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Don't be disheartened. Get re-heartened. With a few resources you can create your own micro-utopia. The human species may very well be a lost cause on a global scale, but do not fret, for you can be a part of success stories on a smaller scale.

I'm not talking about the pursuit of wealth and power. Don't make your utopia by externalizing all the harms. Find a way of living that just minimizes the harms. Find joy in helping other beings and learn not to wait for a dopamine hit in return (there are diminishing returns if you rely on that).

Plant some trees. Feed some birds. Repair equipment other people were throwing out. Pick up some plastic crap from a beach.

Detach your mind from the negative words and actions of the haters--they're on a different journey. The most satisfying aspect of mammalian existence is love. Share it and grow it.

... as a threat to democracy

Beginning this year, third-party payment processors will be required to report a user's business transactions to the IRS if they exceed $600 for the year.

They're just handing the keys over, again...

Meanwhile, Wall Street gets their freebies

SNAFU

In 2020, before vaccinations, Mrs Turgid caught COVID from work (secondary school). The head of her school was an arrogant workaholic who had all the staff mixing indoors and they dropped like flies. She was ill (off work) for 10 weeks and has never been right since. One of her colleagues lost her husband and grown-up son to the virus. Another almost lost her husband. Fortunately, he was saved by a very skilled surgeon. During this time, I think I caught it too (tests were hard to come by) because I had a cough and was very light-headed and slept for three days.

Mrs Turgid is permanently short of breath and struggles to walk any significant distances. She went back to work for a few weeks, but it was very difficult. Fortunately we were able to move and have a lifestyle change so that she was able to give up working completely.

In the last year we have both been vaccinated (2xAstraZeneca and 1 Pfizer), and I have been fortunate enough to work remotely during this time, so mixing has been very limited.

However, a few days after having my booster a couple of weeks ago I started to feel like I was getting a cold. It started with mild sinus trouble then a runny nose, sneezing and shivering over the next couple of days. I then became very sleepy and had a very dry mouth. Then it went to my chest, so I did a lateral flow test and it was positive.

Needless to say, I isolated for 10 days and slept a lot. I eventually managed to report the positive result (the web sites were very busy and overloaded) and they sent me a PCR test.

The PCR test couldn't be "read."

No one else in the house got any significant symptoms this time, and no one else tested positive.

I'm very grateful to have been vaccinated. Thanks and congratulations to all the scientists and medical staff involved. You did an absolutely fantastic job in a very short space of time.

Meanwhile, scientists working on COVID are receiving abuse from members of the public.

Most letter-writers have at best a very basic grasp of the English language – enough to get their point across, but extremely rudimentary. The spelling really is shocking. Sometimes it makes me wonder about the mental state of the sender; whether they are from the UK at all (Russian call centres come to mind); or whether they were even written by a human. I find it strangely comforting to think that some of them might have been generated by a clever bit of computer code rather than an angry, deluded member of our society.

Another says:

One of the most unpredictable aspects of the past two years, and one of the most disheartening, has been the rise of widespread misinformation. The line between facts and lies has disintegrated. Years of experience in infectious disease control and a doctorate or medical degree quickly became equivalent to the influencer on YouTube or Facebook who has garnered hundreds of thousands of followers by promoting exciting-but-untrue “facts”.

On 29th December, anti-vaxxers stormed a COVID testing centre believing it was a vaccination centre.

Video shared on social media showed the group of several dozen activists, led by former Ukip candidate Jeff Wyatt, walking through the facility holding signs encouraging people not to get vaccinated and criticising the BBC.

Wyatt, a former deputy leader of the far-right For Britain Movement, addressed crowds at a rally held before the storming of the Covid-19 testing site, where he claimed there are “millions” of like-minded anti-vaccine activists who have “woken up”.

Why are some people reluctant to get vaccinated and what changed their minds? A co-incidental miscarriage following one vaccination, needle phobia and government hypocrisy.

“I’m a scientist and I know that if there was something seriously wrong with the vaccines, fellow scientists would stop at nothing to discover it and improve our understanding of them.

“I understand the visceral response and fear of vaccination, but we need to be realistic about how serious Covid can be and recognise how hard scientists and doctors have worked to keep us safe. No matter how I look at it now, getting vaccinated is worth it.”

Mr. Hoojgruggwidd very slowly raised his heavy feeling eyelids to open his sore, weary eyes. He was not too surprised to see very little effect of this action. Pitch darkness was of course something with which he was very familiar in what, he had to admit, had effectively become his new home: the boundless and seemingly inescapable wilderness. Something felt different though. A different sort of pitch darkness, as odd as that sounded. He did not think he could exactly see what was different yet but some of his senses were picking up cues that told him there was empty space close to him, with some sort of boundaries to that space a short distance away. Could they be walls? The idea felt very comforting to him after all his endless wandering around the plains. When you could not escape them, even open spaces became maddeningly confining. The usual itchy long grasses were conspicuous by their absence on his lower legs and the ground felt harder and more even and level than the surfaces to which his raw, blistered feet were accustomed.

He strained his vision to try to see these supposed walls. Any surfaces were the same pitch black as everything else, but as he cast his eyes around he began to convince himself that he could just about make out soft sort of edges, a very slightly pale golden color, a pale, golden black. They did not look how he would have expected a room's edges to look. They were more like bands of very dim, soft light. They formed the shape of a cube, a cubic room. That was all he could see. Where had the plains gone? Was this freedom? If it was, then he certainly did not feel very happy about it. Was it safe? Was anyone here? He shouted "Hello" and his own voice sounded hoarse and echoed in a way that just did not sound quite right for an empty room that size.

He sighed. Bizarre environments did not seem to shock him these days. They seemed to be almost the norm for him now. The new normal. His hunger, fatigue and dehydration could not have helped but something in him somehow just knew that all these unexpected phenomena were to be, well, expected, in this place. But he could not remember why. There was so much he could not remember. He had so much time to think but thinking never seemed to get him much closer to figuring out what the hell was going on, so he had started to develop a sort of stoic, resigned acceptance of the inherent weirdness of his new life. And the discomfort of it. There was not much fear of the unknown, or in his case of even the seemingly impossible, anymore. He knew on the plains he could likely die at any moment and he had so little control over it that the fear and even his curiosity had massively faded, leaving his cynicism, impatience and a little arrogance. He could not even reminisce about his past before the plains because his memory of those times was an almost impenetrable fog.

His eyes were still on the bottom edge of the wall in front of him. He could have sworn that the soft, pale golden line had pulsated. As this room, if it even was a room, seemed to be empty, Mr. Hoojgruggwidd decided to walk forwards towards the wall in front of him. With each step he took, the golden room edges seemed to pulsate more vigorously and they enlarged. He wondered if they could harm him. That would be typical, he reflected. He took another step forward and the golden lines were now very clearly visible. At the corners they had expanded rapidly in curves, rounding off the corners like rising orange flames licking at the walls. The walls themselves and floor and ceiling were all still as black as the darkest night sky which made Mr. Hoojgruggwidd wonder whether he could actually just be suspended in outer space. A space without stars at this point perhaps. He took one more step forward and his leg wobbled a little as he put it down. The golden lines shimmered as if they copied his leg's movement. He cautiouslessly pulled his right sleeve down over his hand, which seemed to hurt, and reached his arm out and swung it down at the front wall so that the tip of his cuff brushed against it. A green, blurry, multi-sided shape spun extremely rapidly on the wall around his cuff and instantly expanded out from view, at which point the golden wall edges rotated clockwise in a circle in front of him, changing shape as they did so, such that he was no longer inside a cube. It had many more sides--ten or twelve, perhaps a dodecahedron. So was there a wall or not? The way his shirt sleeve had hit it, it did seem like there was something there but he could not say for sure that it was solid.

He abandoned his cautious approach, quickly thrust his hand back out of his sleeve and raised it up to tap his fingers against the wall. He felt a sort of fuzzy coldness, like ice but immensely softer, not in the way that ice cream is softer but in the way that a gas, or a gust of wind, is softer than a block of ice to the touch. It was more solid than air though, and firmer than a liquid. Perhaps some very exotic sort of fabric. He had no idea. Anyway, it was not anything like a hard brick wall, and there was not a door, so he decided there was nothing for it but to try to push through it. He gritted his teeth and strode forwards, into the soft coldness. He jolted as he felt the strange cold make contact with his face and arms and, continuing through the so-called wall, clenched his teeth tighter as he felt it glide in a chilling band over his whole body. As he had passed the golden wall edges, he noticed they faded into a lush green color and actually seemed to turn into serrated plants like brambles or creepers. It was so dark he could not be sure if they really were plants, but hopefully it would not matter.

Beyond his previously golden cube or golden dodecahedron, there was now a corridor lined with the serrated creepers. In fact, he reflected, rather than being lined with them, it seemed to him it was probably actually composed of them. They were not arranged in the way he would expect plants to grow. Instead they formed an intricate lattice, like a thick green spider's web or perhaps the veins of a leaf skeleton. There was a noise.

"Hellooo!" called a loud, female voice.

"Hello. Who's there?" replied Mr. Hoojgruggwidd uncertainly.

There was silence, so after a moment's hesitation, he just resumed walking along the serrated green corridor.

"It was you! You did it! You!" the voice scolded.

"Huh?" reacted Mr. Hoojgruggwidd.

"You! You! You! Why did you drink the green mud? Why must you stay here? You've ruined it all! It was you!"

"I can assure you, whoever you are, I wasn't sticking around deliberately." he said firmly. Once again there was silence, but the serrated boundaries of the corridor were moving a lot now, in sort of spiky waves, and some of them scratched past Mr. Hoojgruggwidd's shoulders and caught on his sleeves. Although it hurt, he ignored them and kept walking onward.

The web of green that defined the sort of corridor widened out in front of him, but he could still feel the plants scratching his sore skin. He looked up and could see pale, grayish shapes a short distance in front of him. It could be someone's skin visible in the shadowy gloom. Yes, it must be the person that had been calling out to him. Why the hell was she so annoyed with him? How did she even know him?

"Who are you?" he demanded.

A pale hand reached out of the darkness and pointed an index finger with a long, white nail on it, which jabbed at his chest.

"It was you! It was you! You're a disaster, a blight on this land! You!" With each word, her nail spiked harder into his sore flesh. He felt a little faint.

"Y-y-you! I-it w-wa-as y-o-ou!" her words seemed to somehow double and triple up upon themselves like echoes at full volume and at the same time Mr. Hoojgruggwidd shivered as he saw the pointing fingers had multiplied and they continued to do so, a bit like how images seem to spread out when rotating a kaleidoscope, until there must have been about twenty hands all pointing at him, twenty voices all berating him, twenty very sharp nails jabbing in and out. The pain seemed to radiate out from those points until it felt like all of his skin was absolutely burning. He cried out in pain and fell to the ground. Everything was dark again, then there was a very loud rushing noise in his ears, getting louder, like a tremendous roar of air, cold, then the hot soreness of his skin, then cold again, rushing faster and faster, the green web of creepers flew by in elongated streams, the golden lines from earlier flew past as well like fuzzy laser beams, and then they diffused and reformed into sort of crispy, sharp little rainbows that were so bright and intense that his eyes hurt like they had never hurt before, and then the noise and light and motion became so impossibly intense that he could not even form any kind of impression of it; it just utterly and completely overwhelmed every one of his senses.

He woke up, panting and confused. The searing pain was there. All over his skin. It was real. He looked up at the peachy gray clouds. The sun had set, a few minutes ago he imagined, but he was burnt. Sunburn! He had fallen asleep in the sun and he was still on the plains. So that was a dream. What a dream! He felt more tired now than before he fell asleep. He felt sick too and had a headache. He shivered. He needed more sleep and he desperately needed a drink but he could not immediately think where he could find either. He was sure he did not want to try sleeping here again. He remembered the tadpole men. Were they part of the dream? No, they had been real, unless it was delerium. Anyway, he really needed that drink. He cursed at his own thoughtlessness at losing his way when he followed the voice of those weird tadpole men. It would probably take him hours to find one of his little patches of mud to drink now. Still, it would not be the first time. He spent most of his days just walking around these endless plains. Oh, the pain of that sunburn. He wondered if any of his wet drinking mud could soothe it, and he set off in search of it.

Redirect all that Wall Street bailout money to the real economy, and all your infrastructure financing issues will go away. Doesn't kill interest entirely, but it's a good step

You must remember the old joke about the electron who was stopped for speeding. The policeman said to him, "Sir, do you know how fast you were driving?"

"No," replies the electron.

"You were driving at precisely 100 miles per hour, sir."

Despondently the electron retorts, "Great, now I'm lost."

I was explaining that joke to Turgid jr. recently. When he was much younger, he just thought it was funny because an electron driving a car would be funny.

I said to him that he should ask his Religious Education teacher whether God knows the positions and momenta of all particles in the universe. His RE teacher is also his science teacher.

This should be interesting.

QOTD.

- No magic power at all??? How's that even possible??
- I've heard her mother was from No Magic Valley...
- This is sad. A person without any magic power can never be free...

That's right.

I saw some comments in the article about the quad-state tornado that were dismissive about a possible climate change link. Just five days later, we're looking at another very unusual high impact severe thunderstorms event, this time in the central Plains.

First, I want to give a bit of meteorological background. If you know there's going to be a thunderstorm, there are three main factors that modulate its strength and severity: moisture, instability, and vertical wind shear.

Moisture is linked with instability in that, all other things equal, more low-level moisture will make the atmosphere more unstable. It's also an important factor in tornado potential, with most strong tornadoes (EF2+) occurring with dewpoints in the 60s or greater.

Instability causes rising air in thunderstorms to accelerate upwards. With strong instability, air inside thunderstorms can rise at speeds of 100+ mph. Generally speaking, more instability will produce stronger storms.

Vertical wind shear is the change in wind speed and direction with height. We often talk about the bulk wind differential, which is the vector difference between the winds at two levels in the atmosphere. Strong low-level vertical wind shear is favorable for tornadoes if the conditions are favorable. There tends to be much less instability in the cool season, but vertical wind shear tends to be much stronger during that part of the year. The strong shear can somewhat compensate for the lack of instability, also accelerating air upward in thunderstorms.

In the warm season, most tornado outbreaks occur with high moisture and instability, but the vertical wind shear tends to be weaker than during the cool season. The opposite happens in the cool season, with tornado outbreaks generally having less moisture and instability, but really strong vertical wind shear. In either case, you need sufficient amounts of all of the ingredients to get a tornado outbreak.

During the cool season, it's extremely rare to get enough moisture and instability in northern states to get tornado outbreaks. The shear is really strong, but there's almost never sufficient moisture and instability to get severe thunderstorms. Today is different... very different.

Temperatures over parts of Nebraska and Iowa are close to record highs for the entire month of December. Those records are generally in the low to mid 70s. More surprising is the amount of moisture, with dewpoints around 60 in Iowa and in the upper 50s in eastern Nebraska. This is about as much moisture as you'll ever see in these states in mid-December, if not completely unprecedented. The instability forecast this afternoon is also on the very high end of what's possible this time of year. The vertical wind shear isn't unprecedented, but it's strong, even for this time of year.

Put these together and you have the recipe for a tornado outbreak over the central Plains today. From one of the Storm Prediction Center's convective outlooks issued this morning:

This should result in potential for at least a few tornadoes, mainly after sunset. One or two of these may be strong, particularly across western to northern IA and southeast MN. This threat appears unprecedented for this region this late in the year.

Because of climate change, we expect moisture and instability to increase during the cool season. We expect that extremely rare events like this will become more frequent as the climate changes. These are weather conditions I'd expect in March or April, not December. I used to chase storms and I've seen plenty of tornadoes. The strong winds, the warmth, and the moisture make this feel like what I would expect on a chase day in March or April. I don't expect this in the middle of December.

To be clear, this isn't a repeat of Friday's tornado outbreak. There still isn't enough moisture and instability to get the type of storms that caused those tornadoes. But there's still a threat of tornadoes, some strong. Storm motions may get close to 80 mph, so tornadoes won't need to be on the ground particularly long to have long tracks. The winds just above the surface are extremely strong, and it won't take a very strong thunderstorm to bring those winds down to the surface. There are high wind warnings up over most of the central US. It's very possible there will be widespread 75+ mph wind gusts, enough to cause a lot of damage over a wide area.

Cool season outbreaks are particularly dangerous when they happen. Storm motions tend to be really fast, like today. Much of the severe weather is expected to happen after dark. It's a time of year when people aren't expecting a severe weather outbreak.

Again, this type of event just does not happen in December in the central Plains. How many "unprecedented" events have to occur before we accept that there's a link to climate change, and that these events are no longer so unprecedented?

The U.S. budget deficit totaled $356.4 billion in the first two months of the budget year, down 17% from the same period a year ago thanks to a sharp jump in government revenues that offset a smaller increase in spending.

In its monthly budget report, the Treasury Department said Friday that the government’s deficit in October and November was $72.9 billion below the deficit in the same two months last year. The government’s budget year starts on Oct. 1.

The improvement was due to government revenues rising at a faster pace than spending over the past two months.

U.S. government deficit down 17 percent from same period a year ago