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I’m sure there are many plans, some more resembling plots or schemes.The Republican Party is a house divided against itself at present. Lifelong Republicans have been actively campaigning against the incumbent Republican President and his re-election. No former Republican President or nominee has endorsed the current Republican President, they’ve almost all indicated that they aren’t voting for him and many have hinted that they will vote for the Democratic nominee this time around.Republicans with any degree of remaining ethical backbone, more integrity and intellectual honesty are voting for the Democratic Party. Many have rescinded their Republican Party registrations and are Independent. Some have registered Democratic.Many of those former Republicans will never go back. Once you leave the tribe, it’s easier to see it clearly. From within the party, prior to 2016, it was still possible to squint and see it as the Grand Old Party. It was deluded, but reasonable. However, from the outside looking back in, its six decades of rot are more obvious.I tend to peg the beginning of what turned out to be an actual slippery slope, not just a warning metaphor, to 1956. That’s the year that the Republicans, once staunch defenders of the separation of church and state, changed the motto and the currency of the land, replacing “e pluribus unum” with “In God We Trust”.The 1960s saw another radical departure from their roots. Lincoln emancipated the slaves and won the Civil War, a Republican President doing what was right in a major civil rights advance. But in the 1960s when the Civil Rights movement was under way and the Democratic Party was denouncing and making amends for its racist past, the Republicans chose to embrace the racists with their Southern Strategy. Most non-racist Republicans inside the tribe could ignore that.But the 1970s saw another devolution. Republican politicians had voted 76% for enfranchisement of women, but 50 years later they rejected the Equal Rights Amendment. Once again, non-misogynistic members of the Republican tribe could ignore this, but the ranks of the tribe swelled with people who thought a woman’s place was in the home.The Republican fall from grace as the party of separation of church and state advanced substantially in the 1980s, with Reagan’s pact with the Moral Majority. This too swelled their ranks with people who didn’t want women and other minorities to have equal rights, misogynists and homophobes. This too was easily ignored by tribal members who liked Reagan personally, and he was likeable. But his voodoo economics broke the spine of fiscal rigor that the Republicans once had had. The party of balancing budgets became the party of tax cuts for the rich. But the Berlin Wall fell, in large part due to strategies that long preceded Reagan, yet on his watch and with his symbolic gestures such as his speech at the Brandenburg Gate to Gorbachev. It was possible to be merely uneasy or even at peace with the increasingly religious fervor demanded of Republicans in the face of the fall of the Soviet empire.The 1990s saw the loss of valuing of the Fourth Estate. Fox News was formed as an inverse Pravda, a private-sector booster for the Republicans and policies which favored the rich. Where it led was obvious, but the road to hell is wide and smooth, and so the Republicans walked down it. This seemed innocuous to many within the tribe, a mere counterbalance to CNN, something more aligned to the concerns of conservatives specifically. What could be the harm?At one point, the Republicans were the great conservers of nature. They formed the national parks system. They founded the EPA. They ended acid rain and filled in the hole in the ozone layer. But climate change was another betrayal of their core values. Instead of leaning into the science and doing the hard things necessary to fight this global problem, they accepted the fossil fuel and oligarch money to become the party of denial and delay, something easy to do when their base was already full of Young Earth Creationists and other anti-scientific types. And so in the 2000s Bush exited the Kyoto Protocol and the past 20 years have seen climate change denial and delay as a staple of Republican policy.And yet another betrayal of their past. The Republicans fought polio to its knees and were instrumental to making the USA’s longevity and low infant mortality rates the envy of the world. But in the 2010s, at the federal and state level they became more the party of anti-vaxxers than not. Trump’s tweets, White House officials, five Republican gubernatorial candidates in 2018 and Oregon Republican state representatives were beating the anti-vaxx drum, and their tribe has heard them.Trump’s ascendance wasn’t an aberration. He wasn’t part of the tribe. He simply leaned into what the once Grand Old Party had become. It was a mighty oak, hollowed out from the inside by rot, fungus and insects, racism, misogyny and willful ignorance. He simply fanned the flames of hatred to ride into the White House.And so the Republicans who have left the party will find it difficult to return. It’s not the party that they thought it was. The ones who remained in the party, fighting against its failure, people like Mitt Romney, still haven’t realized how deep the rot goes. Republican strategists like Stuart Stevens, in his book “It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump”, lays out some of the tawdry history of the past 60 years, but it’s still difficult for him to accept that he spent his entire adult life in the service of an increasingly adrift party.David Frum left the party in the late 2000s over the Affordable Care Act, as he laid out in his vastly read post Waterloo. He’s accepted gay marriage since and voted for Clinton in 2016, and will vote for Biden in 2020.After the stunning defeat Obama handed them, Republicans asked themselves what had gone wrong. The report is interesting reading. It ignores virtually everything I’ve listed here, considering it inconsequential. Instead, it leans on demographic change, the rise of Hispanics as a major political force and bemoans the lack of Blacks voting for Republican candidates. Its recommended solutions are trite, mostly about messaging and outreach programs. By not understanding the causes, they failed to address the sickness, instead offering bandages. And then the Republican Party didn’t even apply the bandages, with Donald Trump throwing the box away entirely.What plan could they have as they stand in the smoking remnants of the once great oak tree, its branches and trunk splintered, its roots laid bare? The fungus, rot and insects are all that are left.The party of fiscal good management is now the party of massive debt and deficits and tax cuts for the rich. The party of environmental conservation is now the party of environmental desecration. The party of emancipation of the slaves is now the party of racists. The party of equal rights for women is now the party of misogyny.The voters remaining in the Republican Party voting for Donald Trump are more the fungus, rot and insects than the good solid wood of the oak.I refer to this graphic, done by the New York Times from data from the EU’s Manifesto project, regularly. It shows that the Democratic Party has returned to being a barely center-left party by global standards, one which accepts rights and reality, one which addresses the actual needs, one based on global leading practices for the greatest good for the greatest number.It also shows that there is enormous room for the Republican Party to swing to center-right again. At present, their policies are out among fringe right-wing parties by the rest of the world’s standard. Their rejection of climate change alone is anathema to the rest of the world.The remaining good oak wood and people who have left the party could form the core of a 21st Century Republican Party, one that once again embraces the glories of its past and abjures the fungus, rot and insects. The tribe remains strong enough that the vast majority of Republican voters would still vote for them. There is the potential. One of the federal political leaders who accepts climate change and has been part of the bi-partisan Climate Solutions Caucus could take the party back. They could return the party to being what it pretends it still is.But the road to hell is wide and smooth. And there are many Republican politicians who want to guide the Republican Party further down it. Matt Gaetz and Tom Cotton are current political leaders in the party who want to actively help the party slide further down that slippery slope. Tucker Carlson, fact- and morality-free Fox personality, is actively being touted as a Presidential candidate. They love the fungus and rot and insects. They know that they can gain power and influence and money by pandering to them. It’s worked so far, so why would they stop?But if they do, the Republican base will shrink further. This 20 year trend of more people voting Democratic and fewer voting Republican will just continue unabated. Republican leaders leaning on the fungus and rot and insects will be big fish in a shrinking pond. They’ll do just fine. Their personal needs will be well attended to.But the USA will not be well served. The people of the USA will not be well served. And the fungus and rot and insects’ needs will not be well served either. They will vote themselves bread and circuses, they will vote for hatred, they will vote for destruction of civil society that they benefit from. They are too stupid and ignorant to realize it, but they are harming themselves.And the world would not be well served. Despite the challenges of the pandemic this year, it is a blip compared to climate change, the real major global issue of the 21st Century. The world needs a USA not riven by domestic issues, one with two major parties accepting reality and arguing about best actions. The world needs a USA with both conservative and progressive voices advancing policies and debating them. The world needs a healthy USA, not one fighting with fungus and rot and insects.With luck, a Blue tsunami will sweep the Republicans out of power entirely for eight years. They need an extended time in the wilderness after a near-death experience to give them the will to transform to be better. To be once again the Grand Old Party.I wish them well. And to that end, I wish for a Blue tsunami.

‘How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?’ (Sherlock Holmes)In this case though he would want to prove the “guilty” to be innocent: It’s so easy to wait for an uncommon event to rev up the spotlights of attention and then step forward and bask in the limelight. And because these events are a little more uncommon than even the media cares for, they eagerly and uncritically jump to the first relief coming their way: a normal human being taking responsibility. Great, we can go back to sleep! But Sherlock isn’t that easily satisfied with shallow claims.This yantra (shri yantra) appeared 1990 carved in the hard bottom of a desert lake in Oregon and comprised a total of 13 miles of 10″ wide furrows dug 3″deep. Lieutenant Bill Miller of the 190th Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron reported the details of what he had spotted to the authorities at the Air National Guard - “a 13.3 mile glyph of lines about a quarter of a mile square, on the extremely hard, sun-baked dry bed of a lake in Mickey Basin…” These pilots are trained to spot the unusual on a much smaller scale than that and there is no chance they could have missed the ongoing construction of such an image during their regular rounds.Now, here’s the recent account of a then 12 year old who claims to have camped out there for couple weeks helping his dad and a friend creating this perfectly executed pattern. Oregon Land Art (Sri Yantra)“It was really hard work because we didn't use any machines or special surveying equipment.” The challenge wouldn’t be the hard work, it’s the precision layout without compass and ruler and without leaving auxiliary construction lines.“…we had to draw some pretty big lines!” he states, and thus blows his cover: he used the wrong words, the right ones being “dig” and “furrow”, but these words wold immediately solicit the thorny follow-up question: “were did the dug up material go?”“We kept the project anonymous and left no traces of us having been there.” he writes, completely ignoring the fact that 13miles worth of furrows 10″by 3″ will leave you with 400 cubic meters of debris, which means moving and making disappear 600t of desert material. Now, I’ve helped my dad dig a lot of tree pits - in comparatively soft soil - so I have a good, hands on appreciation of what it means to manually move cubic meters of material. They would have collapsed with broken backs not half way into this.“It was really accurate too because small errors are smoothed out as a result of the large scale involved…” Another sign that this guy doesn’t know at all what he’s talking about: Inaccuracies in the underlying geometry and proportionality of any structure will reveal themselves more clearly at a distance. That’s why artists always step back from their canvas to make sure they get it right.Perfectly straight and parallel lines in perfect orthogonality without a guide, perfectly identical ogee shaped curves without a template? Just by walking and pulling a crude plow through hardened mud? It would be a major logistics project with tons of preparation and high tech equipment to pull that off. Yet it is claimed to be the result of a family outing entertainment with only the crudest of tools. Whom are they kidding?It’s amazing how easy it is to hoax the hoaxing, how much nonsense the brain can produce and accept without short circuiting itself.Take Bower and Chorley for instance, who claimed responsibility for most crop circles in England from the mid 70ies to the early 90ies. They claim to have produced, in nightly excursions, intricate geometric patterns with ropes, a simple board and that silly contraption on their cap which is supposed to help them follow a straight line - how exactly? and in the dark of the night when most crop circles appeared?The problem with crop circles in fields is the layout, the lofting. In the Oregon lake bed you could have at least laid down the pattern first, and then focused on executing the dig, but in a field you can’t. The layout challenges of some of the patterns are practically insurmountable - especially in the dark of the night, which is always claimed to be the time when “pranksters” go out and “have a little fun”.Why don’t all of you self proclaimed “debunkers” just grab a piece of paper and try to replicate any of the hundreds of patterns you find on the net? Apart from the challenge of figuring out the very complex mathematical proportionality of some of these, you will find that you need a lot of auxiliary lines and centers of circles in order to construct them. These patterns do not simply “emerge” by walking around in the dark, you have to “build” them. But never are such auxiliary lines and centers visible. Especially the centers of large auxiliary circles can be located way off the pattern, but they are never seen.Well, after you have mastered the pattern so you can produce it flawlessly in one try, you step it up a notch: switch off the lights, replace the compass with a piece of twine and leave the ruler out altogether - because you won't have it in the field either. To make it even more realistic, have a friend hold the other end of the twine with you giving him directions. Proceed to creating the pattern and when you’re done switch on the light. What you will see will pretty much resemble the garbage you have been talking all along.Wikipedia states: “Formations are usually created overnight,although some are reported to have appeared during the day.” Crop Circles which have been produced in the context of competitions or for advertising purposes always are done in daylight and with the help of optical instruments and stepladders to get off the ground, then also without time constraint and without taking the condition of the flattened stalks into account.That’s were oil seed rape comes into the picture: Crop circle formations often appear in canola fields. This plant has the consistency of celery. If the stalk is bent more than about 45-degrees, it snaps. Yet, in a "genuine" crop circle formation the stalks are bent flat at 90-degrees. Nobody has come forward yet and shown that he can do that.Many genuine crop circles also feature stalks bent several inches off the ground - which would be impossible to create by “walking” the board - as well as intricate weaving over larger areas than can be covered by two pairs of outreaching hands. This is clearly also beyond “walking the board” technique.The geometrically not very intricate and with 200′ puny Firefox crop circle below needed two weeks of planning and 24 hours of labour for 12 students of OSU. That’s almost 300 man-hours work for such a simple design. And typically - compared to the precision of genuine circles - the lines are not perfect at close inspection.The largest crop circle yet is the “human butterfly” and with 1738′ by 1479′ almost twice the length of the Titanic. It covers over 2,500,000 square feet which makes it almost 4000 times larger than the Firefox - here the lines are absolutely perfect, the symmetry flawless. This is of course not only laughably impossible to be the product of the three Dutch guys who claim authorship to this gigantic piece of beauty and perfection, it also blows the entire debunker camp straight out of the water.Below you see the 2007 Eastfield, UK crop circle, created in the night of July 7th that year. It features 160 circles and over 87,000 square feet of flattened wheat. That’s over 130 times the flattened area of the Firefox. If the OSU students would put in 8h days, they would be pressed to finish it in a year - no weekends no holidays. But the real zinger is the fact that it sits on undulating land, which means that you have to actually draw ellipses in order to make them appear as perfect circles from above!!! This is a clear indication that these patterns are actually projections.Let’s remember we are Sherlock now and do not yet speculate about what all that entails, we just go through the process of eliminating the impossible, only to look at what’s left over later. And the impossible has just been factually proven: Humans just simply cannot produce these patterns in the size, perfection and time frame represented by genuine crop circles.If you need more proof - here it is: Torino Airport, Italy, June 23rd, 2015 ….. apart from the layout, the thin lines, especially the outlined small circles cannot be manmade, simply because man cannot get there and do it without ruining everything…..

Too much boba is bad for you. California's new data law could show who’s most at risk.Put down the boba, Asian America. Those tapioca balls and sweetened drinks, when consumed too often, can cause major health problems.One boba, milk tea with pearls, can have 36 grams of sugar — as much as a can of soda. It’s something public health advocates say too many people don’t realize. And that’s a problem because diabetes is on the rise, especially among Filipinos and Pacific Islanders.One thing that stands in the way of these kinds of campaigns: There isn’t very good tracking of health for specific Asian ethnicities because the data collected by the state of California usually lumps all Asians together. The few studies that do break down results by ethnic group tend to be limited, such as to patients of a certain healthcare provider.“There’s a model minority myth for public health: If you’re skinny, you’re healthy,” says Scott Chan, program director of the Asian Pacific Islander Obesity Prevention Alliance, one of the groups behind a “Rethink Your Asian Drink” campaign. The alliance, along with its campaign partner the American Heart Association, supports a bill for ethnic-specific healthcare data that is currently making its way through the California legislature.Better statistics, they say, would help target outreach to certain ethnic groups or provide education in different languages.“The more information we have, the better we can address it,” says Chan. “When you look at diabetes, the data is all aggregated.”Studies show that the health of Asian Americans tends to look more and more like the health of the US population at large the longer they are in the country. But it’s not always obvious that there can be wide differences between Asian ethnicities.In Sacramento, California’s first Filipino legislator, Rob Bonta is pushing AB 1726 through the legislature, which would disaggregate state-gathered data for different Asian ethnicities instead of lumping it together in one homogenous racial category, or only breaking out a few national origins.“It’s a bill of inclusion,” says Bonta, a Democrat who represents Alameda. “There has already been disaggregated data for the Chinese, Japanese, Filipino. That doesn’t change at all. But it adds additional communities, such as Hmong, Thai, Indonesian.”The federal government, including the US Census Bureau, has been breaking out certain Asian ethnic groups for as a long as 150 years. AB 1726 would mandate the same for public health agencies in the state of California.The bill unanimously passed the California state senate Tuesday and is expected to head back to the assembly on Wednesday or Thursday. But the bill hasn’t been without opponents. In its original form, the measure would have gone even further, also applying the requirements to public universities and community colleges.A few Chinese American groups vocally opposed AB 1726 on the grounds that data disaggregation might pave the way for bringing race-based affirmative action policies back to state university admissions, something they believe puts Chinese Americans at a disadvantage.In 2015, a similar data disaggregation bill passed both houses of the California legislature, only to be vetoed by Governor Jerry Brown. Last week, California Assembly members reached a deal striking parts of the bill that would break down public education data by ethnicity, leaving the legislation to focus solely on public health.“This result is a good compromise, to say the least,” says Kai Zhu, committee member of Silicon Valley Chinese Americans, a group formed in 2014 to oppose a state constitutional amendment that would have resumed affirmative action programs for California universities and government jobs. The group no longer opposes AB 1726 because it is now restricted only to healthcareCalifornia's Asian Pacific Islander American Commissioner Karthick Ramakrishnan is disappointed that California is now lagging behind states such as Oregon and Washington, which have done more to breakdown data."Removing education from the bill also puts it at odds with federal efforts to improve data disaggregation in K-12 and higher education," says Ramakrishnan. “We are missing out on an important opportunity to have better policies and more efficient spending decisions that are informed by good data.”Breaking down statistics by ethnicity may reveal other health trends, too. Bonta says studies from the Bay Area reveal disproportionate rates of hepatitis B among Chinese Americans and other studies report higher rates of suicide among Korean Americans. Information gathered through the Affordable Care Act shows that some Southeast Asian communities, such as Vietnamese, Cambodian and Lao, have lower rates of health insurance coverage.“From smaller reports, we know that there are high diabetes rates in the majority of Pacific Islander communities. Filipino and Cambodian communities have higher cases of diabetes,” says Chan.Right now, the combined rate for all Asian Pacific Islanders shows the group as a whole is only at a moderate risk.Organizers of the Rethink Your Asian Drink campaign hope the bill will pass and provide comprehensive statistics to help them better teach people to choose lower-sugar versions of their favorite drinks, or to make the boba tea an occasional treat, instead of a regular indulgence.