The national parks are in a really––and literally––crappy position, thanks to the government shutdown. According to a National Parks Service spokesman Andrew Munoz, Yosemite is not fairing well: “With restrooms closed, some visitors are opting to deposit their waste in natural areas adjacent to high-traffic areas, which creates a health hazard for other visitors.” As a result, parts of the park have been closed. 

It’s similarly bad in other parks. At Joshua Tree,

People are streaming into the parks, enjoying the free access, but they’re finding trash cans overflowing and restrooms locked. Vault toilets are not serviced, and there’s hardly a flush toilet to be found anywhere. If nature calls — well, the woods are over that way.

The lack of services and staff is alarming because it means that the parks are getting damaged without anyone to prevent or repair it. Some townspeople near Joshua Tree are trying to keep an eye on the park and clean what they can, but it’s not enough.
 
Meanwhile, federal employees are suing: “A federal employees union filed a lawsuit Monday against the Trump administration, alleging that the partial government shutdown is illegally forcing more than 400,000 federal employees to work without pay.”

More news.

David Leonhardt, New York Times op-ed columnist, listed his top stories of the year. What beat out Facebook and the Trump scandals? Climate change, of course: 

A global heat wave. Extreme rainstorms. Severe droughts. Rapidly intensifying Gulf Coast storms. The deadliest wildfire in California history. And a presidential administration that’s trying to make the problem worse.

In another article, he chronicles the harsh realities of climate change: 

In 2018, heat waves killed people in Montreal, Karachi, Tokyo and elsewhere. Extreme rain battered North Carolina and the Indian state of Kerala. The Horn of Africa suffered from drought. Large swaths of the American West burned. When I was in Portland, Ore., this summer, the air quality — from nearby wildfires — was among the worst in the world. It would have been healthier to be breathing outdoors in Beijing or Mumbai.

Another op-ed columnist offers potential solutions for a “Green New Year”:
The majority of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions come from electricity generation and transportation. We could cut generation-related emissions by two-thirds or more simply by ending the use of coal and making more use of renewables (whose prices have fallen drastically), without requiring that Americans consume less power. We could almost surely reduce transportation emissions by a comparable amount by raising mileage and increasing the use of electric vehicles, even if we didn’t reduce the number of miles we drive each year.

The Seattle Times suggests that climate change should be our nation’s biggest priority. The Guardian says the same thing, that it’s time for politicians to make stark choices. 

The fifth-generation wireless network will begin reaching mobile phones this year. It’s not only your phone that you should consider.

According to the New York Times:

But this is not just about faster smartphones. The transition to new fifth-generation cellular networks — known as 5G for short — will also affect many other kinds of devices, including industrial robots, security cameras, drones and cars that send traffic data to one another. This new era will leap ahead of current wireless technology, known as 4G, by offering mobile internet speeds that will let people download entire movies within seconds and most likely bring big changes to video games, sports and shopping.

But don’t get your hopes up. Current tests indicate that the 5G network isn’t much faster than the 4G network:

While we would need AT&T to explain things to know for certain, analysis points to AT&T’s 5G network in Indianapolis being so young that it isn’t capable of delivering peak speeds. In fact, the current theoretical peak speed of AT&T’s 5G network is 625Mbps, much slower than theoretical peak speeds of 4G LTE (1.2Gbps).

More tech news.

At 12:33 a.m., NASA scientists were celebrating. They weren’t ringing in the New Year late, they were celebrating a space milestone. The spacecraft known as New Horizons flew by a minor planet known as Ultima Thule––”Beyond the Known World.” 

NPR describes the event:

“We have a healthy spacecraft,” announced the mission’s operations manager, Alice Bowman, as signals from the probe reached earth hours later. Stored on board are close-up pictures of the celestial body that’s less than 20 miles wide, and four billion miles from the sun. The first images, just a few pixels across, arrived Tuesday morning and revealed a floating mass shaped like dog-bone, a peanut or a bowling pin, depending on your interpretation.

According to the New York Times, 

During the flyby, the spacecraft was out of communication with Earth because it was busy making scientific observations. Only hours later did New Horizons turn its antenna toward home. Then, it sent a 15-minute update on its status, confirming it had survived the flyby. The message took six hours to travel the 4.1 billion miles at the speed of light to Earth. Future transmissions are expected to convey new pictures and readings from the flyby.

More news.

It’s just shy of the year 2019, and already the campaigns for the 2020 presidential elections are shifting into high gear. Senator Kamala Harris of California, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York are all shifting their campaigns into high gear, according to the New York Times:

These four high-profile Democratic senators are poised to enter the 2020 presidential race in the next several weeks, advisers and people briefed by their associates say, after spending December finalizing the outlines of their political operations, selecting top campaign staff and conducting research into their own political weak spots. In some cases, they may first announce the creation of presidential exploratory committees to ramp up their fund-raising and hiring efforts, before launching their candidacies more formally in the following weeks.

Vox points out that such candidates are under pressure from progressive Democrats to build diverse teams, but the challenge they face in being truly diverse: “For all the progressive excitement around minority and female candidates, in the (way too) early days of the 2020 season, white men still maintain a sizable advantage where it counts: with voters in early-primary states and deep-pocketed donors.”

Finally, The Washington Post notes that the potential candidates face challenges in funding. They might set limits on their spending, 

…responding to demands that they spurn outside assistance from independent groups or cease accepting donations from employees of specific companies, among other strictures. The fiercest battle so far has been over whether candidates should accept money from those employed in the oil and gas industry — one seen as acting contrary to the party’s position on climate change.

More politics.

Psychology Today suggests five questions to ask as you set goals: 

Think about what’s inspiring your goals. Say you want to read more––ask why you want that. Because you used to read as a kid, and you want to return to that state of childlike enjoyment? Or maybe because you feel less-than-adequate at work and you want to get ahead. With that knowledge, you can better situate those goals within your whole life.
Break down your goals into categories, and make sure you have one goal from each category. For example, choose personal, professional, economic, and social goals. Picking one goal from each category will make sure you don’t hyper focus on one.
Understand how you spend your time before you set new goals. Knowing where you’re coming from can help you decide where to go.
Think carefully about the aim of your goals. Do you want to produce something, or do you want to feel a certain way? The latter may be hard to measure. 
Consider the thinking habits that might hold you back. Are you trapped in negative-thought patterns? Do you have assumptions that are holding you back? 
Here’s more to consider about goal-setting: 

Since his first day in office, critics of Donald Trump have been calling for his impeachment. Now, two years later, the calls have grown louder, and they’re taken up by more voices. In a recent interview, Steve Okun, a senior advisor at U.S.-based geopolitical consulting firm McLarty Associates, raised the specter of impeachment in a very real way: 

Whether the Democrats will impeach Trump, [Jerry Nadler, the expected chairman of the House Judiciary Committee] didn’t say, but he said he committed impeachable offenses and that came with the hush money cover up and certainly can come with the obstruction of justice with the Mueller report comes out

Okun notes that the danger her is primarily economic. With the government shutdown and now the threat of impeachment, he believes 2019 is going to be a tumultuous year for the markets. 

A New York Times opinion piece notes: “An impeachment process against President Trump now seems inescapable. Unless the president resigns, the pressure by the public on the Democratic leaders to begin an impeachment process next year will only increase.” As more pieces like this come out, the market is likely to continue panicking. 

More news

Data suggests that Americans make easy targets for Russian trolls––we are nine times more susceptible to Russian propaganda than Russians themselves!

Psychology Today suggests a few possible solutions to that. The most likely, the author suggests, is related to our loneliness.  

As we ran into fewer people, we have fewer friends. Americans’ number of close confidants dropped from three to two over the past 25 years, nearly tripling the degree of social isolation. With fewer friends and fewer social interactions, we become lonelier, seeking virtual substitutes through the Internet. And that’s where Russian trolls dwell.

Here’s a potential solution:

…we should all get out more. Loneliness is a dangerous condition, with health consequences as dire as a 15-cigarettes-per-day smocking habit. Until recently, we could dismiss loneliness as a personal problem. But the success of the Russian mass identity manipulations shows that it can be a political problem as well. 

We’ve suggested that another possible solution is learning to read critically before sharing news online.

More about politics. 

After Donald Trump’s startlingly and abrupt withdrawal from Syria––and then partly from Afghanistan––despite warnings from his advisors, U.S. allies are angry and beginning to question the benefits of a US alliance. 

The U.S. withdrawal from Syria has been seen as a betrayal to their Kurdish allies. One Syrian man told reporters: “If they will leave, we will curse them as traitors. The Kurds helped them to destroy ISIS. … I have seven people from my family who were fighting ISIS and who were killed. And they were very young, not even in their 20s.”

Wesley Clark, former commander of NATO, retired Army general, and former Democratic presidential candidate, says that allies believe Trump was blackmailed: “People around the world are asking this and some of our friends and allies in the Middle East are asking, did Erdogan blackmail the president? Was there a payoff or something? Why would a guy make a decision like this? Because all the recommendations were against it. And it looked like all the facts were against it, too.”

Meanwhile, Trump believes––or, more accurately, wants others to believe––that the United States is once again respected. Unfortunately, he is dead wrong.

More news.

Kevin Spacey is to be charged with felony assault, and he is to be arraigned January 7, 2020. From NPR: “Clerk Magistrate Brian Kearney issued the complaint for “indecent assault and battery,” a felony offense, following a public show cause hearing on Thursday. The criminal charges stem from former Boston news anchor Heather Unruh’s accusation last year that Spacey had assaulted her son.”

As this news broke, Kevin Spacey released a mysterious video called “Let Me Be Frank:” 

The Daily Beast did not love the video, to say the least.

This important culinary primer aside, the video is not just a fail, it is also a menacing, self-aggrandizing, beyond tone-deaf, ego-maniacal fail, which shows exactly how little Spacey has cared to learn about himself, or the gravity of what he has been accused of, and the devastating effects of his alleged actions as so eloquently expressed by his accusers, like Anthony Rapp, who claimed Spacey had assaulted him when he was 14.

The video is confusing. What does Spacey mean? Does he want to return to playing Frank Underwood? Or does he want to speak “frankly”, using the classic Underwood direct-to-camera aside? And who is he talking to? The House of Cards audience? The American public at large? Or his accuser? 

More news.

The Christmas markets closed with the sharpest drop since 2008, and China bought zero soy beans from the U.S. in November.

Following a brief upswing, the Dow plummeted 653 points after Trump criticized the Fed. Democrats have had harsh words for the President: 

It’s Christmas Eve and President Trump is plunging the country into chaos,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a joint statement. “The stock market is tanking and the president is waging a personal war on the Federal Reserve — after he just fired the Secretary of Defense.

Trump’s tweet criticizing the Fed led investors to fear that he would fire the Fed chair, CNN speculates.

In addition, China bought zero soy beans from the U.S. in November, an escalation in the trade war with the U.S.

But since it is Christmas, we don’t want to ruin the spirit, so let’s close the news with a little Christmas poem:

‘Twas the day before Christmas, when all through the land

The traders were freaking, sell tickets in hand. 

The farmers were stuck with soy fields all dying,

In hopes that China would resume past levels of buying.

But the president took to twitter from his bed, 

Instead of offering help, he just blamed the fed. 

When Jim Mattis resigned as Donald Trump’s Defense Secretary, he offered to stay in his position until the end of February in order to give Trump time to find and onboard a replacement. Trump, however, has forced Mattis out early. Mattis is now to retire on January 1, 2020 and will be replaced by Patrick Shanahan.

Mattis’s resignation letter, linked above, is allegedly the cause of the early ouster. According to a source, Trump hated the letter. The letter was of course a strong rebuke of Trump, and Trump did not take it well. According to the New York Times, the letter changed everything. While he initially was kind to Mattis, 

As became apparent to the president only after days of news coverage, a senior administration official said, Mr. Mattis had issued a stinging rebuke of Mr. Trump over his neglect of allies and tolerance of authoritarians. The president grew increasingly angry as he watched a parade of defense analysts go on television to extol Mr. Mattis’s bravery, another aide said, until he decided on Sunday that he had had enough.

More news.