Climate Change is Terror

 

I have never seen climate carnage on the scale of the floods here in Pakistan.

As our planet continues to warm, all countries will increasingly suffer losses and damage from climate beyond their capacity to adapt.

This is a global crisis. It demands a global response. pic.twitter.com/5nqcJIMoIA

— António Guterres (@antonioguterres) September 10, 2022

 I know this is a hell of a message to send on the 21st anniversary of 9/11, but I can't hear the skirling bagpipes deliver "Amazing Grace" one more time without thinking about the future pressures of what colonialism and global commodification of the planet will mean for future generations. We've been looking at the war on terror as about a lot of things, but about oil and water, not so much--maybe we should. About self-determination, and the world corporations would leave us to--not so much. Maybe we should.  We were lost, but will we be found? We were blind, but will we see? 

We tend to want to put a face on our terrors and consider the villain as "the other". Nature, in its raw power and inexorableness, seems to us to act in ways so removed from our capability to harness it--but we harnessed the atom. We can make use of the energies of water and wind and even capture lightning in a bottle and the sun in a mirror. I think we should be able to understand that over 30 million people are displaced and maybe thousands have died or will, and a third of a large country is under water, destroying crops and homes and livelihoods, because for over a hundred years, we, humanity, did something to the atmosphere that made storms more potent and the future more uncertain. 

Blessed are the Peacemakers

WATCH: President Trump says that he could win the 18-year Afghan War in 10 days, because he has plans that could wipe Afghanistan off the face of the Earth and kill 10,000,000 people, but "I don't want to go that route." pic.twitter.com/IftsRmBjpG

— NBC News (@NBCNews) July 22, 2019

A lot of people would tend to doubt the diplomatic chops of someone who suggested they've given thought to ending a war by glassing 10 million people, but then decided it wasn't fair, and this is probably why India's government wasted no time in responding to the idea floated by Trump that he could mediate a resolution between that country and Pakistan regarding Kashmir to say, albeit more diplomatically, "like hell he will."

Which is really just as well. There are definite reasons to doubt his understanding of the political, geographic, and religious considerations involved in a meaningful dialogue, in addition to his undiplomatic personal tendencies. Even if he does think he might rather like a Nobel Prize someday.

Aaaannnd...He's Still Booming!

I think from a foreign policy standpoint, this is really not helpful--but then he gets almost too, too, entirely "Donald Trump" even for Twitter:

Trump's "button" is so bigger than Kim Jong Un's, the Fake News Awards will be Monday (next week? so soon?) at "5:00 o'clock" (has he forgotten how to tell time?) and p.s., also watch Fox News. Today was like a double LP of Trump's greatest Twitter hits.

This is not the behavior of a responsible adult, let alone a president. He is a danger to himself and others. And the GOP leadership supports him.

UPDATE: He deleted the Tweet about Sean Hannity, but probably because he's not supposed to be promoting television shows as president or something like that, and not from the shame of watching Hannity.

I'm Sure this Won't Happen Every Day

Eyebrows might be raised by PEOTUS Donald Trump's phone call with Taiwanese leader President Tsai Ing-wen because it suggests either a break with current US foreign policy or a lack of knowledge of it (or, maybe, just self-interest). It's really hard to say, isn't it?

And that's the problem. This is, after all, a person whose advisers assured Japanese officials that they should not take things Trump says in public literally. It leaves you with very little idea how to take him, at all. So when he speaks with leaders in Pakistan or Kazakhstan, there is a certain alarm...

How do leaders around the world decide to "take" what he says, publically and privately?  I guess one thing they could do is keep an eye on Trump's business interests and finagle accordingly. (There is no trust so blind as one the entire business-pages reading world can see.) How does Trump "take" what they say, in turn? Who knows?

This is not how any of this is supposed to work.

Blasphemy: You Know It When You See It--Right?

So, I have been following with some interest the protests occurring in some Moslem communities against the Charlie Hebdo "blasphemous" cartoons, because it just strikes me as so...forced. People are being killed in these protests. If protests from Karachi to Algiers are to mean anything, they are only to remind us that the compulsion to ban and kill to protect a ban on free speech exists all over, and that the sentiments of the attackers didn't come from nowhere. The idea that speech--ironic speech, critical speech, vulgar speech, should be met with death, is a sentiment enshrined in some nations' very being. Which does nothing to hallow it.

Take Pakistan, where very recently over a hundred schoolchildren were killed by extremists, whose legislature seems to be mouthing the extremists line. "Death to blasphemers?" Like, death to Asia Bibi, whose alleged blasphemy charge is very thin indeed? Like, death to Veena Malik?  Like death to Rimsha Masih--a mentally challenged child falsely accused?

The blasphemy laws in Pakistan are clearly arbitrary and can be politically motivated and terribly subjective. How does anyone look at lawmakers cheering the terrorists who killed people in France as anything but terrorist sympathizers--as being murder-minded and encouraging to people who feel this way?

It very much reminds me of the Justice Potter Stewart  definition of obscenity: "I know it when I see it." Which is subjective enough to do no one any good.

The Pakistani Taliban Are Full of It.

I'm not the only person to realize this, but making a statement that killing over 100 schoolchildren is because of revenge over the Pakistan military's assistance to the west is, not to put to fine a point on this--bullshit. The apparent statement by a Taliban spokesperson:

Taliban spokesman Muhammad Umar Khorasani said that the Taliban had targeted the army's school "because the government is targeting our families and females," and that "we want them to feel the pain."

is particularly galling when the Taliban are being targeted, to the extent they are, because among their hobbies is attacking schools and targeting women and children. It is especially hard for us not to take note that these are the bastards that killed Benazir Bhutto (having killed 140 people in the Karachi bombing attempt to kill her before the attack that succeeded) and tried to kill Malala Yousafsai--an assault by anti-intellectual cowards who shot a young girl in the head. That's what they've got. And it would be ever so much easier to spare a moment of sympathy for their poor families--were it not that they've indicated these are, in their considered opinion and actual practice,  quite legitimate targets. And considering that they have intended to make people hurt--no surprise, they do. If there was little sympathy for the Taliban among western-looking Pakistanis before, though--what should there be for them now?

What they have done was revolting. The families of those slain in this assault have my sympathy.