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United State of Terror: Is Drone War Fair?

Monday, April 24, 2017

On Earth Day Global Lies Zing Science.

Just because we could doesn't mean that we should.

As a celebration of  Earth Day, thousands of San Diegans crowded downtown, coming together, not so much to celebrate our good, once-green, earth, as to repudiate the anti-science stance of many of our current administration's henchmen and policies:

“The march is an incredible opportunity to celebrate the central role that science plays in our daily lives,” the center said in a release. “It's a family-friendly, nonpartisan event with the goal of raising awareness of the contributions of science to society and the importance of supportive public policy.”

For me, as well as millions of others, science represents the shining of a light into the deep dark recesses of the brain wherein lie superstition and ignorance, the result of flat-out lies adults taught to us as children. But science gave us a view of reality more consistent with our own observations as opposed to the dogmatic religious pronunciations and "call to Prayer" that worked about as well as letters to Santa Claus.

That shouldn't, however, keep us from noticing that there would be no need of an "Earth Day" to rally citizens of the world together to stop its destruction if it weren't for science. We know how Democracy led to an undeniable boon to the human psyche, personal freedom, and economic opportunity of those fortunate enough to live under its sway, but we also know it has not had such a sanguine effect on those who got in its way. The Indian Wars in America, for example, was comprised of nearly 250 years of bloody one-sided combat waged until the last of the hostile tribes were either rounded up, starved out, their food sources having been deliberately eradicated, or run to ground in shallow canyons wherein they were killed outright, women and children specifically targeted for extermination.

During most of the period, by slave-owning citizens of a freedom-loving country.

It was an historical feat that Hitler used as his own plans for  extermination took form in his head. His Final Solution was intended to be only the first phase of a vast, megalomaniacal project of privation and enslavement; of murder and colonization modeled on the historic colonization of North America by 19'th century imperialism, only modernized with scientific theories of eugenics and blitzkrieg invasions perpetrated with mechanized armamentaria.

But just as most of the gatherers on Earth Day were unaware of the direct connection between Democracy and The Final Solution, they were also unaware of an equally direct connection between the Industrial Revolution, based entirely on the new-found discoveries of science, and Climate Change, Global Warming, and the end of the world as we've known it.

So intent were they on their "goal of raising awareness of the contributions of science to society", that even on Earth Day, they remained steadfastly determined to never mention the contributions of science to Global Warming: No science (I know, impossible, even medieval stumblings in the dark were still science), no industrial revolution, which is the exact turning point in mankind's history when loading of the atmosphere with carbon began.  The acceleration really took place for good during and after WW2. But what was a spike then is merely run of the mill now. WW2 levels of unfettered carbon exhaust into the atmosphere is now a constant.

The one enabling factor? Science.

What keeps those engines of globalization chugging across vast oceans powered by burning the dirtiest bunker fuel imaginable, soon to be plying the open waters of a melted Arctic? Science. The never-ending panoply of chemical weapons of mass destruction built, deployed and dropped on an ongoing basis around the world? Science. Chemical waste dumps, slag heaps, toxic sludge, oceanic dead zones and acidification, melting polar ice-caps, smog, automobile deaths, overpopulation, jet lag and Caitlin Jenner? Science.

So whereas, “The march", may indeed be, "an incredible opportunity to celebrate the central role that science plays in our daily lives,” it should not be forgotten, being Earth Day and all,  that it should also be used to castigate the central role that science has played in destroying lives and the environment, and the central role it plays in enabling the very destruction that Earth Day was initiated to highlight. (It was, after all, born as a result of Rachel Carson's, "A Silent Spring", itself a howl of anguish raised by the unprecedented destruction of the environment by DDT, a deliberately deadly product of Science, manufactured with one object in mind: to kill).












Thursday, April 20, 2017

Is the News Reel: Actual Footage vs. Talking Heads.


 “The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client.”
William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch


 Perhaps it was 9/11 with those endless replay of the same footage over and over and over again. Or maybe it had started earlier and it only became apparent in retrospect, but somewhere along the way (as a result, I suspect, of the CNN-ization of what we still call news) whether it is breaking/broken, news became propagandized. The latter always being the case in time of War, and we are currently always at war. Yet the corollary, that we are constantly fed propaganda, has been (like may things that no one likes to admit, is a result of He who must be obeyed, The Reality TV star Donald Duck Trump, or Baby Huey and The (Fake) News), completely ignored for fifteen years, except by programs on Comedy Central, such as The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, who proudly boasted that his show propagated Fake News, when it in fact was the only source, for a while, of a different view than the Completely Corporate-owned MSM's pasteurized product, one that went right past your eyes without any of the discernment citizens in a Democracy needs to exercise if it is to remain one.

One of the none too subtle ways they did this was via the replacement of footage with talking heads who explained the news to you and exactly what you should think about it, rather than presenting it and allowing the viewers to form their own opinion from the displayed facts. Now, there's nothing that comes closer to being pure propaganda than those pre-movie News Reels that were played during WW2, yet they now stand out for one important attribute: while the narrator voiced over all the footage of what we now like to call "events on the ground", those events were actually being simultaneously displayed. Now the only thing we have going on simultaneously is the ticker tape at the bottom of the screen that has nothing whatsoever to do with what's being proffered by a photogenic infotainer posing as a journalist.

Also, being as it was a time of war, the milieu of what was reported was often outside the US, but now, unless it is War, sports, or a climate-change-charged weather event, there is no longer any foreign news, sports apparently being that much more important to expanding our understanding of the dynamics of how our world is faring than footage of what is going on in the world outside our borders.

Yet, on just one of the blogs I like to peruse everyday, Yves Smith's Naked Capitalism,  there are references, in stories that are not just tangentially important, to China, Russia, Syria, France, Britain, Korea, and India, just to name those I remember from today's post off the top of my head. That even two of these would get airtime on a TV news show would invariably mean that there is a conflict brewing or that one has already started.

I'm sure you've seen those interview shows where the reporter goes out on the street and asks passersby where such-and-such a country is and we all laugh in derision at the profound ignorance of the GP (that being the General Public) to the world around them, and the blame is always laid on the educational system. I disagree. I received the dubious honor of being granted Harvard's Tortoise Award, for taking 32 years to finish my Bachelor's Degree; what taking that long taught me was that there are things we learn in school, which we finish around age 18/22, that we never revisit again, and without continuing education for everyone, the only resource to refresh our learning is the News, which at one time wasn't just an arm of the Military/Corporate/(Here I was going to put government as the third member of this triumvirate, but that is all it's devolved into, a military/corporate entity that no longer has any function separate from these two conglomerations) power, but helped elucidate and enlighten, but now more often is involved in deliberate obfuscation and sowing seeds of confusion in its viewers' heads. Geography is therefore never a subject until or unless it's to explain the military's newly formed necessity to deploy troops there (well, not troops exactly, our armed personnel have been reduced to being referred to as footwear, so they are only "boots on the ground", deployed to foreign climes where they invariably leave empty, bloody booties on the ground) or a hurricane has ripped through, an avalanche has mowed down, or hail the size of baseballs has pummeled it to a pulp. Otherwise anything New that has happened anywhere else is not newsworthy.

That is why the GP, whose ignorance we like to chuckle about and shake our heads at, is so clueless about the state of the world around them, the fourth estate no longer goes forth to state what they've witnessed, but stays in its cubicles and relies on newsfeed from CNN. But not having their own correspondents to have to pay has resulted in a paucity of footage, which is why no matter what news outlet you tune in, it has not only identical footage as all the other outlets, but shows that same footage over and over an over and over, while its "News" correspondents and Senior analysts, and other high-falutin'- monickered monkeys, with titles that The DAily Show used to mock (but which apparently doesn't stop them from using) argue ad nauseum on subjects barely tangential to the actual issue at hand. It's reminiscent of  Catholic high school Theology class where students debate a trivial piece of Church dogma while the real questions of God's existence, free will, and other metaphysical enigmas that burn in the hearts and minds of adolescents are left unanswered: ignorance by design, topics chosen for their similarity to cheap magician tricks of distraction and deflection to deliberately misdirect attention from matters that are important, and instead debating with a pseudo-sober mien of concern and erudition, go traipsing through a maze of  trivial pursuits and entertaining but insignificant ephemera.

Like magicians, news anchors have become masters of legerdemain, using sleight of hand to exploit nuances of human perception, attention, and awareness while relying heavily on the use of cognitive illusions, manipulating people’s attention, trains of logic and even memory. Although magicians probably haven’t studied these phenomena via the scientific method, the networks, drawing heavily on the expertise of their advertisers, have, and make full use of the techniques and gimmicks that mAdmen have tested over time, perfected by practice, and performed under conditions of high scrutiny by skeptical audiences looking to spot an inconsistency.

This is why we all of a sudden have this debate about fake/alt news, because, someone, and the inconvenient truth is that that someone is again Donald Trump, has finally had the temerity to point out that there is a slant to the news that at times amounts to its being so biased as to render it, if not exactly fake, more than a little suspect. And whereas the media has raised alarming warnings of the perils to our freedom the specter of a president calling the main news outlets purveyors of fake news represents, it seems contrarily that a healthy dose of skepticism about the view of the world we're spoonfed by septicemic talking heads for whom truth is what they say it is, seems instead to be precisely what's warranted.








Friday, April 14, 2017

MOAB: Maniacally Outsized American Bombs



BOMBARDMENT  (by Philip Guston)

It was 1991, and surrounded by computers in the fishbowl environment of Wells Fargo's data Center, I watched the operators and programmers in the sealed-off adjacent room as they stood agog, mesmerized by the video display of George Herbert Walker Bush's Stealth bombers as they rained destruction down on the helpless citizens of the country of Iraq.  The self-same country that we had recently supplied, (while then-President Bush, the former head spook of the CIA, analogous to Putin today, was Reagan's VP), with chemical weapons and military intelligence so they could carry on their War with our enemy-of-the-week, Iran.

Soon Wells' personnel were all oohing and aahing at the pretty lights and fluorescent green lines of arcing rockets, being loosed onto yet another ally turned enemy, as though they were at a fourth of July barbecue watching a fireworks display .

The reason I was there was to do an upgrade to the company's computers. Implementation of the OSI (Open Systems Interconnect) architecture that would open up previously inviolable networks to interoperability with other networks was in full swing, arguments questioning the wisdom of leaving vulnerable to hack attacks the previously impervious networks dismissed, as the greed for the mountains of money to be thus garnished allowed blind ambition to override hesitant naysayers' objections. And there on the video screens of Wells Fargo was the apotheosis of that thrust, the melding of Stealth technology and instant communication via electronically driven networks of weapons and personnel on full display to silence those objections and make manifest the gains to be had by wielding, though the dust had barely settled following the collapse of the Soviet Union whose existence would have stayed our hand, unassailable power, and the USA! USA! unleashed its latest additions to its arsenal of weapons of mass destruction onto the civilian infrastructure of Saddam's Iraq, cementing its position of Full Spectrum Domination and flaunting its newly crowned title as Soulless Super Power.

Twenty years later that same internet technology was used to facilitate the coordinated destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City.

On a parallel track with the Internet's implementation was the planned development and deployment of another deadly technology to take the risk of US 'warriors' off the table when conducting America's illegal incursions into sovereign territory: the drone. This weapon would allow a Milgram-like capability of US commanders as they separated Honor and Valor from the Armed Forces and transformed soldiers into something worse than assassins: murderers without risk.  Hidden in mountain fortresses and ensconced in comfortable office chairs in front of computer monitors, they could assail with impunity. Thus validating my argument, formulated while watching the WTC pancake earthward in a swirl of flames and dust, that the military has, far from making the world Safe for Democracy, put their countrymen, who they are supposedly paid to defend, into grave danger while they themselves remain protected from retaliatory strikes that their own murderous unlawful activity had prompted.

Now we have commercialized drone technology and made it so easy to manufacture, its penetration so complete, that Amazon uses it to deliver packages.

So let me backtrack to that "dustbin of history" phrase, and show why such glib dismissal of a great Empire is dangerous and ominous:

In a previous post, I wrote,

On May 28, 1987, Mathias Rust took off from Helsinki, and, flying at low altitude to avoid radar detection, landed a small, single-engine plane in Moscow's Red Square.

... and in my last post, I mentioned the use of katyusha rockets by the USSR during WWII.

These rockets were so effective because they were cheap to manufacture, and hard to take out as they could be loaded onto very mobile platforms and then moved from their launch site before the Germans could accurately pinpoint their location and destroy them with a retaliatory strike.

So now the great USA has added to the terrorists' bag of tricks a technology that can "flying at low altitude to avoid radar detection, land a small" drone, an aircraft that is cheap to manufacture and can be moved from their launch site, and now, fully capable of remote operation, be deployed to retaliate against the very entity that devised and paid for their development.

It is in this environment, one that we have ourselves created, one that gives operational superiority to any poorly-financed and nefarious group capable of moving its base of operation, much like real drones do with their Queen bee, to safer locales whenever circumstances warrant it, that the US President has decided it's just fine to start blowing up the world for fun and profit. He, after all, is well protected by a huge cadre of secret service personnel and mountains of armamentaria paid for by the very population he has so nonchalantly endangered by his reckless displays of maleficent machismo. And, because he knows that on September 11, 2001, after two airliner jets slammed into NYC's tallest skyscrapers while a third plowed into the Pentagon itself, not only did not a single government person lose their job, but the smirking chimp who was our Fearless Leader at the time rose in the polls to the highest level of popularity of any previous American president, he has nothing to stay his hand from continuing on this course of madness until the disaster he has invited strikes.

But he'll still be yelling "Lock her Up" and blaming Obama, because, to him, the mayhem won't matter. All that will matter is that he'll be alright; he'll be able to continue stuffing his Marshmallow-a-Lardo face with the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake you've ever not seen.





Friday, April 7, 2017

The Trump's Been Played.

                                                      Well ... that didn't take long.

The babies ... the poor babies!! Oh ... they're American? Nevermind.


The Emperor, heavy of face, with all his features sagging, his lines thickening, a theatrically mean countenance, a mind drowned with things that don't matter, the lassitude of a hippopotamus with intermittent flashes of understanding: a man deaf to new ideas, with aural hallucinations which make him listen over his shoulders when someone speaks to him face to face, grunted in annoyance and, coming to life like a ruminant emerging from its digestion, shrugged himself out of his chair, as though standing would clear his phlegmatic brain and crystallize what he should do.

The babies ... the poor babies!!

But not the America First! babies his Lack of Healthcare plan would end up killing, not the America First! babies his destruction of the EPA will choke to an early grave; nor does his heart go out to any of the more than 100 America First! children already killed by gun violence since he's taken the oath of office (their lives don't matter nearly as much as the support of the NRA does), not the America First! children left to starve because, won't it be a Blast! to spend the taxpayer money Meals on Wheels could use to feed hundreds of hungry children and ailing elderly to go spend a weekend in Mar-a-Lago? Roly-poly, he lounges Royally amidst his 20 valuable acres with manicured fingernails and vibrant orange coif: here there's no dearth of red meat, tables groaning with food, banquets for the chronically overfed wafting their aromas like a steaming locomotive chugging its way though the sweeping sea-to-lake vista, while the walruses surrounding him waddle their overstuffed-chair physiques to overfill their plates and continue mulling over the new methods he and his Congressional cohorts are devising to further erode the lives of millions of his fallow (sic) Americans in order to funnel even more billions into the coffers of the Corporations that already are bursting with wealth they refuse to invest in the American economy from which they've extracted it.

It's  hard to believe it was but a year ago when Newt Gingrich proclaimed,

"Keeping America safe is the first job of the American President." 

But as then-candidate Trump pointed out, it was his opponent Jeb's brother who was in office when the Twin Towers were reduced to a pile of rubble as a result of their Father's bright idea of attacking Iraq. We can argue all you want about whether we should have done so or not, but the carnage that ensued from that truncated attack lies strewn across decades and continents.

Now President Trump plays tit-for-tat, in more way than most realize (Just as the Russian interference in our elections was accomplished via a construct of our own War Department, the internet, the attack on the Syrian airfield was accomplished via rocket technology that is a direct descendant of the Soviet-developed katyusha rockets used so successfully in WW2. With the usual sensitivity of armed men, our version is called the Tomahawk (and is prohibitively expensive at $1.59 million each), named after the handheld weapon of the people we mowed down with superior Western technology).

Delivering Lucky Strikes

Our President decided to use the Madeleine Albright twisted pair concept formulated in the nineties that has driven US policy since:

              1)       "What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?"

                                                                       and

"Do you think the death of half a million children, more than were incinerated in the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, that have died since the imposition of Iraqi sanctions is worth it?"

              2)     "The price, we think is high, but yes, I think it is worth it."

  "It's all right with Albright 'cause all whites, not Alawites, are always right ."

The Allwhites Regime.

But just as the first Bush failed to translate a military success into a domestic one, sporting epaulets instead of the ubiquitous flag lapel, the inside-traders symbol that most easily marks the scalawag of today, this action will have Homeland repercussions that no border ban, or Wall, nor barrage of Tweets will keep out.  Because, perhaps sooner rather than later, the truth behind the gas attack will be revealed.  The murky atmosphere surrounding this episode has the ring of the "Kuwaiti babies being ripped from their incubators by Iraqi soldiers" story that so easily manipulated Americans into being led by the nose into a conflict that their grandchildren are still paying for and dying in today. The strategy has been pulled out of mothballs, dusted off, and used yet again to justify rash knee-jerk reactions that we will later regret (well, actually, we won't, as we'll never make the connection).

Our Trump's been played, he just doesn't know it yet. And when it is known, the hasty action of the temperamental leader of the country that has snuffed out the lives of countless babies, with that never having been a consideration before (500 thousand? "We think it's worth it" ... Translation? "We think they're worthless"), will be exposed as being the price the US pays for putting into the Oval Office a pampered child that can be so easily manipulated into temper tantrums and displays of cowardly machismo. And it will redound onto us. The people he has sworn to protect but for whom the job of doing so is just, Oh so boring. The Bankrupt now has the lives, not just the tax dollars, of his fellow countrymen in his hands, and he's already proving to be just as reckless with them. Quelle Surprise.





















Tuesday, April 4, 2017

Trump's Warp Enterprise, America's Reality Star Trek.


The Trumpn Show: "You lookin' at ME?
The NYT was very timely this morning, as it posted an article about MLK. The same MLK, who, far from running for office against LBJ, merely said that, “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.”

Unlike Black Lives Matter who have no such scruples, remaining silent as the state of Libya was invaded and destroyed, its ruler gruesomely murdered while their candidate of choice cackled in unabashed malignant glee about it, MLK saw the connection that the working class and disenfranchised the world over need to make with each other regardless of their nation of origin.

For voicing the above rather obvious opinion, Dr. King was placed under surveillance, a very heavy surveillance which he was still under even as he was gunned down, so it was fairly obvious it wasn't for his protection. Yet, presumably because Trump's just another Sta-puff marshmallow-physiqued fat rich White dude, he thinks he can accuse the Secretary of State and the Commander-in-Chief of the United States' Armed Forces of creating ISIS with impunity. The man who funded and supported a cabal of nutjob conspirators who, with no evidence whatsoever on which to base their absurd claim other than a debased, ersatz racism, all accused Obama of not being a citizen of the country that elected him president. The same people who claim President Trump's detractors should just quietly accept his winning of the election, even if he did need to play Russian Roulette, insisted right through Obama's re-election, that President Obama was an alien. In other words, after he served a full term as President, Donald Trump insisted he couldn't be president. As though he could retroactively change history. Yet these same people now insist the Resistance movement should just go ohm.

Yet this man who considered it his right to rail insanely as the number one member of the "Birther" movement for eight years (not surprisingly as anyone with any stature was too embarrassed to be a part of such a sour-grapes movement), which he later admitted was merely a front to get him in front of the TV cameras (vindicating my impression all along that the same MSM against whom the Donald rails were instrumental in pushing his candidacy at every turn by providing, as "news" free coverage he could never have bought, because it was eyeballs - views, not news - which, like "spin" in the Bush era, is just newsspeak (sic) for lies (eyeballs meaning advertisers dollars, and advertising, like "spin", is never more than, gussied-up/massaged lies)).

If the FBI considers it incumbent upon themselves to put under surveillance a Baptist Minister for making a speech against War (and this was during a time when War And Christianity weren't just accepted as synonyms, as they are today), then they would be being a tad remiss if they weren't actively monitoring a man who was running for freaking president who, purely for his own aggrandizement, declared that the country's Commander-in-Chief was a spy, a traitor, and a pretender to the throne. He accused President Obama of sending hundreds of US fighters to their death against an entity he himself actively created, all while working for a foreign power.

Martin Luther King did none of these things, he merely preached a sermon and for that he was put under FBI surveillance, yet the Donald spit out his hate-mongering rhetoric and apparently felt, despite the fact that we are actively engaged in a War against Terrorism, which his obvious aim was to inflame to his own advantage, that he should be able to spew all the treasonous lies he wanted, with no one thinking, "Ya know, maybe we need to watch this guy". If he wasn't a person of interest to them, they just weren't doing their job. He then used hired thugs to throw out and beat up protesters at his rallies, all while boasting to his cheering fans about what a good time he was having doing it. The RNC was investigating him for this, so why wouldn't the administration? Why all the pretended huff?  Yes, like everything with him, it's all a charade, a distraction, a part of the Trump legerdemain everyone falls all over each other to fall for first; ooh, it's "Breaking NEWS!" A Reality Show Star who goes all kerfuffle because he finds out he was being watched ... yeah right. 

 Even now, as we see the menagerie of thugs and hate-mongering shills he's surrounded himself with, such a cavalcade of horrors invites surveillance because the forces they stir up to do their dirty work for them are filled with unsavory characters far slimier than the swamp (their own description, its being far from drained) they're currently infesting, who feel no compunction about spitting venom and using the levers of power to squelch dissent and enrich themselves to enhance their Family's Value, government not being for the purpose of actually governing, but simply to be used as a tool of personal aggrandizement.

The last president to even come close to this level of cynical "Let's Party!" mania, as he turned the country into a war-mongering Ark of Instability, was GW Bush. And he started several Wars, inflamed Wall St into a cauldron of grift, graft, and toxic debt instruments that were then used to swindle investors, the Country, and the world of their future, while his cohorts stashed the stolen money into every tax-sheltered hole they could scurrilously lobby open. And it is the Bush administration's game plan, the one that delighted in destroying any regulation that would stop the mad romp of a depraved Capitalism Gone Wild, and start Wars whose sole end-game was the granting of reconstruction contracts to its cronies, all while granting them the biggest tax cut of the century, that Trump has boasted he is  using for his template.

And that regime left us embroiled in two unwinnable Wars, a destabilized MENA region, businesses hemorrhaging jobs, families being thrown into the streets by the millions, a financial system reeling like a drunk stumbling down a blind alley, its auto industry, once the crown jewel of the country's economy, pillaged by its executives to the brink of bankruptcy (while Mitt Romney made it clear that he'd not bail them out if he were president), while the price of a barrel of oil skyrocketed higher than it had ever been in US history, thus leaving the country in the throes of an economic downturn so severe it was dubbed the "Great Recession" (but only because economists and the press, the grannies of the Granny State, thought it might crush morale if we were to call it what it actually was: a Depression ... not a great depression, mind you, but it was indeed, by economic definition, a depression).

 And President Obama, despite being busy clandestinely creating ISIS and ferreting out and scurrilously burying all proofs of his alien origins, inherited this duplex constructed from the joining of Schrödinger and Pandora's box, and somehow healed it:



Do you see where President Obama took office? At the nadir of a plummeting Stock Market. Whatever you say about Obama, he is the President who left office (the only one to do so since the country abandoned the gold standard) with the country better off than when he swore that oath: Reaganomics gave us the crash of '87, and then the Bush recession followed, the Clinton's brought us the tech crash and Bush two, we won't redo. So that leaves, as the above chart so graphically shows, the difference leadership makes when it's sole agenda isn't untrammeled greed, a greed so ravenous it consumes worlds. And by a slew of metrics that, like the one above, often got ballyhooed by candidate Trump as rigged, or overvalued, or not reflective of the underlying economy, and he could be absolutely right, but which, as Trump has already shown since he claimed a rising stock market was evidence that "his" policies were working a mere two weeks after being inaugurated, now are all of a sudden relevant once they're possible to use to his own advantage.

What one can put good money on though, is that after Trump gets through with the economy, the DJIA won't look like this. Because the shocks he's purposely subjecting the system to will have their intended debilitating effects, both here and around the globe. Then, as he promised, he will run the country like a business, and you don't run a business for either the employees or the stockholders, despite giving lip-service to doing so for both: you run it for your own and your heirs' benefit. Period. And that's what we have been promised, so that is what he intends to deliver: Trump's Enterprise, America's Warped Reality Star Trek, powered by assistance from Ivankaka crystals. But the Presidency is not a business, where you can risk a loss, a bad investment, a bad assessment that did some damage to investors' portfolios and Your company. The damage you cause by your misjudgements and rant-like tweets is to  your country and your people, and no matter how small it might be - two people, ten people, fifty ... hundreds - the loss is unacceptable. That's when the psychological dynamics of what Naomi Klein called "Disaster Capitalism" begin to be brought into play and rule by surveillance gets a lot more personal until the day comes when UPS won't be the only brown shirts you glimpse skulking through your neighborhood.






































Monday, April 3, 2017

Twenty-Five years after Kyoto.

2017 marks the 25'th anniversary of the Kyoto Protocols. Let's see what has changed since then: 

Has our use of fossil fuels diminished? No. It has increased, and now has the added burden of diesel fuels and ethanol which, like the fossil fuels they pretend to replace, feature ecological rape and unapologetic habitat destruction.

Has the amount of CO2 accumulating in the atmosphere subsided? No. It is not only not subsiding, it is instead accumulating at an accelerated rate. It is now greater than 410 ppm, and will never again in our lifetimes go below the 400 ppm, never mind the fairy tale 250 the Paris agreements settled on (as recently as 2014 it was below 400 ppm. What this means is that  the rate it is accelerating is itself accelerating. This is akin to seeing yourself driving 1.5 miles over the speed limit, and determining that that is too fast so you have a conference with all the other drivers, and decide to roll back to the agreed upon speed limit, then find yourself in the space of just a few miles going more than 10 miles an hour faster than the speed limit yet deciding nevertheless that the best way to deal with that is to have yet another conference). In addition, this atmospheric burden of CO2 has also been worsened by the accelerated addition of enormous plumes of methane (which is not even mentioned by either Kyoto nor Paris, despite its reputation for warming the planet many times faster than CO2) from rapidly melting Arctic seas and uncapped leaks from thousands of fracked wells. Which fact reminds one of the other powerful greenhouse gas never talked about: water vapor. Which is also not even on the table, as though we think, with floods raging on every continent on the planet, it's only water, so how can that matter?

Has the main culprit responsible for the increase of these gases, industrialized civilization (sic), laid plans to replace itself with a competitive infrastructure? No. It has used financial legerdemain and casino economics to computerize the globalization of industry for the purported reason of making it more efficient, while it has instead made it more intractable, and removed billions from the countrysides and funneled them in to ever-growing metropolises which have no ability to generate the food, water, or energy resources they require for their maintenance.

Has it gotten control over the geometric increase in its human population growth? No. It has instead, by providing cheap fossil-fuel-derived energy to an ever-widening assemblage of nations, increased the Middle Class, the class most responsible for the rampant release of CO2 into the atmosphere, to mammoth proportions, resulting in a burgeoning human population and the increased destruction from the requisite livestock and agricultural acreage and rampant overfishing necessary to sate its insatiable appetite.

Mankind is nothing if not contraire.

As Queensland reels from Typhoon Debbie, and Peru, where hundreds of thousands of people have been rendered homeless by similar deluges that have caused the tragic loss of 100 souls, destroyed thousands of buildings, 200 bridges, and 2,000 miles of highway, while, on  Friday night, a member of this new breed of monster thunderstorms, pumped to greater intensity by the moisture bleed off from record warm ocean waters, unloaded a total of a half-month’s worth of rainfall in just a few hours upon the small Colombian city of Mocoa losing more than 250 residents' lives to the raging torrent and devastating landslides, the new paradigm of locking in tomorrow's disasters by mitigating today's is on full display.



For one State alone, the estimated damage toll from this ongoing climate disaster is now 6 billion dollars. But in both Queensland and Colombia the cost will be even higher. And these billions and billions of dollars in recovery costs will all be earned by generating economic activity spurred by the industrialized underpinnings of Capitalistic monopolies of globalized trade that are at the root cause of each of these disasters, cementing the certainty that they will be repeated again and again. Much like the dynamic of the rolling War in Iraq which has followed a parallel timeline: push it to the brink of destruction, while raking in enormous profits, finance reconstruction from the disastrous levels of creative destruction your actions have resulted in, thereby locking the populations in a prison of debt, rinse, and repeat. Over and over and over and over.

Like a field goal in a tied game, it is not a foregone conclusion, it is a gone for conclusion, and we are getting what we have gone for, so don't be too surprised when it is gone for good.