05 August, 2021

After conducting such a review, the state board may appoint a temporary superintendent to oversee a county’s election administration if three members of the board determine that the county’s top election officials recently “committed at least three violations” the state’s election laws and regulations, or if these board members determine that the local officials “demonstrated nonfeasance, malfeasance, or gross negligence in the administration of the elections.”

Yet, while these provisions might be reasonable and nonpartisan if they were administered by reasonable and nonpartisan officials, they entrench Republican power in two ways. Firstly, SB 202 increases the Republican Party’s grip on the State Elections Board by bringing the total number of board members appointed by the legislature to three.

Before SB 202, the state board was chaired by Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who refused Trump’s suggestion that Raffensperger “find 11,780 votes” and award them to Trump — thus giving the defeated president an illegitimate victory over Biden. SB 202 allows the Republican-controlled state legislature to appoint a more pliable chair (the seat is currently vacant).

GOP lawmakers already appointed two of the other board members: One of these seats is appointed by the state senate, and another by the state House, both of which have Republican majorities. (Theoretically, control of one or both houses could flip to the Democratic Party in the future, giving them more power over the board of elections, but that’s no reassurance for anyone worried about the administration of the 2022 elections — and Republicans can use their current majorities to pass gerrymanders that could lock them into power.)

And Republicans actually have even more control of the board: The two remaining seats are filled by the state Democratic and Republican parties, meaning Republicans currently control four of the five slots.

This brings us to the second way SB 202 entrenches Republican control of the 2022 elections: A supermajority on the board enables the GOP to take over local election administration, even if a Republican member of the state elections board dissents. That’s because only three of the board’s five members need to support a state takeover of a local election board for that takeover to happen.

So what happens next?

Under SB 202, Republicans still need to jump through several procedural hoops before they can claim control Fulton County’s election administration. The process from here on out looks like this:

Because Fulton is likely to remove a GOP-appointed superintendent as soon as it can, Republicans need to time this entire process carefully if their intent is to skew the 2022 election in their favor. To gain maximum advantage, Republicans need to ensure that the temporary superintendent’s nine months in office overlaps with the 2022 election and the post-election period when that election is being certified.

Once Republicans take over the Fulton County election board, they gain broad new powers to disenfranchise voters

In those nine months, the temporary superintendent gains all the powers that would normally be held by local election administrators — at least three of which could potentially be wielded to disenfranchise voters.

First, county election boards normally have the power to adjudicate claims that a particular voter is not lawfully allowed to vote, so this power would be transferred to a GOP-appointed superintendent. If a county board (or a temporary superintendent) determines that a particular voter is “not qualified to remain on the list of electors,” the voter will be disenfranchised and removed from the list of registered voters.

State law does permit a voter disenfranchised in this way to appeal to a state court, but that’s an onerous process that many voters will struggle to navigate. Imagine, for example, that a Republican superintendent declares thousands of Fulton County voters ineligible. These voters would need to find lawyers, file an appeal, and hope that the state’s GOP- dominated judiciary doesn’t uphold the superintendent’s actions.

Meanwhile, voters in other, less Democratic counties would be free to cast their ballots normally.

A temporary superintendent also has the power to relocate polling sites, and they have some authority to divide, reshape, or combine existing polling precincts. In the worst-case scenario, a Republican superintendent might attempt to shut down most of the polling places in Atlanta, forcing voters to wait in long lines to cast a ballot. At the very least, such a superintendent might move around many voters’ polling places, confusing voters who are accustomed to voting in a particular location.

Finally, county election boards (or a superintendent appointed to replace that board) must certify the results of an election once all the votes in that county are tallied. It’s not at all clear what happens if local election administrators refuse to certify an election because they don’t like the result. But the statewide bodies that could plausibly resolve such a dispute — including the State Elections Board, the state legislature, and the state supreme court — are currently controlled by Republicans.

So, while it remains to be seen what the state GOP will do with its authority if it does take over elections in Fulton County, the Republican Party could potentially gain the power to rig the 2022 election.

As a reliable income evaporated for a significant contingent of Americans, you might assume national credit card debt increased as those in need leaned on the lifeline — but you’d be wrong.

According to a recent congressional report, credit card balances actually declined sharply, by $76 billion, in the second quarter of 2020. You might also assume that, with the guillotine of joblessness hanging precipitously in the balance, Americans might defer large purchases, like homes or cars. Again, you’d be wrong: By the fourth quarter of 2020, mortgage debt grew to $10 trillion (compared to a fourth-quarter 2019 statistic of $9.56 trillion), and auto loan debt reached $1.4 trillion.

Desperate times, it seems, did not lead to desperate measures. If Americans were facing what many anticipated would be the largest financial slump since the Great Depression, or at least the Great Recession, why were their spending and debt accumulation habits so … healthy? Sociologist and demographer Teresa Sullivan has some ideas.

Sullivan, who teaches at the University of Virginia, has studied consumer bankruptcy for decades, publishing award-winning books on the subject alongside co-authors Elizabeth Warren (yes, that Elizabeth Warren) and bankruptcy specialist Jay Lawrence Westbrook. She says it’s “impossible to look at” consumer bankruptcy without also considering consumer debt. In June, I spoke with Sullivan to parse the patterns of Americans’ personal finances and debt before and during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The phrase “consumer debt” is one that I think the public tends to misinterpret. What is consumer debt, and what does it look like in America?

In my own work on consumer bankruptcy, “consumer” debt is any debt incurred by an individual or couple (as opposed to a business) — so that would be mortgages, car debt, student debt, bank loans, etc. The Federal Reserve Consumer Credit G.19 report excludes any debt secured by real estate, so it omits mortgages. Of course, the consumer can’t omit the mortgage. The Federal Reserve reported $14.56 trillion of consumer debt after the fourth quarter of 2020.

What was the consumer debt landscape like in America directly preceding the Covid-19 crisis? Who was particularly vulnerable?

First of all, it took the United States a long time to recover from the recession of 2008. People were very cautious about taking on new debt then, but they became less cautious as we moved on in the decade of the teens. So by 2019, the year before Covid hit, total consumer debt was a little over $14 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve and Experian.

There were a lot of people whose finances were in balance, but only barely. They didn’t have emergency savings to fall back on, and when they lost their job, their steady source of income disappeared. The vulnerability was the lack of a cushion.

During the worst part of Covid, people were pretty cautious. Debt did rise, but not all debt rose. For example, the US experienced the largest recorded quarterly decline in credit card balances (about $76 billion, see the Congressional Research Service study of May 6, 2021). For one thing, people stopped spending; they really just cut back on expenditures. That’s one of the reasons that businesses were so hard-hit: Aside from the lockdowns and all the rest of it, people weren’t buying stuff.

But I would say that what really saved it from being a total disaster was the three stimulus checks. That first stimulus check was spent almost entirely on expenses, and it appeared that was the period of highest unemployment. When the second stimulus check came out, people were more likely to spend that on debt; that may be one reason that we began to see a decline in credit card debt. And then by the time we got to the third stimulus check, some people were spending it, some people were buying down debt, but a surprising number saved it. The personal savings rate actually reached a high in April of 2020. Who would have believed it?

How did the financial impacts of Covid-19 shift as the pandemic continued through 2020 and into 2021?

When Congress moved through the CARES Act and the subsequent acts to provide relief for Americans, one of the things they did was provide mortgage forbearance, which meant that if you were delinquent on your mortgage payment, basically, the lender had to put up with it for a while. In fact, the lenders could not tell the credit bureau that you were delinquent. At the same time, they also extended repayment on student loans, and the CDC said you can’t evict rental tenants because of the health crisis.

Federal relief almost surely made a huge difference because people could buy groceries and other necessities, and the forbearance on mortgages and evictions meant they could postpone mortgage or rent payments (but those obligations did not disappear). The larger unemployment benefits also provided cash to the unemployed, sometimes more than their lost earnings.

But it appears that discretionary spending rebounded slowly. Many purchases could be and were postponed (such as clothing). There was a notable decline in college attendance, which meant that students were not paying tuition, room, and board.

The biggest increase in consumer debt was for mortgages. And the biggest group there, at least in percentage terms, has been Generation Z, our youngest generation. Experian says they had a 67 percent increase in mortgage debt. It’s still small, relative to how much debt the older generations are carrying, but it was the biggest increase. This may reflect the fact that they’re trying to get into the housing market.

You mentioned that credit card debt declined during the worst of the pandemic. A report by Creditcards.com found that 51 percent of adults with credit card debt (about 51 million) actually added to their balance in 2020, and 44 percent of them blame the pandemic. Why do you think there is a discrepancy in the statistics, and can both be true?

It’s possible that both are true. Experian reports that credit card debt is down 9 percent between 2019 and 2020. I do think that consumers have become much more savvy about the fact that their highest interest rate is on their credit card balance. You know what your interest rate is on your mortgage, but often with your credit card, you’re not really sure what it is, because with some credit cards, it can fluctuate. Because of the uncertainty and high rates of credit card debt, for some people, if they had money to pay off a debt, that’s what they paid off. I think one of the things the stimulus check did was it gave them an alternative to using the credit card to pay for their everyday expenses.

Now, having said this, there probably were people who put their groceries and everything else on their credit card because they didn’t have any other way to get it. What I would look at, if you could get to it, and you can’t, would be the composition of what people were buying on credit cards. They weren’t buying restaurant meals because the restaurants were closed. They weren’t buying airline tickets. But they could have been using their credit card at the grocery store, at the pharmacy, and in many cases, they could even pay their rent on a credit card. Only the credit card companies could tell you if there has been a change in the composition of the use of the card.

First of all, I think it depends not only on the unemployment rate, but also on what happens to wages. If there is some rise in wages, that may give people a bit of a cushion.

The troubling signs to watch will be student loan defaults (after forbearance ends), foreclosures, and evictions. I would watch for any increase in homelessness recorded in the school districts this fall. And the holiday season will be important to watch, as well.

We know that consumer bankruptcy filings dropped a lot in 2020, but they are now rising again. In March, we had 40,000 consumer bankruptcies; in April, we had 38,000. It is a truism among some bankruptcy professionals that people wait to file until they have exhausted every alternative. With the mortgage and eviction protection ending, we will almost surely see more people filing in Chapter 13 to try to save their homes. One way to basically buy more time with an eviction or a foreclosure is to file bankruptcy. Usually when those bankruptcies go up, it could well be associated with an increase in evictions and foreclosures.

The congressional research study I mentioned above notes that compared with the Great Recession of 2008, more homeowners during the pandemic had more home equity, and so they were in a better position to refinance. And the real estate market is booming in many areas, so distressed homeowners may seek to sell their homes and pay off their lenders. Similarly, some people who fall behind on their car loans might be able to sell their cars because there is high demand for used cars right now.

The Census Bureau began doing a survey that was very helpful during the pandemic called the Pulse survey, which comes out every week and asks people about their economic difficulties. In the survey that covered May 12 through 24, there were still 26 percent of respondents who said they were having trouble paying their household expenses. That’s a red flag. And 9 percent of adults were in households where they said that at least some time in the past week, there had not been enough to eat. So it appears to me that the people who have been in dire straits are not going to get out of those dire straits any time soon.

The people who you mentioned experienced the greatest vulnerability pre-pandemic were those who didn’t have a cushion or savings. Do you think that will change?

The people who are sort of scraping by, they’re still scraping by. Life is not necessarily going to get better for them any time soon. Now, there are states that are raising their minimum wage; that could help. But what I would say, just in conclusion, is this whole thing would have been a whole lot worse had there not been the effort to provide stimulus.

“Does every species matter?” asked Mark Vellend, a plant ecologist at University of Sherbrooke in Canada. “You cannot even give an answer unless you say, matter for what?”

How to measure “goodness”

But in specific places, biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake is not necessarily good. On islands, for example, plant diversity is generally increasing because non-native species are arriving; some rare island plant species may go extinct as a result, but not always. Biodiversity might also be the wrong lens in ecosystems that weren’t diverse to begin with, like boreal forests close to the Arctic, which have low numbers of species that rarely face extinction even in the face of logging.

Many scientists recognize biodiversity as an imperfect yardstick. The total number of species, and how it changes, doesn’t capture all the ways that humans and other forces alter landscapes. “‘More biodiversity’ is not a universal prescription for conservation,” journalist Michelle Nijhuis writes in Beloved Beasts, a history of the conservation movement.

It also doesn’t capture the human experience of nature. A 2013 study — “Is biodiversity attractive?” — found that when it comes to outdoor recreation, visitors don’t actually prefer species- rich urban spaces. “Especially during the pandemic people [are] flocking to natural, wild spaces,” said Vellend. “Whether in those spaces there are 1,000 species or 100, to me that’s a pretty small part of the overall story.”

For many people, the on-ramp to nature is not through science. “Their point of entry is aesthetic,” Barry Lopez, the nature writer and Arctic Dreams author, said in a 2001 interview. “It’s not that they don’t know what biodiversity is, but it doesn’t have the pull,” he added. “The door for them lies elsewhere.”

A more measurable dimension of a place’s “goodness” within the human story, some scientists think, is ecosystem function. Forget the number of species, in other words, and focus on what each does for keeping an ecosystem enjoyable and humming, like the life-supporting role of oak trees — which support hundreds of species of caterpillars, a mainstay in most songbird diets — in North American hardwood forests. Using this framework, land managers would focus their conservation efforts on species that appear to play the most crucial role in a given ecosystem. (An 80-page US National Park Service report, called “Resist-Accept- Direct,” recently called for this triage approach.)

Pimm, for his part, thinks this framework is “total bullshit” — and he is not alone in that sentiment. It’s hard to develop a conservation plan around the emerging concept of ecosystem function, according to Pimm, precisely because we still know so little about the role of any given species in a place. “What does one even mean by ecosystem function?” he asked. “It doesn’t have any operational meaning.”

The concept of biodiversity is becoming even more influential in the realm of climate policy: In June, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its first- ever joint report with the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. Yet one of its authors, the Paris-Saclay University ecologist Paul Leadley, said while introducing the report that current on-the-ground approaches to saving species are essentially outdated. “We have to really rethink biodiversity conservation,” he said.

There is a broader movement to expand the meaning of “biodiversity”

So if the idea that saving every species saves the planet is imperfect, should we now abandon biodiversity?

“A concept can’t truly die until it’s got a replacement,” said Vellend. He says that the 1980s version of biodiversity should be seen as a starting point, with plenty of room for improvement. “Until somebody comes up with something better, we’re stuck with it.”

Even R. Alexander Pyron, the author of the explosive Post piece, cautioned against dropping “biodiversity” in a mea culpa he posted on his Facebook page after blowback from his peers. “I succumbed to a temptation to sensationalize parts of my argument,” Pyron wrote.

But others see an opportunity to expand the notion of biodiversity into something more inclusive and more just. Campaigns like #BiodiversityRevisited have created virtual dialogues and in-person workshops where an array of voices discuss ways of breathing new life into “biodiversity.” These discussions have pushed out possible replacement terms, like “fabric of life,” that might better capture the full range of life on Earth, from thriving trees to prospering pandas to healthy people.

One starting point might be to broaden the biodiversity concept to include humans, breaking down the barrier between our species and other animals. “My well- educated scientist colleagues will often slip and say ‘mammals and humans.’ Every time, I get a chill down my spine,” said Hopi Hoekstra, an evolutionary biologist and curator at Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. Humans are mammals, after all. That even experts make these slips of the tongue “just highlights that there is still something to overcome there,” Hoekstra said.

Conservationists could also gain from a broadened notion of biodiversity that centers Indigenous and traditional knowledge, which has long been diminished by establishment science. Research shows that lands managed by Indigenous people are home to much of the world’s biodiversity, and that biodiversity tends to decline more slowly on those lands.

“Many of these Westernized concepts, we don’t see ourselves in them,” Andrea Reid, a fisheries scientist at University of British Columbia and a citizen of the Nisga’a nation, said. Indigenous concepts of conservation “include people within the system,” said Reid, who monitors diversity in British Columbia’s coldwater streams by counting species in ways that have cultural meaning to Indigenous people.

Reid has been working with Indigenous “knowledge keepers” who will go to a stream and look for certain species of dragonfly — for them, a “cultural indicator” that marks a healthy ecosystem. Other scientists might go to the same place and tally all insect species to measure local species richness. These measures can be used together, Reid says, to assess the overall condition of the stream over time.

This kind of “pluralistic” perspective, as some scientists call it, aligns with what Reid calls “two-eyed seeing” — a way of bringing together Indigenous and Western understandings. “It’s not about throwing something out, or just walking away from ‘biodiversity’ and its metrics,” Reid said. “It’s about enriching our understanding by bringing multiple perspectives to bear.”

From The Hindu: Sports

From The Hindu: National News

From BBC: Europe

From Ars Technica

From Jokes Subreddit

My little daughter came to me all excited, saying, “Daddy! Daddy! Guess how old I’ll be this August!” I chuckled, “Oh I don’t know princess, why don’t you tell me?” She gave me a huge smile and held up four fingers. -

It’s now three hours later, the police are annoyed and she still won’t say where she got them!

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A farmer buys a young cock. As soon as he gets home it fucks all of his 150 hens. The farmer is impressed. At lunch, the cock again screws all 150 hens. -

Next day it’s fucking the ducks and the geese too

Sadly, later in the day the farmer finds the cock lying on the ground half-dead and vultures circling over its head. Farmer yells , “You deserve it, you horny bastard!”

The cock slowly opens one eye, looks up at the sky and whispers , " Shhhhhh, They’re about to land!!!"

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A Russian and an Irish wrestler were set to square off for the Olympic gold medal. -

Before the final match, the Irish wrestler’s trainer came to him and said, “Now, don’t forget all the research we’ve done on this Russian. He’s never lost a match because of this ‘pretzel’ hold he has. It ties you up in knots. Whatever you do, do not let him get you in that hold! If he does, you’re finished.”

The Irishman nodded in acknowledgment. As the match started, the Irishman and the Russian circled each otherseveral times, looking for an opening. All of a sudden, the Russian lunged forward,grabbing the Irishman and wrapping him up in the dreaded pretzel hold. A sigh of disappointment arose from the crowd and the trainer buried his face in his hands, for he knew all was lost. He couldn’t watch the inevitable happen.

Suddenly, there was a Long, High Pitched Scream, then a cheer from the crowd and the trainer raised his eyes just in time to watch the Russian go flying up in the air. His back hit the mat with a thud and the Irishman collapsed on top of him, making the pin and winning the match.

The trainer was astounded.When he finally got his wrestler alone, he asked, “How did you ever get out of that hold? No one has ever done it before!”

The wrestler answered, “Well, I was ready to give up when he got me in that hold but at the last moment, I opened my eyes and saw this pair of testicles right in front of my face. I had nothing to lose so with my last ounce of strength, I stretched out my neck and bit those babies just as hard as I could.”

The trainer exclaimed, “Oh, so that’s what finished him off?!!”

“Not really. You’d be amazed how strong you get when you bite your own balls.”

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Jill decides to take her husband Jack to a strip club for his birthday. -

They arrive at the club and the doorman says, “Hey, Jack! How ya doin’?”

Jill is puzzled and asks if he has been to this club before. “Oh no,” says Jack. “He’s on my bowling team.”

When they are seated, a waitress asks Jack if he would like his usual and brings over a Budweiser.

Jill is becoming increasingly uncomfortable and says, “How did she know that you drink Budweiser?”

“She’s in the Ladies Bowling League, honey. We share lanes with them.”

A stripper then comes over to their table, throws her arms around Jack, and says “Hi Jack ! Want your usual table dance, big boy?”

Jill, now furious, grabs her purse and storms out of the club.

Jack follows and spots her getting into a cab. Before she can slam the door, he jumps in beside her.

He tries desperately to explain how the stripper must have mistaken him for someone else, but his wife is having none of it.

She is screaming at him at the top of her lungs, calling him every name in the book.

The cabby turns his head and says, “Looks like you picked up a real bitch tonight, Jack”.

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A man playing on a new golf course got confused as to what hole he was on. He saw a lady playing ahead of him, so he walked up to her and asked if she knew what hole he was playing… -

She replied, “I’m on the 7th hole and you’re a hole behind me, so you must be on the 6th hole.”

He thanked her and went back to his golf.

On the back nine, the same thing happened and he approached the lady, again with the same request.

She said, “I’m on the 14th, you are a hole behind me, so you must be on the 13th.”

Once again, he thanked her.

He finished his round, went into the club house and saw the lady sitting at the end of the bar.

He went up to her and said, “Let me buy you a drink to show my appreciation for your help.”

He started a conversation and asked her what kind of work she did.

She said she was in sales and he said he was in sales also.

He asked what she sold.

She replied, “If I told you, you would only laugh.”

“No, I wouldn’t.” he said.

She said, “I sell tampons.”

With that he fell on the floor laughing so hard.

She said, “See, I knew you would laugh.”

“That’s not what I’m laughing at!” he replied. “I’m a toilet paper salesman, so I’m STILL one hole behind you!”

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Daily-Dose

Contents

From New Yorker

From Vox

How Georgia’s new law allows Republicans to take over local election boards

So what happens next?

Once Republicans take over the Fulton County election board, they gain broad new powers to disenfranchise voters

The backstory of biodiversity

“We need to be careful about what we are saying”

How to measure “goodness”

There is a broader movement to expand the meaning of “biodiversity”

From The Hindu: Sports

From The Hindu: National News

From BBC: Europe

From Ars Technica

From Jokes Subreddit