Butterfly Blather
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On the eve of the weekend again — time flies when you’re having fun.
Just ask Monty Python-named character Reince Priebus, RNC honcho, who thinks butterflies are actually female body parts: “If the Democrats said we had a war on caterpillars and every mainstream media outlet talked about the fact that Republicans have a war on caterpillars, then we’d have problems with caterpillars.”
Women just love nasty, empty spaces between a man’s ears — drives ‘em crazy with anti-lust.
Molly Ball at The Atlantic responds: Under the guise of aiding the agriculture industry, Republicans and their allies in Washington have been waging a long-running campaign to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from limiting bug-killing pesticides…But the truth is clear, and it’s nothing new: Republicans just don’t care about caterpillars.
Pop that in your cocoon and smoke it.
(Illustration: M. C. Escher’s ‘Hand with Reflecting Sphere‘ found here).
And from the looks of it, Republicans don’t care for anything except hard cash and the people who have hard cash on their person.
From The Hill yesterday:
Mitt Romney often bears false witness about what he really believes, but when we see through his pander of the month, it comes down to this: Romney is the rich man’s candidate who believes in a Social Darwinism (fervently supported by Paul Ryan and Ron Paul) in which the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, the middle class gets crushed, wealthy factions can buy elections, big money dominates, women are punished, Hispanics are disenfranchised, Medicare is destroyed and Social Security is attacked while these programs would be turned into profit centers for Wall Street firms under Republican rule.
These Republicans even oppose pay equity for women and do not understand why Democrats benefit from a gender gap that is epic, gargantuan, intergalactic and probably decisive in November.
One wonders if the GOP really has any sense other than the bubble sprouting from tea bags floating around in tepid tap water.
They lash out at anything they perceive as dangerous — forgetting all the while that females also have the ability to remember.
Starting with the Kennedy-Nixon presidential race in 1960, I’ve followed politics for more than half a century and this season’s episode is the most sordid, nasty and cruel ever, as neurotic wingnuts have taken war flight on fantasies against everything, not just caterpillars, or women, or the environment, or the poor, or…
As George Carlin lamented long ago: “Conservatives say if you don’t give the rich more money, they will lose their incentive to invest. As for the poor, they tell us they’ve lost all incentive because we’ve given them too much money.”
And that’s why weekends are for total cocooning.
Warmer Still — ‘No Way Out’
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Environment, Madness | Leave a Comment
Dramatic changes in climate are being rigged as plot devices for entertainment — ‘Are you not?’
From the New York Times review of the new film, “4:44 Last Day on Earth:”
The cause of the calamity is an environmental breakdown enabled by the human failure to do anything about about climate change.
Or perhaps the hole in the ozone layer; the science is a bit vague.
But the timing of the big finish (referred to in the film’s title) is clear, and though there is an occasional flicker of doubt that it will actually happen, all of the public and private voices of reason and faith seem to agree that there is no way out.
(Illustration found here).
Even as the US has finished a string of record-breaking warm temperatures, described as one of North America’s most extraordinary weather events in recorded history.
Although the Times movie reviewer did not go crazy for ‘4:44,’ the plot device did allow a view of the last day as being somewhat normal — would that be the reality?
One near-fact and leaving that ‘science is a bit vague‘ sense behind — it will be much warmer.
Another round of research finds previous temperature predictions to be above previous expectations:
A new study suggests climate scientists may have underestimated the effect of greenhouse gases, with global temperatures now predicted to rise by between 1.4 and 3 degrees Celsius by 2050.
The study was published in the journal Nature Geoscience by a team of international scientists who ran 10,000 computer simulations of climate models in an attempt to explore the range of global warming predictions made by climate scientists.
The researchers found that while their results matched the predictions made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) at the lower end, they were higher than earlier predictions at the higher end.
…
“But it makes me think that people who are thinking about real-world problems, farmers, wine growers in Australia, people managing river catchments for instance, might want to have a look at some of these models to think about what … might plausibly happen, what sorts of changes they might plausibly have to manage for,” he said (Climate-change Professor David Frame at Victoria University of Wellington).
“So one of the real purposes of this is to give planners a chance to … think about scenarios for the future that are physically plausible, are internally consistent, which is an important property and potentially quite practical.”
The professor also doubles up on reality: “If people keep emitting fossil fuels in the way we expect…”
And this is to be expected for the US region: Decreasing snowpack in the western mountains; 5-20 percent increase in yields of rain-fed agriculture in some regions; increased frequency, intensity and duration of heat waves in cities that currently experience them.
Even worse for other parts of the planet, especially in the availability of drinking water.
Some of that shit is already happening — and why climate change is way-way-more than just being entertained.
As in time for young adult crazies — vampires or kids trying to kill one another.
From Climate Progress this morning:
The increase in global climate temperatures has raised concerns about the vampire bat species travelling from Mexico and South and Central America into the southern and central regions of Texas.
Carin Peterson, training and outreach coordinator of the Office of Environmental Health and Safety, said even if vampire bats are not making their appearance, Austin’s surrounding caves and popular bat attraction, Congress Avenue Bridge, already have their annual bat species.
“Biologists are paying attention to the warming climate and what potential impacts that could bring, including non-native wildlife, but this is not something that will likely happen within the next few years,” Peterson said.
‘Next few years…?‘
Just don’t go out without a turtleneck — so now, are you entertained?
Gas By Another Name
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Environment, Madness | Leave a Comment
Some joy from the Arctic Methane Emergency Group:
We declare there now exists an extremely high international security risk* from abrupt and runaway global warming being triggered by the end-summer collapse of Arctic sea ice towards a fraction of the current record and release of huge quantities of methane gas from the seabed.
Such global warming would lead at first to worldwide crop failures but ultimately and inexorably to the collapse of civilization as we know it.
This colossal threat demands an immediate emergency scale response to cool the Arctic and save the sea ice.
The latest available data indicates that a sea ice collapse is more than likely by 2015 and even possible this summer (2012).
Thus some measures to counter the threat have to be ready within a few months.
More from the Group, other climate studies, videos and reports can also be found here.
This methane is some way-bad shit — a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
From the UK’s Independent last December and a piece on the joint US-Russia cruise of the East Siberian Arctic seas.
Igor Semiletov of the International Arctic Research Centre at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, who led the expedition:
“Earlier we found torch-like structures like this but they were only tens of metres in diameter.
“This is the first time that we’ve found continuous, powerful and impressive seeping structures more than 1,000 metres in diameter.
“It’s amazing,” Dr Semiletov said.
“I was most impressed by the sheer scale and the high density of the plumes.
“Over a relatively small area we found more than 100, but over a wider area there should be thousands of them,” he said.
These science guys from all over the world figure there’s hundreds of millions of tons of this methane gas underneath the Arctic permafrost.
And like a lot of other climate-changing articles on studies/reports/findings, the Independent piece also carried the most-usually found phrase in stories of its kind: ‘More/quicker then previous studies/reports/findings anticipated.’
As such: Dr Semiletov’s team published a study in 2010 estimating that the methane emissions from this region were in the region of 8 million tons a year but the latest expedition suggests this is a significant underestimate of the true scale of the phenomenon.
As the earth continues to warm, the permafrost in the Arctic also starts to melt, which in turn allows this methane shit to bubble up to the surface (as described above as “plumes”) through what’s been called “chimneys” — seen in the drawing at the left — and the more heat, the bigger the release.
Two years ago, this process was already getting bad: “The amount of methane currently coming out of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is comparable to the amount coming out of the entire world’s oceans.”
The same thing down south in the Antarctic region — and this methane-release sequence is of the quick BOOM variety, as in not much happening, then pop.
(Illustration found here).
The permafrost methane is just fine where it is right now — everything’s cool until released by what scientists call a ‘trigger,’ and in this case, the trigger is the warming earth.
A 2008 study using history reported this heat could trigger an abrupt climate change because very little warming could unleash this trapped methane, and could happen fairly rapidly.
Key word here is abrupt: 1. Unexpectedly sudden; 2. Surprisingly curt; 3. Steeply inclined; and so forth.
Way back in 2004, the Union of Concerned Scientists: The term “abrupt climate change” describes changes in climate that occur over the span of years to decades, compared to the human-caused changes in climate that are occurring over the time span of decades to centuries.
Of course, this was before the real game changer in 2007 with the release of the UN’s IPCC report that determined that is was “unequivocal” the globe was warming, and, us humans were “very likely” the cause of it.
The report started a climate-change shit-storm which continues to this very minute — five years later and assholes still deny what’s now happening right outside their own windows.
One hopes, but…
Natalia’ Shakhova, a colleague at the International Arctic Research Centre at the University of Alaska Fairbanks — from the Independent story:
“I am concerned about this process, I am really concerned. “
But no-one can tell the timescale of catastrophic releases.
“There is a probability of future massive releases might occur within the decadal scale, but to be more accurate about how high that probability is, we just don’t know,” Dr Shakova said.
“Methane released from the Arctic shelf deposits contributes to global increase and the best evidence for that is the higher concentrastion of atmospheric methane above the Arctic Ocean,” she said.
What prompted this particular post was this particular story this morning from the BBC:
An eminent UK engineer is suggesting building cloud-whitening towers in the Faroe Islands as a “technical fix” for warming across the Arctic.
Scientists told UK MPs this week that the possibility of a major methane release triggered by melting Arctic ice constitutes a “planetary emergency.”
…
Wave energy pioneer Stephen Salter has shown that pumping seawater sprays into the atmosphere could cool the planet.
…
Towers would be constructed, simplified versions of what has been planned for ships.
In summer, seawater would be pumped up to the top using some kind of renewable energy, and out through the nozzles that are now being developed at Edinburgh University, which achieve incredibly fine droplet size.
I’ve done posts on this terrible accident/event-waiting-to-happen before — and it’s frightening no one seems to be paying much attention to what’s already happening to the earth’s climate, much less the near future, causing Nina Federoff, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, to proclaim last month she’s “scared to death” of the serious lack of serious concern for what’s happening to the planet’s environment.
So thusly, the BBC ends its piece:
Depending on the size and location, Prof Salter said that in the order of 100 towers would be needed to counteract Arctic warming.
However, no funding is currently on the table for cloud-whitening.
A proposal to build a prototype ship for about £20m found no takers, and currently development work is limited to the lab.
Cow by any other word.
‘Deranged, Crazy Person’
Filed Under Bullshit, Madness, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
Mitt Romney gave his most-rich thoughts yesterday on the massacre of Afghan civilians over the weekend: Asked whether he agrees with conservative commentators who say the U.S. should accelerate the pullout, Romney said Monday that he “wouldn’t jump to a new policy” because of a “deranged, crazy person.”
Crazed, of course.
The US Army staff sergeant who perpetrated the slaughter was indeed carrying a shitload of mental baggage, but the incident way-underscores the horror in a decade’s worth of killing children in far off lands which has created a legion of deranged, crazy people.
(Illustration — Salvador Dali’s ‘Soft Self-portrait With Fried Bacon‘ — found here).
First and foremost:
“In making the case for war, the Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent.
As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed.”
“It is my belief that the Bush Administration was fixated on Iraq, and used the 9/11 attacks by al Qa’ida as justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein.
To accomplish this, top Administration officials made repeated statements that falsely linked Iraq and al Qa’ida as a single threat and insinuated that Iraq played a role in 9/11.
Sadly, the Bush Administration led the nation into war under false pretenses.
This the June 2008 findings of the US Senate Intelligence Committee , which under sane, rational rules would have sent a shitload of high-in-the-government assholes to the jailhouse.
However, just as with all those banksters that brought the world’s financial house down that same year, not one of those responsible has spent even a second behind bars — talk about crazed and what’s-up-with-that-shit.
One wonders at that staff sergeant’s state of mind when he seemingly methodically killed 16 people, including nine children and an entire family, all 11 members, in a total nutcase of an incident.
A clinical psychiatrist told HuffPost the guy might have gone ‘berserk‘ and lost all mental capacity as berserkers “have this curious quality of icy and flaming rage; all they want to do is destroy, they want nothing to get in the way of their unmediated destruction and killing, and they are truly insensitive to pain. They are totally beyond the society of their own military forces and disconnected from them.”
The sergeant’s entire life will soon be an open book, but we may never know what happened to snap his brain.
Three tours of the nightmare inferno of Iraq might be a clue, but there’s been so much of this ‘berserk‘ shit in the last few years, vets are afraid of the backlash.
From military.com:
“It’s a huge concern,” said Matt Gallagher, an Iraq War vet and senior fellow at Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.
“The only thing missing right now is a powerful visual, but I’m sure someone is going to find a creepy photo of the sergeant in question posing with guns, and that will be blasted everywhere.”
That perception affects the “99 percent of veterans who never have committed any crimes or unnecessary violence,” Gallagher said.
“[It affects] not only job searches, but how friends and family interact with them,” he said.
One must, however, remember this from a non-indicted war criminal: Rumsfeld paused, asked Wilson to repeat the question, then finally replied, “You go to war with the army you have.” Besides, he added, “You can have all the armor in the world on a tank and it can be blown up.”
Juan Cole offers his thoughts this morning:
It should be remembered that frequency and duration of deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan were substantially increased by then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
As a result of the Bush administration’s frenetic pursuit of multiple wars abroad, the small professional military of the US was put under enormous strain.
Deployments were increased from a year to 18 months, and multiple deployments became common.
Because of the prevalence of roadside bombs as an insurgent weapon of choice, brain injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan sky-rocketed.
The murky military occupations of countries where young US troops had little local knowledge produced paranoia and widespread Islamophobia, sometimes reinforced by evangelical hatemongering among the troops. British officers who served with Americans in Iraq were shocked and appalled at the sheer racism they often encountered among their US colleagues, complaining that Americans viewed locals as Untermenschen, a lesser race as the Nazis would have put it.
Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome often went untreated.
Used and discarded in other words.
If these dumb-ass wars aren’t terminated and US military veterans treated for all sorts of war trauma, most-likely more of this kinds of delayed horror will happen.
And who’s the deranged, crazy person?
Terminal Death
Filed Under Bullshit, Madness, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
Understatement on the crazed shootings yesterday in Afghanistan: It is believed that, some time before the killings, the soldier suffered a nervous breakdown.
In a bad situation getting worse, the incident only makes it near-imperative the US and NATO get the shit out of that country, and like way-now.
US peoples know, but the powers-that-be don’t, or don’t care: Sixty percent of Americans believe the war in Afghanistan is not worth its costs, and nearly the same number advocate an early US pullout from the country, a new poll showed.
(Illustration found here).
Although on the surface apparently, the shooting hasn’t yet stirred the ugly pot of unrest, but it might be just building up steam.
From the New York Times this morning:
Early on Monday, with the attacker in the custody of American forces, the public mood in Kandahar and Kabul seemed subdued with no immediate sign of protests on the streets.
But social networking sites such as Facebook and Afghan blogs were filled with angry postings, some of them accompanied by graphic photographs of what appeared to be children slain in the attack.
“This is a clear crime and will only add to the people who hate American in Afghanistan,” said one online posting.
“You can’t give their lives back to them with apologies.”
The shooter, an US Army staff sergeant, had from all indications, more than a passing experience in the ways of war:
Another senior military official said the sergeant was 38 and married with two children.
He had served three tours of duty in Iraq, this official said, and had been deployed to Afghanistan for the first time in December.
Yet another military official said he has served in the Army for 11 years.
War effects everybody and these George Jr.-affiliated conflicts seem to pack a wallow with those actually doing the killing — the shooter yesterday was from Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state, a place in 2010 considered “the most troubled base in the military” by the military newspaper, Stars and Stripes.
Overall, suicide in the US military jumped 80 percent from 2004 to 2008 — four real-bad years for a lot of killing.
Two years ago, four Lewis-McChord soldiers were convicted in the deliberate thrill killings of three Afghan civilians, and the military would like to sweep all that bad shit under some kind of happy rug in order to save money.
CBS News:
In the past five years, about 300 patients at Madigan Army Medical Center at the base had their PTSD diagnoses reversed by a forensic psychiatry team, The Seattle Times reported this month.
The Army is reviewing whether those doctors were influenced by how much a PTSD diagnosis can cost, in terms of a pension and other benefits.
At Coffee Strong, a coffee shop near the base that doubles as a resource center for soldiers seeking to leave the Army, executive director Jorge Gonzalez said he was not surprised the shooter was from the base.
“Joint Base Lewis McChord has been bombarded with bad stories,” said Gonzales, who served in the Army in Iraq in 2006.
“We’re not seeing the true costs of war, we’re seeing soldiers committing suicide … murder and domestic violence.”
Richardson said the vast majority of the tens of thousands of soldiers at the base were professionals.
“It’s unfortunate that these things keeping ending up at Joint Base Lewis-McChord,” he said.
“I promise you, not even a percent of those people are like this, but unfortunately it keeps happening.
Things like this will continue until there is no more war.”
The war on terror sucks the terror homeward.
Despite reality, President Obama continued the official line of bullshit: “This incident is tragic and shocking, and does not represent the exceptional character of our military and the respect that the United States has for the people of Afghanistan.”
Barry, are you out of your mind.
Even as he meets with his UK counterpart today.
This nugget from the Guardian:
Such is the bleak reality facing Barack Obama and David Cameron when they sit down in Washington to discuss Afghanistan on Monday.
The shared narrative they have presented to their nations on how the Afghan war will end has been relentlessly eroded by the death toll among their soldiers and the daily headlines about the Karzai government’s seemingly incorrigible venality, like the Wall Street Journal report over the weekend that the US-funded Afghan air force was using its planes to smuggle narcotics and illegal weapons around the country.
Afghanistan is indeed the ‘graveyard of empires‘ and the US is most-likely at the end of its run as the world’s top dog — what a fitting place to end the American Dream.
Hopefully, not, but yet….