Tag: climate change

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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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Daniel in the Liars’ Den — The assault on science and sanity continues

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

February 17th, 2024

www.zeppscommentaries.online

The Guardian on February 14th had a story by Aliya Uteuova with this lede: “Nearly 15% of Americans don’t believe climate change is real, study finds.” The University of Michigan poll continued, “Denialism highest in central and southern US, with Republican voters less likely to believe in climate science.”

My first thought was that this was actually kind of reassuring. Thirty percent of Americans don’t know the Earth revolves around the sun. Forty percent believe in angels. This poll showed that only one in seven respondents were total idiots who couldn’t see irrefutable evidence even as it was biting them on the ass.

It’s been quite a while since I stopped assuming climate denialists—the remaining ones—were acting in any sort of good faith. The ones remaining are getting more strident, perhaps reflecting the more intense propaganda emanating from the filthy fuels industries and the rightwing thinktanks. Certainly I am encountering more in social media, and seeing peripheral effects from the constant attacks on people acknowledging climate change.

Some are easy to ignore. The moment someone starts babbling about how climate change can’t exist because god swill and puny humans can’t change the divine plan, I just block them. They are at best delusional and at worst total morons, and no amount of logic or persuasion is going to convince them that I’m anything other than hellbound, along with Taylor Swift and Joe Biden.

Some parrot the same talking points we’ve been hearing for the past forty years. Climate change isn’t because of volcanoes, sunspots, Milanković cycles, end of an ice age, orbital perturbations, yada yada yada.

If I’m not busy, I’ll stick around to politely and firmly refute the points made. Even if I’m not feeling particularly charitable, I know this approach is by far the most effective. Usually they just run away. Being polite and earnest stymies trolls and confuses the more strident ones who think they can annoy the opposition into making silly mistakes.

Lately, I’ve seen more blatant lies. For instance one claim I saw was that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere dropped by 20% during the pandemic-related shutdown.

Well, that would be lovely. Having the concentrations drop to 340ppm would ensure a habitable Earth 50 years from now. Unfortunately, it isn’t true. The rate of increase dropped by 20% in 2019, but that meant concentrations only increased from 417ppm to 419ppm.

Another claim was that the Harvard Climatology Department had PROVED that the only reason Earth was warming was because we were coming out of an ice age. Needless to say, nobody at Harvard has made any such claim, and the records indicate that, if anything, we probably would be going into an ice age about now.

However, with greenhouse gases at their current levels, no ice ages are in the offing, no matter what they might do for Ray Romano’s career.

But it’s the residual ripple effects of the propaganda that can be the most pernicious. The public at large has a mistrust of scientists, one carefully fostered by fundamentalists, oil-industry flacks, and the National Association of Zealots and Ideologues, ie, the galaxy of think tanks, radio show hosts, big churches, and Faux news and its clones, and the poison blogosphere.

The other day, just as a reminder that their standard tactics of smearing and lying have become more expensive, climate scientist Michael Mann won a million-dollar defamation suit against conservative bloggers who accused him of falsifying data and once compared him to a convicted child abuser.

A few days ago, I passed along a link to an article that Stanford Magazine did about Dr. Daniel Swain to some friends. It was a good article, and Swain’s expertise would be useful for that group.

But I got one response that caused my jaw to drop. “He’s a media whore,” my friend wrote.

Now, my friend has been a bit tetchy ever since the Dodgers signed Ohtani and Yamamoto. And while the article itself was well done, the magazine cover was, to put it mildly, a bit over the top. It portrayed a colossal Daniel Swain a good half a mile tall, striding through heavily-forested foothills, his head well above the clouds. I could see where someone might detect a slightly fawning note from Stanford, based on that cover. And from that, it could be inferred that it suggested the sort of treatment Swain might be expecting from the press.

Except I’ve been a regular on his blog, weatherwest.com, for most of a decade. I was familiar with his style and approach from before he became famous. (The way he became famous was unlikely in the extreme. In trying to describe a persistent blocking high in the Gulf of Alaska that was causing a massive drought in California, he coined the phrase “Ridiculously Resilient Ridge.” It caught the popular imagination. Now, only Swain knows if he ever actually sought fame, but I seriously doubt he sat up in bed one restless night and shouted, “I know! I’ll coin an awkwardly alliterative analogy! Eureka!”)

Swain does appreciate the opportunity to convey his expertise to the world. He puts in long hours doing just that—not just interviews, but in serious scholastic research and considerable effort in keeping his relatively small audience on his blog well informed, and encourages others of similar expertise to contribute freely.

I know a couple of people who are well known and who are media whores. They constantly self-promote, resent anything resembling competition, and pretend they have the answers. They’re depressingly easy to spot. I find them annoying.

But Swain is not one of them.

Indeed, the same day I had that email exchange, he did one of his “office hours” on YouTube. Anyone watching those quickly realizes that this is not a man basking in the effusive glow of public acclaim. As he often does, he was fielding questions from the chat thread, and he got one about Rossby waves. Those are defined as a “large horizontal atmospheric undulation that is associated with the polar-front jet stream and separates cold polar air from warm tropical air.” per Brittanica. There’s a hypothesis that decreasing ice cover in the Arctic Ocean and subsequent warming has caused the waves to increase in amplitude and decrease in frequency, allowing polar air to sweep into the middle latitudes. It caught the media’s fancy, since it was a handy explanation of big cold snaps in the midst of a warming climate. I admit I’ve based arguments on that myself.

Swain said that while he generally accepted the thinking behind the hypothesis, there just wasn’t any solid evidence that it was happening at this time. It was a very ‘Daniel’ sort of answer. If there isn’t a solid, concrete answer, he won’t hesitate to say so, and go on to discuss the elements that prevent a hard-and-fast answer. It’s exactly the sort of response a responsible scientist would give.

Certainty in the face of randomness and complexity is the mark of a charlatan.

But it’s not an answer a media whore—or any whore—should give. Don’t tell the marks what they need to know; tell them what they want to hear! It’s rule number one. If I was Swain’s unscrupulous agent, I would draw him aside and say, “Son, you’re doing it all wrong. I say, I say, son, you don’t get the return business if you’re saying things to the John like ‘You call that loving, mister? You sound like a Yugo with a flat tire!’ or ‘Oh, come on. That thing looks like the ghost of a poison mushroom. Can’t you at least paint it orange like the original?’ Nah, you gotta make them happy. Make ‘em feel big, y’know? Now, let’s hear your ecstatic moan.”

OK, he wouldn’t benefit from having me as an agent. Or as he might put it, I would be a “piss poor pimp.”

So why does a guy who normally is responsible, reasonably liberal, and scientifically literate declare a scientist who is the antithesis of a publicity hound a “media whore?”

Inculcation. Propaganda. The public at large is inclined to assume the worst of any responsible figure who challenges the present public gestalt.

That current gestalt is very toxic indeed. It’s pervasive, and manages to be both blatant and subtle at the same time. People honestly believe George Soros is giving scientists billions of dollars to push us all back to the stone age by destroying technology. And people don’t realize the people promoting such ideas are spending billions in order to protect trillions in profits made at our expense. It has to stop.

There’s no quick cure to it. It will take time. The parties dumping the poison into public discourse have to be called out, again and again, their lies shown for what they are, and the vacuity of their attacks exposed.

George Orwell once said, “In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” He also said, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.” It is not the freedom to say two plus two make five.

Be a revolutionary. Tell the truth, no matter how much people don’t want to hear it. Be like Dr. Daniel Swain.

In America, the number of people accepting the truth of climate change has climbed to 85%. Keep telling the truth, and truth will prevail.

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Happy Slappy gets Sloppy — Thomas is the face of the GOP’s moral bankruptcy

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

April 16th 2023

www.zeppscommentaries.online

There was plenty of ‘silly season’ news this week. For instance, we had videos of enraged rednecks standing in their backyards and shooting cases of beer with AR-15s after Budweiser had an online video featuring transgender advocate Dylan Mulvaney. No, they weren’t promoting drag queens or litter boxes in school bathrooms. It was to promote the NCAA basketball tournament. But the National Association of Zealots and Ideologues have devoted many, many “minutes of hate” against transgenders, so their brownshirt followers promptly lost what little in the way of minds they had and started shooting beers, and not in a good way.

Normally the GOP views such antics with a self-satisfied smirk. But then one of them noticed that the maker of Bud Lite, Anheuser-Busch, was a major GOP contributor, and the morons were violating the prime directive of the GOP, which is “You don’t piss on the money.” Suddenly they realized how idiotic the whole thing was. It was so idiotic that descendant of stable geniuses, Donald Trump the Lesser, suddenly noticed it was idiotic. This resulted in another civil battle between the two branches of the GOP: those who felt hate should be pure, and those that feel love of money should be pure.

Maggie Armpits weighed in on climate change. Rather than trying to describe it, let me just quote her: “If you believe that today’s ‘climate change’ is caused by too much carbon, you have been fooled,” she wrote. “We live on a spinning planet that rotates around a much bigger sun along with other planets and heavenly bodies rotating around the sun that all create gravitational pull on one another while our galaxy rotates and travels through the universe. Considering all of that, yes our climate will change, and it’s totally normal!”

OK then. That sorts that. Maggie should ask for letters of apology from Michael Mann, Al Gore, and Daniel Swain for all that fear mongering. It was all just gravitational pull.

When last seen, Maggie was complaining about ‘marijuana zombies’ in New York City. Apparently it’s quite a problem. Perhaps one of them bit her. That would explain a few things.

On a more serious note, the widening corruption of Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence “Slappy” Thomas continued to spread like a sinkhole in a septic tank. Today’s revelation (and they are coming on a daily basis now) is that he reported up to $750,000 in income from an outfit called “Ginger, Ltd., Partnership” that was owned by himself and his toxic wife, Ginni. The operative word there is “was.” Ginger, Ltd., Partnership was dissolved in 2006, so Thomas was reporting income from a company that doesn’t exist.

Well, it sorta doesn’t exist. It was replaced by another company, Ginger Holdings, LLC. But Slappy and Ginni don’t run it. It’s run by one Joanne Elliot, who is Ginni’s sister. But even though they have no formal association with this company, they’re still receiving considerable amounts of money from it for who-knows-what.

And what does Ginger Holdings, LLC do? Well, that’s one of life’s little mysteries then, isn’t it? Whatever it is, it pays well. I need to get me one of those Ginger Holdings LLC for myself. Then I can feed the cats the fancy cat food instead of the usual slop. As far as I can tell, you don’t have to do jack shit, just watch the money roll in. My kind of job!

In any other developed nation, a judge with the kind of malfeasance Slappy is displaying would have been in prison by now. In less developed countries, the mob might have got him.

But Slappy is vital for keeping the fascist contingent in control of the court. He’s one of six conservative justices, but one of them, Roberts, has shown that he puts law before ideology sometimes, and that makes him totally unfit for purpose. So if Slappy is impeached, that leaves the Court at the mercy of Joe Biden and a Democratic Senate, which means they might nominate an actual jurist with an interest in the law, rather than what the Federalist Society and the National Association of Zealots and Ideologues want. And worse, that uppity public might not vote Republican in ‘24, meaning it could be six years before they get to continue eviscerating the Courts.

So the GOP aren’t going to impeach Thomas, and he sure isn’t going to retire. He thinks it’s his god-given duty to screw over the public in the name of owning the libs.

Well, you can’t really expect a healthy emotional outlook on life and society from a man who willingly turned himself into a lawn jockey, can you?

We may get a better look at the one group that could force Slappy off the bench, the rest of the Court, this coming week. They will be ruling on whether to maintain the stay on mifepristone that that religious nut Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of the Northern District of Texas imposed on the country. I expect Roberts to side with the three liberal justices, since the ruling is so blatantly and egregiously unconstitutional. I think there’s a decent chance Brett Kavanaugh might also jump the leads. He’s basically the swing vote on this. Gorsuch could go either way. Amy Coney Barrett is another religious nut and feels a divine need to impose her psychosis on the rest of us. Alito, of course, is the author of Cobb and depends on 16th century witchfinders for his legal lodestar.

Normally it would be a slam-dunk for the religious loons. But I think that Kavanaugh and Gorsuch might bolt simply to cut Slappy loose. He’ll probably head up the ban-the-pill contingent, and the size of that contingent will speak volumes about Slappy’s clout within the Court.

As Rachel Maddow says, “watch this space.”

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Three Crises — Any one of which can kill you

Three Crises

Any one of which can kill you

April 16th, 2022

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

There are three situations that are edging closer and closer to flash points that could create immense damage and in one instance, kill a sizable percentage of the human race.

The first is Putin and the Ukraine. The invasion and war has not gone well for Russia. Ukraine not only failed to fall in days to a Russian blitzkrieg, but the blitzkrieg itself flopped, something that was self evident the moment we saw that forty-file long convoy of tanks and other mechanized units along that two-lane highway. Poland and France didn’t fall because the Germans approached in single file. And at that, the Russians got off lightly; Ukraine could have turned it into a “highway of death.” As it stands, reports are that Russia has lost a full 10% of their overall military might in the seven weeks that they have tried to smash Ukraine.

Adding to Putin’s woes is the sinking of the Moskva, the flagship of the Russian navy. While the military impact is negligible (the Russian flotilla in the Black Sea was there to look intimidating, since there was little in the way of practical military applications to be brought to bear. Turns out you can’t sink a country) the morale damage was massive.

Additionally, and of far greater impact strategically and tactically, Putin’s declared aim of pushing back on perceived encroachment by NATO on Russian borders has backfired massively. Finland, historically a thorn in the side of the Russian bear, is expected to petition for membership in the pact in the next couple of weeks, and Sweden is likely to be not far behind. Putin has made it clear that nearby nations not servile to Russia that aren’t in NATO are targets.

So speculation that Putin may resort to nukes both as part of his campaign of terror against Ukraine and his efforts to intimidate the west is growing. There’s no doubt in my mind that Putin has the requisite viciousness. Is he that insane, though?

The west, including the US, must make it clear that nuclear strikes against Ukraine or anywhere else is a line that cannot be crossed without dire and immediate consequences. We’ve managed to avoid a nuclear holocaust partially through dumb luck (we’ve had some really scary close calls, and those are just the ones we know about) and partially through the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction. Any country that launches nukes dies. Much, and perhaps all of the world dies with it. Putin must be reminded of this, and be aware that a first strike will result in global nuclear war on the grounds that all is lost anyway. The last thing the world needs or can tolerate is a dictator that gets away with a nuclear strike. Perhaps, once again, we can step back from the abyss. Putin must know that we aren’t bluffing because we can’t afford to bluff.

The second is the behavior of the fascist right in America. Have you ever heard the term, “blood libel?” It’s a hateful story that first grew in medieval Britain and has spread throughout much of the world over the centuries. The most common variant is that Jews capture and kill a young Christian boy at Easter in order to put his blood in matzo balls. Supposedly, if Jews do this each year, in a different land, they will get the Holy Land back. If you’re thinking about 1947 and the State of Israel and how that might have diffused the libel then you don’t know conspiracy theorists very well. They still believe Jews drink the blood of virgin Christian boys. Who needs a reason when you’ve got a hobby?

The thing about conspiracy theorists is that they are gullible and easy to manipulate. To them, the world is a dark and dangerous place, filled with looming, sneering villains who stop at nothing to augment their power. Giving them “secret knowledge” of such horrors both allays and augments their fear and credulity.

All you need to do is invent an unspeakable act by a minority or adversarial group and then promote the hell out of it.

Claims that the Clintons and various other liberals run child sex rings have been making the rounds since about 2015, which was about when Trump and Putin decided America needed Trump. Supposedly, the sex ring was run in the basement of a pizza parlor. Never mind that the pizza place in question didn’t have a basement—weren’t you paying attention when I asked if you knew what conspiracy theorists were like? One guy even went in there with a semi-automatic and shot up the place.

Republicans have been deliberately electing—there’s no other phrase for it—the most vicious and stupid trash they can find to public office. People too stupid and too gullible to know they are being played, or the worse variant, the ones who know the truth and are part of the plan. That’s why the Jackson nominating process was smeared with political porn about how she was “soft on child pornographers” and why some of the louder specimens of the trash-American GOP have been calling teachers and supporters of Ukraine “child abusers.” Blood libels are great for the libelers, since they can pretend to a position of “protecting the children” while simply sinking to about the same level as a child molester.

The third flash point rapidly approaching is the climate. The physical climate. True to the models, as it gets warmer on average, it is also becoming wilder and more unpredictable. Antarctica saw temperatures last month that went a full SEVENTY DEGREES above normal. Yes, that’s Fahrenheit, but still… This time of year the normal day time high in New York City is 63 degrees. In order to replicate what happened in Antarctica, it would have to reach 133. In Mid April. Let’s not even think about July or August.

We all remember the heat dome that hit the Pacific Northwest last summer, sending temperatures as high as 118 in British Columbia. That was only 40 degrees above normal.

In addition to all the myriad problems we’re expecting in the near future, heat domes seem to be a New Thing, and a potentially hideous one. Few cities in the world are prepared for temperatures in summer that are 40 degrees above the local norm. The death toll could be in the millions. Kim Stanley Robinson, in his recent novel “Ministry of the Future” had a three week heat wave strike India that was only 15 degrees above normal, and resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. Suddenly we have to consider possibilities like 145 in Los Angeles, 120 in London, 145 in Sydney. We aren’t prepared for it because we can’t prepare for it.

In the meantime, the oil plutocrats—many are the same people who underwrite the blood libel crowd and are profiteering off the Ukraine war—are doubling down on fighting any effort to reduce fossil fuel consumption. And yes, that includes the oil companies that run those expensive ads about how green and responsible they are. They’re corporations; they exist to lie to us for profit. They are what prop up the disgraceful anti-American whores in congress, and they have think tanks devoted to the nomenclature used by conspiracy theorists and Putin about how “woke” child molesters spread “fake news” and the press cannot be trusted.

They are authoritarians, and they are herding us towards the edge of some very large cliffs, thinking they can control the situations and profit from them at the same time.

But it’s all coming to a head, and no, they won’t be able to control it when it does.

Unfortunately, nobody will be able to.

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Cold Comfort — Texas Shivers; Ayn Rand Quivers

Cold Comfort

Texas Shivers; Ayn Rand Quivers

February 20th, 2021

It’s been a truism in American politics ever since the anti-government absurdities of the John Birch Society in the 1950’s: if you elect people who want government to fail to office, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s a heavily underwritten idiocy that spread from the Kochs to the JBS, and then to the Libertarian party and from there to the right wing noise machine, where millions of man hours and billions of dollars were spent creating amiable puppet monsters like Reagan, and persuading Americans that if they only threw government off their backs, the aristocrats and churches would take good care of them.

It took over the Republican party entire in the 1990s, and Republican approach to governance ever since has been a blend of disdain for societal needs and general incompetence. Republican governors routinely blew up the budget. Vast sums of money were transferred from the public weal to big multinationals and the super rich. Infrastructure languished. Workers lost power and options, and wages stagnated, and then dropped. Consumers started hearing it was none of their damn business what was in their food and water. As part of a devil’s pact with fundamentalist churches, religion was permitted to intrude more and more deeply into our personal lives. Health care and education were weakened, and turned into lucrative scams.

Jefferson, Madison, et al set government up to serve the people and forestall the depredations of corporations, aristocrats, and the churches. They used to teach that in school before the current fable that individuals could stare down trillion-dollar companies and the Church.

GOP governance saw a steady procession of massive screwups from the war on drugs to 9/11 to the war on terror. Katrina. The 2008 financial melt down. And most recently, COVID.

It’s no wonder the GOP finally coughed up the morally bankrupt and criminally corrupt Donald Trump as their avatar.

Texas, of course, has its own particular ethos that lends itself readily to libertarian propaganda. Individualist, go-it-alone, free brave and independent. A cross between John Wayne and the Marlboro Man. Government help, sissy stuff like medical care, roads, schools and infrastructures were for weinies and darkies. Bubba don’t need no government telling him he’s gotta buckle up and wear a mask. Fuck the Feds! Anything government is socialist.

Which brings me to another truism. Socialism sees to the needs of society, and capitalism sees to the needs of capitalists. Having a lawnmowing business makes you a business owner, but you’re no more a capitalist than owning a computer makes you Bill Gates. (And in something symbolic of how the game is rigged for capitalists, read your various EULAs for your software—despite paying for it, you don’t own any of that shit). The only reason Americans put up with the crap and don’t stage the French Revolution redux is they all believe they can become capitalists. They’re all just temporarily embarrassed millionaires, as the joke goes.

We had plenty of warning before last week’s cold snap paralyzed the entire state of Texas and caused minor inconvenience everywhere else.

Texas broke from the federal power grid specifically to avoid federal regulation. Ken Lay and ERCOT would see to all their needs. Billionaires are selfless heroes, here only to serve the people, you know.

Republicans aren’t just incompetent in times of crisis; they philosophically cannot make a response to a crisis because that would make government look effective.

They started dealing with the crisis by lying. It was the fault of windmills freezing (some did, but the agency overseeing this fiasco admitted that generation from wind power was actually UP during the blackout crisis). Tucker Carlson, the poor man’s William F. Buckley, said “So it was all working great until the day it got cold outside. The windmills failed like the silly fashion accessories they are, and people in Texas died,” Some other lies were ludicrous on the face of it. Blaming Biden for canceling Keystone XL or rejoining the Paris accord were flat-out ridiculous accusations. Rick Perry, who outside of the GOP would be the dumbest man in the room, declared proudly that Texans would rather endure blackouts rather than suffer under federal regulation. (I’ll bet Perry’s lights were on). Donald Trump Jr., who somehow manages to be even more stupid than his father, blamed the crisis on Texas’ “Democrat governor.” That would be Greg Abbott, who is…wait for it…a Republican. Texas has been Republican since the days of Ann Richards, and somehow, inexplicably, in decline over those 30 years.

Ted Cruz fled to Cancun, leaving his little doggie alone in his freezing house and when caught out, blamed his young daughters for the trip, lying about when the trip was planned and his expectations of an early return. (Newsmax sprung to Cruz’s defense, noting that Joe Biden’s German Shepherd was looking kinda raggedy-ass, which isn’t too unusual for that breed in February in a cold climate.)

While Cruz was indelibly disgracing himself and his office, Beto O’Rourke organized volunteers to make more than 784,000 wellness calls to senior citizens around Texas. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC to the dimwitted dittoheads) used her office pulpit to raise more than two million dollars for Texas. Biden and FEMA sent 60 massive power generators and over 200,000 meals, along with a million gallons of fresh water and 30,000 blankets. Unfortunately, most are still sitting at airports around the state because state and local authorities can’t figure out how to move them to people that need them. Fortunately for Texas, Biden is sending in federal guard to take over distribution. Someone’s gotta go it, and it sure isn’t the government haters that infest Texas government.

The cold snap should have been nothing more than an inconvenience. It stretched from northern Mexico to Newfoundland, and except for Texas, that’s all it was—an inconvenience. But not Texas. Because freedumb.

This should be a massive wakeup call to Texas and the country, and hopefully, people will remember in 2022 that billionaires won’t save them from their own stupidity.

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Gaetz and Poses – A government of gangsters

February 26th, 2019

As things continue to crumble for the GOP, and the lunacy and flat-out gangsterism that pervades the party has come into full view.

By way of example, Matt Gaetz, the thug representing Florida’s 1st District, tweeted Michael Cohen on the eve of his public testimony before the Committee Gaetz slithered on to Twitter, and wrote, “Matt Gaetz (@mattgaetz) Hey @MichaelCohen212 – Do your wife & father-in-law know about your girlfriends? Maybe tonight would be a good time for that chat. I wonder if she’ll remain faithful when you’re in prison. She’s about to learn a lot…”

In normal times, Congress would be deliberating whether to censure or expel Gaetz for such an illegal act. He’s trying to call it “witness testing,” but it is a clear case of witness tampering: “Talk, and your wifey learns all about that little piece of fluff you have on the side.”

The technical term for that is blackmail. It’s a crime. In fact, it’s a felony. When you use it to intimidate a witness, it’s an even bigger crime, and a major felony.

If Gaetz had enough brains to send that tweet from the floor of Congress, then he is exempt from the law, and only Congress can discipline or expel him. Whether Congress will is another matter: nearly all the Republicans are cowardly and criminal whores, and too many of the Democrats seem afraid of upsetting such vermin. Witness today’s vote in the House, in which only 17 Republicans mustered up the courage and patriotism to put country ahead of Trump.

But if Gaetz was stupid, and sent it from a restaurant or his apartment or whatever…well. Someone call the DA of the district he was in. Open-and-shut case, against a prestige dirtbag. All the DA has to do is show Gaetz sent it, and wasn’t on the floor of the House when he did so. DA s launch political careers convicting morons like Gaetz.

And yes, he’s a moron. Just take a look at his web page:

“Congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida is one of the finest and most talented people in Congress. Strong on Crime, the Border, Illegal Immigration, the 2nd Amendment, our great Military & Vets, Matt worked tirelessly on helping to get our Massive Tax Cuts.” [bold text his]

OK, he may be one of the finest and most talented Republicans, but talk about a low bar. I guess he doesn’t know that those “massive tax cuts” don’t apply to the 99% of Americans that he doesn’t give a shit about. They got screwed on the deal. Most of the Republicans realize how close they are to getting lynched over that ‘tax cut’ and keep their mouths carefully shut in the hopes that an armed mob won’t give them credit for it.

As if that wasn’t enough, Trump announced what he calls the “Presidential Committee on Climate Security” This committee will exist to prove that there ain’t no sech thing as global warming. More to the point, the committee will stand for the civil rights of CO2 molecules everywhere.

The council will be headed by National Security Council senior director William Happer, and if you think that being on Trump’s NSC is a prestige position, reflect that against strong objections from members of his own transition team and the Obama administration, Trump named disgraced general and probable traitor Michael Flynn to the group, and, for a few days, the clownish buffoon Steve Bannon. National security isn’t exactly Trump’s top priority, and it shows.

But Happer himself is a real piece of work. He’s putatively a physicist, although at the age of 79, his days of physicking are pretty much in the past. Most of his “scientific expertise” is spoon-fed to him by such entities as the Heritage Foundation, or gleaned from websites such as wattsupwiththat. This enables him to say, with a straight face, things like “We’re doing our best to try and counter this myth that CO2 is a dangerous pollutant. It’s not a pollutant at all. . . . We should be telling the scientific truth, that more CO2 is actually a benefit to the earth.” As you might have guessed, he said this at a gathering of the Heritage Foundation. If he had said something like that in front of any actual scientists who weren’t just clowns in lab coats stooging for the fossil fuels industry, he would have been laughed out of there.

CO2 is vital to survival, of course. Plants need it, and we actually have a direct need in that CO2 build-up in the body triggers the instinct to inhale. But too much CO2 is pollution. At above about 445ppm, most plants can’t process any more, and the “greening planet” theory has been shown to be false.

Put it this way: we need oxygen, Without it we can only survive about four minutes. Earth’s atmosphere is about 21% oxygen. If we emitted enough oxygen that that ratio climbed to 30%, we would die. If the wildfires didn’t get us, the corrosive effects of so much oxygen on our lungs and trachea would. Any substance, beneficial or not, is a pollutant if there is too much of it, and too much CO2 is drastically altering our climate. Even Happer can’t come up with a factor that would cause warming when the excess CO2 so neatly fits the bill.

But he previously came up with something that even the Heritage Foundation—which once compared climate scientists to the Unabomber—to possibly reject as too vicious and dishonest. Well, maybe they would.

Happer said this:  “demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler,” and added that “carbon dioxide is actually a benefit to the world, and so were the Jews.”

Now, don’t get me wrong: carbon and oxygen are two of my favorite elements, and many members of my own family consist of carbon and oxygen. And if a randy carbon atom wants to get it on with a couple of consensual oxygen atoms, well, where’s the harm. (I do have a problem with a monogamous relationship between one oxygen atom and one carbon atom for reasons to involved to go into here). I like CO2 in my soda, and I even exhale CO2 on occasion. I’m not a CO2 hater.

But I think it’s a bit of a stretch to claim that climate scientists have committed genocide against CO2. For one thing, CO2’s population is half again what it was in 1970.

And Jews, as a rule, tend to be life forms. Thank you for not asking about Joe Lieberman. CO2 isn’t a life form and can’t be murdered. I don’t happen to know what Happer’s opinion on Jews might be, but I think he’ll have to admit that a Jew and a CO2 molecule are not the same thing, even if the atoms that comprise both a) include oxygen and carbon and b) are immortal.

Now I’m used to fossil fuel stooges saying ludicrous things. They are paid to lie in the face of overwhelming evidence, and as a result often look and sound extremely stupid and ignorant. But I think Happer set a new standard of sorts, comparing warnings of climate change to the Holocaust.

So what becomes of a whorish moron like Happer in this age of Trump? He’s head of the Presidential Committee on Climate Security.

Perhaps he can persuade Trump to build a wall along the Gulf coast, around Florida, and up to Maine in order to keep huricanes out.

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IPCC – The Scientific World Wants 1.5C: Trump wants 4.0C

October 9th, 2018

Perhaps the most surprising thing is how hopeful report is, with the incredibly wordy title of GLOBAL WARMING OF 1.5 °C: an IPCC special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty. http://report.ipcc.ch/sr15/pdf/sr15_spm_final.pdf.

It all sounds, at worst, survivable. Some samples from the summary are to be found as follows:

B2.1.Model-based projections of global mean sea level rise (relative to 1986-2005) suggest an indicative range of 0.26 to 0.77 m by 2100 for 1.5°C global warming, 0.1 m (0.04-0.16 m) less than for a global warming of 2°C (medium confidence). A reduction of 0.1 m in global sea level rise implies that up to 10 million fewer people would be exposed to related risks, based on population in the year 2010 and assuming no adaptation (medium confidence).

B2.2.Sea level rise will continue beyond 2100 even if global warming is limited to 1.5°C in the 21st century (highconfidence). Marine ice sheet instability in Antarctica and/or irreversible loss of the Greenland ice sheet could result in multi-metre rise in sea level over hundreds to thousands of years. These instabilities could be triggered around 1.5°C to 2°C of global warming

B3.3.High-latitude tundra and boreal forests are particularly at risk of climate change-induced degradation and loss, with woody shrubs already encroaching into the tundra (high confidence) and will proceed with further warming. Limiting global warming to 1.5°C rather than 2°C is projected to prevent the thawing over centuries of a permafrost area in the range of1.5 to 2.5 million km2

B4.1. There is high confidence that the probability of a sea-ice-free Arctic Ocean during summer is substantially lower at global warming of 1.5°C when compared to 2°C. With 1.5°C of global warming, one sea ice-free Arctic summer is projected per century. This likelihood is increased to at least one per decade with 2°C global warming.

The list goes on, and it doesn’t discuss some of the direst scenarios for a world in which the temperatures average 1.5C above levels observed between 1850 and 1900. But I’m going to.

Dr Goodwin and Professor Williams advise that cumulative carbon emissions needed to remain below 195-205 PgC (from the start of 2017) to deliver a likely chance of meeting the 1.5°C warming target while a 2°C warming target requires emissions to remain below 395-455 PgC.

(Philip Goodwin, Anna Katavouta, Vassil M. Roussenov, Gavin L. Foster, Eelco J. Rohling, Richard G. Williams. Pathways to 1.5°C and 2°C warming based on observational and geological constraints. Nature Geoscience, 2018; DOI: 10.1038/s41561-017-0054-8)

Present emissions are around 550 PgC (pettagrams Carbon). We would have to cut those emissions by 20% starting last year to limit warming to 2C, and 60% starting last year to meet a goal of 1.5C.

Not. Going. To. Happen.

We’re already at .87C above preindustrial levels, and of course it varies, sometimes by quite a bit, and in fact in 2015, during a big El Niño event, we already blew past the 1.5C market, hitting 1.58C.

As the chart shows, the most optimistic scenario has us hitting 1.75C before tailing off slowly to 1.5C by the end of the century. If we maintain present emission levels, the chart says we’ll hit 2.0C and just stay there.

The good news is we’re on course to flatten CO2 annual emissions. No matter what the destructive and purblind Trump administration thinks. In fact, they’ve decided we’re already being raped, so we might as well just accept it, with a report the day before the IPCC Special Report stating that a 4C rise was inevitable. The right wing Chicago Tribune reported, “The draft statement, issued by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), was written to justify President Donald Trump’s decision to freeze federal fuel efficiency standards for cars and light trucks built after 2020.”

The horrific thing is that Trump could make this happen, in the name of Disaster Capitalism. Your tragedy is their profit.

Four degrees would be utterly catastrophic. At best, millions would die, and since the huge human and economic dislocations would almost certainly trigger global war, the death toll could easily be in the billions.

The IPCC doesn’t discuss knock-on effects of warmer temperatures. In the case of 1.5C, those effects may be somewhat limited, both in terms of ice and permafrost loss and habitat change (perhaps 15% of existing habitat would be subject to major change). At 2.0C they would be much more pronounced, with ice loss driving Arctic temperatures, already 4C above normal, to about 8C above normal. Ice-free summers would become common (IPCC says one per decade, somewhat optimistically.) Melting tundra and muskeg permafrost would release many gigatonnes of CO2, ocean temperatures would change enough to interfere and even stop some of the main current flows, and habitation and bioregional changes would be dramatic and widespread. Tens of millions of people would have to relocate, sparking already inflamed political tensions.

Greenland and Antarctica, already showing melt rates far beyond what anyone expected, would lose their icecaps altogether, in Greenland’s case before the end of the century.

We’re already well behind what is needed to prevent 2.0C, let along 1.5C. Things aren’t as bad as the Trump administration, which in a burst of unequaled cynicism have decided it’s more profitable to just give up now, says, but Trump and his type want it, because authoritarians prefer suppressed populations that are desperate, frightened, and utterly dependent on the authoritarians to save them.

Another thing that’s Not. Going. To. Happen.

If we want to save ourselves, we have to save ourselves. Vote for candidates strong on climate change, and reject the tawdry self-serving cynicism of Trump and his corporate masters. He isn’t going to save you. In fact, he thinks you’re more useful if you’re struggling to survive and begging him for help. And that’s Not. Going. To, Happen, either.

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SOTU 2013 – Obama brings it

SOTU 2013

Obama brings it

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson

February 12, 2013

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?

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Odds and Gods

Odds and Gods

Momma Nature is gonna spank little baby

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson

December 8, 2012

The Climate Change conference is taking place right now in Qatar, a ludicrous choice since Qatar has the highest per capita emissions of CO2 in the world.

Adding to the general air of clownishness that surrounds this meeting is the fact that Senator Inhofe and Lord Monckton showed up—two of the biggest fools the denier community has. Inhofe wanted the world to know it wasn’t hot and dry in Oklahoma, and Monckton tried to claim he was the representative from Burma and actually managed to address the meeting before the ruse was discovered and he was kicked out of the country.

In the meantime, some of the details of the IPCC’s next comprehensive report leaked out. It’s a pretty terrifying report. Climate Change will reach catastrophic levels by 2050, 37 years away. That’s pretty bad. But the IPCC does not address the billions of tons of methane that will be released as the permafrost in Siberia and Canada melt. This is not a projected problem—it’s been going on for twenty years now, and is one of the main reasons why the rate of climate change keeps exceeding scientific predictions.

Continue reading “Odds and Gods”

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The Silver Lining

The Silver Lining

Did Frankenstorm take America off a Path to Catastrophe?

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 31st, 2012

First, I am truly sorry for the death and destruction that the Frankenstorm visited upon people in the Northeast. For the vast majority, the storm means a few days without power, and perhaps talks with insurance adjusters over payments for storm damage. For those who lost loved ones or their homes, my deepest regrets.

Coming as it did, a week before a presidential election, it’s impossible not to look at the political calculus of the storm. If the election were as truly close as some of the polls suggested, then the fallout from the storm seems to be strongly favoring Obama.

It isn’t just that it happened while he was President, and the country always gives support to the President in times of national challenge. Merely pointing that political fact out is significantly less cynical than the Republicans, who, days after 9/11, started trying to parlay that massive catastrophe into a tax cut for the rich. Give billionaires tax cuts or the terrorists win. It was pretty disgraceful.

In this instance, there were several other factors that exacerbated the boost that Obama got at the expense of Romney.

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