‘Will Putin and Trump Save Us?’ He Asked Sardonically
By Bryan Zepp Jamieson
Well, folks, we’re at the Crunch Point, I think.
If in the next few days, we have an electronic meltdown in which the Internet, power grid, and banking system all shut down, then it’s safe to assume that Vladimir Putin just declared—and probably won—World War III against the United States.
Yes, I’m absolutely serious. The events of the past 48 hours have convinced me that we are right at the edge of a major war (e-W 1?), a domestic coup d’état, or just a general swirling chaos that might be the worst option of the three.
Obviously, I hope to hell I’m wrong. Maybe by next week I’ll be saying, “Well, saner heads prevailed”, or perhaps we’ll still be in a period of tense crisis and we’re all still waiting for the hammer to fall.
If you haven’t heard, several things occurred all at once, and that leaves me gravely concerned.
Israel has been slaughtering Palestinian protesters along their Green Wall, and as is usually the case, Israel is deploying first-world military weaponry against people armed with rocks and knives. Israel is also believed to have conducted a bombing raid in Syria. They claim they are stopping Iranian encroachment. In the meantime, the Russian-backed Assad regime conducted a gas attack that killed at least 40 and injured dozens more, mostly women and children. The attack was so vicious, and such an egregious violation of international law, that Trump actually criticized Vladimir Putin by name for his complicity in the gas attack. This is about like Pinnochio biting Giuseppe. Trump went on to promise a strong reaction within 48 hours, and Putin, in turn, promised ‘grave repercussions’ should Trump bomb Syria.
There’s only two reasons Putin would piss on Trump’s head like this. Either he has decided his puppet has so marginalized himself that he’s of no particular use any more, or he’s prepared for war with the US, and thinks he can win it. Since he can’t win a conventional military war, it means he has something else in mind.
And Netanyahu is behaving like a mad dog who has slipped his leash. He’s behaving like he thinks neither of the superpowers can rein him in.
The other crisis erupted today. The FBI raided the offices and domicile of Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer, and seized his records relating to Trump and the Russians. This wasn’t done by Mueller’s office; according to the Guardian, “Stephen Ryan, a lawyer for Cohen, released a statement that said: ‘Today the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York executed a series of search warrants and seized the privileged communications between my client, Michael Cohen, and his clients.’ He did not name Trump.”
It’s very rare for police to seize client’s records from his lawyer. Usually attorney-client privilege invalidates the legal standing of any such records, making them inadmissible. The only exception is if there is prima facie evidence of conspiracy between the lawyer and client; in this case, that would be Cohen and the President of the United States. The materials seized include documents relating to Trump’s relationship with the Russians, and the Stormy Daniels thing, although the latter is just a side show.
Trump called it “an attack on our country in a true sense. It’s an attack on what we all stand for.” In effect, he has declared a state of war between the US and the FBI, and presumably the Southern District of New York.”
That’s scary. Trump usually engages in hyperbole, and usually doesn’t mean most of the shit he says anyway, but in this case his back is obviously against the wall. The offices of the probes, both at the state and federal level, have strong evidence of conspiracy involving a nation America may be at war with next week. Trump maybe be facing more than conspiracy, RICO charges, fraud and emoluments clause violations; he may be facing charges of sedition, and even treason.
We have a dangerous cowardly sociopath who has his back against the wall, which makes him extremely dangerous.
We have a dangerous determined sociopath who clearly thinks he has us by the balls and is ready to make his move. That makes him extremely dangerous.
And we’re caught between the two.
We may get through this OK, but I doubt that after this week, the world will ever be the same again.
Looking at the Trump administration this past week, I feel like I’m in a runaway locomotive that is heading at full tilt toward the side of a mountain in which someone has forgotten to carve a tunnel. If you aren’t frightened right now, you should be. This is even scarier than Nixon’s final week was.
So let’s talk about Daylight Savings Time. But don’t worry: there’s method in this madness.
Daylight Savings Time, or what we as kids called “Summer Time” has become deeply unpopular, and a majority of Americans would like to just get rid of it altogether. There’s even scientific evidence that the self-inflicted twice-a-year jet lag leads to a loss of productivity, and an increase in heart attacks and strokes, especially in the spring when the clocks are moved forward. It’s just one more irritation in a world filled with irritations big and small, and of course the government, having made it an annoying waste of time (literally), will do nothing to alleviate it.
When I was a kid, Daylight Savings Time was great. It came at a time of year, late April, when the last of the dust and gravel from the winter had vanished from the streets, the tulips were topped by fat buds with hints of the colors to come, the days were warm(ish), and suddenly, magically, you had time for three more innings of baseball after dinner. It marked the end of Unlocking and the beginning of true summer. It was a glorious event. It was Summer Time, and it was special.
The first week of October marked the beginning of Locking. The leaves were beginning to turn, the evenings were crisp, the mornings chill. It was time to put away the toys of summer. Thanksgiving and the Grey Cup were only weeks away (this was Canada, after all) and the NHL would be starting soon. Locking had begun, with the promise of the winter to come, and it was right that the evenings would darken, softened by the extra hour of sunlight on school mornings.
The time shift, which began was a need by plutocrats to squeeze more work out of us, meshed with the seasons and our moods. It was almost organic, and gladdened our souls. People set their clocks ahead and smiled at the warm days to come. In fall, it heralded another welcome transition. People moved their clocks back and settled in to get cozy.
In the 1970s there was the APEC crisis, and Congress decided to extend daylight savings time in the vain hope it would save energy. It didn’t, and eventually the crisis passed, making the point moot, but Congress wasn’t about to admit they were wrong and set it back to where it was.
Another, smaller energy crisis struck in the Oughts, and the Congress, now mostly twisted and broken minions of twisted and broken plutocrats, could think of nothing better to do to deal with it than extend DST again, this time from the second weekend in March to the first weekend in November.
I remember early March. It was just barely light when I awoke, and when washing my hands in the kitchen, I would look at our neighbor’s north-sloping roof, hoping to see gaps in the snow cover where the eaves would appear. At least the giant icicles of February had fallen. The trip to school was a slog, wet cold winds, rain or snow, or both. It was the rotten part of late winter, where the white ice had melted from the streets, old man Campbell had shut down his rink because the ice was too rotten for skating, and the berms were crunchy foul nightmares of black gravel and automotive soot and dead things caught by the plows. “Summer Time” began, not only before the snow had melted, but before it even stopped snowing. The pussy willows, the bravest harbingers, hadn’t even budded yet. Worst of all, one’s mornings were slammed back to the latest sunrises of the year, the hopeless dark of a mid-winter morning. School began at first light, a phenomenon of which everyone was already heartily sick, having gone through it in early January.
The end of DST is an even more meaningless. Evenings are already dark and cold, the leaves have all fallen, and as the cold and dark encroach, we are tormented by the false gaiety and emotional blackmail of the Mass of the Christ Commercial. Suddenly, it’s dark before dinner, and the faint gray light of November mornings are no consolation. Saying goodbye to summer is like grieving for your great-grandfather who died twenty years before you were born.
The time change has changed from an accentuation of the seasons to just another bloody pain-in-the-ass regulation foisted on us by a corrupt and uncaring government.
Is it any wonder people have learned to hate Day Light Savings Time?
There’s been a spate of articles lately about how people are depressed an alienated, crushed between the millstones of runaway capitalism and a corrupt and twisted government.
And now we see the end game of the fascistic notion that society should serve the economy, rather than the other way around. A man whose only qualification for office was that he was a good thief is disintegrating before our eyes and threatening to take us with him. The inevitable political implosion is here, and the economy is threatening to follow suit. The media each day reflect how, like the time change, the foundations of society have completely lost relevance to our human needs.
Of course we are depressed and frightened. Any sane person would be.
I think we’ll muddle though, and I’m sincere when I write that. But that’s my own optimism, and that’s all it is. The only thing backing it up is “Well, we’ ain’t dead yet.”
It’s a mean time in our lives, the bleakness of dead leaves in the gutters and a swirl of snowflakes mocking the dying lawns. And now, suddenly, it’s dark, far too early.
When I first came to America at age 14, I was told that it was a lot like Canada and England, and I wouldn’t even notice the difference. Just a few words spelled differently and football has four downs, is all.
After a month, I was still trying to navigate the strange currents of southern California society. The paper had no mention of my favorite football team, the Ottawa Roughriders, or even the CFL at all. Weather reports indicated that Canada apparently got no weather. The whole country was blank. England apparently didn’t exist. One kid tried to get me to give him twelve cents for a dime, apparently thinking of the British system. He punched me when I told him in Canada it was ten cents to a dime, just like here.
A month in, I walked into my first American classroom. Because of the British and Canadian educational systems, I was the youngest kid in the class by a full year.
The classroom wasn’t all that different. There was a picture of George Washington instead of the Queen, and the walls had images relating to the teacher’s topic: in this case, history. So instead of Wolfe versus Montcalm or Henry VIII, there were images of Abe Lincoln and John Glenn and so on.
The only thing different was the flag. Classroom flags were sedate little 18 inch affairs, pinned flat to the wall. Canada usually had two—the Red Ensign and the Union Jack. But they were just part of the background decoration.
THIS flag was on a pole with a gold eagle on the top and gold fringe, and was taller than I was. I figured maybe it was used in history lessons in some way.
The teacher strode in, and everyone took their seats. Then the teacher made a ‘stand up’ gesture that looked like a conductor asking his orchestra to sound like a scalded cat, and all the kids stood up, put their hands over their hearts, and started chanting at the flag.
I watched, utterly dumbfounded. Nobody had told me about this. I had stood up when everyone else did, and after a few seconds put my hand over my right lung. Left-handed, you see, and since I couldn’t see any rhyme or reason, I just used my dominant hand.
The teacher had noted my unstylish clothing and leather satchel and figured me for a furriner, German, maybe or Swiss. The next day he handed me a mimeographed sheet. “Memorize this,” he said.
I read it with growing perplexity. “I pledge allegiance…”
Um, to the flag? What?
I took it home, along with a light load of homework (no Latin!) and memorized it. And then realized it wasn’t for me. A newly-minted atheist, I didn’t want to say “under God”, and just omitting the phrase seemed inadequate. Especially since the whole thing felt ridiculous, anyway. All these people, chanting earnestly at a piece of cloth in the corner. It seemed like something out of wartime Germany, not to put too fine a point on it.
So I got the salute sorted, and stood respectfully when the others got up, but remained silent.
The teacher noticed.
“Didn’t you memorize the Pledge?” You could hear the capital “P”.
“Yes sir, but I’m not comfortable reciting it.”
He hauled me off to the Principal’s office, and my Dad was called. He came in about a half hour later, and fortunately, the Principal knew the law. We agreed I could remain silent, and it was enough that I stood respectfully. I didn’t even have to salute if I didn’t want.
The teacher didn’t like it, but had to acquiesce. He settled for picking on me for answers, and if I didn’t know, might say something like “You need to know this if you ever want to be an American.”
I was lucky in one way: my classmates never picked on me about it. A year or two later, when Vietnam was clearly falling apart and authority was being challenged, things might have been different.
I never have recited the Pledge, not in over 50 years. And I still think it’s ridiculous.
So when Colin Kaepernick dropped to one knee for the national anthem a year ago, I agreed with why he did it for a number of reasons, some personal, some not.
The first was his principal motivating reason: police brutality. That problem hasn’t gone away. Over a thousand Americans—the majority of them African American—have been killed by police this year. Just yesterday I read, in quick succession, stories of a deaf man who was shot to death by police as neighbors screamed at the officers that he was deaf and couldn’t hear them. Another man took seven bullets for turning and walking away from a cop. The cop hadn’t detained him, and the video suggests that the cop found it suspicious the guy wanted to avoid him. Another guy was kicked half to death for having an epileptic seizure. He lived, but he’ll know better than to have any involuntary neuromuscular spasms in front of his community’s protectors and defenders. There’s been a lot of unrest as cops, clearly guilty of murder, get acquitted all around the country. A rage is building.
So Kaepernick’s grounds for protest are real, and valid, and unfortunately, have not changed.
Trump, pandering to his racist base in Alabama, attacked pro footballers who refused to stand for the anthem. He said, “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out! He’s fired. He’s fired!’”
Trump managed to hit on the issues of the rights of employees and other workers, and freedom of expression and freedom to protest. And with every step, he managed to squelch a fresh turd.
Le Bron James called Trump “a bum”. LeSean McCoy called him an “asshole”. Stevie Wonder fell to both knees in protest. Dozens of players on other football squads knelt for today’s anthem. Coaches, managers and even owners linked arms in a show of solidarity with the kneelers. Pittsburgh’s squad elected to stay in the locker room until the anthem was played. It has finally begun to show up in baseball. The SF Warriors decided to forego the ‘honor’ of a White House visit. The protests have even reached that most reactionary group of players, pro baseball.
Kaepernick’s mother, in a great American moment, responded that she was proud to be the bitch Trump was referring to, and proud of her son.
What Trump doesn’t understand is that you simply cannot order people to do things in the name of freedom. Or symbols. Or because {patriotism, religiosity, or fear}.
If someone orders you to stand for freedom, you should consider it your right to kneel if you want. Or sit. Or lie down. Or walk away.
If someone orders you to salute freedom, feel free to keep your arms at your side.
George W. Bush once declared that “Freedom is on the march.”
He was wrong. Free people do not march. They may decide to march, but they don’t do so at the order of the President.
Trump does not represent freedom. He represents what people fought and died to protect their freedoms from.
If you agree with Trump, you have that right. But ask yourself just whose freedoms are being protected by ordering people to obey symbols of authority.
If you’re fine with your answer, feel free to obey in the name of freedom. That, too, is a freedom you enjoy.
But don’t demand that others share your servitude. You don’t have that right, and others are free to ignore you. And Trump, they can even defy you.
By now, you’ve probably heard that there where four Broward County deputy sheriffs in the immediate vicinity of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas last week. There was the on-duty security officer, and three more cops who got there while the shooting spree (all four minutes) was still going on. They didn’t go in, and it wasn’t because they were all suffering from bone spurs, that infamous affliction that has waylaid the most renowned of American war heroes.
They didn’t go in because facing an AR-15 was certain death, and would not save a single life. As long as the shooter had his weapon of mass destruction going, there was little or nothing they could do. Only an abject idiot would chant that the way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. In this case, it’s like saying the only way to stop a bad guy with fragmentation grenades is good guys with whiffle bats.
A big part of the problem is that an AR-15 isn’t just a sidearm. It’s a weapon of war, designed to create maximum lethal casualties in the shortest possible amount of time. To get an idea of just how different these vicious weapons are, read this article: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/what-i-saw-treating-the-victims-from-parkland-should-change-the-debate-on-guns/553937/
I used to think that the NRA, the main proponent of unlimited gun fire, was just a mouthpiece organization for gun sellers.
But it’s just as easy to promote .22 rifles, or 9mm sidearms. The NRA is pushing weapons of mass murder. Even gun companies have to realize that this is a strategy that would eventually blow up in their faces. And thanks to the survivors of last week’s attacks, it has.
There’s several elements that put the motivations of at least some of the NRA leadership into clearer focus. First, nearly half the guns in the US (some 320 million nationwide) are owned by just 3% of the population, and by an even more disproportionate ratio, the weapons of mass murder are in the hands of that same 3%.
Second, it’s reported that Russia used the NRA to launder some $25 million as a conduit to influence the US elections in 2016.
So you have an absolutely mad policy designed to give a small private army weapons to conduct military sieges with, and it’s allegedly being financed, in part, by a hostile foreign power.
Some of the NRA—and their benefactors—are preparing for a civil war. They want a small but dedicated cadre who will be willing to kill thousands of their fellow Americans if push comes to shove, or the country just gets rid of a corrupt and criminal incompetent president. They are fascists, and they are preparing for war against America and the American people.
The kids leading the revolt against this are facing fierce headwinds. Take the people who accuse them of being ‘crisis actors’ or who are paid to feign outrage over what happened at their school. (Stop and think for a moment about the sort of mind that assumes that one can only be outraged at the murder of friends and children if one gets paid for it—that’s the sort of moral cripples speaking on behalf of the NRA). The ones who accuse the school of faking the attack are exactly on the same level as child pornographers—they exploit and harm children for their own personal agendas. They are on exactly the same level. When your cause is twisted and evil, your hireling will be twisted and evil.
There is a way to contain these murderous people, and while we can’t get rid of this neo-confederate army, we can drive it deep underground, and make it a lot more difficult for them to use our children for target practice, and our freedoms to destroy us.
The Second Amendment has a subjective clause, one that the NRA hates so much that they left it out of the inscribed quote of the Second Amendment that adorns the lobby of their main offices.
It reads, in full: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
It’s time to take the Second Amendment literally. It doesn’t guarantee the right of arms to every individual; it guarantees the right to bear arms to every member of a well-regulated militia. The amendment doesn’t even specify state or federal militia, but I would strongly prefer seeing it as a uniform federal requirement for owning a firearm.
As a gun owner, a mandatory requirement would be enrollment in a federal militia. This would entail an agreement to put in six training days per year, a requirement to let the militia know the exact number and nature of the firearms owned, and a log kept of the use of each weapon.
Anyone using a gun in the commission of any crime would be subject to military justice. Anyone in possession of a gun who has not joined the federal militia should be required to hand in their weapon, or face military justice for illegal possession of a firearm.
Exceptions would pertain to law enforcement officers, and members of state militia, although both sets would face military justice in the event of malfeasance.
It would effectively end the ability to stockpile arsenals for the purpose of making target practice of schoolchildren. (It’s a chilling note that there were at least five instances since the Marjory Stoneman Douglas where students with similar arsenals were planning attacks. Nobody knew they had these arsenals, and the only reason they were caught was because the boasted of their plans on social media, or to friends. There may be hundreds more like them out there, waiting their turn.)
Finally: the militia will determine what guns are appropriate for use. Firing rate, muzzle velocity, and range are all factors the militia can use to determine if a weapon is appropriate. Since the role of the militia is to protect the public and preserve the peace, weapons of mass destruction such as AR-15s would not be appropriate.
The contempt the gun nuts have for our liberties and our lives ends here.
In the wake of Harvey and Irma, it’s time to take a look at climate change. The usual bad actors are out there, trying to downplay the damages the storms did. Ann Coulter was so egregiously nasty in her approach that she actually drew a reprimand from White House Chief of Staff Kelly.
Since the storms did do enormous damage, the carbon apologists have gone to their first fall-back position—don’t talk about it. They’ve tried telling us that now is not the time to discuss climate change, and that by doing so “liberals” are engaging in the most shameless of political opportunism.
The problem with that is there is no better time than now. So let’s talk about it.
Harvey and Irma were both extraordinary storms, created by unusual meteorological and temperature related situations. They wound up as unique, with Harvey stalling and dumping up to 55” of rain on south Texas and Louisiana. Irma became a cat 5 where no storm had become a cat 5 before, and raked nearly all of the northern coast of Cuba—several hundred miles—before finally turning north as a Cat 3 and hitting Florida as “only” a Cat 4.
These are unique storms. However, they are also harbinger storms.
Because the climate and the oceans are warming, we will see more and more “unique” situations like this. I will guarantee it.
There’s two changing factors critical to the formation of tropical storms (there are others, such as the Coriolis Force, but they are constants).
First is the temperature of the water. For a tropical system to form, a sea surface temperature of 26.5°C (79.7°F) is required. Further, that temperature has to reach a depth of about 50 meters (164 feet) because these storms churn the water up to that depth. If a storm is on disturbed water that is now only 25°C at the surface, the storm will peter out and die.
This is a constant, world wide. Since the overall average temperature of the oceans is 16°C, there’s only limited areas where such storms can form.
However, the warmer the sea surface temperature, the more energy the storm can take from that warm water (and warm water has far more energy than warm dry air—about 10,000 times as much), and the more powerful a storm can become.
The oceans are warming: Between .2°C and .4°C, depending on location. The warming is most intense in shallow waters, such as the Gulf of Mexico and there’s actually been some cooling in the polar regions with cold fresh water spilling from Antarctica and Greenland. Areas of water about 26.5°C are spreading, and those areas subject to seasonal variation are staying warmer longer. Vast tropical regions such as the West Pacific and the Gulf often average well above 30°C, sometimes all the way up to 35°C, or 95°F.
So, more energy for tropical storms to spawn in, lasting longer, and over a wider area. What do you suppose happens next?
Then there is air temperature. It’s not a significant factor as a source of energy, since the energy required to warm air is, as noted, only about 1/10,000th that of water. But it does have one very significant contributing factor: water vapor. There’s a formula called the Clausius-Clapeyron equation that tells us that when air is in the range of -50°C to 100°C (which pretty much covers all of Earth’s climate except for extremely cold regions), the capacity of the air to hold water vapor increases by about 7% for every degree Celsius. The warmer the air, the more vapor it can hold.
And the air is overall getting warmer. We know that, too. There is no doubt.
One last factor: moist air is lighter and less dense than dry air. Thus it takes less energy to get it up to a given speed like, oh, say, 200 kilometers an hour. 125 miles an hour. That’s a Cat 3.
Now, climatologists don’t like to say global warming will cause more hurricanes, and that they will be stronger. Part of the reluctance stems for not being able to point to a time frame, and because climate is a massively complicated science, they are aware that feedback mechanisms can and almost certainly will affect any predictions they make—in either direction. So they don’t.
But I’m not a climatologist. And I’m not going to make a specific prediction.
But the science is clear: as global warming continues, the area that can support tropical storm formation will increase. With greater area to form, that means more storms. And because the water and the air are warmer, they will flourish. Tropical depressions will be more likely to become tropical storms, and tropical storms will be more likely to become hurricanes. And because they have more energy and more moisture, more monsters like Harvey and Irma will develop.
Scientists have to qualify their projections because some feedback mechanism they don’t know about might affect the climate. But without such an unknown mechanism, this is what will happen. No ifs, ands, or buts.
I understand why they take that approach, but in terms of day-to-day reality, they are, like the rest of us, in the position of a man standing in a pool of gasoline, tossing lit matches and hoping there is something overlooked in the chemical nature of gasoline that will prevent it from catching fire.
Every year, I write a piece to coincide with the winter solstice. The theme, always, is that of hope. It’s always darkest before the cliché, the sun will return, so quit shivering and throw granny on the fire.
But this was 2016.
Big Deaths are supposed to come in threes, not thirties. In just this one year, we lost a sizable chunk of the people we admired, enjoyed, who enriched our lives with courage, or talent, or drive. They shaped us, perhaps made us a little bit better than we might have been. I could fill out the rest of the piece just naming the people who died we all wish were still with us. Mohammed Ali and Gordie Howe are dead, and Tucker Carlson is alive. Yes, Virginia, the Universe is fucking random.
They could have saved time and trouble by just lowering the flag to half-staff on January 1st (death of Dale Bumpers) and leaving it there until at least this week (John Glenn).
In America, the country has, in its past, seen fit to elect illiterates, morons, cutthoats, goosesteppers, egomaniacs, sex fiends and fascists. But until now, we’ve managed to avoid electing someone who combined all those features into one gruesome package.
Oh, wait. Americans did avoid electing him. But rigged elections in two or three states, plus the Electoral College, defeated the popular will. It’s a sign of things to come that in the month following the election, there were 1,200 hate crimes committed in Trump’s name—against transgendered, women, blacks, Moslems, and Jews. It didn’t matter who you are: if you aren’t white and male and Protestant, you are now at risk.
Then there’s the matter of Russian involvement in the election. A lot of people look at endless American efforts to stymie popular will in elections around the world and argue that turnabout is fair play, and perhaps it is. But this particular one has made the world a far more dangerous place for everyone.
Trump, or as I call him, President-Select Putnik the Putznik, was the cherry on a poisonberry pie.
Aleppo. Milan. Paris. Nice. Orlando. The Mexican Drug War. Yemen. The Kurds. Sinai. South Sudan. The Ukraine. Somalia. The Philippines (blessed with a vicious madman of their own). Boko Haram. And of course, George W. Bush’s ongoing legacies, Iraq and Afghanistan. Americans don’t like to discuss Iraq, hopefully out of a sense of shame. So most people don’t know there was a terror attack in Baghdad in the same month as the slaughter in Nice, but which killed four times as many people and injured three times as many. I’m sure the victims of such attacks in Iraq scream just as loudly, bleed just as profusely, and die just as horribly as the victims in France did. But Americans don’t count them, because they were the result of an American oopsie called Bush.
This was the year we realized that any hope of avoiding major damage from climate change was gone, and the best we could manage now was to try to avoid utter catastrophe. Naturally, our captains of industry spent billions trying to dissuade us from such precipitous action.
Northern California saw a crippling drought washed away by copious soaking rains as Southern California struggled with the Big Dry like a bug on a pin. But that was nothing compared to the climatic horrors visited on north Africa, large parts of Asia, and even the Arctic, which saw ice melting in November as the ice cap continued a death spiral. As vast as the damage humans have done to the environment is, climate change is on the verge of doing more damage than all the rest combined.
Things have gotten so bad that Putnik has upped his daily presidential briefings from one per week to three. He may even pay attention to some of them.
So no doubt about it, 2016 was an absolute shit year. It was a leap year which only prolonged the misery.
So how does all this tie in with a Solstice message? Is the message changing? Will I suggest you all run out and top yourselves because there’s nothing to be done for it?
Well, no.
The fact is, I lived through a year that was even shittier, and chances are quite a few of you did, too.
Remember? It was a year we elected a man that many believed was temperamentally and morally unqualified to be President. It was the year we learned the American military wasn’t invincible, but could get its collective ass kicked by a small country armed with fifty-year-old technology and lots of resolve. It was the year a major river caught fire, and the space program appeared dead in the water – or dead in the vacuum, if you will – following a catastrophe the year before. People were just beginning to wonder if it was really a good idea to burn leaded gasoline in cars. Two of the most important men in American history were assassinated.
Ah. The nickel just dropped, didn’t it? Yes, I’m talking about 1968. Kennedy and King were assassinated. Nixon was elected. The Tet Offensive made it clear that the war was not going well, and the government was lying—a lot—about what they were doing there.
You say the Chinese just seized an oceanographic drone and took two days to return it? In ’68, the North Koreans seized the USS Pueblo, and held it and its crew for nearly an entire year.
Putin and the Russians may be bad actors now, but 1968 saw brutal repression in Czechoslovakia, Russia sent nearly a quarter-million troops in to crush the “Prague Spring”.
A lot of people think that it wasn’t until after the Nixon resignation that the GOP decided ethics were for losers, but Nixon more than made up for any decency and honesty the GOP once possessed, impeding the Paris Peace Talks and boasting of a “secret plan” to end the war. Five years later and over a million deaths passed, he reached an agreement with Hanoi that was the very same terms he sabotaged in 1968.
Disgusted by the behavior of state police and armed corporate thugs at Standing Rock? You should have seen Mayor Daley’s pigs in action. Journalists called it a police riot. This was back in the days when the talking heads on TV were actual journalists, and not just overpaid fascist clowns.
Somebody even shot Andy Warhol.
There were differences. We didn’t have nearly as many mass shooting back then, but the overall murder rate was far higher. The Black Panthers were a lot angrier and more strident than Black Lives Matter, unfortunately for the same sad reasons that confront BLM today.
We did have several terrifyingly close calls with an intercontinental thermonuclear war, but we didn’t learn about those until much later.
NASA chose to have a capsule with a pure oxygen atmosphere and thousands of yards of electrical wiring. The resultant inferno barbequed three astronauts on the launching pad during a live exercise. A year later, people were still wondering if the space program could recover.
Yeah, 1968 sucked. I posit it was worse than 2016, although I admit our outlook now at year’s end is grimmer than it was in 1968.
In December, two brighter signs appeared that year. Unemployment dropped to 3.3% (as is often the case, the country prospers during Democratic administrations, and this unemployment level was reached after a 10% rise in federal taxes and a boost in the minimum wage.)Finally, on the Solstice of that year, Apollo 8 was launched to orbit the moon and take a picture that forever changed how we saw our world. Two months later Standard Oil would paint the beaches of Santa Barbara black, and this would forever change how we cared for our world.
We survived 1968. We may have been a bit more tired, a bit more cynical, a bit worn around the edges, but we survived. Kids born that year learned to dream just as kids had before. The wounds healed.
We don’t have great economic news or Apollo 8, but there are signs of hope. If Trump doesn’t destroy us, he’ll destroy the plutocracy and the system of lies and corruption that put him in office. Yes, it will boil down to us or him.
There was good news in sports. The Cubs finally made the World Series, and won in an incredibly dramatic world series. The Cleveland Indians were equally deserving. Maybe next year, Cleveland. In the meantime, enjoy your NBA championship. Oh, and next time you get in the World Series, have Charlie Sheen throw out the first pitch. You know what music to play.
In the Premier League, Leicester City won for the first time since…oh, never. Founded in 1884, they had made the finals four times over those 131 years, only to be turned away each time. Meanwhile, just to show some symmetry, in the Canadian Football League (Motto: more yards per down needed) we saw a third year team, the Ottawa Rouge et Noir, win the championship, having appeared in it twice in their three years of existence. That’s a bit like seeing the eight year old who absolutely butchered “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” on the triangle in rehearsal get a scholarship to Juilliard because someone else made a typo on their application. For Juilliard, the kid played it in a way that would make Mozart groan in envy.
Lost in the political miasma are the amazing scientific advances and discoveries. If we survive our leadership, people will live longer, healthier, and with an amazing access to all the world’s knowledge—assuming they don’t sewerdip in the slime of fake news instead.
We survived 1968, a year of horrors.
We’ll survive 2016. I believe that.
Don’t lose hope. Never lose hope.
1968 chronology available at:
About 18 months ago, I wrote about Australia’s minimum wage laws, and with Congress poised to reject out of hand a presidential suggestion that the minimum wage should be raised to $9 an hour in the world’s richest country, it’s time to revisit Australia.
I wrote at the time, “Australia passed the Fair Work Act of 2009, which took effect in the form of the National Employment Standards on January 1, 2010. The act covers roughly 2/3rds of Australia’s workers (about 27% of the workforce are deemed “casual workers” defined by a tautology; they are called casual workers because they are paid as casual workers). Some of the provisions are, by American standards, utterly amazing.”
The minimum wage was $569.90 per week, then. Now it’s $606.40, based on a 38 hour work week, or $15.96 an hour. “Casual employees” (part timers) get a minimum of $21.66 an hour, which encourages employers to hire full-time workers and save money.
OK, it’s official. The ZNN news service has just announced that this morning’s meteoroid strike in Chelyabinsk, Russia, has knocked earth off its axis, with the result that the south pole will be constantly facing directly toward the sun. No more sunrises and sunsets.
But it’s a moot point, because it also knocked the earth out of orbit, and it is now receding from the sun. Folks are advised to exhale as much as they can in order to increase the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere so we can stay warm. It’s a little-understood factoid that CO2 actually warms the air. Radioactive chemical reactions or something.
But that’s not important. Earth may be spiraling out of control toward the stars, some of which are a surprisingly long way away, but it’s going to collide with Pluto. That will warm us up. That’s the good news. But it will kill anything left alive after the mutant space radiation sickness.
Oh, did I forget to mention the mutant space radiation sickness? The meteorite had radioactive space germs on it, some sort of space flu but with plutonium, and it’s going to drive us all insane. We will believe in Republican economic policies, with the result that 99% of us will starve before we hit Pluto. That’s the not-so-good news.
Be sure to pass this along to any NRA survivalists you know. They’ll immediately spend the next three months in caves and remote cabins shivering in fear until their food runs out, and be out of our hair for a while. By the time they reappear, naked, shivering, and no longer toilet trained, Chelyabinsk will have fixed up the damages done by the meteoroid (mostly broken windows) and hopefully all the injured will have made full recoveries.
What happened there isn’t really that uncommon. Earth gets hit by objects that size two or three times a century on average. Most hit in uninhabited regions, in the oceans or in the millions of square miles where humans are sparse or nonexistent, such as the polar regions or the Sahara. A bigger explosion, generally believed to be a meteor strike, hit in Siberia in 1908. We know about it because the sound traveled half-way around the world, and because we later discovered several hundred miles of forest that had been flattened by the blast. Nobody was hurt in that one.
Oh, darn. I just gave away the whole plot of my next novel. Oh, well. I did it for science.
This meteor will get far more attention (and panic) than that far bigger one just 105 years ago, because hundreds of video cameras caught it, and because people were hurt—about 1,000 people, mostly by flying broken glass—and because at least one building suffered major structural damage.
The strike did beat some pretty impressive odds anyway. Everyone was watching an asteroid that passed within 17,500 miles of earth this morning, at 1125 PST. By astronomical standards, that’s frighteningly close. Think of it being like having a 50-caliber round nick your earlobe. Disconcerting.
The odds of two such events at once have to be in the range of billions to one. Indeed, my immediate response was the belief that this had to be a preceding outrigger of 2012DA14, the asteroid in question. It’s not too unusual for asteroids to have clusters of other, smaller rocks around them. But Russia was on the wrong side of the planet at the time, and in the wrong hemisphere. Analysis of the meteoroid showed that it came from an entirely different direction. Completely unrelated.
What are the odds of such events in one day? Billions to one.
I felt a chill when I heard that it struck in Chelyabinsk. That was the locale of what at the time was the world’s worst nuclear accident (since exceeded by Chernobyl and Fukushima) at the top-secret Soviet plant at Mayak. It didn’t hit in any of the irradiated areas, and other nuclear plants in the region report no significant problems, so it’s ok to exhale again.
We’ve known for the better part of a century now that the solar system is something of a shooting gallery. We’ve come from disbelieving that stones could fall from the sky to realizing that not only are many features of the Moon and Mars the result of objects striking them, but that quite a few of our own planet’s features are the result of such strikes. Oh, and one big strike sixty-six million years ago is why we don’t have any dinosaurs about. We’ve had the strike in Siberia, and more recently, the spectacular collision between parts of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet and Jupiter which resulted in earth-sized explosions on the giant planet’s face. Something else hit Jupiter just six months ago with the force of a large nuclear weapon. We still don’t know what that was all about.
Most of the debris in space that might hit us lies between us and the sun. We know it’s there, and we track some of the bigger ones that we know about. Chances are for every one we know about, there’s thousands we haven’t spotted yet. Space is big. Even the space scopes—Hubble, Kepler, and this year’s Gaia—can only cover a tiny fraction of one percent of the sky at any given moment, so they aren’t likely to notice an object big enough to do damage, like this morning’s. Or even something bigger. The one that hit this morning was from inside our orbit. They are hard to predict over a long period of time because as they pass near Mercury, Venus, or Earth, that affects their orbits, and they affect one another in small but sometimes significant amounts.
What are the odds of something really big hitting us, say in the next ten years?
Millions to one against.
But the odds of the two events happening on the same day were even more stacked, more improbable. That should make anyone pause to consider.
We need to work on a more comprehensive way of tracking near earth objects. We might not be able to do anything about something really big that comes our way, but we can deflect smaller stuff that is big enough to cause significant damage.
And we need to keep working to get humans off earth and on other planets. As Heinlein said over half a century ago, we can’t keep on just keeping all our eggs in one basket.
Today’s events show that high odds don’t preclude the possibility that we may be the universe’s next omelet.
I nearly skipped watching the State of the Union speech tonight. They are usually perfunctory affairs, filled with partisan bragging and dutiful applause, wherein a bored-looking president recites that the state of the union is good and we really need to solve some problems, and the members of his party applaud while those in the opposing party sit on their hands and look stern. Like far too many elements of the marketing-driven politics of America, it has become something of a kabuki dance, as formal and as scripted as an 8th century Japanese play. Meetings of the old Soviet politburo must have been like this.
Additionally, I’m still disgusted over the assassination memo. Not much in the way of decent human values there. Is Obama nothing more than a mirror reflection of Vladimir Putin or Wen Jiabao? A thug, posturing as a statesman?
Back on February 19. 1942, Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing police to round up and throw American citizens into concentration camps because one or more of their ancestors came from Japan.
Even the most fervent admirers of FDR regard this as a shameful blot on his record, a moment of weakness and cowardice from a man who assured the nation it had nothing to fear but fear itself. It was illegal, it was immoral, and it violated the very heart of the Bill of Rights.
There aren’t many apologists around these days for that action, but the few that remain argue that America was facing the greatest threat of her existence from Japan and Germany, and what’s more, those countries had concentration camps and things far worse than concentration camps. That’s true: Hitler and Japan were huge threats, they were utterly vile, and they represented a standard that America was expected to exceed. For the hundred thousand plus Americans who were locked up indefinitely without trial, their property seized and their lives ruined, “We’re not as bad as Hitler” must have seemed scant comfort. In 1943, in a photo-op that would have made Joseph Goebbels moan in envy (and probably did) Eleanor Roosevelt allowed herself to be photographed at the Gila River concentration camp, where she paid a “surprise” visit, surrounded by clean, well-dressed, beaming concentration camp inmates.
That shameful time brings us to 2011, and a 16-page memo entitled “Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen Who Is a Senior Operational Leader of al-Qaeda or An Associated Force.” Basically, this document lays out an Obama policy that anyone accused by the administration of being a member of or supporting al-Qaeda or any other group that scares the administration can be assassinated.
The government can kill anyone they accuse of being involved with the wrong people. They don’t need proof. They don’t need evidence. Just an accusation by any high administration official will do. The order goes out, and the accused dies. In fact, in Yemen, Obama has taken up killing off children of the accused, just in case. They killed an American in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki, and then they targeted and killed his 16 year old boy, because a teenage orphan four thousand miles away has to be at least as big a threat to America as the Japanese Navy, or the Nazi U-boats.
That the administration had been targeting and killing people based on gossip, who may or may not be members of outfits that don’t like America, has been pretty well known. Some were Americans. But the administration had always denied that any formal decision to do this had ever been made, and that the deaths were more or less incidental to larger, more legal policies.
The paper is a frightening document, at least as terrifying as the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. It simply states that based on the unsupported opinion of any senior member of Obama’s administration, they have the right to murder you without warning, let alone without due process. And they can kill your family, too. There’s no “minimum requirement.” That’s explicitly stated right at the beginning. The administration needs NO threshold to decide that you must die. If they feel like it, you’re dead, your house blown up by a drone. Just like that. Just by writing this, I might meet that fate.
In amazing verbiage, the memo calmly states that it does not violate international or American law, including laws against assassination. It asserts that the administration has a constitutional mandate to protect Americans by murdering some of them. Just enough to set an example, you understand.
It uses “imminence” as a rationale, the same ruling that permits a police officer to use lethal force if a suspect presents an immediate and real threat to bystanders. It’s a well known fact, of course, that police never overstep this directive and exceed their authority. And politicians are even more moral and circumspect than police. Therefore abuse is inconceivable.
You did know that, right?
The document attempts to figleaf itself by iterating that it must be on foreign soil that these assassinations are carried out. It’s hard to understand how some clown with a bazooka can be an imminent threat to the security of the United States when he’s four thousand miles away. “Foreign soil” – wink, wink, nod, nod, a wink’s as good as a nod to a blind drone, eh?
The document goes on to justify itself by citing Supreme Court decisions, Geneva Convention rules, international and national laws, almost as if any of these things did justify this policy. In fact, none of them do. Not even the ones that deal with treatment of foreign soldiers and other adversaries during conditions of declared war.
This document lays bare the utter moral, ethical and legal depravity behind the so-called “war on terror.” It shows the cowardice and fear that informs US efforts to deal with people who don’t like America and might throw rocks. It is shameful, as shameful as the incarcerations in World War II, as shameful as My Lai or Andersonville.
It’s a disgrace to America, and it’s a disgrace to Obama.
Obama must renounce and abjure this document and the policy it represents, and he must do it now.
If he cannot, he doesn’t belong in the White House. He belongs in prison as a war criminal.
