Drumpf plays WW3 and eats KFC

SUBHEAD: A careless and ignorant bully amok in the KFC at the End of Empire.

By Phil Rockstroh on 24 September 2019 for Counter Currents -
(https://countercurrents.org/2019/09/a-careless-bully-at-the-kfc-at-the-end-of-empire)


Image above: Donald Trump pretends to shoot rifle at an enemy. From original article.

Will Trump go to war with the Iranians or the homeless? ...or both?

Trump is a coward. The nation of Iran has the means and the will to fight. Do you recall the will displayed by Iranians when repelling foreign invaders when Iraq attempted to invade Iran as a de facto US proxy force? Conversely, the homeless do not possess any defence against assault by the agents of the US police state.

Regardless of his image among credulous true believers, Trump, character-wise, is the diametric opposite of the image he conveys as a titan of supreme self-confidence. The pose is ego-based compensation for inner feelings of inferiority and abject weakness.

Only those who are terrified of their own feelings of weakness and vulnerability fixate on the weakness, real or perceived, of others. If you desire to suss out a person ridden with self-doubt, no matter how outwardly confident and bestowed with worldly success, notice if they possess a proclivity to bandy the ultimate designation of capitalist derision, “loser.”

Trump is prone to inflict a Heinrich Himmler-like evil towards the homeless because, as was the case with the chinless cipher “toy soldier” Himmler, Trump is contemptuous of his inner feelings of inadequacy. To avoid a crippling spiral into shame and self-doubt, feelings of doubt and concomitant animus must be displaced.

The US, in a collective sense, cannot address the societal sin of allowing homelessness, due to a fear that even regarding the crisis might lead to feelings of vulnerability…that some form of contact loseritude might overwhelm and decimate their will.

The inherent weakness in the structure of late US empire compels contempt for the homeless. Trump’s self doubt is the source of his compulsion to humiliate those he perceives as weak and shunt them from sight. Only then can he separate himself from self-hatred.

The reason the mode of mind is lethally dangerous: The psychical trope cannot be sustained in a viable sense. The sense of weakness remains, compelling the sufferer to double down on the perpetration of force.

There can be no end to the depth of cruelty inflicted because the pathos rages in the interior life of the totalitarian bully — not those on whom he projects his feelings of weakness and vulnerability. The fires of Auschwitz were lit by fires of self-hatred. When tyrants attempt to cage their self-contempt, hell is unloosed upon the world.



Image above: Donald Trump pretends to eat his traditional meal... KFC's turd on a napkin. Food bill on Air Force runs $24 million a year. From (https://www.ibtimes.com/us-taxpayers-eat-air-force-one-refrigerator-bill-24-million-2645893)


There is much back and forth about Trump’s level of intellect. Is he the cluelessly imbecilic, Dunning-Kruger effect-ridden, ambulatory head wound that he appears to be? Does he fake being a gibbering idiot so that his foes will underestimate him?

Carl Jung stated, Adolf Hitler did not possess originality nor intelligence but possessed a “low animal cunning” — a description that fits Donald Trump as well.

A business failure, he got his start — bestowed with epic advantage — in business with multimillions of dollars from his wealthy, crooked father thus Trump was able to impersonate a canny mogul within the make-believe precincts of reality television, preening for the noxiously credulous citizenry of the United States of Dumbfuckistan, while accruing revenue for the benefit of a cabal of cretinous, short-sighted-by-cupidity, mass media oligarchs.

Moreover, Trump was able to become President due to the epic stupidity of the elite of the Democratic Party who rigged their primary and nomination process for a candidate whose sense of entitlement to power was only exceeded by her ineptitude as a campaigner and her inability to turn in a plausible impression of an actual human being. In short, the bar of US intelligence is set so low even someone as toxically stupid as Trump can outwit the militantly obtuse elite of late US imperium.

Yet John Bolton, The Moustache Of The Apocalypse, was banished from the sight of the Tangerine Tsunami Of Viciousness. Yet the (bi-partisan) blood-sustained empire has not seen the last of the former’s blood-intoxicated breed and the latter’s brand of racist demagogic jerk-rocketry.

Trump and Bolton were made by the system; they did not make the system. An empire sustains itself on militarist plunder and its leaders retail in sleight-of-hand, xenophobic tropes. What else would its political class be populated by other than a nest of vipers?

What else would Trump bear, on a psychical level, but a head full of snakes? There has not been a reckoning of common sense and basic decency in the precincts of US power. Bolton simply blundered into the snake pit of Trump’s vanity.

Rich thus born-with-obscene-advantage man-boys such as Trump — and again in the news, due to newly unearthed allegations of creepopthatic transgressions against women trapped in vulnerable circumstances, Blubbering Brett Kavanaugh — are raised with the (careless and vile) ethos:

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” ― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Worse: When called out for their transgressions against people born without money, power, and privilege, man-babies such as Trump and Kavanaugh flush with indignation and insist they are the victim and their accusers should be subjected to pillory and rebuke. Hence, we arrive at the origin of this vicious clutch of hideous man-boys: Capitalism is, what it always has been, a hierarchy of bullies.

Post prancing down my Facebook newsfeed by a Trump rah-rah: “Trump has kept his promises. The economy is great. America is getting great again.”

Dispatch from a realm closer to reality:

The US economy is an over-heated, inflated bubble which is merely serving to bloat the already obscenely bloated coffers of the economic elite.

Trump is gutting environmental regulations and laws that help to preserve endangered wildlife; he has withdrawn from crucial nuclear treaties; his wrong-headed tariffs are proving economically devastating to farming regions; he is caging children in concentration camp-like conditions; he is obsessed with building a money-sucking wall on the southern border and his xenophobic, racist demagoguery provoke violent reactions in a nation where xenophobia and racial resentment, perpetually, simmer beneath the surface.

It comes down to this: Donald Trump embodies U.S. America, its origins and zeitgeist, as is the case with the prevaricating, High Dollar owned and controlled tools of the Democratic Party.

Why and how have these circumstances been allowed to prevail, unfettered by common sense and common decency? The US was founded on a principle in which the moneyed elite would have the means to monetize all things that their cupidity-seized minds surveyed, including the life and labor of human beings.

Moreover, addressing the query in advance, there is not a “solution” to late empire…other than the terrible redemption that arrives with The Second Law Of Thermodynamics. Empires overextend themselves abroad and collapse into their corrupt core at home.

Do you desire to catch a glimpse of the Second Law Of Thermodynamics in play? Gaze upon the junk food bloated body of Donald Trump, denizen of the KFC at the end of empire, or note the carnage his (or the Great White Lifeguard Of Hope, Joe Biden’s) increasingly senile dementia-ridden mind inflicts upon syntax and cohesive narrative structure.

Trump’s collapsing linguistic function mirrors the decay of US infrastructure. His proposed remedy also mirrors his psychical derangement: A manic compensation, analogous to a junk food binge, involves the full-spectrum exploitation of all available fossil fuel resources, without regard to the damage inflicted on the body of the earth and the soul of the world.

Although the intrinsic foulness of the US did not arrive with Donald Trump. He is a reflection of the racist, genocidal, perpetually exploitative, money-lusting, humanity-loathing construction of the US — a hideousness that has been in play since the origin of the sham republic. Donald Trump simply reveals what exists at the rotten root and makes visible the murderous spores carried on the insidious winds of US empire.



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Nuclear Risk Soar

SUBHEAD: The US is modernizing and expanding its nuclear weapons capabilities, to the detriment of all.

By Jon Letman on 16 July 2019 for Truthout -
(https://truthout.org/articles/as-us-modernizes-its-nuclear-arsenal-costs-and-risks-soar/)


Image above: Illustration of nuclear weapons carrying missiles over sunset on American flag. From original article.

On July 16, 1945, the U.S. detonated the first-ever nuclear device in the New Mexico desert. Less than a month later, it dropped two more atomic bombs, destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing and injuring more than 200,000 civilians.

Today, 74 years later, President Donald Trump has elbowed his way to the precipice of war threatening fire, fury and obliteration against one state that has nuclear weapons (North Korea) and one that doesn’t (Iran). In June, shortly after Trump reportedly called off a military strike against Iran with just 10 minutes to spare, he lashed out on Twitter: “Iran cannot have Nuclear Weapons!”

Meanwhile, the United States is pushing forward with plans to modernize, upgrade and rebuild its own aging nuclear stockpile. Over the next 30 years, the U.S. will spend at least $1.2 trillion on maintaining and modernizing nuclear weapons. With inflation, cost overruns and common under-estimation of weapon systems, the final cost of the U.S. nuclear enterprise could be as high as $2 trillion.

Trump’s 2020 budget alone calls for $16.5 billion (an increase of 8.3 percent over 2019) for the Department of Energy (DOE)/National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) which maintains the U.S. nuclear stockpile.

When President Obama delivered his landmark Prague speech in 2009, he spoke of a U.S. commitment “to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons,” but quickly adopted the language of the NNSA: “As long as these weapons exist, the United States will maintain a safe, secure and effective arsenal to deter any adversary, and guarantee that defense to our allies.”

A decade later, the U.S.’s nuclear triad — weapons based on land, air and sea — is being granted a life extension, fueling a boon to the weapons industry and prompting opponents to warn of an expensive, potentially deadly new nuclear arms race.

The idea of modernizing the stockpile was born, in part, from the decision to end nuclear weapons explosive testing in 1992. The resulting Stockpile Stewardship Management Plan modernizes existing nuclear weapons through life-extension programs, modifications and alterations in order to maintain a nuclear deterrent.

While “life extension” is meant primarily as a means of refurbishing specific nuclear weapons, it is also a prime driver for nuclear delivery vehicles (missiles, submarines, bombers) to be newly redesigned as more capable, faster, stealthier systems, making the overall nuclear arsenal more lethal.

The NNSA did not agree to speak to Truthout for this story, but an NNSA spokesperson did confirm by email that it is currently executing five major nuclear weapons modernization programs. Those programs include a gravity bomb and an air-launched cruise missile whose nuclear yield can be dialed up or down (adjusted), allowing for greater flexibility.

Among the modified warheads is the W76-2, a lower yield (5-7 kilotons) version of the earlier more powerful (100 kiloton) W76-1. By comparison, the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki were around 15 and 20 kilotons respectively.

The first W76-2 warhead was completed in February at the United States’s only nuclear weapons assembly and disassembly facility, the Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas. However, in June, House Democrats blocked funding for deployment of the W76-2 onto submarine-launched ballistic missiles.

Opponents of new low-yield “mini nukes” argue that bombs with an adjustable selective yield option can produce less radioactive fallout, and may thereby lower the threshold for using them, making a nuclear conflict more likely. Currently, the U.S. stockpile includes around 1,000 warheads with selective yield options, some believed to be as low as 0.3 kilotons (exact yields are classified).

“Even the lowest yield is a very large explosive force compared to even the biggest conventional weapons that humans have been able to build,” said Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS).

He points out that the U.S. is not alone in modernizing and upgrading its nuclear arsenal. All nine nuclear states have their own version of modernization reflecting the maturity of their program. The idea that Russia, for example, is modernizing, and the U.S. is “falling behind” is a mischaracterization of the real situation, says Kristensen.

“All countries use that [argument] to their advantage,” Kristensen told Truthout.

Modernization proponents include Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney, who said in a May press release, “Congress must invest in the modernization of our nuclear triad and the additional low-yield capabilities called for in the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review. These investments are critical to America’s ability to provide credible deterrence and rein in China and Russia.”

In the same release, Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton argued future arms-control agreements should take into account Russia and China’s own nuclear expansion and modernization efforts.

Plans to use nuclear weapons are not just an abstraction for U.S. military planners. As the FAS’s Steven Aftergood reported, the Joint Chiefs of Staff posted an updated version of U.S. nuclear policy that included the passage: “Using nuclear weapons could create conditions for decisive results and the restoration of strategic stability … specifically, the use of a nuclear weapon will fundamentally change the scope of a battle and create conditions that affect how commanders will prevail in conflict.” FAS noted that the original document was quickly taken offline (but not before being preserved).

The above passage provoked concern because people saw it as a greater willingness to consider the use of nuclear weapons. “Rattling the nuclear sword a little more explicitly,” Kristensen said, noting that the language was consistent with half a century of nuclear strategy, but he was struck by the bluntness of the message at a time when the Trump administration is seeking low-yield nuclear weapons.

“To me, those things coinciding is a worrisome trend that we may be seeing signs here that … what you could call nuclear war planning operations are becoming a little more active than they were before,” Kristensen said.

Proponents argue modernization is essential to maintaining a “safe, secure, and effective” arsenal, but modernization can represent many different things. It may be something relatively simple, such as replacing components to extend the life of a warhead, to highly complex redesigns that carry the risk of introducing uncertainty and reducing confidence that a weapon will work.

Kristensen says it may be possible that at some point, a military commander could say they lack confidence that the weapon will function as intended. “The United States, therefore, could back itself into a corner where it would be forced to conduct a reliability test — a live nuclear test of that warhead to figure out it if really worked,” Kristensen said. To do so, he warned, would set off a cascade of nuclear tests around the world.

Tom Collina is the director of policy for the Ploughshares Fund, a global security foundation seeking to reduce nuclear risks. He calls the modernization of the U.S. arsenal “excessive and dangerous,” and argues that an adequate deterrence can be achieved with far fewer missiles than the U.S.’s more than 6,000 warheads.

“The more [nuclear weapons] that you build beyond what you need, not only is it very expensive — billions and billions of dollars — but it encourages Russia to build up as well so you create a new arms race,” Collina told Truthout.

According to Collina, the combination of rebuilding the U.S. nuclear stockpile and Trump’s efforts to pare down and withdraw from arms control agreements suggest a dangerous new arms race against Russia is in the making.

“We are planning our whole nuclear policy against the possibility of an intentional attack from Russia — a bolt from the blue,” Collina says. Rather, the U.S. should be more concerned about bumbling into a nuclear war through miscalculation, poor judgment by the president, or a false alarm.

Doubling down on Cold War-era threat perceptions, spending up to $2 trillion to rebuild nuclear weapons based on the past actually increases the danger of an accidental war, Collina argues. “Today we have a very different threat and we’ve never adjusted.”

Collina distinguishes between replacing components that remain unchanged and designing new parts that will result in a new, untested (currently untestable) weapon. “This is the danger when you give these assignments to the weapons laboratories (Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos) because these people like to design stuff. They like to make new things. They like to improve things — it’s kind of their nature,” he says.

In contrast to the positive “safe, secure and reliable” language used by the nuclear weapons industry, Collina offers a more sobering description, calling them “incredibly dangerous killing machines … these are weapons that annihilate women and children.”

He continues, “This is why nuclear weapons are different from any other weapon in the U.S. arsenal…. They do not discriminate between combatants and noncombatants, between civilians and military. They kill anyone, anywhere, nearby. This is why they are not weapons of war. They are weapons of mass destruction.”

After more than 135 nations adopted the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in 2017, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

ICAN’s executive director, Beatrice Fihn, told Truthout that while the overall global number of nuclear weapons continues to gradually decline, those that remain are being modernized, upgraded and given new missions.

“The total number keeps going down very slowly … but they are also making these upgrades and alterations of nuclear weapons, which means that the qualitative impact of using them is not going down; rather the opposite — they’re planning for new types of nuclear warfare scenarios,” Fihn said. “It shows that they are expanding on the type of scenarios where they think that nuclear weapons can be used.”

As technology advances at a pace with which humans are struggling to keep up, Fihn worries that artificial intelligence, cyber warfare, autonomous weapons systems and other emerging technologies increase nuclear risks exponentially.

According to Fihn, the nuclear weapons industry has very successfully used the highly technical and complex nature of nuclear weapons to keep the general public in a state of feeling helpless and completely removed from the decision-making process.

In pursuing the nuclear ban treaty, ICAN is following the examples of successful campaigns that have led to the prohibition of biological and chemical weapons, landmines and cluster munitions. Fihn says there’s a need to strip nuclear weapons of the mystique of being viewed as a security tool with almost magical powers.

“As long as governments believe nuclear weapons are the ‘ultimate security guarantee,’ they won’t be abandoned,” says Fihn, adding that the commonly accepted notion that it’s necessary to maintain and modernize nuclear stockpiles runs counter to the idea of ridding the world of nuclear weapons.

To argue in favor of “keeping nuclear weapons until they are gone” is an incoherent argument, she says. To do so is to never give up nuclear weapons, Fihn argues. She believes nuclear weapons, like other weapons of mass destruction, need to be delegitimized.

The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, Fihn says, “is the vehicle where we stigmatize and reject nuclear weapons so that they are seen as unattractive, problematic, dangerous — what they actually are is a security threat to anyone who has them.”






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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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Trump ditching INF Treaty

SUBHEAD: Experts sound alarms after Trump confirms plans to ditch nuclear arms control treaty with Russia.

By Jessica Corbett on 20 October 2018 for Common Dreams -
(https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/10/20/colossal-mistake-experts-sound-alarms-after-trump-confirms-plans-ditch-nuclear-arms)


Image above: The US presidency wears down the occupant of the White House. Trump appears to have degenerated worse than most in less than two years in office. This photo of Trump was taken last Saturday. He looks unhealthy, worn out, disheveled and miserable. Who's doing his hair? From original article.

Trump says that he is abandoning the INF treaty, basically confirms a renewed arms race, and absolves himself from any responsibility to lead efforts to reduce nuclear tensions around the globe.

Concerns are mounting after President Donald Trump confirmed on Saturday that he will withdraw from a Cold War-era nuclear arms control treaty with Russia following reports that National Security Adviser John Bolton had been pushing the plan behind closed doors despite warnings from experts that ditching the agreement "would be reckless and stupid."

The Guardian had reported Friday that Bolton and an ally in the White House have been working to convince members of the administration to support the United States withdrawing from the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces treaty (INF) on the grounds that Russia is violating it. Nuclear arms control experts and others rapidly responded with alarm.

Many agreed that Russia's alleged violation "merits a strong response" but noted a withdrawal could alienate European allies and raise the chances of armed conflict.

The president's comments on Saturday spurred more alarm, with Daryl Kimball of the Arms Control Association calling the looming withdrawal "an epic mistake."

Jeffrey Lewis, the director of the East Asia nonproliferation program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey agreed. "This is a colossal mistake," he told the Guardian. "I doubt very much that the U.S. will deploy much that would have been prohibited by the treaty. Russia, though, will go gangbusters."

"By declaring he will leave the INF Treaty, President Trump has shown himself to be a demolition man who has no ability to build real security," responded Beatrice Fihn, executive director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. "Instead, by blowing up nuclear treaties he is taking the U.S. down a trillion dollar road to a new nuclear arms race."

Journalist Glenn Greenwald tied the update to broader narratives about the Trump administration's relationship with Russia, and in particular President Vladimir Putin:

This is a major (and dangerous) provocation toward Russia by Trump that - like his lethal arms to Ukraine, the bombing of Assad's forces, & sanctions/expulsions - should cause anyone who peddled the "Putin-controls-Trump-with- kompromat" conspiracy tripe to apologize in shame.

 Trump revealed his withdrawal plans to reporters after campaign event in Nevada on Saturday. "Russia has violated the agreement. They've been violating it for many years. I don't know why President [Barack] Obama didn't negotiate or pull out," he said. "And we're not going to let them violate a nuclear agreement and go out and do weapons [while] we're not allowed to."

While claiming he would be receptive if both Russia and China concluded, "'Let's all of us get smart and let's none of us develop those weapons," under current circumstances, Trump appears hellbent on making more weapons.

"If Russia's doing it and if China's doing it and we're adhering to the agreement, that's unacceptable," he said. "So we have a tremendous amount of money to play with with our military."

"We are going to terminate the agreement and we are going to develop the weapons. If we get smart and if others get smart, and say 'Let's not develop these horrible nuclear weapons,' I would be extremely happy with that," he added. "But as long as somebody's violating that agreement then we're not going to be the only ones to adhere to it."

The signing of the INF treaty during the nuclear arms race of the Cold War, as CNN pointed out, had "marked a watershed agreement."

It required both Russia and the United States to eliminate ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 300 and 3,400 miles.

The treaty "wasn't designed to solve all of our problems with the Soviet Union," but was "designed to provide a measure of some strategic stability on the continent of Europe," explained former State Department spokesman Rear Adm. John Kirby, now a CNN military and diplomatic analyst.

"I suspect our European allies right now are none too happy about hearing that President Trump intends to pull out of it."

Kingston Reif of the Arms Control Association outlined in a pair of tweets the impact a withdrawal could have on American foreign relations:

Our response to Russia’s INF Treaty violation shld be guided by the following:

• Ensure Russia doesn't gain a military advantage
• Keep allies on our side
• Ensure Russia left holding bag if treaty collapses
• Exhaust all diplomatic options

Withdrawal is not in keeping with these principles.

Withdrawal would make the problem far worse by:

• Removing all constraints on Russia’s production and fielding of the illegal 9M729 missile
• Dividing NATO
• Allowing Russia to blame US for killing the treaty
• Undermining US leverage to attempt to bring Russia back into compliance

And thanks to the president's warmonger of a national security adviser, the INF treaty isn't the only arms control agreement with Russia currently under threat of termination. As the Guardian reported:

Bolton and the top arms control adviser in the National Security Council (NSC), Tim Morrison, are also opposed to the extension of another major pillar of arms control, the 2010 New Start agreement with Russia, which limited the number of deployed strategic warheads on either side to 1,550. That agreement, signed by Barack Obama and Dmitri Medvedev, then president of Russia, is due to expire in 2021. 

"This is the most severe crisis in nuclear arms control since the 1980s," said Malcolm Chalmers, the deputy director general of the Royal United Services Institute. "If the INF treaty collapses, and with the New Start treaty on strategic arms due to expire in 2021, the world could be left without any limits on the nuclear arsenals of nuclear states for the first time since 1972."

Responding to the developments in a series of tweets, Alexandra Bell, a former senior arms control official at the State Department who is now at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, said:

"Trump says that he is abandoning the INF treaty, basically confirms a renewed arms race, and absolves himself from any responsibility to lead efforts to reduce nuclear tensions around the globe."

"This administration has damaged, perhaps irreparably, an international order that has served U.S. interests for decades, turned a blind eye to catastrophic climate change, corroded our govt, [and] poisoned our national discourse," she added. "Now it will ask you to fund a nuclear arms race..

Egomania and Bad Taste

SUBHEAD: Trump hangs ‘Tacky’ fantasy painting of himself with former GOP presidents in White House.

By Maxwell Tani & Tracy Conner on 14 October 2018 for the Daily Beast -
(https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-hangs-tacky-fantasy-painting-of-himself-with-gop-presidents-in-white-house)


Image above: Painting by Andy Thomas of "The Republican Club", with the addition of Donald Trump. A print now hangs in the White House. From original article.

President Trump’s latest addition to White House decor is a kitschy fantasy painting that shows him relaxing with Republican presidents of the past—an update to a best-selling image commonly found in tourist gift shops and online galleries.

The print, “The Republican Club” by Andy Thomas, could be seen in the background of a photo tweeted by 60 Minutes, which aired an interview with Trump on Sunday night.

It shows a slimmed-down Trump sandwiched between Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, directly across from Abraham Lincoln. Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and both Bushes are also in the imaginary scene.

Amateur art critics sneered on social media that the artwork was “tacky,” “a travesty,” or “blasphemy.” Some said it looked like the political version of the famous “dogs playing poker” painting.

But one person was thrilled to learn that it was hanging on the wall of Trump’s office—the artist himself.

Thomas told The Daily Beast that Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), a fan of the artist’s work, gave the print to Trump.

“He had actually given a me real gracious call to tell me how much he liked it,” Thomas said of Trump. “He was very complimentary. He made a comment that he’d seen a lot of paintings of himself and he rarely liked them.”

The painting is the latest in a well-known series by Thomas that depicts past presidents from each party hanging out together. Thomas’ first, which was finished in 2008, included Republicans—minus Trump—playing poker. A subsequent portrait showed Democratic presidents playing pool.

When Thomas decided to add the current president, he said, he found “Trump hard to paint” because of his skin tone and smile, but made him the center of attention anyway.

He said that as far as he knows, no other president has his artwork. He said Issa has both the Democratic and Republican prints hanging in his office and commissioned a portrait of himself from Thomas, who also paints cowboys.

“He’s a really friendly guy and he said, ‘If I get a chance, I’m going to show this to Donald,’” Thomas said.

Still he never expected Trump would call to thank him and was shocked when his wife told him he should be home at a certain time for a call.

“You can’t imagine how happy that made me,” he said.

Thomas stressed that while the painting with Trump is getting the most attention, his presidential art is bipartisan. And he said he didn’t want to discuss his own political views.

“I challenge people to look at the paintings and see if they can figure it out,” he said.

Other cosmetic changes Trump has been made to the White House have also been panned, with detractors calling them “drab” and “gaudy.”

In an effort to make the West Wing less of what he described as a “dump,” last year Trump redecorated the Oval Office with gold drapes and gold-hued upholstery.

And to ensure no one forgets about his electoral accomplishments, a map of results of his 2016 victory is hanging in the West Wing.


Image above: Born in 1844, Cassius Marcellus Coolidge first painted dogs playing poker in 1894. This one is titled "A Friend in Need". From (http://www.warmunart.com/story-dogs-playing-poker-painting-series/).

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SCOTUS halts youth climate case

SUBHEAD: With Kavanaugh in place on Supreme Court likely to close lawsuit against fed not controlling greenhouse gases.

By Jessica Corbetton 20 October 2018 for Common Dreams -
(https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/10/20/disgraceful-and-enraging-supreme-court-halts-youth-climate-case-after-last-ditch)


Image above: Demonstration in April 2017 in St. Paul MN by children wanting Federal Government take responsibility for not controlling greenhouse gases and imperiling life their lives. From original article.

In a move author and activist Naomi Klein denounced as "disgraceful and enraging," the U.S. Supreme Court has halted a lawsuit brought by 21 American children and young adults that aims to hold the federal government accountable for its ongoing failure to adequately curb greenhouse gas emissions to battle the global climate crisis.

The decision came in response to a last-ditch effort by the Trump administration to kill the "potentially landmark" case ahead of the trial slated to begin in the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon on Oct. 29.

The case has been tied up in the legal system for three years. Just this week, District Court Judge Ann Aiken reaffirmed that the youth plaintiffs can credibly claim that the government has violated their due process rights.

The Supreme Court, however, stayed discovery and the trial in an order (pdf) issued Friday, demanding a response from the plaintiffs' legal counsel by Wednesday afternoon.

Michael Gerrard, director of Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia, called the move "highly unusual" and "reminiscent of their stay of the Clean Power Plan."

Farron Cousins, a radio host and executive editor of The Trial Lawyer magazine, tied the development to the upcoming midterms, tweeting:

There was one glimmer of hope this week when this case was allowed to proceed to trial, and in an instant, this guy took it away. Future generations are getting screwed, and I hope they remember who did this. Vote like your life depends on it! https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/2018/10/19/supreme-court-kids-climate-case-roberts/ …

While the high court's one-page order provoked public outrage, Julia Olson of Our Children's Trust, co-counsel for the youth plaintiffs, remained optimistic and said the team plans to file their reply on Monday.

"We are confident once Chief [John] Justice Roberts and the full court receive the youth plaintiffs' response to defendants' mischaracterization of their case, the trial will proceed," she said.

"As the Supreme Court has recognized in innumerable cases, review of constitutional questions is better done on a full record where the evidence is presented and weighed by the trier of fact. This case is about already recognized fundamental rights and children's rights of equal protection under the law."

As E&E News noted, "Roberts' action came hours after Jeffrey Wood, a top political appointee at the Department of Justice, said there is no such right. Speaking at a law conference in San Diego, Wood said the right to a safe climate that the plaintiffs demand 'simply does not exist,' adding that the government is still preparing for trial."

Several observers pointed out that the Supreme Court had previously allowed the case to proceed, back before the contentious new Justice Brett Kavanaugh replaced now-retired Anthony Kennedy. Environmental attorney Jeffrey Gracer remarked: "A newly configured Supreme Court seems poised to close the courthouse doors. But the tide of #ClimateAction cannot be stopped."

Jeffrey Gracer tweeted;

Justice Kennedy previously denied a stay in this climate change case brought by children who simply want their day in court. A newly configured Supreme Court seems poised to close the courthouse doors. But the tide of #ClimateAction cannot be stopped.

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Case against Trump proceeding 10/18/18
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Case against Trump proceeding

SUBHEAD: Blockbuster ruling on Children's Climate Change suit will proceed to trial October 29th.

By Julia Conley on 16 October 2018 for Common Dreams  -
(https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/10/16/blockbuster-ruling-judge-says-youths-climate-case-against-trump-administration-can)


Image above: A young gird holds a poster of Planet Earth supporting children's lawsuit.  From original article.

Twenty-one children and young adults were looking forward on Tuesday to bringing their climate lawsuit against the federal government to trial in the coming weeks, following a U.S. District Court ruling arguing that the plaintiffs have made a convincing case that the Trump and Obama administrations have failed to curb carbon emissions even as they knew of the pollution's myriad harmful effects.

Judge Ann Aiken handed down the ruling late Monday in a court in Eugene, Oregon, affirming that the plaintiffs can credibly claim that their due process rights have been violated by the government and fossil fuel companies—an argument the young people are more than ready to make in court starting October 29, when the case is set to go to trial.

Following the decision, 21-year-old Tia Hatton said in a statement, "My fellow plaintiffs and I have our eyes set on one thing: our trial date...We—my lawyers, our experts, and my co-plaintiffs and I—are ready to make our case against the U.S. federal government and their deliberate energy policy that cause catastrophic climate change."

The lawsuit, Juliana vs. The United States, was first filed in 2015 under the Obama administration, with the 21 plaintiffs, then ranging in age from eight to 19, arguing with the help of Our Children's Trust that the government's actions that have worsened carbon emissions have "violated the youngest generation’s constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property, as well as failed to protect essential public trust resources."

The children pointed to increasingly frequent and destructive extreme weather events, rising sea levels, and droughts in their hometowns across the U.S. as evidence of their claim, and since then have called expert witnesses including climate scientist James Hansen and economist Joseph Stiglitz to bolster their case.

The young people "proffered uncontradicted evidence showing that the government has historically known about the dangers of greenhouse gases but has continued to take steps promoting a fossil fuel based energy system, thus increasing greenhouse gas emissions," said Aiken in her ruling.

Aiken dismissed President Donald Trump as a defendant in the lawsuit, but she did so "without prejudice"—meaning the youths can bring a case against him later on. Other Trump administration officials who head government agencies can still be named in the current case.

"The District Court continues to provide well-reasoned decisions that narrow and appropriately frame the heart of this case for trial," said Julia Olson, executive director of Our Children's Trust. "We are ready to bring all of the facts forward and prove these youths' case once and for all."

The federal government has for three years attempted to have the case dismissed by arguing that extreme weather events and pollution levels happen around the world, not only in the U.S., and that, as one Justice Department lawyer put it in 2016, "There simply is no constitutional right to a pollution-free environment." Aiken vehemently rejected the argument:

Where a complaint alleges knowing governmental action is affirmatively and substantially damaging the climate system in a way that will cause human deaths, shorten human lifespans, result in widespread damage to property, threaten human food sources, and dramatically alter the planet's ecosystem, it states a claim for a due process violation. To hold otherwise would be to say that the Constitution affords no protection against a government's knowing decision to poison the air its citizens breathe or the water its citizens drink.

"Judge Aiken's blockbuster decision lays out in extremely precise detail the factual and legal issues in our case which remain to be resolved at trial," Alex Loznak, a 21-year-old plaintiff, said.

"Having contributed extensive personal testimony and research to help develop our case's factual record over the past several years, I am confident that our arguments on the remaining disputed issues will ultimately prevail in court. We still need a full and fair trial to prove our case. October 29, here we come!"

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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Kavanaugh to Earth - "Drop Dead!"

SUBHEAD: Supreme Court lets stand an anti-EPA decision written by then Judge Kavanaugh.

By Jay Michaelson on 10 October 2018 for The Daily Beast -
(https://www.thedailybeast.com/kavanaugh-and-supreme-court-to-planet-drop-dead)


Image above: Illustration of grumpy, bitter Burt O'Kavanaugh smelling coal burning smokestacks. From original article.

In the same week that the world’s scientists declared global climate disruption has reached a “point of no return”, the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, and the Trump administration all agreed to do nothing about it.

On Monday, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a special report describing the effects of climate change that are already being felt today, and the disastrous effects that could come as soon as 2040 absent dramatic action.

Then on Tuesday, the Supreme Court, at the request of the Trump administration, dismissed an appeal of a D.C. Circuit decision that prevented the EPA from regulating a powerful greenhouse gas.

The author of that decision: Judge Kavanaugh.

For anyone waiting for the impact now-Justice Kavanaugh will have on the Supreme Court, you need wait no longer.

While Kavanaugh was not involved in the decision to dismiss this case, it is his opinion is now the law of the land — and is it a disaster for the environment.

David Doniger, who had argued the case for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement that “Coming only a day after the world’s leading climate scientists called for urgent action to curb dangerous carbon pollution, the court’s decision lets irresponsible companies continue harming our planet.”

The regulation in question dates back to the good old days when the EPA accepted the global consensus of climate scientists that manmade gas emissions are causing the earth’s atmosphere to trap more heat – a phenomenon that, among other things, enabled life on earth to develop 2.5 billion years ago, but which is now causing the Earth’s climate to warm at a breakneck pace unlike anything in the history of the planet.

Among the gases doing the most damage are hydrofluorocarbons.

While HFCs are helpful in preventing ozone loss (they replaced chlorofluorocarbons, which cause it), they are nasty greenhouse gases – nicknamed “super-pollutants” because each molecule causes around 14,000 times as much warming as a CO2 molecule. And they are ubiquitous, found in millions of household products from air conditioners to hairspray.

So, in 2015, the EPA effectively banned companies from using HFC in their products when alternatives were available. A consortium of industries sued – although since the leading HFC alternative is manufactured by Honeywell, Inc., it sided with environmentalists.

In August, 2017, the D.C. Circuit court struck down the regulation, in a 2-1 opinion written by Kavanaugh. The court held that while the relevant provision of the Clean Air Act gave the EPA authority to ban ozone-depleting chemicals, it could not ban the replacements for those chemicals, such as HFCs.

That suited the Trump-era EPA just fine; they were planning to roll back the HFC regulations, part of Obama’s Climate Action Plan, anyway.

And so while Honeywell and environmental groups appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, the EPA filed a memo arguing that since they weren’t going to regulate HFCs anyway, there would be no point in the Court taking the case.

The Court agreed today – which makes sense, really. There would be little point going through the effort of a Supreme Court briefing, argument, and decision process if, at the end of the day, the regulation is doomed anyway. So they dismissed the case.

The larger contexts, of course, are Kavanaugh and climate change.

Kavanaugh’s opinion in Mexichem Fluor vs. EPA is the perfect example of his view that agencies may not act without specific statutory authority.

That sounds like a neutral principle, but in practice, it would spell the end for a huge swath of environmental, health, safety, labor, financial, commercial, and other regulations.

Congress has neither the time nor the expertise to specify every consequence of every law it passes.

That’s why it delegates that level of decision-making to agencies, who have teams of experts (until the Trump administration, anyway) to work out the details.

In the case of HFCs, the EPA noted that it had the authority to replace ozone-depleting chemicals with “safe substitutes.” HFCs, it said, are unsafe, because they are climate change super-pollutants. But Judge Kavanaugh called this a “novel reading” of the statute and struck down the regulations.




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Trump in your face

SUBHEAD: Local governments, corporations, organizations and individuals need  push back against Trump.

By Juan Wilson on 9 October 2018 for Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2018/10/trump-in-your-face.html)


Image above: The test message from President Trump to all cell phones as illustrated by FEMA. From (https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/02/politics/cell-phone-presidential-alert-fema/index.html).

A week ago today FEMA was used to send a test "Trump Alert" message to all US cell phones capable of receiving it. Thank God I have no "smart" phone to be so imposed on by a tyrannical egoist.

From CNN:

The "presidential alert" headed to Americans' cell phones won't actually be written by President Donald Trump, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said Tuesday.

Wednesday afternoon's message is the first nationwide test of the system built by the government and cell phone carriers to push an emergency message to nearly all cell phones in the US, a senior FEMA official told reporters on a Tuesday conference call.

Despite the name, "the president will not originate this alert, say, from his mobile device," the official said. "You would not have a situation where any sitting president would wake up one morning and attempt to send a particular message."

That name had generated questions about how and when the system can be used. The official said the uses are limited, such as to a "coordinated attack on our major cities across the country" or "some other type of public peril that is ongoing in the country at the time."

The FEMA official spoke to reporters on a conference call the agency arranged on the condition of anonymity. FEMA did not elaborate on why the official could not be named.
 
The official said the system includes safeguards. In a real emergency, a FEMA official using a device "very similar to a laptop computer" will receive information from multiple federal agencies and the White House, and select one of several pre-written messages and update it to fit the circumstances.

The system requires passwords and the text will be "checked by two people before that message is sent. 

Donald Trump's first 'Presidential Alert,' an unblockable wireless alert warning to cellphones in the United States, was deployed last Wednesday, October 2nd at 11:18 a.m. PT/2:18 p.m. ET.

"THIS IS A TEST of the National Wireless Emergency Alert System. No action is needed,"

No emergency, just testing. Now a group of New Yorkers are suing the President and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to stop the new practice, which many fear Trump will abuse.

From CNET:

Three New York residents last week filed a lawsuit in the Southern District Court of New York against President Donald Trump and William Long, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The residents want to halt FEMA's new Presidential Alert messaging system, which enables Trump to deploy alerts of national emergencies.

"Plaintiffs are American citizens who do not wish to receive text messages, or messages of any kind, on any topic or subject, from defendant Trump," the lawsuit (posted below) reads. "[Trump's] rise to power was facilitated by weaponized disinformation that he broadcast into the public information sphere via Twitter in addition to traditional mass media."

The White House, FEMA, and plaintiffs didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.

(..) The plaintiffs' main complaint is that Presidential Alerts are compulsory -- there's no way to opt-out of receiving them. They argue that under civil rights law, government cannot use cellular devices to compel listening, "trespass into and hijack" devices without a warrant or individual consent.

The plaintiffs are also concerned Trump might use the alerts to spread disinformation because IPAWS doesn't regulate the content of the messages. That means Trump may be free to define "act of terrorism" and "threat to public safety," and may broadcast "arbitrary, biased, irrational" messages to "hundreds of millions of people," the plaintiffs say in the lawsuit.

If you do not think this is an unwarranted intrusion you've already taken the "Blue Pill" from the Matrix and everything is just fine:

"You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember: all I'm offering is the truth. Nothing more."

If you have read Ea O Ka Aina: Final call to save the world (10/8/18) and Ea O Ka Aina: Scientists outline paths to survival (10/4/18) then you know that Donald Trump will be in office and and in a daze of self delusion until it is too late to save the "Earth" from a transition to what Bill MCKibben has named "Eaarth"- a planet inhospitable to life as we know it.

States, counties, municipalities, corporations, organizations and individuals need to act on their own to push back against Trump's stranglehold on federal regulations and activities. For the moment the nation is lost. Trump has embraced worldwide extinction for a moment in the spotlight and in your face.

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Trump expects the Earth will boil

SUBHEAD: His administration expects the planet is going to experience temperature rise of 7ºF and doesn't care.

By Bill McKibbon on 2 October 2018 for the Guardian -
(https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/02/trump-administration-planet-boil-refugee-camps)


Image above: Trees silhouetted by flames in recent out of control wild fire in California seen in Washington Post article dated 9/28/18 titled "Trump administration sees a 7-degree rise in global temperatures by 2100". From (https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/trump-administration-sees-a-7-degree-rise-in-global-temperatures-by-2100/2018/09/27/b9c6fada-bb45-11e8-bdc0-90f81cc58c5d_story.html).

In the cloud of toxic dust thrown up by the Kavanaugh hearings last week, two new Trump initiatives slipped by with less notice than they deserve. Both are ugly, stupid – and they are linked, though in ways not immediately apparent.

In the first, the administration provided the rationale for scrapping President Obama’s automobile mileage standards: because Trump’s crew now officially expects the planet to warm by 4C . In the environmental impact statement they say it wouldn’t make much difference to the destruction of the planet if we all keep driving SUVs.

The news in that statement is that administration officials serenely contemplate that 4C rise (twice the last-ditch target set at the Paris climate talks). Were the world to actually warm that much, it would be a literal hell, unable to maintain civilizations as we have known them.

But that’s now our policy, and it apparently rules out any of the actions that might, in fact, limit that warming. You might as well argue that because you’re going to die eventually, there’s no reason not to smoke a carton of cigarettes a day.

Meanwhile, reporters also discovered that the administration has set up what can only be described as a concentration camp near the Mexican border for detained migrant children, spiriting them under cover of darkness from the foster homes and small shelters across the nation where they had been staying.

Not an extermination camp – these aren’t Nazis – but a camp that literally concentrates this “problem” in one place: a tent city in the middle of the desert. Schooling is not available there, as it was in the shelters they came from; instead the kids are given “workbooks that they have no obligation to complete. Access to legal services is limited.”

That camp is linked to climate change because, first, it’s in a desert. If you searched high and low across the North American continent, you could barely find a place hotter and drier than Tornillo, Texas, where in June the average high is 96F and where, as one climate data source succinctly puts it, “there is virtually no rainfall during the year”.

But the link goes much deeper. Most of those migrants are from Central America and Mexico, and they might as easily be described as refugees fleeing gang violence (much of it rooted originally in the US) and a changing climate. Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras first saw an outbreak of coffee rust linked to higher nighttime temperatures; the El Niño that began in 2015 led to years of unprecedented drought.

Deep new droughts this summer wiped out more harvests: “total or partial loss of crops means that subsistence farmers and their families will not have enough food to eat or sell in coming months,” the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization warned.

The author Todd Miller, writing in the Nation, described meeting men trying to jump a train in Guatemala headed north toward the border. “When I asked why they were heading for the United States, one responded simply, “No hubo lluvia.” (“There was no rain.”)

This will, of course, get steadily worse in the years ahead – every climate forecast shows deserts spreading and water evaporating across the region. And of course more migration will follow, in every corner of the world.

The World Bank predicts we may see 140 million climate migrants before long, and given the chaos that even a million people fleeing the (partially drought-fueled) crisis in Syria created, we better come to grips.

Some of that migration will be internal – perhaps six million people will abandon their coastal property in Florida alone, according to recent reports. And much of it will be international, as people flee because their lives depend on it.

And telling people to stay home is not a moral option, either. Because the climate chaos setting off waves of refugees is born above all from the unconstrained migration of carbon dioxide molecules from America over the last century.

No wall can prevent the exhaust from our armada of oversized cars from raising the temperature in Mexico; if Guatemala could ship its changed climate back north it doubtless would, but it can’t.

We have to realize that global warming stems from the fact that we are a world without atmospheric borders, where the people who have done the least to cause the problem feel its horrors first and hardest.

That’s why, over the last half-decade, the environmental and migrant-rights movement have grown ever closer.

The Trump years are a fantasy land where we pretend we can go on living precisely as in the past, unwilling even to substitute electric SUVs for our gas guzzlers, and able to somehow insist that the rest of the world stay locked in place as well.

It’s impractical, it’s unfair, and when it ends up with camps for kids in the desert it’s downright evil.



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Winners will lose - Losers will win

SUBHEAD: The consolation, perhaps, is that there will be plenty for all those who survive the collapse.

By James Kunstler on 20 August 2018 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-winners-will-lose-and-the-losers-will-win/)


Image above: Detail of poster for the 1949 movie "The Life of Riley" based on the popular radio show and later hit 1950's TV show. From (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0041590/).

Who doesn’t want to think that they are a good human being? That they are a person of good intentions, clear conscience, fair-minded, generous, loving, and merciful? On the other hand, who wants to be a loser?

The current political predicament in the USA has America’s winners turned losers and the consequent pain of that flip-flop has propelled the new designated losers into a fury of moral indignation.

The deplorable Trump insurgents were supposed to be put in their place on November 8, 2016 — stuffed back into their reeking WalMarts — but instead, their champion with his gold-plated hair-do presides over the nation in the house where Lincoln, The Roosevelts, and Hillary lived. “Winning…!” as the new president likes to tweet.

What a revoltin’ development, as Chester A. Riley used to say on “The Life of Riley” TV show back in 1955, when America was great (at least that’s the theory). Riley was an original deplorable before the concept even emerged from the murk of early pop culture.

He worked in an aircraft factory somewhere in southern California, which only a few decades prior was the mecca of an earlier generations of losers: the Oakies and other Dust Bowl refugees who went west to pick fruit or get into the movies.

Chester A. Riley supported a family on that job as a wing-riveter. All the male characters in the series had been through the Second World War, but were so far removed from the horror that the audience never heard about it.

That was the point: to forget all that gore and get down with the new crazes for backyard barbeque, seeing the USA in your Chevrolet, enjoying that healthful pack of Lucky Strikes in the valley of the Jolly Green Giant… double your pleasure, double your fun… and away go troubles down the drain….

As Tom Wolfe pointed out eons ago, the most overlooked feature of post-war American life was the way that the old US peasantry found themselves living higher on the hog than Louis the XVI and his court at Versailles.

Hot and cold running water, all the deliciously engineered Betty Crocker cake you could eat, painless dentistry, and Yankees away games on Channel 11, with Pabst Blue Ribbon by the case! By 1960 or so, along came color TV and air-conditioning, and in places like Atlanta, St. Louis, and Little Rock, you barely had to go outside anymore, thank God! No more heat stroke, hookworm, or chiggers.

It was a helluva lot better than earlier peasant classes had it, for sure, but let’s face it: it was kind of a low-grade nirvana. And a couple of generations beyond “The Life of Riley” the whole thing has fallen apart.

There are few hands-on jobs that allow a man to support a family. And what would we even mean by that? Stick the women back in kitchen and the laundry room?

What a waste of human capital (even for socialists who oppose capital). The odd thing is that there is increasingly little for this class of people to do besides stand near the door of the WalMart, and if the vaunted tech entrepreneurs of this land have their way with robotics, you can be sure there would be less than nothing for them to do… except crawl off and die quietly, without leaving an odoriferous mess.

What political commentator has failed to notice that the supposed savior of this peasant class is himself a sort of shabby version of Louis XVI, with his gilded toilet seats, brand-name pomp, and complex hair?

A happy peasantry needs a good king, and that is the role Mr. Trump seems to have cast himself in. I assume that he wants very earnestly to be considered a good person, though all his efforts to demonstrate that have been startlingly clumsy and mostly ineffective.

The one thing he has truly accomplished is driving his opponents in the overclass out of their gourds with loathing and resentment. (The term, overclass was minted, I believe by the excellent essayist Michael Lind.)

It’s a wonderfully inclusive term in that it describes basically everyone who is not in the underclass — that now-dreadful realm of tattooed diabetics moiling in the war memorial auditoriums and minor league ball parks for their hero and leader to descend like Deus ex Machina in the presidential helicopter to remind them how much they’re winning.

Meanwhile, the class of former winners-turned-losers — the Silicon Valley executives, the Hollywood movers and shakers, the Brooklyn Hipsters, the Ivy League faculties, the Deep State guideline writers, the K-Street consultants, the yoga ladies of Fairfield County, Connecticut, the acolytes of Oprah Winfrey and Elizabeth Warren — resort to righteous litigation in their crusade to restore the proper order of rule in this land. When they come to power, the shining city will be at hand….

I kind of doubt it. The truth is, all current winners and losers are living in the shadow of a financial system that doesn’t really work anymore, because it doesn’t represent the reality of wealth that is no longer there.

The consolation, perhaps, is that there will be plenty for all those who survive the collapse of that system to do when the time comes.

But it will be in a disposition of things and of power that we can’t possibly recognize from where we stand these days.

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Displacement Syndrome Anatomy

SUBHEAD: USA facilities around the country working around the clock to penetrate foreign computer defenses.

By James Kunstler on 20 July 2018 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/anatomy-of-a-displacement-projection-syndrome/)


Image above: Small portion of the NSA Data Center in Bluffdale, Utah. This facility is reportedly capable of storing all electronic communications in the United States. From (http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2015/07/31/report-utah-cops-get-1m-a-year-to-park-at-nsa-data-center).

“For more than a decade, Russia has meddled in elections around the world, supported brutal dictators and invaded sovereign nations — all to the detriment of United States interests.”
— The New York Times

The Resistance sure got a case of the vapors this week over Mr. Trump’s failure to throttle America’s arch-enemy, the murderous thug V. Putin of Russia, onstage in Helsinki, as any genuine Marvel Comix hero is expected to do when facing consummate evil.

Instead, the Golden Golem of Greatness voiced some doubts about the veracity of our “intelligence community” — as the shape-shifting Moloch of black ops likes to call itself, as if it were a kindly service organization in Mr. Rogers neighborhood, collecting dimes for victims of childhood cancer.

If I may be frank, the US Intel community looks like a much bigger threat to American life and values than anything Mr. Putin is doing, for instance his alleged “meddling” in US elections.

This word, meddling, absolutely pervades the captive Resistance news outlets these days. It has a thrilling vagueness about it, intimating all kinds of dark deeds without specifying anything, as consorting with Satan once did in our history.

The reason: the only specific acts associated with this meddling include the disclosure of incriminating emails among the Democratic National Committee leadership, and a tiny gang of Facebook trolls making sport of profoundly idiotic and dysfunctional American electoral politics.

The brief against Russia also contains vague accusations of “aggression.” It is hard to discern what is meant by that — though it apparently warms the heart of American war hawks and their paymasters in the warfare industries. They allege that Russia “stole” Crimea from Ukraine. Consider: Crimea had been a province of Russia since the 1700s.

Ukraine itself was a province of the USSR when Nikita Khrushchev put Crimea under Ukraine’s administrative control in 1956, a relationship which became obviously problematic after the breakup of the soviet mega-state in 1990 — and became even more of a problem when the US State Department and our CIA stage-managed a coup against the Russia-leaning Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych in 2014. Crimea is the site of Russia’s only warm water naval bases.

Do you suppose that even an experience American CIA analyst might understand that Russia would under no circumstances give up those assets?

Please, grow up.

Does anyone remember the explicit promise that US Government gave the transitional leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, that NATO would not expand into the countries of eastern Europe formerly under soviet control? NATO now includes the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, and Montenegro.

Is anyone aware that NATO has been staging war games on Russia’s border the past several years? Do you suppose this might be disturbing to the Russians, who lost at least 20 million dead when Germany crossed that border in 1941?

As to the thug-and-murderer charge against V. Putin, has any news org actually published a list of his alleged victims? It’s very likely, of course, that Mr. Putin has had some of his political enemies killed. I wouldn’t take the “con” side of that argument.

But I’d be interested in seeing an authoritative list, if the intel community has one (and why wouldn’t they?).

I imagine it doesn’t exceed two dozen individuals. How many innocent bystanders did President Obama kill during the drone attack spree of his second term, when our rockets blew up wedding parties and sandwich shops in faraway lands. In 2016, The Atlantic published this:

One campaign, Operation Haymaker, took place in northeastern Afghanistan. Between January 2012 and February 2013, The Intercept reported, “U.S. special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. During one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets.”

I suppose the excuse is that none of this was personal — as V. Putin’s alleged murders were. No, it wasn’t personal. It was worse than that.

It was a bunch of military video-game jocks sitting around an air-conditioned bunker eating hot pockets and slurping slurpees while snuffing out lives by remote control twelve-thousand miles away. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were high-fiving each other with every hit, too.

As for “hacking” of elections, do you suppose for minute that we do not have hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of computer techies at our many sprawling NSA facilities around the country working around the clock to penetrate foreign computer defenses absolutely everywhere, among friend and foe alike? And that we are not trying to influence the outcomes of their political struggles in our favor?

Go a step further: do you suppose those US “intel community” hackers are not also collecting information about American citizens, including yourself?

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