Graphic Firing Table

 

Hunter Biden.

Let's just start there.

Mind, that's just a placeholder for the tl:dr version, which I now kind of have to explain. So.

There's always a handful of ominous clouds on the new year horizon, every year, things we know are in view but have no way of knowing how they will affect us or even whether they will affect us..

But this one's both a surety and a misery; the GQP's takeover of the federal House of Representatives, which I'll just go ahead and call "Hunter Biden" for short because the coming ridiculous fucking clown show is sure to include massive amounts of the sonofabitch.

(And in case you haven't been following this goat rodeo, the central fact of our next two Congressional years is that the fucking monkeys will be running the House zoo. The steering wheel will be in the clutch of the whackjobs - the Greenes, the Gaetzs, the Gym Jordans...the people who make Louie Gohmert look like a sage.)

As we've discussed here (over and over, because it's the central reality of our current U.S. politics) the modern "conservative" movement has only a handful of actual policies, all of which are loathsome to anyone who can't check all the "rich, "white", "male", "god-botherer", "ammosexual", and "bigoted" boxes.

Popular support for policies like "tax cuts for rich fucks!", "let's make American society socially, politically, and financially more like 1929!", and "let's hand over more political power to big business!" ranges from nonexistent to miniscule to at-least-less-then-two/fifths-of-the-public. 

In a genuinely popularly-elected government flogging those sorts of political goals would get you locked out of the corridors of power for generations if not forever; there's just not enough plutocrats, plutocrat-fluffers, and morons to get you elected.

Since that's all the "conservatives" have, though, they have to spend - and will spend - the vast bulk of their time fapping over ridiculous QANut conspiracy bullshit that is red meat to their lunatic base.

So when Margie Taylor Greene gets her little dickbeaters on the House Judiciary Committee gavel you know damn well she's gonna drag Tony Fauci in front of her to explain why...ummm...well, that's a good question, actually, given that it was Greene's outfit - starting with her Orange Crush - that fucked up the COVID response and managed to kill something like half a million people and all Fauci did was what he could to stop the suicidal morons from killing others along with themselves

Over at wherever Matt Gaetz lands he'll gin up a dozen Hunter Biden "investigations" generating a shit-ton of FAUX "News" content while trying to make Hunter a scandal on Daddy Joe...as if Jared Kusher didn't even fucking exist or if anyone outside the looney wingnut Right gives a shit.

All the while these chucklefucks will deliberately impede every other goddamn thing the federal government is there to do.

Because the bottom line is that these fucking people are 1) dumb as a box of rocks, 2) mean as weasels and 3) convinced that "government is bad" so they're bad a governance.

Which, in a republic where the fucking people are supposed to BE the fucking government, is a nonsensical and dangerous conviction.

Which isn't going to stop these nitwits. 

They'll tie the House, and to the extent they can, the entire federal government and everything that government has a hand in (which means damn near everything, the modern U.S. being an immense industrial nation that cannot continue as an entity without constant and continuous governance in everything ranging from foreign defense to meat-packing inspections...) with their "Hunter Biden"-level foolery.

Which means that the true disaster of our age...

Climate Change

...will roll unchecked.

We've talked about this, too. We're headed straight into the Perfect Storm of the Holocene Thermal Maximum and the Sixth Extinction without the slightest idea what that will mean.

Except not good; we can take that as read.

Will 2023 be The End of All Things?

No, of course not.

But it'll be incrementally worse than 2022 was. More extreme weather. Probably another bad western fire season. Trouble with supply chains. Difficulties in crop yields, and changes in, especially, water budgets that will affect everything from drinking water to fish runs.

It's difficult enough to get even the left side of the political spectrum to pay attention - let alone doing anything genuinely useful - about this stuff. It's complicated (meaning that the vast majority of Americans neither understand it nor appreciate how potentially devastating it will become...) and expensive (meaning taxes, which nobody likes, particularly the rich fucks who have their hand up the typical elected sock-puppet's ass...).

The Right?

Probably 80% still think the whole climate change thing is a Red Chinese hoax.

Yes, they ARE that fucking stupid.

I'm old. I'm not going to live to see how bad this could and probably - at the rate we're going - will get. But my kids will, and I'd just as soon not hand then the mess that it looks like we're going to get.

There's a lot of other shit that we're going to see in 2023 that ranges from "gee, that's kinda fucked up" ro "WTAF!!??"; increasing plutocracy and the New Gilded Age, more COVID (including new strains that we're incubating now because we've effectively given up on trying to run the Smallpox Program and vaccinate the fucker out or existence), and more trouble around the periphery of the former Soviet Union. 

Because...

Wars and Rumors of Wars

...are likely to continue to roil eastern Europe and north Asia as well as all the usual (ahemMiddleEastahem) places.

Ruth Deyermond has a useful Clif's Notes discussion of the problems of Russia and the West, but the tl:dr is Ukraine has made clear if nothing else that the Western (including the U.S.) assumption that the post-Soviet status quo - a chastened Russia unwilling and unlikely to act aggressively outside its post-Soviet borders - is gone so long as the current Putin-led leadership remains in place.

Okay, let me make this clear - I am NOT writing a new Long Telegram for 2023.

Putin Russia is a problem. That doesn't automatically make it OUR problem, or automatically make it a geopolitical-military problem. I'm not arguing for a new Cold War.

I'm agreeing with Deyermond, though, that we need to:

1. Accept that the old energy relationship with Russia cannot be recovered. Communicate this, and the reasons for it, clearly to readers/viewers/voters.

2.  Acknowledge that the need to pay attention to Russia isn’t going to go away and that this requires reorganisation and investment.

Deyermond has a long sub-thread that expounds on how institutional neglect of post-Soviet Russia has gone a long way towards putting us (and Russia!) in a vastly more risky position.

This is a new bud on the troublesome U.S. foreign policy tree, but there's a lot of poison fruit still hanging on the old branches.

Unquestioning support of Israel even now that it has become an openly theocratic apartheid state. 

Ignorance, or, worse, ignorant meddling in internal troubles in subSaharan Africa and the Middle East.

The uncertainty about the PRC's intentions towards it's own "near abroad", especially Taiwan.

Problems in Central America - a lot of this is related to the climate issues mentioned above - and the instability of Mexico in particular brought about by a combination of demographics, economics, the institutional political dysfunction baked into Mexico by its colonial master Spain, and the collision of the Mexican underworld and U.S. drug policies.

Ugh. I won't even want to think about what will happen with all this shit if Trump gets back into the White House in 2024.

But 2023's gonna be bad enough as it is.

Homelessness in Portland

With the defeat of Joanne Hardesty there's no Portland commissioner who will push back against Mayor Wheeler's "might, power, and beatings" plan to sweep the poor people in these squalid camps out of Portland.

So we'll go on with the whack-a-hobo "policy" that's been all the City can come up with to try and figure out what to do with poor people who either can't afford Portland's astronomical rents, or who are struggling with everything from addiction to mental and physical health problems.

And we'll hear the usual bullshit from people like Betsy Johnson about how this is going to "solve" the problem, which is the equivalent of pissing on your head and telling you how lucky you are that the rain is warm.

All the while the City will he shoveling money at the worthless fucking Police Bureau.

Plus there's all the usual bullshit. Payday lenders. Non-alcoholic beer. Bathroom ceiling fans (I'll have a post about that in a bit...) The Fucking Big Bang Theory.

Is there going to be more good than bad?

Christ, I hope so.

But whatever we're going to get, it's too late now. We're gonna get it good and hard.

 Well...not now. But until this morning we had a week (and more) of 95+ temperatures thanks to those cunning Chinese climate-change hoaxters. 

 Being the hardy American pioneers were are...we all hid inside the air conditioned Little House

...even this goofball.

So I promised (warned? threatened?) to have something to say about the Oregon story that's in y'all's news feeds this week; the wildfires (and attendant smoke-clouds crouching over Portland) that are still tearing up our Northwest forests.

As with everything in the United States today, the fires have several competing narratives. Viewed from the Left, it's all about climate change. From the Right, it's spotted owls and ecofreaks preventing Good Loggers from cleaning and raking Oregon forests.

The reality, as reality tends to do, has a definite liberal bias. But it's more complex than either side wants to admit, meaning that changing the reality we're facing today is complex and difficult and, as you probably know, humans aren't good at "complex and difficult".

But let's begin with the climate.

Baby, It's Warm Outside

Yes, the warming climate is a big part of the problem.

Oregon and the rest of us here in the Northwest have a rep as a misty hinterland of coffee and beer and Sasquatch and flannel shirts set amid the rainy forests. But in fact the north part of the Pacific Coast - from about Mendocino, California to the tip of Vancouver Island - has what's called a "xeric" climate. You might have heard it called "Mediterranean". 

It means cool, wet winters and warm, dry summers.

And our summers are dry. It's common to have little or no rain between the end of June and mid-October. Temperatures can run up into the nineties for weeks, with nasty days in the hundreds, and everything dries and bakes under the summer sun.

But we've been getting less rain (and, critically, less snow - because many of our rivers depend on Cascades snowmelt by late summer and early autumn) and that's definitely been a factor in the frequency and size of forest fires, including this year's.

But that's not all, or, in my opinion, even the biggest factor, in the Fire Story

Tall Timber

You probably know we throw a lot of timber. Still do. Aside from the plow, the axe and saw did more to make Oregon "Oregon" than perhaps anything else outside the fishwheel and gillnet. The earliest fortunes made here were made in timber - not that the people who were actually touching the trees - the toppers, fellers, yarders, choker-setters, the guys running the steam-donkeys or goading the ox-teams, poling the log rafts, the mill hands and sawyers, the cooks in the camp kitchen - were making bank, mind. 

Nah. Those poor bastards were just, y'know, "people", and who gave a shit about them? They weren't organized - the I.W.W. ran into lots of trouble trying to unionize the lumber camps back in the Nineteen-Oughts and Teens - they were usually those damn dirty immigrants (although more often Swedish and Finnish and Norwegian than the current browner versions doing the dirty, dangerous, low-paying work us nice people don't want to do...) and probably radicals and anarchists, anyway.

Nope. The money was made by the "timber barons" and their companies; the plutocrats who fronted the cash and reaped the big harvests of money from the harvesting of timber.

And, it should be said, gave about a micron of a picoshit about the timberlands they reaped.

Very, very few timber magnates, or timber companies, spent anything on trying to restore the lands they cut. They logged them flat and walked away. If the hillsides slid, if the rivers and streams choked with mud? Who cared? That just fucked over those "people", and there were lots more hills and streams and trees to cut and people to cut them.

Well...the free land did finally run out, and the timber outfits began to realize that there was nowhere left to log. And they'd pretty much logged out the rest of the nation already, so there was nowhere to run, either.

(If you want to read a sickening tale of corporate logging, read about Michigan. The logging companies moved in during the 1860s and started cutting. They cut like sonsofbitches until by 1900 the state was literally logged out. Not a single marketable stand of big trees remained. 

So the timber outfits ran like little bitches to the Northwest, and left the Michigan loggers to hit the road begging for work and the timber towns to die.)

So reluctantly Weyerhaeuser and Cavenham and Simpson began to "replant" their Oregon timberlands.

But these plantations weren't "forests". A mature Northwest forest looks like this:

The big trees screen out most of the light, so the forest floor is pretty open. There's some swordfern and maybe Oregon grape, a vinemaple or three...but not a lot of undergrowth. It's dotted with openings where a tree has died or fallen, but it's mostly just tall timber and a sparse understory.

(In fact, the local tribes used fire to open the canopy to get browse for the elk and deer they hunted; there just wasn't much huntable meat inside the big trees.)

Now...this is a plantation - what the #Timberunity people like to call a "working forest". This is what happens when a timber outfit "replants" a "forest":

This is a bit exaggerated; this stand has never been thinned, but it's still pretty close to typical for a 10-year old stand. We call it "twig" or "doghair" timber, and it's nasty to work in - close, hot in the summer, and full of things that poke and tear the shit out of you when you try and push through it - and as explosive as a match-head when it dries out in the summer.

The big trees and the wet forest floor tend to hold water, even in the driest months. This stuff? Dries like flashpaper. Even relatively mature second-growth stands, like this one - 

are much drier and the flammable load is much higher. 

An old forest burn tends to smoulder. The undergrowth burns, but the fires tend to be lower and cooler; most of the trees themselves may char but don't burn. In an old stand you often see big redcedars or douglas-firs with blackened bark telling how they've lived through (presumably) several fires.

Those second-growth, "plantation" trees?

They candle.

So you have thousands of acres of these matchbox stands of second-growth, and when you throw in generations of fire suppression that has removed the natural regime of regular fires that remove the forest floor litter and combustible brush with these unnatural "forests"?

And you've got perfect tinder for big fires.

Hell is Other People

And, then, of course, you add fucking people.

Forests have always burned. Before people, it was just a thing that happened. Dry lightning, usually, and the woods would burn. Some of the creatures in it would die, the rest would have to run for it, and then the reforestation would begin.

Add low-tech humans and, as I've noted, you get human-caused fires; untended campfires, deliberate clearing, but pretty much the same effect. Most native tribes here in the Northwest would have been smart enough not to set fires where they were camped or their houses were built.

And - barring the occasional freakish windstorm, say, that spun the longhouse fire out into the trees - their limited means of firemaking meant that those fires almost had to be deliberately set.

But now?

Christ, what don't we industrial civilization-types have that causes things to light up?

Powerlines, obviously, are the big offenders. Many of the current fires were lit off by the big windstorm that blew through here at the end of the first week of September; falling limbs and trees hit or knocked down powerlines, and the dry East wind whipped up the sparks into a firestorm.

But you got your exhaust pipes, your brush- and trash-burning, your cigarette butts, your fireworks, your gender reveal parties...fuck, as my old drill sergeant used to say; "People, enh? They could fuck up a wet dream."

And, of course, you have your woods dwellers.

Here in Oregon we have two main varieties.

Our well-to-do love to live in the woodlands. They plant their communities thick with trees, they push their homes deep into the forests, because...well, it's Oregon, and we're timber people, right? Never mind the Tesla in the driveway, we're just flannel-shirted loggers at heart.

And there's also a bunch of genuine flannel-shirted poor people who hang on in the woods at the fringes of the cities, out in the scabby second-growth, because they need to live cheap and a shotgun shack in Clackamas County is goddamn cheap.

Both sorts usually don't bother to clear the undergrowth far enough away from the walls. Hell, the richies have lot of lovely flammable landscaping planted to make the place pretty. 

The houses of both the scraggly poor and the manicured rich burn like sonsofbitches, though, when the fire rips through the place, forcing people to run, sometimes killing the ones who don't, or who can't, and forcing the firefighting teams to try and dig in and defend these damn firetraps to let the people inside escape.

So here we are.

Climate + Logging + People?

And there you have it. Years of fucking up the woods and then moving into them set the table, then the changes in the climate cooked the hell-feast, and we're here, huddling indoors because the smoke from the Santiam Fire...

...spread across our state in a choking blanket of eye-searing, throat-tightening misery for which we have only ourselves to blame.

And the notion that we will do anything sensible to change this?

That We the People will rein in industrial logging? That we will stop people from building in harm's way? That we will do any damn thing to reverse the inevitable slide back into the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum?

Ha.

Thanks. I needed a laugh right now. 

Because otherwise my throat is full of nothing but rage and smoke.

I'm sitting at my desk here at work. Not working, obviously, but just waiting for the clock to run down. My Timbers are playing tonight and I'm idly wondering whether to go. I've been immersed in soccer lately. Copa America. EURO 2016. The local teams, Timbers and Thorns. As well as writing the Thorns for Slide Rule Pass. So I'm honestly torn. I'd kind of like to see the match. And I'd kind of like to go home and do nothing.

As I sit I'm reading the Internet. News, opinion, various blogs and websites I enjoy.

Every so often I check into my Facebook for good stuff like this:

Lee: I lost my electroporation virginity today - although my partner was electrifying, it was brief and shocking and I won't know for days whether I'm satisfied. ‪#‎scienceporn‬

Comments
John (a.k.a FDChief): I have this mental picture of you reclining on the lab table in nothing but a lab coat and cigarette holder while the device intones (in the HAL voice from 2001): "Procedure complete, Lee. Are you sure it was good for you..?"
Lee: That sounds like every day in my lab, John.
John: Well your work is a damn sight more fun that mine, Lee. WTF? GEOLOGY was supposed to be the place to major if your primary interest in science was primarily intoxication and reproductive anatomy. When the hell did you biologists get so lascivious?
Diane: Does HR know?
Lauren (Lee's daughter): I swear, you and John Lawes could write a book on things your offspring never want to hear
John: But not, alas, cooperatively. Apparently biology is the New Sexology and I appear to have completely missed THAT memo...
Lauren: You should ask her to recite her diatribe on pornographic pollination. I was scarred for life after that one. I swear, parents say the darndest things
John: That's the point. You get to be pains in our ass when you're little; we get to be pains in yours when you get big...It was worth the price of admission explaining to my daughter about puberty.
Lauren: My mom drew me a scientifically accurate diagram of the uterus and phallus. It was very educational
John: Knowing your mom...I'll bet. And probably pretty funny.
Lee: I don't remember any of that...

Some people give good Facebook. Some people post reams of fucking cat pictures and links to everything and nothing. It's like letter-writing. Remember those? Let me tell you; I could write a terrific letter. Most people? Not so much. That translates over to the electronic version of epistolary friendships, too, and I'll let you guess which is more enjoyable.

But here's the other thing I found on FB today:

"Democrats appointed to the Democratic Party’s Platform Committee by Hillary Clinton and the party’s chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, defeated a ban on fracking on June 24."

This was from my friend (and commentor here) Mike's feed. Mike and a lot of the comments on the original post were, understandably, furious.

It just made me sad and sick at heart.

Because I just don't see that there's a real hope in hell of "doing something" about anthropogenic global warming (or "AGW" for short...) through our political process. And if that's not possible...well...I'm not sure what this planet will look like with a return of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum and I'm not sure I want to.

That, in turn, got me to thinking about what look like very similar electoral situations; Great Britain's "Brexit" referendum and the people who wanted out of the EU, and the coming U.S. general election and the people who want Trump.

In both cases there seem to be a fairly good prima facie case for opposing both Brexit and Trump. Both appear to be based largely on rumors and lies and fed by nativist anger and racist rage. Both appear to be like hitting yourself in the face with a hammer to swat a fly on your nose.

But in both cases there's the arguments my friend Mike and other lefty pals employ against HRC; that the "Remain" argument for the EU (and the "better than Trump" argument for Clinton) are, in effect, demanding your vote for something deeply flawed, something that rewards the rentier class that has effected a silent coup.

Mike and the Sanders supporters make good points about how the current system is horribly skewed against the "regular" Joe and Molly. How things like trade deals and crony capitalism strip people of jobs and wealth, and how people are sick of being "ruled", in effect, by unelected corporations and capitalists. I agree. The current economy isn't "good" for people like me, or my family.

The current system isn't "good" for the planet in terms of accelerating climate change. Both need to be changed.

But what bedevils me is...how?

Republics and democracies aren't good a big, radical changes. They're not good, either, at demanding that their citizens do things that they don't like to do in the short term to make things better in the long term. Remember when Jimmy Carter asked us to turn down the thermostat and put on a sweater? The average U.S. citizen knows perfectly well that things like eating McDonald's rainforest-beef hamburgers, driving an SUV, and living in a 3,500-square foot house with a quarter-acre lawn in a city built in a fucking desert are bad ideas.

They just don't want to not do them.

And - short of war - it's hard to either make them or persuade them TO do them.

That's why I eventually bagged on Sanders. Because I'd read things like this:

"We need a president who will vigorously support international cooperation that brings the people of the world closer together, reduces hypernationalism and decreases the possibility of war. We also need a president who respects the democratic rights of the people, and who will fight for an economy that protects the interests of working people, not just Wall Street, the drug companies and other powerful special interests.

We need to fundamentally reject our “free trade” policies and move to fair trade. Americans should not have to compete against workers in low-wage countries who earn pennies an hour. We must defeat the Trans-Pacific Partnership. We must help poor countries develop sustainable economic models.

We need to end the international scandal in which large corporations and the wealthy avoid paying trillions of dollars in taxes to their national governments.

We need to create tens of millions of jobs worldwide by combating global climate change and by transforming the world’s energy system away from fossil fuels."

...and I'd think, yeah, you're right. That'd be great. That'd be awesome.

How the fuck would you do that?

I mean, how does President Sanders go to Congress...the same Congress that has a House full of shit-flinging flying monkey wingnuts and a Senate that has enough of the same to prevent cloture, remember?...and tell them, yep, I want to cut the Defense budget and spend it on solar and wind energy. I want to reform the tax code to prevent capital flight and return the top marginal rate to 90% like back in Ike's day. I want to cut CEO pay. I want to raise tariffs to prevent offshoring and job loss.

These are fucking people who think that the problem is that there's not enough oil drilling in fucking National Parks, for fuck's sake. These are people who are elected by even stupider people who think that the world was created 6,000 years ago and that Jesus wants you personally to have the full tank of gas that those dirty, smelly Mooslim people stole and hid under their deserts.

Add to that the people, like the people who voted "Leave", think that "international cooperation" means Brussels telling them what shape their bananas should be.

And you have to convince all these people; the good folks, the worriers, the activists, the goofballs, gomers, nativists, racists, ignoramuses, conspiracy-theorists, ding-dongs, and low-information knotheads to be patient, compromise...and to give up their styrofoam cups and cheap plastic crap from Wally-Mart and NASCAR and put down their Confederate flags and ride the fucking bus to work.

What president could do that?

Hell, Jesus riding on a velociraptor and carrying an AR-15 couldn't fucking do that.

That's what kinda drove and drives me crazy about Bernie. Yes, these are all good things. Now...how do you get them? How do you convince people or coerce people or force people to stop building suburbs? To stop driving to work? To stop buying disposable diapers? To stop living in McMansions? To stop voting for people who tell them that they don't HAVE to stop doing all those things because "global warming" is a lie?

I want to hear not an uplifting speech. I want to hear a plan. I want to hear an actual strategy. How are you going to beat down FOX "News"? How are you going to force-feed Michael Savage and Rushbo and Coulter and Malkin and Beck and every other talk-radio moron a nice, hot cup of STFU? How are you going to get people who don't want to accept the science of climate change to accept it and live the lives they need to live to help change things? How are you - in detail, now - going to get people to ask for more taxes and less cheap Chinese-made crap and more equity?

I'm not saying that we shouldn't keep working for this good stuff Bernie talks about.

I'm saying that by its very nature it's a ridiculously difficult, painful, time-consuming body of work. That you're going to get beat. A LOT. And that you're going to have to grit your teeth and work with people you don't like...like goddamn DLC triangulators and people who want fracking regulated rather than banned.

And that's fucking hard.

So hard that I'm not sure it can ever happen.

And that, in turn, really depresses the shit out of me. The worst are, indeed, full of passionate intensity. And the best...well, they're getting sick and tired of trying to roll that rock uphill.

I want to believe that there are ways. Real ways, practical ways, workable ways, to make all the good stuff that Bernie wants happen.

I just can't see anyone actually producing them.

One thing that makes me despair for my species is the appallingly chasm-like abyss of derp that you encounter whenever you say the words "climate change".
I mean, yes, it's a science. But it's not fucking rocket science.

What's the one single thing that we hairless monkeys have been doing more than anything else since the end of the Neolithic?

No, not screwing. We've been doing that forever and will continue so long as we have teensy tinsy little stupid-brains in our genitals, sort of like the ones that the big therapods had in their butts to help control their back ends. Except the genital tillermen and -women are usually busy driving us into a freaking tree in pursuit of each other instead of doing anything helpful. But that's beside the point.

No. We've been making stuff. Bronze axeheads. Iron plowshares. Steam engines. Cotton gins. Battleships. Nuclear power plants.

All this making means burning dead things. Wood. Coal. Petroleum. All that burning shoves gases and particulates into the air.

And we know what that does. We've seen it on Venus, where the gas blanket is so thick that it traps solar heating like a big ol' duvet.

So it's not some sort of wild speculation or conspiracy theory to draw the line from A to B to C; more industry = more gases = more insulation = more heat.

And it doesn't take a genius to figure out how this extra heat could be a bad thing. Hell, even my old boss the Green Machine is worried. In the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review the authors said:

"Climate change poses another significant challenge for the United States and the world at large. As greenhouse gas emissions increase, sea levels are rising, average global temperatures are increasing, and severe weather patterns are accelerating. These changes, coupled with other global dynamics, including growing, urbanizing, more affluent populations, and substantial economic growth in India, China, Brazil, and other nations, will devastate homes, land, and infrastructure. Climate change may exacerbate water scarcity and lead to sharp increases in food costs. The pressures caused by climate change will influence resource competition while placing additional burdens on economies, societies, and governance institutions around the world.

These effects are threat multipliers that will aggravate stressors abroad such as poverty, environmental degradation, political instability, and social tensions – conditions that can enable terrorist activity and other forms of violence."

Note the verb. "Poses". Not "might pose" or "could pose" or "fuck NOAA, this climate change stuff is a bunch of libtard hooey..." "Poses"; pose pōz/verb
3rd person present: poses

1. present or constitute (a problem, danger, or difficulty).
"the sheer number of visitors is posing a threat to the area"
synonyms: constitute, present, create, cause, produce, be
"pollution poses a threat to health".

So. I go to my Facebook page and I find a post from a friend of mine. Great gal, Olympic athlete, mom, artist...and a pretty smart person. And she's got a link from "PragerU" talking about how climate change isn't a real - not a REALLY real - problem and, besides, "doing something" would be SOOOO expensive. "Will the enormous cost justify the gain?" is their tagline.

That's pretty much where I facepalmed. PragerFuckingU. Gah. Have you ever encountered those idiots?

SweetFuckingBabyJesusonaStick you've never seen drool-puddle-stupid until you've seen one of the videos these drooling stupids produce. They're supposed to present topics from a "conservative" point of view, "conservative" meaning, apparently, "the condition the human brain assumes when all the little brain cells have been herded onto cattle trucks and transported to extermination camps where they are dosed with ZyklonB in the brain showers..." but all they manage to do is make "conservatives" look "fucking stupid" by reducing complex topics to a word salad of conservative talking points, bad arguments, and outright lies.

Here's an article from something called The Blaze which is, so far as I can tell, some sort of wingnut website that luurves them some PragerU (Prager, BTW, is one Dennis Prager, a wingnut radio shouter before branching out into dubious "educational" schemes).

The article tries to make this "PragerU" sound full of awesomesauce but, instead, ends up making the wingut radio-shouter moron sound like...well, a wingnut radio-shouter moron. Here's the article citing the wingnut radio-shouter moron on foreign affairs;

“The people who try to make the Middle Eastern conflict complex have an agenda,” he said, giving just one example (see the condensed Middle Eastern lesson, below)."

Complex? Pshaw! Saddle up, l'il buckaroo, and let's ride through hundreds of years of migration, religious coexistence and conflict, resource allocation, consuption, and disputation, Mongol invasions, Ottoman rule, European colonial highjinks, and four Israeli-Arab wars - in just five minutes!

Yes. Somebody has an agenda here...but more'n likely it's the wingnut radio-shouter moron who thinks that you can "teach" the Middle East in five minutes.

That's "PragerU" and that's what my smart, dynamic, engaged friend thinks is a valid "take" on climate change. I've tried to expose Prager to her, I've tried to show her the science...and she won't go there. "I'm not convinced." she says. "What about "Climategate"? What about this? What about that?", throwing every wingnut talking point smokescreen out at me. She just. Won't. Budge.

And that's reeeeally depressing. Because she's a relatively "high-information" Republican sort of voter. She reflexively hates Clinton but is smart enough to recognize the passengers in the Republican clown car as three rings full of liars, fools, charlatans, and whackaloons. She's very religious but not self-righteous about it. She's usually pretty good people...but she's buying this and - I can't imagine any other reason other than - its because the wingnuts and Christopaths are yammering about it.
So this strikes me as pure tribalism. And if the Clown Clan can pull my friend into their Clubhouse of Bottomless Derp...what the hell can the rest of us do? There's enough of these people to jam things up enough, long enough, until we're all dog-paddling around Manhattan.

And then what..?

See below; this is my reconstruction of the Santa Clarita landslide.


Typically large, slow-moving rotational slump- (meaning that the movement is rotational, with the top part moving down and in and the bottom (or toe) moving down and out) earthflows (meaning that the thing is moving slowly, like a big earth glacier) develop large toe-bulges at the bottom. Somewhere in my files I have a picture of an old mine access road that has been buckled up and rotated vertical by the toe pushing up and out at the bottom of a large earthflow; the thing stood straight up for about 8 or 10 feet. That'd have been a real sonofabitch to drive up with a stick shift.

I had a long discussion about this thing with my friend GeoChick, and I told her my problem was that all the articles had the scientific intelligence of a mophead. "Guh - landslide" was about the level of sophistication. Seriously; I couldn't tell either from the pictures or the text enough about the topography or the geology to even guess what was happening.

But long-time commentor Ael finally sent me a link to an article that showed not just the big honkin' road uplift but the surroundings, and it looks pretty clear to me that this thing is at or near the base of a slope that is failing, and it's pushing this road up because the road is at or near where the bottom of the slide plane "toes out" of the ground surface...

And this is a simple landslide. Given that, can you imagine how hard it is for most reporters to understand something as complex as climate change?

I just gave him a big shoutout and, yes, I'm usually completely down with Charlie Pierce. But I think he's missed his target here when he says that George Effing Will is trying to equate climate-change-denialism with "science".

He puts up this Will quote from his WaPo column and no, I'm not going to link to the insufferable sonofabitch but Pierce does if you want to read his condescending little screed. In it Will says of the current Roman Catholic pontiff:

"He stands against modernity, rationality, science and, ultimately, the spontaneous creativity of open societies in which people and their desires are not problems but precious resources. Americans cannot simultaneously honor him and celebrate their nation's premises."

and what Pierce picks from this chunky nougat of fuck is that Will is claiming that pretending that human beings are not substantially changing our planet's environment is "scientific" and "rational" and that to suggest that they are, or might at least be doing enough to support some serious investment in changing that, is to be against "modernity, rationality...and science".

But I think that Will's point is really worse than that. It's in his conclusion that this concern for things like planetary temperature is an attempt to destroy "...the spontaneous creativity of open societies in which people and their desires are not problems but precious resources." and that "...celebrat(ing the) nation's premises." involves subordinating everything else to "people and their desires."

Now this isn't an elusive or subtle idea. In its simplest form it's just what Veruca Salt wanted from Willy Wonka: everything, the whole world, and right fucking now. It's greed, raw, naked greed. It's selfishness on a Randian scale, the "desire" is simply that everyone and everything else owes me what I want and more and right this very second. Call it the "rollin' coal" theory of social responsibility. Or call it what it really is; the morals of a four-year-old...or Veruca fricking Salt.


And I agree that a hell of a lot of human history has been about people trying to get everything yesterday. But should that really be "our nation's premise"? Should we really be all about trying to be bigger, fatter, richer, stronger, happier than everything and anything regardless of the cost? Is that a "precious resource" or more likely to be a "problem"?

George Effing Will in his capacity as the nation's Republican Intellectual wants to tell you we should be, and it is.

Bullshit.

He's a Bad Egg, and so is his argument. Hell, so is any argument that is nothing but fucking Verucasaltism in a goddamn prom dress.

In case you wanted more doom and gloom (and talk about the weather, Ael...) here's two related news items laying out in excruciating detail the killing blow awaiting us at the top of the dark ramp ahead.

First, the near-certainty that we are in the process of baking our world to a delicate crunch.

And, second, that we are ensuring that our New Oligarchic Masters will not give a flying fuck about that.
And despite the furious verbal and written smokescreen that the meeching coterie of remoras for the wealthy and powerful will emit, these are related, and unless We the People act decisively and swiftly mean that those of us not insulated by wealth and power are headed for an ugly future.

Simply put, since the advent of the Industrial Revolution we've been transforming our planet not so much to an unprecedented degree but at a hyperkinetic rate. Our average global temperature has both risen and fallen significantly before this, but these were part of the larger global/solar system heat cycles.

What we've done has been, in effect, to add a heat wave to the vast swells of insolation, ocean circulation, carbon sequestration and release that affect the Earth and have pretty much since the damn thing cooled enough to accumulate an atmosphere.

We con't be sure how big this wave is relative to the swells. But we can tell that it's there, and that it has the potential - assuming that the overall global climate isn't dropping back into a glacial period - to drive our planet towards the kind of climate that makes grasslands of forests and deserts of grasslands, raises oceans and otherwise creates some pretty impressive changes in our local flora and fauna.

And the critical factor is that this is happening fast; a couple of hundred years, a flick of geologic time.

Things like our food crops are the products of generations of selective breeding, and our food-producing regions developed of millenia of human history. And the same history shows that when those crops and regional conditions change, as they did for the Sumerians, as they did for the Anasazi, that can get very difficult and deadly for the humans involved.


Unless...you have the wealth and power to insulate you from that change.

If you can move freely about the globe, if you can pay for your own sources of food, of heating and cooling, if you can pay for your own armies to secure those things and to defend you from those who don't have the wealth and power to secure them for themselves, well, then...why should you care?

Why shouldn't you be more interested in your short-term wealth and power? Why should you give a flying fuck what happens, then?

That's one of the huge reasons that oligarchy and plutocracy are bad for everyone outside the oligarchs, plutocrats and their entourage and, eventually, for them, too.

When you put that much wealth and power into the small group that also controls the polity you produce a perfect storm of ignorance and indifference. The aristos don't know how bad it is for the proles and don't care.
We know what the inevitable result is. The ugly mess shambles along until finally some sort of unholy disaster unhinges everything. The society disintgrates into a war of all against all. The usual conclusion is either the ascent of a strongman, a Lenin or a Napoleon, or a descent into anarchy and barbarism as after the fall of Rome.

And for some reason we've managed to construct this meatgrinder and are ramming our collective dicks into it while we worry more about missing airliners and white girls and who's got the inside lane on this season's reality show.

I have absolutely no idea what the fuck to say about this except the dinosaurs had the excuse that their brains were the size of a fucking walnut.

I merely note in passing that I was utterly, completely correct about the final product of the Copenhagen Conference;

a lot of hot air, a gassy bubble not even full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. A niddering, a naething. A complete and total mockery.

China walked away, just took their marbles and went home. They will do nothing - regardless of whether there is a significant risk to human health and safety from increased global mean temperature - and they will be perfectly happy if no one else does anything, too.

Sadly, this was utterly, completely predictable. The Chinese government has no legitimacy beyond what it can provide its people in largesse. If it fails to grow and thus provide more lucre and better lives for Chang and Mei Lunchpail, it dies. What this also proves is that the U.S. government is little more than a whore for its industrial, commercial and financial interests to the point where it can no longer afford to bully or wheedle the Chinese. It had no military, political or economic capital to spend; the Chinese held the whip and and used it, mercilessly.

And so it goes. The usual U.S. liberals and enviros will wail and rend their garments, the usual conservatives harrumph with satisfaction, both of them misunderstanding that this is neither a victory nor a defeat for their faction.

It is a defeat for us, for our nation, and its allies in the West, and a sign that the Middle Kingdom will look out for its own first, just another monkey in a different tribe grimacing and flinging its shit to mark its territory.

I take no joy in being right. Cassandra was right, too, and look where it got her.

Every year I grow older I grow more cynical and less impressed with my own species.

Over at MilPub one of my colleagues mentioned the Copenhagen Conference on climate change and the recent fooforaw about the "censoring" of climate change skeptics by the mainstream climatologists.

Now, overall, I am perfectly confident that if human industrial emissions ARE having a significant impact on global climate (and I cannot imagine why they wouldn't - see below) that this conference will continue the great tradition of looking away from a difficult and painful choice until it rips our collective head off and vomits down the neck stump. There never has been a human society that anticipated their own impact on natural systems prior to those systems going to hell. Ask the Sumerians about soil salinization, the Anasazi about irrigated agriculture in a desert, or the Easter Islanders about giant heads. Oh, wait, you can't...But as for the "censoring" the skeptics...my background is in geology, not climatology, but here's my short take:

1. We are in an interglacial, and we know that over the past 1.8 million years the Earth has warmed and cooled considerably from where it is today. From the VOSTOK ice cores in the Antarctic we have O16/O18 ratios that give us a fair idea of global temperatures back into the end of the late Pleistocene. Stratigraphic, palynological and flora/fauna interpretation can give us a good guesstimate of global temps back at least as far as the Proterozoic (4 billion years ago). And we know from that that the Earth has been both much warmer and much colder than it is now.

2. But...the temperature data we have now looks suspicious; it spikes starting in the late 18th Century and that trend seems to be continuing. This trendline is rising at about the same rate as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, which saw 6 degrees of rise in 20,000 years and had a fairly major impact on planetary life.The thing is that we think that the PETM was triggered by one or more natural causes, the most likely thought to be the release of deep-ocean methane deposits or "clathrates". Of the other natural or cosmogenic processes that have affected global temperatures, from cometary impacts to the development of grasses, we have seen none over the past 200 years.

3. We also know that...

4. Industrial gases, including CO2, do have a "greenhouse" effect, and we have poured a tremendous amount of them (relative to the global baseline) into the air since about 1800.

5. So it makes sense, in a purely empirical way, to be highly skeptical of the notion that "humans can't alter the global temperature stasis", which is the primary point of the skeptics. Even if the temp spike and the industrial emissions aren't 1:1, it makes no sense to think that there's no effect at all (which is the main skeptic point).

6. And the real problem is that we know from Venus that there's a tipping point where the greenhouse becomes irreversible. And we don't really know what that tipping point is here on Earth. Runaway greenhouse here is unlikely - we have too much free water - but the point is we don't know. We don't know what is happening, other than the global temperature is rising above the normal trend and we have no smoking gun - no volcanism, no bolides, no clathrates, nothing that we know or think has caused warming in the past - to account for it. We don't know.

7. So since we know so little to me it makes perfect sense to reduce the amount of industrial gas emitted into the atmosphere to the greatest extent possible. And many of the skeptics

- whose evidence consists mostly of nitpicking holes in the theory and some pretty wild assumptions (as in the cartoon above - are paid for by industries that have a short-term stake in preventing this. It's also worth noting, as the Toronto Sun editorial stated:

"A key factor in the controversy is that the data discussed in these e-mails was not suppressed. It was discussed in the IPCC's Fourth Assessment report, which concluded it is more than 90% likely that human emissions of greenhouse gases are responsible for climate change."

This whole business is another attempt to make doing nothing - or making a mistake - seem like doing the right thing. Haven't we been there before?

So my feeling is this: we're not going to reverse the industrial revolution and go back to living in yurts. No one who warns of climate change believes we will. What they are trying to do is talk to a largely uneducated, credulous and greedy public about the notion that we need to put off our pursuit of that Wii and that Hummer H4 to slow down the emissions cycle and reduce the chance that we will end up with a runaway greenhouse.

This is the scientific equivalent of taking your foot off the gas because the terrain ahead suggests there may be a hard left turn in front of you. The skeptics, many of them, are saying "Fuck you, you pussy, floor it!" for no reason other than they have found some irregularities in the climate data, the scientific equivalent of saying that you don't need brakes because the road has always been straight and always will be.

So in a perfect world the climatologists would lay out all the data, point to the trend and then point out the irregularities and discrepancies and admit "We don't know why this is, this seems anomalous, but the overall data seems to suggest this." But the Western publics know only this: anything that curtails their industrial "progress" makes them "poorer" in the short-term.

Therefore if someone can manage to take those irregularities and discrepancies and make them look like a fatal flaw (which is possible with any scientific data you don't really understand how to interpret) they will seize on it as an opportunity to do nothing.

So I don't think that what the climatologists did was smart in the long run; if there IS a serious climate problem, people in general are going to have to become smarter about it in order to solve it.

But in the long run we're all dead and these guys have been fighting the battle against the nay-sayers for thirty years. We all saw how the people who were skeptical about the good sense of invading a fucked-up post-Ottoman Third World dictatorship to let freedom reign were swiftboated and lied about and generally screwed over. They did, too.

So I can fully understand their instinct to shut these guys up before they managed to raise their Pecksniffian bullshit to full Cheney on them.

The editorial in the journal Nature sums the situation up pretty well:

"In the end, what the UEA e-mails really show is that scientists are human beings — and that unrelenting opposition to their work can goad them to the limits of tolerance, and tempt them to act in ways that undermine scientific values. Yet it is precisely in such circumstances that researchers should strive to act and communicate professionally, and make their data and methods available to others, lest they provide their worst critics with ammunition."

But no matter. The entire controversy is a tale told by a lot of idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. The bottom line is that if this climate problem forces us to make a hard decision today, forces us to put down the TV remote and do something that makes us poorer and smaller in the short run...we'll kick it down the road. We like our problems minor, and our major problems invisible - until the moment they strike us dead. That way it's SO much less stressful.

Just ask anyone on Venus.

(cross-posted at MilPub)