One Down, Many More To Go

Fuck the Koch brothers, right in their evil hearts. The family fortune was literally started with their dad digging oil wells for Stalin, then building an oil refinery for Hitler. It's gone steadily downhill since then.

David and Charles Koch epitomize the Scrooge McDuck scumbag who hoards pelf for its own sake, occasionally doling out a crumb here or there to the "right" type of philanthropic endeavor, but never anywhere near the ballpark of what it would be if they just paid their goddamned taxes.

It would be nice to think that that sort of person is actually somewhat miserable, that having to spend all one's time plotting and scheming in order to hoard and accumulate endlessly would eventually create a mental feedback loop where that's pretty much all you can do anymore, just in terms of having an existence, rather than a life that you take joy in. Maybe not. Maybe people like that are just hardwired to endlessly compete with one another, to play dress-up and go to the big parties and schmooze and pretend they don't all hate each other.

Check out the intricate mechanisms of the political system right here and now -- there are enormous, deliberately set fires engulfing hundreds of thousands of acres in the Amazon rain forest at the current moment. It is an ecosystem within itself, and a cornerstone of the world's ecosystem. Destroying enough of the rain forest would drastically accelerate an already looming climate change situation.

This has been going on for years, of course, mostly to clear land for cattle ranchers, but since the election of the current Trump clone there, the process has been intensified. Since Preznit Genius Q. Dealmaker has decreed that trade wars are good and easy to win, China in response has cut off all American agricultural products for import, especially soybeans, which as you might imagine, China consumes a great volume of.

Guess which country China just signed a huge soybean deal with?

All of these features are natural results of the system the Koch brothers have quite literally purchased with their ill-gotten pelf -- not just lower tax rates, but the steady elimination of even basic environmental protections, and installing climate-change-denying clowns in important government offices. This is what they wanted, and we've let them do it, at the very least by having enough chumps fall for their self-serving propaganda.

It's a small consolation that, for all his filthy money, David Koch is every bit as dead as the homeless heroin addict in the next drawer at the morgue, and from the look of things a hell of a lot more reviled. It's a reminder, though, that the homeless guy deserves better, but hopefully it's also a reminder to the surviving Koch brother that no matter how many crumbs he disperses to the art museum or the philharmonic or whatever rich-asshole hobby, what he'll be remembered for is ruining the planet.

Oh, the rented dogsbodies at Reason and AEI and all that will slap together some insincere encomia, but Charles will know. He'll know that the family name has passed on to utterly useless progeny -- fat, soft, spoiled jerkoffs who will be used as catamites and barbecue in the eventual climate change holocaust. He'll be every bit as dead as the poorest dirt farmer he poisoned or exploded, and most people will spit as they say his name.

There's your legacy, Chuck. That's your mark on the world, after all that. Nobody in your life ever really loved you, without due compensation. Know that above all else. Enjoy what's left of your time, with your empire of dirt.

Got Woke

Jim Wright has far and away (afaik) the best and most complete take on (cue cheesy Ludlum title generator) The Kaepernick Kerfuffle. Kaepernick's rabid Facebook detractors proclaim that the song and flag worship that introduces professional sporting events is all about Respect. Well, clearly Kaepernick -- and now professional soccer player Megan Rapinoe -- feel that respect is a two-way street, that is something that must be earned, and not given mindlessly. And sometimes individuals might feel that they're not given the same respect that is demanded of them by their country.

The idea that the flag or the anthem stand for freedom and liberty is a nice one, but one that falls on its face when it's only for approved freedoms and liberties. The right to dissent or protest is even more important than the right to simply go along with the rest of the stadium. Anyone can do that; it take guts to decide not to do the (ahem) politically correct thing.

Now, to play devil's advocate, one should also note that if Kaepernick is trying to start a "conversation" or a "dialogue," there were and are any number of better ways to go about that. He is, after all, an NFL quarterback who came within thirty seconds and a dropped pass from winning a Super Bowl just a few years ago. Any number of reputable Bay Area journalists would have been happy to sit down and interview him, if he wanted to start a discussion on race. Performing provocative stunts like wearing socks with pigs wearing police caps, or pointedly sitting down through the national anthem, tend to (you'll be surprised to find) provoke something other than reasoned discourse.

#notallassholes; Or, Shart Week

Taking into account two fresh new stories that might make one consider the merits of capital punishment:

First is the heartwarming tale of one Douglas McAuthur (sic; Jesus H. Christ, do people not own a fucking history book or a liberry card?) McCain. Now, while Doug is not (as far as we know) related to our good friend Poor Ol' Straight Talk, he did make the fateful decision to leave his decadent, meaningless existence in San Diego, and join up with the world's most notorious terrorist group, to bravely slaughter villages of unarmed unbelievers and behead infidel journalists. You can sort of get why a kid in some horrid Middle Eastern despotism might say "the hell with it" and take up arms against whoever and whatever. What possesses a homegrown dipshit to head to one of these god-forsaken places to murder and pillage, who knows? Sounds like he got what he was looking for.

Second is this charming little story from England, where piece-of-shit "gangs" preyed upon children while the authorities turned a blind eye and scorned the victims, some of them as young as 11. Because nothing says "tough guy" like preying on sixth-graders, amirite? Forget all that claptrap of "the state has no right to take life," every one of these gang assholes needs to be lined up against a wall, and the "authorities" that let it go on need to do some serious time. I would seriously suggest that someone who participates or facilitates the gang-rape of children is not a fucking human being, and therefore you're just ridding the world of a rabid animal.

These are the sorts of things that serve as a reminder that the planet won't miss us when we finally push its climate past the point of no return.

Protest and Survive

Great interview in one of the local free sheets, with a gentleman who did a couple years for the high crime of crashing a land auction. What's particularly galling about this case is that not only did the judge rig the jury selection process by stocking it with people who pledged their allegiance to his decree rather than their consciences, but that it wasn't even allowed to be discussed at the trial that the auction in question had been ruled illegal.

There are other worthy tidbits throughout, not the least of which involves a cop who, in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, realized his basement was being shoveled out by on of the Occupy kids he had been told to truncheon in Zuccotti Park.

I differ from Mr. DeChristopher in his hope or belief that the cop might have been transformed even a little bit by such an encounter. Oh, it might have made him think a bit, but probably not enough to question seriously why he mindlessly did what he had "been told" to that kid and others like him, not enough to change the trajectory of his ways or beliefs.

DeChristopher's dismay (I was hoping for more palpable contempt, but the guy is simply too nice) for the chickenshit bien pensant liberal baby boomers is also choice -- and also not enough to get them to change their ways. They are clearly content to believe that shopping organic and voting Democratic is sufficient, that climate change is a problem for the next generations to figure out. They hung on, made their money, and they're going to by-god take as much of it -- as well as the health care and Social Security funding of the next generations -- with them as possible.

The problem is, since they have most of the money, they have most of the political power, and so pay for a system that keeps inert just long enough for them to finish their days in comfort, and then everyone who's left can start sacrificing.

I don't think Americans of any generation will start to take climate change seriously until there's a truly catastrophic -- and I mean like mid-five figures of casualties -- event, something like twenty Katrinas or Sandys all at once, on an "important" US city like Los Angeles or New York. Somebody famous will have to perish.

And even then, because the system more than anything counts on inertia, counts on people's willingness to be distracted from their fate for just one more day, there's always the chance that it'll go away. Think of the huge events of this new century already, man-made or natural -- 9/11, Fukushima, Katrina, the extended wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. After all the news coverage and the hand-wringing in the aftermath, what actually changed in the wake of any of these things?

Did 9/11 change our approach to dealing with the Muslim world? No, we still prop up corrupt petrocrats, sell them weapons, let them oppress their people into a senseless rage, and then wonder what the fuck is wrong with "those people". Did we take any measures that showed that we take seriously the clear ramifications of global warming and carbon concentration in the atmosphere after Katrina or Sandy or the 2004 tsunami? You tell me.

Consider -- in the space of a few minutes, nearly a quarter-million lives in fourteen countries were ended, and hundreds of thousands more transformed, by the tsunami. Yes, it was caused by an earthquake, and no, there wasn't anything man-made about an undersea subduction. But it should have been a potent reminder of the power of nature, and the powerlessness of humans to stop it.

It's not just Americans, though we certainly set the stage for all this. The Chinese and Indians, after all, are just following our model, empowered by the blessings of globalization and the credo of The Chicago Group. It's difficult to blame them for wanting to catch up with us in standard of living.

Yet that bears consequences, when 1 in every 3 humans lives in China or India, and 1 in every 2 -- think about that, especially if you're in America, which has comparatively sparse population density overall, every second human being -- lives in Asia. And most people live in cities, and most cities are near oceans, and the levels are rising, and will take as long or longer to reverse than they did to set in motion.

We don't all have to go full eco-activist and go to prison, in a system that's rigged to begin with. But if enough people, just in the US, looked at the three primary factors -- what/how we drive; what/how we eat; what/how we consume in general -- all of which are within lost people's control, a real dent can be made in this very real and growing problem.

The Big Bunk Theory

Some say a comet will fall from the sky, followed by meteor showers and tidal waves.
Followed by faultlines that cannot sit still. Followed by millions of dumbfounded dipshits.
-- Tool,Ænema

Articles about poll outcomes, especially ones that have sociocultural elements to them, are always problematic and incomplete. What was the sample size, and the geographic range thereof? What was the phrasing of the question(s)? Margin of error, confidence level?

All that said, no doubt we each know enough bona-fide bozos, proud of their nincompoopery, to at least intuit that even if the numbers might be a bit hinky, there is still a substantial -- and any size is unacceptable, but this is a number probably large enough to sway elections -- swath of folks who fall into this range of shameless intellectual boobism.

Certainly there is a measurable correlation between political "conservatism," or what passes for it these days, and the stubborn refusal to believe the findings of scientific method and empirical observation, or to even understand what those things are, and what they mean. And there is additional correlation between those things, and having a regressive, anachronistic outlook on the world, informed by whatever hodgepodge of religious dogma insinuates itself through their transoms and into their brain stems.

But religion and politics only partially explain this phenomenon; one does not have to look too far back or around to find examples of believers and/or conservatives who still understood the scientific role in explaining the mechanics behind physical and natural conditions. Perhaps the most pernicious part of all this is how the average 'murkin has actively distanced themselves from what used to be conventionally understood and accepted principles of arguing a point, and mustering facts and analysis to support that point.

It scarcely bears mentioning that there is no real forum for "debate" any more -- you either have the staid, canned bullshit of the Sunday morning political follies, hacks trotting out stale arguments that have the veneer of thought, but always end up in support of the insect overlords; or you have the pro-wrasslin' cable bonobos flinging shit at everything within reach of the monkey house. Whoever's loudest, or the biggest asshole, wins.

Most of the time, we prefer scoreboards to tell us who the winner is in a contest. Probably only on matters of scientific consensus are people so willing, so eager, to toss the literally 99% of career scientists who have weighed in with peer-reviewed data and observations on things such as evolution, climate change, the age of the earth, how the universe was formed and expanded. Suddenly a statistically overwhelming proportion, an almost unanimous response of individuals who have spent the majority of their lives studying this stuff, is cynically cast as corrupt, suspect, and therefore meaningless.

That's the downside of the internets, empowering drooling morons with the ability to sharpen their electronic crayons and inflict their ignorance on everyone. It's much easier to spout nonsense and conjecture, raise idle speculation, than to actually read up on the subject one is attempting to dispute. Obviously, it affects our ability to compete in areas such as science and engineering, as well as leaving these sorts of folks vulnerable to the cheapest demagoguery. It explains a great deal, though; if you're still wondering how people can be so easily bamboozled into voting against their own rational self-interest, not just once but every goddamned time, there ya go. They're gullible because they want to be gulled.

As in politics, it is of little use to attempt to convince them, best to ignore them if at all possible. It's a strange irony that the most ignorant tend to be in the most vulnerable areas, and when the deluge comes, whether literal or figurative, suddenly they may decide to learn to swim. See you down in Arizona Bay.

Virus

I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague and we are the cure. -- Agent Smith

Well, good thing that's settled then. Christ on a cracker, where do these fucking people come from? Normally actual scientists, who spend their lives studying logical thought and tested hypotheses, don't resort to this magical, providential thinking, which in this case boils down to "something will come along, because something always does."

The world population is now estimated at 7.2 billion. But with current industrial technologies, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has estimated that the more than nine billion people expected by 2050 as the population nears its peak could be supported as long as necessary investments in infrastructure and conducive trade, anti-poverty and food security policies are in place.

Oh, the food wing of a borderline-useless relief organization has estimated. Shit, no need to worry anymore, I guess. Nothing to see here, folks, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has estimated. The same people who spent five years thumbing their dicks while Syria's record drought morphed into a civil war. One does wonder where some people find pants large enough to contain their enormous balls. Because of course all of those "necessary investments in infrastructure and conducive trade, anti-poverty and food security policies" will be "in place" tout de fucking suite, n'est-ce pas? Sure, and if my aunt had balls, why, she'd be my uncle. Cool story, bro.

Neither physics nor chemistry nor even biology is adequate to understand how it has been possible for one species to reshape both its own future and the destiny of an entire planet. This is the science of the Anthropocene. The idea that humans must live within the natural environmental limits of our planet denies the realities of our entire history, and most likely the future. Humans are niche creators. We transform ecosystems to sustain ourselves. This is what we do and have always done. Our planet’s human-carrying capacity emerges from the capabilities of our social systems and our technologies more than from any environmental limits.

It's almost as if it was cribbed from some tech wing of the US Chamber of Commerce. We can have infinite energy, so long as we don't mind removing mountaintops, turning water tables into flammable vats of poisonous slurry, and the occasional bursting pipeline inundating some backwater with a few thousand barrels of crude. Hey, that's why we have media blackouts and airspace closures. What you don't know hurts someone else, amirite people?

We "transform ecosystems" by damaging their long-term sustainability in a variety of ways, from pollution and desertification to more vicious and mendacious means, such as habitat destruction and poaching. Yes, the magic beans Monsanto is forcing us to buy may indeed make it possible for 20 billion people to stack on top of each other and feed heartily, in a world with smartphones but without tigers, or coastlines, or potable water. Awesome. Where do you sign up?

There is so much more to the impending overpopulation catastrophe than merely being able to produce enough food for everyone to eat. The most overcrowded places are also the most poverty-stricken; surely this is not a coincidence.

Which makes one wonder, what was even the impetus for this op-ed in the first place? What the hell is wrong with acknowledging that there are very serious environmental and sociopolitical ramifications inherent with overcrowding? Why do some persist in whistling past the graveyard and presuming that infinite growth is possible and/or desirable, without any serious environmental and quality-of-life impacts?

How does better food tech help, for example, Bangladesh, where 160 million people are crammed into an area about the size of Iowa, that is mostly underwater, and will be almost completely submerged by 2100? Who gets to handle all the refugees, one of the other overcrowded backwaters surrounding it? Don't worry folks, the UNFAO has estimated. It's all good.

Just as Paul Ehrlich might have jumped the gun a bit (at least as far as the Oceania and Eurasia nations are concerned), so might Malthus have presumed too much, so might we yet (depending on who "we" is, 1 in every 3 people lives in China or India, 1 in 2 in Asia, so....) innovate a way out of this. But maybe not; there are a multitude of serious issues looming in relation to overcrowding, and there is much work to be done just to alleviate the almost certain impact for many millions right now, not to mention those yet to be born.

Ownership Society

Let's see if by chance anything at all unrelated to royal babies or Anthony Weiner's cock might be happening in this crazy planet of ours, shall we? Maybe there's a reason we're hearing about those things instead of these things:

Apparently the slithering evil that is Halliburton continues its unholy bargain with the Elder Gods of R'lyeh, in that they have admitted to incompetence and the destruction of evidence that may very well have cost 11 men their lives and poisoned the Gulf of Mexico for years to come, yet pay a whopping $200,000 fine for all that. They may yet take a hit in civil court, but we're talking about a company that routinely pulls down $7bn in revenues quarterly.

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh CheneyCthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn, indeed.

Kids, are you up on all the latest super-awesome oil-extraction technologies? If you love 'murka, then you are down with fracking and tar sands like Lindsay Lohan chasing a dime bag of bathtub crank. Ah, except for the fact that tar sands EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) is usually 25-50% of conventional oil EROEI, which may not be a dealbreaker, but is still substantially less than ideal. That and the problematic issue of the breakeven costs of tar sands range at $65-70/bbl for in situ (steam) and $90-100/bbl for mining.

IOW, the promises of petroleum plenitude for all are belied by the fact that those methods are only cost-effective at higher price ranges -- that is, if there's a scarcity. So either there's a scarcity or there isn't.

Also, too, the small problem of increasing environmental issues. Yeah, who'da thunk something would go south with injecting pressurized steam into substrata in order to melt and steam tar out of the topsoil. Jesus H. Christ, how could anything possibly go wrong there?

Which brings us to fracking, and as always, the day any of its bought-and-paid-for proponents agree to have it done in their backyards, with their water tables and aquifers, then I guess we can all be okey-doke about all that. Till then how 'bout them crickets you hear?

All of these things are just parts of a greater looming environmental issue, as the oceans acidify and fishing stocks continue their decline, at faster and faster rates. But we got what we paid for, which was "cheap" oil, without the bother of innovating truly renewable technologies. The U.S. government dumped half a billion dollars into Solyndra, while the Chinese gov't poured over $30bn into the same tech, and all we could do when Solyndra inevitably failed (in no small part due to health insurance costs, like every other American industry these days, held hostage to the most pernicious racket of all) was hold our dicks and scream about sociamalism.

And hey, speaking of which, how about the "revelation" that the parasitic financial class is manipulating commodities prices? You're shocked, right? The real issue here is not that Goldman Sachs jacks up the price of a can of Coke by a tenth of a cent by scooting tons of aluminum from warehouse to warehouse, but that they make billions of dollars by not producing a fucking thing.

Seriously, when I say that this is parasitism, I fucking well mean it. These people do not produce a goddamned thing, they simply broker and hedge and take bets and game the system. Because it's their system, you're just forced to participate in it, bunky. They own it all, and they rent the people who make laws and policy, and fuck you in the neck if you have a problem with any of that.

Investing used to mean that you participated in the creation of wealth and value, by collaborating in a financial endeavor that produced an item that a mass of human beings would want to buy. An innovation, an invention, a new item or service. Read any "get rich" volume from the uniquely American cult of "self-improvement" books. One thing they will all tell you is that you need to analyze and profile who you expect your customer base to be, and then to provide them with something of value.

Take my own example that I've undertaken this year -- I've played guitar at a decent skill level for a couple of decades now, and taught at various times throughout, so I constructed tabs, wrote text, and created books for people wanting to improve their game. The market will ultimately decide whether or not those things add value to the desires of the customer base.

But the bottom line is, for better or worse, I created something. I didn't hoard a vital commodity in order to leverage prices and game the system, and then skim a commission off the top. That is the Tony Soprano approach to economics, I don't care what these leeches try to rationalize this bullshit with. They're nothing but thieves and vipers. Instead of innovating and creating, people get rich these days simply by making book, taking bets, gaming systems for their own benefit at the expense of the unrich.

This is the system that they've bought and paid for, and contrary to popular plaint, that system is not at all broken, it's fixed. Keep that in mind at all times, when you're not distracted by the deliberate inanity of the corporate mockingbird.

It's Getting Hot In Here

You know, I was just about to drop a token yammer about how bloody hot it is this fine weekend (and no, I don't have air conditioning, I have a swamp cooler, which is useless above 100 degrees), when I saw this awful news. Jesus, so sad. Seriously, words fail.

Firefighting is obviously dangerous, often thankless work, and you may have noticed the past few years that wildfire season out west starts earlier and goes longer these days. Last year it was Colorado, because large swaths of forest have been turned into tinder by infestations of pine beetle -- wait for it -- which have proliferated because it no longer gets cold enough long enough during the winter.

Usually it's a safe bet to scoff at arguments which deploy the Children, Who Are Our Future trope, but in the case of laypersons attempting to figure out whether climate change is "real," and/or caused by human activity, one would think that most parents at least would want to err on the side of caution, to ensure that their kids have a reasonably safe planet to inhabit. Maybe not; in most subjects, especially ones requiring the ability to assess empirical evidence, one observes a great deal of providentiary thinking. The problem is recognized but studiously ignored; something will come along because something always does.

At this point, you can't even totally invoke the shibboleth of mindless 'murkin consumerism and waste; while of course there is waste, the more egregious examples of suburban assault vehicles, such as Hummers and Excursions, fell prey to high gas prices. That's the only thing the assholes who "needed" gargantuan grocery schooners understand anyway, is a swift kick to the pocketbook.

No, the blessings of globalization have created a lot of newly-minted middle-class aspirations in grievously overpopulated third world countries. What happens when a quarter-billion Chinese and a quarter-billion Indians are suddenly thrust into the arena with the big boys? We're spoiled, we're accustomed to it, but the scope and scale of economically empowering half a billion people or so, in a relatively short time, is bound to have environmental consequences.

There may not be a direct correlation between, say, the ongoing desertification of China and the proliferation of the lodgepole pine beetle, but one thing students of climate change have duly noted is the interdependence -- hell, the interconnectivity -- of the natural world. That is not a difficult concept to understand.

But it is very easy to ignore.

Believe it or not, I have neither lecture nor lament here. I'm writing this, and you're reading this, so by definition we are using electricity, generated by fossil fuels, for non-essential activity. Nobody is Simon-pure here.

But it doesn't hurt to be at least cognizant of the things we do, and the impacts we inflict, and strive to be just 10% less of an asshole, when it comes to being kind to the environment. The thing is, and this is something many Americans do not consider or even know, is that one in three human beings lives in either China or India. One in two -- that is, half of all humanity -- lives on the Asian continent.

In past times, we could afford to be somewhat smug about our hyperconsumerism and wanton pollution because we are relatively sparsely populated, and no one else had the tech or the stones to be as crudely wasteful. We at least had control, in the sense that we could pull back if we so chose. We chose not to.

The demographics, and the concomitant effects of globalized commerce, have rendered that previous mindset inoperative. We retain some control, but only over ourselves, and perhaps not enough in the aggregate. The U.S. is only 5% of the world population, after all. As China outpaces us in accessing African resources, we may find ourselves not only in a bind as climate change continues apace, but increasingly powerless to do anything about it.