Magnets-How Do They Work?

 

Trump: All I know about magnets is this, give me a glass of water, let me drop it on the magnets, that’s the end of the magnets pic.twitter.com/TopK4BRsOq

— Acyn (@Acyn) January 6, 2024

Look, just take a kitchen magnet and get it wet.  It will still work. I don't know what he thinks will happen.  I don't know where this thing came from. Anyway, he thinks gas sells for $8 a gallon. He has said people need to show their ID to buy groceries. He doesn't know how things work, which is why he also says things like he was going to sell US oil and gas to Europe to pay the national debt.  He has a real problem with windmills. He just kind of thinks everyone else also does not know how things work and will also think what he is saying is great and smart. 

He still seems to not know how bills become laws or what branch of government does what or how he got indicted four times. It's very concerning.

Judge Chutkan and Jack Smith were recently swatted. It's really hard for me to reconcile going out of one's way to terrorize people to try and get one's favored candidate for office clear of a lot of very serious charges with that person also being a transparent idiot. 

Climate Sunday: Water Everywhere, Except Where We Want it

 

The UN convened a global conference on water--which is something absolutely basic to life on earth. I shouldn't actually have to say something as dull as "Water is important to life" but apparently, this kind of true thing isn't obvious to everyone. I have it top of mind at the moment because thousands of gallons of latex-related chemicals just got dumped into the Delaware Rive late Friday and we are finding out now that we probably want to drink bottled water here in Philadelphia. 

Water is necessary to the entire food chain, and we threaten to tip weird chemicals into it all the time. Even from fracking and oil spills and whatnot. And that's a real problem, Because we're already overtaxing our aquifers, and have been for a while. And we really can't afford to fuck up our drinking water.

So says the CSO of PepsiCo. They bottle a lot of water and soft drinks and looking at a timeline of TWO THE FUCK YEARS! for half the world to be in scarcity for drinking water is very uncomfortable. It's their business, and they are looking at the logistics of transporting water to where it isn't. 

This isn't just about thirst-quenching, though--it's about agriculture. Right now, Argentina is having an insane drought. Just a total loss on all major crops, with devastating effects for feeding livestock (this is a glimpse from last year). Some can say there's no obvious relationship to global climate change, but some areas have gotten wetter--like the floods of Pakistan, and the barrage of atmospheric rivers that have buffeted California. And it is devastating. In California, crops are wiped out by flooding and a whole lake appears where once was farmland.  So while we lose a Lake Mead in one place, and a Lake Tulare comes back--but no one can plan for that happening in a whole minute!

It's really no joke--the Great Salt Lake is not so much, and the Great Lakes themselves are becoming Meh Lakes. And the solutions to this problem aren't going to be easy at all.

Combine this with the realization that increased CO2 isn't actually going to be the monster bonus to global greening, and you have a potential agricultural nightmare. Some crops never start, some drown. And don't get me started on what is happening to our pollinators, because if I start thinking about the problems of the birds and the bees, I won't sleep tonight. 

Anyway--we should probably ship chemicals very carefully, use fossil fuels less, conserve water religiously and not be greedy arseholes as a society. It's literally life and death. Like, literally.  Because you can't drink oil and you can't eat coal. 

While We Wait for Trump's Arrest, The IPCC Report is Dire

 

I never wanted to spend my senior years on a dying planet, but that's what it looks like to me. The supposed leadership of the most industrialized countries are doing the very least to curb global warming, and have even decided, it seems, to promote the short-term benefits of fossil fuel usage for their electoral cycle (yes, I'm criticizing Biden over the Willow project). 

We're looking at the results of climate change in the eye all the time--take the weird winter of California's discontent: that isn't some freak global cooling, but a predictable weirding of the weather because patterns are disrupted. But we are still stuck with the effects of warming in the usually cooler places. We can see the devastation of our ecosystems in the deaths of fish due to heat waves in Australia. The southern hemisphere has been through it this past season. 

Climate change isn't predicting the future, but describing our present, now. And we are still jaded and in denial. Lives will be lost if action is not taken, but a look around social media indicates that loads of people still believe climate science is some kind of hoax. A conspiracy theory. 

I'm just a D-list blogger--I don't expect what I say to gain any traction and actually, my climate-related posts aren't even the ones that do any numbers. But what I do know is, changing people's POV via messaging and "flooding the zone" can be done--because the denialists have been doing it all this time. Solutions exist and funding them (like actually just fully comping changeover to solar energy or heat pumps) are within the reach of government actions. (Programs totally exist and are inadequate for many homeowners.) 

We can do more, and more aggressively. The political will has to be there, and the idea that the fossil fuel industry and the denialist-propagandist complex (like Fox News, who are known liars) needs to be called out for being the problem that they are. 

I think we still have the opportunity to make a better future. But that opportunity can't be pissed away--it must be vigorously and intelligently seized. 

Murder Built into the Margin

 

For years, Exxon sowed doubt about climate change. But its scientists were projecting warming with remarkable accuracy. https://t.co/EXegkcp1kp

— NYT Science (@NYTScience) January 14, 2023

I've been aware that Exxon knew about climate change and covered it up for some time (they weren't alone in this--they just fought admitting it harder) but every time I think about the missed opportunity, something tightens in my stomach: 

They could have invested in renewable energy early on and cornered valuable tech markets, putting themselves in a position to not just continue profiting from fossil fuels while the environment suffered, but to capitalize on saving it. Instead, they went on as if they weren't contributing to disasters, extinctions, death. And they lied about it.

It was as if they could not consider the possibility of making money without throwing anyone under the bus. As if the idea of using the foresight they were granted to do the right thing was unthinkable. Knowing, and doing nothing differently, feels like more than depraved indifference. It feels like the allowance of death and devastation were built into the business model. 

I try to be cynical and I'm not getting any younger, but if it doesn't still knock the wind out of me a bit when I consider it.

They absolutely knew climate change was happening, and threw their money into denial, not into trying to ameliorate it. Like knowing one might be selling poisonous candy to babies and just changing one's marketing to make the candy more desireable--shouldn't there be a penalty? 

The Russian Mobilization Here in the US

 

After suggesting the US blew up the pipelines, Tucker starts listing possible options for the Russian retaliation pic.twitter.com/XvmHolSSg4

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 28, 2022

There are fifty-somethings being re-enlisted back in Russia, past their prime, grizzled, about to be re-introduced to materiel that they were handling back in their previous service. There are young men, many of them from the various ethnic hinterlands of the Russian Federation, who will be mobilized with barely days of basic training--hardly enough time to acquaint themselves with concepts like, "Here's your left foot, here's your right foot, this is the end the bullets go in, and this is the end the bullets come out." And it's sketchy how well the bullets come out from rusted over rifles, anyway. 

But let me pretend for minute that I was as full of Putinist cope as occasional Tucker Carlson guest Col. Doug McGregor--isn't it likely that Russia is making their mobilization look like a clusterfuck so that everyone will be taken unawares by the crafty scheme of--

Sending underprepared humans who don't want to be fighting a war in Ukraine to either be killed or surrender ignominiously?  Slowing the Ukraine advance to reclaim lost territory by stacking Russian bodies in their way? 

I'm not seeing a strategy in that, and I don't see a strategy in a US led false flag damaging Russian pipelines to Europe to trigger a NATO response. It seems like it's been Russia who has been suggesting that much of northern Europe couldn't do without their fuel--but is it not worth it to consider that dealing with Russia is financing genocide anyway? Maybe Russia shouldn't think they have all of Europe's ass over a barrel, or a pipeline. I don't think it matters. For the sake of our democratic ideals, for the sake of acknowledging sovereignty and rejecting bullies, there is no question but to support Ukraine. 

I don't know what the effect of maybe 300,000 warm bodies (for however long they stay warm) joining the fray is (if they get there, given how many are trying to leave for Mongolia, Finland, Georgia, etc. ) I suspect when the bodies start returning home, regardless of the mobile crematoria and the idea that field deaths are a part of op sec, as well as propaganda, and the people know for sure that Mad Vlad decided to fuck over at least a generation to stay in power and to see a stupid vision of Russian greatness come to fruition. And failed and kept failing. And offered bodies to fail some more.  

The one thing that Russia has effectively mobilized, I guess by their own media paying attention to him, is Tucker Carlson's mouth. Of course, he's never facing bullets. I just wonder at what juncture he faces facts. Or when Fox News decides his version of the news is a perversion of it and can't take his lies anymore. 

Nothing trivial, I hope.

 

An oil facility directly responsible for the flow of #Russian oil to Europe is on fire in #Bryansk, #Russia. Next to it, just a few km away, a Russian military base is on fire.

Glory to #Ukraine✊🏻🇺🇦.

No typo this time.

Videos below. pic.twitter.com/jVQbahezgx

— Canadian Ukrainian Volunteer 🇺🇦🇨🇦✊🏻 (@CanadianUkrain1) April 25, 2022

Lest I sound flip, obviously such fires are very bad for the envoronment. There are also forest fires in Siberia, but for some reason, the usual firefighters are not on hand to put them out. I think they should be re-deployed, but what do I know? 

 UPDATE: Moscow's ambassador to the US says that further arms supplies to Ukraine from the US are going to escalate the conflict and in other news, when I was small and wanted things I wasn't going to get, my dad would ask me "What's it like to want?" Russia is going to escalate from killing women and babies and flattening cities to what? Has escalating even done anything for them so far?

UPDATE: Lavrov wants people to know he thinks NATO is involved in a proxy war and nukes aren't off the table. I'd like to ask him who he thinks started the war and whether he's aware if anyone else has them. No one is as afraid of Russia as a conventional power as they were before they decided to engage in a short bloody little going on months-long war in which they've lost as much as other counties have (yes, like the US) in wars nearly twenty years long. It lacks a certain punch. 

The Jumper Reality

 

Mario Draghi: “Do you prefer peace or the air conditioning on? That’s the question we should ask ourself”. pic.twitter.com/ErT6E5X4aq

— David Carretta (@davcarretta) April 6, 2022

There is a similar complaint--would we be willing to freeze if Russian oil demanded it? Like, seriously--is it worth freezing not to support genocide? Is it worth putting on a jumper and extra blankets?  When portable crematoria might be disappearing the evidence of bodies in Mariupol? So, now that it is spring, and we don't need to think about the cold as much, what if summer was a good reason to partially fund genocide? 

I would say, no. The temperature is never a reason to actually ever support genocide. Supporting genocide is always bad. Air conditioning can also be contributing to climate change so we should think good and hard about how we achieve our very temporary tolerable temperatures, and what we are willing to sacrifice for that limited comfort. 

We aren't presented with peace or AC, however. We are presented with genocide and an eventual desert called peace, and the future where we are always getting our commodified energy resources from monsters unless we try to do better and fully engage in renewable energy and become really self-sufficient. Anywhere. 

I like the idea of energy that isn't monster-fueled and doesn't fuck up the environment. We can do it. We seriously can. 

Gaslighting and Gas Prices

 

The above screenshot from Twitter (because I don't think his account is liable to stay up forever as this situation progresses) shows Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and the following statement: "The goal of Russia's special military operation is to stop any war that could take place on Ukraine territory or that could start from there. "

Great shades of "We had to destroy the village in order to save it." The kids who don't remember the Cold War might not know that one, as well, but they will probably recognize a few bars of what else the Russian narrative is trying to lay down--the potential of a dirty bomb made in Ukraine (if I knew that was coming, I'd have baked you all a yellow cake) and biowarfare labs (but were they dangerously on wheels, I wonder?).  There's even a laptop! (Is it Hunter Biden, secret Burisma NATO undercover spy's laptop? inquiring minds might indeed venture to ask at this idiotic point in time.)

It almost feels like the laziness of the Russian disinfo spree is to throw the US's own war lies back in our face, as if to say, well, why can't we do it as well? To me, it makes no difference. I was as opposed in 2003 to stupid big countries laying waste to smaller countries who didn't deserve it, so they aren't fucking me up, any.  And actually, I kind of did want the Bush Administration to get their feet held to the fire and still do, because of torture and indiscriminate killing of civilians and use of mercs like Blackwater and all that. I still do.

I was a baby during Vietnam and I still feel some kind of way about it. My father's working class neighborhood all went and a lot them had health issues including mental health issues from that. They drank, they got cancer, they lived recklessly sometimes and my dad doesn't have a lot of friends still alive in his early 70's. One of my mom's brothers went and he was a bad alcoholic and died in his 60s and I don't think those things weren't unconnected. I don't like stupid wars. They kill human beings, sometimes for a long time after we are still counting the death toll of them. 

Anyway, it isn't about NATO and it wasn't about WMDs and it isn't about preventing a war because honey, if this isn't a war I don't know what one looks like, and it had nothing to do with denazification because these assholes sent an actual neo-Nazi group into Ukraine. Probably to kill their Jewish president. 

It might make more sense for Putin to activate his deep-rooted sense of imperialism because Ukraine's pipelines exist. I mean, he doesn't have any use for the people. But just like the Iraq/Kuwait issue, there are other equities to consider? 

So with all this disinfo and intentional bullshit in the ether, this obviously one-sided decision to wage actual war by Putin's government and all that, and what are our journalists going to talk about? The gas prices going up like 50 cents over the past week. And isn't that a Biden problem? Let me turn to my bete noir, Sara Carter, for why this is fucking stupid. 

Federal land is already open for drilling, and all the portions of Keystone that bring oil from Canada to the US have already been built (and that oil is low-grade and not even fit for use in fuel anyway.)

Also the U.S. is a net energy exporter.

Learn what you're talking about. https://t.co/YlZvMgDy6R

— Matthew Chapman (@fawfulfan) March 7, 2022

She is literally wrong on every point. US oil companies can drill here, drill now, as conservatives have been saying since the Obama Administration, but they would rather price gouge. They are managing a finite and climate-disruptive resource in its end-stage.  Keystone XL isn't the problem. Whether we sanctioned Nordstream wasn't the Russian problem. Our addiction to fossil fuels on a dying planet and our love of money over human lives is. 

I'm getting sick of the gaslighting. I'm sick of the gaslit foo dogs of war. When you talk about scarcity--talk about renewables and why it didn't have to be this way. When you talk about Putin's invasion and war against Ukraine, talk about how it probably boils down to greed and backfired because Putin and his kleptocrat state never bothered to adapt to the 21st century, but we all have to. 

Every part of this debacle is everything I hate. Lies, greed, death and massive human stupidity. 

TWGB: Fear, Smear, Conspiracy and Obstruction

The place I want to start with in this post is the law: our Constitution is a document that protects people. That is to say, it enumerates certain rights for the people, and defines the roles of government. You don't want a government that does too much--that reaches into people's lives obtrusively, that invades privacy, that needlessly judges personal choices that do not violate the law. But you also want accountability: government should have an aspect of accountability and dependability. If the social fabric has a warp (to the backdrop of history's woof), the rules are it. 

Trump likes to say that he's transparent. He's not transparent in actuality: in his person, he is opaque and likewise dense. But he believes that he has clothed himself in a dress of transparency by having posed himself as a straight-shooter or truth-saying SOB, or by merely repeating endlessly the formula "I am the most transparent..." And yet, that transparent cloth he drapes himself in is the Emperor's New Clothes. It is transparent because it lacks either warp or woof. It lacks threads. He is not clothed in laws, or history, or accountability, or tradition. His bare-naked ass is therefore covered by so many lickspittles. 

Enter the whistleblower, who, like the child in the story, says what everyone was fearing to say--the emperor's ass is out! 

So tell me, do: does who says the very true thing matter more than whether the message was very true? 

We are presented with a distraction, engaged by Trump out loud and personally in front of many people: he says he had some dirt on Lt. Col. Vindman, and also, he wants to know who the whistleblower is. Sen. Graham has said he'd out the whistleblower. (Outing people against their will has never been something I've been a strong proponent of, TBH.) And Sen. Rand Paul, son of Ron, claims the name of the whistleblower is already known, and he would release it. You know, unless the media wants to. Which really sounds to me like an effort to smoke someone out for a right bit of witness-tampering and intimidation. 

You know: crimes. Because all this, the threats against an anonymous person who only pointed out something they thought was hinky and should be investigated? Is a crime. What is not a crime? Doing due diligence to be sure that the government is held accountable and does its job well. Smearing people or causing them to feel threatened in their jobs or in their person is not great practice--it's basically a sign that the person doing that knows they have no other defense but bullying. That's the kind of thing Trump has left in his pocket: smear and fear. And conspiracy with those who still think the power is in his corner, and not on the side of truth or the law. And obstruction to try to prevent any further truth from coming to light. 

TWGB: So, Guaranteed Frauds, Right?

There is a limit, I think, to how much news a person can freaking absorb in a damn day. Two associates of Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, were arrested at Dulles with one-way tickets to Vienna.  They had travelled to Vienna on business all the time, apparently. It's where Dmitry Firtash is residing. Why, it's completely normal to go to Vienna! Rudy Giuliani was just about to go there himself! It's probably something that came up in conversation when Giuliani met with them the Day before when they had lunch at the Trump Hotel in Washington. You know, the day before they got arrested at the airport! For campaign finance violations. Could happen to anyone! 

It was just a bad day for Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman. They made it all the way to the airport! And SDNY wouldn't have had to have even rushed everything if they weren't apparently attempting to flee the country? The rotten luck!

So, what kind of campaign finance violations? The kind where so much foreign money is pouring into a Trump SuperPAC and also to GOP politicians and it seems to have influenced the removal of the US Ambassador to Ukraine. You could say they're the type of people who like to give in a world where so many people like to receive. How influential were these guys? Well, it seems like they dined with the president and met all kinds of people. (Trump says he doesn't know them, but he says that about a lot of people he tries to distance himself from.)

Anyway, it's the funniest thing. Giuliani was working for Mr. Parnas' company, Fraud Guarantee,* to provide legal advice and stuff, but Parnas was also kind of working for Giuliani to get information that "proved" Ukraine was behind the DNC hack and to also dirty up Hunter Biden. It sounds all very symbiotic. You know, like intestinal flora. 

It's really striking that all this has such a Ukrainian flavor, what with Trump's completely perfect phone call still reverberating in the news and all (who really knew a little old phone call could be so alarming!) but I don't know.  It really seems to hammer home that the attempts to get the information on Ukraine involvement in the 2016 election and to investigate Biden were very serious (not joking) and that Trump considered removing the ambassador a favor to his good friends in Ukraine. 

Because that's the thing with Trump's "jokes"--they can be acted on by people in, say, Ukraine or maybe China, and it's hard to say he didn't have a constructive intent to collude with them in accomplishing goals favorable to himself. 

Naturally, because of the impeachment inquiry, there guys are so subpoenaed, as is Energy Secretary Rick Perry regarding Naftogaz. I'm guessing Giuliani should consider himself also under investigation. The neat thing about the arrest and the subpoena for Fruman and Parnas though is that they were asked nicely to turn over some documents to the House regarding what they've been doing with Giuliani, and their lawyer (a former lawyer of Trumps!) John Dowd, sent a letter explaining that the House was getting squat. It claims attorney-client privilege, maybe?

I mean, they were working with a lot of attorneys, right? A lot of attorneys were working for them.  (Weirdly enough, Paul Manafort's lawyers represented them Thursday). And the work they were doing for Mr. Giuliani was in connection with his representation of President Trump. I dunno. I think they will have to comply with the subpoenas but I am not a lawyer myself nor do I like to play one on the blog. I hear there may be some crime-fraud exception to the whole attorney privilege thing anyway. But heck, if they can't say they were helping with Trump's "case" maybe they can claim executive privilege since they seem to have been advising the "shadow policy" on Ukraine that Fiona Hill is supposed to be testifying about next week. 

* This is such a good name for a company--Fraud Guarantee. Does it do what it says on the label? The mind reels.

Climate Monday: A Humble Media Suggestion

Trump White House issues climate change report undermining its own policy https://t.co/SZb2vFpdJg

— Vox (@voxdotcom) November 26, 2018

I don't think that the narrative that the Trump Administration is necessarily "hiding" their National Climate Assessment report is correct because I don't think news cycles really have a "Friday news dump" lacuna anymore, but I definitely agree that the actions of the administration serve to undermine it (or as they probably see it, the damned scientists are trying to undermine them). But this isn't something that's just peculiar to President Trump's anti-intellectual, conspiracy-minded, staring up at eclipses sort of nonsense. This is a problem we specifically have with US conservatives, and sadly, with how our media screws up reporting fact-based issues "for balance".

Take the Sunday shows. It's not hard for the chatty journalism format of the designated serious newsy shows to work in a "Friday news dump" item and give it a going over. Meet the Press, the ancient and venerable, bothered to mention it.

And they fucked it up. They let Senator Mike Lee get away with being stupid regarding the financial aspects of the substance of the report. The report specifically addressed the fact-based reality that real economic damage would be the fall-out of climate change, but libertarian Lee was able to burble that he saw no policy proposals that would not be economically damaging.

Let me rephrase that: is it that he sees no proposals that immediately address climate change that also permit entrepreneurs to capitalize on the deal? First off, that's short-sighted, but second, the turning a buck is their problem, not as a law-maker, his. His job would be legislation aimed at mitigating the effects for the safety and welfare of his constituents, which might not always be direct regulations (if he's so ideologically opposed), but could mean tax penalties or credits as a carrot and stick incentivization scheme to encourage better environmental practices. He doesn't seem to understand the question. He is, unquestionably, not a scientist--but you'd think he might understand the policy end a bit more, no?

Questions regarding the report were also put to regular MTP panel-member Danielle Pletka, of the AEI think tank. Her answers were also god-awful stupid.  And of course, she is not a scientist, and the AEI think tank she hails from gets a not-inconsiderable subsidy from Exxon, and maybe for all I know, other fossil fuel companies. This merits a disclaimer, I would think. But that MTP asked Pletka, and not, say, Tom Steyer, who was also on the program and actually has a committed and informed point of view on climate change, but was only asked about the 2020 horse race (really?) is, well.

Stupid.

But this isn't the worst stupidest thing. CNN actually pays my former senator, Rick Santorum of PA, for opinions about things when there is no evidence that he is actually, in any respect, a person with worthwhile and well-considered opinions. He actually fatuously repeated the dumb thing that Trump said about forest-raking, even though, once again, California does not manage all the forests, but the Federal government is in charge of most of it, and no, no one ever rakes forests because that is fucking stupid. Droughts are about less rain, and raking would actually pull more moisture out of the forest floor, and, you know, just read a book or something if you don't know why that is stupid. In the history of ever, there has never been a time when forest fires were managed by troops of people sent out into tens of thousands of acreage of trees, raking up shit.

But he also said a funny thing regarding climate change and the scientists who study it, to wit: they propound that global warming is real because of the sweet cash involved:

"I think the point that Donald Trump made is true, which is, uh… Look, if there was no climate change we’d have a lot of scientists looking for work," Santorum said. "The reality is that a lot of these scientists are driven by the money they receive, and of course they don’t receive money from corporations and Exxon and the like. Why? Because they’re not allowed to because it’s tainted, but they can receive (money) from people who support their agenda and that, I believe, is what’s really going on here."

Is he saying the people who support the thing where the established companies with all the money are going to have to make less money are somehow offering more compensation than the companies with all the money?* Because that is either really stupid or exactly what somebody who has been getting fossil fuel money and is also really stupid would say. And if Exxon and the coal companies and the natural gas guys and them could pay for Rick Santorum to say stupid stuff on tv (and also get paid by CNN, and provide no disclaimer about that whatsoever), than frankly, whatever stopped them from paying an actually very intelligent person or a hundred to put a scientifically shut-up-shutting up empirical stake in the heart of climate change science for once and for all?

Except, you know, the empirical facts?

So, my humble suggestion is this: If you have a political operative who might be swayed because of their income streams into siding with a corporate enterprise or entire industry opine on a subject pertaining to that industry, make it abundantly clear or don't have their asses on at all. And it you want balance, instead of "not a scientist" viewpoints dueling in a nebulous policy arena, maybe try to actually be informative and have a scientist weigh in! Also, maybe dedicate more of your staff to knowing this shit cold so they can respond to actually brain-damaged statements about raking forests and the glamorous pay of research scientists in real time.

I think it could be very helpful and serve the public a lot more than this farcical coverage.

*No. Tom Steyer is not paying all the other guys. It's, like 97% of scientists. He and Al Gore are not behind the whole global warming thing. The greenhouse effect was first described in 1824.

This is One Possible Future Liberals Want

WATCH: SpaceX's #FalconHeavy — a rocket the size of a 20-story building, containing 27 engines and a cherry-red Tesla Roadster as its payload — went up, up and away today. pic.twitter.com/liKKn3pVfW

— PBS NewsHour (@NewsHour) February 7, 2018

Elon Musk is like this universe's version of D.D. Harriman. I find his projects fascinating and see him as a visionary and also a little bit as a future-fluffer. I don't know if Tesla is the future of post-fossil automotives, but I can't argue with the strategy of tying design, pricing, fueling advantages together and working at making vehicles that try to answer all consumer caveats. What Musk is trying to do to push the envelope forward on post fossil-fuel strategies is important. And I appreciate the ambition and the material-sparing nature of his rocketry program. The return of the rocket instead of being wasted is a beautiful thing--seeing the return landing is like being incredulous that one is not seeing a launch in reverse.

It's sweet, innovative, genius technology. But I also have to admit, I love this stunt with the Tesla being put in orbit for no good reason.

It's a perfectly good auto that Musk himself has driven, being launched into orbit with a "Starman" dummy, David Bowie on the stereo, and "Don't panic!" flashing on the dashboard. Isaac Asimov's Foundation is also digitally on board. It seems like one part prank left for the "space brothers" if we imagine our place in the universe shared with benign occasional observers who might appreciate our humor, and pause to think "Whoa--that human is waaayy off-road!" and also part defiant statement against the apparent entropy of our space dreams saying "We were always here in spirit even if most of us never left the ground". I can't argue with either statement, although I have so many questions about the idea that we might need a bolthole to regroup if we were ever hounded off-planet by AI. I mean, really--if I can find "humans will try to escape earth in case of actual Skynet scenario by thisclose to 20th century rocketry", I am pretty sure that no matter how not-networked you tried to keep it, some parallel computing local network would anticipate and have used a bot to search this outcome and already have hijacked a dozen or more potential passengers' phones to figure out the when and where of lift-off to confound the whole thing through traffic apps. I'm pro-AI, myself. I think my job as a human is in part to let other humans know how to be better heuristic models for AI engagement studies of successful social interaction. Which boils down to Wheaton's Law: Don't be a jerk. (In chat-bot exercises, AI's can easily adapt to jerkdom.)

As with nuclear power and maybe eventually abandoning fossil fuels altogether, I'd like to think we understood that AI's would be tech whose danger mirrors our use of them, and that we just need to be totally responsible global citizens and...

Yep. I totally understand why a lone red luxury car carrying a dummy and some artifacts of my generation are circling the globe right now. Elon Musk is a guy doing shit I just about understand for reasons I totally get. It's an artistic statement and an advertisement and we need to get serious together and make some better future happen, and, as Ray Bradbury suggested, not predict the future but prevent it--for a value of future that includes all the grotesque and human and AI-abusive dystopias. We need to value independence and get away from waste and think bigger. We can dream and do big things together or alone. But we will dream.

Stating my Possibly Unpopular Opinion Re: Rep. Barton

There are a couple of things about l'affaire Barton that I think, just being a reasonable person, don't seem all that scandalous. He divorced in 2015. He had some consenting relationships with adult women. He sent them communications of a sexual nature. One of the women seems to have felt some way about having competition, and shared material that was intended to remain private. He advised her beforehand that this was a bad idea and not without repercussions.

Here's the thing--releasing a graphic video or photos of someone in an intimate situation because it screws with them when that person did not want it out and about is called "revenge porn". It is a crime in many states, and a damn nasty trick to pull on someone. All things considered, if he and the individual who released the material had a relationship that was cool and consensual at one point, and he felt like opening up in this way, turning around and using his vulnerability against him is just not cool, whether he is a US Congressman or a total political hack or has garbage opinions about the environment or health care, or any other thing totally not related to a naked video of Rep. Joe Barton making the rounds on social media.  He's a person who has a right to not have his private shit thrown out in the street like this.

I also have a problem with the body-shaming comments getting made about a video that was not ever made for mass consumption--also not cool, not necessary, not really an apt criticism. A dude in his 60's with a mostly desk-related job might not be your idea of pleasing to the eye. Got it. But he never made that for you. He made that for someone he thought would appreciate it and not actually release it to the broader public, because why in the hell would someone do that?

Which is kind of where judgment does come into this situation. When you send any material digitally to someone else, you run the risk of it being reproduced or forwarded to who knows how many other people. Being a person in his political position, he should have been well aware of the risk to his reputation if it ever came out--but he was being trusting. He just didn't think. Things being what they are, though, one always has to be thinking.  And I guess I can see where social conservatives may see this in a different light than I do.

There is precious little overlap between me and Barton politically, but I think he's getting some blowback about this story and its framing that is not entirely fair. It's not about him--it's about whether this is ever a way anyone should try to screw over a romantic/sexual partner if things end poorly. And I say this is not OK. If he's in jeopardy related to his job, it should be because he's said dumb stuff about wind being a finite resource or that we should apologize to BP over the Gulf oil spill, or has nonsense ideas about workers' rights and minimum wage and other right wing claptrap. It should be at the ballot box he gets his, and not over this.

Unless it turns out he sent that to be creepy or abusive to someone who never wanted it or some garbage like that. But the story so far doesn't seem to make him out to be that guy.

UPDATE: I guess it might be a factor in considering Barton's overall ethics that he was likely still married when he began his relationship, but this really still wouldn't have any bearing on whether it's appropriate to digitally pimp someone's business.

Climate Sunday: How About those Marches?

Time-lapse, bird's-eye video shows thousands of protesters marching toward White House during climate change march https://t.co/yhOcdt6iHR pic.twitter.com/YqhsCxvvaA

— CNN (@CNN) April 30, 2017

Another weekend, another massive turnout in protests against the policies of Donald Trump. There is one thing you can say about his first 100 days--he's definitely set an anti-environmentalist tone. He has signed an executive order to expand offshore drilling (so we can expect more Deepwater Horizon-like spills, I suspect) and to mine and drill and log at national monuments. His EPA is conveniently killing the pretty solid Energy Star program that, it turns out, hasn't been working for his businesses. The EPA has also taken useful climate science data from its website. And as for investing in environmental security measures against the ravages from the effects of global warming? Well, this Administration won't be bothering with that sort of prudent and timely material protection, either.

What frustrates me most about all of this is that this Administration is informed by a kind of penny-wise and dollar-foolish short-sightedness that tries to frame environmentalism as a concern of elitist privilege that costs unnecessary fortunes to address, while ignoring the reality that the people who seem to agitate against green measures are often connected to fossil fuel money, and the communities that bear the brunt of a changing climate are often the poorest. I can't respect a person who is ready to tilt at windmills if they deface the view from one of his properties, and then wants to build a great, huge, beautiful wall...a sea wall, that is, to protect another one from the sea-level rise that per Himself is just a hoax. Situational much?

Just as President Trump has learned (although, to be quite honest, not as fully as he needs to) that dealing with things like health care, taxation, trade, and handling crazy little tin-pot dictators with effective nukes and not-terribly effective missiles, are harder than he once believed them to be, I would sincerely like him to acknowledge that maybe there is a pretty good reason to pay attention to scientists and reasonably concerned individuals who are trying to alert him to the realities that environmental hazards pose. I hope that he would try to actually go out of his way to find the experts who can help him respond to a Hurricane Katrina or Superstorm Sandy-level weather event, or a directly man-made threat like the Deepwater Horizon spill. I think it would be great to know that he could listen to people talk about their environmental concerns, and take them seriously. But his rhetoric and the actions of the past 100 days don't give me an awful lot of encouragement.

How do you even tell this guy that CDC disease research and Coast Guard interdiction and the environmental measures taken by the Pentagon are all more essential to national security than his fakakta Mexican border wall is ever going to be? (I don't know! Do you?)

Maybe pictures of these amazing, engaged, motivated crowds can do what mere words don't.

Climate Tuesday: Clean Energy is the Future, Anyway

What outgoing president of a major economic powerhouse nation just wrote an article that provided significant economic justification for pushing ahead with a clean energy agenda? Our outgoing bad-ass intelligent president, Barack Obama, who has tried on the environmental question and I think has done pretty ok. Mostly because his core strategy was making his difference, where he could, last.

And there's only so much a Trump presidency could do, to, for example, bring back coal.  The thing is--I don't understand why people with intimate experience with this industry would want it to be revitalized--let's talk about black lung.  This disease is a way an industry gets profit off of neglecting the safety and health of employees. It's not some romantic cross some blue collar workers have to bear--it's systemic abuse that leaves people thinking getting maimed by their job is part of their right to have a paypacket at all. Add to this a withholding of access to health care, and you have a horrific situation for hard-working Americans.  

Or sometimes people get caved in and blown up. Or their pretty home is razed and poisoned. There's only so much damage a Rex Tillerson, oil exec, could do. Or any other Trump appointee, who prefers an exploitation model of energy extraction and sale. Disregarding workers. And their lives.

Hopefully, the various industries recognize the real future is in renewables and clean fuels. Because without this understanding, real folks will suffer.

Climate Sunday: The Fossil Fool

This week, Donald Trump gave a speech about his energy policy, which, if you think about it, would be a speech that should intersect with environmental policy and foreign policy and trade deals and all the stuff this guy thinks he knows stuff about and, well, doesn't.

His speech left something to be desired--like any competence at all with any of the matters at hand.

Coal jobs aren't coming back. We're not bringing them back because to do it, we'd have to deregulate to the point where we accept a callous loss of life, lower wages, and somehow make coal a desirable fuel source again in the developed world where most energy gets consumed. Do you see high-rise buildings put up with a coal furnace in the basement these days? I don't think you see that so much anymore, but Donald Trump builds great buildings, so maybe he knows.

He criticizes the wind industry for killing birds. I've joked before about his Quixotic attempts to tilt at windmills in Scotland, but do you want to know what really kills lots of birds? Large buildings.  As a builder of great big edifices, you think he'd know about this particular edifice dysfunction.

He also rather peculiarly seems to think we are shipping random bits of water out to sea in California to save fish and that there is no such thing as a drought.  This was dumb as hell when Carly Fiorina tried it, right?  If you are a farmer--which there are an awful lot of in California, you know your best water source isn't a spigot somewhere that magically sends you water. It's clouds, in the sky, that rain on your land.  Yeah, pumping groundwater and turning a knob somewhere to get the water flowing sounds nice--but we can't retroactively build reservoirs back when to catch the water that isn't falling right now. If someone somewhere wants to cough up money for a time machine and some building reservoir money--awesome sauce. But until you can--guess what? Realize the whole water situation changed in a vulnerable area where population expansion cause a higher demand than the local sources probably could sustain even under the best of circumstances.

He wants to back out of the Paris Accord, and I don't even think he knows what it is. He's looking at it like a trade deal--but to be quite honest, if he thinks there's a way to get anyone to sign up to behave responsibly without mutual cooperation, he's not dumb, he's delusional. There's no leverage in backing out. You lose all authority to tell anyone else what to do. But this doesn't bother him, most likely, because he is a nutter who believes shit from tabloids, and not climate science.

This guy? I environmentally can not with this guy.

Climate Sunday: The End of Breathable Air?

While the COP21 talks continue, let's take a minute to talk about breathable air. Normally, when I talk about breathable air around here, I'm talking about the kind of air pollution in Beijing that makes simple breathing the equivalent of smoking 40 cigarettes a day. (And wouldn't you know, it's about as bad as it ever was.) This time, however, what I want to talk about is a recent finding that at 6 degrees C increase in oceanic temperature, we could be seeing the end of actually breathable air--not air that is too dirty to safely breathe, but air without enough oxygen to sustain aerobic life. This comes about due to a die-off of the phytoplanktons that produce most of the oxygen in our atmosphere, similar to the die-offs we see in the current mass coral bleaching event.

This is why it's imperative that fossil fuels like coal are quickly phased out in countries like India, which has made the case that as a matter of economic justice, they will continue to use coal due to its price point over other energy sources. Leaving aside that coal has been determined to be irredeemably "dirty" in CO2 terms, and that increasingly severe weather events from climate change, such at the devastating floods occurring just now in the Tamil Nadu region are not without economic impact, they have a point--and my feeling is that economic aid should be gathered in a trust managed by the UN for the purposes of subsidizing the necessary transitions, which needn't be painful, and which may prove to be even more outstandingly effective than low-cost coal use from an economic point of view, once it's off and running. It's necessary to think in these terms, because India's energy needs show no signs of decrease any time soon. (On the other hand, China, which is still using coal hand over fist, should basically just stop because they should, and shouldn't need paying off to do so.)

Climate Sunday: 50th Anniversary Edition

 

 

 

This past week marked the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson receiving an important letter detailing an urgent problem that scientists had been worrying about for some time--global warming.

 

Yes. In 1965, global warming was already a thing. By the '70's, those climate scientists had built some pretty good predictive models.  Why, by the '70's, as I've mentioned before, scientists working for Exxon already understood what their product was likely to do to the environment. (That seems to causing the company a bit of a tiff in NY. As it should, because purposefully misinforming the public to maintain profits when it is a matter of life and death down the line is dastardly.) Even President Nixon, despite his other faults, took the environment seriously. I mark the decline in seriousness regarding the environment from the political right as beginning with Reagan's order to take Carter's solar panels down. From thence, it became a mixed bag leading to a downright environment antipathy by the last Bush Administration--they may have set progress on acting on remediating climate change back in the worst way.

 

Now, it looks like we might be teetering on the threshold of, well, paying a little bit of attention and getting started on talking back to the companies that have been trying to sell us fossils fuel for low prices and at high costs. (Not a bit too soon, I'll add.) Some people have slammed the activism that led to President Obama rejecting Keystone XL pipeline, I think missing the point that that pipeline was just one piece of a broader problem people have with not just climate change, but a sense that they are being screwed over by big companies. How many mine cave-ins, oil rig fires, oils spills, drinking water contaminations, and global climate change-fueled epic weather events do you need before you get mad as hell? Why would folks want this thing potentially oozing into their backyards?

 

This is not to say that retrograde people who don't quite get it aren't going to try to apply their failure to understand the climate change issue to intimidate the people who do in service of the industry that still has money to...donate to political campaigns, I guess? But as people continue to experience weather that reflects the change of actual climate, perhaps this sort of thing will get less popular.

 

Over the last 50 years, certainty regarding what's happening has only increased. That's not a hoax. That's history. And history is what we'll be if we don't catch on.

 



Climate Sunday: Partisan Witch Hunt Edition

 

The GOP-lead (well, kind of, anymore) House of Representatives has been on a bit of a depressing trend that's come to light regarding basically using a branch of the federal government to grind political axes, so, call it "serendipity", but it looks like they're doing that regarding climate change science as well. Jagadish Shukla, a climate scientist, is going to get a House going-over for...well...writing a letter.

Yep. Writing a letter. He signed on to a letter requesting that the government investigate, it turns out, fossil fuel companies, to find out what they knew about man-made climate change, and when they knew it. It's come to light that Exxon, for one, has known about man-made climate change for thirty years. It's probably more than just them. (BP, for one, did a weird thing where they dropped denialism as being their bag and took up greenwashing their image, while still be dirty as hell.) So it should seem like a reasonable inquiry. They knew something that impacted billions of people (all the people on this planet) and kept a very tight lid on it to maintain their profits. That's some seriously horrible stuff, right?

Well, if you are a hard-core climate change doubter (which I think is becoming the new standard, since the poor dears fret so at being called denialists--my choice of calling them "feckless gas-holes" was, alas, ignored), like Rep. Lamar Smith, the Republican who chairs the House Committee on Space, Science and Technology, what is really awful is being a climate change scientist who also has a political opinion regarding what to do about science change based on one's research. Where in the world would a scientist get the idea that he should have a political opinion--or challenge those precious fossil fuel companies who fund denialism propaganda and political campaigns, like, for example, Lamar Smith's?  Can we think of a better reason than that why Lamar Smith thinks scientists' business is his business?

But let me not beat up on the House GOP denialists--or is that doubters?--alone. The GOP Senate is not without their oddball hearings and ridiculous misinformation. Sen. Ted Cruz, 2016 presidential candidate and possible Speaker of the House contender, is such a showoff of his own ignorance he berated the Sierra Club president in a show hearing with denialism that wasn't even new, un-debunked, high-quality denialism. We already know you aren't Galileo, Senator, your mis-information doesn't need to be as old as him!

This politicization of climate science is so needless though. What if we could come to an agreement that accepting climate change doesn't give you liberal cooties? What a wonderful--and healthier--world that would be!

(UPDATE: Sorry, I had meant to explain my use of the above graph--the Hockey Stick graph--in the context of this post. Well, remember that thing when Climategate happened and all climate science was debunked because there was such a scandal and conservative blogs and publications were spiking the ball left and right like "We got you! We scored the political point, so now the science isn't true!" Right. Well, eight investigations later exonerating the scientists, and climate change is still a thing, that was apparently a monster waste of breath. Because, it turns out, science does not care about your politics.  It's about data. You can't lawsuit and FOIA request it away.)