The Legend of Cancún Cruz

Today, we’ve got a lot of stories to catch up on, and they’re all basically either local or international. We’re covering topics like Chicago’s spending of COVID funds, Boris Johnson, updates on Texas’ power outage and leadership outage (Ted Cruz), as well as Mount Etna news.

 

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Transcript:

FEB. 19TH

 

OPEN

Friday, February19th. Today, we’ve got a lot of stories to catch up on, and they’re all pretty much local or international. We’re covering topics like Chicago’s spending of COVID funds, Boris Johnson, updates on Texas’ power outage and leadership outage (Ted Cruz), as well as Mount Etna news.

 

CHICAGO

 

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and her administration have been catching some heat the past few days since the news broke that of the $1.2B that Chicago received from the federal government for COVID relief, they spent $281.5M of it on personnel costs for the Chicago Police Department. Obviously, with everything that happened last year, that’s not real popular with some folks.

 

Last summer,  Ald. Daniel La Spata says he asked the mayor to put federal money toward housing relief or other programs to help struggling residents. He said he and other aldermen heard from residents that they didn’t want federal money targeted toward police payroll.

 

City Budget Director Susie Park said no relief money had yet been spent on police funding when she spoke to aldermen in June.

 

These personnel costs were for things like police performing wellness checks on residents, airport security when travelers had to be screened for COVID-19, security at the McCormick Place coronavirus field hospital and security at virus testing sites.                        

 

And there was still money that went to the city’s public health response to the disease, to homeless services, to O’Hare and Midway airports, and to senior citizen assistance.

 

The headlines were misleading because they wanted you to believe this was a big chunk of the money that Chicago got for COVID relief, but it was about 1/6. That’s a lot, but it’s better than the 1/3 number I was seeing floating around on Twitter (people were saying that the city only got $600M in funding).

 

If we’re actually about paying people for their work, then this shouldn’t be an issue. It’s not like it was for additional task forces to hunt down BLM members or something.

 

BOris johnson

The UK listeners might have a better idea about this than me, but Boris Johnson is such a strange figure. I cannot get a read on this guy. One second he sounds like a typical conservative xenophobe, and the next he’s got ideas like getting the G-7 countries to form ways to speed up the development of vaccines, treatments, and tests.

 

And this isn’t just a plan for COVID, this is a plan for all emerging diseases. Johnson is looking to prevent future pandemics. He said, “The development of viable coronavirus vaccines offers the tantalizing prospect of a return to normality, but we must not rest on our laurels. As leaders of the G-7 we must say today: never again.” He also went on to talk about the need for these countries to combine their resources and knowledge so that we can make sure “vaccines, treatments and tests to be battle-ready for future health threats.”

Considering that the COVID vaccine was developed in about 300 days, which is the fastest one yet, reducing it down to 100 days is really ambitious (it usually takes 4 years or more). But he makes a great point: we can’t do this again. All of these lockdowns, all the masking, all the social distancing, people are just not going to go for it again. And to do all that again for another year? Forget about it. Unless it’s some worst-case scenario where it’s a flu-like virus that’s as deadly as Ebola, I don’t think that many people who have lived through this would take this many precautions again.

 

In addition to that plan, Johnson will also be confirming that the UK will share a majority of any extra COVID vaccines with Covax. Covax is a really cool organization that is led by both the WHO and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (aka CEPI). This organization helps get poor countries equitable access to COVID vaccines.

 

So, all in all, a really good streak of news coming from the UK. On these specific topics, I’ll give Boris some real respect.

 

TEXAS

As we hear more details coming out of Texas and the whole power situation there, it seems like we’re getting some people who are trying to improve their image after failing to keep the power on. It sounds like Uncle Rico telling you he used to be able to throw a football over that mountain and that he would have gone pro if he hadn’t hurt his knee in his senior season at the local community college. It just sounds too heroic, and it’s coming from the company that did it. But I’m going to tell you anyway because, if nothing else, maybe you can learn a thing or two about how a power grid works.

 

So, when I’m talking about Uncle Rico spinning his BS, this is what I’m talking about: “officials with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, which operates the power grid that covers most of the state, said Texas was dangerously close to a worst-case scenario: uncontrolled blackouts across the state.” They went on to say that their grid operators made a quick decision to go to rolling blackouts, otherwise that worst-case scenario would mean that the state might have had blackouts for months.

 

According to ERCOT, the grid operators were seeing warning signals that the energy supply was decreasing insanely fast. The reason that this is bad is that if demand for the power is greater than the supply of power, this could cause grid equipment to be set on fire, substations to blow up, and/or power lines to go down. If that would have happened, it would have taken months to get to all of that equipment and repair it, which is why the power would have been out for so long.

 

Now, maybe some of it was confirmed by outside sources because Bernadette Johnson, the senior vice president of power and renewables at Enverus (which is basically and IT company for oil and gas companies), is quoted as saying “As chaotic as it was, the whole grid could’ve been in blackout. ERCOT is getting a lot of heat (no pun intended I’m sure), but the fact that it wasn’t worse is because of those grid operators.”

 

The reason I’m still skeptical and saying this is some Uncle Rico BS is because ERCOT took the names of their leadership off of their website on Tuesday night. The group said it’s because they were getting threats, and I don’t doubt that they were, but it also seems like a convenient way to avoid something that us regular folks call “consequences for their actions”. I know for people of a certain stature in the business world aren’t used to that pesky concept of “consequences”, but I guarantee that there will be numerous investigations into whether they prepared as well as they knew they should have.

 

 

TED CRUZ

You’d have to say it has not been a good start to 2021 for Ted Cruz. First, he supported an insurrection but even they didn’t want him on their team. Then this week, he decided to take a trip down to Cancun while parts of his state are suffering from rolling blackouts that aren’t rolling, people freezing to death, and a former governor saying that the people would rather freeze than take help from the evil federal government. That made me realize something: how are Texans not more afraid of rolling blackouts? I mean, the name has black in it…

 

Yes, Ted had to issue this apology: *CRUZ CLIP*

 

That other noise you hear in the background, besides the protesters shouting at Cruz to resign, is Ted throwing his teenage daughters in front of the bus, then getting behind the wheel and running them over. “I was just trying to be a dad”? My girls were cold? I guess Ted is actually so spineless and weak that he would even say that his daughters basically made him take them to Cancun (you know, like working class people can do whenever they feel like it. “Hey, want to go to Cancun tomorrow, just because?”).

 

I mean, you know it’s bad when you have former House Rep and King of Benghazi Trey Gowdy saying this on Fox News: *GOWDY CLIP*

 

The weirdness doesn’t even stop there. Even his friends are snakes! That, or they were just trying to be nice to the Cruz family and it went too far and now the friends are sick of them. But why do I say all that?

 

As it turns out, someone who was in a group chat with Ted’s wife Heidi shared screenshots of their conversation which proves this wasn’t just because his daughter wanted to. In these screenshots that were given to the New York Times, Mrs. Cruz said “Anyone can or want to leave for the week? We may go to Cancún” because their house was, in all-caps, “FREEZING”.

 

So, to recap, Ted left his constituents in the cold and dark, tried to blame his daughters for it, then got proven to be a liar because someone who’s close enough to his wife to be in a group chat with her shared screenshots from said group chat with the New York Times. Again, the classic Al Franken quote comes to mind: “Here's the thing you have to understand about Ted Cruz, I like Ted Cruz more than most of my colleagues like Ted Cruz. And I hate Ted Cruz.” How does everybody hate this guy, yet he keeps winning? That shows you that for the south, all that matters is that R next to your name.

 

MT. ETNA

 

There were 2 eruptions this week: one Tuesday and one Wednesday (Thursday in Italy).

 

The Thursday eruption was worse. Lava was flowing for over an hour and reaching heights of 300 meters. Ash reached an altitude of 30,000 feet.

 

I was really shocked to see that there weren’t any injuries or deaths. However, a few paragraphs later, I read this: “Etna regularly erupts, but it also serves as a popular tourist destination. Some travelers visit just to see the eruptions. The volcano is active almost once a year.”