In recent weeks and months I have been amazed at the general public and most scientists ability to ignore the blatant evidence that we are in early stage, non-linear runaway warming. From individual activists, to the donation soaked and addicted corporate NGO’s, who are literally dependent on “Business as Usual” to maintain their cash flows, they ignore the elephant in the room, squandering vital time to prepare for the already unfolding collapse.
On an individual basis the decision to deny the severity of the situation is up to each persons conscience and/or courage to accept the predicament we find ourselves in but when it comes to research universities and their tenured scientists, governments and the large NGO’s it’s a ‘Dereliction of Duty’ for them not to be ‘completely frank’. That for me is abject dishonesty, especially toward the youth. I’ve previously singled out Dr Michael E Mann, the corporate media’s ‘Go To Mann’, for this dishonesty.
Below I will lay out just a few examples showing that we are in the runaway phase of this extinction event.
This fire season alone, “Australia’s wildfires have destroyed more than a fifth of the country’s forests, making the blazes “globally unprecedented” following a years-long drought linked to climate change, researchers said Monday.” Bushfires burned a fifth of Australia’s forest: Bushfires burned a fifth of Australia’s forest: study Remember this is not an El Nino year, the next El Nino, if we have one, will be brutal and will put this event on steroids. The double feedback from these fires is that the forests were formerly carbon sinks so that has been lost and all the carbon that has ben released will accentuate the predicament.
In August last year Professor Guy McPherson and I re-interviewed Dr Andrew Glikson from the Australian National University regarding an article he wrote titled:Beyond Climate Tipping Points: Greenhouse Gas Levels Exceed the Stability Limit of the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets
“The pace of global warming has been grossly underestimated. As the world keeps increasing its carbon emissions rising in 2018 to a record 33.1 billion ton CO2 per year, the atmospheric greenhouse gas level has now exceeded 560 ppm (parts per million) CO2–equivalent, namely when methane and nitric oxide are included. This level surpasses the stability threshold of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. The term “climate change“ is thus no longer appropriate, since what is happening in the atmosphere-ocean system, accelerating over the last 70 years or so, is an abrupt calamity on a geological dimension threatening nature and civilization. Ignoring what the science says, the powers-that-be are presiding over the sixth mass extinction of species, including humanity.”
Links to the article and our interview with the exceptionally honest Dr Glikson can be found embedded below; Tipping Points in the Earth Climate System. Dr Andrew Glikson returns to Nature Bats Last
We are on the cusp of witnessing a sea ice free arctic ocean. The consequences of the albedo feedback loop and other side effects of the loss of sea ice like loss of habitat for algae, krill, sea lions, sea birds and polar bears. “Losing the remaining Arctic sea ice and its ability to reflect incoming solar energy back to space would be equivalent to adding one trillion tons of CO2 to the atmosphere, on top of the 2.4 trillion tons emitted since the Industrial Age, according to current and former researchers from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego.”
“At current rates, this roughly equates to 25 years of global CO2 emissions.For further reference see: ”Cascading Consequences of the Loss of Arctic Sea Ice
My cohost on Nature Bats Last recently commented on this aspect of the unraveling titled: “Edge of Extinction: Scientists don’t know why !!
“To believe that our species can avoid extinction, even as non-human vertebrates and non-human mammals disappear, is classic human hubris wrapped in a warm blanket of myth-based human supremacy. The evidence indicates humans will join the annihilation of “all life on earth,” as reported in the journal literature on 13 November 2018. Even tardigrades, the go-to survivor for those who deny the impacts of abrupt climate change on life, are unlikely to survive, according to a paper in the 9 January 2020 issue of Scientific Reports. If the organisms on which we depend do not survive, if even tardigrades do not survive, then humans will not survive.” Quoted from this article published by Counterpunch titled: Extinction Foretold, Extinction Ignored.
On next weeks episode of Nature Bats Last Professor McPherson and I will be interviewing George Tsakraklides on his recent article titled “Collapse means Collapse.”the interview can be found at the NBL archive shortly after the live broadcast on The Progressive Radio Network.
‘People believe what they want to believe. It is a striking-yet all too familiar-fact about human beings that our belief-forming processes can be so distorted by fears, desires, and prejudices that an otherwise sensible person may sincerely uphold a false claim about the world despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. When we describe someone as being “in denial,” we mean that he or she is personally threatened by some set of facts and consequently fails to assess the situation properly according to the evidence, instead arguing and interpreting evidence in light of a pre-established conclusion.’
— From the ‘cover notes’ of Adrian Bardon’s book, THE TRUTH ABOUT DENIAL
As I have written before: The New Climate Denial Position is to deny Abrupt Climate Change.
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 
The fat lady is singing loudly but who can hear her over all the noise from that CIRCUS?
“Global warming is a Chinese hoax”, “the economy is BOOMING!” The “green new deal” will save us, all we need to do is for all of us to become VEGAN or FAST, Just keep it in the ground, buy EV’s,buy solar panels, buy wind turbines buy buy buy, I think I have heard all this crap before!
Gotta keep the stooges BUYING that Chinese crap, kick the homeless down the road, those lazy bums! So what if a ‘bot or Chinese slave has your job, find another invisible job before that illegal immigrant takes it.56
Just how STUPID are we?
Most of us actually believe in fairy tales, “sustainable” growth, green new deal, renewables, now the dems call for open borders, just let the worlds pregnant, poor, needy & unskilled flood in & hold their hands out after all, aren’t all ‘mericans as rich as the Cardashians?
Look at all that “empty” land, as they look out at the great ‘merican DESERT, there is plenty of space for more GROWTH, we could sustain 10 BILLION people or more! Just stack ’em up like cord wood & stuff them all inside Texas!
Here on the Oregon coast, it’s HOT, DRY & fruit trees are blooming, not good news for farmers but who worries about farmers, we can allways import food, but Australia WAS one of the worlds bread baskets, now they have to IMPORT WHEAT! Will we be the next food exporting country that will have to import food from elsewhere, but WHERE?
Climate disruption is collapsing crops every where, hungry, thirsty, unemployed, unskilled migrants will be on the move by the tens of thousands to a border near YOU!
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I added “56” at the end of a sentance, & it finally posted, WTF!
That’s NUTS!
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Human behavior wasn’t stupid in the sense that it served us well in our evolutionary past.
Not this time.
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Yes, it serves us well until we got “smart” enough to exploit the energy & resources in COAL, OIL & NATURAL GAS. Then it got all out of whack & totally out of reason.
Our animal instincts overruled our smarts so we fed our growth with a temporary resource, Now we are so far into overshoot that no matter what we do now, we are still toast!
Our RULERS prevent us from stopping our growth, the made birth control, sex education & abortions illegal, punish women & their doctors who provide an abortion. push for endless growth that only benifits them, even as climate disruption gets worse, the still force more growth on us.
There are even some governors that want to turn their state into a “christian” state! What will they do to Jews, Hindus, Moslums, Buddists, Jains, Atheists etc?
The “final solution”?
If they believe they can escape in their luxury bunkers, their wrong, they will still fry, just a little later.
I tried to “like” the other posts but WordPress won’t allow it.
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Thank you Kevin… as usual, you are right on! Thank you for naming it.
I sometimes feel like I’m Crazy. It is so weird to see business as usual happening all around me when I know things are absolutely coming apart. Nobody’s talking about it and it seems as if nobody cares. This is the biggest news story ever. And it is downplayed and ignored. I’ve had several people tell me they just don’t want to know, Then they go on to discuss their pension and plans for a baby.
I really don’t want to be right but the signs are everywhere. I fear how people are going to react when things become blatantly obvious.
Oddly enough I’m experiencing this right now in regards to the coronavirus at my own level one trauma hospital. The administrators seem unwilling to prepare or even talk about it. They put us on activation level one but failed to give us any preparation. My boss was getting irritated with my questions about testing. She seem to know nothing.
Big big big sigh.
Thank you again for being a voice of sanity in an insane world.
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Kevin, there was not a SINGLE question about climate collapse at the Democratic debate yesterday. Not ONE FUCKING PEEP out of these useless excuses for a supposedly ‘progressive’ and ‘evolved’ Homo Sapiens, the exceptional species who was clever enough to invent nuclear bombs to use on each other but too goddamned stupid to get rid of them when they figured out just how insanely dangerous they are. And I’m not even going to mention the other corporate party and their batshit crazy, dementia-plagued, dear leader…
No, I don’t watch tv, only read about what went on. I don’t think I could handle actually listening to these bozos. I’d throw up.Talk about cognitive dissonance!!! The wealthy will destroy the species, crash the current Empire, because that’s what they’ve always done in the past empires.
\
Big sigh.
So this week, again, I’ve been walking around outside in the full sunny afternoons. Today, a short-sleeve t-shirt & very light sweat pants because it is over 50’F/10C+. I could break out the summer shorts but…it’s February, ya know? I refuse to put on warm weather clothes. But the sunshine feels MUCH warmer hitting the skin. I could get sunburned very easily I think. Oh wait, it isn’t February it is LATE APRIL. I did take my ’78 Bahne 27″ Bullet ‘Bob Mohr’ pool rider and skated around town doing errands yesterday. First skateboarding of the year…and it’s February.
The nearly bare-of-snow mountains all around me look…naked, and there should be 3-4 feet covering the property on this day 27Feb. There is maybe an inch or two of icy crap here and there, and still in the shaded areas under the big trees, but the rest is sticky mud or squishy wet snow that freezes every night. What is missing on the peaks around me…is horrifying. Winter used to be my favorite time of year. There will be a point where the ski & snowboarding industry will die out due to unpredictable weather and lack of snow (or too much rain).
The local snowboarding hill, admittedly a low-elevation peak, but at 49’N latitude it used to average 305″ a season. They say they are at 100″ of base on top, and they’re lying. Not a chance there is that amount of snowpack on the Peak. The night temperatures are still below freezing is all that is saving them. There is nearly zero snow piled along the road up to the resort.
There are bugs out flying around, and I stepped over a butterfly sitting on a step of the porch two hours ago. It was alive but seems a bit disoriented. I put it up on the railing after it crawled up on my hand but…it won’t survive the temperature drop after dark I don’t think. One day of life for it…
People in town continue to walk around actually COMPLEMENTING how nice the weather has been this month. And I make sure to look suitably shocked when I ask them where do they think they live, California? These are the mountains next to freaking Canada, folks, and what do they think is normal for February for the last ten thousand years of human occupancy that we know about? They look…confused and confounded for a moment or two before they come back with ‘But the weather is so nice.’ Their eyes go BLANK, Kevin. It’s really freaking scary.
I can actually see their brains stuttering, gears clashing behind their eyes, then the cognitive dissonance takes completely over their brain and they come out with that!
I can’t fucking stand this, Kevin. My tolerance level for stupid is tanking like the climate, and I find myself sticking vicious verbal needles into people with questions like “How long do you think your water is going to keep coming out of the faucet when the aquifer below your feet is NOT refilling with melting snowpack because there ISN’T any fucking snowpack?’ Or what do you think the fire season is going to be like around here this year? Or lost your fire insurance did you, well why do you think that is?
The reply often is ‘You are so depressing, seal’ or ‘I’ve got kids/grandkids and I can’t think that way for THEIR SAKE.”
They. Can’t. Think. That. Way. For. Their. Kids. Sake.
My mouth just hangs open at this point I imagine. Can you think of a better way to describe ‘cognitive dissonance?’
____________
There is not a goddamned thing I can do about any of this. Just watch it unfold and wait for people to go completely, unhinged, murderously insane, when the term ‘abrupt’ suddenly becomes part of the reality out their front door. How damaged and hungry does one have to be to catch and butcher the neighbors fat little kid who plays video games all day long? Four days without food? Ten days? A month? By then they won’t be able to run down their prey…
I’m ranting, I know I’m ranting, and I’m going to go smoke a big fat stinky sticky bud. And I rarely do that in the daytime.
Kevin, if you meet up with some intelligent beings from another solar system that made it through this bottleneck our species finds itself in and became sane, and they offer to take you for a ride, give me a call…
sealintheSelkirks
Cognitive Dissonance OZ style:
Burning the Future: the Growing Anger of Young Australians
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/02/24/burning-the-future-the-growing-anger-of-young-australians/
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Seal, there is NO “other party”, it’s just ONE party with two different names. “Both” parties are run by GREEDY, STUPID, IGNORANT, FUNDAMENTALIST CHRISTIAN MORONS! We have some govenors who want to make their state a CHRISTIAN STATE!!!
Here we go AGAIN!
So who will be their PREY this time? Jews, Jains, Mormons, Hindus, Muslums, etc, Atheists are always popular for a “roasting” at the stake.
It’s been abnormally warm & dry here as well, flowers are blooming, I only saw one very small, skinny moth however, insects here are on the way out. “my” swallows haven’t been able to breed for YEARS, last year they were desperate but no hope for babies, no dam INSECTS.
Most people believe insects are nasty, dirty, filthy creepy critters, but I LOVE insects & I wish I had more of them, for the swallows, sparrows, doves, woodpeckers, swifts, ducks etc etc.
Trump believers are the most STUPID, IGNORANT things I have ever seen or heard,
.
What will they do when Armadeden comes but Jesus doesn’t ?
Unless he jacks off! ;^p
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My dearly beloved son has now fallen victim of a climate denier YouTube influencer, creating friction between us. My decision this year to become a vegetarian for the sake of a sustainable future for our planet doesn’t sit well with my son’s meat-eating preferences.
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Dear Mr. Hester, In my opinion, cognitive dissonance is a mental condition that individuals have minimal control synchronizing behaviors and actions with beliefs, a duality of self that an individual might not possess enough self awareness to recognize the flaws inherent in this mental state. I’m far less generous than I perceive you are. While I agree wholeheartedly with your assessment and confusion at public lack of appropriate reaction, I believe that many people are purposefully ignoring the evidence you cite, and acting clearly in their own self interests, Macchievlian style. Somehow these people have devised an understanding that allows them to continue functioning in the way that they “want”. Its deliberate. They recognize climate disruption is occurring and they are going to try and out run it by using whatever resources they can exploit to accomplish that end. That is why you New Zealanders are experiencing so many transplants with means. Those nice people are trying to construct enclaves to live reasonably comfortably while much of humanity suffers extinction fall out, more than it is currently experiencing. I know some of those people. They have rationales to explain away almost all environmental catastrophies. This allows them to continue watching Netflix, eating Soylent Green like burgers at McDonalds and purchasing larger stretchy clothes from China. Joie d vivre in the U.S.
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As we circle the drain politically, economically and environmentally cognitive dissonance is a recurring theme for me.
Being that I’m from a ‘shithole’ country I struggle to see much difference between the Republicans and the Democrats in the USA. Two cheeks of the same corporate asshole it looks like from my side of the pond.
I like the expression of Sanders being labeled a ‘Sheepdog’, it resonates.
I truly believe that many people are suffering from “Stockholm Syndrome”. That seems to be the way it is as our civilisation teeters on the brink of collapse.
https://blackagendareport.com/cognitive-dissonance-democratic-socialists-cults-die-slow-death?fbclid=IwAR11BgtF6azkbF3DC03zSzYQl8BdPoaKyYwoBe-8NLbuesx82Udnvsn2BOs
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You are invited to stay at my place if you are ever in Southern Ontario Canada. I have also invited Guy. It is nice here in Guelph right now.
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I’m still amazed that people still believe we have a “democracy” but what “democracy” has an electoral collage that overrides our “votes”?
I am going to “BOYCOT THE FAKE, RIGGED, FRAUDULANT 2020 “ELECTION”. I’ve been saying that since the rigged 2016 “election”.
We don’t have a real “vote”, it’s switched, “lost” people are given fake ballots, their disenfranchised, illegally removed from the voting rolls, taken to the wrong voting place, the “voting”machines are owned & controlled by corrupt corporations as are the vote “counting” machines & there is NO PAPER TRAIL. Voters have watches as their “vote” was switched from the candidate they chose to another one they did not want!
Finally, “elective” surgeries are being done again & I finally had my cataract removed.
I had been complaining for TWO YEARS about my deteriorating eyesight & in 2018 I was determined that if he gave me another dam worthless office visit in 2019, I would have to find another opthalmologist, I will not accept another useless office visit when what I NEEDED was to have the DAM cataract removed!
My vision was terrible, everything was foggy,out of focus & blurry! I couldn’t read street signs, road signs, freeway signs, business signs or addresses, I couldn’t read my books without a frensil lens, 3X reading glasses or a magnifying glass & that is NOT acceptable!
I went home, got on the ‘puter & did some research.
I finally left him a message with his receptonist, “I don’t need Medicare, I can pay CASH for that procedure, I can pay CASH to have lifeflight take me to where ever they do that procedure, I have MONEY & I don’t need Medicare!”
I had hardly gotten home & back on the ‘puter when I got a call from his office.
I was told Dr. X doesn’t do cataract surgery, Doctor “Y” in Crescent city does, would you like to see him?”
Of course I said yes, because the only other option was to drive 75 miles over one of the top 5 most dangerous highways in the country to get there.
To drive that road, in winter, with only ONE eye & a cataract in the other would be suicide.
I can finally SEE again! Colors are vibrant, black & black & white is white, orange letters don’t disappear into a pale tan, page, I can see street names again, my vision is so sharp now, I should not have to have threatened to leave him for another to get this cataract removed.
It was very interesting to watch the procedure from the inside, I was awake of course, the eye & eyelids were paralized but I wasn’t so I had to lie very still.
The ONLY place to get food here has a lot of empty shelf space, hording of toilet paper continues, I couldn’t get toilet paper if I needed it, but I am well stocked & use very little TP. HOW can people use so much TOILET PAPER?
Our governor is reducing the stay at home order but unlike many, I will continue to wear my OLD N-95 mask, latex gloves & use alcohol spray as a sanitizer, we can’t get ANY OF THAT HERE! I can’t even order a new mask online, their out of stock everywhere, probably still in CHINA where most of our stuff is made now.
My area has really gone downhill in the last few years, we lost banks, food shops, appliance stores, our post office, a jewelry store, electronic store, motels, we don’t have much left to lose now.
My town just has a pharmacy, a liquor store, some pot shops & a couple of resterants. I now have to drive several miles, through another town to reach the ONLY food shop left.
With the lockdown, many small busineses are hurting, nail shops, hair shops, tattoo parlors are open now but who needs that? Resterants that have take out are still in business but sit downs are shut.
I expect some businesses will never reopen. Millions of jobs have been lost, many will stay lost & poverty & homelessness will grow.
Trump “thinks” the economy is booming, just look at the STOCK MARKET! The RICH are getting disgustingly RICH while millions fall into poverty & homelessness.
We need a new government, clean out the swamp & get rid of these LYING, GREEDY, CONSERVATIVE, RACIST, MISOGYNIST, WARMONGERING, OLIGARCH MORONS!
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Somehow, Sheila, I don’t think the word you are looking for to describe primate behavior should have been “amazed!” I could think of far more interesting words to describe the plethora of random neuron misfiring going on all around us, but unfortunately not a single one would be complimentary. Except for maybe ‘and the species had such potential’… Might be that the anthropologists that discover this planetary system in the future will find all the decaying debris and just shake their heads at another sapient life form that didn’t make it out of the nest…there probably are so many just in this small to medium-sized galaxy of ours…
Nope, totally controlled system of government by the wealthy. No doubt about it. Voting is only the most visible piece of that control. Oligarchy isn’t some new rock & roll band name, it’s what it has always been about. So tell me, why did women fight so hard to be able to vote? Or was it because they wanted a piece of the pie, too? I’ve noticed that being wealthy and vicious isn’t a gender specific behavior!
Glad to hear about your surgery, though. At least now you can see the MAGA hats coming and can avoid the contaminated ignorant freedumbers! That friend who was cancelled for her other ‘lens’ replacement just got rescheduled, too. You can SEE again. Isn’t that freaking amazing? 50 years ago you would have been using a white cane the rest of your life. Bodies truly are just ‘vehicles’ like cars that can have parts replaced.
You can re-use N95 respirators, you just have to let them sit in sunlight for a couple days, better with wind playing across them, too. Have to be careful that they still fit correctly when taking them off and on, though. If your sunglasses or goggles fog they aren’t and you have to reshape the nose-piece until they just get used up and can’t. But this is what the RNs are doing, alternating the ones they have with letting some dry out before sterilizing them as best they can. Of course a lot of them are catch this and dying…but hey, you’re right, there are none anywhere except junk copies with the right printing, and I read yesterday that the US needs 3.5 billion of them by November when the Pandemic’s 2nd Wave is expected to slam into this country (and the world). That is, of course, if this 1st Wave gets a chance to let up. But with all this lunacy of ‘open for business while the infected numbers keep going up I guessing that the 1st Wave will not abate anytime soon. Rather the opposite, just like climate will keep destabilizing even if the ‘news cycle’ has forgotten all about that coming collapse. Damn, sure are a bunch of different ‘collapses’ hanging like axes above us, aren’t there?
The bottom of the food chain are never going to have access to enough PPE. The wealthy do, and tests, too, for that matter. The extremely wealthy have been leaving the US to their estates in New Zealand and on 400 foot yachts out in the oceans with supply drops being brought to them by helicopter or boat. Or they are seriously ‘self isolating’ in their mansion and penthouses avoiding all the sick ‘little people’ as heiress Leona Helmsley publicly called the rabble years ago when she got busted for tax evasion.
Sheila, this is the start of the Trump Greater Depression of the 2020s and the Trump Pandemic. You just have to add together the President ‘Hoovervilles’ of the 1930s and the Pres. Woodrow Wilson Pandemic of 1918-20. We get BOTH at once. How…novel is that? And we ain’t seen nothing yet. Unless, of course, the worldwide empire goes the way of all empires quickly instead of drawn-out suffering and madness. What the climate is doing around the planet the last few months…
Here’s one to send to your dumb-ass Governor. She ain’t too bright but maybe she’ll read it if you send it to her. This Texas legislator and businessman who is so scarily incompetent of critical thinking that he shouldn’t have been allowed to breed. I just had to post the entire thing and I don’t do that very often:
Death and the Economy: a Dialogue
Foreign Policy In Focus
Welcome to Chewing the Fat, our weekly talk show here at WXYZ.
Today, we have a special treat for you — two guests who will answer the question on everyone’s mind. Should we stay at home in virtual quarantine or should we head out the front door and reopen the economy?
The coronavirus pandemic is still claiming lives — nearly a thousand a day here in the United States. But other countries, like New Zealand, have effectively eradicated the disease. There is a huge disparity within countries as well, within states, even within cities. And some countries that have loosened their quarantine restrictions, like China and South Korea, have seen fresh outbreaks of the disease.
Meanwhile, the global economy has taken a major hit. GDP has dropped deeper and faster than at any time since the Great Depression. Unemployment here in the United States stands at 15 percent and rising. People don’t know if they’ll keep their current jobs, get their old jobs back, ever get a job again. The government can print money to keep things going, but individuals can’t do that. A lot of us just don’t know how we’re going to pay the rent or get our next meal.
Frank Jacobs is a Texas legislator, a businessman, and a vocal advocate of re-opening the economy. Frank, you’ve been talking about the Texas Solution. Tell us about that.
Frank Jacobs: I own a chain of 15 movie theaters across this great state of Texas. We opened up five of those this last weekend. This is what I told customers. I said: Take your mask off and relax. Breathe in some great buttery popcorn smells, watch a great movie, and just enjoy some time with your family. And that’s what I’ve been saying to people all over the state as part of what I call the Texas Solution. Here in Texas —
Cassandra Jones: Are you crazy?!
That’s our other guest, Cassandra Jones, an infectious disease specialist at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.
Cassandra: The number of coronavirus cases is rising in your state. And that’s even before your governor declared your reopening. And you’re not testing enough in Texas, not compared to other states and not compared to what you need to be testing in order to safely reopen the economy.
Frank: Well, let me tell you that in our movie theaters, we are taking every precaution and then some. Everyone will be six feet or more away from each other. We’ll be cleaning every surface. It will be a lot safer than going to the supermarket, where people get much closer to each other. We’ll be giving my employees their jobs back and safely providing some much-needed entertainment. If you don’t want to go see a movie, hey, that’s fine. But we’re providing an option for those of us who do.
Cassandra: You’re not talking drive-ins. If someone coughs or sneezes in your enclosed movie theater, the air will circulate any potential viruses to everyone else. And you’re not taking into account all the other interactions that take place because you’re opening up your movie theaters. In the parking lot. On the sidewalks. At the gas station where people are filling up their tanks. At the restaurants where they’re eating before or after the show.
Frank: With all respect, if we don’t start opening up the economy in these small ways, then there won’t be an economy left to reopen. Our approach here in Texas is very careful.
Cassandra: Your governor acknowledges that reopening the economy is going to cause deaths. And your lieutenant governor said that “there’s more important things than living.” He was talking about basically sacrificing lives — the lives of senior citizens, of people of color, of folks with preexisting health conditions — and for what? For making sure that the stock market goes back up? When it comes to the vulnerable members of our community, your Texas Solution sounds a whole lot like the Final Solution.
Frank: Now hold on there. No one is talking about sacrificing people. It’s the opposite. We’re talking about saving lives. Making sure that people have enough money to eat, to feed their children.
Cassandra: But more people are going to die as a result of the relaxation of restrictions. That’s a fact. Suddenly all the people who got bent out of shape about how there were going to be “death panels” because of the Affordable Care Act, now they’ve basically set themselves up as a death panel, deciding on how many people are going to live or die.
Frank: No one is talking about death panels. This is the right to life. Hey, listen, nearly 40,000 people die every year on America’s highways. It’s the leading cause of death for people under the age of 55. But we don’t ban cars. Instead we improve auto safety. We come up with better and better methods of reducing the risk of going out on the roads. And it works. Back in the 1970s, more than 50,000 people a year were dying in car accidents.
Cassandra: A car accident is not an infectious disease. Our models show that, even with the necessary interventions, we’ll have well more than 100,000 deaths in this country. If we relax those controls, the difference would be an order of magnitude.
For our non-scientific listeners, you’re talking about a million, yes? A million deaths.
Cassandra: That’s correct.
Frank: Other countries have been opening up around the world. They’ve taken a sensible approach that balances medical prudence and economic risk. Take a look at Europe. We’re 29 million people in Texas. We’re nearly twice the size of the Netherlands. About 40,000 Dutch have been infected, with over 5,000 dead. But here we’ve only had a little more than a thousand deaths and fewer than 40,000 infections. And, look, the Dutch opened up their primary schools and day care centers last month.
Cassandra: The countries you’re talking about have seen a substantial reduction in the infection rate. Netherlands has cut infections from over 1,000 a day to less than 300 a day. Italy was seeing over 6,000 new infections a day back in March. They’re now under 1,000 a day. The same with Spain, with Germany. These countries have much more robust systems of testing and contact tracing than we have in the United States. We are almost completely in the dark here in this country as to the real spread of this disease. In Europe, they’re operating in a much more information-rich environment.
Frank: Hats off to those Europeans. But here in America, we can make decisions for ourselves. We don’t need the state telling us what to do. We had a fellow here in Texas at Prestige Ameritech, the last domestic mask producer, who was all ready to restart production of N-95 masks way back in January. He notified the federal government, and they just blew him off. All that bureaucracy and red tape: it’s heartbreaking. Here in Texas, we know not to depend on government. We believe more in individual responsibility.
Cassandra: Individual responsibility? How about all those students on Spring Break partying and spreading the virus? Or that party last weekend in Ft. Worth where 600 people got together to shoot off fireworks and then started shooting each other? Most Americans are taking their responsibilities very seriously by staying home. But all it takes for an infectious disease to spread is a minority of the irresponsible.
Frank: But you don’t have a plan, do you? A plan to reopen the economy? If we listened to you, we’d all starve to death at home. Millions of us! That’s the order of magnitude I’m talking about.
Cassandra: We wait until the infection rate drops substantially. We wait until we have a robust testing and tracing system in place. We wait for more effective treatments, widespread antibody tests, and, ultimately, a vaccine.
Frank: Wait. Wait. Wait. A lot of us don’t have the luxury of waiting. You have a job, Ms. Jones, that you can no doubt do from home. You are in a comfortable place where you can wait. The rest of us depend on going back to factories, to running restaurants, to building houses.
Cassandra: I’m not saying that we can’t reopen the economy. I’m saying that we have to do so responsibly.
Frank: Well, here’s something to chew on. People die because of the economy all the time. They die in workplace accidents. They die commuting to work. They die because of air pollution caused by factories and cars and energy production. Every morning we get out of bed in the morning, we are taking a risk. Living is a risk.
Cassandra: That may be true. But some folks are at greater risks than others. The counties that are disproportionately African-American account for nearly 60 percent of the coronavirus deaths. In New York City, 70 percent of the essential workers are people of color.
Frank: Here in Texas, by opening up the state, we’re actually spreading that risk around!
Cassandra: You’re spreading the risk by spreading the disease.
Frank: You liberal types are always pointing to Sweden as the model the United States should be emulating. So, what about the Swedish model of tackling this pandemic? The government is full of social democrats and Greens. All lefty types. But there’s no lockdown. You can eat out at a restaurant. The schools remain open. Sure, there are some common-sense restrictions, like no gatherings larger than 50 people and no visits to nursing homes. They’ve had more deaths than neighboring Norway, which went for a complete lockdown. But the Swedes also haven’t ruined their economy.
Cassandra: But Sweden also has a very robust testing system. And contact tracing. They have a much stronger social safety net than we have here in the United States, with paid sick leave for workers. And people there complied with the voluntary distancing recommendations. What works for Sweden won’t work for Texas. Unless you’re planning to put in place a strong social safety net and rein in some of that good ol’ boy individualism.
Armed militia members in Texas are demonstrating around the state on behalf of non-essential businesses that want to open up.
Frank: Well, we’re definitely not sheep down here in Texas. Just because the government says something doesn’t mean it’s right. And I say that as a representative of government. The bottom line is that we can’t know for sure about my plan or anyone else’s plan unless we test them. You’re all for testing, right?
Cassandra: That’s not what I meant.
Frank: Every year more than 2,000 infants die in this state. That’s twice as many lives as the coronavirus has claimed. It doesn’t make any of us happy. We’ve reduced those numbers over the last decade, but we can’t get it to zero tomorrow. Everyone says that this virus is going to be with us for a long time. So, we have to figure out a way to live with it as well.
Cassandra: Or die with it.
Frank: Well, some people are going to die. But most of the deaths in Texas have been in nursing homes, prisons, and meatpacking plants. The governor is sending surge response teams to those hotspots to contain them. It seems more sensible to me to focus attention on containing the hotspots than trying to keep everyone under house arrest.
Cassandra: You’re basically saying that old people, prisoners, and low-income workers are expendable. That’s a cruel and disgusting policy. And it’s not even effective. The virus doesn’t stay in hot zones. By opening up the state, you’re providing the virus with millions more hosts to infect. And that will mean a lot more deaths, and not just in institutional settings.
Frank: Look, the Pilgrims knew that some of them were going to die on the ships coming over here from England. The settlers of the westward expansion knew that some of them were not going to make it to California. And our soldiers knew that some of them were going to die defending democracy overseas. That’s what it means to be American. We take risks. Live free or die, right?
Cassandra: All of those people volunteered. They knew the risks. And when they took those risks, they weren’t endangering their whole community. Increasing exposure to the coronavirus is a whole different category of risk. My grandmother is not volunteering to fight overseas or drive a covered wagon across the Great Plains. But these new state directives put her at risk.
Frank: I wouldn’t recommend that your grandmother go out to see a movie any time soon. Or go to a restaurant. At-risk populations probably shouldn’t be taking the risks that you or I can take.
Cassandra: You still don’t see that these are not individual risks —
Frank: And you still don’t see the importance of individual choice —
Well, we’ve run out of time, folks. On this show and maybe in this country as well. We’re facing the greatest threat to America in a generation, in two or three generations, and we can’t figure out how to pull together and get the job done?
This is not the America I know. But maybe the America I know just doesn’t exist anymore.
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How’s that for clueless, wealthy, and powerful, eh? A perfect anecdotal example of Neoliberal Disaster Capitalism in full flower there, eh Sheila? The mentality of people like this rule this country. It’s why the US is about to lose it completely in the next six weeks. It’s…a bit boggling to correlate all the disparate sources of information and the patterns jump out at you… Oh my.
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Of course we don’t actually get to vote for our interests because…well…that wouldn’t be optimum for the winning side of the Class War. I read that one can’t vote yourself out of tyranny. Not when a wealthy interconnected oligarchy/plutocracy Elite small group hold the power to make all the decisions that affect pretty much everything. And the best part is that the system is working for them!
Just read or listen to some of Nader’s speaking engagements at colleges and universities. And don’t forget George Carlin’s take on the Constitution’s ‘Bill of Temporary Privileges.’ Both men spoke truth (well, Nader is still doing so).
Big sigh.
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I wonder how many rolls of toilet paper it takes to make these people feel ‘safe,’ that the empire will continue because they have ‘enough’ piled in the garage to last until…I don’t think any of them think any farther than that actually. So what comes after it’s all gone I wonder? Hmmmm.
I live where many people carry handguns on their waists. But when I go out (rarely, every 14 days maybe) I’m wearing an N95 and I carry multiple pairs of gloves (fabric and/or leather doesn’t keep virus alive long) and eyewear. I still get sneered at and what I’ve read is that wearing a mask means ‘yer skeerd’ in dumbfuck speak. But somehow wearing a .40 Glock with 15 rounds of jacketed hollow points on your Levis is somehow just ‘protection’ and in no way should it be thought of as the behavior of a pansy. Hmmmm again.
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There are so many small businesses going under right now everywhere, that may open up but there just isn’t going to be the customer base. There really are a lot of people that aren’t going for this stupidity. Not everybody in this country spouts ‘FREEDUMB’ in a red hat. The figures I’ve been seeing are at a minimum of 40% aren’t expected to get much past this month or won’t open at all, and that is considered a somewhat conservative estimate. a majority of the working class work in small business. Oh my fucking hell.
40 million unemployment claims filed in the last 6 weeks, and that is not including the more than half of the working class jobs that aren’t eligible to file because they are under-the-table, so-called ‘gig’ economy, already unemployed still from the last banker crash in 2007/08 and aren’t even counted. We both live in rural, poverty-stricken areas of the Pacific NW, we know what’s coming. Amazing how many little gardens have been started around here the last couple of months…
Also how un-amazing that corporations and the wealthy who own them were again ‘bailed out’ to the tune of over a trillion with much more on the way.
The Fed Hasn’t Spent a Dime Yet for Main Street Versus $735 Billion for Wall Street
https://wallstreetonparade.com/2020/05/the-fed-hasnt-spent-a-dime-yet-for-main-street-versus-735-billion-for-wall-street/
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And you’ll be glad you aren’t living in Hurricane Alley this year after you read this. Wanna buy a couple of double lots in Avon Park in the middle of Florida? HA!
Unfortunately, the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season could be record-breaking
By Sophie Hirsh
https://megaphone.upworthy.com/p/2020-atlantic-hurricane-season
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Let’s see, what else?
It has rained here 16 days since May 2nd ranging from sprinkles turning off and on all day to major deluge t-storm and overnight pounding cold rains. A couple of the rainy days went for days, and some had hail events, too. Had a couple days of heavy winds without rain. Powerful gusts, too, at 40-50mph! This ridgeline had treetops arcing 40+ degrees. Lost a few tops, lots of debris being blown about, one of the birdhouses out back looks busted up and almost ready to fall off its platform. I think it got hit by a branch.
And then there have been the days over freaking 80’F that were just miserable. Body just doesn’t like the freaking heat. Couple of freezing and near freezing mornings scattered about, too. All in the last three weeks. Very unpredictable weather from what the web weather says I see it literally change overnight.
Doesn’t seem to bother the hummingbirds. Sheila, I’ve never seen so many here before. At least 25 Calliope and Rufus. I try to count in groups of five at a time, so yeah there could be more. I’ve got 4 feeders up, three 4-seater and one 3-seat. The migratory small birds really appreciated the suet feeders I put out early as there weren’t enough bugs out yet, but the crowd of difference species that hung around the bare branches of the apple tree aren’t flocking on them now. Normal food supply showed up I’m guessing.
Flowers haven’t really come out yet except the apple tree already went through its bloom cycle. The Lilac bushes over by the garden north fence just went purple and the middle bush blossomed white. The lilacs didn’t at all last year. Their smell is already intense, tickles the nose.
Unfortunately the honeysuckle that graced the front porch in front of the kitchen window when I bought this place is completely dead, no sign of life at all. There was only sprigs that leafed last year.
Some good news. The final PDF from the publisher came a week ago, the last chance to do any changes or corrections to the book, and I sent the reply back last night. I am completely done with the book, it’s all in their hands now. The first black & white copy should come off the press this or next week. Paperwork for the Library of Congress copyright fee to get the ISBN # is something they do, and then a bar code can be put on it. It’s done and will be out in a couple of weeks I think. A freaking Pandemic, an on-going economic crash, and climate collapse. Boy do I have great timing!
Nothing else. Again, glad you can see again, Sheila!
sealintheSelkirks
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Hi Seal & Kevin- Today unlike so many days before it, it’s RAINING! Ever since March there has been no rain, the days have been overcast with a weak sun & CHILLY. This is not good for farmers.
Isn’t anyone thinking about how climate disruption is affecting FARMERS?
Our clueless govinor has opened up the state a little more so useless shops like hair dressing, hair cutting, hair curling, nail cutting, nail painting, hair coloring, cool sculpting for all those females out there who still believe they need to emulate a skinny, mindless, store front manikin, tattooing & some restaraunts are open for sit down & I finally got some real 3M,N95 masks instead of those questionable Chinese KN95 masks that don’t have a good fit & who’s protection is questionable, these do FIT which I will continue to wear!
Call me a paranoid nut, but the pandemic rages on & morons are still refusing to wear a dam mask!
I’ll keep wearing my 3M N95 “face diaper”until it’s over IF it’s ever “over”.
Biden is just a less insane version of TRUMP, a LYING, OLIGARCH, warmongering, racist, fundamentalist religious Catholic, misogynist, homophobic, greedy POS!
The FIRST thing that that dam LYING Biden did wasn’t to send relief checks to those about to lose their homes, to the unemployed, to those suffering from lack of affordable health care, he killed that dilusion by telling us that any Medicare bill for all that crosses his desk will be VETOED!
NO, the most pressing “need” was to BOMB SYRIA!
He continued to support that murderous ZIONIST, Netenyahoo in Israel as they continue the GENOCIDE of Palestinians, he continued Trumps selling of WOMD to terrorist, dictators & increased Pentagon spending for more KILLING of innocent civilians overseas & here.
He’s allowing endless immigration even though we are still in a PANDEMIC, we have millions of unemployed, hundreds of thousand of homeless, million in dire poverty, do we really “need” more poor, unskilled, uneducated, non English speaking, needy people?
We will soon be seeing MILLIONS of new homeless as the rent moratorium ends at the end of June, the landlords need, want their RENT money payed back IN FULL, months of unpaid rent will need to be paid by poorly paid or unemployed former workers.
We now have more people than ever without masks, with useless face shields, bandannas, beaded masks & masks with the bottom cut out, what MORONS!
Too bad COVID19 doesn’t restrict itself to these MORONIC, ANTI SCIENCE, FUNDIES!
We can’t even trust the guy in charge of the health dep. Fouci, he also LIED TO US ABOUT MASK WEARING! He said we didn’t need to wear masks, later he claimed he said that LIE to leave more effective masks like those 3M N95 masks for health care workers & I saw even those folks were wearing those poor, blue paper “surgical” masks that have gaps top to bottom, what good is that?
So WHO has been getting those “gold standard” 3M N95 masks anyhow, just the OLIGARCHS?
Yes, it’s more clear than ever that we are in a steep decline, more countries dare to say NO to the us, more countries are working around the US “reserve”currency, perhaps soon that US reserve currency will be replaced by the euro, Yen or ruble.
ALL oil is now in decline, more jobs are either being automated or sent to communist China, more homeless, more jobless more lies about the state of the economy.
Fuel prices are UP & with a rising demand as more states “open up” to BUSINESS, after all PROFITS are more important that our miserable lives.
If you thought the temporary fuel shortage back east was a disaster, just wait until this summer when demand has surged but supply can’t.
Keep your .40 revolver close by & loaded with your hollow points, you might need them. At least your skateboard doesn’t need oil but you may have to defend it against those guys with HUGE TRUCKS without fuel now. They will be PISSED & I have already seen what angry guys do when their gas hog can’t get enough fuel, it get’s very nasty & dangerous at the pumps!
Censorship is blatant in the corporate news & online like Twitter, Facebook & Youtube, it’s next to impossible to find out what’s actually going on.
I do keep hearing how “black” people are being BRUTALIZED & MURDERED by those militarized MALE ANIMAL COPS,shooting someone in the back is NOT “self defence” & yet they CONTINUE TO GET AWAY WITH MURDER!
As our decline continues, some white folks will also continue to be targeted by those uniformed male animals with guns, stun guns, poison gas, tanks, vicious dogs & clubs. If your poor, homeless, mentally disabled, gay,bi or queer, you too will be targeted by those thugs in uniform.
What I will never get is just how BLIND people are to how CORRUPT & CRUEL this government is, WHY do they keep “voting” for one of those two CORPORATE EVILS when there are suppopse to be OTHER PARTIES to choose from?
WHY DO THEY KEEP VOTING FOR EVIL?
Red or blue, they BOTH SCREW YOU!
On Nextdoor Brookings, people there have the strangest beliefs, microchips in the vacceens, vacceens are worthless, masks are worthless, “I value my freedom” to pass my disease on to you by not wearing a mask or keeping my distance, I see them also in a crowded restaraunt, masks off of course, eating.
Eating in a crowded restaraunt is the “best” way to catch COVID19!
Everytime we “open up” some, COVID cases surge, it was down to 177 per day, now it’s back up to over 370 a day & thats just the ones who are reported, who knows how many got COVID but didn’t report it & are now walking around infecting others as they also refuse to wear a mask.
The rate of vaccination has dropped thanks to those anti vax people so COVID19 will just keep spreading, mutating & infecting, turning some peoples brains into mush, their hearts, lungs, kidneys & liver failing, is that worth their so called “freedom”?
I still don’t have any swallows or bats, no surprise really, hardly any insects for them to eat.
Without insects, we will have no fruits, no berries, no nuts, no veggies, no fresh water fishes, most birds will go extinct as will all stupid, greedy HUMANS!
We cannot “terriform” lifeless Mars, it’s EXTREMELY COLD, it’s gravity is too weak to keep an atmosphere or surface water, it’s “soil” is toxic, solar radiation reaches the ground killing any living cell & if we can’t survive on the ONE planet we evolved in, how can anyone believe we can “terriform” Mars & breed like rats there?
It is so painful to have to watch the decline of this amazing, living planet being destroyed for PROFITS by one greedy, stupid,short sighted species of ANIMAL when we knew how to prevent that, we know how to stop our cancerous growth, we should know that “renewables” are no “solution” but are useful only so a few rich people can make obscene PROFITS by selling rich dupes solar panels, electric cars, flying battery powered cars even as essential resources are being mined to exhaustion & we have nothing to replace them.
Cali want’s to BAN ICE vehicles by 2030, do that & Cali will collapse as it’s TOTALLY DEPENDENT upon ICE cars, trucks & aircraft & just WHERE will they get the ELECTRICITY all those EV’s need?
People just refuse to comprehend that we cannot replace declining resources with a resource dependent technology.
“They” our oligarch RULERS cannot keep that hidden much longer.
Cassandra always wins in the end & the end is nigh.
About your book Seal, does it have a title yet? If so, what is it?
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“Funding dried up after inconvenient truths”.
One of the reasons why so few scientists are prepared to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth is access to research funding. Recent guests on Nature Bats Last including Professors Paul Ehrlich and Dr Andrew Glikson from the ANU are near the end of their careers and have the courage to call it as my co-host Professor Guy McPherson and Sam Carana from the Arctic News Blog do.
Another reason is no scientists wants to get tarred with the ‘Doomer’ label as we discussed with our most recent guest on the show Professor Corey Bradshaw.
Scientific reticence has ensured that the dominant culture has been able to kick the can and the biosphere off the cliff.
“Schellnhuber said in a recent interview that the IPCC report stating we could stay below 1.5°C of warming was “slightly dishonest” because it relies on immense negative emissions (pulling CO2 out of the air) which was not viable at global scale. He said 1.5°C was no longer achievable but it was still possible to stay under 2°C with massive changes to society.”
Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber in this article is playing ‘fast and loose’ with the actual level of warming we have already experienced. If you go back to 1750 as a baseline we are already past 2C.
At the edge of extinction only a handful of courageous scientists and researchers like me are willing to tell you the truth.
I’ll be surprised if this set of living arrangements survives 2 more melt seasons in the Arctic, that equates to about 18 months.
https://voiceofaction.org/collapse-of-civilisation-is-the-most-likely-outcome-top-climate-scientists/?fbclid=IwAR3pi1FUqdWIJN7EihsRUE1-eu6HDOrSZ113Rr4Pdw4_qT-sZvrZ-2GOT34
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Hottest April on record. Now the hottest May on record. It rained at least once a day here for three weeks in May. Guess that 7% more water in the atmosphere has to fall somewhere, eh?
Article links:
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‘Extinction Is a Political Choice,’ Scientist Says After Study Warns of Threat to Civilization From Humans Destroying Wildlife
“This new study shows yet again that the very survival of humanity is at stake if we don’t end the heartbreaking wildlife extinction crisis.”
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/06/02/extinction-political-choice-scientist-says-after-study-warns-threat-civilization
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And I think everybody reading Kevin’s blog should read this one. Just puts the rest of this shit going on into a comprehensible perspective: https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/06/05/roaming-charges-mad-bull-lost-its-way/
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Global Warming is Nuclear War https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/06/02/global-warming-is-nuclear-war/
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It started raining again here in early afternoon. It has been one very wet Spring in the lower Selkirk Range. Prediction is for more into next week but predictions based on previous weather is spotty at best…
On the VoiceofAction article link you posted, well…guess we’ll see if billionaire Elon Musk can get his rocketship to Mars in time, eh? Didn’t work out real well for Val Kilmer when he tried it. Or maybe not…as the world goes to being too overwhelmed to care… Hell Kevin, even Jane Goodall the Gorilla lady spoke up a warning this week and she’s in her 90s now.
Big sigh.
It sure isn’t looking good, is it? And now the US feels like 1968 when I was 13 and caught up in police riots…that lasted right through the late 1970s where I and my beach band performing was right in the middle and I saw it start (who & why) in 1977…and then Reagan and his goons came in bringing corporate wealthy Fascism and neoliberalism into acceptable mainstream because he was such a ‘great’ communicator. Trump is the epitome of Reaganism, the end product of decades of deceit and control. Of course we didn’t have a goddam worldwide Pandemic on our hands along with the cop riot pandemic that was happening then…and an economy that is going south that is likely to make the Great Depression look somewhat tame…while the climate goes completely haywire.
Big sigh again. After my jaunt to town today, and seeing the incredible idiocy of what people were doing in town (before the rain came in), clumped like primates everywhere, no masks, eating in restaurants etc etc, I’m still staying home, Kevin. SARS II/CoVid 19 is still very much alive and the US is going to go tits up with a skyrocketing death and infection rate in the next couple of weeks. Like every other country that lives off Capitalism and cannot survive a Pandemic. Then Trump can declare a National Emergency, declare Martial Law, and cancel the election in November. The sadistic cops will continue having their fun killing and maiming while declaring ‘I was under orders’ with perfect immunity. What perfect strategy!
Stupid fucking humans. Can I get off this ride now? I’m getting dizzy trying to see in all directions.
good luck with that!
sealintheSelkirks
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It’s like being In the front of a locomotive hurtling off the cliff with the driver having his foot to the floor. Baring witness to the ultimate train smash.
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Yeah, sucks to be us, eh? But I’ve always wanted to KNOW and I’d rather see the train coming than stand with my back to it not seeing it. I’m funny that way.
Raining really, really hard and it’s almost 3am. Pounding on the roof in sheets of rain. With my bar musician hours sleep pattern still keep me up late I get to see a side of the world that most don’t see…but the world is so much quieter at this time of night. The illusion of peace.
I’m still feeling a bit off kilter from being in town today. I caught the depreciating looks from people as I passed by on my skateboard with an N95 mask on. The open walls of the pizza & beer place were rolled up, it’s been open for 5 days now, and I was the seeing man in the land of the blind. I’ve only gone to town every couple of weeks for mail and…it shocked me.
I had a friend tell me today that she’d rather not die because of being stupid. I agreed with her but somehow we both will probably die because OF stupid. Life is temporary.
You’ll like my book. Waiting on the copyright paperwork at this point. It has taken more time that originally expected. Ah well.
sealintheSelkirks
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[…] niezaprzeczalne dowody na to, że jesteśmy świadkami początku wykładniczego ocieplenia Ziemi, przyznaje działacz ekologiczny i antynuklearny Kevin Hester. Od aktywistów po korporacyjne organizacje […]
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I love D. A.but his grief is influencing his position. It reflects the cognitive dissonance of extinction.
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Finally, a climate crisis that mentioned human overpopulation BUT the “solution” will NOT include wind turbines or solar panels. “Renewables” = OIL & there is no way around that, we cannot “transition” from declining RESOURCES to a RESOURCE DEPENDENT TECHNOLOGY!
But our RULERS continue to push for even more dam GROWTH & they continue to fight against birth control, sex education, education for women, female equality & abortions.
I see NO move twards using less FF, less consumption or more efforts to stop population growth. \
For 7.8 BILLION HUMANS, OIL = FOOD!
We should be educating people against buying wildlife products like Ivory, rhino horn, animal based “medicine” & most of all, WE MUST STOP GROWING!
But we won’t will we.
Already, we are reaching the end of oil, 80% of all oil fields are in decline, all but one of our fracked oil fields, the Permian, is in decline with the Permian soon to follow & fracked oil wells decline very quickly, the lose from 60 to 80% of their production in their first year!
Here in Trump land, people are still in denial about COVIS-19, people still REFUSE to wear masks, those that do have a mask on, have their NOSE sticking out over it so NONE of the air they breath in or out is filtered, they many as well as leave that mask at home, others wear a useless bandanna or a plastic face sheild.
For weeks now, no one on the coast could reach the Rogue valley for health care, we have very little health care here.
A friend of mine had to go to the Rogue valley each month to the VA for health care. Lucky for her, she has left the state & is in a area with much better access to health care. She would have to endure horrible pain if she was still stuck here.
How did YOU get a N-95 mask Seal? I can’t get one ANYWHERE, all we can get are less effective, soft, KN-95 masks from CHINA! That’s because the only thing the US produces for sale is DEATH & MASS DESTRUCTION, WE MAKE WARS, WE KILL CIVILIANS. we don’t mind “collateral damage” like murdering civilians & have you noticed all the MURDER BY COPS here?
It’s brutal & disgusting, Trump has turned loose the racist, white supremises, the homophobes, misogynist & brutal, militarized COPS who get away with BEATING UP & KILLING African Americans & are never charged with anything!
Stay north of your southern border Seal, we have SAVAGES ruling us & our cops are DANGEROUS even if your white!
I saw one old white guy just talking to some cops, he was brutally shoved back, his head struck the cement & he then laid still with blood pouring out his ears indicating a basel skull fracture that can lead to perminent brain damage or even DEATH!
Stay away from the US, it’s a dangerous place to be now & Trump is doing every dirty thing he can to stay in power, he wasn’t “elected” in the first place, he was SELECTED by that undemocratic electoral “collage” of corporate oligarchs, the REAL RULERS of this country.
Stay safe Seal & keep riding your skateboard & wearing your N-95 mask.
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Sheila, you keep forgetting that I live 40 air miles SOUTH of the Canadian Border, between it and Spokane Washington! If you are in Trumpland, I’m in Trumpland North! I hear AR-15s and various calibers of handguns firing in one direction or another just about every damned day somewhere within hearing. And no, I’m NOT kidding. Gunfire is a way of life in these mountains and not just hunting season. Bear season (don’t you love that term; a season for killing bears?) is about to start (or has) and not only the AR militia crowd is shooting but the hunters are getting ready, too.
I’m living in the 3% militia world here, the Proud Boys and their friendly cops that are blatant about their racism and violent tendencies. Surrounded by the worst kind of people imaginable; ignorant to the point of stupidity and armed to the teeth (for civilians at least). A county where the town of Marble in my county of Stevens, State of Washington, was taken over and now is completely controlled by psycho Christian fundamental religious fanatics dedicated to killing, and I quote, “All males over the age of 15 that will not join them and bow before their god.” And this little missive is from a ‘manifesto’ put out by an elected Spokane Valley State Rep who is connected to Marble from documents that were released… You can’t drive into town looking ‘different’ without being set upon by a ‘welcoming committee’ of friendly faces asking why did you stop there. Armed friendly Christians! Ain’t no joke, that. Like the militia that was putting up roadblocks in Oregon to check for ‘anti-fascists’ starting the fires (there weren’t any), and aiming their assault rifles at people in cars they deemed ‘suspicious.’ And the cops LET them do it instead of arresting the fucks for it. Madness.
And I’m telling friends I have up in Canada what you told me. Stay the hell out of the US, it is a failing state and falling into a banana republic run by the wealthy who have no problem siccing their mad dogs on those that won’t do what they say. The USA version of Fascism is most definitely wrapped in a flag and carrying a bible…and weapons. Just as was predicted a long time ago.
And the Canadians don’t want anybody from down here driving over their border, either! It has been closed for months now due to the SARS II Covid-19 infected US population and the crazies that won’t pay any attention to the science continuing to insist it is all a hoax. but then Canada has its own brand of neoliberal rightwing politicians running around trying to control everything. Seems like a lot of countries are going that way as I can’t hardly count all the countries of the world that are being run by neoliberal right-winger dictators, Oligarchs, Totalitarians, military coups, there are just too many. It seems that the Empire Virus inherent in our species is running absolutely rampant across the planet…again. A reoccurring theme that rears its ugly head over and over and over in different forms throughout our short 9,000 years of written history…
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Here, like down there in your coastal area of southern Oregon, the same ignorant and violent mindset is readily apparent when it comes to paying any attention to SARS II CoV-19. An extreme lack of mask wearing though it has gotten a bit better, that same nose-not-covered thing going on, an absolute disdain for those that are wearing masks (social snubbing, dirty looks, bad mouthing), people in stores without them because store owners are afraid to say anything due to the implied violence that is barely under the surface. This county hasn’t been hit hard with deaths, not yet, but with only 40,000 or so in the entire county it wouldn’t take much to decimate these rural mountains.
And then there are the stores that fully support the meme that it’s all bullshit, there is no pandemic killing one person per minute in this country. I walked into the post office yesterday to get mail from my po box, and the ’boutique’ that sells nothing but cutesy fake antique-looking China imports of cheap crap had it’s door wide open and visible inside were two mid-30s/early 40s women without masks browsing the store shelves blissfully unaware of what they were risking as was the store owner who is one of those disdainful right wingers that refuses to acknowledge the risks or follows the health regulations in order to sell her cheap crap (the cardboard recycle bin in the alley is next to the 2nd hand’s parking lot that I fix furniture in, and I see the shipping labels on her boxes-all from China, a very high markup!
Seven months of people dying and getting sick and recovering with horrible side effects, from blood clotting strokes and heart attacks to serious permanent organ damage and now there is brain damage starting to show up just like the ‘Encephalitis Lethargy’ that showed up after the 1918 Pandemic in millions of people. And…they still don’t get it because they don’t WANT to, even though it is a state regulation to wear masks inside ANY store. People sitting at sidewalk tables packed close together and I shake my head, then I looked inside through the big front windows and…it’s the same inside! People walk in with masks on then take them off to eat in a closed room where everybody is breathing the same exhaled air? I’m aghast at the inability to think I see around here.
Then this article came out which is enough to make anybody cringe:
The 6-foot rule is ‘outdated’: Researchers devise chart to gauge COVID risk
https://www.sfgate.com/science/article/The-6-foot-rule-is-outdated-Researchers-devise-15520286.php
ALL CHARTS AT LINK
Scientists now believe that droplets and aerosols containing SARS-CoV-2 pathogens can be expelled at least 8 meters (26 feet) by coughing, sneezing, shouting and singing. Because of this, British researchers say the 6-foot rule of physical distancing is outdated and oversimplified. They have proposed a new model for assessing the risk of infection under a wide range of conditions.
more at link
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Sheila, I haven’t eaten in a restaurant since February. And won’t anytime in the near future it looks like. And even though the CDC is under the control of the insane neoliberals, this managed to get out without Trump’s censors stopping it:
If you caught COVID-19, you likely ate at a restaurant, CDC report finds
https://www.sfgate.com/food/article/If-you-caught-COVID-19-you-likely-ate-at-a-15560086.php
And I have also avoided driving down to Spokane for the last 7 months until the 21st of August when I had to pick up the first two boxes of my published book. Then had to go get another two boxes on 11September because most of them sold (which was a good thing!).
And yesterday I had to go again, straight down to load out a storage unit auction won by my friend who runs the 2nd hand. Both of us masked up of course but she can’t lift much..
I went to WinCo Foods and Costco on the way home from the first book pick-up for a few staples, and bought four bags/220 pounds of dog food so I don’t have to go again until next year. I’m expecting the 2nd Wave of this Pandemic to roll over this country in the next couple of months from what I’m reading, and the prognosis looks extremely poor that there will be any positive change in this country and especially if Trump steals the election…which is looking more and more likely.
Since this old husky girl dog is like me, doesn’t really eat much, we should be okay for months without having to go down again. Unless I sell all the copies of my book, then I might have to make another trip.
Costco requires masks as does WinCo, and they stop people at the door, but then I saw people walking around in both stores with them dangling off their ears and pulled down off their noses once they got inside, and NONE of the employees are saying a fucking thing to the Covidiots. I ran a fiberglass shop back in the 70s/80s, talk about having to wear a mask! It was a way of life so I have NO problem protecting myself from a deadly disease by wearing one. I don’t like it, either, and there are times when I have to step away from what I’m doing and pull it down to breathe deeply when working on something outside due to just not getting enough O2 through it, but I’m not going to bitch that I’m being denied my free-dumb!
The stupid is so strong around here that I just stay home on the property for the most part. There is something broken in the brains of these neoliberal rwnj types and I sure can’t fix it for them by myself. I don’t think there is a cure for stupid…except by catching this damned disease and dying of it! It’s going to get so much worse when the snow starts falling and people are stuck inside in huddled masses. There are already signs of stir crazy and cabin fever showing up in populations all over the world, massive depression along with the massive unemployment and crashing economies, irrational behavior and short tempers and physical violence… I prefer to stay home with my gate closed. But it’s everywhere, not just out here in the rural under-educated zones that you and I live in. A restaurant manager in Pacific Beach in San Diego, part of the beach areas I grew up on, got punched in the face and broke his nose because he asked a customer to put on a mask recently. That security guard in the upper Midwest that got shot dead for doing the same thing at a grocery store…but he was a black guy so I guess the PB manager got off easy because he could be dead, too? Probably wasn’t black I imagine…
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As for N95 masks, I’ve always had a box or two of them on the tool room shelf for fire season, when the smoke gets so bad that the only way to breathe and not choke is with one on. That big Canadian burn a few years ago that drowned this area in layers of filled valleys full of particulate matter and eye-watering smoke, the local Carpenter Road fire that got within just a couple miles of me a couple years before that… and always fires every summer that burn west of me in the dry flatlands of mid-Washington State called ‘The Scablands’ that back the smoke up on these mountains. Or the Spokane Rez to my southwest for that matter, about 12 miles s/sw that seems to get set on fire a lot, too, for some reason.
I’ve got most of a box of the N95 dust mask style left, and two of the N95 respirator version with the exhale valve that are unused. The two respirators I’ve been using that I keep in the vehicle for when I leave the property are at the end of their life as is the dust mask one that I keep inside the house to wear if/when people show up and I go outside to talk with them. But since I’m not around people much these masks last a lot longer than normal as I don’t wear them around the property at all. Excepting of course during the massive smoke cloud from your Oregon wildfires that blasted us from the 10th to the 20th. The AQI was nearly 200 that week, and I had to keep the two big floor fan/swamp coolers running to keep the house air cleaned out enough to be able to breathe without wearing one inside. Wet filters sure do work well for taking particulate matter out of the air.
I have a couple of those KN95s, too, that you mentioned, and of course running a sew shop I can always make fairly effective cloth masks if needed by cutting up a bunch of brand new in package HEPA filters I snagged that were being thrown out at the 2nd hand. Filters for air purifier machines nobody has, so I saved ’em for just that purpose as I can insert a shaped piece in between the cloth layers that should work. Sew a little pocket to hold it in place to replace it now and then. Finding real N95s are nearly impossible at this point like you said, so we make do with whatever we can if necessary. Huge numbers of fake ones are showing up, too, and most of the real ones are going to medical staff and the POLITICIANS of course!
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And the neoliberal Fascist Republicans are about to steal another election, Sheila, just like they did in 2000 with the rightwing Supreme Court breaking both the US and Florida Constitutions to put those bastards in power. They didn’t have to in 2008 because neoliberal right wing Democrat Obama was a perfect foil to use for shutting people up AND pissing off the racist white trash in this country. The screams of anguish after 8 years of President Dick Cheney and his sockpuppet Wbush rampaging around the world and fucking the US up even more weren’t allowed because it would have been ‘racist’ to call out Obama for his deceitful smooth lies about what he was doing.
Oh my hell, the tangled webs the wealthy weave, eh? The Oligarchs chose Obama well and their corporations funded his campaign just like they did Cheney & Wbush. Or if we’re lucky we get the corporate-owned neoliberal Senator from Mastercard & Drug Warrior Biden and HIS little group of wealthy neoliberal pricks including another non-US sorta black person who has no US slaves in her history…just like Obama. Funny that the only black president and possibly the only black vice president have zero slaves in the ancestry don’t you think? Also funny is that they are getting endorsements from Wbush republicans…very funny, yes?
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Here’s another link to read:
Monstrous Nothing
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/09/23/monstrous-nothing/
Warning: the following article makes no recommendations as to what we can do about climate change/global warming. The author believes that most of the things we can do are already known, and that the problem is that we are not doing them – or not doing them as if we genuinely believed in their necessity. The problem is that the future for our planet predicted by the scientists is so far from our experience that it is almost impossible to think about, let alone believe. Perhaps the exercise of carrying this trend to its logical, “if-left-to-itself” conclusion will help us to understand what we are doing now. Think of it as a kind of quiet scream: “This isn’t a dream! This is really happening.”
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I guess this is enough of an answer for your post, Sheila! I think I need to go out and shut the door of my shop before it gets too cold. The cannabis garden is inside and out during the day, but I can’t let the freezing temps expected to chill the shop down too much. About two weeks before harvest, and they are incredibly stinky at this point. You’d love it!
Do something fun, girl, every damn day because there will be a point I’m afraid there won’t be any fun left to find…and yes I’m rolling on my skate whenever I get the chance. Who WAS that old guy zipping by on the 70s pool rider with the white ponytail flapping behind him??? HA!
sealintheSelkirks
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I just LOVE your posts Seal! I can see the smoke pouring out of your ears as you type!
It’s a wonder your pony tail isn’t black from the heat!
I too am pissed off royally at this UNELECTED government, the constitution written by white, land owning, slave owning RICH males, kept them in power while us “pee-ons” get the shaft in the ass!
They don’t even use LUBE, just shove it in & we are expected to smile & ask for more!
Did you hear that Trump has COVIS-19? I hope he DIES FROM IT along with his corrupt, greedy staff especially McConnel! What a piece of shit he is!
I couldn’t care less about those useless, pointless “debates” between two, lying warmongering oligarchs who will continue doing all the wrong things speeding up our inevitable collapse.
I have now left Twitter, they kept blocking the whole page all the while proclaiming “your in control! select what ADS you “WANT” to see.” This went on for months!
I would be lying if I said I “wanted” to see certain ads, why couldn’t they just leave me alone & show what ever ads they want cuz I don’t actually “want” to see any of them! I also don’t like being FORCED to say I do “want” to see certain ads, so I left them a final message, “this is how I exercise control, goodby Twitter!” & then I closed my account!
I like you am sick & tired of being stuck at home, can’t go anywhere without running into those IGNORANT, STUPID, MASKLESS, TRUMP SUPPORTERS!
For weeks, we had smoke, one day we had those bloody orange skies, YIKES!
Several small towns, Phoenix & Talent were burned to the ground, thousands of “mobile” homes were totally destroyed leaving thousands homeless.
Heading for a town near you are thousands of ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS are heading our way from Guatemala to take OUR JOBS, OUR HOUSING & put their children IN OUR OVERCROWDED SCHOOLS or perhaps they will swell the #s of the HOMELESS, WE MUST KEEP THEM OUT! If Biden is selected, expect
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DAM WORDPRESS, I WAS NOT FINISHED! Hitting “cap lock” is not “POST”!
If Biden is selected, expect even MORE IMMIGRATION, our corporate rulers want more poor needy workers to keep down the wages of legal low income workers.
As our climate continues to deteriorate, we will have more crop failures, perhaps you noticed the huge floods China has that destroyed many of their crops & almost caused the collapse of three gorges dam that would have wiped out many towns & cites. Again there were fires in the tundra melting the “perma” frost releasing more METHANE & our fracked wells are gushing methane, we are indeed, doomed!
More crop failures means more desperate people migrating into richer countries who are already closing their borders to migrants, as their numbers swell those borders will become death traps for migrants, they will be shot if they try to force their way in & those crossing the Med will be given two choices, either turn around or we will sink you & you will NOT be rescued. There is no way the target countries can take in millions of migrants, they soon won’t be able to even feed those already there.
We now have 7.8 BILLION PEOPLE on a planet that without OIL, can only support 500 MILLION to 1 BILLION, poorly fed people, max.
My “special” crop is in & I’m working on the second season by cutting clones.
A pink, sweet smelling rose was left behind in the mobile home park a friend lived in, I cut a stalk from it to clone.
It got roasted by the heat wave we had & I didn’t expect it to live. All it had left was some green at the bottom of the black stem.
It’s now showing its new leaves!
After threatening to leave my ophthalmologist, he finally gave me a refferal to a cataract surgon in Crescent city, I was prepared to drive to Grants Pass over one of the top 5 most dangerous highways in the country, H199 through the Smith river canyon with but ONE EYE & a cataract in the other to reach another opthalmologist cataract surgon! I was determined to NOT go through 2020 with that dam CATARACT! I felt too uncomfortable driving with such poor vision!
I was really looking forwards to seeing again & visiting our beautiful parks & beaches, but then came along COVIS-19 & all that changed.
Now we cower in fear behind our doors wondering if we too will get COVIS despite all our efforts to avoid it.
Let the Trump, evangelical MORONS get it not me or thee!
Stay safe Seal & sneak north over the border, leave this mess behind!
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I had a book order from Bonner’s Ferry Idaho last week (how she heard about it?), and when I emailed about what color she wanted for the Tuck neck gaitor she also ordered the reply was a perfect cognitive dissonance story! No, I’m not kidding. Read on:
She is ten days into a bout with SARS II CoV-19 after nursing her husband through the disease for a month. A month flat on his back! He is an anti-science Trump voter, called it all ‘a hoax, a damned libbrll plot,’ the usual spew one hears from Trump or off the Fox channel propaganda, and of course he refused to wear a mask much less physical distance from groups etc etc. Bonner’s Ferry by the way is in the N/E corner of the Idaho Panhandle, a place not highly regarded for having critical thinking skills.
He brought the disease home from Montana after Labor Day. No, I don’t know where he got it but I’m sure it wasn’t contact traced to the spreader…at least she didn’t mention anything about that.
When she made the order he hadn’t had a fever in 9 days, about the same time she went down with it but so far she hasn’t gotten as sick as he did. He hit the floor very quickly, extremely sick within days, and she had to nurse him. I don’t know if he went to a hospital but probably not. That kind of mindset would want to ‘tough it out like Clint Eastwood.’ He lost over thirty pounds and is weak as a newborn kitten. I got the impression he’s not much help at this point, and she’s now sick!
He had a fever for how long?? Holy shit, that probably killed some brain cells. What’s left after neoliberalism chewed its way through the thinking processing areas anyway…
And you can be sure he’s gonna vote for Trump the Immune who feels better than he has in 20 years at 74 years old, obese, with high blood pressure and obviously high cholesterol, whose exercise is tweeting-serious thumb work for such a perfectly healthy specimen of American manhood. Oh, can’t forget being driven around in a golf cart between visits to McDonalds.
So there really is a devil and it loves Trump because he publicly said he’s now immune. But it supports the followers by NOT granting those poor saps immunity. But then all of the gods have always been fickle that way. Definitely cognitive dissonance!
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Sheila: It’s okay to be honest and say I’m just a freaking noisy old surfer dude. I can take it! Hell, I was always called by the little stepkids their Noisy Stepdad so I got used to it. And I got the rolled eyeball looks when they turned into teens. As adults I had my stepson tell me one time that he learned more from listening to me than he ever learned in high school…
As for sneaking over the Canadian Border, they DON’T WANT US THERE. The border is closed to US citizens! Can you blame ’em?
But yes I, too, avoided most of the expected insanity of the ridiculous debate but even without TV it’s hard to not get some of it because of all the article reading I do. And I heard a couple DemocracyNow shows on the community radio station out of Spokane (KYRS) that replayed bits and pieces. Very anti-Trump radio… But the debate, and I use that word in the broadest of terms, About what I expected, unhinged figureheads of the neoliberal Aristocracy spouting bullshit soundbites and platitudes. Biden can’t hide his extreme neoliberal political record that fits right alongside the last four years of Trump’s, or Obama’s eight, or Cheney/little wanker Wbush eight, or Bill Clinton’s eight… It’s literally the same shit different decade that goes on and on with slight adjustments now and then to keep the workers in line. “Full of sound and fury signifying nothing.” Excepting the further gathering the strings of power into the hands of an extremely limited group of sociopaths & psychopaths… Ain’t american exceptionalism fun?
So now it’s two weeks since you posted this and reading the news just keeps getting more chilling by the day. I’m trying not to be overwhelmed with it all but there is so much awful going on. But I have outside chores to get done before the snow starts here like cutting more winter firewood into rounds, and I certainly need to start trimming my harvested medical cannabis garden. I cut the last late-growth girl down last night and hung her from the ceiling in my shop after the mandatory 24 hour blackout to stop photosynthesis. The other ten are ready to cut spears and start the work of trimming waterleaf and then nipping the buds off. Sore fingers and sticky nippers that I have to put in the freezer to be able to use the next day (after scraping the residue off of course!) but holy smokes I accidentally knocked a fat bud off one of the hanging God Bud plants that stuck to my ponytail before hitting the floor, and I picked it up and smoked it yesterday. I wasn’t ready for the extreme potency and got hardly anything done the rest of the evening. Other than making dinner and reading a book! Pretty dang potent canna-girlie there! God Bud cannabis is far more potent than the invented god kind!
Sheila, my crop this year is two Blue Bird hybrids, two Permafrost hybrids, four Northern Thunder, two God Bud, and one very late Mantanushka Thunderfuck-Alaskan Purple hybrid. All are sativa crosses, and only the Mantanushka was grown from seed as I picked up clones from a local grower last Spring. Turned out well and done just as the season closes me down with cold. It’s been freezing at night lately, hard frosts. The rubble from the harvest turns into Green Goo CBD topical paste…
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GOOD NEWS! My rebuilt website is about to go live! The paypal link finally connected on Friday afternoon and I had a test order come in this morning from the webmaster to make sure it’s working. I’ve got book orders on hold because the old site’s shopping cart couldn’t handle the new phone apps and just kept glitching badly. It’s been a mess for three weeks though I have had a couple orders get through, but I’m NOT an IT guy and really don’t have any idea why it was doing that. I’m just glad they fixed it even though they had to rebuild the entire site. Ouch. That’s gonna cost but they gave me a deal after they couldn’t get the checkout to connect to the update they did on the old site. Pretty much three weeks of it mostly not working right.
And Kevin, on the new book category page there should be links to four published short stories from three different magazines that should be there for people buying the book. Since nobody will see them until they go to that page (excepting the Lunch Counter Trilogy which is on the home page), it’s kind of a bonus to folks who are buying my book.
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Weather Report:
Cold and overcast with wind moving the conifers, and snow due possibly tomorrow night sometime and again on Thursday but with the deranged Jet Stream looping like it is who the hell knows! The weather predictions have gotten far less reliable the last few year, ya notice? Had a cold rain both Friday and Saturday nights and the first dusting on the snowboarding hill but just barely on the very top of the Peak last week.
A couple of reads:
How Donald Trump Is Remaking the Federal Courts in His Own Image
The president’s judicial nominees have been notably white, male, and conservative.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/11/how-donald-trump-is-remaking-the-federal-courts-in-his-own-image/
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As White House Embraces Dangerous ‘Herd Immunity’ Strategy, Covid-19 Deaths Predicted to Spike 80% in US by February
“This is the time when we could be entering one of the worst periods of our epidemic and one of our worst periods in modern American public health. I’m very worried for the nation.”
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/10/16/white-house-embraces-dangerous-herd-immunity-strategy-covid-19-deaths-predicted
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Does It Really Matter Who Wins the Election?
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/09/25/does-it-really-matter-who-wins-the-election/
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Imperial Irony: New York Times Announces Halt to ‘At War’ Section Even as Endless US War Continues
“The forever war outlasting the NYT section on the forever war is a very forever war thing to happen.”
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/10/14/imperial-irony-new-york-times-announces-halt-war-section-even-endless-us-war
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If the People Were to Settle Their Own Quarrels
“It is wrong to consider that courts are established for the benefit of the people. Those who want to perpetuate their power do so through the courts. If people were to settle their own quarrels, a third party would not be able to exercise any authority over them. Truly, men were less unmanly when they settled their disputes either by fighting or by asking their relatives to decide for them. They became more unmanly and cowardly when they resorted to the courts of law. It was certainly a sign of savagery when they settled their disputes by fighting. Is it any less so, if I ask a third party to decide between you and me? Surely, the decision of a third party is not always right. The parties alone know who is right. We, in our simplicity and ignorance, imagine that a stranger, by taking our money, gives us justice.” (Mohandas K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj)
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And remember that other quote from Gandhi when asked about civilization in the US. He said it would be nice to see such a thing happen!
Nothing else for the moment I guess. Time for a cup of hot tea!
sealintheSelkirks
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Denial of Reality;
https://problemspredicamentsandtechnology.blogspot.com/2020/12/denial-of-reality.html?fbclid=IwAR0dUao078lFz_PTjj21DqCkHf9TVLST-idvLM0t_X9iKp_qfwKgB7pf7fI
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Good article posted 15Dec, and it stated a serious problem that I keep seeing cropping up in conversations. That ‘technology’ will save us…as long as we keep mining and building and using up every resource we can possibly put our grubby hands on! Which has always seemed to deny the point of NOT using everything up while absolutely changing the lifestyles and size of our species population on this crowded little mudball…
Actually, that strategy might save some of us IF it is used to build a self-sustainable off-planet nursery for our species before we suffocate in our own poisons. Maybe. But that’s not what is going to happen and it’s pretty obvious that it’s already too late…
NOTE:
I’ve got a bunch of your postings to read through, Kevin. Been 40 days since my dial-up service disappeared without notice Nov. 30th after more than a week of spotty connections or being unable to even log on before I called their number only to find out it had been disconnected with no new number. Signed up for NetZero dial-up and waited ten days for the new service install disks to arrive only to find out that my old HP Media Center running on Windows XP had a dead disc drive. So I installed them on the new HP computer with Windows 10 that I had a external modem put on…and it went online but the browsers, none of them, could recognize that it was already online. I spent a month shuttling both computers back and forth to the local repair guy who, to be blunt, was freaking incompetent before I took them south to a new repair shop recommended by my neighbor on Tuesday. This guy fixed this machine in 15 minutes and sent me home with it to check 40 days of freaking emails that took me 9 1/2 hours of sitting through that night! My delete finger is sore and my damned hamstrings in both legs tried to cramp up into a knot from sitting so long! I picked up the new HP Windows 10 yesterday from him, tipped him a big bag of goodies from my latest cannabis harvest that had him grinning from the smell, and I can’t use either of the two Windows 7 or the new Windows 10 computer because they were never designed to work with the slow speeds of dial-up and I sure don’t have the income for the cost of high speed in these mountains! So I’m stuck with using the two old XP machines, and the computer with Vista, because they were designed to run on modems. He said if I could find a disk with an old browser on it like the one I’m using now (old Mozilla/Firefox), I could install it and it would run the much better machine. But finding one that hasn’t been updated is going to be hard.
Old tech for an old surfer dude! But I did get all the book orders out yesterday that were sitting on my email and have been replying to people who wrote to talk about what they read in it. Wondering if you have gotten to my book yet? HA! I’ve got a stack of books, too, and at the moment I’m finishing Edward Snowden’s Permanent Record and Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. I’ve realized what a patriot and freedom fighter Snowden is…no wonder he’s hiding from being murdered by the corporate US government’s assassins..
Nothing else. Off to read more emails.
sealintheSelkirks
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https://kevinhester.live/2020/02/28/cognitive-dissonance-and-outright-lies-at-the-edge-of-extinction/?replytocom=12599#respond
answering my post from May 2020
Hey Sheila! I had to look for your June 12th 2021 post because it wasn’t at the end of the thread where the new posts go but waaaay back tacked below my June 20 2020 post! Have you missed reading all that’s been posted since last year? Lots of articles to read that I’m sure will piss you off because, well, they did me a lot of the time! Good information should do that I think…
So you’re getting rain down there, too, eh? March up here was officially mid-June dryness levels, and for the last month it’s been in the 90s or triple digits. What little dribbles of rain isn’t even wetting the ground under the forest canopy because walking with the dogs in the morning I’m kicking dust on crackling dry needles under the trees. Been RED FLAG warnings up and my fire district has hit the yearly wildfire average last week. Not even mid-June yet…
You did hear about the idiot Utah governor publicly asking for people to pray for rain and end to the drought? What a bozo!
Today is June 15th and a monster T-storm rolled overhead about 1am last night. Holy smokes it was loud and brilliantly bright! Huge lightning strikes with heavy winds, and the forked bolts were doing the CRAAAACK-SNAP as they went to the ground or scattered through the cloud masses above. Concussions hit the house so quickly that the flash was still there. Damned close and made the floor shake underneath me.
Had micro-burst squalls blast through pounding on the metal roof after the front went N/E but at least it was enough water to wet the ground for a change. Chill today, feels good after the constant mid-90 heat levels with over 50% humidity level which is high for this area. I don’t get much done outside in the afternoons at all. Swamp cooler and fans going; books, water, and cold sun tea is a better idea.
The strikes further away were huge rumbles of thunder booming and echoing for many seconds… But at least it freaking rained unlike Sunday at dark when it was just a flurry of bolts in the distance. Scary shit as we’re now in late July levels of dried-out forest with mid-90s temps and it seems like there is always a breeze, or it’s windy, or it’s really blowing, or we’re getting blasted and my 90 foot conifers are bending 60 degrees both ways… And with the 10 acre wildfire five miles east of me at Loon Lake that burned a garage down and got a shed at another place but missed both houses, we have hit the ‘average’ wildfire numbers already! 47 wildfires in my fire district in April alone when it used to snow around my house or at least be raining… Like hurricane season in the Atlantic, there’s a new ‘average’ being realized in our destabilizing atmosphere. 55 is the old normal, 47 in April the new? Gives me the shivers up my spine, that’s for sure. Living in the forest is like living on the side of a volcano or a flood plain or an earthquake faultline or on the beach in a hurricane zone. Humans live everywhere, don’t we?
Saw pictures of Shasta Lake south of you that I used to access from the Antlers boat ramp. Which the end of (you know, the part underwater?) is now officially 100 feet above any remaining water in that part of the lake. In mid-June. The 2nd worst drying out period in the last 1200 years…SO FAR? Excuse me? That sounds like climatic shift going on to me! It was 125’F in Death Valley a couple of days ago and it’s only mid-June, Shelia!!!
Good article on this ongoing Western drought that is affecting you down there in Oregon and me up here:
Not Just Another Drought
The American West moves from dry to bone dry.
Resource Insights.
https://popularresistance.org/not-just-another-drought/
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As for Covid, Holy Shit! COVID Part II, Return of the Mutants now playing at a restaurant or pub near you. People are acting positively giddy almost drunk about all this opening up shit and crowding into restaurants spitting into one another’s faces because they are vaccinated…or else never wore a mask in the first place and they ain’t dead so Trump was right it was all a hoax and was going to go away like a miracle. Both sides are losing their minds. This just in:
***Interesting comments on the Delta Variant from the Tweet feed of Dr. Bob Wachter, chair of the UCSF School of Medicine…
If you’re fully vaxxed, I wouldn’t be too worried, especially if you’re in a highly vaxxed region….
Unvaxxed may well do OK for a while, probably through summer [due to the large number of vaccinated people]. But fall/winter now scares me a lot, much more than it did 2 weeks ago….
For Delta, Pfizer dose 1 is only ~33% protective. https://gov.uk/…/vaccines-highly-effective-against-b-1… This creates 2 problems: 1) People stay vulnerable until after shot 2 (& many let guard down earlier); 2) Loss in efficacy for dose 1 points to some degree of vaccine/immune escape. And – though this isn’t proven – I’d worry that a fully vaccinated elder, or someone whose immunity stems from an infection >12 mths ago, won’t be sufficiently protected over time, if immunity falls below a threshold needed to thwart Delta….
For a vaccinated person, watch the Delta % in your region (currently ~6% in the U.S. & rising) & Covid cases in your community. https://cidrap.umn.edu/…/delta-variant-makes-6-us-covid… If you’re seeing more cases & more Delta, I’d restore some precautions (esp. if you’re high risk) – at least indoor mask wearing (if you’ve stopped; BTW, I haven’t) in places w/ unvaxxed/unmasked folks.
I’ll now bet we’ll see significant (incl. many hospitalizations/deaths) surges this fall in low-vaccine populations due to combo of seasonality, Delta’s nastiness, & “back to normal” behavior…
For me, Delta adds to my resolve to keep mask on indoors when unvaxxed/unmasked people may be around. And I’m getting psychologically prepped for some restrictions to return in fall (tho highly vaxxed places like SF will likely do fine). Nobody wants that, but the virus doesn’t care what we want. For unvaxxed, I wish you well but my sympathy is flagging. Your bad choice is looking worse.
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Bluntly, it’s insane behavior. After 900,000 real covid deaths in this country according to the latest UofW disease lab report and millions more than being reported around the world just like the 1918 Pandemic, you’d think there’d be some caution. Nope, just dumb behavior denying the existence of higher cognitive functions. It is SO much easier not to think, ya know?
Oops! With the extremely scary South African, Brazilian, and the two British mutated strain variants running loose spreading because they are SO much more infectious, we really should not be doing this. Biden and the Dimocrats absolutely CAVED to the Trump rethuglicans and the corporate cut-throat business people.
And even worse, India’s mutated Delta variant is slaughtering so many people that the crematoriums cannot find enough wood to burn the bodies…and that damned mutation is killing 20 & 30 year olds that have completely inundated the hospitals. Can we count the orphans being created? The Delta mutation somehow managed to have great sex with one of the British variants (the Alpha) and has now invaded Viet Nam which beat the damn original strain due to their excellent public health care system. Few deaths in the 90 million population, and they never closed up or locked down. Now they are dying in droves from this hybrid Alpha-Delta variant. Holy fuck this is bad.
And the US is acting like nothing that is going on in the rest of the world matters. As usual. There are signs that various variants (Singapore identified ten (10!!) different strains in their population just before they locked down again in mid-May) are already finding ways around the vaccines but both my biologist friends were warning me of that months ago when they started popping up. I have read that a couple are forcing down the vaccine effectiveness percentages already. The more people in dense living conditions the quicker a virus will mutate past natural or vaccine immunity. Did you know that California now has its own mutated strain with its very own number? The first of the states but such a huge population of course…
Are We Ready to Emerge From Covid-19? Revisiting the Pandemic as a Portal
Instead of rushing to emerge, we would do well now to slow down, take stock of the luggage we are carrying and the carcasses we are still dragging.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/06/08/are-we-ready-emerge-covid-19-revisiting-pandemic-portal
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All these variants, and the new ones we don’t know of yet, WILL get into the US. The world is a much smaller place than it used to be an it doesn’t take months to cross the oceans anymore! Duh! The two Brit, the Brazilian, and the South African have shown up, there’s been documented cases already. The SA one showed up in…Georgia I think? Or maybe it was South Carolina? Deep South state anyway. Nobody has any idea how it did or who brought it in. There really aren’t any gods watching out and protecting us otherwise there wouldn’t BE any fucking deadly virus’ stomping around, yes? So much for benevolent guardians!
My Dimocrat governor who did pretty well for most of the last year caved like Biden and changed the mandates so that the counties that kept failing could all claim they’re ‘safer’ and open all those businesses. They need the sales tax money! There are an amazing number of storefronts closed down in Spokane as I had to take an older friend to the VA last week and did some driving through a lot of it. From the previous mandate of every two weeks review having no more than 30 cases per 100,000 levels AND no more than 5 serious ICU hospitalized to 100 per 100,000 OR only 5 ICU…passing either gets one bumped to a more business-friendly level. Since most of the rural counties ship their bad Covid to Spokane they cheat the numbers every time.
And my closest town with a bank and a supermarket, hardware store etc is the tiny (pop. 2,400 largest in the south county) 1-stoplight town of Chewelah. The Main St. in reality is only two blocks long east and one west off highway 395 than runs through the center of town. It’s the only stoplight. It’s so poor that the McDonald’s closed a few years ago though Zip’s burgers is still on the Spokane to Canada highway. My county has a 22% vaccination rate and Kathy has been throwing people out of her 2nd hand store all year for not wearing a mask. With 5 stints in her heart she does NOT need to catch this bug especially due to the heart muscle deterioration the virus does to some.
Chewelah’s first block east has six buildings on the northside, all 100 yr old brick building business fronts one a 2-story with wire around the edge of the roof to stop the brick pieces from falling on people below. The southside has the post office on one end and the newer two-story community arts/music/yoga/ballet/painting etc building on the other with three more of the 100+yr old brick buildings sandwiched inbetween. One of which is also a 2-story with the 2nd hand I fix stuff in once a week in the downstairs storefront. Three apartments upstairs. Four of the six storefronts across the street have been empty more than a year, one for more than three, and another at least two years, and the fifth is a Dance Studio that opened up for about a month then closed but is supposed to open again. Sporty’s Bar is iconic in the middle and probably won’t ever close as people want their alcohol…
So no, I’m wearing a mask because I fully expect that this 2nd Wave of the virus being the new mutation strains not just ‘surges’ of the original, sweeping the world is going to wash up and drop the US population to its knees in the next couple of months. People are going on vacation to countries that haven’t gotten a single vaccine dose yet! And it’s only a few hours back and they won’t be showing infection signs yet…
I hate being a Cassandra but at least it gives me a chance to think about what I’m doing based on the information I’m absorbing. Problem is that ignorant people do the same from all the Fox info-tainment crap they listen to. But those unfortunately don’t require any critical thinking.
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As for Biden, he’s exactly what he has always been! What, are you surprised? In 1980 I would have called him a Reagan Dimocrat. And, well, actually if you think about it ever since that’s all we’ve had. Bill Clinton? Right wing Republican. Barack Obama? Said he idolized Reagan. Hillary Clinton? Best buddies with Trump the Democrat for decades before he switched party faces. Just like that fucking idiot from Virginia Senator Munchie-boy the closet Trumpie. Biden immediately bombed Syria and what does that tell you? Right wing servant of the Empire!
Have you noticed this thought: There never seems to be any neoliberal Republican politicians that give any inkling of leaning or supporting anything the Dems put out much less cross the always-rightwing ‘Centrist’ position. But there are plenty of neoliberal Democrat politicians that snivel and squeal about so-called bi-partisianship (which has only one side to it) that are always supporting vicious Republican wish lists….and continue to be ‘in the Democratic Party’ for some reason. Why don’t they just change side officially? Funny how that works.
And not that there really are any other sides but the right wing neoliberal corporates anyway…
As for less insane I’d have to argue that point. He’s obviously in the first stages of Dementia but not Trump’s version which is far more outwardly violent. He’s still has words and can read speeches on his good days and stay mostly on the track his handlers want him on. Trump never could do that and has a vocabulary of a 6th grader. Both versions of course are detrimental to the health and well-being of all earthlings I’m afraid.
The Talking Heads band said it best: Same as it ever was.
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And of course Biden will continue to support with billions of our dollars the US military base of Israel. Which politician was it that said if it didn’t already exist we’d have to invent it? I think it was a Dimocrat as a matter of fact! We like our aircraft carriers like Israel, Okinawa, Diego Garcia…
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As for our currency, try another, LARGER, housing crash than Bill Clinton/Wbush’s 2007/08 Wall St ripoff. We ain’t seen nothing yet!
The Coming Crash
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/06/11/the-coming-crash/
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I don’t read MSM, or watch tv, and only listen to and support (in my small way) community-based non-profit radio KYRS.org out of Spokane. Does Pacifica Radio stuff, Thom Hartman, Ralph Nader Radio Hour, Project Censored, DemocracyNow, along with a lot of local features. There are enough MSM articles sprinkled into the alt left reading that I do anyway like Truthout, CommonDreams, InTheseTimes, Counterpunch, ConsortiumNews, Shadowproof, MintPressNews, TomDispatch, TruthDig, Grayzone, ReaderSupportedNews, etc etc. But articles from the rightwing NY Times, Bezo’s Washington Post, ABCnews…there’s always one or two that pop up from some MSM site on alt news.
But then one has to remember that 85% of the adult population in this country gets all its news off TV!!! Which is all owned by five giant corporations. It’s all propaganda…
Never been on Twitter, never on Instagram, never signed up to FaceBlech, never use Google (duckduckgo search engine instead). But I do however have two snowboarding video shorts of myself on youtube due to it being put on my website that way by my retired webmaster a couple years ago. One is titled Two Feet of Freshies and is 5 minutes long and is a GREAT snowboarding vid (in my opinion) in deep dark trees and powder holding my camera in my front hand while riding; one HAS to watch it on a big screen not a phone and have good headphones for the piano solo music that blends in so well it’s amazing. The other vid is only 30 seconds or so of running at speed through sunshine powder and called Busting Loose I think…oh hell I forget! The links to them are on my website home page.
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MY BOOK: Is titled Massacre Sites; Working for the Dead. That is NOT just a title but a description. Sub-title under that is ‘A Tale of Connections’ which also are not just cute words. It has been selling on my website and in a couple local stores since August last year. There’s about 80 copies out in the world now including the one Kevin bought. With tax is costs $21.53 per copy plus shipping (USPS media mail, totals about $4 with packaging). 252 pages, over 50 images both color and b&w and my shop site takes Paypal and I take checks in the mail.
Go to http://www.boardwarm.com and tab Books at the top, then tab MORE on the next page to read the back cover and have other of my published pieces links to read for free at the bottom of that 2nd page.
Yeah, I published in a pandemic how dumb is that, eh? I refuse to put it on Amazon to enrich sociopath Bezos a single dime so it’ll never make the NY Times bestseller list. Don’t have a Publicist nor an Agent, either. I’m just not commercially viable I guess and will never get an $11 million McMansion in the Hamptons like Obama did…
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And your cop rant:
The cop murdering & beating crap has always been around since the very start of police in this country. I have a picture of a South Carolina Runaway Slave Patrol Police badge from the 1850s at the same time police thugs in the North were beating and killing factory workers wanting better wages and safer working conditions. It just goes on and on, and it’s far more about Class Status and how much power you have when they grab you. Think if they pulled over Zuckerberg or Bezos or Gates or Adelson they’d haul them out of the car and beat the shit out of them for ‘resisting arrest’ for a broken tail light? Not fucking likely! Here’s a link you should read:
US Cops Train Far Less And Kill Far More Than All Other Developed Countries
https://thefreethoughtproject.com/us-police-training-kill-more/
and you’ll love this one in my state:
Lying Cops Still On Duty Despite Brady List
By Marlanna Bullock
Liberation News
https://popularresistance.org/bad-apples-or-bad-system-lying-cops-still-on-duty-despite-brady-list/
Bad apples or bad system?
“I really think we should not need a Brady list, because there should be no such thing as a police agency that keeps cops with histories of lying, or false arrests, or brutality, or fabricating reports, or other misconduct,” – Anita Khandelwal, director of the King County Department of Public Defense.” – Crosscut.com
Almost 200 Washington state law enforcement officers have been placed on the Brady list, a list of officers who may not be considered trustworthy in a court of law.
NOTE: My question being: When a fucking hairdresser needs 1500 hours of training and a cop gets 650 then is handed a gun and they’re a dumbfuck bullie from high school that nobody liked anyway, how sick is that? Oh wait, hairdressers use deadly weapons like scissors! It took me over five years to qualify and pass a black belt test in martial arts…
____VACCINES
Why would anybody need to put a microchip in a vaccine to track you? Everybody carries their tracking chip everywhere they go anyway. It’s called a CELL PHONE! They can be remoted operated, they can be on when you think you turned them off and can send out to whomever has the technology everything you say at any moment of the day or night. Very easy to trace back your movements with GPS and tower pings. The ignorance of these people is just astounding, isn’t it? Savages in thinking but not in technology. That’s why all this shit is so scary. Cavemen with nuclear weapons.
As for the mask thing, last year’s regular flu season numbers were incredibly low in this country because they work so well. In Asia, my oldest friend’s wife is Hawai’ian born Japanese and those people are smart enough to always wears masks at the start of flu season! They don’t get nearly slammed as hard as we are every year in Free-Dumb USA!
Packed restaurants up here, too, bars are open and all the rest but June 31st all restrictions are off. Total madness. And I also did read that restaurant dining IS the best way to catch Covid. Most likely source of infection, then comes church going (all that singing to JEE-zuz sprays it everywhere) and other large gatherings. But you are EATING the spit of the people talking at the table next to you because it lands on your food all during your meal…
I will continue to mask up, and the 2nd hand store will continue to require masks inside regardless of what the state does. With 5 stints in her heart the old lady who has run it for 20 years isn’t about to let stupid in the store. Besides, I’d walk and she can’t run it without my one day a week time I give her.
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I have bats swooping at night here. And swallow bird nests in bird houses hung around the house and front yard area to out back by the shop. A new robin nest with 3 blue eggs showed up under the eves of the front porch, and other birds like juncoes, mountain finches, a bunch of small birds have nested around the property this year. Not having domestic cats makes a difference. About 30 Rufeous and Calliope hummingbirds came back this year, too, and I had to hang a 4th four-seat feeder out front. I can tell which are returnees because they are the ones who stare in the windows at me when the feeders need changing! The weather has been so fucked up this year that some species showed up way too early and there weren’t any bugs yet. I had woodpeckers, the little black & white ones, eating on the suet feeders in the apple tree. And that tree bloomed at least a month early when there is never any bees except a few of the big black & yellow and brown bumbles. About the last week, before a windstorm came in and tore off the petals, a couple of small bee species showed up and were buzzing all over it so at least I’ll get some apples this year…
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Terraform Mars? Sure we can! Just have Elon Musk ask for some new technology from the ET’s in the flying craft the US Navy now admits to having videos of that they can’t explain. Or wait a couple hundred years until we can invent it. But then the chances of our species being here in two hundred years continues to diminish daily for a variety of reasons…
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Painful to watch everything die off? How about a stronger word? Painful is such a mild description, Sheila!
Just finished ‘The Big Heat, Earth on the Brink’ by the counterpunch co-founder St. Clair and managing editor Joshua Franks. A series of snapshots of the world, places, things, politicians, Hanford, melting glaciers, the de-Forest Service, on and on to the point where it made my head hurt. Or maybe it was my heart… mostly things I knew of but tied together showing how it all links into one…what a depressing read of past and current reality that was very well written and a great read anyway. Cognitive dissonance rules the world…
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Okay, I’ve gone through your entire email and tried to reply. Hopefully Kevin will forgive me for answering you this way! I took up a bunch of space and it IS his site after all!!
And I apologize for the length, Kevin, but Sheila writes so many questions and thoughts… But Kevin, you already know I’m a noisy old surfer dude! And I hope you liked my book. You never said a damned thing about it except that it was in the que to be read… I’m sure you found it different…
sealintheSelkirks
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“We know there is a cognitive dissonance when climate change is impacting people so far away from you and everything you know. We tend to put it on a shelf, because it’s one thing to see ‘this is what they say,’ but it’s another thing to feel it. We’re at a point where everyone on the planet now has felt the impacts of climate change itself, or at least someone they love or know has. It’s circling in closer and closer.”
The cognitive dissonance is a mind fuck for me.
CNN and Michael Mann playing down the real rapidity.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/20/world/climate-change-extreme-weather-speed-cmd-intl/index.html?fbclid=IwAR33No-2f8ngvNZOrmsON6VR22TqWbSmAk8fCsKTtmR6vqNqqRVH5bCNagU
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“We know there is a cognitive dissonance when climate change is impacting people so far away from you and everything you know. We tend to put it on a shelf, because it’s one thing to see ‘this is what they say,’ but it’s another thing to feel it. We’re at a point where everyone on the planet now has felt the impacts of climate change itself, or at least someone they love or know has. It’s circling in closer and closer.”
The cognitive dissonance is a mind fuck for me.
CNN and Michael Mann playing down the real rapidity.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/20/world/climate-change-extreme-weather-speed-cmd-intl/index.html?fbclid=IwAR33No-2f8ngvNZOrmsON6VR22TqWbSmAk8fCsKTtmR6vqNqqRVH5bCNagU
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Erik and I are totally on the same page and neither of us ever wanted to be right.
https://problemspredicamentsandtechnology.blogspot.com/2021/08/more-cognitive-dissonance.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A%20blogspot%2FkVCufb%20(Problems%2C%20Predicaments%2C%20and%20Technology)&fbclid=IwAR34p9Z9Z-ZuKjVRUQJ_btrOwARrxYH4TA6e0DX3MWlZ91eEe-5FwPC-5Gg
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More genius from Erik
https://problemspredicamentsandtechnology.blogspot.com/2021/11/why-war-on-climate-change-is-bipolar.html?fbclid=IwAR30SZcaJ2W7x_a5Khsj25fLVWeLRu8FiuXLJOEk6vOLoZR3vGXW5SlG4s8
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“For me, having come to COP26 at a time when the science is clear, the cognitive dissonance is astounding,” said Eric Njuguna, a climate activist from Kenya.”
https://www.thethirdpole.net/en/climate/cop26-disappoints-youth-from-global-south/?fbclid=IwAR2SxKO8nbvjF2jCCcszPVV9gVrcC58sWxwU-l9nGW4J2ENwpUTKnQHTv2k
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And the destruction continues with no end (or even slowing down) in sight. Big sigh.
Canada’s Tar Sands: Destruction So Vast and Deep It Challenges the Existence of Land and People
Oil companies have replaced Indigenous people’s traditional lands with mines that cover an area bigger than New York City, stripping away boreal forest and wetlands and rerouting waterways.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/21112021/tar-sands-canada-oil/
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I have two riversurfer/snowboarder friends that live in Alberta that told me you don’t want to be downwind anywhere close to this disaster area as it will choke your lungs and burn your eyes.
sealintheSelkirks
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I feel so sorry for all those young people who’s future we have litterally TRASHED!
There is no way we can reach neutral carbon, even if we used NO fossil resources, we would still have to produce carbon just to heat our homes & cook our food by burning wood.
Those COP talks are simply hot air, I wonder how many came to that conference in a commercial aircraft?
“Renewables” are also just more hot air, but that’s all our RULERS have to offer us, BUY expensive EV’s that will BURN even MORE OIL, COAL & NATURAL GAS just to produce & support them, wind turbines are even worse in their need for fossil resources, they simply add to our delema BUT THERE SO DAM PROFITABLE so we will keep right on building them & feeding the poorly educated masses more lies about “green, clean energy”!
Immigration has been ramping up, thousands of migrants used BRUTE FORCE to shove their way past Mexican police to continue their march north to the US, in Poland, thousands of illegal migrants tried to force their way into Poland but were forced back by water cannons.
It will get worse!
Biden’s “build back better” proposal will allow 7 MILLION ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS to get AMNESTY! That will simply encourage MORE ILLEGAL MIGRATION!
Don’t we have enough POOR, NEEDY, HUNGRY, JOBLESS & HOMELESS PEOPLE YET?
An inspector from the UN said he has seen POVERTY here as bad as anything he has seen in the third world, sewage running down the road, hungry children, hordes of homeless, homeless drug addicts, falling down “homes” thousands of HOMELESS, JOBLESS & SICK DRUG ADDICTS on our TRASHY dirty streets.
(go to YouTube, look for Kensington Av in Philly to see just how bad the homeless & drug problems are here, also search for homeless, USA.)
WHY would this government want to allow in VICIOUS, CRIMINAL MIGRANTS into the US?
Those young people don’t understand why the richest country ever won’t provide funding to help them cope with climate disruption, a disruption caused by those same rich countries? We won’t help them because there is NO PROFIT in doing that, they don’t have anything we would want to wage WAR on to STEAL!
Aside from all that, it’s simply too dam late & I’m sure our RULERS know that, but PROFITS are more important to them than a living planet, I suppose they believe that with their great, STOLEN WEALTH ,they can buy safety until after the collapse when all those “useless eaters” have died off but there is NO escape on a dying planet, there will be no safe place for them to wait out the coming storm, they too will perish without their cheap, slave, labor.
All we can do now is just document just how greedy & STUPID homo sapians is as our lovely planet BURNS!
For some reason, this page locked up so I could not post, I copied my rant & tried to reload the page, that didn’t work so I had to close the browser. now the writting is smeared beyond the border,
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WordPress has problems! It went all wonky, I could not finish my post, when I tried to reload & when it wouldn’t reload, I closed the browser, when that didn’t work, I rebooted the computer.
It posted my rant without my help but since it was acting up, I made a copy of my blatherings on notepad.
I am now triple stabbed with Moderna, I wear a 3M N95 mask when ever I must go out to shop, go to the pharmacy or my doctor otherwise I just sit home & go bonkers.
Curry county is just about #1 in the state of Oregon for COVID & anti vaxers, their also infested with RELIGION & religious nut jobs are sure COVID is a hoax, that it’s just a goobermint scare tactic to control us & take away our non existant “freedoms”, they believe the vacceen has a microchip inside to spy on us or it’s DANGEROUS, it’s just “experamental”, they believe that the “stab” is killing more of us than COVID etc etc etc! They are NUTS!
Down here in “fundyland” I have hordes of house sparrows scarfing up the seed in the feeders & since I have no more Swallows here, I’ll have to block off the nest boxes so they can’t breed in them.
It makes me so dam ANGRY that we are doing this to the ONLY planet we know that has life, complex life like BIRDS!
Geeze! I just hit “backspace” to remove an extra letter, WordPress scrunched up the reply box to a narrow little bar, when I hit “backspace” again, it opened up! WTF is going on with wordpress?
I’m glad to hear you still have swallows Seal, mine are now all gone, not enough INSECTS to feed them or their young.
Now it’s locked up again, had to fight to reload the page, I’ll have to quit before it gets deleted by wordpress!
I’ll try to remember to compose the whole rant on notepad & then fight WordPress to post it!
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Well hello Sheila,
Have been wondering what you have been up to.
Having problems with WordPress, eh? Never signed up with it which is why my picture isn’t on here but of course not FaceBlech or twitter and all those others either, Not having a cell phone keeps me sane I think and I know I wouldn’t handle corporate-owned ‘social media’ very well anyway.
Electronic addictions are far more subtle that substance ones are…and even harder to break because they are so ubiquitous!
About your worry of the younger generation; some are smarter than you think. Here’s why:
More Young People Don’t Want Children Because of Climate Change. Has the UN Failed to Protect Them?
Activists have filed a complaint with the UN’s Human Rights Council, saying member nations have supported unsustainable population growth that is dangerously warming the planet.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16112021/young-people-children-united-nations-climate-change/
And suicide rates of the young have continued to climb, too. Not unexpected.
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Now it’s almost December and what birds were left after the incredible heat of this years Spring/Summer/Fall where there was no ground food sources or flying insects in these dead-dry mountains full of fires and smoke, most of the birds that hang here were gone by August. Or earlier. It was eerie.
My suet feeders in the old apple tree are nearly untouched still, haven’t replaced any of the squares since…maybe September. They haven’t been eaten through yet. My feeders have always needed replenished within a couple of weeks but not this Fall. Bad sign.
Yeah, the smaller birds are mostly just gone. Mountain finch, mountain bluebirds, juncoes, sparrows of various types. Swallows and robins disappeared quick. I don’t know if the birds went downhill closer to the Colville River in the valley below or what they did but there was a notable lack of insects that continued through Fall, too, so there was no reason for them to return. The flying eaters had nothing here, just empty air where last year I could sit on the porch and see clouds of bugs swirling around in the sun’s ray between the old apple tree and the bigger ponderosa. And as I posted earlier, the ground bug eaters like robins abandoned their eggs in the nests because the eggs cooked to death in the heat by July. Swallows too as they nest in similar places. And there weren’t any worms or anything coming up out of the ground. No morning dew, no rain for months, the dirt was rock-hard. Like a damned brick, you could bounce a golf ball off it. Pretty tough for a worm to get through that! I haven’t removed the nest under the front porch roof that has 3 blue eggs in it yet…Guess I should do that.
I did however keep feeding the hummingbirds. Had quite a crowd of those little jeweled buzzers because there wasn’t a flower anywhere. My neighbors to the north also reported a huge influx of them around their feeders and, like me, they had to put out extra to cut down the air combat going on. I had four 4-seat feeders out and there were at least 30 birds. A friend gave me a 6-seater which helped, but I kept having to spread them farther apart because of the fighting going on. How they could handle the heat I have no idea. Then the babies started showing up and the air wars got worse…
Not as many ravens, crows, eagles, or hawks overhead the last couple of months, either. Hardly any owls at night though there are some. Bats are distinctly fewer also. Yes it was pretty damned bad here this year. Since it has cooled down, snowed a little, rained a little more, I’ve seen a few of the smaller birds and they have been in the apple tree going for the suet in recent weeks but only maybe a couple species and not nearly the numbers I’d expect. Last November I had at least 10+ different species fluttering from branch to branch and squawking at one another. Even the mid-sized black&white woodpeckers haven’t show back up and they’ve always been here as they seem to like suet, too. We had a die-off, Sheila. Fuck, this has been awful. I’ve found dead birds on walks with the dog into the treeline but I’m sure the ground scavengers ate more than I saw.
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As for renewables, yep. If you don’t add in the mining, transporting to refineries, all the electric power generation needed, fabricating then shipping etc etc all those do look pretty good. And we know it isn’t really making a difference.
for instance, sends a huge number of its most polluting factories to China that makes the US GHG numbers look better and China the bad CO2 guys, it’s all a mirage. But a renewable lifestyle for 8,000,000,000 isn’t possible.
We’ve talked about renewables on this site, the insane population load, and we all pretty much know the real story. Not feel-good information, is it?
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As for immigration and corporate-owned Biden, well shit Sheila our country has attacked, raped for resources, and overthrown governments for corporate profits over and over again in every damned one of those countries to the south whose refugees are showing up at the border. And they are being blasted with the effects of climate destabilization caused by the North. Sheila, they CAN’T GROW THEIR OWN FOOD anymore. The small family dirt farmers can’t feed their kids so what do you expect them to do? Stay there and watch them starve to death when there is the shining mega-mall to the north that they have been inundated with propaganda their entire lives about how wonderful it is just waiting for them?
Of course they are going to head north! You would, too, if in their place. What they all don’t realize is that not only did the US turn their home countries into waste dumps and resource mines, it turned this continent into one big-ass toxic waste dump from sea to shining sea, too. And that shine is a USA oil sheen that is sickening and killing it’s own people in the scramble for corporate profits.
Most of the people on the border are poor small farmers, Sheila. Not the evil boogiemen you been reading of. Of course there are those that are vicious criminal types especially trained ex-cops and military but honestly, don’t you think those types would fit right in? The wealthy always needs more enforcers, CIA needs more recruits, military uses them, it’s all good, right? Trump probably needs replacement groundskeepers on his golf courses and maids in his hotels while Obama and Biden surely need a few new landscapers and cooks and custodians at their palatial estates. Seen Obama’s island mansion yet? Whoo-hoo!
And slaughterhouses need a never-ending supply of migrant workers to cut up those Tri-Tip steaks most of us can’t afford. migrant farmworkers are always good for exploitaion and who wants to go pick strawberries much less pay $50 a basket for them without migrants? On and on it goes…
But when your home becomes inhospitable? This is what our species has ALWAYS done lady, migrate to somewhere that one might survive with their family. And the Equator folks are getting smashed, destroyed, burnt up, drowned out, as climate collapse has hit worse in their lands first is all. Their corn won’t grow, their beans shrivel up, veggies burn in the heat and never-ending drought caused mostly by the industrialized North (USA USA!).
You’ll notice that Canada has pretty much stopped migrants from the US? Hell, Canada flat closed the border 40 miles north due to Covid and the freaking amazing lack of cognitive function in this country that showed up with the Pandemic, and I can’t say I blame them a bit. And people in the southern US is moving the hell up here. Houses popping up everywhere as US climate refugees head the hell away from the storm/drought/flood/fire death zones of the southern US states. Funny how California is still gaining in population, eh?
Really big sigh here, lady. I have no answers for all this. All I do know is that everything bad is going to get worse for the rest of my life at an accelerated rate. Like the article I posted above, I’m real glad I decided to not have kids. Now the young are making that choice in far larger numbers than when I did.
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As for Covid, I just put another name on my dead-of-covid list. Number 20 was a well-known local native artist I knew. Just died of Delta last week. I’ve played music with his young son at jams for years and dad who was a few years older than me always came to the gigs and we’ve talked on a number of subjects over the years in the noisy dancing crowds. He talked with his paintings, sculptures, and other art as I talk with my music and writing and martial arts so we had subjects that crossed easily.
The guy that lived upstairs of the 2nd hand in the back apartment was hauled out a month ago. Also Delta variant. Nice dude, mellow older guy that I’ve talked with a few times since he moved in last year. Sneaked his cat in. Last week there was a younger couple (late 30s?) with a truck emptying the last of his stuff out.
The landlord of course being a ‘conservative Trump voter’ is not going to sterilize the closed up still air apartment. Even the local that picks up rent checks for him (he lives on the east side of WA) was troubled by that which surprised me. I didn’t think he thought deeply into anything but corporate sports. Mostly he doesn’t but I think with the radical infection rate since 1 out of 9 people in this county has gone down with Delta since August 1st, and the death rate has skyrocketed along with ‘Long Covid’ symptoms showing up…yeah, he’s a bit more intelligent than I gave him credit for.
After telling me he’s a Republican (Duh! I already figured that out a couple years ago, dude) and my replying that both parties are all owned by corporations which he sort of liked which was weird> Then for some reason he told me that he’s ready for the civil war that is already happening and that he’s got 7 guns and plenty of ammo and food for his family to ride out the attacks by antifa and the ‘woke’ mob of Democrats when they send out the national guard and cops to start confiscating supplies and he’s about to build a big fence around their property and woe to anyone coming over as they are in trouble, and he really doesn’t like the quotas for hiring woman at the utility company he supervises a work crew for. And he caught covid, too, was hospitalized for a week three days after he got his second shot (so he was already infected). Went down sick for a month but I don’t know if his wife or young kids caught it, and he’s a needle diabetic… The rant went on and on. It was rather unhinged and jumped from subject to subject rapidly so maybe his head wasn’t working all that well yet, that Long Covid thing is real also. But because it was all spoken in a monotone sort of way it was disturbing without a doubt. Not the first time I’ve run into this up here.
You aren’t alone living in ‘Fundyland.’ You’re just Fundayland Oregon is all!
Last I read my county was at 37.2% vaccinated, and walk into nearly any store in Chewelah and you will see fully 1/3 of the customers frowning at or stiffly ignoring all the rest in masks. Chewelah by the way has a 41% vaxx number. Whoo-hoo! The state as a whole was over 75% and has a mask mandate that is absolutely useless over here. 60 teens went down three weeks after the high school opened with more in quarantine. Mother’s Against Masks protested at the School Board building the 2nd week of August but it’s a STATE HEALTH MANDATE and masks are to be worn in the schools by everybody. The vaccine mandate was required by mid-October with more protest signs screaming ‘freedumb’ and ‘liberty except for the libs’ and some people lost jobs or quit. Supposed to be thousands but most weren’t willing to risk paychecks…
And these people are dying. Which is okay I guess as it actually is part of ‘their choice’ ya know? More in the last four months than in the previous 18 months combined so there are now fewer Trump voters than last year. Slow attrition rate but they’ll keep dying off as nothing is going to change their ‘beliefs.’ Beliefs are so much easier to deal with than THINKING, yes?
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Yes the Rulers of this country certainly know what’s coming. It’s why they are doing everything they can to save themselves. Amassing ever-more wealth and power is what they do, and obviously they are doing quite well at it.
I had two 80 year olds and a late 70 year old tell me Thursday that they were glad to be in the dying age because they wouldn’t want to be young with what’s already ongoing. I replied that it really wasn’t going to matter much because there isn’t going to be any surviving of any age. All three are very aware of the climate but haven’t quite wrapped their heads around the term existential and extinction very well. Hard concepts no doubt. They have kids and grandkids that keeps them from going that far I think. How does one look at at grandkids and accept they are never going to be as old as you without breaking down?
I’m on the list for the J&J booster but it isn’t in this county yet. Being in the far north boonies does that in many ways. I don’t think it has even got to Spokane yet. I do know a couple that had the Pfizer booster. Sometime soon I imagine though that new monster variant out of South Africa seems to be eating vaccines for breakfast. If we don’t vaccinate the world all at once this will be never ending.
OF COURSE none of this is PUBLIC HEALTH any longer. It’s corporate profits and this will be the Pandemic that keeps on giving because boosters every few months as the variants keep coming out in the unvaxxed populations. And they are HUGE populations to mutate in so expect the worse. None of that Hopium stuff as long as corporations have control.
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Okay, time to get off this machine and go bring in a wheelbarrow of firewood. Drizzly rain today, heavily overcast but very little wind, The ground is not frozen so it’s mostly mud at this point. It shouldn’t be like this at the end of November. Maybe three months of this before the snap to heat and fires, a little snow here and there but not really a 49’North latitude winter. Probably end up like March last year, driest ever and the first fires started.
sealintheSelkirks
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William Rees is good but he doesn’t get collapse or extinction.
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“I’m not trying to be alarmist but just presenting the information as we understand it better,” Miller told me. “I would say that there is a great urgency in terms of people understanding what’s going on with the climate system, especially carbon feedback and the Arctic. And understanding that there are now some natural events that will take place over which we will have very little control but that we will have to take into account in our planning for the future.”
Another case of scientific reticence and fear of the obvious outcome of where we’re at.
The cognitive dissonance is a mind fuck for me.
Because the prognosis is so dire and scientists have so miserably under estimated climate sensitivity they are all wracked with grief at their failure, only a few can own it.
https://www.typeinvestigations.org/blog/2021/12/14/abrupt-permafrost-thaw-has-scientists-worried/?fbclid=IwAR3LGTAr3pu7Mn5A7lxUF262hbPZ_LIUjIxYQYxnPIRiR8kLZ43bf29S3lE
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So there is all this methane from the thermokarst lakes blowing out as the permafrost breaks down. Added to other sources from the quick thawing that are also not included in modeling predictions (WHY THE HELL NOT?) but together it all…doubles the expected amounts?
And I hate the term ‘alarmist’ that he says he is not trying to be. Fuck that! The time for 5 alarm fire bells screaming DANGER DANGER is long past I’m afraid. Now we’re just heading for a great dying. Can you imagine a doctor coming in with your test results and telling you he isn’t trying to be alarmist just telling you that you have Stage 4 pancreatic cancer and will be dead very soon? No, not our scientists. They say “You have time to fix this!'” so sayeth the Mann…
What an epitaph. Another planetary example of an intelligent species that killed its own planet through hubris, greed, and apathy.
We can’t be the only species that has committed suicide in this galaxy. It’s a bottleneck that probably all species reach after attaining a certain level of technology; about the time they are starting to get off their birth planet, using up all the resources, polluting the shit out of everything, and overpopulating. Our species has destroyed 22 major civilizations following the same path (without space flight).
One either makes that leap out or stumbles, starts sliding backwards, and then dies out. At this point our chances of getting off this planet in any survivable sustainable numbers are slim to none because too much of the resources needed are already permanently used up. We could use a few asteroids in orbit to mine… So the species never gets another chance to survive. One shot, baby, that’s all we get and it sure looks like we blew it.
Big sigh. And we really did have much potential just based on our dreams and science fiction imaginations! But then there’s that dark demon called religion brooding over it all…
sealintheSelkirks
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Watching the bargaining and cognitive dissonance is fascinating. 99.9 % of the population has no idea that we are in collapse;
View at Medium.com
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But Sheila, it’s every mammal’s god-given right to procreate until they crash and burn which is obviously how god set it up! So destroying our planetary ecosystem must be a good objective for our species.
Of course it’s all god’s plan, right?
She sure is a mean pissy bitch without a humorous bone in her body type of dog to think this ending up. Not very good at designing her creatures, either. I mean, a platypus? Wisdom teeth? Greed and hubris as basic behavior?
Of course we aren’t going to ‘fix’ what we’ve done. Zero carbon emissions? You and I burn wood for heat. If all the rest of the GHG producers were banned winter heating with wood would still increase the totals. We are part of the problem. But then it was -12F last week. I really don’t do well in those temperatures without heating even though my house tends to stay around 63’F even with a very good Lopi woodstove. The shop is heated with my old rectangular box Earthstove-copy but it I did the insulation and put in the interior walls when I moved here in 2004.
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Now it’s Jan 9 and we’ve had 2 feet of snow fall in the last week. I blew out the road to the gate and the next morning (Wednesday) there was another 8 inches! Which wasn’t bad as I drive 4×4 but then it started raining on the snowpack by afternoon as the temps went up. That was weird.
That was super-saturating the layer on the roofs of the house and shop which really isn’t structurally a good thing to have happen. Every bit of snow hanging on the conifers hit the ground by the next morning. Nothing but green.
Thursday the temperature spiked to 44’F and turned all this snow into a huge soggy slippery mess of thick sticky oatmeal and my lovely packed down and cleared road to the gate turned into a tire-sucking bog. Then the sky cleared off and went into the teens the last couple of days. Never got out of the 20s yesterday and I had to ship a book and it was Low 4×4 just to get to the gate. The county gravel road to town was so slick that even in 4 High I could feel the tires slipping and losing traction, and the road is straight and level and I’ve got mud/snow tires on! Oh my, this hasn’t been fun at all.
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Heating…yeah, it isn’t just the East Coast. There’s suddenly a nationwide lack of propane for heating and a lot of people around here rely on that and/or electric. Prices have spiked to nearly $5 a gallon according to another Sheila who lives south of me by the Spokane River.
As for wood, I really wish I had been able to get more in this Fall because I’m already thinking I’ll probably burn through what I’ve got before winter ends. Unless it ends like it did last year in March when the fires started. But there has been more snow on this property this last week than the total of last couple of winters which of course is still extremely less than what used to be normal. And the bummer is that I just can’t work as hard as I used to as takes days to recover from cutting wood now. Getting old is what we do…but the needed chores don’t seem to slow down, ya know? The intense heat didn’t let allow me to bring in wood early in Spring, and certainly curtailed my getting back out there in September since it was still unsafe heat conditions to cut & haul in. The heat started too early and lasted way too long…but then we know this will continue to get worse don’t we?
As you realize, there’s only one outcome facing us. Pretty sad shit and like Kevin said, the grief we have should be carried for the entire living ecosystem we’ve trashed. More wolf killings up here because they just WON’T stay where we tell them to stay. And sheep ranchers are shooting Bald Eagles because they eat the lambs that die (high mortality rates).
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Last thought: China isn’t communist by the way. It has turned totalitarian Capitalist with a wealthy oligarchy just like Russia who also isn’t communist anymore. Just like the US.
sealintheSelkirks
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The real problem we face is the one most IGNORED,human overpopulation!
It won’t matter how “green” we try to be, we are still ADDING 80+ MILLION MORE HUMANS to the planet each year!
There is NO WAY we can reach 0 carbon emissions, just BREATHING adds carbon to the atmosphere, want to be warm in the winter up north or far south?
Pile on the WOOD & burn it, more CARBON added to the air.
Every living thing produces carbon just by breathing, just by being alive.
I’m sick & tired of all the LYING HOPIUM, we are BURNING MORE OIL, COAL & NATURAL GAS in our struggle to produce more solar panels, batteries & wind turbines & shipping that here from COMMUNIST CHINA!
“Renewables” NEED the support of FOSSIL FUELS to cover for when the wind don’t blow or the sun don’t shine, Germany, the leader in the struggle to transition to “renewables” are having endless problems, more blackouts & burning even more COAL! WASF!!!
The UK is worried that they won’t get enough natural gas this winter if it’s cold, they will run out of gas by February.
Seems like things aren’t so rosy here either, New England is worries about having enough energy to get through this winter, more here-
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/New-England-Is-One-Cold-Snap-Away-From-An-Energy-Crisis.html
I’m glad I’m in Oregon, in a small town where we have plenty of WOOD. I have a efficient wood stove & at least a cord of wood in the garrage. I won’t be cold this winter & the coast doesn’t get all that cold anyhow.
I hope you folks had a nice holiday season & that 2022 won’t be too much worse.
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“But this isn’t the only way such markets put vulnerable communities at risk. This highlights the cognitive dissonance of the climate crisis.”
https://www.planetcritical.com/p/sustainable-finance-only-cares-about?utm_source=email
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The US is facing 48C temps now and in the next few days dead on top of the Midwest grain belt. Our food-growing farmland. As it’s doing in Europe, in Africa…on and on the list of scary realities pile on top of one another.
It’s doing what I lived under in last summer’s Heat Dome except this year they are stretching out across the Northern Hemisphere. So far here the thermometer has only crossed 100F/38C a couple times so far and it is dropping into the mid-50s/13-14C at night which makes sleeping enjoyable. Breezy in the day but near dead still at night though I’m getting drainage wind from up the creek canyon behind me after dark.
But then there is this from Hunziker:
Greenland Threatens
https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/07/19/greenland-threatens/
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Yep, it’s all winding up like a kid’s spinning top about to go into the extreme wobbles and then falling over on its side. Big sigh.
sealintheSelkirks
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How on earth can Umair write about our unfolding extinction and then in the next breath talk about rebuilding for the next millennium!
The cognitive dissonance is a mind fuck.
https://eand.co/in-an-age-of-extinction-our-economies-evolve-or-die-a7c1d8182c8a
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#5 ATTEMPT TO POST A COMMENT!
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#7 attempt to post my comment, I GIVE UP!
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#8 attempt failed again after another dam LOG IN!!!
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I’m going to have to give up on WordPress, I HATE CENSORSHIP!
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[…] atmosphere. Think about that lunacy for a second. The Cognitive dissonance is a mind fuck for me. Cognitive Dissonance and Outright Lies at the Edge of ExtinctionThe reality is, there was no safe level of destabilisation of our atmosphere. It’s pitifully […]
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This is brilliant, take a dive in :
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1570605328693338114.html
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” Things will change from “maybe with a concerted effort humanity can solve the climate crisis” into “there is nothing we can do to put the genie back into the bottle, and humanity is doomed.”
The author keeps speaking in future tense when if he could switch off his Cognitive Dissonance and convert to present tense his writing would have more credibility.
Games up kids, preparing for anything else is denial.
https://wraltechwire.com/2022/09/16/climate-change-doomsday-irreversible-tipping-points-may-mean-end-of-human-civilization/?fbclid=IwAR24uYuWDeiBJPpxF78GQUuzWHRoBMMPA5m-f4Qo43u-7B785nHyPNyELhs
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I’m at the 20.00 mark and I haven’t heard one degree of urgency.
How can we explain to people we’re in a planetary emergency when none of you sound ‘urgent’. Scientific reticence sealed our fate.
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There is no urgency, Kevin. It’s all intellectual ‘exercise’ because they can’t, or won’t, apply what it all means to their own lives, families, or world outlook. That’s the failure of our species, we don’t apply what we’ve learned to ourselves.
I’m not going to watch this one since it’s already disturbed you this much! I trust your judgement here…
sealintheSelkirks
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‘We’ are NOT going to ‘SOLVE’ global warming. Period. It’s waaaaaaay too late for that and we know it. Some of us, anyway; we knew it when this TED Talk was released and no I’ve never seen it before.
Hell, the fucking oil company execs KNEW IT in the 1960s when the silenced their own damn scientists from going public with their research… And they’re probably all dead now like they figured they’d be before the climate blew up in their face and they got to be wealthy rich pricks living a wealthy man’s life that I couldn’t imagine (nor want for that matter).
I wonder what this guy would think about his own talk now in January 2023 facing, you know, what he just called “DOOMISM” at the end of this?
El Niño Is Coming—and the World Isn’t Prepared
Global heating will set the stage for extreme weather everywhere in 2023. The consequences are likely to be cataclysmic.
https://www.wired.com/story/climate-environment-hurricane/
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And so he flew back across the Atlantic Ocean the next day after picking up his paycheck for this talk.
AHahahahahahahahahaha but it isn’t funny because he had a huge heaping shovel full of ‘Hopium stirred into a great big bowl of his own cognitive dissonance that he tried to spread all over his audience. EEewwwww, what a stinker!
I think I’ve managed to drop most of that shit but that just may be an illusion, too, eh?
sealintheSelkirks
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Great article about monetising the end times!
View at Medium.com
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“Federal Reserve Governor Chris Waller said Thursday that he doesn’t believe climate change poses a serious risk to the US financial system even as the central bank tests the resilience of banks under different climate scenarios.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/feds-waller-climate-change-not-a-serious-risk-to-us-financial-system-174415815.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly9sLmZhY2Vib29rLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAGO-ege5CDjKXlWR8Pz_4TuABVhDbWRu6UWchOWoMRnJay9hcsqQ_5fViDYnrOtUQii52vxpwv9QY1TC4ElBSci96WtuUQLCGD5YqQvF7b-1-wgJ59nH-v_bHR0EfvBaMcwe5OMtxQJBnW2QElDpb5SsX6eHJmzycfDPeovzW224
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