harder to access the polls.

“We are especially concerned that these closures will be harmful to Cobb County’s Black and Latinx voters because many of the locations are in Black and Latinx communities,” a group of advocates, including Georgia branches of the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote in a letter Monday to local officials, calling on them to maintain 11 early voting sites for the runoff. They included a map that showed how most of the early voting locations are in areas with a higher shares of Black voters.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Cobb County Elections Director Janine Eveler said she didn't have the staff to run more early voting sites....

End the burning in Brazil.

The massive scale of the Amazon rainforest as a carbon sink (click here) gives it a significant influence on the global carbon cycle. However, droughts and fire, resulting partially from deforestation and fragmentation and partially from global climate patterns threaten to create a “dieback” scenario where the forest no longer functions as a carbon sink.

The climatic istory of the Amazon basin is relevant to understand the effects of climate on forest distribution and composition. South America originally formed part of the Gondwanaland supercontinent, connected with Africa and Antarctica. Just 2 million years ago, in recent geologic time, the Isthmus of Panama closed to connect the Americas (explaining part of the distinction in North American and South American flora and fauna)....

November 2020
By Liz Kimbrough

2,500+ major blazes burned across Brazil’s Legal Amazon (click here) between late May and early November. Many were on recently deforested lands, indicative of land grabbers converting forests to pastures and croplands, while others were within conserved areas and Indigenous reserves. Of concern: 41% of burns were in standing forests.

Estimates say that nearly 5.4 million acres (2.2 million hectares) of Brazil’s Amazon standing rainforest burned this year — an area roughly the size of the country of Wales in the United Kingdom.

Brazil’s soaring deforestation rates and Amazon fires point to another problem: the nation is not on track to meet its 2020 goals under the Paris Climate Agreement for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, carbon emissions in Brazil did not fall, but rose by 9.6%, in 2019, the first year of President Jair Bolsonaro’s four-year term.

Under its UN climate commitments, Brazil is only required to measure fire-related greenhouse gas emissions from newly deforested lands, not from fires in standing forests. A questionable practice, say some critics, as fires in the Amazon are routinely set by people and escape into forests. The highest CO2 emissions from forest fires in the Amazon don’t happen during the burn, but years later, a new study concludes, complicating emission estimates....

Shut down the border wall construction.

Mexican security guards are not vetted. There is no security clearance and for all we know they are working for the drug cartels. Who else in Mexico is heavily armed.

Shut down the construction. The Border Patrol will have to report on the entire issue, including the cages and children in camps. All this has to be documented and the southern border now welcomes armed Mexicans across the border. I don't think so.

December 11, 2020

By Peter Wade

Contractors used armed Mexican security units (click here) who were illegally smuggled into the United States to guard the construction sites of Trump’s border wall, according to a complaint by two whistle-blowers.

According to the New York Times, in unsealed court documents the whistle-blowers allege that two companies, Sullivan Land Services Co. (S.L.S.) and Ultimate Concrete of El Paso (U.C.), who were awarded federal contracts, not only smuggled in armed Mexican security guards but overcharged the government for construction costs.

Additionally, the report claims that a supervisor at the Army Corps of Engineers approved Ultimate Concrete’s building of “a dirt road to expedite illegal border crossings to sites in San Diego, using construction vehicles to block security cameras.”

“This U.C.-constructed road was apparently the route by which the armed Mexican nationals were unlawfully crossing into the United States,” the whistle-blowers said in the complaint.

Sullivan Land Services Co. has been awarded more than $1.4 billion in government contracts to work on the border wall and, according to the Times, allowed its subcontractor, Ultimate Concrete, to hire the armed Mexican guards....

Commitments to the children MUST be honored.

The health of Earth's climate is about the future as well as the present. The USA has to throw it's weight behind the Paris Climate Accords and hold all countries accountable.

December 9, 2020
By Somini Sengupta

China (click here) must do better now. It cannot wait until mid-century. China must improve its air quality. China states it wants to be a global leader. Then prove it.

The world as a whole (click here) is dangerously behind schedule in slowing catastrophic climate change, and its richest people will have to make big changes in their everyday lives in order to shift course, a major United Nations report warned Wednesday.

But nearly five years after a landmark international climate agreement in Paris, there are signs of a sea change, including from some of the biggest polluters in the world.

The “undercurrent” of the global economy has shifted, said Christiana Figueres, a former United Nations diplomat who led the negotiations that yielded the Paris Agreement in 2015. “We are moving faster than we ever were,” she said in a call with reporters Wednesday.

Most of the world’s biggest emitters of planet-warming gases, including China, have promised to draw down their emissions to net-zero by midcentury, meaning that they would eliminate as much of the greenhouse gases as they emit. If those promises are kept (a big if) the world would come very close to the Paris agreement’s goal of limiting temperature rise to the levels required to avert the worst climate disasters....

Sometimes it takes a PhD. to find the truth and deliver it to a nation.

Mr. Epstein is a misogynist. I am sure he is primed for the fight and wants it more than he wants his favorite beverage, but, this is exactly what this DISCRIMINATION/PREJUDICE amounts to.

Dr. Jill Biden continues to work even when First Lady. There are women in this country that are very talented and well educated and are the only one that can get the job done. Vice-President Elect is another one that passed over a chance to run for US Senator for California to finish a project only she could finish when she was Attorney General of California.

Hillary Clinton began the "womens and girls" movement when she was in office and continued to pursue that goal as a Secretary of State.

It is called dedication, know-how, and gravitas. Women love challenges no different than their husbands, sons, or male friends. They not only seek it out, but they also succeed at mastering the challenge to bring about results.

I have absolutely no doubt Dr. Jill Biden is a first-rate educator and is needed in the community where she works. I look forward to a "Working-First Lady." Should be interesting.

December 13, 2020
By Rachel Treisman

An opinion column (click here) in The Wall Street Journal came under fire over the weekend for asking educator and incoming first lady Jill Biden — who holds two master's degrees and a doctorate in education — to stop using the title "Dr."

In the op-ed published Friday evening, writer and former editor of The American Scholar magazine Joseph Epstein urged Biden to drop the title, a message that public figures and women in academia panned on Twitter as misogynistic both in substance and tone.

"Madame First Lady — Mrs. Biden — Jill — kiddo," begins the piece. "Any chance you might drop the 'Dr.' before your name? 'Dr. Jill Biden' sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic."

Biden earned her doctorate from the University of Delaware in 2007. Biden's Obama White House biography describes the dissertation as focusing on "maximizing student retention in community colleges." Epstein disparaged the title of that dissertation as "unpromising."...

Big News for the Atlantic Ocean! A birth announcement of two baby North Atlantic Right Whales.

Americans have forgotten the importance of protecting our oceans and the magnificent mammals that live there.

The Marine Mammal Protection Act (click here)

It has been a very difficult year for marine mammals, especially the Atlantic Right Whales. Several have been spotted emaciated because it appears their normal habitat is not producing enough food them. There were several that got entangled in fishing gear off Canada. It is estimated they were looking for food and ran into the fishing nets and lines. 

The habitat at least produced these two great new members of the species group. Everyone is very happy about the news.

One of the things the new administration will have to do is review all these laws including the Clean Air and Clean Water Act and straighten out the mess Trump's administration left in their wake. There are a lot of issues including lawsuits. If the new administration would meet with the environmental and conservation communities the lawsuits will be resolved and free up some of the burdens being carried by people that love animals and nature.

December 10, 2020
By Abigail Mercer

A critically endangered (click here) North Atlantic right whale mother and her calf were spotted Thursday off Volusia County's coastline — the first sighting off Volusia County this season.

The whales were spotted in the Ponce Inlet area, and the sighting was confirmed by Julie Albert, right whale coordinator for the Marine Resources Council. She said it's the third time this season that a mother and calf have been spotted. The other sightings were off the coast of Georgia, and off Vilano Beach near Jacksonville.

“We had a longtime volunteer within our spotter network call around 9:15, which kind of put into motion the response process to make a species identification, but also for photo ID and research," Albert said. "I had some locals up there who were willing to stay with the whales until we got there at 11:30.”

The calf and its mother, nicknamed Millipede for the propeller scars streaking down her back, were the same pair spotted in Vilano Beach. Albert said they both appear to be healthy, and with the photos they were able to take, researchers will be able to study the whales....

I am fairly confident some of the problems are changed in shipping and shipping lanes. Also, the mammals and fish that live in the ocean are running into warmer waters, confusion, and altered migration patterns. A lot of work lies ahead if we value our fisheries on all coasts.

December 11, 2020
By Brian Kahn

There are many ways to remember President Donald Trump (click here) ’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....

It is a darn shame the way Trump carried on with Putin.

See that guy, there. He has been Chairman of the KGB. I don't know if he still is, but, he was for a long time. He has more USA computer codes than the USA does. You want to know why? Because Trump gave them to him and then he went about not only using USA codes but, installing his own codes on USA agency files.

I have no doubt there are break-ins all the time, but, it isn't because the GRU is clever so much as good students of a captured American called Edward Snowden and also the Russian's good friend Donald John Trump. It is a mess and now the Democrats will come into office and clean it up.

December 13, 2020
By David E. Sanger

Vladimir Kryuchkov during session of the USSR Supreme Soviet

Chairman of the Committee for State Security KGB Vladimir Kryuchkov (1924 - 2007) during session of the USSR Supreme Soviet of XII convocation in Moscow, Soviet Union, July 1989. 

The Trump administration (click here) acknowledged on Sunday that hackers acting on behalf of a foreign government — almost certainly a Russian intelligence agency, according to federal and private experts — broke into a range of key government networks, including in the Treasury and Commerce Departments, and had free access to their email systems.

Officials said a hunt was on to determine if other parts of the government had been affected by what looked to be one of the most sophisticated, and perhaps among the largest, attacks on federal systems in the past five years. Several said national security-related agencies were also targeted, though it was not clear whether the systems contained highly classified material.

The Trump administration said little in public about the hack, which suggested that while the government was worried about Russian intervention in the 2020 election, key agencies working for the administration — and unrelated to the election — were actually the subject of a sophisticated attack that they were unaware of until recent weeks....

Scientists studying the climate do pick up significant changes with world events, ie: September 11, 2001 grounded planes

This is what can happen if civilization ended it's use of carbon in ways that produce greenhouse gases.

IT IS POSSIBLE. THERE IS PROOF.                                  

The kids know what they are talking about, "Shame on you; How dare you."

December 13, 2020
By Doyle Rice

Global CO₂ (click here) emmissions MtCO₂ per day to December 2020

Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, (click here) the leading cause of global warming, fell by 7%, according to the report from the Global Carbon Project (click here), a group of international scientists who track emissions.

That's the biggest yearly drop on record, the group said.

Transportation accounted for the largest share of the global decrease, researchers said. Emissions from surface transport, such as car journeys, fell by approximately half at the peak of the COVID-19 lockdowns.

“Of course, lockdown is absolutely not the way to tackle climate change,” said report co-author

Corinne Le Quere, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia in the U.K.

The report estimated that the world will have put 37 billion tons of carbon dioxide in the air by the end of 2020. That’s down from 40.1 billion tons in 2019.

Emissions dropped 12% in the USA and 11% in Europe but only 1.7% in China. China had an earlier lockdown and less of a second wave of coronavirus infections. China’s emissions are more industrial-based than other countries', and its industry was less affected than transportation, Le Quere said....

Do you believe this mess? This guy is supposed to be such a great lawyer and listen to him. He has to know the Supreme Court is going to do the same thing as the rest of the judicial branch. 

DISMISSED! Yet he rants on and on about how great it all is when he knows full well it isn't. This is the type of nonsense that is dividing this country. I realize the right-wing likes it that way, but, it is simply wrong to deceive people. Did anyone actually believe the Supreme Court was going to throw out an entire election because Trump had loyalists on the court? Really? That is treason. 

The Supreme Court is not going to side with the president that nominated them for the sake of loyalty. Their OATH is to the USA Constitution, not some carved out loyalty to a president that creates his own reality. 

Knock it off!

I want a full retraction of all the lies stated within this program. Someone needs to send it to review of a state bar. This is highly unethical.

Just stuff tonight.

This is my pet peeve. I think the study is genius if one is looking for patterns within mass extinctions of the past. It is an important study.

However.

The study of the past in trying to predict the current climate crisis and how it will spin out is highly inaccurate. I probably haven't said this enough, but, this warming of Earth is only the second warming that can result in mass extinction. There were no humans on the planet when most of the creatures in the oceans died off and living on land was not easy. Please understand there is nothing wrong with understanding Earth's past. It is important. An understanding of how Earth reacts in such glaciation and melting periods is important, but, never before in Earth's history has there been nearly 8 billion people on Earth that carry with them consumerism that is adverse to Earth's climate.

December 13, 2020

...Creative destruction (click here) is central to classic concepts of evolution. It seems clear that there are periods in which suddenly many species suddenly disappear, and many new species suddenly appear. However, radiations of a comparable scale to the mass extinctions, which this study, therefore, calls the mass radiations, have received far less analysis than extinction events.

This study compared the impacts of both extinction and radiation across the period for which fossils are available, the so-called Phanerozoic Eon. The Phanerozoic (from the Greek meaning “apparent life”), represents the most recent ~ 550-million-year period of Earth’s total ~4.5 billion-year history, and is significant to paleontologists: before this period most of the organisms that existed were microbes that didn’t easily form fossils, so the prior evolutionary record is hard to observe.

The new study suggests creative destruction isn’t a good description of how species originated or went extinct during the Phanerozoic, and suggests that many of the most remarkable times of evolutionary radiation occurred when life entered new evolutionary and ecological arenas, such as during the Cambrian explosion of animal diversity and the Carboniferous expansion of forest biomes. Whether this is true for the previous ~ 3 billion years dominated by microbes is not known, as the scarcity of recorded information on such ancient diversity did not allow a similar analysis.

Paleontologists have identified a handful of the most severe, mass extinction events in the Phanerozoic fossil record. These principally include the big five mass extinctions, such as the end-Permian mass extinction in which more than 70% of species are estimated to have gone extinct. Biologists have now suggested that we may now be entering a “Sixth Mass Extinction,” which they think is mainly caused by human activity including hunting and land-use changes caused by the expansion of agriculture. A commonly noted example of the previous “Big Five” mass extinctions is the Cretaceous-Tertiary one (usually abbreviated as “K-T,” using the German spelling of Cretaceous) which appears to have been caused when a meteor hit Earth ~65 million years ago, wiping out the non-avian dinosaurs....

It is Sunday NIght 

It is time for the spirit of Christmas to come alive.

Do you know there are no more big Christmas pageant shows? It is easy to find Charlie Brown's Christmas and Frosty. They are cartoons. But, there aren't that many new Christmas songs or Christmas programs. 

That is just being Scrooge. It cost money to make programs that air once a year.

It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year by Andy Williams (click here for memorial at his arts center)

It's the most wonderful time of the year
With the kids jingle belling
And everyone telling you be of good cheer
It's the most wonderful time of the year

It's the hap-happiest season of all
With those holiday greetings and gay happy meetings
When friends come to call
It's the hap-happiest season of all

There'll be parties for hosting
Marshmallows for toasting
And caroling out in the snow
There'll be scary ghost stories (The Christmas Carol)
And tales of the glories of
Christmases long, long ago

It's the most wonderful time of the year
There'll be much mistltoeing
And hearts will be glowing
When loved ones are near
It's the most wonderful time of the year

There'll be parties for hosting
Marshmallows for toasting
And caroling out in the snow
There'll be scary ghost stories
And tales of the glories of
Christmases long, long ago

It's the most wonderful time of the year
There'll be much mistltoeing
And hearts will be glowing
When loved ones are near
It's the most wonderful time
Yes the most wonderful time
Oh the most wonderful time
Of the year

I will be starting a little late this evening.

Thank you.