Ugly Gerry font of voting districts

SUBHEAD: A computer font made out of the shapes of gerrymandered voting districts.

By Rusty Blazenhoff on 2 August 20129 for Boing Boing -
(https://boingboing.net/2019/08/02/gerry-is-an-ugly-font-made-fro.html)


Image above: A message to Republicans on gerrymandering by someone using the UglyGerry type font. Of course Democrats have played their pert in this as well. From (https://pbs.twimg.com/card_img/1157070040816128006/gEPX-685?format=jpg&name=600x314).

Ooh, this is awesome. Activists have made a free font called Gerry that is made from the shapes of gerrymandered congressional districts. They encourage you to use it to write your representative.

The font’s creators, Ben Doessel and James Lee, made it to raise awareness and provide a method for disenfranchised voters to protest partisan gerrymandering. The duo, in a press release provided to the media, stated:

"After seeing how janky our Illinois 4th district had become, we became interested in this issue. We noticed our district’s vague, but shaky U-shape, then after seeing other letters on the map, the idea hit us, let’s create a typeface so our districts can become digital graffiti that voters and politicians can’t ignore."

For those unfamiliar with gerrymandering, it’s the process by which US voting districts use increasingly nonsensical borders to disenfranchise voters and limit who they can vote for by party lines instead of geography.

Congressional districts have a reputation for being downright ridiculous.

"North Carolina's 12th district resembled a severely broken snake until it was revamped in 2017. Pretty much all of Maryland's districts defy comparison to anything but abstract art. And then there are a few dozen districts that look like letters in the alphabet — so much so that an anonymous gerrymandering fighter turned them into a font.

A few of the letters in the Ugly Gerry typeface are a combination of side-by-side districts, while New York's 8th District is turned on its head to be both the "M" and "W" in the alphabet. But most of the districts don't even require much squinting to resemble letters, which are all downloadable in one file on UglyGerry.com."
From (https://theweek.com/speedreads/856423/someone-made-font-gerrymandered-congressional-districts)

Image above: The alphabet made of gerrymandered US voting districts. From (https://www.uglygerry.com/) (https://twitter.com/UglyGerry). Click to enlarge.





.https://www.uglygerry.com/

Destruction of our postal service

SUBHEAD: The Trump Administration, Republicans and corporations are already taking it apart.

By Jim Hightower on 2 January 2019 for nTruthDig  -
(https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-wholesale-destruction-of-our-postal-service-is-already-underway/)


Image above: USPS mail truck on delivery. From original article.

Last spring, President Trump created an inter-agency federal task force to propose structural reforms in the U.S. Postal Service.

In only two months, the task force (comprised entirely of top Trump officials) zapped out a down-and-dirty report with this key recommendation: 

“Prepare [USPS] for future conversion from a government agency into a privately-held corporation.”

Privatization! Are they not aware that our public postal agency is enormously popular and important to… well, to the public?

A February Pew Research poll finds that an astonishing 88 percent of Americans give the Postal Service a thumbs up.

Even the president’s executive order setting up the task force conceded that the post office “is regularly cited as the Federal agency with the highest public approval rating.”

The 640,000 middle-class postal workers and letter carriers merit such kudos because they literally deliver for us.

Working from 31,585 local offices, they trundle 150 billion pieces of mail a year, 4 million miles a day, to 157 million addresses across the land — from inner-city neighborhoods to back roads — delivering all with remarkable speed.

USPS does this without taking a dime in taxpayer funds, financing its operations entirely from its sales and services to customers. This is a genuine public good linking all of America’s people together.

For decades, though, anti-government propagandists have pushed the narrative that government is inherently incompetent, wasteful, and a social evil that must to be eliminated.

But the problem for these ideologues is that USPS is not only a government agency that works, but millions of folks see it working for them daily.

Therefore, to maintain the negative political narrative about public entities, the far-right corporatists are desperate to kill our public post offices.

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Capitalism and ecological collapse

SUBHEAD: Our consumer economy will be the "Final Solution" for organic life on Earth.

By Ed Simon on 9 October 2018 for History News Netrwork -
(https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/170192)


Image above: Chiseled upside down into the stone embankment of the Elbe River four centuries ago, at a time of historic drought, are the words "If you see me, weep!" From (https://twitter.com/lfulg/status/1022831523920310279).

Four centuries ago, somebody starving in the drought afflicted Elbe region in what is today the Czech Republic, anonymously chiseled onto the stone of the receding river bank a warning.

Here, along the river where one day American and Soviet troops would meet on their duel approach to Berlin, a graffito made by unknown hand marks 1616 as the oldest year recorded on one particular “Hunger Stone”, and on that surface there is a memento mori which reads

“Wenn du mich sicht, dann weine.” 

This summer, among the hottest recorded, and the Elbe once again receded to the point where observers could read that ominous missive:

“If you see me, weep.”

Something to tattoo on the brain with the Monday release of the United Nations Intergovernmental Report on Climate Change.

Authored by 91 scientists, representing 40 countries and based on over 6,000 peer-reviewed scientific studies, the conclusions of the commission are horrifying.

According to Coral Davenport at the New York Times the climatologists discovered that if “greenhouse gas emissions continue at the current rate, the atmosphere will warm up by as much as 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit” by 2040, radically earlier than had been thought, meaning that most readers of this article will bear witness to “inundating coastlines and intensifying droughts and poverty.”

A child born today will have just turned the drinking age in a world where close to all of the coral reefs will be extinct and where massive storms like Hurricane Florence or Hurricane Maria, which has nearly destroyed a Puerto Rico abandoned by the government of the United States, will be common.

Where the social, cultural, and economic affects of climate change will be recorded not on revealed hunger stones, but in pandemics, wars, famines, and genocides exacerbated by the effects of higher temperatures.

Brandon Miller and Jay Croft at CNN write that we’ll see in starker detail the horrific results of industrial man-made global warming earlier than in two decades, with the report concluding that humanity has “only till 2030 to stem catastrophic climate change.”

Alterations to human behavior which might hasten the worst effects of climate change are technically possible, though the study’s authors doubt such change is politically feasible, as it would require direct action on the part of the industrial economies of the world, something with “no documented historic precedent.”

Myles Allen of Oxford University explained that “we need to reverse emissions trends and turn the world economy on a dime” if we’re to stave off an ecological apocalypse which we now understand isn’t centuries in the future, but rather mere decades, if not years.

We already see the effects in the increasing ferocity of storms, the droughts that mark not just the developing world, but increasingly North America and Europe, and in the wildfires, which have burnt their way across the west.

As the world’s temperature rises we see an equivalent political slow burn, nations increasingly moving toward the delusional reactionary nationalisms as a means of punishing refugee populations often affected either directly by climate change or by the civil strife made possible by it.

For as Mark Fishcetti describes the Syrian civil war in Scientific American, “Human-induced drying in many societies can push tensions over a threshold that provokes violent conflict” – a reality that if the Trump administration pretends to deny, has long been acknowledged by the Pentagon.

Climate change has resulted in civilization catastrophe before.

Historian John Kelly notes in The Great Mortality, his book on the Black Death of fourteenth-century Europe, that pestilence was furthered by “climactic and ecological instability,” the bubonic plague encouraged by weakened immune systems brought on by drought and famine.

Polymathic anthropologist Jared Diamond has considered how climate change brought collapse in cultures as varied as the Anasazi and Maya or the medieval Norse settlements of Greenland, writing that the “collapse of industrial civilization… could assume various forms, such as the worldwide spread of diseases or else of wars, triggered ultimately by scarcity of environmental resources.”

Arguably the civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia and the Indus River Valley were felled by climate change, and one wonders if the peasants of Sumer were as despondent as that German speaker on the Elbe who asked future generations to weep, or if they were rather as myopic as we are, saying of such changes that “This too shall pass” while what expires is civilization itself?

Humans are unable to imagine the actual passing of their way of life. A sense that history changes has been novel for most cultures, even apocalyptic minded ones, as medieval paintings which depict Christ as a Flemish peasant or ancient Judeans as Florentine nobleman can attest.

The idea that the past was radically different from the present and that tomorrow will be distant from today is an innovation of Renaissance humanism and then modernity.

Rather, it’s always been easier to imagine that your world will literally pass into oblivion than that the values your civilization holds dear might disappear (or need to disappear).

During those lean times on the Indus River, on the Euphrates, or the Elbe, women and men may have dreamt of the end of days, but they couldn’t have quite dreamt of us. The myths that structured their world precluded it.

Lest we be too arrogant, ours is not so different a perspective, for as the literary theorist Frederic Jameson famously noted, it is “easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.”

Similar for the hungry penitent in the temple to all the gods of Sumer, or to the starving medieval pilgrim who could envision the return of Christ, but not that he might look different from those who populated his world.

Limited perspective is the wage of any totalizing ideology, and all eras are structured by such paradigms.

As a priest in Moloch’s temple or a monk in a medieval monastery had their religions, so have we ours, but the cracked gods of our world differ in one important respect – only capitalism’s Mammon has the capability of bringing about the apocalypse.

Only capitalism was able to inaugurate a new geological epoch in the Anthropocene; unique is our dominant ideology’s status in being able to obliterate all of humanity.

IPCC Co-Chair Debra Roberts said that the report is a “line in the sand and what it says to our species is that this is the moment and we must act now,” but what should disturb us most is the authors’ accurate alarm at the lack of political will to avert catastrophe.

In the United States the coal, oil, and gas industries’ obfuscate, high percentages of Americans believe the lie that climate change is a hoax (while record heat affects the Midwest this October), and the Trump administration trashes the Paris Accords.

Noam Chomsky has said that the Republican “party is dedicated to racing as rapidly as possible to destruction of organized human life."

There is no historical precedent for such a stand, with modern fascism directly correlated to the increasing chaos of climate change itself.

Roy Scranton in We’re Doomed. Now What? writes that as the “gap between the future we’re entering and the future we once imagined grows ever wider, nihilism takes root in the shadow of our fear…. [Y]ou can see it in the pull to nationalism, sectarianism, war, and racial hatred. We see it in the election of Donald Trump.”

What must be reckoned with is how this situation was directly engendered by industrial capitalism, and in particular by the partisans of its most extreme ideological manifestations of libertarianism and neoliberalism who have provided cover for policies that have enflamed the crisis.

Past centuries were circumscribed by their worldviews, be it medieval Catholicism, or classical Roman Augustan paganism, or the varied gods of Sumer in ancient Mesopotamia.

Even the most visionary of individual perspectives must be limited by a culture’s dominant way of thinking, but while our adherence to the market is as all-encompassing as a Babylonian’s loyalty to Marduk, it is only our dark religion which actually threatens Armageddon.

Unfettered, unregulated, capricious, vampiric capitalism has brought us to the brink, and the mass inability to comprehend this fact evidences how ingrained said ideology is.

Our blinders are such that human tragedy that is attributable directly to our economic system is often naturalized as simply being “The way that things are,” thus precluding even the possibility of different ways of arranging our world.

Death due to differing ideologies is always interpreted as conscious and preventable, but capitalist tragedy is simply understood as how life operates.

Consideration of those who have died because of capitalism (and those who will, which may yet include us all) doesn’t require a cover-up.

So inured are we to seeing capitalism as its own imposed ideology that we fail to understand its death toll. Franco-Bulgarian philosopher Tzvetan Todorovwrote that “remembrance of our own woes prevents us from seeing the suffering of others,” and while true, the converse is also accurate.

While admitting that capitalism provided for unprecedented class mobility and technological innovation, an honest consideration of its death toll in any hypothetical Black Book of Capitalism would have to include not just the obvious fatalities of those who died in industrial accidents or whose lives were shortened by their labor, but indeed the victims of colonialism, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and of fascismo corporativo, which is simply capitalism driven to its horrifying end.

Invisibility of such atrocities through normalization is a species of what the philosopher Louis Althusser termed “interpellation,” that is to say that we’re all molded subjects of the ideology that governs our world so that we mostly hold uncritical assumptions about capitalism’s normativity.

Writer William T. Vollmann addresses future generations in his new tome on climate change Carbon Ideologies, explaining that “We all lived for money, and that is what we died for.” As 2040 approaches our ignorance is a form of collective suicide.

The Editorial Board of theWashington Post writes that future “Historians will look in absolute astonishment” that not only did our governments and corporate elite fail to halt climate change, but that our policy makers “actually pushed in the wrong direction.”

That’s assuming that there will even be any historians left after the climate change horseman of pestilence, famine, war, and death gallop across the scorched and burning world, their riders named “Deregulation,” “Bottom Line,” “Market,” and “Profit.”

An August environmental impact statement prepared by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration concedes that far from being a “Chinese hoax” as Trump has alleged, the average temperature will rise seven degrees by century’s end.

Quite a wide gulf between what the Trump administration knows to be true and what his deluded believers will swallow.

Juliet Eilperin, Brady Dennis, and Chris Mooney at the Washington Post write that the Trump “administration did not offer this dire forecast … as part of an effort to combat climate change,” for their “analysis assumes the planet’s fate is already sealed.”

Why prevent collapse when Trump concludes that there is still so much money to be made in not averting disaster?

This is the nightmare logic of scarcity capitalism, the macabre calculus which is content to let millions of people starve in the third world and that will ultimately exterminate refugees who dare to escape a parched landscape, all so that the economic status quo can be maintained before the process kills us all.

The puritanism of corporate eco-individualism which configures environmental protection as simply a matter of driving a Prius or taking short showers is moral contrition or personal branding rather than policy, a quasi-theological sacrifice before the altar of the dying Earth.

What’s actually required is a massive, international, eco-socialist mobilization of governments and industries that are responsible for this calamity. Because right now capitalism’s final solution is nothing less than complete ecological collapse.

In his 1888 autobiographical Ecce Homo, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche eerily predicted that the 20th century would witness “wars as have never happened on earth.”

With chaos brought about by the scarcity resulting from climate change, we may reevaluate how prescient Nietzsche was about the last century, realizing that he was perhaps actually off by a hundred years.

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The Dog Wags Trump

SUBHEAD: The "missile attack" on Syria hardly diverted attention from the impeachment lava flow headed Trump's way.

By Juan Wilson on 14 April 2018 for Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2018/04/the-dog-wags-trump.html)


Image above: US Tomahawk fly missiles over Damascus, Syria. Photo by Hassan Amma. From (http://www.srzd.com/geral/putin-acusa-eua-ataque-agrava-crise-humanitaria-na-siria/).

The Upside
Bombing hardly worked to divert attention from "Trump's bad press problem a year ago when US navel forces in the Mediterranean Sea sent 59 Tomahawk missiles to a pre-warned Shayrat Air Base in Syria on 7 April 2017. That "wagging of the dog" ended with Syrian combat flights resumed from the airbase the same day on the relatively undamaged runways.

Now we have another show of force against the Syrian government in reprisal for another supposed "weapons of mass destruction" incident with poison gas. This time 71 of 105 Tomahawk missiles were intercepted by high tech Russian installed missile defense systems.

This kill count was likely enhanced by US military information provided to the Russians to avoid tripping into WWIII.

The effort to drag our allies into this mess did more harm than good, in that England and France (both nuclear powers) came along for the show but Germany and Italy wanted no part i it. This effectively splits the NATO alliance in two.

The Downside
It appears the Michael Cohen, Donald Trump's "personal attorney" and "Fixer"- who did not practice law or have other clients to speak of - will likely be the fall guy for a myriad of felonies related Trump's "business activity" otherwise known as  "organized crime". As in the "Godfather", Cohen has been the Consigliere (counselor Tom Hagen) to the Don ( mob boss Michael Corleone).

Unfortunately for Trump, the warrant the FBI obtained to search the home, office, and hotel room occupied by Cohen will likely produce a treasure trove of records pointing to criminal activity of the Trump organization.

If you look at the leadership personnel of the FBI, Special Prosecutor's Office, and Court of the Southern District of New York, you will realize that it is the Republicans that are legally going after Trump in a way that will likely lead to impeachment in the Republican controlled US Congress and Senate.

Trump is Toast
I think the writing is on the wall. The conservative Deep State has been embarrassed by Trump's crudeness, ignorance, narcissism, selfishness and impropriety. The stench of corruption is everywhere and it's too ugly for them to watch. George Bush was an embarrassment as well, but at least he took orders from Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Karl Rove. Trump has the misconception that he's "The Boss". Sorry chump! YOU'RE FIRED! 


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The Darkest Hours

SUBHEAD: But like all addicts, we have to hit bottom before anything like clarity returns to our daily doings.

By James Kunstler on 18 December 2017 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-darkest-hours/)


Image above: The Republican senate leadership gloat after passing self-serving tax reductions for the wealthy. From (https://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21732096-todays-bill-does-not-much-resemble-1986-tax-overhaul-how-republican-tax-bill).

The Tax “Reform” bill working its way painfully out the digestive system of congress like a sigmoid fistula, ought be re-named the US Asset-stripping Assistance Act of 2017, because that’s what is about to splatter the faces of the waiting public, most of whom won’t have a personal lobbyist / tax lawyer by their sides holding a protective tarpulin during the climactic colonic burst of legislation.

Sssshhhh….

The media has not grokked this, but the economy is actually collapsing, and the nova-like expansion of the stock markets is exactly the sort of action you might expect in a system getting ready to blow.

Meanwhile, the more visible rise of the laughable scam known as crypto-currency, is like the plume of smoke coming out of Vesuvius around 79 AD — an amusing curiosity to the citizens of Pompeii below, going about their normal activities, eating pizza, buying slaves, making love — before hellfire rained down on them.

Whatever the corporate tax rate might be, it won’t be enough to rescue the Ponzi scheme that governing has become, with its implacable costs of empire.

So the real aim here is to keep up appearances at all costs just a little while longer while the table scraps of a four-hundred-year-long New World banquet get tossed to the hogs of Wall Street and their accomplices. The catch is that even hogs busy fattening up don’t have a clue about their imminent slaughter.

The centerpiece of the swindle, as usual, is control fraud on the grand scale. Control fraud is the mis-use of authority in applying Three-Card-Monte principles to financial accounting practice, so that a credulous, trustful public will be too bamboozled to see the money drain from their bank accounts and the ground shift under their feet until the moment of freefall.

Control fraud is at work in the corporate C-suites, of course, because that is its natural habitat — remember that silver-haired CEO swine from Wells Fargo who got off scot-free with a life-time supply of acorns after scamming his account-holders — but their errand boys and girls in congress have been superbly groomed, pampered, fed, and trained to break trail and cover for them.

The country has gotten used to thinking that the game of pretend is exactly the same as what is actually going on in the world. The now-seminal phrase coined by Karl Rove, “we make our own reality,” is as comforting these days to Republicans from Idaho as it is to hairy, “intersectional” professors of post-structural gender studies in the bluest ivory towers of the Ivy League.

Nobody in this Republic really wants to get his-hers-zhe’s-they’s reality on.

Ah, but reality wants to do its thing regardless of our wishes, hopes, and pretenses, and you can kind of see how these moves taken in the dark waning hours of 2017 will play out in the quickening weeks of 2018. Long about March or April, something’s got to give.

Other players around the world are surely eager to assist shoving this mad bull of a polity towards the critical state it deserves to enter, though we are doing quite enough on our own to put ourselves at ground zero of financial and political implosion.

The addiction metaphor does apply to America. We are simply addicted to our own bullshit. But like all floundering addicts, we have to hit bottom before anything like clarity returns to our daily doings.

When that does happen, it will be as far from intoxicating as you can imagine. The smoldering wreckage of The World’s Highest Standing of Living will be visible in a 360-degree panorama. A lot of familiar faces will be among the suddenly missing. But we’re already prepped for this by the sexual purges of the season.

One day, the reassuring figure of ole Garrison Keillor is there to remind you of the exquisite taste of Midwestern sweet corn on an August night; and the next morning, you’re up to your eyeballs in the colonic explosion of unintended consequences engineered by the least reassuring cast of characters ever assembled under one capitol dome.

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House Science Chair likes CO2

SUBHEAD: Global Warming is good as it melts Arctic Ocean and gives shipping access.

By Chris D'Angelo on 24 July 2017 for Huffington Post -
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/lamar-smith-climate-change-beneficial_us_59765a54e4b0e201d577466d)


Image above: San Antonio Express articel says Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) is raising concerns about alleged Russian funding of U.S. environmental activism. Is that the right Russian meddling to focus on? Photo by Bob Owen. From (http://www.mysanantonio.com/opinion/editorials/article/Smith-s-Russia-concerns-miss-the-mark-11300535.php).

Rep. Lamar Smith (Republican-Texas) — who has spent his career cozying up to fossil fuel interests, dismissing the threat of climate change and harassing federal climate scientists — is now arguing that pumping the atmosphere full of carbon dioxide is “beneficial” to global trade, crop production and the lushness of the planet.

Rather than buying into “hysteria,” Americans should be celebrating the plus sides of a changing climate, Smith argues in an op-ed published Tuesday in The Daily Signal, a news website published by the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Smith — who has used his power as chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology to push his anti-science views — kicks off his op-ed by claiming Americans’ perception of the phenomenon is “too often determined by their hearing just one side of the story.”

“The benefits of a changing climate are often ignored and under-researched,” Smith said. “Our climate is too complex and the consequences of misguided policies too harsh to discount the positive effects of carbon enrichment.”

Increased carbon dioxide, Smith writes, promotes photosynthesis, resulting in a “greater volume of food production and better quality food” and “lush vegetation” that “assists in controlling water runoff, provides more habitats for many animal species, and even aids in climate stabilization, as more vegetation absorbs more carbon dioxide.” Warmer temperatures, he notes, results in longer growing seasons

Smith goes as far as to make a case for why a rapidly melting Arctic, which scientists warn could cost tens of trillions of dollars by the end of this century, is a positive thing.

“Also, as the Earth warms, we are seeing beneficial changes to the earth’s geography,” he writes. “For instance, Arctic sea ice is decreasing. This development will create new commercial shipping lanes that provide faster, more convenient, and less costly routes between ports in Asia, Europe, and eastern North America. This will increase international trade and strengthen the world economy.”

The op-ed comes roughly two months after Smith led a group of lawmakers on what BuzzFeed described as a “secret tour of the melting Arctic.” The unpublicized, weeklong, multi-stop outing included meeting with climate scientists and learning about how they track the levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, according to BuzzFeed.

While Smith reportedly canceled an interview with BuzzFeed to discuss the trip, Rep. Jerry McNerney (D-Calif.) told the publication that he and Smith had productive discussions about the climate.

Monday’s op-ed would suggest that, while Smith may have accepted the reality of the threat, he’s opted for the when-life-gives-you-lemons-make-lemonade approach.

Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University who sparred with Smith during a March hearing on climate science, told HuffPost via email that “it is clear” Smith is “slowly advancing through the stages of denial ... having apparently now moved from ‘it’s not happening,’ to ’ok—it’s happening, but IT WILL BE GOOD FOR US!”

“One step at a time I suppose,” Mann wrote, “but at least there is some apparent progress toward the truth (that climate change is real, human-caused, and already a problem).”

Joseph Kopser, an aerospace engineer and Army veteran from Austin, Texas, is one of several Democratic candidates vying for a chance to unseat the 16-term Republican in the 2018 midterm election. Reach Monday by phone, Kopser described Smith’s op-ed as “stunning.” And he said it is “exactly” what the late English author George Orwell warned about in his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

“He is acknowledging the warming planet,” Kopser said. “And he’s trying to use Orwellian speak to say that, ’No, no, no — These terrible things that scientists have talked about and proven and explained why they are terrible for our planet, are actually good things.”

What Smith is doing, Kopser said, is “equivalent to telling somebody who’s in a flood, ‘Oh no no, all this water is going to be great. Just think how much more drinking water you’re going to have available.’ Or somebody in a burning house, “No no, think, you now no longer need a furnace because you have this wonderful heat source all around your house.’”

First elected in 1986, Smith is the 14th longest-serving member of the current U.S. House. The San Antonio native has received more than $700,000 from the oil and gas industry over those years. In his five years as chairman of the science committee, he has worked to defund climate research and harassed federal climate scientists, whom he has accused of playing “fast and loose” with data. He has also sprinted to defend the fossil fuel industry ― namely Exxon Mobil Corp. ― from investigations into their own records on climate change and used his power to stack hearings with coal and chemical lobbyists and climate skeptics.

Burning fossil fuels, Smith writes in his op-ed, has “helped raise the standard of living for billions of people.”

“The use of fossil fuels and the byproducts of carbon enrichment play a large role in advancing the quality of human life by increasing food production to feed our growing population, stimulating the economy, and alleviating poverty.

Bad deals like the Paris Agreement would cost the U.S. billions of dollars, a loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs, and have no discernible impact on global temperatures. Instead of succumbing to fear tactics and exaggerated predictions, we should instead invest in research and technology that can help us better understand the effects of climate change.”

Smith is among a trio of Republicans that nonprofit political action committee 314 Action is targeting for their anti-science views. Smith’s office did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment Monday.

In a statement Monday, 314 Action founder Shaughnessy Naughton blasted Smith’s op-ed as the latest of his “industry-funded attacks on scientific consensus around the issue” of climate change.

“Rather than playing the hits to the Heritage Foundation’s mouthpiece, I challenge Mr. Smith to explain the benefits of climate change to the displaced people of Isle de Jean Charles or Tangier Island,” said Naughton, referring to two U.S. islands vanishing as ocean levels rise. “If climate scientists can’t convince him, maybe our country’s first climate refugees can.”

• Chris D'Angelo is a journalist for Huffington Post and a former reporter for Kauai's Garden Island News.
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War Whore Graham

SUBHEAD: A bewildered Fox News host takes on delusional Sen. Lindsey Graham over Syrian air strikes.

By Hawk Media on 8 April 2017 for Zero Hedge -
(http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-04-08/bewildered-tucker-carlson-takes-delusional-senator-graham-over-syrian-strikes)


Image above: Mashup of Sen Lindsey Graham applying lipstick on a whore. From (https://56packardman.com/2015/12/16/jerry-manders-political-corner-the-many-faces-of-lindsey-graham/).

I want you to watch this video, so that you know what you're up against. We aren't dealing with rational people. Here is the Senator from South Carolina, a man with great power in this country, telling Tucker Carlson with a straight face that taking out Saddam was a good idea. Additionally, he said taking out Libya was a good idea. Now he wants to take out Assad, because 'he's killing his own people.'

It's called a civil war, actually, and he wasn't killing anyone until American sponsored ISIS invaded his country.

For about a year, I've been blogging a lot of politics, hoping that Trump's message of 'America first' was genuine. I see now, much to my dismay, that's not the case.

While some of you don't take issue with the Syrian attack, I view it as the rubicon that Trump crossed to be part of the club, one with John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Nancy Pelosi.

This isn't about supporting Assad, but about setting priorities and properly analyzing risk. In many respects, this is much akin to trading. We place bets and hope that they work out. But any good trader knows that the monetary loss isn't the most important factor in a bad trade, but the time lost in hoping for a return.

How does destroying Assad help you? How does spending $84m on 59 cruise missiles help towards that elusive infrastructure bill?
It doesn't.

There will be plenty of true Trumpers out here to fulfill your need for partisan propaganda. I can no longer provide such a service, as I've decided that I don't trust the man anymore.
Anyone who placates filth like the man featured in the video below is undeserving of my valuable time.

Please listen to his words, interpret his rationale, analyze his cadence and body language -- and juxtapose that against Tucker's -- and tell me Graham isn't a dangerous person.


Video above: S.C. Senator Lindsey Graham on Tucker Carlson's Fox NEws show said, "We need more troops in Syria like we have in Iraq" From (https://youtu.be/6q44qea3zmc).

And here's the other side to the story.


Video above: Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard on Tucker Carlson's Foc NEws show said, "Syria missile strike is illegal and unconstitutional" From (https://youtu.be/wsQbvpMmBZs).

On April 8th Tulsi emailed her supporters this message:

"What President Trump did was illegal. Not only did he lack the Congressional authorization to launch a military strike against Syria -- by launching missiles before the United Nations could collect evidence from the site of this week's chemical attacks in Syria, the White House has jeopardized the legitimacy of future attacks on chemical assets or the regime airbases used to deliver them."
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The curse of the Thinking Class

SUBHEAD: I would like to join the party dedicated to getting our house in order. Anybody else out there feel that way?

By James  Kunstler on 27 March 2017 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/curse-thinking-class/)


Image above: Karl Lindberg, Senior artist at Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), provided some remarkable concept artwork for Kong: Skull Island, the latest in the franchise. From (http://www.scified.com/news/kongskull-island-concept-art-karl-lindberg).

Let’s suppose there really is such a thing as The Thinking Class in this country, if it’s not too politically incorrect to say so — since it implies that there is another class, perhaps larger, that operates only on some limbic lizard-brain level of impulse and emotion. Personally, I believe there is such a Thinking Class, or at least I have dim memories of something like it.

The farfetched phenomenon of Trumpism has sent that bunch on a journey to a strange land of the intellect, a place like the lost island of Kong, where one monster after another rises out of the swampy murk to threaten the frail human adventurers.

No one back home would believe the things they’re tangling with: giant spiders, reptiles the size of front-end loaders, malevolent aborigines! Will any of the delicate humans survive or make it back home?

This is the feeling I get listening to arguments in the public arena these days, but especially from the quarters formerly identified as left-of-center, especially the faction organized around the Democratic Party, which I aligned with long ago (alas, no more).

The main question seems to be:
Who is responsible for all the unrest in this land.

Their answer since halfway back in 2016:
The Russians.

 I’m not comfortable with this hypothesis. Russia has a GDP smaller than Texas. If they are able to project so much influence over what happens in the USA, they must have some supernatural mojo-of-the-mind — and perhaps they do — but it raises the question of motive.

What might Russia realistically get from the USA if Vladimir Putin was the master hypnotist that Democrats make him out to be?

Do we suppose Putin wants more living space for Russia’s people? Hmmmm. Russia’s population these days, around 145 million, is less than half the USA’s and it’s rattling around in the geographically largest nation in the world.

Do they want our oil? Maybe, but Russia being the world’s top oil producer suggests they’ve already got their hands full with their own operation. Do they want Hollywood? The video game industry?

The US porn empire? Do they covet our Chick-fil-A chains and Waffle Houses? Our tattoo artists? Would they like to induce the Kardashians to live in Moscow? Is it Nascar they’re really after?

My hypothesis is that Russia would most of all like to be left alone. Watching NATO move tanks and German troops into Lithuania in January probably makes the Russians nervous, and no doubt that is the very objective of the NATO move — but let’s not forget that most of all NATO is an arm of American foreign policy.

If there are any remnants of the American Thinking Class left at the State Department, they might recall that Russia lost 20 million people in the dust-up known as the Second World War against whom…? Oh, Germany.

Altogether last January the US military deployed thousands of soldiers and heavy weaponry to Poland, the Baltic states and southeastern Europe in its biggest build-up since the Cold War(Reuters).

As they used to say in old film noir Bogart movies: What’s the big idea?

The State Department would say they big idea was cautioning Russia against annexing anymore neighboring states or regions, as they did in Crimea a few years back.

Apparently the public is supposed to forget that the State Department sponsored and engineered the conversion of Ukraine into a failed state, prompting Russia to retain its naval bases in Crimea, its only warm-water outlet to the world’s oceans.

Ask yourself: if for some reason the state of Virginia were plunged into anarchy by foreign mischief, do you think the US would batten down our naval station in Norfolk?

I think the sad truth of the American predicament these day, including the ascension of a narcissistic ninny to the White House, is that we’re responsible for our own problems due, most of all, to the destruction of boundaries in virtually all realms of American behavior from the things we put in our bodies to the ridiculous ways that we occupy our waking hours at the expense of getting our own house in order.

I would like to join the party dedicated to getting our house in order. Anybody else out there feel that way?

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Trump keeps foot on gas pedal

SUBHEAD: Study says half the species on Earth today will likely disappear by the middle of the century.

By Jahr Jamail on 27 March 2017 for Truth Out -
(http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/39906-as-trump-s-denialists-get-to-work-the-climate-is-changing-170-times-faster)


Image above: An Alien planet like image from Meteor Crater, Arizona. A mile wide crater formed in a fraction of a second as 175 million tons of limestone and bedrock were uplifted from formerly flat terrain 50,000 years ago. The meteorite was only 150 ft. wide. From (https://www.pinterest.com/FDVoyages/meteor-crater-arizona/).

You can feel it, can't you?

You already know what is happening to the planet. To Gaia. To Earth. To the only planet humankind will ever "permanently" inhabit. We've nowhere else to go but here ... this incredible, majestic, beautiful Garden of Eden that has held us, and carried us, this far.

We have ignored the fact that we are, at best, mere stewards. We have forsaken the Earth by fantasizing that the planet was ours to control. To exploit. To manipulate. To drill, mine and desecrate.

To gain riches from.

The balance is upset, the die is cast, now we reap the consequences of a whirlwind of forces so vast we cannot comprehend them.

We needn't look far to see how very far off the climate precipice we have already fallen, as our pace accelerates by the day.

A recent study, Extinction Risk from Climate Change, published in the prestigious journal Nature, shows that half the species on Earth today will likely disappear by the middle of the century -- within 33 years. Although this information is devastating, perhaps we should not be surprised, since we've known for years now that we have already entered the Earth's sixth mass extinction event.

Last month, a paper titled The Anthropocene Equation revealed that anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD) is causing the climate to change 170 times faster than it would if only natural forces were affecting it. "The human magnitude of climate change looks more like a meteorite strike than a gradual change," one of the authors of the study said.

Both NASA and NOAA data showed that this January was the third hottest January ever recorded, with the brunt of the warming extremes occurring, distressingly, in the Arctic. Some anomalies were as high as 50 degrees Fahrenheit above normal over the winter.

The amount of dissolved oxygen in Earth's oceans is currently declining, according to a recently published paper in the journal Nature. This will assuredly have severe consequences for all marine organisms.

For perspective on where we are in relation to what has happened in Earth's history, National Geographic recently published a piece that shows how sudden and dramatic changes in the planet's climate have historically been catastrophic for humans, bringing plagues, famines and heat waves.

The article highlights the importance of not only the extreme change that is predicted over the next 100 years (4° to 6° Celsius, which could be an extremely conservative estimate), but also the rate of change, as it far exceeds nature's ability to adapt in order to sustain most life forms.

National Geographic goes on to point out that this exceptional rate of change will test adaptability by all global species, including humans, and that over the long term, all of our survival is far from certain.

In 2015, NASA launched a massive mission to study how quickly the oceans are melting Greenland, and the findings that are now coming in are disturbing. While we don't yet have all of the results, the study has already enabled the lead researchers to provide some broad brushstrokes on what they are finding.

"Overall, together I think these papers suggest that the glaciers as a whole are more vulnerable than we thought they were," Josh Willis, a researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the principal investigator on the mission told the Washington Post.

"We could be in for more sea level rise than we thought," he added. "And we're not alone; the fact is that almost every time some new results come out of Greenland or Antarctica, we find these glaciers are more vulnerable than we thought."

At roughly the same time Willis was making those comments, US satellite data from Antarctica showed that sea ice around that continent had hit a record low.

That means that the sea ice around Antarctica has shrunk to its smallest annual extent on record, after having been at its record high just a few years earlier. It's also worth noting that in mid-February, the Larsen C ice shelf there shed a Manhattan-sized chunk of ice into the sea.

On February 22 Truthout reported that the next major bleaching event to hit the Great Barrier Reef in Australia had begun. A little over two weeks later, the first survey for this year was conducted by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA), and the survey confirmed that another mass bleaching event had occurred and was ongoing.

"In total, those extreme weather events and the overall impact of climate change is a major threat to the future of the reef," the GBRMPA's David Wachenfeld said grimly to the media of his findings.

Closer to home in the US, on February 12 the tallest dam in the country, the Oroville dam, was at risk of disintegrating due to an onslaught of torrential flooding that prompted the evacuation of more than 200,000 people living downstream.

The crisis underscored how infrastructure mechanisms like dams are in no way built to withstand the impacts that ACD is already causing, let alone future impacts.

Truthout published an article that contained an interview with Deborah Moore, who was a commissioner with the World Commission on Dams, an international body that investigated the performance of dam projects across the world.

 Moore was asked what experts like herself should be looking at in terms of incorporating climate science into engineering design. Her response? "We can no longer use historic data in order to plan these projects because it's no longer relevant."

Earth
The evidence of runaway ACD across the land sectors of the planet is glaring.

A recent State of the Environment Report for Australia has warned that ACD could be "irreversible," and that ACD's impact to ecosystems continues to increase. "It [ACD] is altering the structure and function of natural ecosystems, and affecting heritage, economic activity and human wellbeing," the report's summary said. "Evidence shows that the impacts of climate change are increasing, and some of these impacts may be irreversible."

As if to underscore this point, another report from Australia emerged recently, which showed that country's wheat productivity has "flatlined" as a direct result of ACD.

Lastly in this section, spring has arrived nearly a full month early for many plants in the Arctic. Scientists have warned of ominous consequences from this, as the change marks the greatest shifting of the spring plant emergence that they have ever observed in the Arctic.

"As a climate scientist who studies the start of spring, I struggle to answer the question, 'What is spring?'" Heidi Steltzer, a professor at Fort Lewis College and author of the recent scientific paper, told the New York Times. "A longer spring opens up the potential for gaps -- points in time when it would be spring with no spring-like events occurring. Would this still be spring?"

Water
As is usually the case in these dispatches, the watery realms are where runaway ACD is the most visible.

Major droughts, which are looking more permanent with each passing year, are persisting around the globe. In Somalia, a country that has had to grow accustomed to drought, words like "unprecedented" and "record-breaking" have begun to lose their meaning.

The drought there is now so bad that hyenas won't even eat the carcasses of goats, sheep and camels that have died, as there isn't enough meat on their bones to make it worth their while. In early March, in one 48-hour period, at least 110 people died in Somalia from famine and diarrhea resulting from the ongoing drought conditions.

Famine warnings have now been issued for Rwanda, Kenya, Ethiopia, South Sudan and Somalia, all of which are experiencing their worst droughts in decades, with no end in sight.

By February, it became clear that the climate in the Arctic was, and had been for several months, already well advanced into abrupt ACD. Temperatures in many areas, including the North Pole, were clocking in between 30°-40°F above normal for extended periods of time, and the Arctic sea ice was hitting record minimum extent levels.

In January, what is normally one of the colder months of the year there, sea ice extent was nearly half a million miles below the January 1981-2010 long-term average, an average that was already well below what a healthy preindustrial age sea-ice level would have looked like.

A recent study showed that as Arctic warming continues to ramp up, Canadian glaciers are paying for it dearly; the melt-off from them has risen by a staggering 900 percent. This has now caused them to become a major contributor to sea level rise. Another recent study revealed that of all the permafrost that exists in the global Arctic, at least 10 percent is already melted out.

Anchorage, Alaska will lose its drinking water source before 2100, according to another recent study. The city's water comes from the Eklutna Glacier, in the Chugach Mountains above Anchorage, which is in the process of melting away, according to United States Geological Survey (USGS) Scientist Louis Sass, the lead author of the study.

"Eklutna looks like it's going to more or less disappear," he said, adding that the only question is how long that will take. According to Sass, who this writer accompanied on a USGS glacial survey of another Alaskan glacier twice during 2016, if the climate remains as it was between 2008 and 2015, the Eklutna will be gone by 2100.

But, he said recently, if the climate warms more, which of course it will, the timeline could be half that long. To give you an idea of how fast the glacier's melt rate is increasing: Between 1957-2010, the rate of melting ice there was 5 percent per year. Between 2010-2015, that rate had risen to 7 percent. And during that same period, during hotter years like 2013 and 2015, the rate even reached 13 percent. Farewell, Eklutna.

Meanwhile, sea level rise continues, and coastal regions are paying a price. A recently published study showed that US coastal cities could be flooding three times every single week by 2045. That means, if you buy a home in those areas now, before you finish paying off your 30-year mortgage, you would have a little trouble selling your constantly flooding real estate.

Lastly in this section, even life in the deepest seas is being impacted negatively by runaway ACD. A recently published study has shown that creatures living in the deep ocean are facing major food shortages, rapidly changing temperatures and other human-caused problems.

The deep ocean plays an essential role in the sustenance of commercial fishing and also removes major amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere, but the study notes that food supply in the deeper areas of the oceans could fall by a stunning 55 percent by 2100, which will of course starve the animals and microbes that live there.

Fire
So much for fire season being in the summer.

In early March, within just a few days, wildfires had torched a 1.5 million acre swath across the Central US, incinerating at least six people. The area, ripe for burning due to ACD-warmed temperatures and an ongoing drought, detonated into fires that spread across Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas.

In addition to the deaths, the fires caused vast amounts of damage: Thousands of people were forced to evacuate, much livestock was burned to death, vast expanses of cropland were lost, and numerous structures went up in flames.

In Kansas, one wildfire burned more than 1,000 square miles, breaking the record for that state's largest-ever fire. These fires were ongoing in all three states at the time of this writing.

Air
In February near the North Pole, temperatures were 50 degrees warmer than normal, yet again. In one area of Greenland, temperatures surged upwards of 43 degrees in a mere 12 hours as scientists continue to watch in amazement and shock as the Arctic literally goes into meltdown.

Moreover, these dramatic temperatures were simply one of many major heat waves sweeping the planet in February. Temperatures in North Texas reached into the mid-90s by mid-February, and one area in Oklahoma nearly reached 100. At the same time, parts of Australia were baking in 115-degree heat.

February was so hot across much of the US that the Great Lakes' already weak ice cover was cut down to nearly nothing and ski conditions across the Northeast looked more like they usually do in April.

To give you an idea of how hot things have been in the US, according to Climate Central, "There have been 3,146 record highs set for the month-to-date compared to only 27 record lows, ensuring February will go down as the 27th month in a row with more highs than lows. The astonishing 116-to-1 ratio of highs to lows would easily set a record for the most lopsided monthly ratio in history. There have also been 248 monthly record highs and no monthly record lows."

Evidence of abrupt ACD abounds, including torrential downpours following record-setting drought. This sequence is precisely what we saw in California last month, when an extreme weather event that was referred to as a "bombogenesis" or "weather bomb" brought torrential rains and floods, killed four people, swallowed cars, disrupted flights, and knocked out power for more than 150,000 people.

Additionally, it seems that a previously unforeseen nightmare scenario may have already begun.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in its most recent summary, includes the fact that the carbon equivalent contained in Arctic permafrost is 1,400-1,700 gigatons, and the IPCC estimates that by 2100, between 800-1,400 gigatons of carbon will be released into the atmosphere.

Currently, humans are emitting roughly 40 Gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere on an annual basis.
Amazingly, while the IPCC does note these amounts of terrestrial carbon in the Arctic from the melting permafrost, they do not include their release and the implications thereof into their modeling predictions.

The release of all this extra carbon from melting permafrost represents yet another ACD-driven positive feedback loop: The carbon released from the permafrost will add to atmospheric warming, which will only accelerate the feedback loop by melting more permafrost.

Denial and Reality
Given that we are in the country of Trumpistan, we can now safely assume we will be fed a steady diet of ACD denialism.

With the Trump administration full of ACD deniers, climate scientists are already facing threats, harassment and a very real fear of "McCarthyist attacks." Abusive and vulgar verbal attacks, and even death threats, have already become the norm.

In just the two months since he entered office, Trump has already undertaken the most ambitious regulatory rollback since the Reagan era and, of course, some of the most dramatic acts of deregulation have been happening on the environmental front. Trump's frontrunner for the role of science advisor is William Happer, a man who has described climate scientists as a "glassy-eyed cult."

Also in Trump's denial cabal is Scott Pruitt, the new head of the EPA (which means he's the person in charge of destroying that particular agency), who recently publicly questioned whether the EPA is even empowered to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

During a recent interview Pruitt was questioned as to whether he believed ACD was caused by humans, to which he replied: "I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do, and there's tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so, no, I would not agree that it's a primary contributor to the global warming that we see."

At this moment, it is worth harkening back to a 1991 film produced by the oil giant Shell, which warned that the climate was already changing "at a faster rate than at any time since the end of the ice age."

The film, titled Climate of Concern, went on to state that the rate of ACD even at that time, more than a quarter of a century ago, was "changing too fast perhaps for life to adapt, without severe dislocation."

It minced no words, stating that the world was warming and serious consequences could result. "Tropical islands barely afloat even now, first made inhabitable, and then obliterated beneath the waves … coastal lowlands everywhere suffering pollution of precious groundwater, on which so much farming and so many cities depend," the film narrates. "In a crowded world subject to such adverse shifts of climate, who would take care of such greenhouse refugees?"

Like Exxon, which knew, early on, of the dire consequences of runaway ACD and then covered up the facts, Shell is currently immersed in an elaborate charade, acting for the benefit of its bottom line.

Whether the denialists in Trump's cabinet are engaged in their own charade -- or whether they really believe their bizarre rhetoric -- no one truly knows, but there's no doubt that they are acting in the interest of the fossil fuel industry.

Once again, the oil giants have realized profits beyond their wildest dreams, while the consequences continue to be thrust upon every living being on Earth.

• Dahr Jamail, a Truthout staff reporter, is the author of The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan (Haymarket Books, 2009), and Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket Books, 2007). Jamail reported from Iraq for more than a year, as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey over the last 10 years, and has won the Martha Gellhorn Award for Investigative Journalism, among other awards.


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President Trump baits the hook

SUBHEAD: If Trump's people are able to collaborate, we'll be on a highway to Hell, 8 lanes wide and no potholes.

By William Rivers Pitt on 1 March 2017 for Truth Out -
(http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/39673-president-trump-baits-the-hook)


Image above: Republicans applaud as most Democrats remain seated as President Donald Trump addresses a joint session of Congress on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on February 28, 2017. Photo by Stephen Crowley. From original article.

I learned a few things while covering the long grind that was the Candidate Trump phenomenon.

"Don't drink whiskey during debates" proved to be an important if elusive maxim.
"You are never off-duty" became an inescapable truth once the 3 am tweetstorms turned into a thing.

"If his lips are moving, he's lying" comes in handy on a daily, sometimes hourly basis.

By far and away, however, the most important axiom of all consistently proved to be the most difficult to obey: "Don't take the bait."

Donald Trump is all bait.

It is the essence of his existence, his governing principle. Herds of stray cats follow him around because he smells like a bag of musty tuna. He is one of those creepy deep-sea monster fish, all eyes and teeth and dangled glowing lure.

Every tweet is a ladle of chum tossed into the water. It takes a special kind of self-control to lay off, but you have to if you want to keep everyone's eyes fixed on what matters, and not on whatever is scrolling across the careening Times Square ticker-tape screen that passes for his mind.

President Trump delivered maybe the performance of his political life before a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night, and the entire thing was positively surreal.

You had Mike Pence and Paul Ryan standing together in their positions of honor above the president's podium wearing exactly, precisely the same suit, shirt and blue ties.

They looked for all the world like Thing 1 and Thing 2 from The Cat in the Hat. Beyond that was the breathtaking finality of the theatrics: The Sargent-at-Arms bellowed, "Mr. Speaker, the President of the United States," and out came Trump.

It wasn't a mistake; he didn't wander through the wrong door. Here was the president, resplendent in his orangeness, and hats over the windmill. Now it's real.

The performance itself was the bait this time, and many in the media found it tempting on the lure. Is this the new Trump? Has he turned a corner? Is everything different and better now? Can I come out from under the bed and stop stocking canned goods? James Pindell of The Boston Globe sure seemed to think so:

 "In many ways, it was the long-awaited pivot that Trump has always promised. This was unlike any other speech we have seen from Trump: he was disciplined, didn’t veer much at all from the script and hit his marks. Trump expressed optimistic platitudes such as, 'The time for small thinking is over. The time for trivial fights is behind us,' and, 'From now on, America will be empowered by our aspirations, not burdened by our fears.'"

Van Jones, one of Trump's most caustic critics, was even more ebullient in his praise on CNN. Describing Trump's praise for a fallen SEAL, Jones said, "There are a lot of people who have a lot of reason to be frustrated with him, to be fearful of him.

But that was one of the most extraordinary moments you have ever seen in American politics, period. And he did something extraordinary. And for people who have been hoping that he would become unifying, hoping that he might find some way to become presidential, they should be happy with that moment.

Now, there was a lot that he said in that speech that was counterfactual, that was not right, that I oppose and will oppose. But he did something tonight that you cannot take away from him. He became president of the United States."

Not everyone was impressed. "I did not hear President Trump say one word, not one word, about the need to combat climate change, the greatest environmental threat facing our planet," said Sen. Bernie Sanders in a video rebuttal.

"Do we add another $80-plus billion to the Pentagon, or do we allow every qualified young American the ability to go to college tuition-free at a public college or university and reduce student debt?

Tonight, President Trump once again made it clear he plans on working with Republicans in Congress who want to repeal the Affordable Care Act, throw 20 million Americans off of health insurance, privatize Medicare, make massive cuts in Medicaid, raise the cost of prescription drugs to seniors, eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood, while at the same time, he wants to give another massive tax break to the wealthiest Americans."

Two takeaways from Tuesday night, both of which are potentially of a single piece: infrastructure and immigration. President Trump proposed a truly massive $1 trillion infrastructure improvements package.

The problem with the passage of such a large piece of legislation, as ever, is your average Republican congressperson, who will like as not run up a tree and hide when confronted with such a stupendous spending bill. Under most circumstances it's a dead stick, and has been for a while now.

Before the speech, Trump huddled with some news anchors and let it drop that he is open to a "path to citizenship" for undocumented immigrants.

In this, he sounded a whole lot like Ted Kennedy a dozen years ago, who along with John McCain came up with an immigration plan that opened a pathway to citizenship for millions of people.

During the speech itself, though, he made no mention of such a path and instead announced that he has ordered Homeland Security to create a new agency to publish a weekly list of all crimes committed by immigrants.

Make no mistake: If he returns to the idea of a path to citizenship, the GOP base will flip out over this in truly incandescent fashion. "NO AMNESTY," they will howl, and it will be taken as a betrayal of everything Trump stood for during his campaign.

How to square this circle? Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell have a whole raft of right-wing bills they're just dying to deploy.

Cuts to Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid, a rollback of food assistance programs, massive corporate tax cuts, wide-ranging assaults on reproductive rights and LGBTQ+ equality, along with any number of Jesus Uber Alles laws that will technically make it illegal for trans people to go to the bathroom.

Not one of the items on the right's wish list sees the light of legal day without Donald Trump's signature, and there's the bait.

Give me my infrastructure bill, he can say, and you can go have a ball turning the country into A Handmaid's Tale at your pleasure. It's pretty safe to say the GOP hard-liners in Congress will go along for the ride if it gets them even half of what they want.

But hey, who knows? It was just one speech. For all we know, the president and his administration will revert back to full clown status again before the daylight fades … but there was a rumble for a minute there on Tuesday night that should not be ignored.

If these people actually get organized enough to collaborate, we'll be on a highway to Hell, eight lanes wide and no potholes. Ryan, McConnell and the far right will be able to accomplish every nightmare priority on their list while Trump can point to a couple of big bills and strut his way toward the authoritarian Islamophobic regime Steve Bannon has been dreaming of.

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A Hole in the Head

SUBHEAD: America has a hole in its head. It’s the place formerly known as The Center. Normal is no more.

By James Kunstler on 27 February 2017 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/a-hole-in-the-head/)


Image above: Squabbling Democratic and Rebublican parties. From (http://www.nashvillescene.com/news/pith-in-the-wind/article/13031002/tea-party-squabbling).

We need a new civil war like we need a hole in the head. But that’s just it: America has a hole in its head. It’s the place formerly known as The Center. It didn’t hold. It was the place where people of differing views could rely on each other to behave reasonably around a touchstone called the National Interest.

That abandoned place is now cordoned off, a Chernobyl of the mind, where figures on each side of the political margin fear to even sojourn, let alone occupy, lest they go radioactive.

Anyway, the old parties at each side of the political transect, are melting down in equivalent fugues of delusion, rage, and impotence — as predicted here through the election year of 2016. They can’t make anything good happen in the National Interest.

They can’t control the runaway rackets that they engineered in legislation, policy, and practice under the dominion of each party, by turns, going back to Lyndon B. Johnson, and so they have driven themselves and each other insane.

Trump and Hillary perfectly embodied the climactic stage of each party before their final mutual sprint to collapse. Both had more than a tinge of the psychopath. Trump is the bluff that the Republicans called on themselves, having jettisoned anything identifiable as coherent principles translatable to useful action.

Hillary was an American Lady Macbeth attempting to pull off the ultimate inside job by any means necessary, her wickedness so plain to see that even the voters picked up on it. These two are the old parties’ revenge on each other, and on themselves, for decades of bad choices and bad faith.

The anti-intellectual Trump is, for the Right, the answer to the Intellectual-Yet-Idiots (IYIs) that Nassim Taleb has so ably identified as infesting the Left. It is a good guess that President Trump has not read a book since high school, and perhaps never in his entire life.

But are you not amazed at how the IYIs of the Left have savaged the life-of-the-mind on campus, and out in the other precincts of culture where free inquiry once flourished? From the craven college presidents who pretend that race-segregated “safe spaces” represent “inclusiveness,” to The New York Times editors who pretend in headlines that illegal immigrants have done nothing illegal, the mendacity is awesome.

Something like this has happened before in US history and it may be cyclical. The former Princeton University professor and President, Woodrow Wilson, dragged America into the First World War, which killed over 53,000 Americans  (as many as Vietnam) in only eighteen months. He promulgated the Red Scare, a bit of hysteria not unlike the Race and Gender Phobia Accusation Fest on the Left today.

Professor Wilson was also responsible for creating the Federal Reserve and all the mischief it has entailed, especially the loss of over 90 percent of the dollar’s value since 1913. Wilson, the perfect IYI of that day.

The reaction to Wilson was Warren Gamaliel Harding, the hard-drinking, card-playing Ohio Main Street boob picked in the notorious “smoke-filled room” of the 1920 GOP convention.

He invoked a return to “normalcy,” which was not even a word (try normality), and was laughed at as we now laugh at Trump for his idiotic utterances such as “win bigly” (or is that big league?).

Harding is also known for confessing in a letter: “I am not fit for this office and should never have been here.”

Yet, in his brief term (died in office, 1923), Harding navigated the country successfully through a fierce post-World War One depression simply by not resorting to government intervention.

Something like the same dynamic returned in 1952 when General Eisenhower took over from Harry Truman and the defeated Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson quipped, “The New Dealers have been replaced by the car dealers.”

Ha! If he only knew! After all, who was on board as Ike’s Veep? None other than Tricky Dick Nixon, soon to be cast as America’s quintessential used car salesman.

Well, those were the days, and those days are over.

So much has gone wrong here in the past thirty years and the game of salugi being played by the Dems and the GOP is not helping any of it.  [IB Publisher's note: "Salugi" or "Saloogie" is unorganized game among NYC area children in which an article is snatched away from a victim and tossed back and forth among the tormentors; also used as a call in the game.]

And that is why the two parties are heading toward extinction. We’re in the phase of intra-party factional conflict for now. Each party has its own preliminary civil war going on.

The election of Obama era Labor Secretary and party hack, Tom Perez, as DNC chair yesterday has set the Bernie Sanders Prog troops into paroxysms of animadversion. They’re calling out all up-and-down the Twitterverse for a new party of their own.

Trump faces his own mutineers on the Right, and not just the two cheerleaders for World War Three, John McCain and Lindsey Graham.

Coming out of the Conservative CPAC meeting last week, just about his whole agenda was written off as (cough cough) politically impractical by the poobahs in attendance: reform-and-replacement of the Affordable Care Act, tax reform, the promised massive infrastructure-building stimulus orgy, the border wall, the trade blockages.

Anon, comes the expiration of the current debt ceiling, at around $20 trillion, in mid-March. Do you imagine that the two parties warring with each other in congress will be able to come to some resolution over that? Fuggeddabowdit. The Democrats have every incentive to let President Trump stew in this fatal brine like a Delancey Street corned beef.

What it means, of course, is that the US Treasury runs out of ready cash in mid-summer and some invoices just don’t get paid, maybe even some bigly ones like Social Security checks and Medicare bills. Won’t that be a spectacle? That’s where Trump becomes a political quadriplegic and the voters start jumping off the dying parties like fleas off of two dead dogs.

By then, plenty of other mischief will be afoot in the world, including the fractious outcome of elections in France and the Netherlands, with the European Union spinning into its own event horizon, and currency instability like the world has never seen before. Enjoy the remaining weeks of normality.

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Made for Each Other

SUBHEAD: Red team and the Blue team are just playing a game of “Capture the Flag” on the deck of the Titanic.

By James Kunstler on 13 February 2017 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/made-for-each-other/)


Image above: Illustration of the Red vs the Blue team. From (http://www.psychologyofgames.com/2015/02/red-vs-blue-which-should-you-choose/).

Don’t be fooled by the idiotic exertions of the Red team and the Blue team. They’re just playing a game of “Capture the Flag” on the deck of the Titanic. The ship is the techno-industrial economy. It’s going down because it has taken on too much water (debt), and the bilge pump (the oil industry) is losing its mojo.

Neither faction understands what is happening, though they each have an elaborate delusional narrative to spin in the absence of any credible plan for adapting the life of our nation to the precipitating realities.

The Blues and Reds are mirrors of each other’s illusions, and rage follows when illusions die, so watch out. Both factions are ready to blow up the country before they come to terms with what is coming down.

What’s coming down is the fruit of the gross mismanagement of our society since it became clear in the 1970s that we couldn’t keep living the way we do indefinitely — that is, in a 24/7 blue-light-special demolition derby.

It’s amazing what you can accomplish with accounting fraud, but in the end it is an affront to reality, and reality has a way of dealing with punks like us. Reality has a magic trick of its own: it can make the mirage of false prosperity evaporate.

That’s exactly what’s going to happen and it will happen because finance is the least grounded, most abstract, of the many systems we depend on. It runs on the sheer faith that parties can trust each other to meet obligations.

When that conceit crumbles, and banks can’t trust other banks, credit relations seize up, money vanishes, and stuff stops working. You can’t get any cash out of the ATM. The trucker with a load of avocados won’t make delivery to the supermarket because he knows he won’t be paid.

The avocado grower will have to watch the rest of his crop rot. The supermarket shelves empty out. And you won’t have any guacamole.

There are too many fault lines in the mighty edifice of our accounting fraud for the global banking system to keep limping along, to keep pretending it can meet its obligations.

These fault lines run through the bond markets, the stock markets, the banks themselves at all levels, the government offices that pretend to regulate spending, the offices that affect to report economic data, the offices that neglect to regulate criminal misconduct, the corporate boards and C-suites, the insurance companies, the pension funds, the guarantors of mortgages, car loans, and college loans, and the ratings agencies.

The pervasive accounting fraud bleeds a criminal ethic into formerly legitimate enterprises like medicine and higher education, which become mere rackets, extracting maximum profits while skimping on delivery of the goods.

All this is going to overwhelm Trump soon, and he will flounder trying to deal with a gargantuan mess. It will surely derail his wish to make America great again — a la 1962, with factories humming, and highways yet to build, and adventures in outer space, and a comforting sense of superiority over all the sad old battered empires abroad.

I maintain it could get so bad so fast that Trump will be removed by a cadre of generals and intelligence officers who can’t stand to watch someone acting like Captain Queeg in the pilot house.

That itself might be salutary, since only some kind of extreme shock is likely to roust the Blue and Red factions from their trenches of dumb narrative. If the Democratic Party had put one-fiftieth of the effort it squanders on transgender bathroom privileges into policy for mitigating our tragic misinvestments in suburban sprawl, we might have gotten a head-start toward a plausible future.

Instead, the Democratic Party has turned into a brats-only nursery school, with the kiddies fighting over who gets to play with the Legos. The Republican Party is Norma Desmond’s house in Sunset Boulevard, starring Donald Trump as Max the Butler, working extra-hard to keep the illusions of yesteryear going.

All of this nonsense is a distraction from the task at hand: figuring out how to live in the post techno-industrial world.

That world is not going to operate the ways we’re used to. It will crush our assumptions and expectations. Lying about everything won’t be an option. We won’t have the extra resources to cover up our dishonesty.

Our money better be sound or it will be laughed at, and then you’ll starve or freeze to death. You’d better hope the rule of law endures and work on keeping it alive where you live. And nobody will get special brownie points for the glory of sexual confusion.

I look for the financial fireworks to start around March – April, as the irresolvable debt ceiling debate in congress grinds into a bitter stalemate, and it becomes obvious that there will be no voucher for the great infrastructure spending orgy that Trump’s MAGA is based on. Elections in France and the Netherlands have the potential to shake apart the European Union, and with that the footing of European banks.

Pretty soon, everybody in all parties and factions will be asking: “Where did the glittering promises of Modernity go…?” As we slip-side into the first stages of a world made by hand.

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