Evangelical Christians have captured the White House that slaves built and with a steady supply of cheeseburgers and ego-massaging they have control of the “Twitterer in Chief”.
These lunatics believe in “The Rapture” and hastening it’s arrival.
“Just like many other Christian brothers and sisters, I eagerly long for the second coming of the Lord Jesus. We abide by the following passage from the Bible: “Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord” (1Ts 4:17). For this reason, we foolishly look up to the skies longing for the day that Jesus will return and take us up into the clouds so that we can be with the Lord.””The Lord is trustworthy. The Lord promised that He would take us into the heavenly kingdom in the last days. The Lord’s promise certainly will be accomplished and fulfilled.”
These psychopaths and sociopaths see climate change as ‘Gods will’ and fossil fuels are his gift to power the rapture. At the time of writing, the momentum to impeach is building relentlessly (so much for the democratic process!!! ),with the fundamentalist Mike Pence ready and waiting to step into the breach the minute the twitter in chief has an ‘accident’.
“But there may be another secret to Pruitt’s tenacious grip on the agency that he’s busy undermining. Like several other members of the constantly churning Trump Administration who’ve managed to hold fast—Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, and Vice-President Mike Pence—Pruitt is an evangelical Christian.” Are Evangelical Leaders Saving Scott Pruit’s Job
Climate Scientist Katharine Heyhoe is another case in point;”She’s an evangelical Christian. Her husband is an evangelical pastor, even, in a faith whose followers are largely skeptical of climate science.” Texas scientist and evangelical takes to the web
How on earth could you trust a scientist who believes in an ‘Immaculate conception’ and creationism??
“Well this is where hope is, right here in this room, ah it’s with us”.
Then we have the erudite Chris Hedges who one day challenges the fact that ‘Hope’ is unimpeachably good, then the next moment opens a presentation with the ridiculous comment above and looks like he is on the brink of crying at the 1m 50s mark! Generally I enjoy Chris Hedges writing and presentations but every analysis from him is clouded by his belief in a (presumably?) white guy on a surf board flying around in the clouds, who is supposedly omni-potent but stands aside watching as the military industrial complex rains bombs down on the people of Yemen, Syria and Gaza and surfs blithely by as we exterminate 150 to 200 species daily.
Discussing her “ministry” to the U.N. last year, Bachmann claimed that “the return of Jesus Christ is imminent,” and noted that “the clock is striking 11:59 on God’s time clock and as history is culminating in as read in Revelation.”
Bachmann explained the supposed importance of her new mission:
I believe that God is starting a new thing, and because the time is short before Christ comes again to this earth, He is giving everyone one more chance.
“First thing in the morning on April 5, before a meeting chaired by Representative John Shimkus and another with the Solar Energy Industry Association, Energy Secretary Rick Perry headed to the Department of Health and Human Services, according to a copy of Perry’s schedule obtained by Fusion. There, Perry was scheduled to meet for an hour-long “Cabinet Member Bible Study. He has praised the new administration for its power to “change the course of America in ways that are biblical.”
“It is safe to say that God is a Capitalist,” Drollinger once wrote, “not a Communist.” In a January radio interview, Drollinger praised then-senator Jeff Sessions, who “hungers and thirsts for the Scripture,”
“Vice President Mike Pence, HUD Secretary Ben Carson, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, CIA Director Mike Pompeo, nominee for Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, HHS Secretary Tom Price, and Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, have all sponsored the Capitol Ministries Cabinet Bible study, according to literature put out by Capitol Ministries.”
“Drollinger also argues that climate change is impossible because God promised after The Flood never to do anything like that again. Drollinger preaches against “radical environmentalism” and that to believe that human activity could have devastating impact on the environment is not just mistaken, but the result of godless pride: “To think that man can alter the earth’s ecosystem—when God remains omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent in the current affairs of mankind—is to more than subtly espouse an ultra-hubristic, secular worldview relative to the supremacy and importance of man,” Drollinger wrote recently. “It follows that we can all rest assured and wholly rely on God’s aforementioned promises pertaining to His ability and willingness to sustain our world’s ecosystem.” Many thanks to political analyst John Steppling for the lead to the link; The Trump Cabinet Has It’s Own Weekly Far Right Biblical Study Group
This is the level of Insanity and Delusion existing in the US administration as we rush headlong towards annihilation.
I'm an anti-imperialist, environmental activist and blue ocean sailor, who is passionate about the earth and all it's inhabitants without favour. Brace for imminent impact as we bare witness to the non-linear unraveling of the biosphere and habitability disappearing for most if not all complex life on the only habitable planet we know of. To quote President Niinistö in North Russia: ‘If We Lose the Arctic, We Lose the World’. Folks we have lost the Arctic.
Kevin Hester 
Don’t any of these MORONS READ THEIR BIBLES???
It was written many times that Jesus was to return while the people he was speaking to were STILL ALIVE! Those of you STANDING HERE will LIVE TO SEE the son of ‘man’ RETURN, IN GLORY with the ‘father” etc etc!
Why can’t they comprehend that?
They were still waiting for him to rapture them up into the sky at the end of revelation.
They ALL DIED thousands of years ago & this so called ‘son’ of the ‘god’ of Israel did not return, he will NEVER return!
It’s MORONS like these that have doomed us to collapse!
I figured out that the bible could not have been inspired by or written by a ‘god” while still in GRADE SCHOOL & my ‘education’ ended at high school. I continued my education on my own & do NOT believe in those ancient, WRONG superstitions!
Why can’t people supposidly ‘smarter’ than me see this?
Those ancient priests actually BELIEVED that the sky was a solid dome called the ‘fermenent’ that had the sun, moon & stars ‘fixed’ to it & rain was caused by angels opening the ‘windows of the sky’! Really!
How can anyone claiming to be collage ‘educated’ still believe in such NONSENCE?
That’s why I say there is NO HOPE for us moving in the direction we need to go, greatly reduce our use of FF & impliment RATIONING, stop ALL GROWTH of population & economic growth, reduce our numbers through low birth rates & eugenics deselecting those with serious genetic defects like diabetis, heart defects, brain defects, mental defectives etc, too bad we can’t sterilize all FUNDIES & most politicians!
Now “nature’ will cull the herd the ugly way.
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In this latest interview Professor Wolff interviews Chris Hedges. Wolff gives William Nordhaus a deserved serve and Hedges mentions that the evangelicals believe in the ‘Rapture’.
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I don’t think we will ever “get out of” the crash of 2008, we will collapse again before we have “recovered” from 2008 thanks to Bush, Oboma, & Trump & their horrible love of war, war spending & selling of WOMD to ruthless dictators & terrorists.
Did you notice how the Saudi prince was leering as Trump was gloating over all the MONEY he would get for selling more WOMD to the Saudies so they can kill more Yemenis?
He cuts taxes on the RICHES people in the country then borrows more money & spends even MORE on endless WARMONGERING even as the country continues to fall apart!
Homelessness is GROWING & now we have thousands of poor NEEDY illegal migrants walking thousands of miles in the hope of coming here with their hands out expecting us to provide them a “better life” by competing against those already here for insufficient JOBS, HOUSING, EDUCATION & HEALTH CARE that millions of us don’t have & can’t afford!
The GAUL of those people!
What I fear & that the poor & unemployed will put the blame on those migrants instead of this corrupt government that has allowed our jobs to be sent overseas to slave labor countries or those jobs were lost to MACHINES like mine was.
The problem isn’t just our terrible immigration laws, it’s the 14th amendment that gives citizenship to any child born here even if the mother came here ILLEGALLY, NO other country allows this!
This to is a draw for illegal immigration along with our JOBS that employers are allowed to give to illegal workers. Until Reagan, employers who hired illegal workers were PUNISHED not any more!
No country can function under such injustice, inequality, warmongering, growing poverty, open borders, more wealth in fewer hands, huge deficets, an unsustainable economic system & declining essential resources.
We will collapse & it will be a HARD collapse & the last thing we need now are thousands of poor, needy, non English speaking people who are expecting to get jobs, education, housing & health care when we can’t even provide same for those already here, legally!
They will find themselves between a rock & a very hard place, I would hate to be in their shoes but we can’t let them in!
Or we could do what those clueless religious morons want & just open the borders & let them all come in & watch things fall apart sooner.
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Pretty intense rants there, Sheila, and I hope you managed to clear some of the anger and frustration you are obviously carrying inside by writing them. Sometimes it helps.
As for the second rant, I would suggest that you need a bit more historical background about ‘immigrants’ and how the US Corporate/Military Empire is the main cause of why they are trying to run away from their own countries. You are lacking in seeing the whole picture (or at least as much as has been dug out about it).
People’s History of the United States, by Historian Howard Zinn,
War is a Racket, by Marine Brig. General Smedley Butler
The Untold History of the United States, by Oliver Stone/Peter Kuznick
You can pick them up pretty cheaply at the independent bookstore Powell’s Books in Portland (powells.com) which is where I get a most of my used books from unless I go south to the city and get a chance to wander through some of the wonderful used bookstores in Spokane.
Warning! You are NOT going to like what the authors have to tell you in these three books, but knowledge tends to do that. Try to read them in this order, too, as it will help to get a clearer step-by-step picture of why the US is where it is today. Insanity from day 1.
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And I do know where you are coming from on jobs since my small shop building snowgear since 1991 is underwater and I’m mostly ‘retired’ at this point because there aren’t any other jobs for anybody much less an old fart surfer dude. Since Wanker Bush signed the most favored trade treaty with China in 2004, then good old psychopath Dick Cheney and him let Wall St. crash the economy in 2007/08 with the help of right wing corporate Republican Hack Bill Clinton back in the 90s deregulating the banks, my shop finally lost all the retail gear contracts around 2012. Since then it’s bits & pieces of local business and whatever crumbs come in after the corporate internet sites get done selling their Asian slave factory crap.
Retired of course means living broke. My income is about where it was in 1981 running a surf & fiberglassing shop. At least I saw it coming when the unSupreme Court put Cheney & bush in power, and by 2006 was mostly out of debt and had no mortgage to worry about.
Unfortunately only two of the many people I sent information to about that read and listened and then did the same. That was all, just two families! Even my ex didn’t listen and poo-poo’d at me, she always was an optimist, and went ahead and re-financed her house and bought a new $30,000 Toyota 4Runner. Then she watched her retirement finances fall through the floor….bummer. Don’t think she can ever retire as she’s too far in debt last I heard.
I hope you are surviving as best you can, Sheila.
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And don’t worry, Sheila, those religious fanatics that you (and Kevin) railed about are no different than any other religious extremists. Imagine the ones that followed the first son of a virgin born on Dec. 25th under a star in the East and was adorned by three kings!
Horus the Egyptian god of gods. Must have been brutal fight for power between the older gods and Horus, eh?
Horus, by the way, was the first use of this virgin birth myth that we know about. Egyptians about 5,000 years ago came up with it. Imagine what they did to unbelievers back then, eh? There were four more gods before the Jesus myth used it 3,000 years later.
This new Hebrew splinter group called ‘christians’ are just as deluded and just as dangerous I’m sure, as were the Greek believers in Zeus the Thunder god or the Roman god Jupiter (they stole Zeus from the Greeks and re-named him). All had fanatical followers willing to die and kill for their beliefs.
Humans have always killed in the name of their 1,500,000 invented gods-which is the actual number of gods that anthropologists have catalogued so far.
And like all the earlier gods, the current mindless hordes all think they know what kind of hell their god is going to send everyone else to for not bowing down to their invented barbaric Iron Age Hebrew-invented single deity. Burn through eternity.
Instead, we’re already starting to burn here from what our species has done.
Isn’t that a hoot? Or is that a case of serious Irony? Maybe 44south can answer that since there seems to be a smidgen of ironic humor with that person!
sealintheSelkirks
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We all love to “rant” here don’t we, gets some of the grunge out of our brains!
I am all too aware of how this rotten empire has been making war of one kind or another against Central Americans, people of E. Asia & the Middle east, everywhere there are resources we want & a country too weak to defend it against our war criminals, we invade, we bomb, we KILL.
What HIPPOCRITS we are to complain about the Russian “meddling” in our FAKE “ELECTIONS” when we have been putting into power DICTATORS & SUPPORTING TERRORISTS all over the world & continue to do so! Israel & Saudi Arabia are just two of them.
I have read Howard Zinns book “A peoples history of the United States” but I haven’t finished Oliver stones huge book. War is indeed a racket, a very PROFITABLE racket.
We don’t have any book stores here, the nearest book store is over 100 miles away!
I also buy used books on line from Powell’s, Barns & Nobel, Abel books & Amazon for the reviews then I can go to another, smaller book shop to buy. I have thousands of non fiction books in my extensive library, but I need a better MEMORY!
Brookings Oregon is TRUMPS FUNDIE LAND, “progressives” are called “libturds” & there are almost as many churches as people but some of the churches here do help the homeless & poor, more power to them!
We have millions of very poor people here in the USA, the UN said they had seen poverty here as bad as in any third world country they have visited, 40% of children in this the richest country the world has ever known live in POVERTY! Do we need MORE poor, needy people to abandon & ignore to our cold, cruel, streets? I don’t think so.
Do we need more poor, needy people to compete against our poor needy people for not enough JOBS or AFFORDABLE HOUSING?
That’s why I oppose more immigration, this has NOTHING to do with “race”, we are all AFRICANS, we first EVOLVED IN AFRICA & everyone here is an immigrant including the “native” americans but they were here first, we whites were the invaders.
I’m sorry to hear your small business is underwater because our horrible trade deals for big greedy corporations that shipped OUR JOBS off to China & left us with “jobs” of hair cuts, hair color, nail painting, skin tanning, quack doctors, faith “healers”, tattoo artists, butt wipers, food servers, etc etc etc, low paying jobs with no future & no pension or health insurance.
No manufacture can survive here competing against overseas slave labor & no worker can compete against automation & ‘bots.
I guess I will never understand how so many seemingly intelligent people can actually believe in those stupid myths that have been disproved over & over again, what is wrong with those people? Can’t they face reality?
Why do they hate or unaccept SCIENCE?
When people ask if I “believe in god”, I ask “which god?” there are thousands of “gods” that people worship today & they all claim to be “the one true faith”!
I won’t rant on about religion, I can see that you already get it.
I kinda liked “Hathor” in Egyptian mythology, “Athene” was quite a warrior & of peace but “Kali ma” was terrible!
I also don’t “believe in” evolution, I ACCEPT evolution as the best explanation of what we are & where we came from.
I think we will collapse & soon, first the economy then the excessive population so perhaps it won’t matter if we just leave the border open for all to flood in, we are already doomed, the boat will sink sooner with more passengers.
I just wish we weren’t taking so much of earths amazing living things down with us into the eternal darkness of EXTINCTION.
I hope you will have time to enjoy your forced “retirement”.
Who or what is “44south”?
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44 South is Torstein Vidal.
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Thank you Kevin! Torstein Vidal, good commentator, he “gets it”.
We now have a repuglicon nutcase running for office in Washington state who wants to force christian beliefs on Jews & Muslims & wage war against those who refuse to convert to Christianity!
Alternet has a piece about this warmongering INSANE so called “Christian”.
I think Jesus, if he even existed, would oppose such actions.
https://www.alternet.org/election-03918/matt-shea-washington-religious-manifesto-biblical-law
These are terrifying times!
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Ya think, Sheila? This Republican State Representative lives maybe 50 miles+ to the S/SE, a Spokane Valley Rep repeatedly voted in, and publicly says that he is quite willing to kill me for his god since I most certainly flout “biblical law” and therefore am most certainly his enemy.
A cut from: https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a24525183/washington-lawmaker-manifesto-nazi-memorabilia-kentucky-gun-show/
…We head across the continent to Washington state, where The Spokane Spokesman-Review (link at above link) finds a Republican state representative who is seeking re-election on a platform of imminent armageddon.
The document is organized in 14 sections with multiple tiers of bullet points and a smattering of biblical citations. Under one heading, “Rules of War,” it makes a chilling prescription for enemies who flout “biblical law.” It states, “If they do not yield – kill all males.” After the document was leaked online Tuesday, the Spokane Valley Republican insisted he was not promoting violence and that the message had been taken out of context. “First of all, it was a summary of a series of sermons on biblical war in the Old Testament as part of a larger discussion on the history of warfare,” Shea said in a Facebook Live video on Wednesday. “This document in and of itself, was not a secret. I’ve actually talked about portions of this document publicly.”
_____________
Another book from my library that I’m seeing pop up in articles recently:
‘and they thought they were free; the germans 1933-1945’ by Milton Mayer
On the cover below this says: “How and why decent men became Nazis, life stories of ten law-abiding citizens.”
I’d dispute the decent part because I’m of the thought that anybody that is decent would never fold. There is a fundamental flaw in their psychological make-up or they would have chosen to either fight the Fascists or die. But then there’s always been a flaw in our species, hasn’t there? One that never seems to change so we always repeat our own history. Sucks, doesn’t it?
sealintheSelkirks
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“Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition”.
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I discovered this by finding a 78rpm record. The video really brings it to life, the sad sickness of war and the gory, so called glory.
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Great video! Nice parody on what sh*t’s we really are! I stole some nice stills from that as well.
The US is such a hippicrit!
We say we love peace but we engage in endless illegal, immoral wars & occupations.
We say we love freedom but we imprison more people than any other country on earth!
We claim to be a “democracy” but our voting record tells a different story, voter disenfranchisement, stolen votes, fake ballots, gerrymandering, voting machines that switch our vote to a candidate we did not want & an UNdemocratic electoral collage to make sure only a corporate oligarch “wins” the fraud riddled “election”.
Why are so many ‘mericans still patriotic?
Why even bother to “vote” in such a RIGGED system?
Thank you Kevin, your a searchlight in a very dark tunnel!
I think I’m seeing a light at the end of the tunnel & it’s the TRAIN!
splat!
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“This time the ninnyhammer claims that the words the Almighty whispered (bellowed?) in his ear made clear that Donald Trump had been put on this earth to give the church some breathing space before the Rapture. Or Rupture, depending on which way you view these things.”
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/thefreethinker/2018/11/donald-trump-was-sent-by-god-to-prepare-the-world-for-the-end-times/?fbclid=IwAR0C8cz7xtPJ7D4j1gQ3OpVN-HPi3h3h6JgOO4OYjzzzT2-_RiV9T5juPgY
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Jim Baker is still fleecing the sheeple? So “god” told him that Trump is “gods”chosen one to lead us into the “rapture”? And his sheeple are dumb & ignorant enough to believe that?
How pathetic!
Then there is this guy on Youtube who has mountains of data & math to show just how “doable” “renewables” are to replace fossil fuels!
He just refuses to comprehend that you cannot replace a essential resource with a technology that’s dependent upon that same resource, you cannot replace raw materials with technology
The only way I could sort of agree with him is that we will indeed go back to renewable solar power but that won’t include electricity!
He said I needed to go back to “grade school”! HA!
I wonder who is paying him to spout such nonsense?
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But but but…Kevin…we have all sorts of freaking people hearing voices that are sitting in powerful government and military positions. Not just here in the States, but around the globe. And all are following orders from one or another revenge-oriented Bronze/Iron Age cult figure gods. And the humans who pretend to speak for those gods have always taken their orders (and funding let us not forget) from very wealthy autocrats.
But hey, ya think the same voice is the one that told Wanker Bush to invade Iraq so he could kill/cause the death of well over 1 million people (current estimates) who never did a damned thing to the USA except live under a dictator named Saddam who was put into power by the CIA.
Might have been better to think about that one a while but nooooo, not when you hear The Voice telling you to go blow up and turn people’s worlds into a living hell. War is just so profitable. Can we say oopsie about all that ‘collateral damage?’
Don’t you just love that term, Shirley? Collateral damage. It fairly rolls off the tongue. So much cleaner sounding than the terms mass murdering or war crimes.
Maybe Obama was listening, too, since he remarked that (paraphrasing) ‘who would have thought I would turn out to be so good at killing people?’
Remember when Dick ‘Darth Vader’ Cheney’s little mindless sock puppet W actually said “God told him to invade Iraq” on national tv in front of the entire world? And not one head of state, not one tv ‘personality’ (corporate talking head), nor even one religious ‘leader’ said that not only is he completely bonkers but that is against what the ‘Prince of Peace’ would have allowed! You know, that Hey-sus guy who preached ‘turn the other cheek’ and ‘forgive your enemies’ and ‘though shall NOT kill.’ So much for Sermon on the Mount and all that peace-y stuff, eh?
There was another US president, who it was slips my memory at the moment, that also publicly stated he heard voices (god or probably the devil!) telling him to start another war by bombing the crap out of somebody so he did also, I just can’t remember who that was. Back in the turn of the 20th Century.
Funny that there was no such thing as a protestant, no such thing as an evangelical rapture-ite born-again in existence before the Catholic Church split in two inventing another version that went flying off into nah-nah land gathering money and power.
Who, by the way, also heard ‘voices’ telling them to do so. Ya gotta be careful what voices you let into your head, eh? Seems like a lot of the voices these people hear tend to be pretty dang bloodthirsty. Or is it just a coincidence?
Rule of thumb: if you hear voices telling you to kill people it’s probably not a real good idea to listen to them.
The USA sure would be a different place if they all would have stayed in freaking Europe. Imagine if the Mayflower had gone down at sea with all hands… Alternate history!
As for the orange-headed slumlord, he is just the latest in a long, long line of whacked-out leaders that have been sending us down the hellhole since the Manhattan Project. It doesn’t matter who one votes for, they’re all…ideological neoliberal clones!!!
Reality about elections:
Climate and the Infernal Blue Wave: Straight Talk About Saving Humanity
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/11/13/climate-and-the-infernal-blue-wave-straight-talk-about-saving-humanity/
And counterpunch.org just announced today they have published a new book about climate. Title is: ‘THE BIG HEAT; Earth on the Brink’ authored by Jeffrey St. Clair & Joshua Frank. Wonder how bad their news is going to be?
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I’m in Chapter 5 of Wadhams book. Read the introduction of Daniel Ellsberg’s ‘Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner’ and the first chapter. Not sure i should read into both at the same time, probably put me into overload, so I put it down until I’m through Farewell to Ice. I chuckled at the comparison between the current anti-science crowd who can’t understand CO2 makes the atmospheric heat up to the Flat Earth being the center of the universe loonies.
Do well with whatever you are doing today, I’m under a blue sky and stagnant air alert for the next week. So much for snow in these mountains anytime soon… Oopsie again I guess.
sealintheSelkirks
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Thank you “sealintheSelkirks”! well said!
I too hear voices in my head but it’s not the “voice” of some “god”, it’s just me.
Now I wonder when, if ever, the Nobel peace prize committee will demand that Oboma give back his Nobel “peace” prize?
I gave up on the democraps way back when Bill Clinton was POTUS, I had it when he sold us down the river for “free trade” & passed NAFTA, WTO & CAFTA. He promised health care for all but then behind closed doors with the INSURANCE COMPANIES, he tried to shove through another taxpayer giveaway to them!
Oboma was more “successful” with his Oboma “care” private for PROFIT insurance company taxpayer giveaway that was just a renamed Romney “care” scheme.
Oboma was another dam WAR CRIMINAL expanding Bushes wars & killing even more brown skinned people that Bush/Cheney did, almost as bad was his refusal to stop private security & law enforcement from shooting, beating, gassing, water cannoning, siccing vicious dogs on, dragging a women from a prayer circle, beating her, arresting her, stripping her naked then tossing her in jail & mocking her because she & other native americans were trying to protect their sacred land from a private oil pipeline company from forcing a pipeline through THEIR LAND!
Oboma didn’t do a dam thing to protect them from this CRIME!
The WHITE people got the pipeline company to DIVERT their pipeline away from them!
Brown skinned & “black” people continue to suffer murder by cop & the cops keep getting off free to go forth to kill again & again & again aw nauseum.
I won’t go off on what I think about Trump, he’s the worse ever.
Another “election” has passed, more never to get counted “provisional” ballots, more disenfranchised minority voters, more vote switching machines, more election fraud etc, WHY BOTHER?
Just SELECT the next OLIGARCH to RULE US & forget about having those fake “elections” & stop calling this PLUTOCRACY a “democracy” because it isn’t & never has been a democracy, the founding, rich, white, land & slave owning “fathers” saw to that.
Now we have thousands of deluded “refugees”, mostly young males, walking to our border from Mexico, expecting, DEMANDING we let them in so they can get the jobs we don’t have, the housing we don’t have, the health care we don’t have & the social services we don’t have so they will probably end up joining the millions of poor, needy, homeless, sick & unemployed americans already “living” on our mean streets.
I don’t think that’s what they would have been expecting because our TV shows us all living like rich people & they want that too.
Just wait until they experience our WINTERS!
If they last long enough here, Guatemala & Honduras will come north & they will be warm again & getting warmer all the time.
Time to get off & get STONED AGAIN!
We all have our coping mechanisms don’t we?
If not, you had better find some fast!
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I hate to say I told you so but there it is;
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/progressivesecularhumanist/2018/12/secretary-of-state-mike-pompeo-we-will-continue-to-fight-until-the-rapture/?fbclid=IwAR07x4ODzQoHqLnqrHrKJTIhPKFHzrioHKufLnXt92B-Wrr1b7JMMv2-E8o
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Cut me some slack. The pathology of these freaks.
“But now the flock will be arighted, continued Pompeo, a politician who has unironically spoken in public about his belief in the coming Rapture.”
https://www.rt.com/news/448522-pompeo-american-shame-egypt-obama/?fbclid=IwAR027wpO8rW9XcrdnIl7ckKvpoc5zKkFm8ZPzfQ02YnZmTMKRH9q0OtsJ-w
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An evolutionary hiccup in development of the primate brain that led to a permanent/inheritable deranged mental state? Some kind of virus that affects certain parts of the brain that govern this kind of thinking? A feedback reaction to the near-extinction of the species by natural disasters that stuffed the few left through a bottleneck (according to science we got pretty close more than a few times) and left them broken-minded?
Or is it just plain old learned behavior and indoctrination of young primates by power-seeking elders of the pack that discovered one can do anything if they keep the rest in various states of fear?
Kevin, our species has always been this way. At least as far back as we’ve been writing this kind of crap down. Each new ‘god’ invented became more powerful than the last even though all of them fought one another for primacy over the ‘humans’ (as if some ignorant primate species worship was worth fighting over!). Until of course the monotheistic single god was invented by the Arab Semites in the Eastern Med a couple thousand years ago.
As Ellsberg points out in Doomsday Machine, this ‘rapture cult’ meme really got going after the first atom bombs got dropped. Worse when the US lit off thermonuclear hydrogen bombs that made atom bombs look like 4th of July firecrackers. We suddenly had the very real ability to destroy life on the planet and that just terrified these mentally-deranged believer types. The US military became god. It was no longer enough to have the high priests of the various cults threaten ‘hellfire & damnation’ on their Sunday flock by an invisible all-powerful (and pissed off) invented god if you didn’t do what that leader’s particular interpretation demanded. We could now see what hellfire does to everything right in front of us. In moving color! I think the really unstable segment of human society that we’ve always had among us went over the edge at that point.
And it won’t ever get better. That’s the pointed truth. No matter what country you are from, if you want political power you absolutely have to express a belief in one god or another. It doesn’t matter that you don’t live by any of the expressed requirements of said religion, just that you give homage is enough.
Nothing will change because of that. The requirement of god beliefs in human leadership positions preclude any kind of shift to rational thinking. And that is seriously exploited by those in power. Always have been.
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I’m assuming you’ve read the latest couple of articles posted on arctic.blogspot? Wow. Ouch. And the comment by Franklin on Malcolm Light’s 7 January methane one saying to get inland… Our species always tries to run away from what it has caused I guess. Don’t see the mad people inland welcoming the refugee hordes from the coast too well… Then I read the 5 January by Glikson. And just shook my head.
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I’m almost finished with Chpt 20 in Doomsday Machine, The never-ending First Use Threats by the US since 1947 right into the Obama admin and the lovely war-lover Hillary Clinton. Yeah, well, no surprises there.
The last chapter in this book is only 15 pages long, on how to dismantle the machine. The chances for that are practically nil I would assume, so a short 15 page summary is all he wrote. I doubt I’ll be much surprised reading it, either. The most dangerous man in the US but he’s no longer much of a threat to the entrenched power at this late stage.
It has been an informative read. Not a fun one, but definitely pulling at the veil of propaganda this country (and the world) has been bathed in since I was born.
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As for weather, it’s piss-pot poor here in the Inland Pacific Northwest. No storms, no winds, stagnant air masses, barely freezing at night and dripping melt during the day with huge inversion layers of nasty air to breathe. It is not acting like winter here at all even though there is a layer of crusty snow about the property. Not really a snowpack, or not one that is going to make any kind of difference to the aquifers underneath my feet. Get up above 2000 meters and you are in blue sky sunshine. Down here at half that and you are in murk. The Jet Stream is broken and I don’t know how to fix it….
sealintheSelkirks
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“We will continue to fight these battles,” the then congressman said at the Summit church in Wichita. “It is a never-ending struggle … until the rapture. Be part of it. Be in the fight.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jan/11/trump-administration-evangelical-influence-support?CMP=share_btn_fb&fbclid=IwAR3oXQMwyaU1Ry5r6HdRmFwbOFWwGNLwfpA978Ol0vTSZCrXku-Nl8bxweY
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These “rapture” nuts are pathetic!
Us atheists know their “holy” book better than they do!
If they had actually READ their bible like I have, they would have read in several places in the new testament that Jesus was to return, in glory, with the father, to judge while those he was speaking to were STILL ALIVE!
Why are these MORONS still waiting?
No wonder we are doomed!
Over on the left coast of Oregon, we have finally gotten some REAL RAIN! Several inches/CM of hard RAIN!
The winter birds have been eating me out of house & home, their STARVING & clean out the feeders as fast as I fill them up & now I’ve added more suet because seeds don’t have much fat & in cold weather without insects, they need that fat.
I hope this summer will bring on more insects or the swallows, warblers & other insect eating birds are doomed.
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I love these anecdotal observations from around the world. I don’t like watching the unraveling but I do want to be informed however dire the rality, I want to live it.
Thx Sheila.
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Have a great…. Rapture folks!
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What is it about DEAD these preachers don’t get?
Jesus if he ever even existed, is DEAD!
So are all the people he spoke too claiming they would live to SEE his return!
There is no “date” for the rapture, it’s long past.
Try READING your bible instead of just “looking” at it!
What a MORON!
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Sheila chambers, there is NOTHING we can do about these barbaric Bronze/Iron Age ignorant savages. Except growl at them which makes them feels oh-so-picked-on victimization which they love, and then we realize these same mind sick people grasping desperately to these kind of beliefs have always been the ones who are quite willing to maim, torture, and kill those who don’t conform…. It’s the Curse of our Species!
Leaves an uncomfortable sensation in the pit of one’s stomach to realize just how many there are, doesn’t it?
Big sigh. As a species we have not truly progressed emotionally, or for the most part cognitively, over the last few thousand years. There are no such things as gods but religion is as real as being burned at the stake… But we have gotten so much more clever in inventing all sorts of wonderful new weapons to use on each other! Unfortunately most of our species still conflate belief in religious myths as equal to science facts the poor helpless loonies that they are!
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More anecdotal observations from up here in the N/E corner of Washington State for you, Kevin:
Finally snowed here, a foot fell on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning around the property. My local ski hill claimed 13″ for the weekly opening day on Friday which just barely put them barely over the 100″ mark. At the end of January we are at an extremely low snowpack and it took 3 weeks, since the massive rainstorm Dec.29th that blasted the entire ski hill, to finally see a somewhat decent snowstorm blowing through. There has been a couple of inches here and there but not real storms.
Temps continue to fluctuate from just above 0’C during the day to -10C at night with mostly barely above freezing days this week. We’ve had 10-15’C daytime temps off and on since the new year. Expected to be back up next week which is bad news. Not much of a winter here, not really. All the ski resorts around here to the Cascades out west have extremely low snowpacks, most not above 70″ at best. We used to have 305″ a season here…and this season I think we have more than anybody from what the snow reports I looked at the other day told me.
Four yellow jackets appeared in the house in the last few days with two showing up here in the office (coming out of the walls) this morning. Wasps at the end of January! Not normal.
There are still Canadian Honkers flying overhead during the day because there is open water for them still around. I went over the Colville River going to town this week and it was completely unfrozen with birds swimming on the surface.
Lots of inversion layers the last few weeks, too. Great to breathe when one is down sick and can barely breathe anyway! Get up above it and it’s blue sky, maybe 2000meters/4000 feet and sunshine rules. Down under it and in the valleys the air is stagnant and there has been some nasty-tasting air days that remind me of the summer fire season. Mostly woodburner smoke up here but I haven’t been down to the city 50 miles south (out of the mountains in the flats) for months and I’ll bet it’s even worse there.
After weeks of influenza I’m somewhat back on my feet and went into town this week to get bills from the po box that I knew needed paid. Saw a number of people I knew and all they talked about (after telling me I looked like death warmed over after losing 15 pounds from this crap) was how many sick people they knew or family or themselves. Talked to one friend over the phone this week who said both her and her adult son (but not his wife or kids) had the flu for two months, since November, before they finally seemed to have gotten through it. One woman I know who was coming out of a door where she worked waved me away while saying “Don’t get near me, I’m going home because I feel terrible.” It’s not just one strain of influenza, it’s stomach flu, sinus infections, bronchitis, pneumonia, body flu, ear infections/vertigo, and a host of other nasty bugs infecting people. Ugh.
It’s not freezing outside today and I’m waiting for dark and the snowpack to set up before I can go fire up the big snowblower and clear the road to the property gate. Might be late tonight before it gets cold enough since snowblowers don’t work when the snow is mushy. More like spitting oatmeal and they break the sheer pins too easy, and at $5 apiece I’d rather wait until it dryer/frozen!
From 49′ North Latitude in the Selkirk Mountains of Washington State may you all die beautifully…
sealintheSelkirks
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Down in far south coastal Oregon, it’s almost hot!
While the east coast is facing record cold from a loop of the jet stream dragging arctic cold down to them, we bask in record warmth.
Normal for this time of year is 52F, it got up to 68F today!
I have house sparrows courting & starting to build nests, in JANUARY!
Living in a small town with few human contacts has it’s advantages, no flue bugs – yet.
The town is trying to find ways to generating more revenue, border entry tax? bed tax? restaurant tax? breathing tax? The last one is just kidding!
Their also trying to figure our what to do with all the HOMELESS people here. They ran them out of the library parking lot, they ran them out of the beaches, they ran them out of the parks, then came a decision that said you can’t force people off of public property when they have no place else to go.
There will be even MORE HOMELESS people as this country goes down & we are overrun with even MORE illegal immigrants.
Trumps wall will not stop them.
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I’m grateful for these anecdotal observations. The increases in respiratory and infectous diseases are predictable but tragic knowing that everything will deteriorate from here on down the gurgler!
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But wait, there’s more;
https://peopleoftheblackcircle.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-christian-right-zionism-and-coming.html?fbclid=IwAR2p7f5RcAkyYwZWFKQZfNWWXyP4f8FERsI1cQE4bD7U8ppuHJUWop7I-jU
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Now wasn’t that a lovely link you posted for all and sundry to boggle their minds reading, eh Kevin?
And it made me think back a thousand years into history when the Christianized Roman soldiers were holding a sword to the throats of the European tribes men’s families giving them a choice of being Catholic and swear allegiance to Rome or,,,watch them all die.
The descendants of those ‘converts to Christianity’ have very similar mindsets as the Romans did to their ancestors. They learned the lesson well from their conquerors…
So tell me just how much has really changed in our species cultures since then?
Better weapons, that’s what! Ain’t we smart little monkeys?
How very depressing that entire article was! And having finished Ellberg’s book I’ve got a larger sense of…how both tie together in these lunatics’ minds. What was described in his book is a ready-made recipe for their Bronze Age superstitions, so why not help them along a little bit? Lunatics!
I hope I wasn’t the only one to follow that damned (ironic term to use here) article to the end.
You know something that’s uncomfortable? There are people living here, all around in these mountains, that absolutely fit the profiles described. As a matter of fact, I’ve noticed that many are pretty brazen and act out in public to prove that they are quite proud of themselves about their…devotion and viewpoint on these matters. Or it would be delusions of their ignorant mind sickness taken from another viewpoint.
Many say they are quite looking forward to death of the species but for some reason they are also some of the most fearful people of all when faced with their coming deaths. I mean, really, that is the only event that we know is unequivocally in our future. Everything else is only possibilities and yet those that ‘believe’ try the hardest to continue staying alive at all costs. Even to the point of suffering for years or decades bedridden and unconscious hooked to machines. Isn’t that the oddest thing?
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Anecdotal local weather/climate for Feb. 14:
Snowing again out the window after a break of a day. Temps went back up after last week dropping to -20’C nights and -10C days. Had very strong winds that closed most runs at local ski resorts last Saturday followed by more deep & very dry powder snow dumping in the mountains during the week through Tuesday morning. It has condensed down a bit the last couple of days but more has been falling since late morning.
After weeks of Looping Jet Stream throwing the main storm systems up and over the PacNW through most of January, we see some what-used-to-be winter weather. Not the snowpack it used to be every year, that’s for sure.
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2/15/19
Power went out before I could post this, Went to bed instead and woke up to another 12″ of overnight and still snowing out the window.
Hope all is well as can be expected with you Kevin. Down there in the boiling hot Southern Hemisphere winter I keep reading about may you find a shady spot to hang out at….
sealintheSelkirks
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Troubles here as well, this has been a bad week, I’ll spare you the trouble my friend had with his truck wensday.
Today it’s rotten! Rain, hail, lighting, thunder then my cars ignition tumblers decided to keep my key & not let me turn off the power. I had to call a tow truck.
I hope the shop will remember what I told them many times, remove the cable from one of the posts on the battery otherwise, I’ll also have a dead battery! I cannot turn off the power!
What those dam BELIEVERS won’t do is to ACTUALLY READ THEIR DAM ‘HOLY’ BOOK!
It says in there many times that Jesus was to return while those he was speaking too were STILL ALIVE!!! THERE ALL DEAD MORONS!
Jesus was not the “son” of the “god” of Israel! THERE ARE NO DAM “GODS”!
Those MORONS are still waiting for him to return & they are willing to kill everything to hurry his “return”!
What those MORON BELIEVERS don’t realize or REFUSE to realize is that we are just a part of an ecosystem, a system we have thrown all out of whack because we REFUSE to accept that we are also ANIMALS & must have a viable ECOSYSTEM & we are destroying it.
If we lose the INSECTS, there will be no fruits, no veggies, no nuts, NO FLOWERS, no birds, no migratory fish like salmon, no fresh water fish, no small mammals, no brown bears, they depend upon the fall run of SALMON before they hibernate, no reptiles & no DAM HUMANS!
Now I have a sick bird at the feeders that can’t close it’s beak because of avian pox tumors, it will soon starve to death. That’s just about all us humans have been doing for 200,000 years, bringing DEATH & DESTRUCTION everywhere we have gone, WE ARE DEATH!
Now we also have tens of thousands of illegal migrants on our southern border who are fleeing poverty, unemployment & a bad government, they expect us to take care of them, hell we won’t even help the poor, needy, homeless, sick, unemployed people we already have, we don’t need more of the same!
Mexico has already offered them asylum & jobs, they rejected that since they want the better FREEBEES they believe they can get from the US!
We don’t have “freebees” for anyone here except the RICH!
But those dam believers want us to let them all in & take care of them & their children. I say take care of those already here FIRST & deport those illegals back to where they came from.
Our poor, needy, sick, homeless, unemployed NEED the JOBS, HOUSING, EDUCATION & SOCIAL SERVICES those ILLEGALS are illegally taking.
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I went on Google earth & found your little island off New Zealand, so wich coast are you on? You being a yachts man, you should be near the sea with a boat & a warf. I still don’t do silent letters! I see that island also has a ferry, I bet that can be a rough, sea sickening ride at times.
I get pretty ticked off at those morons who believe that “technology” can fix all our problems but technology is useless without the right RESOURCES, or going “vegan” can “save the world” or “renewables” can replace fossil resources, I have seen so darn many crazy schemes for “fixing” all our delemas & I especially get my undies in a wad at those people who believe we could support billions MORE HUMANS!
So “if only love remains” I won’t get any of that either but I will get dead just like any other animal too many of wich we are killing off.
I’ll miss “my” swallows, it seems the average lifespan of a swallow is about 3 years, 8 max. It’s been more than three years since they have bred here, goodby forever, little, innocent, swallows.
We are DEATH to every living thing including US,
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Kevin (and other readers on his site): I apologize in advance for this long reply to the southern Oregon coast woman’s last two postings.
Hey Sheila Chambers,
Where I agree with you is the anti-science behavior of religious beliefs. Those influences show rather explicitly that religion is just an adult version of putting your fists in your ears and loudly going “la la la la la” so you don’t have to hear what anyone else is saying that one did as a kid. But this is for your entire life… and you never have to think, just obey…but then thinking and searching out knowledge can be deeply unsettling.
The idea that most of our species in the last 9,000 years that we know of never went farther than a day’s walk from where they were born their entire lives. Instead of breeding explorers they bred religious leaders!
The wonder of the world is that anybody escaped this social conditioning to actually invent science, and that we aren’t all living in mud huts with pigs and chickens and dying at 35 of old age still….
It certainly would be nice if our species would one day (somehow) grow up and not need fairy tales but instead we have a world full of damaged humans with an emotional maturity level learned from Bronze Age slave society’s social mores of 2,000+ years ago who are no smarter (different from intelligence) than their distant ancestors who hid from the lightning that they knew was being thrown by angry gods.
Unfortunate for every living species on the planet. I think we who are here reading Kevin’s blog gets this.
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Where I disagree with you is the continued not-factual rants about migrants on the border that you always mix into the real world local climate stuff along with your own feelings about what you are seeing in the surrounding ecosystem that you post. Sheila, there are NOT “tens of thousands” of “illegal” migrants on the US southern border. That’s just political grandstanding by the current regime’s Repub Face of the Corporate State just as much as ‘Russia hacked the election’ is grandstanding by the Democrat Face of the Corporate State. Both use the same methods to keep their power. That the wealthy have their own factions fighting over the spoils of their thieving is not surprising, but the goals are the same for both faces… Power and more power. Control of information flow. Use emotional trigger words and concepts.
There has been far less undocumented migration and arrests in the last few years. We are at much lower numbers overall than during the neoliberal corporate Obama regime’s 8 years of massive deportation numbers (Obama set a presidential record for that as a matter of fact).
Fact: there are far fewer people trying to run the border. Quit buying into emotional propaganda being fed to you about this by people who benefit from public ignorance.
As for the actual caravans of a couple thousand people from Centro America, by US law they have every right to apply for Green Cards to enter the US legally which is what they are trying to do. What Trump’s regime is doing is KIDNAPPING THEIR CHILDREN from those who are applying LEGALLY at the border and locking the teens, kids, and infants in dog cages operated by for-profit private prison companies getting federal contracts (YOUR TAX DOLLARS) in Florida and Texas and elsewhere. Guess who’s making the money from those crimes against humanity?
And many of those people are climate refugees if you didn’t realize it. You obviously aren’t reading the worldwide effects the science is talking about that I’m reading. The editor of my first book has a day job, a Sociologist at an Austrian climate research center, studying the real-time ongoing effects of climate collapse around the world on Third World societies. He just got back from 6 months in the low income backwaters of Australian cities and Outback with the Aborigines. He just finished his PhD and I’m really interested in reading the research he’s working with.
I’ve read that many if not most of the refugees heading towards the US are farmers whose land no longer supports growing crops for their families that have gone under due to droughts caused by the industrialized North’s pollution fucking up their climate stability. OUR civilization destroys their farms with our continued and rising use of fossil fuel and you’re mad they’re moving north? Me? I’m not surprised. What would you do in their place?
In truth it is getting too hot to grow in many areas along the Equator, the low elevation web bulb effects kill crops, and also becoming too arid in some places and too unstabile to count on needed rains at the right time etc etc in others. All farmers live with those realities but as the climate falls farther off the cliff… The maize and coco and coffee and other crops from those areas are struggling at best to survive in a ‘new’ climate they aren’t evolved to grow in much less thrive.
This is nothing. Wait until millions are trying to escape the death zones of the Equator. Look at the refugees crossing the Med into southern Europe. Not just war but climate refugees. Or you can wait until the tens of millions in the death zones of Arizona, Nevada, and California try to make it north out of the parched southwester desert. We ain’t seen nothing yet when it comes to migration I’m afraid. How close in the future I don’t pretend to know but worse to come no doubt.
As for ‘freebies’ you mentioned, you do know that illegals are required to pay income taxes and unemployment taxes and all the rest of the taxes that you and I do? But as illegals they cannot apply for any of the benefits. The wealthy that own and operate this country for their private profit don’t give a rat’s ass about them being here because they lower wages and work in jobs that US citizens would rather not work. Higher profits from lower labor costs is their goal. Then add in automation by robots in jobs that no longer need be done by surplus useless ex-workers. More profits. So yes maybe the migrants from down south are ‘stealing’ the jobs that are left, the manual labor dead-end physical jobs that US citizens still don’t want even as they sink into poverty because there won’t ever be any jobs worth having ever again in this country for those useless ex-workers who are Trump’s base.
Ever picked strawberries squatting in a field under a boiling hot sun for 10 hours a day covered in pesticides? Me, neither, but I’ve had darker-skinned co-workers in restaurants, as a night janitor, picking guaves for $10 a crate, in a sewing factory, painting houses, and other jobs so you can believe my words when I say they work hard for their wages, too.
A lot harder than Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton ever worked, that’s for sure!
The wealthy have never helped anyone but themselves. Ever. That’s history. They have always lied and cheated and killed to keep their power and riches. Your sentence: “Our poor, needy, sick, homeless, unemployed NEED the JOBS, HOUSING, EDUCATION & SOCIAL SERVICES those ILLEGALS are illegally taking” is pretty useless in the historical context because none of that has or is ever going to happen. That’s not what the wealthy elites do. There will be no more jobs for the working class except military and police state until these, too, go robotic to the point of needing few human operators. Notice that it is somewhat okay to be an illegal if you are willing to join the military and ‘earn’ your citizenship by killing in the name of Empire? Funny how that works.
Our form of Capitalist-Colonialism is playing an extreme game of Monopoly for keeps and, as you know when you play that game to the end, there is only one result. One person owns everything and everybody else is living in cardboard boxes dying of starvation…which is where this country will be sooner rather than later.
Unless of course we destroy ourselves by starting a thermonuclear war before the ongoing climate collapse reaches a point of cascading feedback destruction events that turns the ‘survivors’ of the crashed worldwide ‘civilization’ into cannibals wandering a bleached-out drought-ravaged landscape… Not all that hard to imagine if one reads the science I’m sad to admit.
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And for your second posting, I, too, looked at where Kevin is but on a small world atlas instead as dial-up doesn’t work very well with all the megabytes of Google Earth. And the picture actually had that little island’s name on it! Funny to see all the English place names mixed in with the Maori. Cape Kidnappers on the east side of North Island made me wonder at the history.
Sail south and all you have is the islands of Auckland, Campbell, Antipodes, and the melting Antarctic…he’s waaaay the hell down there, isn’t he?
Techno-fixes. I’m also doubtful that technology is going to save us. It could, there might be some genius out there with an idea hiding in the back of the mind for removing CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean. But that person has probably been co-opted by some country’s military (like the USA’s DARPA) and is busy designing bigger and better murder machines to destroy other people with or has been shuffled into some corporate shithole to figure out how to make more money for the master class. That’s where the brightest young brains go as they get snatched out of high school or college and end up applying their intelligence for the profit of the worst members of our species. Pretty sorry state of affairs.
I read Limits to Growth when it came out in the early 70s. Read Carson’s Silent Spring in the late 60s as a teen (a present from my stepmom), and many more over the ensuing years. We’re doing exactly what all other animals do on this planet, overpopulate until they eat through their food supply and use up the other resources. Then the population crashes as it starves to death and finds a new balance of numbers in the shifted ecosystem. Our species is going to re-learn this lesson again, painfully (22 crashed major civilizations later and we haven’t learned from history yet?).
I watch the coyote pack that lives here and, like us, the more rabbits that show up to eat the bigger litters of pups the coyotes have. Population follows food supply. Then the rabbit population drops radically and you get coyotes starving and dying and snatching somebody’s cat or poodle pet while people make a big stink about running out with their rifles and shooting the song dogs. And you know what? We as a species are not that tuned into our habitat so it’s going to be much worse that what happens to coyotes.
Love will not remain, only needs. Like the swallows you haven’t seen nesting the last three years and their cousins that showed up here too early in Spring last year when there were no flying bugs to eat and starved to death. Maybe some flew down into the valley along the river where there might have been bugs to eat. One can always hope, yes?
We have lost the Arctic and we have probably lost the insects as well so you and I will probably see less birds every year until none of the migratory species show up at all. I imagine the ground feeders who live here year ’round might last a while longer…
Food, water, shelter, sleep, sex. We will use up this world because we weren’t smart enough to get the hell off it and out into space where our species could flourish and spread out when we had the chance. Like all other species we will go extinct though we are the first on this planet who could have gotten out of this planetary prison beforehand.
Instead we have a world fit for psychopaths to rule…until they, too, die out for lack of resources.
Speaking of which, I need to get on warm clothes and go move some firewood into the house. It was 4’F/-17C at 1am last night and the weather prediction is for the same tonight. Using resources I am, dead trees instead of fossil fuel to stay warm. Until I have to fire up the chainsaw to cut more rounds. Then it’s fossil fuel time. Trapped we are! Big sigh.
sealintheSelkirks
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You must be as “long in the tooth” as I am, I also read LTG, I read & still have Silent spring.
I guess I rant too long about those migrants, I too would try to flee to a place that might offer a better chance at survival, I don’t blame them for that but there are limits as you also know & by not limiting or ending immigration, we make it worse for those already here, it’s simply a case of self preservation, every animal will defend it’s territory whether it’s an ant or a human.
Speaking of ants, unlike most people, the ant I caught sniffing my gummy was taken outside, not killed, save the ants!
Recently I discovered a big, fat, almost black spider dangling in front of my face after it climbed out of the hood of my Korean war era poncho, it too was put back into it’s “home” inside my home, I also don’t kill spiders.
I also think we place too confidence in our technology, even Steven Hawkings believed we would spread out into other worlds in other solar systems, he of all people should have known that will be impossible, not enough energy or resources & there is that nasty unmovable limits from physics.
Here in the Us, the unelected government is preparing to attack Venenzualia, install it’s chosen puppet who will then let in the US oil companies who will steal their oil, ship it to the US so we can blend our light fracked oil to produce syncrude for transportation fuel.
We are lied too as to why Venenzualia collapsed & it wasn’t “socialism” it was the collapse in the price of oil which was 97% of it’s income & like all governments, the Maduro government misused it’s funds & became too dependent upon it’s oil revenue.
All that noise about “humanitarian aid” is also a LIE, those military planes & trucks will mostly have WEAPONS & AMMO for the resistance fighters & very little “aid”, we have done this many times before.
The dems are trying to get it’s dupes all excited about that “green new deal”, that’s just another way to profit from the decline of essential resources like coal, oil & natural gas & we will never “transition” to high tech “renewables” as you cannot replace resources with resource dependent technology.
I feel sorry for all those hard working, enthusiastic young people who are demanding we “get off oil”, “keep it in the ground” & “transition” to 100% renewables unaware that that will be impossible with 7.6 billion humans & our “transition” to 100% renewables won’t include electricity, EV’s, or growing our food in high rises. If we survive climate disruption, there also won’t be anywhere near 7.6 billion humans either, closer to 500 million.
We have people here who believe they can just pack up their “bug out bag” flee into the woods & live off the land with no idea what that would entail & also he’s not figuring in that 330 million other people will be having the same idea at the same time & in the same places.
Our ecosystem is much less rich in resources than in the past, the first people to discover the americas, finished off the mastodon, mammoth, giant sloth, giant bison, horses, camels, short faced bear, saber toothed cat, dyer wolf. giant bison & giant tortus.
The European invaders then killed off the prairie wolf, eastern elk, lower 48 grizzly bears, almost killed off the surviving bison, Dusky seaside sparrow, eastern couger, Heath hen, Carolina parakeet, Great auk, Passenger pigeon once the most numberous bird in the world & all our freshwater fishes are greatly depleted some are also extinct.
The natives here once ate acorns but now sudden oak death is killing them off, the salmon population is much depleted as are the trout, also a once important food to native peoples, the shallow ocean once so rich in seafood is also much depleted. I think that fella who believes he can just flee to the woods & live like a native will find himself very hungry, cold & wet, even worse, he won’t be alone!
The small island Kevin lives on has few people, looks pretty isolated so the ravening hordes won’t choose to invade his island any time soon, too small for more people & there is no electricity.
Let’s just enjoy what time we have left, reduce the damage we are doing to the ecosystem & watch the show as we decline.
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Yep, feeling the body get old. Be turning 65 this year…mustache and ponytail are white but as friends of mine say, at least I still have hair!
I, too, still have Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’ on the shelf. Along with another similar book titled ‘Living Downstream’ by an ecologist named Steingraber. I don’t have LTG anymore, loaned it to somebody and didn’t get it back. That happens with books unfortunately, but books are for reading so loaning is a better idea than hoarding them. Maybe the books that don’t come back get passed around to others and fire a few of those unused neurons? At least that is my wish!
And yes, you do rant too much about the migrants. But I do understand what you are saying. We are a pissy viciously territorial species that will defend our water holes to the death… Sheila, it’s going to get much, much worse as the climate continues to collapse into chaos. People living on the Equator are going to run away as fast as they possibly can for what they perceive as cooler climates where (they hope) there is food and water. Most won’t, not until it is too late and they’ll die where they are or drop dead with their children on a road somewhere trying to get away from the heat. But even the much smaller number that does make the choice to run will overwhelm everything.
We’re talking about how bad it already is in Centro America but what happens when Mexico becomes unbearable hot? The migrant caravans won’t survive crossing south to northern Mexico. If there are any people left to create caravans by that point. Then the millions in Mexico will be trying to move north…
We know that a breakdown in climate means the same for society which means no services, no waterholes, no food to eat. The Sonoran Desert is BIG! It’s a long fucking walk without any transportation other than your own two feet. How fast does cheap shoes from Asia wear out? Oh yes it is going to be unbelievably horrifying but we won’t see it. There’s already so much censorship going on in the media that I can only guess at how tightly locked up it will be by then.
Of course it depends on just how far in the future ‘then’ is, ya know? When the cascading effect of climate chaos goes from spotty reporting of this and that weather disasters to a rapid knockdown there won’t be any news. Not that there is much reality now other than from a few investigative reporting alt news sites like consortiumnews or truthdig or readersupportednews or ICH etc etc.
When will the slow trickle I see coming up here from the southern states turn to into a flood of people trying to escape the growing heat and pure miserable-ness? I expect it to happen, just like the Centro Americans in your rants. When San Diego and LA evacuate…and Arizona and Nevada. There will be hordes of US citizens doing the same thing.
You know there isn’t a single creek, river, or lake in the US that isn’t contaminated with some nasty chemical or other? Not a one is truly safe for drinking. The mind shies away from that thought.
_____________
And yes our ecosystem is trashed. I’ve got wolves back in these mountains trickling in from Montana and Canada but there is so much habitat destruction here in these mountains that nothing can make it ‘go back to the way it was.’ We are so far past that ever becoming a reality. Oh my. Creates sadness in the chest.
And I agree, the Green New Deal is total bullshit if all it is based on is economic growth! It never fails to amaze/disgust me how the only assumption for anything ‘green’ is how much money somebody will make. Always freaking economics not life. It’s not just the US, it’s the entire world’s outlook. Everyone alive has been force-fed that reality from birth.
And there are a million new mouths to feed being born every three days on this planet. Sustainability! Green New Deal! Yeah, right.
Trump will probably invade Venezuela pretty soon. Springtime is generally the start of such US invasions. The US has been strangling that country for 30 years and they are still alive, though, Since Chavez through out the moneygrubbers and corporations and started using the oil money for infrastructure and people he just pissed off all the wrong people, ya know? The wealthy just hate it when what they steal is stolen back from them, don’t they? Murder and death and lies but that country has an enormous reserve of oil under the ground that the US corporations want their greedy blood-sucking hands on.
Doesn’t matter who is in political office, they’re all figureheads of campaign funds from the same corporations so they are bought and owned and will do what they are told. This country never had a “America is Great’ period. It has never been anything but propaganda by the owners. You notice that ‘Great’ always seemed to mean involved in a war somewhere?
Yep, I’m with you. Enjoy what time we have left is a better way of living. I think Kevin is probably doing that down there on the bottom of the world, too. So I give time to help others get things done they need done without asking or expecting payment and I really do try to do something fun every day. Doesn’t always happen. There are some days when the reality just overwhelms me with grief and i have to sit and digest what I’m feeling for a while.
There are times when I (sort of) wish I could be ignorant and oblivious and could joyfully join in exploiting anyone within reach while making millions on the stock market screwing people out of their lives….and I want that $40 million dollar yacht and Lear Jet and a bolt-hole oasis ranch in New Zealand filled with survival food and weapons so I could make it through the end of civilization. Or maybe build a spaceship and fly to Mars to start a new one! Oh the delusions of grandeur some people have.
NAW! JUST KIDDING!! Being a wealthy sociopath psycho sounds like such a drag of an existence that I find that my alternative is that I can actually be happy where I am. How odd is that? I never have been motivated to fit into the accepted social ‘program’ that defines who one is in this country. Hell, I won’t even eat fast food! Guess Trump will never invite me to share his McDonald’s burger.
sealintheSelkirks
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I dread what will happen when we are REALLY flooded with desperate migrants, we have some very nasty militants here who are racist & who wouldn’t hesitate to shoot to kill those sneaking over the border. But what other options will those migrants have, stay where they are & perish from heat & starvation, migrate & get rejected or shot by a unwelcoming country?
We may still be comfortable now, but our turn is coming.
If I had billions, I would want to buy some of the last remaining wilderness, build a small home on the edge of it next to the inevitable road & protect it against hunters, trappers, loggers, miners & all other developers, the land is just fine as it is, WILD.
I have no desire to exploit or “screw” anyone, unless their well hung & well mannered.
Indeed the president is just a figure head, that’s also why “voting” is a total waste of time, we never have had any real choices, their all would be war criminals, their all RICH & will get richer while in office serving their real masters, the uber rich, the weapons manufacturers, the military & large corporations, we the working class are just the tools they use to make even more money, workers who can be dumped like trash when a machine, a bot or slave labor is available to replace them.
These greedy rich people never stop to think that what their replacing us with will never buy their products or need their services so why should they be surprised when the economy goes down? How can anyone be so stupid to believe in “sustainable GROWTH” or in “clean, green, renewable energy”?
I have found it impossible to get those “renewable” believers to comprehend that we cannot replace declining resources with resource dependent technology!
Why is that so difficult to understand? Their either trolls, stupid or their refusing to comprehend what that means.
Along with the doom & gloom, I heard the first Osprey of the season, Purple finches, Brown headed cowbirds & Brewers blackbirds showed up as have sick House finches afflicted with avian pox.
I have a few very fregrant white violets blooming, the Salmon berry is starting to bloom & the old fashioned lilac has buds swelling, my Elk river red current is in full bloom.
The Chestnut-backed chickadees are cleaning out their nestbox for a new breeding season but I doubt if I’ll see any swallows this year. They used to breed here but with the collapse of the insect population, they haven’t been able to breed here for years.
How long does a swallow live?
Will people even notice when the last swallow dies?
Will they even care?
We at least do have clean water to drink when we don’t have a low river at the same time as a high tide, then we get SALT in our water, our rivers are sourced from wilderness areas, no factories here & we only have a few thousand people not millions.
The ocean is rising, winter storms bring more sand & dabrie over the seawall & into the RV park by the ocean, the renamed motel by the beach is doomed as is lower Harbor rd & all the businesses & the coast guard station there.
I wonder what will happen here when we get flooded by millions of Californians escaping water shortages, rising temperatures & hordes of migrants flooding their southern border?
Cali is a “sanctuary” state, I wonder how much “sanctuary” millions of illegal migrants will get WTSHTF?
I don’t want to be around to find out.
Right now, I’m enjoying a nice hot cup of Somotren coffee with beans hand ground in a little painted German coffee mill.
It’s also 420 time! YEA!!
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4/20/19,
Hi Kevin! Hope you are as well as can be expected. You are going into winter down there. Haven’t look at New Zealand stuff in a while.
And I know what you were doing today, Sheila! Well, so was I. As a matter of fact I stuffed in and lit nine (9!) buds of different strains in the bubbler pipe today just because it is the official Cannabis Holiday, and managed to still get some work done around the property. Carried the pipe around all day as a matter of fact though I’m mostly an after-the-day-is-done nighttime smoking type of guy. I do use a homemade CBD oil-based rub-on paste during the day, though. It certainly does help with the aches and pains of old injuries.
I’m also busy with germinating for this year’s garden. I usually procrastinate about that and end up planting late, but I started practically on time this year.
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Migration
So you dread what is coming when the real flood of climate refugees hits? Well, so do I though I’m 700 miles further north next to the northern border. A little more insulated than you are down in southern Oregon. But California is long…and it’s turning back into the burning desert it always has been. If technology crashes along with the climate (which seems likely), we would be talking about a very slow wave of refugees that, for the most part, will probably die enroute.
There isn’t a single water source I can think of that I’d want to be drinking out of on a walk like that. Humans have polluted all of them, the ones that are left anyway.
Look at a geological map, one without human lines on it, and you’ll realize just how big it is. That damn desert stretches from deep in Mexico to the southern Oregon/Idaho/WY/Colorado mountains. You can draw a line across the map. With no food or water sources…everything used up stripped and abandoned by the millions of US refugees that headed north first? Remember that the first two Spanish settlements in SoCal died to the last man, woman and child. Without the technology that makes it possible, that land cannot support huge hordes of starving refugees. It’s a…freaking desert. It just can’t.
I’ve tried to grasp what it might look like when the humans along the Equator literally evacuate north…there is no past experience in our species history that could possibly compare with that because we never had the population we have now during other human mass migrations.
What’s happening around the Med, the refugees from Africa and the Middle East, and the Centro American ‘caravans’ to our south, is a drop in the bucket. We’re looking at tens of millions that will be on the march north and south heading for cooler climes across the globe. Not that there will be any real refuge.
And, like you are thinking, it’s not just them but the vicious way our species has always dealt with ‘the others’ throughout our history. It’s not just here, Sheila, it’s going to be a bloodbath worldwide We are an extremely terratorial species, and by then everybody will know what is real.
Ugly is the word.
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Weather:
Above 70 degrees again here today, far above normal for this time of year in these mountains. I’m still in snowboard mode, and the body does not like this at all. Still a snowpack in the mountains above but above 4,000 feet. The peaks in the area are still very white.
Here’s tidbits cut from mixed media:
+ A new study finds that the diet of urban coyotes consists largely of “pets,” 20 percent coming from cats alone. Yet cats that are allowed outside shouldn’t be considered “pets” but “pests” that kill BILLIONS of birds a year and thus fair game for canis latrans…
Why I don’t buy anything from Amazon:
+ Amazon last year, the online retail giant netted $11 billion in profits while paying $0 in taxes. The company controls nearly half of all online sales in the United States, and its Amazon Web Services division is the leader in providing cloud-based computing services, counting Netflix and the U.S. government among its major clients.
+ …this useful bit information about the origins of the progressive state of Oregon this morning at the Museum of the Oregon Territory: The first Black Exclusion Law in Oregon, passed in 1844, called for any black person, free or slave, who entered the state to be publicly whipped every six months until they left (or died).
+ The last time carbon dioxide levels were this high, Greenland was mostly green, sea levels were 20 meters higher and trees grew on Antarctica. That was 5.3 million years ago. But, by all means, let’s see every last page of the unreacted Mueller Report…
***…and seal asks: because it is soooo important to our survival as a species that everybody believes Hillary Clinton’s bullshit lies about Wikileaks and Julian Assange? Remember this; everything Wikileaks posted was the truth. Everything. And Hillary as Sec of State was caught asking if they could “just drone bomb him” for publishing and exposing the lies and crimes of government officials…would that be considered attempting a conspiracy to murder of an Australian citizen and publisher/journalist?
Scary that the crime isn’t about the crimes of those being reported on, just about criminalizing the person who reported those crimes committed by the people
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April 22nd
Another too-warm day yesterday again, and today is warm but somewhat overcast. I’m walking around in shorts and t-shirt.
To continue with your post:
I’m not sure there really is any ‘wilderness’ left in this country to buy and protect. There seems to be roads and electrical transmission lines and cell phone towers and pipelines crisscrossing and logging is everywhere…even with billions to spend you might have a hard time finding an area that is a fully functional biosphere.
And if you did and bought it all up and kept people out you can count on climate collapse-caused weather to screw it all up anyway. Yes, you are correct, our turn is coming…
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VOTING, here’s the link to reality if you haven’t read it before. Just how well. This country is not and never has been a democracy. It’s pretty funny that retired President Jimmy Carter who has monitored over 90 elections around the world says that Venezuela has the cleanest elections of any country he’s been too, and it is far better than the USA which has ceased being a functioning democracy.
Click to access gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf
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Kevin: Weather, and Sheila Bird News from the Selkirks:
70’F at the end of March, and the first day of April was the same. Insane warmth for this time of year. Obvious that the normal June ‘last frost’ isn’t going to happen this year. Again.
And the weather has continued with ups & downs these last three weeks. Weird little weather systems coming in every few days. Been raining some, but they are short and not much precipitation overall. Those days are between the sunshine days. It’s been mountain-style rain, those ‘start from sunny morning’ to the build-ups over the mountains in the west that turns into an overcast cloudy sky before it starts letting water fall in the late afternoon.
Had a day of sunshine, then clouds by noon, then a lot of hail before going back to rain that kept up until after dark That was the 14th of April. Somehow it feels like the heat switch is going to get thrown earlier than last year which was too early and too hot too fast of course.
Sliding down the cliff face of climate towards the rocks below…
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The birds have returned here, too, Sheila. I was leaning against the porch railing reading a book yesterday evening when the first hummingbird zoomed in front of my face extremely upset that I had not gotten a feeder out for her. One of the female green Calliopes that nest here every year, or maybe one of the babies from last year, and there isn’t anything for her to eat. Very few flowers have come up so far. It’s too early for flowers to bloom this far north at this elevation and fruit trees around here are bare..
She buzzed me, up & down & back & forth, then zooming over to where one of the feeders always hangs and zipping back to hover in my face before winging over to sit on the tip of a bare branch of the apple tree. There she proceeded to give me Serious Stink Eye. The guilt she was throwing at me was almost physical!The sun had already set behind the Huckleberry Mtns. to the west and I figured she must have just arrived from her winter hangout (sw Mexico). Had to be hungry after that flight. Went inside and mixed up a batch and brought it out. Soon as I hung it she flitted back. She was there this morning when I let Gabbydog out on the porch. Nervous little thing, jumped away and came back then jumped away again when I walked back out.
One of the metallic green female Rufous hummingbirds showed up today. She looked really beat up, bedraggled I think is the word. I noticed they sit on opposite sides of the feeder. Hungry little critters.
A mountain bluebird pair is building a nest in one of the birdhouses already, and there are juncoes and robins and mountain finches etc etc all over. Mostly the ground feeders get here this early. Robins showed up literally weeks ago but I haven’t seen any nest building yet going on.
Yesterday there were noticeable numbers of bugs in the air, three sunny 70’F days in a row will do that, but this is early for the flying feeders to show up though I had a couple of the Tree Swallows last week. There’s no food for them yet so they head down into the valley. Lots of ‘skeets already out by the river down there so there is food to be had. ‘Skeets in April! WTF? Also seen a couple Hermit Thrush, a Bushtit, and I think a Golden Crowned Kinglet. Plus a couple of White Breasted Nuthatch, Fox Sparrow, Blue Grosbeak, Western Tanager, there’s a lot of birds showing up for being so early.
Way too early. We used to be a zone 4, last frost was in June and first was in September. Not any more and I guess the birds know it. Too bad the bugs don’t yet. We were officially switched to a warmer Zone 5 a few years ago. Most people didn’t even notice.
I really get tired of hearing people going “oh look, the snow is melting and it’s so nice and warm” or it is almost February and they are already ‘tired of winter’ and are complaining!! Then I ask them where their water comes from and they say ‘out of the faucet’ and they don’t see the connection between melting snow and the aquifers underneath their feet. Scary disconnection from the natural world. Why would anybody move north into mountains and not expect to live in cold and snow??
My large hedge of lilac bushes on the north side of the garden fence out front haven’t flowered in…three years? Maybe a few came out but it gets so damned hot by May into June they just can’t, and that’s when they used to bloom and fill the entire front yard with smell. The white lilacs in the middle, one smaller plant in the middle of a row of 8 foot high bushes, haven’t for sure. The bigger bushes are the pale lavender/purple flowers and were the last ones I remember really blooming well. The bushes are still growing and seem healthy at least because they are spreading out to the east and west.
The old honeysuckle bush by the porch isn’t looking very good. It may have finally died off last year in the heat. That was what drew in the hummingbirds for the last 20 years. I do hope it comes back. It used to be such a bushy three-stalk plant. I would occasionally take a couple and suck on them just to see what the birds & bees were getting.
Still have snow in the high country that hasn’t melted yet. Peaks are showing white. My local snowboarding hill never reached ‘normal-average’ snowpack depth this winter. It was completely gone off the property here by the first of April. Not a sprig of green yet on the apple tree showing, and mostly plants are barely starting to sprout across the property. There is a layer of very early green grass coming up but that usually turns brown and dies by the end of June since it is mostly wild grass at this point as I don’t do lawns. I figure if it comes up, fine, I’ll have grass but I don’t water the lawn when it does.
I need to go out and plant this packet of Bee Flowers I was given. Get the seeds in the ground at least and hope for the best. I have seen a few big fat black & yellow bumblebees bumping around, and a couple of different colored butterflys have been wafting by on the breeze which continue to become rarer by the year. Bug-opolypse is no joke, that’s for sure.
That’s all for now.
sealintheSelkirks
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Kevin, this is a great blog, So glad I found you on FB
Miriam
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April 23rd apparently.
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/progressivesecularhumanist/2018/04/get-ready-for-jesus-the-rapture-is-april-23/?fbclid=IwAR1wGrfZwMVRx9GB2YvZg2oLhZmEZr8RoAxVC1xyEtO4lMrxca13O1SpE_A
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I HAD a comment here, a long one but WORDPRESS DELETED IT!!!
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I’ll try again to get this written & POSTED!
COMPOSED ON NOTEPAD where WordPress can’t delete it!
I’m so pissed off I can hardly write!
WHY did WORDPRESS DELETE MY POST BEFORE I COULD EVEN POST IT?
It’s warm here as well, 28C or 80F, I don’t have near as many birds here as you do in the mountains & far fewer insects, our POISONS are killing them off along with climate change.
If we keep killing off the insects, we will lose our fruits, veggies, berries, nuts, birds, lizards, amphibians, freshwater fishes & ALL our flowering plants, then we go extinct as well, good riddence!
Then our poor abused planet can start over again with what, if anything, is left.
The migrants have left, gone are the golden crowns, white throated sparrows,the Cali quail, spotted towhee, song sparrow, Oregon juncos, chipping sparrows & fox sparrows, returning from the south are brown headed cowbirds, band tailed pigeons, tree swallows, rufous hummingbirds, goldfinches, purple finch & soon hordes of TOURISTS in HUGE MOTOR HOMES will invade us, jam the roads, trash the beaches & hopefully, leave some money behind, this is after all, a TOURIST town!
The year round birds are still here, chestnut backed & black capped chickadees, downy woodpeckers, house sparrows, starlings, brewers blackbirds, scrub & stellers jays, house finches, robins, crows, ravens, gulls, more than the last few years.
I haven’t seen or heard any flickers or swainsons thrushes so far this year & I haven’t seen great blue herons or kingfishers in years.
It looks like the tree swallows will make an effort to breed this year, they have been checking out a nestbox inside & out. They haven’t been able to breed here for at least 3 years, their getting old, time is running out for them & for us.
I hope they will raise young this season, I missed seeing them with their newly fledged young up high in the sky wheeling in flight for the first time before heading south.
While we are having hordes of migrants fighting to cross our border illegally, their so far their are just in the thousands but Europe will be seeing them in the millions then billions, how will they cope with such a mass?
Bloody borders from sea to shinning sea & from east to west I expect.
They will soon have to stop “rescuing” those illegal migrants from Africa, turn back those NGO ships & send those illegals back from wense they came from. If they don’t or can’t, Europe will be no more, it will become just another bloody, 3rd world shithole.
Looking at google earth, I can also see what a hot dry LONG hike it would be for migrants heading north but of course they won’t stay in the desert, they will head for towns & cities & hold their hands out for aid, aid our own homeless, jobless & sick can’t get.
Why on earth do people want more poor, needy, unskilled, non English speaking immigrants when we already have millions of poor, needy, unskilled, jobless, sick & homeless people here legally who’s needs we ignore?
Why does Trump insist on a wall when they can simply climb over it, cut through it, dig under it & still get in?
Why do we allow employers to hire illegal immigrants, rent housing to them or allow their children into our overcrowded classrooms instead of deporting them & punishing their illegal employers & landlords?
Why do we allow sanctuary states & cities to get away with protecting illegal immigrants & give them drivers licenses?
Trump is right here, cut federal funding to those states!
Why do we still allow an illegal immigrant to sneak over the border to drop an infant that will become an instant “citizen” so their mother can then stay & get all kinds of benefits our citizens can’t get?
I think I see some messy trouble ahead.
We already have armed militants on the border rounding up illegal migrants & getting critisized for it. No one was shot yet, they were just held at gunpoint until ICE could arrive to take them.
It will just be “catch & release” again!
What’s the point in having a country with “BORDERS” if we just let illegal migrants flood in to take our unafordable housing & unavailable jobs?
I guess our homeless will have to do what those migrants do, sleep 10 or more to a room & share the rent.
We have about 20 democrats competing for the 2020 primary “election”, why bother when only some warmongering oligarch will “win” in our fake, rigged “elections”.
I’m not going to bother “voting,” let the electoral “collage” SELECT our ruler as usual. It doesn’t really matter who “wins” those illegal wars continue & expand, more innocent brown skinned people will be raped, beaten, gassed & bombed as usual, these dam wars are too PROFITABLE to ever end.
The “yellow vests” in France are incensed that the rich gave millions of Euros to restore the Notra Dame cathedral while their needs are still being ignored.
What they overlook is that there are billions of poor needy humans but there is only ONE Notra Dame.
I wonder what will be left when the ‘dust’ has settled?
Can we save our great museums, libraries & some technology?
Or will it all be destroyed as people in collapse have done so many times in the past?
Well Kevin, April 23 has come and gone & it’s no surprise to us that Jesus failed to show up yet again.
Why don’t those MORONS READ THEIR BIBLE!
They would have known that he will never show up, he stood them up thousands of years ago when he was suppose to show up. I kinda feel sorry for them, disappointed yet again, will they ever learn? of course not, their just dumb BELIEVERS!
I miss the winter birds already, now the feeders are empty most of the time, few birds breed here, most have flown to the mountains, forests, marshes or to the far northern tundra & boreal forests.
The swallows are gone again, I expect they flew south again, later on, they could return to actually breed & raise young, at least I hope they can.
I wonder how hot our summer will be this year, how many fires will burn,how much more of our wildland will be lost to fires & clear cut logging. There has been talk about banning clear cut logging but I expect the loggers to win & our forests to get raped again. Can’t hurt their PROFITS now can we?
Soon it will be our turn again to swelter in the rising heat, to again fight wildfires, arrest migrants sneaking across our border & letting them loose again, farmers are late planting because of the rains & floods have left their fields full of standing water, we can expect not just higher fuels prices but higher food prices as well.
We do indeed, live in interesting times, too interesting.
I hope you have a nice cool winter Kevin, don’t get too cold & stay SAFE!
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Kevin!
Blondie! Haven’t listened to her in years! Too much music in this house to choose from…hundreds of records, more hundreds of cassettes, and too many stacks of cds. It’s ridiculous (or fabulous depending on how one looks at it. When one doesn’t have a tv, the house is either mountain-quiet or full of music. A 375w Technics mid-80s component stereo w/ two hanging three foot tall, 325w double-bass KLH speakers makes it concert quality!
Question: How do I put up a picture in the avatar space by my name? I use a pic of me smiling taken in the garden a few years ago, and you can’t tell what kind of garden but the large green vegetation behind me is…large. It’s the pic I used in the Lunch Counter Trilogy book and in comment sections online.
🙂
sealintheSelkirks
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No idea about adding a pic sorry.
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I have an account with both WordPress & gravitar & you can log into gravitar from WordPress. From there you can add a image of your choice like the one I’m using, a Lucy’s warbler, a VERY VERY rare visitor to my home in Oregon some years ago.
A Lucy’s warbler was seen once before in N.Oregon but it starved/froze to death in a few days. “My” Lucy’s warbler stayed here until April 1st because I kept her fed with sugar water, suet & peanut butter.
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Finian Cunningham’s chilling analysis of the pathology of the Trump regime mirrors some of my own contentions that these psychopaths actually believe they are doing their gods work.
Be afraid people, these fruit loops believe in the rapture.
https://sputniknews.com/columnists/201903271073586735-apocalypse-syria-israel-golan-heights-us/?fbclid=IwAR3hXnZrnUDVaCm1VSutVrKw34aV-A9W9AWnO-hiw-J3O8o1UtkydlxPoOI
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But but…these are the normal people, Kevin. The USA Leaders. They believe in ‘god’ because they are so modern…unlike their ancestors who believed in many gods until the Arab Semites invented the monotheistic death cult and the Holy Roman Empire’s Legions slaughtered their Northern European ancestors into believing this crap and taught them the concept of Total War.
Of course their ancestors also believed that the planet was flat and you’d fall off the edge if you sailed too far…even after they were ‘convinced’ to swear fealty to Rome, the Emperor, and the Holy Roman Catholic Church…
They not only sucked the poison in they improved on it! The earth is round! Imagine that! The ingenuity of our species, eh?
No Kevin, don’t be afraid. No point in giving in to their tactics, it just makes us more like them because they are extremely afraid of just about everything. They’re still stuck in the same 1,000 year old trap their beaten ancestors were in Europe.
This place is all temporary, and it seems like the entire planet is being ruled by these mind-sick f**ks who have taken over an enormous number of countries in the last 30 years of the spread of Reagan Neo-Liberalism disease. I’m sorry to say there is probably only one cure…and it isn’t going to be fun to experience. Collapse is happening and we both know it.
On another topic: HEY, I was right about the bullshit term ‘climate change!’ Ralph Nader (if ONLY he could have become president!) posted who the originator was of the term. Here’s the link:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/05/06/note-to-the-environmental-community/
Toodles!
sealintheSelkirks
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Hi “sealintheSelkirks”, welcome to DOOM!
Oh well, may as well live while I still can, we are all doomed in time anyhow.
It looks like against all the odds that “my” tree swallows are going to have a go at breeding’!
They have been building a nest, I saw a white feather that looked larger than the bird that hauled it in.
Looks like the world economy is discovering that service jobs at low wages can’t enable workers to buy the products now being produced in China, Indonesia, Mexico, India etc.
I wonder what took them so long to figure that out?
Another thing that has me puzzled is how so many people who seem intelligent still believe we can trade resources for a resource dependent technology? Don’t they understand that technology is just a TOOL?
Geeze, I had a rotten “education”, most of what I know now I taught myself but I couldn’t have done that if I didn’t learn how to READ & write first.
OK, I’ll take the “god” bait, people believe in such nonsence because it comforts them, makes them feel “special” & give them hope that “life” will be better after they die!
This is silly of course, dead is simply DEAD, only the bacteria, fungi & “worms” will live on us after we die.
If the people who believe in the “rapture” are “normal” than count me as being ABNORMAL & PROUD OF IT!
These beliefs however reduce our appreciation for the world that IS, we reduce it’s value by believing in “life after death”, living NOW becomes less important, other living things are of less value because “god” will make everything “right” again after we are through messing it up.
The US “education” system is terribly neglectful of giving us a good, basic SCIENCE education, they don’t challenge religious beliefs that can be PROVEN to be in error!
We don’t really TEACH evolution, geology, biology or ecology, we aren’t being informed how we are just ONE ANIMAL amongst billions & we are NOT a “special creation”, we evolved along with every other living thing & we are related to EVERY living thing on this planet!
I think the way we think about nature would be very different if we were really taught our place IN nature instead of fostering the false BELIEF that we are seperate, that we can ignore the collapse of nature, the exhaustion of resources, the degradation of life & that BAU can continue forever.
We are in for a very painful dose of reality & the faster we collapse the better for the rest of the planet.
IMHO, religion is irrational & an INSULT to our alledged INTELLIGENCE!
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Welcome to Doom, eh?
Well Sheila, between the “Atmospheric Convulsion” at the end of April and the ‘Heat Dome’ over the Arctic…probably slamming into the extreme moisture coming up from the Gulf of Mexico and causing what is about to possibly happen over the Rockies and down through the Plains states next week because of the radical departure of the Polar Vortex cold air mass heading south as I type… Oh my. Anyone want to bet on how big the gi-freaking-gantic tornado outbreak could get if this comination of weather ‘events’ collide?
And then add in the pending two new USA War Crime invasions/bombings about to be launched by the insane in DC on Venezuela and Iran (the coup already happened but failed in Venezuela). This could get really ugly in the next two weeks. Or today. Or tomorrow. Beyond ugly. Since you wrote the doo-doo has just kept rising over the entire world.
Iran isn’t Iraq who had no missiles, no army, no air force, and had been bombed every day since HW Bush invade Iraq. Iran, the thousands of years of history of being the Persian Empire, is much much different. But Trump just has to equal the number of countries Obama bombed to shit, and Cheney & little wanker bombed to shit, and Bill Clinton bombed to shit, and HW bombed to shit, and Reagan bombed to shit… Bolten and Pompeo are ready to start the nuclear war it looks like. Will they nuke Tehran and murder a couple million people? They sure act like it.
This is all pretty scary. Weather caused by Catastrophic Climate Collapse and War caused by the Catastrophic Mind Sick. Both at the same time.
I’m not sleeping well.
___________
I’ve got roughly 20 female Rufous and Calliope hummingbirds fighting over the two feeders. It’s hard to count the little devils. Sometimes they’ll sit together and one will sip then pull back and the other will do the same thing. But that is rare! Mostly they want to fight.
Lots of bird species have shown up. I can’t name them all because I don’t know their names! I get out my bird book and still don’t get them all correct. I’ve got a friend bringing me two more used 4-seater feeders she found today at a thrift store in the city. Maybe that’ll cut down some of the squabbles?
Wasps are out, too, and I’ve got four traps hanging for those. Mostly big fat queens looking for nest sites. I killed three different nests last night late by squished them flat. One was a Bald-Faced Hornet paper nest. Those are much worse than the yellow jackets I’ve been told. So far I’ve never gotten stung by one but they have tried. I’ve got really good eye-hand (I teach martial arts; of course I do!) and I am seriously deadly with an old flip-flop. They are perfect for whacking wasps out of the air with.
The US economy? The world’s strip-it-bare Capitalist economy? How’s it doing? Ahahahahahahahaha don’t get me going. I know I will live in poverty the rest of my life. But then I’m old so how long that will be is problematical. What was that about a system that is broken and can’t be fixed?
As for dead is dead, definitely the body dies and turns into soil. After all, that is what happens after the body gets eaten and the leftovers get pooped out, right? Poop becomes dirt! Well, after a while anyway. As for other, I’m nearly finished (I think) with my second book that is on that subject. First-hand personal experience. And of course the book has absolutely nothing to do with man-invented religions in any aspect whatsoever. So don’t worry, I haven’t lost my mind. Yet.
Ever single person who has read one draft or another-maybe 14 people, have been blown away by the story. This ranges from a younger 51 yr old friend in Salt Lake who I’ve know since her and her boyfriend were students at USU back in the late 80s; to a 79 yr old retired prof/PhD/published author native Eskimo/Inut woman who wanted to read it and then called me up for a face-to-face meeting because she wanted to discuss it…I was a bit apprehensive about that! She is very sharp-minded. She said it was done other than a few tweeks and other adjustments I could make. She made a list…just like a college prof to still do that! She didn’t read the draft I’m working on now, she read the 3rd. I’m maybe 15,000 word larger at this point. Or more. I’m a scribbler, need a pen in my hand sometimes, so I scribble all over a paper copy which helps me see the story. Weird, I know!
Anyway, she sent my email to a publisher she knows because of what she thought of it. See if anything comes of it.
_____________
But my worst problem with all these gods is that there are so many to choose from!! Who can possibly make any sense out of the 1.5 million listed by anthropologists?? What if I get it wrong??? What if it turns out the Ooga-Booga tribe from the deepest darkest jungle on the Amazon or the one from The Lost World in deepeset darkest Africa, were the only correct one? I’d be totally screwed for eternity because I’d never heard of that god?
What a crock! I swear it’s a virus that infects human brains. Don’t see any other primates building churches!
____________
And yes, I certainly agree that this behavior completely divorces us from the living ecosystem that keeps us alive. Another form of insanity but since over 80% of the US population now lives in urban settings and 85% of the adults get all their information from corporate news television, the problem will only get worse.
When you can never see the stars above your head you don’t realize just how big it is out there. Those ‘Dark Sky’ reserves scattered around the world, the pictures are just freaking amazing. And I thought the center of our little galaxy was impressive up here being so far away from city or town lights until I saw those. Middle of the ocean a thousand miles from anywhere kind of sky which most people never experience because when they are on a ship they can’t go without plenty of lights on!!
___________ Here’s a cut and the link to a really good article about why the Centro Americans are heading north:
…And not just here. Our brutal prison gang culture has metastacized into Central America which is now driving all of their children to migrate here:
“These gangs are part of the cultural fabric of the U.S., not Central America,” says John Sullivan, a gang specialist with the Los Angeles County sheriff’s department. “We deport them, and they’re bigger and badder than any gangs there, and they dominate. And now we have areas [in Central America] that are widely destabilized, with a high degree of violence.”
Children are forced to either choose sides and live short brutal lives or emigrate here to survive. These are the kids that Trump wants to stop using the National Guard.
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/07/140723-immigration-minors-honduras-gang-violence-central-america/
______________
What you said about being in for it? No, we are not ‘in for it’ which is a future tense. We are in it right now and have been for years! We done screwed it all up! Ongoing disasters around the planet year-round, and every year is worst than the last somewhere/many ‘wheres’ around the planet.
Which we can intellectually grasp if not quite feel in the gut the reality of it even if you are really aware of the world around you. We can see the dying populations of other denizens of the planet all around us and hide in our dwellings in inclement weather (unless we are running from a flood, tornado, hurricane, fire, etc etc). But we’re still watching NetFlix or checking our FaceBlech page or answering the 45th text of the day. Most people I run into are plain not paying attention because they’re hooked into their electronic world rather than the real one. Like zombies!
Or flat choose to not be because they are helpless to do a damned thing to change this paradigm, and it makes them too sick inside their heart to function. Paralyzing with deep discomfort.
But eventually a small event can really pop a person in the nose as to just how far we are into Catastrophic Climate Collapse (or Chaos if you prefer). How do I know this? Here’s a little item from last Thursday on my answering machine: my homeowner’s fire insurance of the last 15 years has been abruptly cancelled.
YEP, it’s been cancelled as of the end of my fiscal year which is July 23rd. And I probably cannot get any from anywhere else. At least at any price I can afford being a low-income senior. I talked to Nancy for 20 minutes about it, her office is freaking because they are being told by their parent companies (in this case Mutual of Enumclaw) that anyone they cover in WA, OR, ID, MT, NV, AZ that has trees around their property or trees ON their property are now uninsurable. And, according to her, it was because the Paradise Fire down in Cali last year has them all running scared because their profit margins are narrowing and they are more aware of what the climate is doing to the weather.
So I no longer have fire insurance. We talked climate, well, I did mostly answering her questions. She owns her grandparents property up here in this county (their office is in Spokane County) and she’s had to cancel her own policy on her g-p’s buildings, too. She did give me a phone number for a company I’ve never heard of that may be able to do something for me. Probably not. I’m sure it’s the same number she had given to a large number of her customers Thursday…
So, if my house doesn’t burn down or get all fucked up from a storm or something in the next two months, 15 years of insurance payments go down the drain. Capitalism: privatizing the profits while socializing the risks or cutting them loose completely, Munich RE, the biggest re-insure on the planet, has been squawking about something like this for a few years. Wait’ll all the coastlines suddenly lose their homeowner’s.
My thought later was what about the bank-owned properties that require fire insurance that are in trees? The banks will foreclose for failure to get insurance? Then what? They can’t sell or rent them without fire insurance! Oh, that’s right, just another tax write-off for the wealthy and less housing for the rest of us…
Big sigh. I’m just soooo cynical.
________________Climate insanity for next week? satellite & radar etc maps link:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/5/15/1857911/-Atmospheric-Convulsion-Will-Cause-Historic-Disasters-of-Arctic-Melt-U-S-Storms-Next-Week?detail=emaildkre
_______________Local Weather Update
Hi Kevin,
It’s been raining for three days straight here, raining hard enough to cause flash flooding down in the city (Spokane WA). One inch in 20 minutes will do that to asphalt and concrete-covered earth but not so much up here where there is dirt to soak some of it up. The drop in the Polar Vortex south has me set up for one-after-another series of Northern Pacific storms projected out to at least two weeks. It’s supposed to get back up to 22’C next Thursday when the next storm is supposed to roll in. Lighting anyone? Nights have been 6/7’C.
So I went from 87’F last week to pretty dang chill again. Lit a fire earlier this afternoon to heat the house up.
20 May
Back, and am in a break of the last couple of days between rainstorms. Cloud masses still keep drifting overhead and the ground is trying to dry out. See what happens this week when the next one rolls in overhead. Still chill enough at night to have a small fire in the house to be comfortable.
I’m watching the insanity of the Arctic Heat Dome. Holy crap! Off the rails if it does what they climate guys are expecting to come from the ‘convulsion’ that’s being talked about. What’s your take on this?
seal
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You always have such interesting, informative posts sealintheSelkirks &
yes, things are getting scarier every day.
I’m “lucky” to be living where I am, I’m not in a forest that could burn
me out, I’m not living on a flood plain like so many here are, we are far from any “shitty” & our water & air is clean.But I think our town is dying, too many empty shops, our local bank closed, we lost our only food shop, now I have to drive to the north end of Brookings for food shopping & everything else.
We do have however lots of POT SHOPS!
Our last rainstorm left many people flooded out of their trailers by the
river, I also don’t live down close to the ocean in line to be wiped out
by the next winter storm, can’t say the same for the large motel by
Sportshaven beach. Great Western was smart to sell it to some poor dupe
who will soon have logs, rocks & sand filling their lobby & rooms on the
ground floor.
I have my summer mix of birds here now, Cali quail, Steller’s & Cali scrub jay, black headed grosbeaks, tree swallows, brewers blackbirds, Anna’s hummers, Rufous hummers, only a few of those, american goldfinches, house finches, house sparrows, purple finches & I shot a few starlings.
We have almost no wasps or bees here, my flowers are empty of pollinators.
I wish I had your wasp “problem”!
“My” swallows are still around but they seem confused, they have been
going inside another nestbox that hasn’t a nest inside, what’s that about?
At least their still around. They haven’t had a brood for four years now.
I have a rather large flock of Band tailed pigeons scarfing down food in
the trays & on the ground. The other evening I ran off a racoon feeding
in the seed tray, they usually wait until dark to raid the seeds.
I act real FIERCE growling & barking along with looking BIG & man do
they scoot!
It’s been very WET here postponing planting for everyone, the plains
states are also flooded out & the farmers can’t plant their maize or
soybeans along with other crops that don’t like being flooded.
Their heavy farm machinery also can’t go out because they would get
bogged down in the mud.
Looks like the TORNADO season is off to an early start, I wonder how
well prayer works on averting those storms? From what I have seen of the
wreckage after one has passed through, not much.
As for the arctic, keep a close watch on ice THICKNESS, ignore “extent” that means little, ice can have a great extent but if it’s also thin, it can melt away very quickly.
The arctic ice melts sooner & faster each season, Greenland is also melting very fast. The jet stream is absolutely loopy, dragging warm air up north to melt the ice then dragging cold air down to freeze the central states, NOT the “mid west”!
What dope named those central states the “mid west” when their no where near the west let alone the middle of the west!
Trump, Bolton & Pence would be INSANE FOOLS to go after Iran!
Like you said, their well armed with a modern army, airforce & navy plus
they can shut down the Straits of Hormuz. They also have powerful allies
like Russia & China, also not push overs like Iraq was.
Trump is giving Israel the green light to do as they wish to the
Palestinians, so more will be MURDERED, more of what little land they
still control will be taken over by Israel & the oppressive terrorism
will continue until the US collapses & can no longer support that
apartite state, Israel is doomed.
Looks like the memorial day holiday will be dry, that should be good for tourism but like so much here, tourism is as doomed as the crab fishery.
They had to close the crab fishery again because of Dominic acid.
That must be hard on our fishermen. The rising cost of fuel doesn’t help them either & then add on Trumps tariffs.
One of my peeves is all the fuss about “renewables”, what don’t people get about how we cannot replace declining resources with a resource dependent technology? All they can do is inefficently convert weak solar energy into irratic, part time, electricity?
The newest & best solar cells can convert weak, dispirsed, solar energy into electricity at a pitiful 24%! Most of the energy hitting those cells is wasted.
Then there are the BATTERIES!
There is no way we could produce enough batteries to store enough tetrawatts of electricity in inefficient, LOW DENSITY, bulky batteries to meet even our minimum needs.
Lot’s of folks are in for a harsh dose of reality when they finally realize that “renewables” only refers to their source of energy, not those expensive, inefficient, OIL DEPENDENT devices themselves.
Now our neotheocracy has many southern states banning abortions!
Last time we had banned it we had bled out, DEAD FEMALES abandoned in dirty hotel rooms, bled out dead females dumped in alleys, dead babies in toilets, dead babies dumped in trash bins, sick & dying women & girls filling hospital wards, unwanted children abandoned or abused, unwanted children rotting in orphanages.
Is THAT what those so called “christian” “REPUGLICONS” WANT?
Is this what their Jesus would have done? If he existed, I strongly doubt it!
Too bad their isn’t really a HELL because it would be full of “REPUGLICONS”!
The USA is a disgusting, terrorist, racist, misogynistic,homophobic, warmongering, theocratic, cruel, OLIGARCHY!
The sooner it collapses, the better off everything else will be.
Have a great weekend sealintheSelkirks, get some weed & get a good nights sleep!
As for you dear Kevin, I hope the masses don’t discover what a nice little island you live on!
I wish I could join you “down under”, be greatfull I can’t!
I’m so UGLY I could scare maggots off a gut wagon!
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Evangelical activist Mary Colbert believes climate change is caused by sin and humans should repent to counteract it.
https://mavenroundtable.io/theintellectualist/atheism-secularism/pro-trump-evangelical-sin-not-carbon-dioxide-is-what-s-driving-climate-change-mFq1EYGCyEqG-Bjj98hZ1A/?fbclid=IwAR1qKe7ie003TkVs8UwDFXpbHVOfBmbIgkE8rqgGxHkJ1f7dmxCwfcPtw_I
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Ahahahahaha Another freak show that one just has to laugh at. I mean, what else can one do? It’s just freaky weird to imagine how their brains work. I can’t, it’s too far into the bizarre for me.
These people are reproducing!! A lot! Big families to fill-the-earth full of…dumbshits! I’m sorry, I’m not being polite and that I don’t want to work hand in hand trying to develop a consensus with people that absolutely are not going to change their delusional mental state much less ‘come to a consensus in the middle.’ These people are extremists, and we know from history just what happens when they get into power (usually during a horrible economic downturn caused by the wealthy siphoning off even more of the available wealth etc etc. Dang, dude, these people are a few cards short of a full deck. Missing some air in their tires. Lost some of their marbles. Both feet are not on the ground, Were home sick the day critical thinking skills were handed out. Whatever the problem is we cannot fix it with facts or proof!
This is REAL good. Pass it around! Made my old ass smile!
https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe
I know some people around here that are just like this crazy woman. People say they are ‘so pious’ and ‘upstanding’ and…,and many carry pistols on their very…generously-sized hips. Both genders! Because they feel…scared and threatened like Jesus did that’s why Jesus carried a sword and chopped up his enemies, right?
But nothing of catastrophic climate collapse/destabilization/chaos/disaster/(insert your description here) is allowed in. Hey-sus is about to fly in just anytime now…
Ahahahahaha.
What does one do with crazy people? When there are tens of millions of crazy people around you, of course you are the one that is crazy! I don’t have any answers for this!!
__________
Okay, so I went off on one of these idiot/troll/bot in a climate collapse article (Alaska) comment section yesterday. I occasionally do that but I don’t do it to ‘get back’ at the anti-science troll, it’s to lay out information and/or links that maybe some of the people who are reading the comments will go to and read up on their own. We have an enormous amount of censorship going on across the planet and this is my little way of tossing crumbs into that tsunami.
But the latest response of his/her to me was…so goddamned funny that I spit iced tea out of my nose laughing. Had to unplug my keyboard to wipe up!! Then I laughed while I commented back! And, no, I’m not sorry that I show very little empathy for this person’s viewpoint. Stupid is stupid and I’m just damned tired of catering to stupid people’s opinions and barbaric beliefs. We’ve got so many people in positions of power, wealthy beyond counting, that are actively destroying the flipping planet’s ecosystem for their own profit that sometimes I just have to yell back. So I lectured instead!
Link:
https://commons.commondreams.org/t/the-changes-are-really-accelerating-alaska-at-record-warm-while-greenland-sees-major-ice-melt/64595/40
______________
Local Weather Conditions
I’m officially in drought again. Fire hazard is climbing, and I heard about a 5,000 acre blaze to the west of me across the Columbia River somewhere.The wind has switched from the North, where it isn’t supposed to be coming from this time of year, back to the normal w/sw flow. So the smoke clouds from the Canada fires quit blanketing this far south, and the one out west didn’t blow this way.
The official revocation of my long-time homeowner/fire insurance came last week. Big Insure knows what’s coming. It ain’t good for profits. Hell, they’ve been getting blasted the last few years and it’s definitely going to continue to get…more expensive!
How about those OVER 500 TORNADOES in the Midwest US so far this year, huh? Ain’t that something? Sunspots, yeah? Solar minimum maybe? Big Insure not very happy? s/
Baking hot over this entire area of NE Washington State all week. The Huckleberry Range to the west usually creates these weird t-cell lightning storms that form after crossing the Columbia River but there hasn’t been enough moisture in the air this week. We certainly have seen them roaring through the last month or so! Hail from mushy to thumbnail-sized rock-hard bouncers carpeting everything outside. And I mean a layer deep enough to cover the ground and crunch around on. That and the deluges have killed a couple of friend’s gardens, smashed them flat. Then we had a couple nights below freezing. A killing frost. Oops, weather continues to get weirder and more unpredictable. Imagine that?
Had those massive cloud towers dumping deluge rain squalls right on top of me while throwing lightning in all directions. Include directly above the house with that distinctive CRAAAACK-SNAP and air concussion that hits you in the chest while the bolt is still lit up out the window. That’s been happening from every couple to a few days apart but the last blast was last Saturday before the west-to-east air flow moved slightly north.
BUT it was snowing in the Snake River Canyon in Wyoming and over in w/sw Idaho (Stanley area) with a tornado-very unusual, during the first week in June. Very cold hellacious downpours and hail, icy road conditions. Lousy camping conditions, too.
In these mountains it has been in the 35’C/90sF range all week, Waaaay too hot. It’s just miserable. There have been huge T-cell towering lightning-throwing storms going by just to the north of us the last couple of days but one can’t hear thunder or really see lightning bolts from here. I have caught glimpses of flashes among the castles and towers. These latest micro-burst downpours are running east across the top of us and into the Panhandle of Idaho. Thirty miles south and we’re missed this week. It was 97’F in the city on Thursday when I drove the neighbor in for his second cataract removal surgery at the VA. City concrete and asphalt was radiating and I skated around before finding a shady spot under a tree to sit and read until they let him go home.
We don’t need any damn lightning today, not with it this dry already! But the clouds came in about 1pm and now I’m under a fairly solid overcast with those raggedy black & gray moisture-bearing with a t-storm look to them. And that’s after a sunny warm morning! Still have fans going but haven’t looked at the outside thermometer today. Tank top, flip-flops, and shorts weather in front of a fan feels just about right sitting inside. Upstairs office temp says 24’C.
Continue to do something fun every day, Kevin. Madness surrounds us. Are we living in ‘interesting times’ yet?
sealintheSelkirks
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Sea Link, the single most concise and eloquent contributor to this blog. Thank you.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thanks for the compliment, Kevin. I don’t mean to grab the limelight on your blog! I’m just, as my stepkids used to say, their noisy dad.
And the link to the commondreams Alaska article comments continue to increase. I just posted another long-ass lecture complete with new links for those that want to read them.
repost link: https://commons.commondreams.org/t/the-changes-are-really-accelerating-alaska-at-record-warm-while-greenland-sees-major-ice-melt/64595/60
And this link at the end which I hope will help people:
https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe
This last is why we are done as a species, Kevin. No shit! Stupidity is hardwired due to evolutionary biology, and is nearly impossible to fix with facts in people. My question, which it doesn’t answer, is why are some of us able to shuck off the brainwashing and continue to absorb information? I always try to look at my own mental blocks…maybe that’s the difference? Hmmmm.
sealintheSelkirks
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I have many issues with George Monbiot but he gets the existential threat of these sociopaths who believe in the Rapture;
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Kevin, I replied to this one a while back and it obviously hasn’t shown up. But there was a personal note at the end (that I didn’t want published) so maybe that was why? Unfortunately it was one that I hadn’t copied to a document file so I can’t re-post. And yes I have trouble with Monbiot also and a lot of the ‘mainstream’ optimists-type people but crazy cultists I have no problem with agreeing to the assessments of their madness!
Anyway this popped up and I am SURE that it is thoroughly appropriate to this thread! The First KNOWN genocide in Europe was committed by Christians book burners in ancient Greece on the War Against Science. This is a GOOD history read! LINK:
On Superstition
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/06/12/on-superstition/
A beneficial consequence of studying ancient, medieval, and modern Greek history was my rethinking of Christianity, which ancient Greeks and Romans basically ignored for nearly 400 years.
Fear of the gods, deisidaimonia
The Greeks accused the Christians of deisidaimonia, superstition, because of their fear of the gods. Yet, in the fourth century, the Roman Emperor Constantine made Christianity the state religion.
REST OF ARTICLE AT LINK!
That’s it.
sealintheSelkirks
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Here’s a new link to the ecological/climate crisis…from a article that’s over 50 years old! The first page of the PDF starts off with a conversation with Aldous Huxley a year before he died….
An excerpt, possibly relevant, from a forgotten classic, The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis by Lynn White, Jr. (Science, March 10, 1967):
Especially in its Western form, Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen. As early as the 2nd century both Tertullian and Saint Irenaeus of Lyons were insisting that when God shaped Adam he was foreshadowing the image of the incarnate Christ, the Second Adam. Man shares, in great measure, God’s transcendence of nature. Christianity, in absolute contrast to ancient paganism and Asia’s religions (except, perhaps, Zoroastrianism), not only established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God’s will that man exploit nature for his proper ends.
PDF here: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/155/3767/1203
________________
Other than this, it’s really freaking hot here. Again. Didn’t start quite as early as last year but variations of a theme can be expected I guess. As it is I don’t go outside all day. Heavy smoke from some fire to the west yesterday (don’t know where) that made wearing an N-95 mask when outside a reasonable proposition. Now the weather is using the term ‘haze’ instead of ‘smoke’ but minimization is the norm. I’d prefer not breathing in microscopic particulate matter if at all possible…
11 billion tons of ice lost on Greenland in one day last week! Madness all around me and I’m the crazy one who talks about science reality because I haven’t ‘given myself’ to their made-up god. It gets really annoying at times. I’ve been using this lately on those that want to push their crazy shit:
The most powerful weapon in the world for control is MYTH, wrapped in BELIEF, which is covered in an impenetrable armor of HABIT. Then I get to explain that. The confusion on faces can be humorous!
Nothing more for now! Hope all is well as possible with you, Kevin!
sealintheSelkirks
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I choose not to monetise this website. I have zero interest to materially benefit from my climate research.
My analysis is free and without strings or ulterior motives, that’s the real value imho.
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And I teach Kenpo Self Defense lessons for free, and teach snowboarding to low income kids and their families in winter. It isn’t always about the money, BestGina…
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Have you been to Googles https://sites.google.com/site/arcticseaicegraphs/ lately?
So many graphs are gone! Even some that are still up don’t get you to the ice map shown but you have to first register before you can even see that map. I guess they figure that if the data is removed, climate disruption will just go away.
Greenland is melting like a Popsicle left out on the road on a hot day! So many melt lakes showing up now.
This AM we had rain, now it’s sunny & hot, how can we farm with such wild swings in weather? Some farmers still have fields mucky from flooding, no planting there!
Took a peek at the sun today, still spotless but the first spots of cycle 25 have shown up so more spots should be seen soon & that means a little more energy flowing our way from the sun.
Just what we need!
I read in the news yesterday about a native tribe in Washington state that tried to have a traditional celebration that would offer a live salmon to the local orcas but they could find NO salmon or Orkas, their GONE! The water is too hot so the salmon are staying far out to sea. All they could offer was some Cedar branches.
We even had a large, tropical Mola mola off shore here! What’s next, Swordfish?
How does one stay “sane” when so many people are bat shit CRAZY?
All the endless excitement about “renewables”, electric cars, electric planes, Cali is forcing developers to put solar panels on all new homes! That should cut down even more on home ownership in California!
Looks like Trumps sanctions are backfireing on him, the problem isn’t China, it’s “our” corporations who move OUR JOBS off to China, Malaysia Mexico, Korea, etc. Trump needs to steeply TAX those corporations to help pay for the unemployment, poverty & homelessness those actions caused. What Trump overlooked is that China is the only source for many scarce minerals & China can cut off our supply.
I’ve been using my BB gun on Cowbirds, their nest paracites that lay their eggs in the nests of host birds. The cowbird chick usually hatches first & pushes the host egg out of the nest or if it’s young have already hatched, the cowbird chick pushes it out of the nest. This a hard on our stressed warblers & blackbirds, double so since so many insects are no more.
I got at least 4 of those pests this morning.
“My” swallows have flown south already or died of starvation, no chicks again. I wonder if I’ll ever see them again?
I did find a larva of the Painted lady butterfly, I haven’t seen one in years even though each year I grow a patch of thistle for them. I cut off the thistle branch it was feeding on & put it in a jar. The next day it stopped feeding & wandered about, it was ready to pupate.
It’s pupa is a lovely thing all washed with gold. It hatched last week into a lovely Painted lady which soon flew south.
Kashmir is again exploding with religious violence. I saw a pair of terrified young Muslum girls being attacked by Hindus. They were being shoved around, yelled at, hit & pushed to the ground into the mud. Most of the people in Kashmir are Muslums but India want’s to claim Kashmir as does Pakistan, both countries have nukes.
Well it’s past “420” so it’s about time to load up my new rig & have a few nice dabs.
We still need the dam fed to make cannabis LEGAL, remove it from the drug schedule.
Let’s allow more folks to medicate or just enjoy, sure beats getting DRUNK & ANGRY!
The fastest growing business here are POT SHOPS! But they can only deal in CASH & that makes it dangerous to do business. So far, they haven’t been robbed.
It’s also about time to head over to Youtube for some shameless entertainment, gotta escape the gloom & doom once in a while.
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Google? You meant to say the unofficial CIA search engine, yes? Just keeping a list of who wants to know what, eh? Sort of like Santa Claus! Checking it twice, naughty or nice…maybe get a nice lump of coal in your stocking… But don’t worry your president has your back on this! Just check out his ‘trial balloon’ on the latest ‘Executive Order’ about federal agencies gaining new far-reaching powers to pick and choose which kind of Internet material is and is not acceptable. This site may become ‘unavailable’ in this country:
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/08/11/leaked-draft-trump-executive-order-censor-internet-denounced-dangerous
Farmers? As for the world’s breadbasket in the Midwest, the farmers are having a hell of a year. I’m sure they are so thankful that Trump is giving them billions in handouts and welfare…oh, oops, excuse me subsidies or maybe it is ‘bail-out money’ due to the massive flooding and then the incredible heat spell that withered whatever crops they managed to get planted in the mud. Oh wait, isn’t that part of the country Red States against welfare and hand-outs? So they must be sucking it up and putting their faith in god and prayer, yes? Or are they are taking money from the Feds??? Hypocrites!
I also read a Washington State story yesterday about salmon being discovered in the upper Columbia for the first time in years. How the hell they got past all the dams is a wonder! But I’m sure the story you were reading was about the San Juan Orcas out west in Puget Sound. They aren’t doing very well. But neither is the oyster fisheries.They lost the entire season here a couple years ago due to heat stress in the water…and look at all the West Coast whales dying…
No Sheila, one does not stay sane in a culture such as this one. It’s impossible to not be affected from the lessons we learned in childhood.
To wit:
An example of lessons learned in childhood:
(from counterpunch.org Roaming Charges):
Two weeks ago, Nancy Pelosi, who seems to have a deep affection for the Gipper, invoked the spirit of Ronald Reagan when she introduced her censure of Trump for his racist tweets about the Squad. “It condemned the words of the President. Not the President, but the words of the President,” Pelosi said. “And doing so, it anchored itself in the words of Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan, beautiful speech by Ronald Reagan, which I reference all the time.”
Any illusions about Reagan’s bigotry were shattered this week when tapes were released of an October 1971 phone call Reagan made to Nixon, after he became enraged at African nations voting in the UN to recognize the People’s Republic of China.
AT LINK: taped conversation released:
“Last night, I tell you, to watch that thing on television as I did,” Reagan said.
“Yeah,” Nixon interjected.
“To see those, those monkeys from those African countries,” Reagan ranted.”Damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!”
+ The racist portion of the taped conversation between Nixon and Reagan was withheld from the public for decades in order to protect the privacy of a man, Ronald Reagan, who respected no one else’s privacy–in what we read, watched, listened to or did with our own bodies.
+ The Emperor may not have any clothes, but he’s still got that white sheet…
+ Each generation tends to think its rulers are more insane than any others. And it often seems that way. But the fact is: they’re all insane. Who remembers how close Reagan was to starting a nuclear war when he was caught “joking” on a live mic before giving his weekly radio address: “
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Mind you, that’s the leader of the Democrats who loves Reagan…Oh, and by the way, Pelosi has a net worth of $123,000,000. Think she’s on anybody’s side but her own profit margin? Nawwww! The Empire pays good.
As for the renewable energy craze, there aren’t enough natural resources to build everyone an electric car, much less put solar panels on everybody’s house. And all of the renewables are built using oil…to mine, transport the raw materials to the foundries, then run the factories that build this stuff. Then ship finished products around the world. Without the massive use of fossil fuels, ‘renewable energy’ machines don’t exist. How’s that for a great big gob of irony? Here’s a cut from an article:
…+ all “alternative energy” itself is fossil-fuel-based. None of it could or did exist without fossil fuels. Solar panel themselves are made with metallurgical coal and quartz – both derived from blowing up mountains. The top beneficiaries of tax subsidies to promote solar? The Koch Bothers!…
So they require solar panels on houses all over SoCal. Makes sense to me. The gov’ment can cut the military budget to pay for the panels and installation! That also makes sense to me. Won’t happen, the country is insane, but is nice to think about the possibilities.
Trump’s tariffs are working just fine. Do they hurt the wealthy? Nope. Remember when Reagan got caught paying the moving costs of US corporations his regime was pushing to jump over the border and build Maquiladoras factories in Mexico in the early 80s? Lots of jobs disappeared then! Did that hurt the wealthy? Nope. Now it’s Asian dictatorship/totalitarian/neoliberal countries with slave factories. Nothing really changes just the faces of the corrupt not the corruption…
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Nope, I’m not shooting BBs at birds. I’m currently arguing with a squirrel who is adamently protesting the chicken wire I’m using to try to keep he/she the hell out of the tool shed that is attached to the woodshed. It got so mad that the little bastard ripped holes in a couple of the 2 cu. yard bags of potting soil (special soil for the cannabis garden) and scattered dirt all over. I just caught sight of it from the window climbing up under the eves with more nesting material and ran out the door to see how it was getting in this time! I also found the new nest-I’ve thrown out six in the last month, and chucked it onto the burn pile, too, along with more pine cones. Then got out the staple gun and put up more chicken wire. It’s going to be really pissed now! It sat in the dog run Ponderosa tree chittering at me the entire time I was working. Yep, seriously pissed.
The hummingbirds are starting to scatter. Only a few left now still coming to the feeders. Guess all the babies have grown up and flown away by August. There were a score and more adults that showed up this Spring, both Calliope and Rufus, and the buzzing aerial battles were intense. My neighbors had a bunch on their feeders this year, too.
I’ve had a few different species of butterfly flitting over the property this warm season. I don’t know the different names but they’ve ranged from near jet black to wildly bright, from tiny dime-sized to palm of your hand. And it’s because of the plant growth! The bio-control Chinese Knapweed weevils I let loose in 2008 (both flying and root) have done an amazing job of eradicating that noxious plant-killing invasive. I was told when I bought them that I shouldn’t expect to see much changed until the end of the first decade. This nasty crap is down to less than 10% across these 8 acres!
I have ground cover back, bushes and saplings everywhere, what my retired biology teacher (botanist) neighbor says are healthy native species. Flowers are re-seeding themselves and growing in profusions of yellows and creams and whites and reds and pinks and purples and lavenders, oh my! He was wandering around mumbling in Latin to himself while pointing out this or that to me. The flying weevils have also made it through the trees and around the corner to their 30 acres of Forest Stewardship Program property on the creek. He’s been seeing them crawling over their knapweed laying larvae in the flowerheads. Spread the love, baby! Let them bugs proliferate!
I walk to the gate to close it every evening when the wind shifts to coming down the canyon east and behind me. It has been like walking into a perfume factory for weeks. The heat has mostly ended the flowering season though the plants are still green and healthy, but the smells were wonderful while it lasted. It’s the little things one has to be aware of to push back that doom and gloom now and then, correct? Ha!
But to escape the doom and gloom? How can I do that, Sheila, when there is only one planet to live on and it is in dire trouble caused by my own species and there is nothing I can personally do to change the trajectory? The joke is there ain’t no planet B…ain’t much of a joke, actually.
Of course I then take a very deep breath and I look out the window behind this computer at the clouds and rain lashing the property-line trees at 11am Friday morning and by the afternoon the sun came out. 6pm it was 78’F. It was 90’F at 5pm Saturday, then lighting and heavy downpours boomed in by 10pm and it rained most of the night. Bolts flying everywhere! Woke up the next morning (Sunday 8/11) to serious overcast and before noon in came more t-cells with lighting in every direction but staying up in the clouds as they blew by. Heavy deluge micro-burst rain squalls kept pounding on the metal roof above my head! I was out in the shop and it was like a thousand mad squirrels with little hammers!
It was overcast this fine Monday morning and comfortably cool. Still is though it is warming up and there is sunshine in blue sky to the south as the cloud cover moves northeast. My weather was only predicted to be rainy into Saturday. Nice that we got the extra day of needed rain. Last year I didn’t see rain from June into October on the calendar…
After the past week of (mostly) 103’F/40C temperatures wearing N-95 particulate masks when outside (not often) due to being horribly buried in smoke from fires, a little pouring rain meant I escaped that doom & gloom even if only for a short couple of days. The fire smoke will undoubtedly return as will the heat later in the week.
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Kashmir. Did you know that India and Pakistan could cause Nuclear Winter all by themselves? At least in the Northern Hemisphere. They’ve nearly gone to full-on war how many times in the last forty years? Twice? Three times? They’ve got enough bombs between their countries to do it!!
Ain’t just our culture that is insane. it’s the entire species… Hey, it’s been 123’F in the subcontinent countries lately and they are running out of food and water because the monsoons are all screwed up. Oh wait, combined they have a population of 1/5 of the total humans on the planet? Nearly 2 billion or something like that? And local battlefield commanders have the local control to use their missiles. Hmmmm. Another one of those when not if situations as is the ongoing climate catastrophe?
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I laugh my ass off every time I drive into Spokane and see giant billboards for cannabis stores. Not funny is the fact that the people/government who have been putting us in jail for the last 80 years over this plant are the ones regulating it and making all the money. Government regulated corporate cannabis! I read that Monsanto has a GMO cannabis seed under patent already…waiting for the fed legalization you mentioned.
I’ve got a friend who was busted for growing years and years ago. Local guy, married, wife’s on a school board, owned a long-time local small neighborhood food market, and can’t legally grow commercial because of the felony grow conviction. So they licensed a big grow op for the state under her name, which is legal, but he runs it while she’s holds the official ownership of the state contract. Last I heard they had 1,800 plants growing last year under state contract. About two pounds of bud per plant, and the plants are moved with forklifts they are so big! I sewed up a bunch of fabric pots for him. They sold the local market they had run for years last year. No profit in it. But they aren’t corporate, they’re just people who managed to get one of the state contracts. Probably one of the few family-owned contracts in the state actually.
Why is it the bad guys are the ones who always win? I mean, really, just look around the world and see who is in control, who own the governments, who profits off misery and hate. How many countries are in effect dictatorships? Ours included of course. No wonder the religious decided to distract people from dealing with reality and invented a mythical ‘heaven’ to aspire to while pandering to the totalitarian influences of wealthy politics. Power is the strongest drug of all…
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Here’s a great history read about how the FBI sent agents to learn from the Gestapo in 1938, then recruited Nazis and gave them new identities after WWII. Explains a LOT about this country’s so-called justice system!!
The Rise of the American Gestapo
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/08/07/the-rise-of-the-american-gestapo/
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And if you’re going to spend time on youtube (which I can’t do being on dial-up internet), you might want to look for the 5 minute 5 second-long vid called “Two Feet of Freshies.” If you can’t find it you can go to my shop website’s home page boardwarm.com and follow the link. Put on headphones because the music fits perfectly with what I’m doing on my powderboard in perfect snow a couple years ago….that’s the nose of my snowboard you see in the camera lens I’m holding in my front hand…
As to that, I’m going to spend a little time fussing with the end of my 2nd book. I’m on the last 20 pages of rewrites and editing of Rough Draft #4. This is the final cut I think, as it feels done to me. My brain has emptied this story out in over 93,000 words and nearly 500,000 characters in the last three years. 3 1/2 years! Freaking finished and it feels good to have it out of my head! I have no idea how I’m going to get it published.
Do something fun, Sheila.
You, too, Kevin! I wish I could watch some of the vids you post but dial-up just sucks for that. Too many MB for a computer that only gets 45.2kbps!!
sealintheSelkirks
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So YOUR Seal IN the Selkirks mountain range of Washington state? Nice!
Climate disruption won’t be doing your business any favors. Might want to move into hang gliding, skateboarding, hiking, canoeing, anything that is a sport that doesn’t need snow!
That snowboarding looked like fun. But the video needed some editing, it was too dark. A light meter is calibrated to a grey card to anything much lighter or darker than that gets too dark or too light. A video editing software should also be able to lighten up & boost the contrast of that video.
I wish I could have snowboarded but I’m a short, fat, ugly, runt of a girl, I have no energy & I was always too poor to engage in such an expensive sport.
These last two days have been “interesting”.
Yesterday I went out to check on the one survivor of 3 Anis plants I had but it was GONE! Nothing left of it! I had ONE suspect – a GOPHER!
I got out my gopher traps linked by a chain, a long shafted screwdriver, a shovel & gunny sack cloth & stabbed around the area until I found a hollow. I then dug a plug, cleared out the dirt & felt about for the shaft then just beyond it it’s RUN. Once I found it’s run I installed the two traps facing away from each other & linked by that chain that I staked out with the screwdriver so if the gopher wasn’t killed, it couldn’t drag the trap off.
The next day, today, I did my usual, fed the birds inside & out & prepared breakfast.
While doing that I heard a thunk but it wasn’t from around the deck so I walked out to the nearby dirt room & looked out the double pained glass door but didn’t see anything.
I then opened the door & I could hear a whistling noise nearby & looking down, I saw a beautiful young Black headed grosbeak lying on it’s back & crying.
It must have flown at a high speed into that VERY DIRTY glass door.
I gently picked it up, head not floppy, no blood in mouth, no wheezing, it was breathing but I could see something stuck in the back of it’s tongue.
I took it inside & using a tweezer & with some difficulty, pulled a seed out of it’s glottis. A birds glottis is right behind it’s tongue & that seed could have stopped it’s breathing.
I carried it off to a inside bathroom that gets pitch black with the door closed & put it on an old T-shirt in the tub for it to recover, I hoped.
I finished my breakfast & went outside to check the traps. The area was all dug up, the gunny sack cloth was lying away from the hole.
I dug out some dirt & pulled on the chains & in one trap was a BIG GOPHER! The digging was probably done by racoons trying to get at the dead gopher. It will have it tonight.
Then I took a flashlight & went back to the bathroom where I had left the grosbeak. When I picked it up, it screeched loudly, strongly struggled & bit me! Clearly it had recovered so I took it outside & tossed it into the air where it flew off as though it’s tail was on fire!
Today it’s been “hot,” hot for here but certainly not as hot as other places like France, Japan & India where people are dying from the heat.
I’m sorry you don’t have high speed internet, 45.2kbps is so SLOW! I get 100Mbps!
For that I gave up my crappy satellite TV.
The satellite provider had moved ALL the channels I liked to the most expensive “package” so I just ended the “service”, I wasn’t about to pay hundreds of $$$ a month just to be able to watch a few of the shows I liked. Most of the channels in my crappy “package” were “reality” shows, game shows, sports, religion, music, unfunny “comedy” channels, ( I just HATE laugh tracks!) shopping channels, hunting, fishing, golf, fake ” local news” shows that had cooking, barbecuing, gardening, fashion & other items that WERE NOT NEWS!
Oh gee, I missed 420 AGAIN! it’s now 1720. Oh well, better late than never.
Have fun? Too hot, too many tourists, good for business, not so good for the locals.
So now you too have billboards advertising cannabis! Cannabis is the ONLY business that’s growing, Just follow the MONEY it’s our MONEY the states want!
Pot shops here are everywhere!
One thing governments love is OUR MONEY!
That’s why they want to impose a carbon TAX on us instead of working to RATION FUEL, STOP GROWTH & END IMMIGRATION.
Things just keep getting worse don’t they, now their finding PLASTIC in the rain & snow in the arctic!
Plastic in the oceans, plastic in our fish, plastic cluttering up the worlds beaches, plastic filling the bellies of baby sea birds, plastic filling the stomachs of dying whales & dolphins & now the fishermen are catching dorados & marlin off Oregon beaches! Just yesterday I said “what’s next? swordfish off our beaches?” Marlins are a swordfish!
A large Sunfish was spotted just off shore here, their a denizen of the tropics!
Salmon dying, whales dying, seabirds dying, swallows going extinct, the inmates are ruling the world & can’t be stopped as long as they can find enough MALE ANIMALS to do their nasty ugly bidding.
Well, at least I might have saved one small life, that young grosbeak.
Too bad about that GOPHER but it shouldn’t have eaten my last anis plant!
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Yep, I actual live in the Selkirks. Well, on the Selkirks to be more precise. Kevin’s got his boat, I’ve got my little patch of woods. We both got lucky, yes? I guess it should be sealontheSelkirks since I’m not underground? An old surfer dude living a long way from the beach, that’s for sure. It’s an 8 hour drive to my favorite surf camping spot at La Push on the Olympic Peninsula…and a 25 mile trip to the parking lot of my local snowboarding hill. If I get a good winter, which isn’t often any more, I can hike up the rest of this ridgeline behind the property to the top of ‘Lime Kiln Hill’ and ride a vertical drop of maybe 800 feet/probably more than a mile in distance, from the peak downhill through the trees to the road. And then a mile or so walk back to the house. I did a ‘First Descent’ for snowboarding on it ten years ago according to the local-born & raised neighbors. They’d never seen another snowboarder do it. I had a four feet of base around the house that year so it was maybe six feet on top. It was a really fun run!
No, catastrophic climate destabilization certainly won’t make a winter snowgear shop a going concern, will it? As a matter of fact I’m dead in the water and have been for years other than having a great local rep and a few decades-ago customer-folk from out of state who can’t believe I’m still sewing gear and will order a hat or a microfleece base layer now and then. It’s more of a hobby than a business though I’m still an official business with the State of Washington (they want any taxes they can wring from me!). A quarter of the shop building has turned into garage/storage but it’s still a snowboard gear sew shop when you walk in. Mostly retired I guess. Ah well.
Funny that this shop survived HW Bush’s NAFTA/GATT that neoliberal Bill Clinton pushed through in the mid-90s along with de-regulating the banks, but it didn’t survive WBush’s most favored trade treaty with China in 2004 and the deliberate collapse of the economy by that neoliberal regime and Wall St. bankers in 2007/08.
Hell, I can’t even get my local snowboarding hill to buy gear any longer because they get such cheap crap from China! So much for supporting local businesses.
Snowboarding is just surfing mountains, really, and I’ve been riding boards on water & concrete since I was 7. Surf mats even longer but I don’t think those are around any longer. But a board on snow made far more sense than two sticks tied to your feet! Never skied. I’ve tried cross-country and still have a pair, but when it came to traveling across snow I do better with my snowshoes. Much more work and slower than skis but who wants to fall that much?
And nope, that vid doesn’t need any editing. It’s supposed to look that way because it was taken in the Deep & Dark under thick forest snow-piled deep canopy with the camera being held in my right hand above my front knee (I’m a goofyfoot surfer) as I screamed down through that out-of-bounds tree run. Only another boarder that loves dropping tight trees could understand! You did notice that about 10 seconds in I turned right into/between the trees? Where the best snow is likely to be found…and it needs to be very shaded to keep the powder light and fluffy!
As for your physical description, do you think the only people I teach to ride for free every year are bronze gods and goddesses? Not a chance! Most of the people I take up are low income kids & teens and their parents and often are friends with people I’ve taken up riding in previous seasons. More word of mouth as a teacher!
Most folks use my loaner boards wearing loaner boots and wearing loaner gloves and goggles, and I make them hats and neck/face gaitors etc etc. I have totes full of different boot sizes and many-sized pairs (often mis-matched) of both ski & boarding gloves picked up over the years from parking lots and sides of the road. It is amazing how many gloves people lose. 12 loaner boards for students, too, ranging from a 115cm little kid to a 161cm adult. And I (nearly always) can get a person up and riding ‘Falling Leaf’ stance on the Bunny Hill sometime during their first day. The ‘nearly’ is because I had one that didn’t in the last 15 years, but none in the decades before that. The first time I taught someone to snowboard was in 1984. My first snowboard was 1972 (who else was buying them but us surfers?), and I got ejected from the lift at Heavenly Valley in Tahoe winter of 1973 for trying to get on with one. Paid for the ticket but the liftie wouldn’t let me on! They did give me my money back.
And physical energy gets better the more you get used to expending it. Until you get old as I’ve started to notice dang it! I have to be careful about that with new students and judge when they’ve reached the exhaustion point and need to go in to rest and eat, or go home. Sometimes you have to make them stop because they are having so much fun! Too tired means mistakes and that means injuries.
And yes, it’s an expensive sport but isn’t everything expensive? Hell, there is always somebody that wants to bleed people of cash waiting around every corner in our world! Ever seen the cost of the rod and gear that a Fly Fisherman spends? Or deep sea fishing out in the ocean? Thousand dollar cell phones, really? Hell, the membership cost at Trump’s golf courses!!! But when one finds something that they absolutely just love to go do, you find a way. Ski resorts tickets outrageously expensive? Go put in a stairway up a snow-covered hill, posthole steps, and board down using 2nd hand gear bought cheap. Can’t afford that $500 reel & rod? Get a stick, tie a line to it and a $1 hook to the line, dig up a worm, and you are fishing. Too far from the mountains or ocean and live in a horrible concrete city? Get a skateboard and learn to surf it. One just has to find that one thing they love to do!
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I may have slow dial-up and not nearly the access that you have, but I pay $8.95 a month for unlimited time online. I can afford that…
Gophers. Don’t get me going on them. Or moles, either. I put in 14 fruit trees years ago and every single one got eaten right down to polishing the root ball with their teeth! They went right through the netting etc and ate every root that grew. A couple lasted a couple years, and there is one over a decade later still standing dead and forlorn on the s/w corner west of the wellhouse. I never tried again. They won that round. There are holes all over the place, but the entire property is coming back to health due to no pesticides and bio-control of invasive plant species. Gophers are a part of the ecosystem even if we don’t like them. I had a raised-bed garden to combat that. Worked, too! I had great melons and zukes and tomatoes that year! But pests? No doubt they are to our needs, as is that damned squirrel I’m wrestling with!
Yep, I get birds whacking themselves into windows now and then. Double-paned winter glass so they bounce pretty hard. Never had one not fly away though some sat there awhile until their little birdie brains quite rattling around in their skulls. One thing I keep getting is mountain bluebirds flying down the damn 6″ double-wallled house chimney. They make a lot of noise as they slowly slide down so I open the flue at the bottom and they drop into the Lopi stove where I can towel-wrap them (use an old pair of nice thick leather welding gloves and they can’t hurt biting) and walk them out the door. Had a (I think) junko get trapped once, too, but it was so ash-covered that it was hard to tell for sure! Why I never find any in the 8″ chimney out in the shop I have no idea.
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I haven’t had a tv since 1993. Such an addiction! Tobacco may give people cancer but tv makes you stupid! Fact! University studies have shown that people are less informed of facts and history behind events about the world the more they watch! And generally everybody watches tv but not everybody smokes tobacco! Think about this: You may not have a working toilet or running water in the poverty-stricken slum housing you are in but you damned sure have a working tv. Terrible! As a matter of fact I gets somewhat annoyed when having gone visiting and there is one constantly blaring in the background. And nobody even notices it’s on until I mention it. I watch people’s eyes get dragged to the screen in conversations. It’s really scary to see that.
Cancer is bad but not everybody gets it. TV makes everyone stupider but generally everybody has one. So dying of stupid is okay but dying of cancer isn’t? I find that so bizarre a thought that it makes me dizzy…
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Touristas! Good for business but not good for the locals. But think of it this way, if those businesses had to survive financially on just the locals the majority of them would go out of business, you’d then have even more unemployed, and all of you would need to go to Ashland or Medford to shop!! Rents would probably go down, and so would property prices and taxes, but then you’d see even worse crumbling infrastructure by the towns and counties… Interlocked systems here, Sheila, just like the climate. DOOMED we are, no doubt about it. Just a matter of when it breaks enough to affect everyone.
Oh, and while I’m on the subject of economics, there is a little-known telltale about the economy that isn’t much talked about. In 2006-07 the railroad sidings and unused railroad areas out in the boonies of Montana were jammed up by thousands of unused flatbed railcars that were supposed to be moving China containers all over the country…and right now it’s happening again. That was just reported in the https://missoulian.com and they called it the ‘canaries’ of the 2008 Crash so you might want to…do what I wonder? We certainly can’t change a damned thing going on!
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About immigration…why do we use the terms African-Americans and Chinese-Americans and Filipino-Americans but for white people in this country, no matter what country they are from, they aren’t called European-American? I mean, the first immigrants (of Asian descent commonly called ‘Native’ Americans) didn’t invite them, right? So there actually aren’t any legal immigrants except the first ones, right? Since the first ones didn’t displace any other humans I guess that would be true.
Even Trump’s grandpappy the whorehouse owner was an illegal! Should have thrown gramps back but he tried…but Austria didn’t want him back and wouldn’t let him in.
Ever think about how the Native Americans should have adopted Trump’s policies of brutality and wall building? Stolen the illegal Euro’s children and put them in dog kennels? Probably should have sunk a few of those refugee ships, too, while they were at it don’t ya think? Imagine the Mayflower foundering with all hands…no crazy Puritan evangelicals. No murdering Pilgrims. No insane Massachusetts Bay Colony! What a difference that would have made to the world…just daydreaming don’t mind me.
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Yes Sheila, things just keep getting worse in every category I read. And that’s daily in more than one. If you want to go with climate there is no end to the horror coming. Economy? Only the rich get fed. The only reason cannabis is legal is because the wealthy own the businesses and governments can tax the shit out of the buyers (sin taxes!). But as Hillary said: it’ll never be legalized on her watch! And her dumbass but wealthy (married one of those ‘hedge’ fund dudes) daughter recently said (paraphrased): marijuana should never be legalized because it makes people crazy and put in the hospitals….no I’m not kidding. Chelsea is a freaking moron neoliberal just like her momma!
But the Arctic, Greenland, every glacier on the planet, acidifying oceans, the 86 football fields of forest a minute being cut down worldwide, CO2, methane, all GHGs are rising, death of the Great Barrier Reef …oh crap does the list of the horrible to mind-boggling get longer and longer the more I read. Then you add in the insanity that has always been prevalent in how our species functions inter-species. On the basis of written human history I’d have to say that anyone that holds out a lot of hope for continued existence is not as intelligent as Albert Einstein was. Which is to say a majority of us…and look what he said about WWIII. Anybody with a lick of sense (common it isn’t by the way) and a handful of facts is bound to have some bad days mulling this stuff over. So you save a grosbeak and I’m sucking yellow jackets off the hummingbird feeders (still a few coming in) with the vacuum hose so they can fly in and eat without getting buzzed. We do the best we can in our own little sphere of influence. That, it seems, is about all we CAN do.
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Kevin! You keep posting the mostly saddest news, and then Andrew Glikson comes up on Arctic News last week. Even worse! Ugh. I wonder how much longer this gradual breakdown will go before the system…just breaks. Won’t be gradual at that point I’m sure. Big sigh.
Weather here has been low 90sF/32C+. Smoke from another fire (level 1 evac) about ten miles south was visible yesterday but the wind pattern didn’t bring it this way. Nor has it today since I’m pretty sure that’s what I see out the window in that direction. Humidity has dropped to 15% or so, forest is dry. The T-cell storms that blow through don’t really drop much water except in localized downpours. Lightning is scaring the piss out of everyone when thunder starts being heard in the distance.
Good News! I finished my second book last week by the way. Rough Draft #4, took me since Dec. 2015 so 3 1/2 years. Over half a million characters and just under 100,000 words but I’m still trying to figure out an epilogue for it that was suggested by a Eskimo/Aleut retired prof/PhD/published writer friend who read draft #3 last year. She said I should consider it and I am, but I’m not really sure where to go with it! She’s got a publisher she thinks might be interested in this genre…but wants to read this draft soon, too. I’ve had stories published in the meantime that were between 2,000 and 10,000 words as I had to put it down for a while at times. I have no idea if that’s normal or not but it worked for me.
Do something fun every day. I’m trying to.
sealintheSelkirks
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George Monbiot reiterates my contention that the lunatic Christian Fundamentalists believe in “The Rapture” and are deliberately speeding up the unraveling of the biosphere.
If you think that’s insane look at the nutcases in power in the US, Australia and Brazil.
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Why would that sound insane? It makes perfect sense when considering the mentality of a Bronze Age Arab-Semite Messianic Cult with a death wish who are just trying to achieve their purpose in life. Nothing insane about that…other than the death of the entire f…ing biosphere at the same time.
And hell, a few millions years go by and you won’t even notice we were here unless maybe a few pieces of trash left floating in geosynchronous orbit still. By then even the continental shapes will have changed, or mushed back together. And even all the radioactivity left across the world would have decayed!
Of course the possibility exists that we do so much damage that this planet turns into another Venus.
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As for the seriously mind sick, this 2nd poorest county in the state that I live in has everything. This popped up last week:
Neo-Nazi militia training camp in NE Washington woods fits into region’s dark history
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/8/15/1879107/-A-Neo-Nazi-militia-training-in-the-NE-Washington-woods-fits-into-the-region-s-dark-history
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And I’m still not a fan of Monibot. Even when he correct. Which I don’t think is all that often.
sealintheSelkirks
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Lawd Gawd spare us ! lol This will cheer you up;
https://deadstate.org/christian-activist-sin-is-to-blame-for-extreme-weather-not-climate-change/?fbclid=IwAR1bJ7RR2SzAbn4XZSCfvVN1eo0fOa73ji75YpQ9UNVg_45pp0ahAyYXRKc
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That was freaky to read, Kevin! And there are so many of these Bronze Age barbaric mental-deficient primates (in one form or another) that there is only one answer to ending their mental instability. Unfortunately I’m not sure how to go about it…
Religions are like a brain virus that only affects our species of primate. No other animal evolved on this planet acts this stupid so it must be species-specific. Maybe finding a vaccine for the disease would be in the best interests of the species and the planet? HA!
Not likely but hey, gotta have a little humor while one can. I really don’t look forward to the kind of rampaging death world they want to have happen. Did you read that post on the same site:
https://deadstate.org/christian-prophet-patriots-will-drag-dead-democrats-through-the-streets-if-trump-doesnt-carry-out-mass-arrests-by-january/
I’m waiting on my slow-ass dial-up for it to load. I need another belly laugh tonight. Been a long day. Oh, this guy is a peach! I’m so glad I’m not a Democrat…but then I’m not a Republican, either… But my ponytail will probably be enough for them to indict me for whatever they want to claim…
Question: Why are so many of these simpering foolish women blondes? What is up with that? Or is that because it is ‘the look’ they desire to present to jesus the 5 foot Arab-Semite Hebrew guy with very dark skin and curly black hair over a prominent hooked nose they hope to impress with their Euro ancestry blonde-ness?
Kill for Jesus. Kill for Mohammed. Kill for Zeus. Kill for Ra. Kill for any invented god because…it is so much fun? We are not a sane species. Me, neither, but I try to watch for the craziness and damp it down as much as I can.
Imagine being terrified of pissing off some god that your parents scared you with as a young child? How awful that must be.
sealintheSelkirks
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In Gawd they trust!!!
https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/trump-is-the-chosen-one-sent-by-god-rick-perry-tells-fox-friends-1.8185709?fbclid=IwAR3u6HrTjFvAZK3WZ3i6k-IaJeptc1kTAapYYyL5YDEjq1fsILOW736pc_I
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Okay, my turn! Read this one and shake your freaking head in exasperation! Fits right in with your link.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/11/29/when-trump-became-messiah-to-the-american-right/
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weather conditions: -10C at night, clear and very chilled air (but the starfields have been amazing this new moon). Barely cracking freezing in the daytime with nasty windchill. Not a speck of snow around here and December is almost here. Local ski hills are all crying, no base to even build upon.
Expected WeatherAlert for high winds didn’t happen though it got a little windy the last couple of days. Possible snow coming on Sunday but tomorrow will be clear and cold again. This just isn’t November in the Selkirk Range…
sealintheSelkirks
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Well Kevin, this one is going to rattle some brain tissue and maybe make the splincter tighten up. Chris hedges nails it horribly well, and I run into theChristo-Fascists constantly where I live. They’re like flies on shit in these mountains.
I recommend everyone reading this blog to read this article and realize just what it means for them, their children, their grandchildren. Talk about lunatics and Handmaid’s Tale…
Actually, I doubt I survive what is described in this article. In these mountains there are more of them than us and we are not organized like the murdering horde that they are… I hear automatic weapons fire quite frequently. But then who would want to live in a world such as Hedges describes as imminent?
The fundies will prove their Satan exists by becoming their true god through their actions. But they won’t ever look in the mirror, will they? Cognitive dissonance.
Cartoonist Mr. Fish did excellent with Ronnie Reagan’s hidden portrait.
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/onward-christian-fascists/#
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Here’s a joke I thought up:
What is the difference between W bush and Jim Jones of Guyana Kool-Aid suicide fame?
Their same god told W to kill a lot more people than Jim. And he did, a million at least since 2003. I guess it pays to be the leader of the ‘Free World’ because you get book deals and a Presidential library and all Jim got was a cup full of shitty Koo-Aid and a bad rep. As a species we are too stupid to exist I’m sorry to say.
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weather news: 4 inches of snow last night, heavy wet bend-the-limbs snow, expected rain this evening and supposedly above 5’C tomorrow. It’s currently (at 3pm 31Dec) above 0’C and trees are shedding huge gobs off their limbs. First snowfall since 19Dec and that turned to rain by 11pm that night and rained nearly all off by the next afternoon. It just ain’t normal up here!!
sealintheSelkirks
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“And the other thing I think that we’ve got to acknowledge is that there’s a higher authority that’s beyond our comprehension, right up there in the sky” he says, pointing the camera to the clouds.
“Unless we understand that’s got to be respected, then we’re just fools. We’re going to get nailed.”
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/barnaby-joyce-talks-climate-god-in-truly-embarrassing-christmas-message?fbclid=IwAR0fjf3mXBqQghTjHJBMuzZgLqQ0DY08rUkzWgVXhGNN3rLD-It_DvF1AMA
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Oh my. The freaking country is burning down and…it’s still pie-in-the-sky. Reading this kind of crap just makes me cringe. Literally. The sickness is so powerful in our species.
Is god-belief some kind of brain virus or something? Is it genetic? Each new invented god starts another rampage of ‘believers’ running around killing everybody and anybody that doesn’t buy into the latest invented invisible being. Over and over and over throughout written history…and nobody seems to remember history? I talk with white euro-descended christians who have no historical reference to what the Romans did to turn their ancestors into bible-thumpers. It’s like history doesn’t exist for these people!
We are truly an incredibly stupid species.
So, being as it is Christ’s Mass Eve (isn’t that Catholic? Mass is one of their practices, yes?) here’s some freaking humor for you from the Onion, Kevin! The picture is absolutely…a scream!!!! You’ll notice the little angels in the sun’s rays to the left…probably there to rapture up Pence….heh heh heh.
https://politics.theonion.com/lightning-bolt-blasts-washington-monument-as-mike-pence-1833978821
sealintheSelkirks
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Like most of what I write about on my blog I hope I’m wrong but the evidence builds daily that the White House that slaves built is controlled by lunatics who believe in “The Rapture”.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/1/5/1909619/-Pompeo-Awaiting-the-Rapture-Pushed-Trump-to-Strike-Iranian-General-Soleimani?fbclid=IwAR0y1c-Lj0szLQLvXkF_R4HHID8F2zBPafq-if13E_bXT0lmVXGXgiifthI
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This is insane. But we know that, don’t we? And insane people do insane things, and the more power they have the more destructive they get to be. And this country has ALWAYS been insane this way, from the very start of Manifest Destiny and the rest of the Christian-inspired ‘reasoning’ for mass murder. Convert of die. So the Rapture-ites WANT a nuclear war to fulfill their Hebrew Arab Semite prophecy.
Of course there is absolutely NO SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE of their planet-drowning Hebrew Noah’s Ark ‘great flood’ bullshit but that doesn’t seem to bother them even a little bit. Let the world burn because…mind sickness.
My mother’s Northern European ancestors learned the lesson of Total War very VERY well from the Hebrew-Christos of Rome more than a thousand years ago. Submit to Jesus or watch your family die on the swords of Centurions. The ones that lived…did of course, and this is where we are at in 2020. On the eve of radioactive hell and the nuclear winter death of the planet. And environment destruction and atmospheric destabilization. What a choice of futures, eh Kevin?
Hey, it’ll take care of Global Warming, eh? Probably within weeks. Unlike the ‘nice’ weather that was written of by Neville Shute in On The Beach, the sun won’t come out for a hundred years in the Northern Hemisphere. Everything will be dead in blackness. The plants will be dead, the insects will be dead, then the large animals of which we are one of shortly afterwards.
It won’t take long for the cannibals to come out even before the wack jobs run out of bullets. Tens of millions starving within a couple weeks, and all those sociopaths etc etc that are on ‘meds’ to stay sort of functional will be out and going loony. EMP will kill electricity and NOBODY knows how to survive as a 9th Century peasant…and I doubt very much that even they would have survived a hundred years of darkness.
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Nobody in this country knows history. It is censored, a deliberate ignorance propagated by the wealthy to keep their hands on the leashes of the peasants.
Nobody even remembers Wbush on the goddam TV saying GOD TOLD HIM TO INVADE IRAQ. I mean, how fucking brainless do you have to be to forget something like that?
And why would anybody who believes in an invisible jealous god be considered rational enough to hold any political office? Maybe dog catcher would be okay…
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Here’s one:
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/war-with-iran/
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And here’s a look back on enviro ‘highlights’ of 2019:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/01/03/world-gone-wrong-an-environmental-diary-of-2019/
And this is a PERFECT cartoon to look at:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/1/6/1909590/-Cartoon-That-old-familiar-melody?detail=emaildkre
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sealintheSelkirks
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In the Rapture they trust
https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/wrens-week-scott-morrisons-pentecostal-beliefs-have-affected-liberal-party-policies,13502#.XiKwkEjw_nA.facebook
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Here in the US we have enormous amounts of tax money being funneled to the seriously mentally deranged religious fanatics’ private schools through the so-called ‘voucher’ system that has effectively canceled the separation of church and state. The Inquisitionists finally found a way to get around the Constitution by just screaming ‘freedom of choice’ though that only works one way. The loonies that are sitting on the top levels of this government…like the murdering mercenary leader of Blackwater Eric Prince’s SISTER the illustrious US Education Secretary & billionaire Betsy Prince-DeVos, are fully in favor and continue to break the Constitution with, as usual, no consequences whatsoever. Why is it only the poor working class have consequences to their behavior?
An ‘education secretary’ that incidentally NEVER went to public school nor did any of her useless pedigreed children; one who never ever even stepped foot in a public school in her life until she needed publicity photos showing her great warmth and caring for ‘the little people’ as her co-elitist Leona Helmsley was quoted saying about paying taxes, Only the little people should was just like Betsy…
Too bad the sneer on Betsy’s face is so obvious in all those press photos…kind of ruins the PR message I think. She has the kind of grandma face you think of at Halloween walking in haunted houses…poison apples and ground glass in the cookies. Brrrrrrr! Scary bad granny!
And the continual de-funding of education in favor of military budgets is certainly strangling education in this country also. But hey, peasants don’t need to think just obey orders. Just make sure they have tv and beer and somebody to hate lower on the economic ladder than they are…
Funny that these a**holes DO NOT WANT schools to teach sex education..since pregnant 13 year old believers are SUCH a benefit to society don’t you know? But they definitely WANT schools to teach religion and scream loudly whenever they lose a court case that denies them this. But of course only their type of fanatical beliefs of that exclusionary version of a vicious jealous overseer is permitted. They also want everybody to pay for their religion but loudly (and violently) protest ‘the religion of secularism’ which is such a bizarre concept that I have a hard time typing those words together…
On that note, here’s another rock-to-the-head for them (not that they’d ever read it anyway):
Baby Dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/01/17/baby-dinosaurs-on-noahs-ark/
The gods are all myths but Religion is as real as a sword through your guts…which is a tried and true way of getting converts. Not much has changed in the last 9,000 years. So much for…intelligence, eh?
sealintheSelkirks
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This one is pretty good:
Who Will Protect My Right NOT to Pay for Your Child’s Religious Education?
A case before the US Supreme Court this week, Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, has far-reaching implications.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/01/25/who-will-protect-my-right-not-pay-your-childs-religious-education
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There is no separation of church & state in this country even though the butchered and discredited US Constitution says there is.
sealintheSelkirks
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Here’s a couple more about the insanity of religion…that we have never escaped from in this country. And of course it is getting goddamned worse as nationalism, racism, and god-ism combined grow like a flu virus. Hey, anybody else think religion is a brain virus endemic to our species? No other mammals practice it that I can see.
But then I look around at the entire world and this planet needs to lose all religions in order to survive. Death Cults. Wannabe godlings in training who want…
But that ain’t gonna happen. Very unfortunate I’m thinking.
I was against the bullshit crap that the neoliberal right winger wealthy corporate Pelosi was pulling with the ‘impeachment’ of Trump. It was all smoke and mirrors because if he was impeached for the really bad shit he’s been doing they’d…have to go after Obama and Cheney & little wanker WBush and Bill Clinton and HW Bush and Reagan (may someone piss on his grave every day) because they ALL are guilty of the same crimes. Send them ALL to the Hague and the International Court. See how that works out for them, right?
So of course the corporate Democrats under their dear leader Nancy (net worth $123 million and rising under the Trump administration) chose to impeach on minor bullshit of withholding military weaponry from a Neo-Nazi coup d’etat regime financed and weaponized by the Obama administration and specifically by her good friend the un-indicted war criminal and mass murderer Hillary Clinton. Can you imagine giving money and weapons to NAZIS??
Well, probably not much different than Reagan giving money, weapons, and training to Wahhabi Saudi Arabian jihadis like bin Laden in the 80s. That sure worked out well don’t ya think?
On the other hand, impeaching the deranged/dementia-raging asshole would have put Pence, an acknowledged Rapture and Christian Dominionist Fascist with very violent tendencies against those who don’t ‘believe,’ in as president…which has all sorts of really bad ramifications. The US is being run by bat-fuck crazy lunatics but at least Trump isn’t a born-again evangelical maniac which gives license to doing ANYTHING to anybody because god told him he could. He just does because he’s a typical rich narcissistic brain-damaged asshole instead.
Pence and Pompeo are far more likely to institute a total Theocracy. That scares the hell out of me. It should any thinking member of our species…but then there seems to be a majority that truly don’t think… Though they’ve already got nasty behaviors going on in the White House already:
“We command all satanic pregnancies to miscarry right now” — Special Adviser to the White House Faith and Opportunity Initiative Paula White
Picture of Paula leading the faithful and saying this: https://twitter.com/GuthrieGF/status/1221208783411650560
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This is very appropriate I think. It is at least an interesting read!
Literally Insane
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/01/31/literally-insane/
sealintheSelkirks
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It only gets better.
Trump’s Spiritual Advisor Says She Visited Heaven, Met God, and Then He Sent Her Back to the White House
https://www.politicalflare.com/2020/02/watch-trumps-spritual-advisor-describe-her-trip-to-heaven-it-sounds-very-weird/
While our nation burns to the ground upon hearing that Trump has essentially welcomed Russia in to screw the Democrats once again, we must occasionally amuse ourselves one way or another. It is always a treat to check in with Paula White, the official White House spiritual advisor who “says” she doesn’t take a salary, but from everything we know about this woman …
Anyway, she went to heaven!!
No, she’s not dead. Not clinically, anyway. She just got a free tour, I guess.
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Here’s a few laughs for the Hester site folks to chuckle at. The only bad part is that these people lived long enough to breed….
sealintheSelkirks
Louisiana pastor defies ban, holds service for hundreds amid coronavirus outbreak
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/3/19/1929075/-Louisiana-pastor-defies-ban-holds-service-for-hundreds-amid-coronavirus-outbreak
You might remember that the Donald Trump-loving pastor of a megachurch in Florida encouraged his congregation to attend services in spite of the coronavirus outbreak. Sadly, this isn’t an isolated case. As CBS News reports, pastor Tony Spell held services in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on Tuesday night, telling a local news outlet, “It’s not a concern… The virus, we believe, is politically motivated.” He said similarly to CNN, noting, “I feel the Covid-19 scare is politically motivated.”
The kicker? Rev. Spell held service in spite of Gov. John Bel Edwards banning public and private groups of more than 50 people at a time.
“I just want to encourage the religious world tonight, Amen!,” Spell said to his congregation, as reported by CNN. Spell, who leads the Life of Tabernacle Church in East Baton Rouge Parish, told CBS affiliate WAFB, “We hold our religious rights dear and we are going to assemble no matter what someone says.” According to what Spell told the outlet, police officers came after his service and informed him the National Guard would break up any groups over the 50-person limit.
How many people attended Spell’s service? 305 came that Tuesday night, he said. How many come on, say, the average Sunday? More than 1,000. He added, “We have 27 buses on Sundays picking up people in a five parish area.”
“Keep going to church! Keep on worshiping God!” Spell reportedly told his audience. “The church is a hospital for the sick! It’s a place of healing for the brokenhearted!”
In the big picture, religious organizations are canceling services or going virtual. Across the country, churches, temples, and mosques have been canceling services, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (known as the Mormon Church) has canceled services around the world. Social distancing is, understandably, tricky for people who receive a lot of mental health support and comfort from group interactions, whether it’s a religious or recovery-focused group, like AA.
Still, going virtual seems to be a reasonable way to handle things, though the lack of internet or data access can be significant barriers for people. It’s a tough situation all around, but one thing is for certain: people in positions of power should be modeling good, safe behavior, like that recommended by the CDC and WHO. In spite of what Trump initially told the public, nothing about this is a hoax.
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NOTE: And it just can’t get any better than this. Goddam am I into Irony tonight or what?
‘If we die, we die for Christ’: Florida megachurch pastor encourages folks to keep coming to service
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/3/16/1927920/–If-we-die-we-die-for-Christ-Florida-megachurch-pastor-encourages-folks-to-keep-coming-to-service
As nations around the world buckle down amid coronavirus outbreaks, approaches to isolation and social distancing are inconsistent, at best, in the United States. While some cities and states are implementing bans on restaurants and bars staying open and capping the number of people in a space, some groups are moving forward with, ahem, business as usual. One example from last Sunday morning? Pastor Guillermo Maldonado, of King Jesus International Ministry, a megachurch in Kendall, Florida, encouraged his congregation to keep coming to service, downplaying concerns about the coronavirus pandemic, as reported by the Miami Herald.
“Do you believe God would bring his people to his house to be contagious with the virus? Of course not,” Maldonado, a Trump supporter, said to his congregation, as reported by the outlet.
“This service is usually packed. So now they’re home in a cave afraid of the virus, that you want to transmit the virus,” Maldonado continued. The Herald noted the venue “appeared half empty.”
Maldonado’s take contradicts advice from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to cancel group gatherings of more than 50 people for the next two months. It also stands in opposition to what other religious groups are doing. For example, Catholic churches have begun canceling mass until further notice, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormon church) canceled service indefinitely, and even some megachurches have switched to virtual services.
Of course, this is far from the first time Maldonado has been outrageous. The pastor once told his congregation that no undocumented immigrants would be deported if they attended a Trump campaign rally held at the church. As reported by The Advocate, Maldonado has claimed homosexuality “invites unclean spirits into our lives” and may stem from a “demonic attack while in the womb.” In terms of being chummy with Trump, Maldonado was selected to pray for the president as part of the “Evangelicals for Trump” rally in January.
Maldonado is not the only religious leader dismissing coronavirus concerns. Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne, also a Trump supporter, encouraged people to shake hands while at service in Tampa, Florida, as seen in the Twitter video below.
A revivalist church in Tampa, Florida was open today despite a global pandemic because they’re “not pansies.”
The pastor, Rodney Howard-Browne, is a climate change denier and, despite warnings from medical professionals, encouraged people to shake hands. pic.twitter.com/Px6coYjRSR
jordan (@JordanUhl) March 15, 2020
“If we die, we die for Christ,” Maldonado told parishioners. “If we live, we live for Christ, so what do you lose?”
Given that a mere 26% of Republicans believe coronavirus will impact their day-to-day life in a major way, perhaps this isn’t surprising. But it’s definitely concerning, especially as we consider that people generally leave these large, congested spaces and go back into the world with everyone else, including the immunocompromised and the elderly. Decisions like these are dangerous for all involved and reinforce the point that amid rampant misinformation, we should be trying to educate others with patience, not mock or dismiss.
___________COMMENTS are hilarious. This is one of them:
>Makes me want to slightly modify the lyrics of the old Country Joe and the Fish Viet-nam song:
And it’s one, two, three, what are we believers for? Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn. Next stop is a MAGA jam. And it’s five, six, seven, open up the pearly gates. Well, there ain’t no faith if you question why, whoopie! we’re all gonna die.
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The Rally Sweden is scheduled to migrate north next year because they didn’t have any snow in this year’s rally. Fighting climate change! Go north, young man.
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Pogroms are coming. Gotta burn the witches to fulfill god’s wishes so say the batshit crazy.
God’s Vengeance: the Christian Right and the Coronavirus
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/03/27/gods-vengeance-the-christian-right-and-the-coronavirus/
sealintheSelkirks
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I’ve crossed swords with Drollinger before in this blog post. He’s a special kind of crazy in amongst a bunch of crazy.
https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/trump-s-bible-teacher-says-gays-among-those-blame-covid-n1168981?fbclid=IwAR1SmLfA-5DEcBBr6NXKGOygrlMyDMWbpsOJwahOveS9zfX79EdW4p6N0Yg
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“We are not stopping anything. I’ve got news for you, this church will never close. The only time the church will close is when the Rapture is taking place,” he said two weeks ago.”
I’d normally make some vacuous comment like “Darwins Law” but two of my closest friends on the planet live in Florida.
This behaviour guarantees why nature will run it’s course because of the delusional amongst us.
The Rapture will be the extinction of us. Not because it will happen but because the morons who believe in it will put us all at risk.
https://www.rawstory.com/2020/03/florida-residents-pack-into-megachurch-after-pastor-promises-he-can-cure-coronavirus/?fbclid=IwAR0hVt1eVg5MN8LE7TZNa3mNjZ7QNcSaVu6YWzLHmp8_CP9N_vcv4MfJd5U
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Ya know, this guy could be plugged right into being a preacher for Horus or Attis or Mithra or Jupiter or Ra and Isis or Zeus or, hell, ANY of the earlier 1.5 million godheads invented by ignorant but greedy power-hungry minds throughout our species history or at least over the last 10,000 years of written history that we know about. Just literally slot this dickhead right into any, give him a sword (or his followers) to chop people up who disagree, and you’ve got yourself another new god and prophet. Can’t you imagine this guy with the madman eyes holding a bone knife in his hand cutting out the hearts on a Meso-american pyramid alter? I can. There is no difference at all between the two other than technology. Mindset is extremely primitive.
In general, a large segment of our species hasn’t changed much, has it Kevin? They’re still running around in their heads screaming KILL KILL KILL at anything they have been told to hate even if they aren’t saying it out loud. Until they can get away with it…
Something I read today: “Never underestimate the delusional power of irrationality, nor the wild lie told often enough with suitable conviction.”
I’ve talked about this before, probably way up the string of this comment section. But DAMN, there are ELECTED State and local government officials in my county and 40 miles south down in the flats of Spokane County that have published called for the death of all males over 15 that won’t bow down to their form of Jeezus worship. They really believe this shit, like what I said in my previous paragraph above. Delusional Power! Of course that state rep wasn’t expecting his declaration to go as public as it did…but the hotbed armed town owned by these violent fruitcakes is on the north end of this county in the town of Marble, WA. I’m sure it is completely locked down (it always is) and waiting for the Rapture at any moment since this of course must be the End Times they were promised. And I’m sure they are in their evangtaliban church singing hymns with their AR15s by their knee as I write this.
That old saying: ‘The more things change, the more they stay the same’ sure does sound like recurrent history talking. And the Chinese curse of ‘May you live in interesting times’ certainly does apply at the moment, eh?
You know something? There are about a billion jeezus worshippers. About 1 1/2 billion Mohammed worshipers. And 5 billion others. They really are outnumbered…
sealintheSelkirks
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Oh I can barely stand it. It’s so stupid it BURNS! You all just have to read this:
Friend of pastor arrested for keeping megachurch open announces big Christian Woodstock
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/3/31/1933078/-Friend-of-pastor-arrested-for-keeping-megachurch-open-announces-big-Christian-Woodstock
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I have the most wonderful concept for this event. LET THEM have it! Why the hell not? Hell being the operative word here.
So you fence in an area for the thousands of true believer right-wing racist batshit crazies that’ll surely arrive because we all know a large proportion of these individuals are just plumb fucking stupid as a goddam post. Once they have arrived and been weapon-checked, they can enter the grounds and all get together and hug and praise jeezus and all the rest that crap as privileged United States citizens they have a right to do. I have no problem with that one single bit.
BUT…
If they choose to enter this area I would make it a 14 day event with nobody (NOBODY!) allowed out of the enclosure until that 14 day incubation period was over with. And then as each person leaves their temperatures are taken and one of those invisible test kits that Trump keeps talking about being available to all ‘murcans’ be used on each person, or a blood sample would work maybe, recorded with their name and address, picture and fingerprint.
But to go to this event they have to stay inside the fence. Make ’em sign a contract. Period. They stay inside the BIG razor-wire topped electrified doubled 15′ fence and I would suggest antipersonnel mines be place around the entire outside perimeter of the fence with only one gate in/out guarded by Islamists armed with automatic weapons used in the Mid-East supplied by the US Army (since they can give them to cops for free why not?). I also suggest these ‘Security Personnel’ be Iraqi, Syrians, Afghani, or Libyans who have lost family members to the right wing christian neoliberal military attacks on their sovereign countries. This group of survivors of US War Crimes I think wold be preferable since they would most likely have little compunction in ‘restraining’ attempts to exit before the appointed time.
This way the true believers get their freedom of religion and freedom of speech and their big party while the rest of us are protected from their batshit Iron Age mental condition and the SARS/CoV II virus that I’m nearly positive one of them is gonna have. But it won’t matter because jeezus will of course protect them and nobody will catch it and die. Things will be just FINE!
Problem solved. And maybe, if they are proven wrong, there will be fewer to breed more little morons to pass on their unstable mental condition to.
Irony is heavy tonight. I just watched 40 years of Carlin with Jon Stewart interviewing him on stage. Disc # 3 show #2 of the collection. Next is ‘You Are All Diseased’ tomorrow night.
sealintheSelkirks
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Roger Waters and Mike Moore reiterate my position.
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Here’s one to chuckle at. I guess you really can fix stupid!
Tomgram: Juan Cole, Iran and the U.S., An Irony of Curious Affinity
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176703/tomgram%3A_juan_cole%2C_iran_and_the_u.s.%2C_an_irony_of_curious_affinity/#more
Since over 30 Deep South Protestant evangelical pastor have killed themselves off with Covid, and knocked off some of their true believers at the same time, at least there has been a small dent against continuing breeding stupid in the gene pool… Of course not nearly enough to cause an overabundance of sanity, but it’s a start, right?
Hey, gotta see the irony whenever it presents itself! I’m sure Carlin would have chuckled…
sealintheSelkirks
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Here’s one I happened to follow a link to today:
A cut from the interview link: “Christian nationalists have betrayed what might have been their strongest suit. Christianity, as most people understand it, has something to do with loving our neighbours. But leaders of this movement have thrown in their lot with a bunch of selfish economic reactionaries who tell us we don’t owe anybody anything.”
Katherine Stewart, journalist and author ‘The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism’
https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/power-worshippers-american-religious-200422144158404.html
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Looks like this woman wrote a serious and realistic view on the power plays of born-again Evangelical right wing Fascists.
They seem to be popping up as heads of governments like acne on a teenager the last bunch of years, too. Not that they haven’t always been fundie nutcases in power, but it’s like a damn BRAIN virus that infects people! Since we are now in the first stages of a first-hand experience of what a Pandemic can do with SARS II/CoVid 19 spread around the planet, isn’t it a possibility that this mass delusion is a brain virus? It could be the answer to the incredibly ignorant stupidity being exhibited, right?
S/
An undetectable RNA virus that allows people to live with total cognitive dissonance that completely impedes their ability to use critical thinking. That sounds about right.
Guess I’ll go back to the massive lightning t-storm front that blew in this afternoon with very powerful gusts, lightning bolts flashing in the distance along with the craaack-snap right above the roof, Deluge pounding rainfall, trees bending way over, and this one roared in from the Northwest in another solid line of a breaking wave. So enough reading on myth today. Back to reality.
sealintheSelkirks
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The Lawd Gawd moves in mysterious ways;
https://theconversation.com/five-aspects-of-pentecostalism-that-shed-light-on-scott-morrisons-politics-117511?fbclid=IwAR36zvgq1jkMxfs5DCicmRWSyPjxRGwiVP9giHZwLG0uQhsiIFebqHN0LQg
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Ah hell, Kevin. This is exactly what I commented about on a post this morning about Trump going down due to the obvious physical problems he seems to keep having on camera.
But I disagreed with the writer as her article postulated Melania becoming the ‘power behind the throne’ as Edith Wilson did with Pres. Woodrow Wilson until his second term ended in 1921. And I pointed out why; the Christian Dominionist waiting-for-the Rapture Pence getting his life-long chance at installing a Theocratic State instead! Along with Inquisition II the 2020 version. Let the pogroms begin on the unbelievers! Here’s the link:
https://obrag.org/2020/06/trumps-health-an-issue-remember-you-read-it-here-first
Written by (I think) the daughter of a former San Diego Dem. city council member back thirty years ago. Or maybe granddaughter? Since nobody else had commented, I thought I’d throw down the gauntlet… The publisher sent me an email a few weeks back asking for help to fend off the neo-Fascist Trump-was-sent-by-jesus Fundies that the site comments had become swamped with so I’ve been there quite a bit since. I’ve done a lot of balloon puncturing for him so they can keep up with other shit going on rather than bozos in comments… Funny that, for the most part, these people don’t reply after the Rag posts my rather lengthy replies to them pointing out this or that they got absolutely wrong in their arguments… Somehow I bet those critical thinking-challenged ignorant idiots don’t bother to read a single link I post with my diatribes. And I put such good links up, too…
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There sure are going to be a huge number of very good people to be hanging out with in their ‘hell’ don’t ya think? Seems like all the people I respect living or dead are going to be there! What a party it will be!! And, to be honest, the paradise envisioned by the demented followers of these made-up cults sounds like the worst place a person could possibly be stuck in. Can you imagine being forced to listen to these morons…for eternity? Which is obviously a very long time, so it is possible that everyone trapped in their ‘heaven’ is either certifiably insane or will be driven so by those that run the place!
The article you posted was right in line with the mega-church psycho set of god loves rich people, and if god loves you you’ll become rich and everybody else are just going to hell. There are SO MANY of these little splinter cults around, too. Jehovah Witness, Mennonite, Mormon, Southern Baptist, evangelicals of all stripes and viciousness. All wrapped in the US flag and I guess down under in the Aussie flag! This five aspect thing is…daunting because how does anybody break through that thick concrete and steel wall of ignorance?
These humans are completely lost and, bluntly, have become the enemy as they will kill to promote their ideology. They always have before throughout history. True ‘believers’ are most dangerous when threatened with reality. Burning the witches anyone?
Big sigh.
There is so much crazy batshit ugly going on around the world. And you can circle the drain and see that nearly all of it is connected to religion and greed. What a tangled web our species has woven around the world.
sealintheSelkirks
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Another that fits this thread, but in a good way!
The Long Goodbye to Organized Religion
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/07/09/the-long-goodbye-to-organized-religion/
sealintheSelkirks
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Well here’s three that the good folks of Kevin’s site should read! Something new, something old, and something insanely political coming from the madness of the religions that control our lives…
sealintheSelkirks
Genocide in California’s History
https://obrag.org/2020/07/238948
What do you think of when someone says “California”? Beaches? Sunshine? Hollywood?
How about the largest act of genocide in American history?
“The idea, strange as it may appear, never occurred to them (the Indians) that they were suffering for the great cause of civilization, which, in the natural course of things, must exterminate Indians.”
– Special Agent J. Ross Browne, Indian Affairs
California was one of the last areas of the New World to be colonized. It wasn’t until 1769 that the first mission, Mission San Diego de Alcalá, was built in California at present-day San Diego. It was the first of 21 missions, which would become the primary means for the Spaniards to subjugate the natives. The leader of this effort was Franciscan friar Junípero Serra.
AT LINK: Portrait: Junípero Serra, looks like a monster.
Despite whatever the movies portray, the missions were coercive religious, forced labor camps. Through bribes, military intimidation, and the eventual onslaught of European diseases (that usually targeted children), the colonizers ensured that eventually sick and desperate indians would come to the missions for help. That’s not to say that they intentionally spread diseases, but there was a consistent, two century long pattern.
article continues at link…
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The Catholic Church Siphoned Away $30 Million Paid to Native People for Stolen Land
Free, government-funded schools were rarely built on reservations—meaning that for many Native families, Catholic mission schools were the only option.
https://inthesetimes.com/article/22564/catholic-church-mission-schools-investigation-treaty-ojibwe-native-people/
The brittle wooden floors creak as we climb the stairs to the long room that served as a dormitory for Ojibwe girls at St. Mary’s Mission School on the Red Lake Indian Reservation in Minnesota.
“My mother slept here,” says Kathryn “Jody” Beaulieu, 70, my guide and a Red Lake tribal citizen. She points to one end of the narrow room. A few white iron bed frames are still stacked in the corner. “Her sisters slept down at the other end, about 100 feet away.”
article continues at link…
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Theocratic Mercenary Erik Prince and the Christian Right
https://thehumanist.com/magazine/july-august-2018/features/theocratic-mercenary-erik-prince-christian-right
President Donald Trump’s election allowed the Christian right to achieve a new level of domination in the US government. Since the 1960s, the Christian right has become the loudest voice in the Republican Party, moving their message from the revival tents and into the political arena. Continuing this tradition, Erik Dean Prince, founder of the private security services firm Blackwater, embodies the values of a heavily financed movement in American politics, combining elements of corporate greed, pro-war fanaticism, and religious fundamentalism. Prince has been eyeing a run for political office, which would enable him to help legislate his proposals and build momentum for his fellow travelers to achieve the same in the 2018 and 2020 elections.
article continues at link…
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