Month: November 2024

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Scientific Kattenstoet — When madness organizes

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

November 19th 2024

Going clear back to the 1980s, the scientific community and millions of other educated people have been warning about global warming and its knock-on effects. For decades, people in the know have advised us that among many other things, warmer ocean temperatures combined with warmer air would result in bigger and far more destructive hurricanes.

Despite the gravity of the looming catastrophe, most people chose to simply ignore the warnings, a sense of denial bolstered by a coalition of filthy-fuel corporations and their fascist enablers in right-wing media, who assured their panting morons that “climate change” was just a conspiracy theory fostered by people who wanted us all to live in caves and hate capitalism.

To say that this caused a lot of frustration among sane people is an understatement.

An unforgettable example of this occurred as hurricane Milton was approaching Tampa Bay about a month ago. A Miami TV weatherman, John Morales, saw the numbers that suggested that the storm was undergoing “bombogenesis”–a sudden and large intensification. The phenomenon, not widely known twenty years ago, is a major factor in estimating the power and destructiveness of an approaching hurricane. Normally, a drop of 25mb in the central eye pressure in 24 hours indicates such a phenomenon is taking place. Milton dropped FIFTY millibars in that period, and Morales understood—and dreaded—the implications. He burst into tears over the damage to come.

Global warming means bigger, stronger storms. And a host of even more serious problems, but that was probably the easiest one to predict decades ago. And the American South has always been the area most vulnerable to landfalls from such storms.

So while Helene and Milton this year may have caused despair among climate scientists, they certainly did not cause surprise. And they’ll be the first to say it’s only going to get worse.

In fact, here in northern California, it’s just starting to snow this morning. A system is approaching the Oregon coast, and while not a hurricane, is developing similar intensity. The central pressure is expected to plunge about 40mb today, with central winds over 90 mph and waves in some areas 60 feet high. I’m 100 miles inland and at 3,300 elevation, and expect heavy snow for three days, and heavy rain after that. Nothing too extraordinary for us, but along the coast from the Bay area northward, it could have storm-of-the decade elements. Climate change didn’t cause the storm, but it does influence its power.

It’s not surprising that climate denialism—the refusal to accept that human emissions are having a major effect on climate world-wide—is losing popularity. When you get several storms-of-the-century or drought of a lifetime in the past decade, there is a dawning awareness that Something Is Going On Here.

Of course, this is the age of Trump, and so there’s no reason to suppose that dawning awareness is going to be constructive, or even sane.

Enter Veterans on Patrol (VOP). This outfit apparently actually did start out as a veterans advocacy group, but like so many elements in American life, it has been taken over by heavily-armed howling nuts from the far right.

Now, normal people, and by ‘normal’ I mean ‘not in the terminal stages of tertiary syphilis or convinced that their cat is telling them to assassinate Taylor Swift,’ actual normal people might assume that Helene was a pretty clear consequence of a hurricane supercharged by several trillion tons of greenhouse gases which might go where hurricanes frequently go and cause more damage than usual. Normal people might think that because, you know, normal.

But not our demented heroes of the VOP. A sample of their email conversations was in the Guardian today, and it read like this: “The US Military destroyed multiple communities and murdered hundreds by steering Weather Weapon Helene into Appalachia country, what should we do?” The answers offered were “Target military equipment and destroy the [directed energy weapons] easily accessible by the public”; “Destroy power and water lines that feed military bases”; “Locate all Top Brass bold enough to walk in public and detain them for murder”; “ALL 3 ABOVE”.

Well, that seems reasonable. After all, we all know from bad movies on the SciFi channel that one mad general, armed only with a black box the size of a shoe box and powered by a single D cell battery can steer a storm system 500 miles across and containing between 5 to 20×1013 watts of energy (200,000,000,000,000 watts) like it was a Hot Wheels toy and send it a thousand miles inland to strike Moscow.

Rather than accept that what happened is exactly what every climate scientist in the world has been warning will happen for debates, it’s easier to believe something that is nefarious, evil, sinister, and utterly demented.

But VOP has a constructive answer to this: “VOP News is openly requesting the public to provide the locations of all USMIC equipment used to control the weather. We intend to destroy this equipment in order to save lives.”

Yes, and Taylor Swift will be safe just as soon as we round up and kill any and all cats using mind control who don’t like Taylor Swift. What could be easier?

VOP is far from alone in this steadfast lunacy. Millions of Americans believe nonsense like this, and even zanier shit.

It’s not limited to America, or the twenty first century. In Europe in the thirteenth century, the Church hit on the notion that cats were evil and needed to be killed (“Kattenstoet”). The idea caught on, and most of Europe’s cat population was massacred. This allowed the rodent population, a favorite vector for the fleas that cause the plague, to explode.

There probably isn’t a culture on Earth without similar tales of mass idiocy, usually conducted with horrible consequences in their past and even their present.

Humans are all too frequently subject to conspiracy theories and similar idiocies. An uncharitable person might call them gullible, and I’m not feeling particularly charitable. They are gullible, and a lot of them are also mean and destructive and delight in the damage they cause.

The only solution is time, and sometimes even that doesn’t work. Ypres, Belgium, still celebrates Kattenstoet, although in a major victory for humanity and sanity, they now only throw plush toy cats off the belfry. See? Progress is possible, even if humans are involved.

But the madness will continue as America continues to lose its way. Climate scientists and even TV weather presenters get death threats from people who believe they are so intellectually superior they can envision D cell batteries steering hurricanes.

Oddly enough, no matter how many people they round up, the hurricanes will just keep on getting worse.

Obviously, Taylor Swift and the cats are behind that. Right?

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“Medals for Everyone!” — A guide to understanding Trumpenstein II

“Medals for Everyone!”

A guide to understanding Trumpenstein II

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

November 17th 2024

If you haven’t seen the 1933 Marx Brothers classic “Duck Soup,” now might be a good time to do so. Raucous and absurd, it’s also a fairly handy guide to what Americans might expect over this coming year.

In the movie, a rich plutocrat (Gloria Teasdale, played by Margaret Dumont) with more money than common sense makes the nation of Freedonia an offer it can’t refuse. $20 million in US dollars (worth nearly $500 million today) but there’s a catch: she gets to appoint the next leader of Freedonia. She has someone in particular in mind: Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho Marx).

Rufus is erratic, egotistical verging on monomaniacal, impetuous and basically a force of chaos. Without the intervention of moronic money, he would never have gotten within a time zone of the levers of power.

Freedonia falls into corrupt paralysis and eventually ends up at war with its neighboring country. Freedonia collapses, and the enemy troops find Rufus and his rich sponsor, toss them in stocks and pelt them with fruit.

This being a Marx brothers movie and not the country you grew up in, it’s all very hilarious.

Thanks in large part to the power of propaganda, a majority of American voters felt liberated to be complete, vicious, selfish shits and elect a hateful nut as President. If you think of the coalition of plutocrats and corporations that promoted this (the National Association of Zealots and Ideologues, and yes, I’m going to keep right on calling them that until they throw me in the camps) as the Teasdale coalition, and Donald J. Trump as Rufus T. Firefly, then suddenly Duck Soup stops looking like an amusing, if dated parody and instead, becomes our future.

I won’t bother discussing the start of our new era. The headlines speak for themselves. Not only is it as bad a start as we can imagine, but it’s a worse start than we could imagine. Andy Borowitz caught the spirit of this new world order with a picture of Matt Gaetz and the caption: “Maybe this is what QAnon meant when they talked about bringing pedophiles to Justice.”

Our only real hope is that the new regime, like that of Rufus T. Firefly’s, will be so corrupt and incompetent that it will simply collapse before it has a chance to utterly destroy the nation. What such a collapse might entail I can’t really imagine. But it has already begun.

We’re already hearing reports of a incandescently angry Trump screaming at aides over leaks, mostly because the leaks tend to be true. We’re seeing flat-out lies already, and repression is rapidly spreading. I know that for some time the earth sciences have been moving data and access to data out of the country, a stream that has become a flood since the 5th of November. I imagine a lot of other disciplines that fall under the tent of “woke” or “bad for business” or which contradicts holy script are all doing the same thing. We’re not going to get out of this without falling into a mini-dark age at the very least.

Fortunately, most of the world’s library is on-line and safely abroad. They can ban all the books they want, but as long as people can log on overseas (magic words: Tor Browser and a virtual private network) access to knowledge and wisdom will remain.

Another reason to believe that the age of Trump might be short-lived: his policies (tariffs, deconstruction of nearly the entire federal government, deporting nearly half of the agricultural labor force) are going to be catastrophic for the economy, and no matter how much his regime tries to hide it, the same plutocrats who made Trump possible (the top ten richest Americans added $68 billion to their wealth in the DAY after Trump as elected) are going to start seeing immense losses.

Social unrest will probably rise to levels unseen since 1933. Trump wants to respond to protest violently, which is the surest path to cause discontent to blaze into full rebellion. Trump and his motley crew are probably too arrogant and too stupid to realize it, but they are creating what will become a social tsunami. It won’t be pretty.

And remember: Trump already has dementia, and is in terrible physical condition. He personally will not last, and knowing his management style, his death will create a bloodbath in every organization he heads, including the United States.

The next few years are not going to be pretty. I haven’t even discussed what America’s abdication from the world stage is going to mean, except that under the very best possible scenarios, America will no longer be the strongest nation in the world. It may not even be in the top ten.

But hang in there. History shows that things like this don’t last long unless folk like you give up. Be prepared to resist.

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The Dark Age — Once again, dear friends…

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

November 6th 2024

First, I want to apologize to my readers. I really blew it on my forecast on how this election was going to turn out. I’m especially sorry to those who took my forecast in good faith—I’m sure it added to the pain you are feeling now, and I deeply regret that.

I’ve been contemplating overnight and this morning over how I—and others, including the Harris campaign—so totally got it wrong.

I don’t have any real answers and indeed, more questions than I began with. How could such a large number of Hispanics support Trump? He’s made it clear that they are one of his target groups; when he says “illegal immigrants” he’s including Hispanics born here, or naturalized. They’re part of the twenty-two million people he wants to mass deport. He isn’t doing it to “save the economy.” He’s doing it because he’s a bigot, pandering to other bigots.

I don’t understand the self-professed Christians who supported him. He is the antithesis of everything they supposedly stand for.

And most of all, I don’t understand the women who voted for Trump. In seven states, freedom of reproductive choice was on the ballot, and many women in those states voted for reproductive freedom and then went ahead and voted for the man who destroyed that right in the first place!

I underestimated the power of the aggrieved anger that the right wing media—mostly run by plutocrats who wanted to use the mob to destroy the safeguards the constitution has to protect that same mob—and there was one thing I did get right; the economy is extremely strong, but it hasn’t really reached the lower middle class and the poor, even as conditions were beginning to improve.

A friend of mine once told me that revolution and revolt was most likely, not when things were at their bleakest, but when things were starting to improve. He told me that some forty years ago, and a close look at major upheavals throughout history confirms this to be true. Not always, but usually.

I have friends in the scientific community, so I was already aware of an on-going effort to save and secure date In The Event Of. Efforts will be redoubled; some of the incoming administration regard such data as either blasphemous or economically inconvenient.

America is heading for a scientific dark age, but there’s no reason to drag the rest of the world into it.

The Ukraine will be on their own now, along with the states surrounding the genocidal Netanyahu. Trump wants to end NATO, which will give his buddy Putin license to invade much of eastern Europe, and he won’t stop there. The NATO nations need to start gearing up for a war footing NOW. There may be a general war in Europe within two years. The middle east will become a sea of flames, and before his mad reign ends, Netanyahu will have slaughtered millions. Other major nations currently not involved, such as Canada, Japan, India and China—may step in.

America is heading for a geopolitical dark age, but there’s no reason to drag the rest of the world into it.

Project 2025 is alive and well, with all its draconian plans. I was compiling data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics today for a Trump-loving client, and it occurred to me to advise him that when this annual task comes due next year, neither I nor the BLS may be around.

America is heading for a governance dark age, but there’s no reason to drag the rest of the world into it.

Putting tariffs on most foreign imports and deliberately destroying over half the agricultural production force isn’t going to lower costs or put food on the table. Destroying nearly all federal jobs is going to create a huge labor surplus. States attempting to fill the huge gaps left will have to double, triple, quadruple taxes.

America is heading for an economic dark age, but there’s no reason to drag the rest of the world into it.

Trump will pursue his mad aim to encourage profligate use of fossil fuels, dooming the already inadequate efforts to mitigate climate change. The world has already entered a catastrophic zone: America is now a major part of the problem.

America is heading for an environmental dark age, but there’s no reason to drag the rest of the world into it.

With the Department of Education gone, public schools will fall prey to the same people who have already benefited from spreading misinformation, disinformation, and slowing the spread of scientific and historical knowledge. Thousands of books will be banned “for the children” and eventually, movies and other forms of communication. Literacy will fall, both by design and through sheer incompetence.

America is heading for an educational dark age, but there’s no reason to drag the rest of the world into it.

Rights will rapidly contract and then vanish altogether. People will be told that the era between 1865 and 2025 was an aberration in American culture, and that life under our caring despots who safeguard our morals and thoughts is what the Founders really intended.

America is heading for a humanitarian dark age, but there’s no reason to drag the rest of the world into it.

Here in California, and other deep blue states, talk of secession is mounting rapidly. It may, in the end, be the only way we can protect ourselves from the libertarian and fundamentalist quagmire that Trump plans. It would mean dissolution of America, and/or civil war. A peaceful way back may not be possible.

America is heading for a dark age, but there’s no reason to drag the rest of the world into it.

To the rest of the world: help us where you can, but remember our leaders will be inimical, and this sort of madness can be contagious.

We’re on our own.

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Decision Day 2024 — House and Senate up for grabs, along with our future

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

November 4th 2024

Kamala Harris is going to win. And fairly substantially. She will be our next president and with any luck at all, by next March Donald Trump will be just a bad memory.

But if you can vote, do so. Especially if you are in a state or a Congressional district that is even remotely close. Harris won’t be able to put many of her campaign promises into effect if Republicans control either House. At this point, I think the Dems have a good chance of taking the House back, but I’m not so sure about the Senate. Even with Mitch McConnell shuffling off to well-deserved obscurity, I expect whoever replaces him will be just as obstructionist and possibly a crazy MAGAt.

Some of the smaller polls are producing startling results. Texas might just dump Ted Cruz, and may even break for Harris, despite the best efforts of the fascist government in Texas to skewer and interfere with the vote there. North Carolina may go for Harris: a lot of voters there heard Trump’s claims of no government assistance in the wake of the hurricanes, looked around, and realized that Trump was lying. Many realized that the future will bring more natural disasters, and they need a government that won’t base assistance on how you voted in the last election. Harris is leading in solidly red Iowa by two points.

America needs a government that is competent, clean, and works on behalf of everyone in the country, and not just people waving Trump flags. Unless Democrats take the White House and BOTH the House and the Senate, that’s not going to happen.

Imagine a future where the news of the governance of the nation isn’t dominated by Marjorie Taylor-Green, Lauren Boebert, Jim Jordan, Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, Mike Johnson, Elise Stefanik, Joni Ernst, Rick Scott, or any of the other nutball rabble that infest our governance these days. Yes, many of them will be re-elected or didn’t have to run this time, but if they are in the minority, it will put an end to the endless kangaroo court hearings, and Congress might actually become useful again. Instead of clownish hearings about impeaching Biden or punishing family members of his, we may instead hear about debate over housing assistance for young adults entering the workplace, expanded Medicare, and further efforts to rein in the corporations.

Fascist plutocrats like Rupert Murdoch, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos, and the National Association of Zealots and Ideologues will continue to poison the well, of course, and they will have the usual clown shows where some attention seeker in the GOP ranks will call for Harris’ impeachment three days after she takes office. That won’t change. But at least a solid win for the Dems will set them back, and reduce the threat they pose to our freedoms.

I expect that MAGA and QAnon will disintegrate after the inauguration. Trump won’t be their figurehead any more; at the very least he will have lost his clout, and in all likelihood he’ll be in prison or a rest home. Yes, America, like everywhere, will always have a significant population of nasty right wing nuts—bigots, greedheads, haters—but without the cult leader, they will crawl back to under the rocks where they belong.

Most importantly, control of court appointments must be taken back. Trump appointed three disgraces to the Supreme Court, and he’s even on record suggesting that his District Attorney (appointed, because there isn’t a prayer the Senate would confirm her) would be his pet corrupt Florida judge, Aileen Cannon. He’s also said he will make the loony Robert F. Kennedy Junior the nation’s ‘health czar’ and put the eerie Reinhard Heydrich clone Steven Miller in charge of immigration. Yesterday, he proposed to put the nation’s missile defense in the hands of noted rocket scientist Herschel Walker! Trump probably would like to have Mafia-type rule, but what he would achieve to control our lives would be an extremely malignant and incompetent idiocracy.

Last week Joe Biden made an ambiguous statement that interpreted one way, suggested he called Trump supporters at large “trash.” There was a lot of outrage over that, of course, but it’s significant that the outrage didn’t spread much outside of Trump’s most devoted followers. Many people who have known Joe Biden for years don’t believe he meant it that way (the remark, Biden says, was aimed at some of the trash who spoke at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally) and among those who did, there was considerable doubt that the supposed judgment was particularly harsh. It’s hard to give people the benefit of the doubt when they shout that liberals are communists, Democrats are scum, and want to impose their church doctrines on us all, not to mention nutball opinions about vaccines, reading material, women’s right to vote, eugenics, and “race science.” Some of these flat-earth nuts want us to doubt the Moon landings took place.

It’s time to put this idiocy back in its place. People have an absolute right to wrong-headed and illogical opinions, but they don’t have the right to impose them upon the rest of us. And yes, this includes religious-based opinions. Robert Heinlein once wrote “One man’s theology is another man’s belly laugh.” And a meme popular on social media states, “America is not a Christian nation. It is a nation in which you are free to be a Christian.”

So do vote. Even if you are in a state that is solidly blue or red, your vote could tip the balance in the House and Senate, and ensure that America remains America, and doesn’t become a corrupt and evil kleptocracy.

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Three Days To Go — Tension is actually decreasing

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

November 2nd 2024

This is probably the next-to-last piece I’ll write before election day, and believe me, I’m really looking forward to having things to write about other than American politics. For one thing, once the election is settled, I can sit down and consider my Solstice essay. It’ll probably be a doozy this year. Something about addled old farts who use words like “doozy”, perhaps.

With the election just three days away, I’m feeling considerable optimism. Trump’s campaign behavior is part of it; he’s acting like he’s already lost, and boy, does he know it. He was supposed to attend last night’s Penn State football game in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania, and abruptly canceled that. This is the campaign equivalent of spitting on babies and waving a Soviet flag.

His rhetoric is getting increasingly unhinged and violent, and he keeps saying things that would be political suicide for any candidate who isn’t a cult leader. As women arise en masse to protest the Dobbs decision, he’s prattling on about how he will protect women “whether they like it or not.” He’s still loudly fantasizing about shooting opponents, particularly former members of his own administration.

The voting patterns show considerable reason for optimism. It’s startling enough that over 62 million Americans have already cast ballots. (And of that 62 million, less than a dozen were cast by non-Americans, if previous voting patterns hold true). But of that 62 million, 56% were women.

It reflects a trend of new voter registrations over the past year, where over 55% of registrants were female.

In an absolute genius move, the Harris campaign ran an ad letting women know that their vote is absolutely secret, and not only do they have no obligation to vote as their husbands demand, but they have the right to lie about how they voted. Apparently Republicans really hate the idea that women can have a secret ballot too, and Newt Gingrich stood up to huff loudly that Harris was encouraging women to lie to their husbands. Newt Gingrich. You remember old Nootie, of course. Played a seminal role in turning the once-proud GOP into mindless obstructionists for corporation, now on his fourth wife, cheated on one wife while she was dying of cancer. Outside of Trump himself, about the last person on Earth to be lecturing women on marital fidelity and lying to their spouses. It’s a bit like being lectured on diplomacy by Triumph the Insult Dog.

In Pennsylvania, the state whose number one football team Donald just pissed on, new voter registrations ran nearly 3-1 for Democrats, and independents got more new registrations than Republicans.

The unedited version of the “grab them by the pussy’ tape from the 2016 election showed up on TikTok, and millions of users too young or too disengaged in 2016 are seeing it for the very first time. Chris Hayes thoughtfully played the entire tape on his MSNBC show last night, and it’s every bit as appalling as the edited excerpts we’d all heard before suggested. I imagine it’s wildfiring through the rest of social media now.

Two of Trump’s campaign stunts, both on the level of Mike-Dukakis-in-the-tank, backfired. There’s a meme rocketing around social media now that show Joe Biden and Kamala Harris sitting together, laughing their heads off. The captions read [Joe] “I made him drive a garbage truck!” [Kamala] “I made him work at a McDonalds!” I posted a image of Trump in the garbage truck and labeled it “From the Department of Repetitive Redundancy Department.” It failed to impress Trump supporters, I’m sorry to say.

Mainstream media are still playing the silly horserace game, of course. CNN and the NY Times played up a weak jobs report from yesterday as a “devastating blow” to Harris, apparently unaware of the fact that it normally takes about six months for changes in the economy to seep into the public consciousness, and longer if the economy is doing well and people only know what Fox News tells them. The gain of “only” 22,000 jobs for the month will have absolutely no effect on the vote.

The plutocrat press is learning that making newspapers into rich man’s toys isn’t working out: the Bezos-owned Washington Post has lost over 300,000 subscribers over their public self-neutering, and the LA Times, with a much smaller circulation, has lost some 50,000.

Even the Supreme Court, resolutely fascist, has backed away from further opportunities to tamper with the election. They denied cert on several GOP-backed suits following the Virginia case.

I suspect that a lot of Republicans are not going to vote for Trump, and many will vote for Harris. Millions, perhaps. Enough to seriously tilt the scales. It helps that over 600 Republicans of note, including some 200 from the Trump administration, over 100 retired line officers, and dozens of retired Congressionals, have all come out for Harris, including the Cheneys and Schwarzenegger. Harris has gotten endorsements from such Republican bastions as the Economist and the Houston Chronicle.

It’s important to remember that a lot of the Republican disaffection stems from the fact that Trump himself is an incompetent, addled, vicious and dishonest pig. That may or may not affect their votes down ticket, depending on how closely aligned with Trump the candidates are. Congressional votes may hinge, not on never-Trumpers, but on discouraged voters. And, of course, the millions of women voting to take their rights back. They don’t see old “grab them by the pussy” as their preferred protector, it seems.

Finally, a lot of self-identified Christian voters have finally realized that Trump is not a divine test of godliness or whatever the fuck, and are going with the candidate who isn’t a serial adulterer, rapist, con artist, liar and dementia patient. It’s a good look on them.

It’s too early to be complacent, mind you. Trump will challenge the results and put up a huge fight to try to de-legitimize the vote. He’s already said he would. Just like he did in 2020. So expect a battle.

But Trump isn’t fighting for you. He’s fighting for himself. And he knows he has everything to lose.

 

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