SO LONG DAVID KOCH, NOT BEEN GOOD TO KNOW…

Of all the posthumous scribbling, this is now my favorite obit for the late David Koch.  Click here.

GUNS ARE US, GUNS ARE U.S.

In Dayton, Ohio, a friend bought a hundred round ammo clip for a friend without asking why?  Why?

Yet in New Zealand people are turning in their assault rifles in response to a mass killing and a national government’s  buy-back program.  Just like what happened years ago in Australia.  Will any of our U.S. mass shooting survivors live long enough to see that happen here?  Don’t be holding your breath.  We have a gun-loving minority that thinks big guns make them big men.  History shows us there is little hope trying to reason with testosterone and its close relationship with violence.  And we have one political party that dares not speak the truth about gun laws for fear of losing a slice of white male voters.

MY LAST, PROMISE, CLIMATE BLOG

If you get beyond the mere political and performance news and look at what is happening to our planet, survival is THE ISSUE on our crowded Earth.  From microbes to migration of displaced persons, from charcoal to coral reefs, there is constant change and struggle and a feeling that change is bringing an inevitability.  Is it down the drain?  Over the cliff?  Into the abyss?  To even type the word “hope” seems now almost cynical, like urging somebody to go shopping to make themselves feel better.  We are consuming the planet and destroying its ability to support life, ours along with the gorilla, the coral, the right whale, the ponderosa, the banana we love to eat, the Bachman’s Warbler (oh wait, that one’s long gone).

This will be my final catalog of the climate crisis events.  I find I can no longer read and shrug and vow to move on.  It all looks so awful I almost think the author of The Uninhabitable Planet was just having fun and making us feel false hope…even though his opening line is “It’s worse, much worse, than you think.”

No, David Wallace-Wells (author of above), your book doesn’t even approach my imaginings, my pity for my grandkids, my relief that I am old enough not to be around when we hit 3 degrees Centigrade above the old average, or 4 or 6 or…

Here’s some of the recent stuff, each indicative of what we have to look forward to…and I am not even going to mention the Dengue Fever outbreak in the Pacific.  Wait until that spreads like West Nile or Lyme’s Disease have.

Hardly worth noting that July, 2019, was the hottest month on record.

Meanwhile Greenland used to be a sort of ironic name for that icy land.  No more.

In Brazil the authoritarian regime seems determined to deforest the Amazon, bad in too many ways to count.

The oceans and their living ecosystems suffer, from coral and plankton to whales and sharks.  Beyond mere acidification, heat, deadly algae, pollution, oil spills, upheaval of ocean currents…we now find that climate change is inhibiting creatures for communicating and even sensing their watery world.  This tantamount to taking away all the cells phones in a high school.

Bee deaths continue and we are not sure why or what or how or…  I hope I do not outlast almonds and cherries.

Turns out the meteor that crashed to Earth near the Yucatan 66 million years ago was a disaster that almost didn’t happen.  Yet it did for the dinosaurs and millions of other organisms and allowed the conquest of Earth by our mammalian ancestors and avian cousins.  There will be no swerve in the current extinction event.

Cities are particularly vulnerable to climate change.  Too much heat. There is a biological limit to how much heat a Human body can stand and that limit is far below boiling water or baking granola.
And then high water or drought or general social collapse.

Speaking of social collapse.  Human migration will only increase as drought and starvation get worse…it won’t stop at Honduras or Somalia or Syria.  It will be tens of millions of people not mere thousands.

That will cause even more violent nationalism, genocide and racism.  The gunner in El Paso already sees the future as a fight to save his lifestyle from the impoverished hordes because the environment is disintegrating.  Young eco-fascist have leap-frogged the right-wing deniers and grabbed climate crisis as a great reason to kill their enemies.

One bright spot seems to be that the current U.S regime is trying to save us from the worst.  They are blocking information that might upset.  They want to protect us from the unpleasant science that says future crops of rice will far less nutritious because of the heat.  The researcher who did the studies has quit.  Oh well, rice is only the #1 source of starch for billions of people. Let ’em eat cake.

A LIFESTYLE TO DIE FOR

What would you be willing to do to preserve your lifestyle?  Drive an SUV that gets less than 25 miles per gallon…shop at huge air conditioned stores without solar panels on the roof…eat hamburgers several times per week…buy products wrapped in at least two layers of plastic…use Roundup and neonicotinoids on your lawn and rose bushes…drink hot coffee every workday from a styrofoam cup…keep a loaded assault rifle with a 100-shot magazine next to your front door?  To some in our benighted country this is a lifestyle ideal to kill for.  The El Paso gunner apparently published a manifesto (the done thing among mass murderers these days, when mass killing is so often politically inspired).  In that manifesto he makes the case that climate change and environmental damage is endangering his preferred, privileged lifestyle and it must be protected from brown-skinned invaders who threaten to make the planet worse off.  It is being called “eco-fascism.”  The good of the planet requires ethnic cleansing.  Never mind that the average U.S. resident creates far more pollution and waste per capita than any average citizen anywhere else on earth. How long before White House tweets accuse the democrats of eco-fascism? Facts don’t apply here.  We’re talking fear, hatred, anger, violence and testosterone of young white men.

So here we have it: white nationalists one generation younger than the old guard (Exxon-Koch Bros-McConnell) that is still trying to pretend that climate crisis is phoney, phooey, poof.  Now we have younger gunners who cannot ignore the storms, forest fires, floods, melting ice caps, record heat, droughts…so they choose to embrace climate crisis as a good reason to go to war against those masses of people who might over-run their shopping mall and gas station.   Here’s a new archetype: the El Paso gunner drove across much of Texas from Dallas to El Paso which has a largely Hispanic population…and he chose Walmart as the location for his slaughter because he would have known that there would be plenty of non-white shoppers.  The ideal of American consumption–mass produced stuff from poor workers elsewhere–Walmart could not have been more carefully chosen.  Talk about ideal.

Sadly it is innate that bullies and mass killers often look for the most powerless, unprotected as victims.  Children at an elementary or high school, fellow students, night-clubbers, worshippers in prayer—we don’t see mass killings at exclusive country clubs, or gatherings of bankers, conventions of stock brokers, awards shows for show business celebrities, expensive-ticket sports events.  It is central to the current violence to aim for victims lower on the socio-economic scale.  The U.S. is in the midst of a civil war.  White supremacists against anybody else.

On the attempt of NRA apologists in the Trumparty to blame video games, I refer you to the actual facts.  The U.S. is third among nations in consumption and use of video games.  South Korea and China are ahead of us. None of the other top ten nations in video-gaming has a murder even half as bad as the U.S. rate.  It cannot be simply that Americans are more violent by nature and proclivity.   Canada has a similar cultural and violent history of displacing Native Americans.  Their murder rate is tiny compared to ours. Most of the other countries on the list can boast a bloody history.  France is home of the guillotine and had a record of atrocities during the Algerian revolution. Germany has a notorious record of war and mass murder.  Spain—what that nation did across Latin America is legendary in a not good way and then they had their own bloody civil war.  Japan—Remember Pearl Harbor…don’t forget mass rapes in China.  Britain—slavery for profit and an empire built on violence. In China the government is authoritarian and deadly, but those individuals intent on mass murder resort to swords.  Unlike the Dayton (not Toledo) killer you can’t kill nine people in 30 seconds with a sword. Yet these other gamer nations all now do one thing the U.S. doesn’t do: they control the access to big guns with bigger magazines and unlimited ammo.

 

JUST ANOTHER CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS

It’s bad enough that a minority of voters can elect a U.S. president.  It’s not good that the U.S. can fight in foreign wars for nearly two decades after a single vote of Congress. It’s horrific that there is no way to have a public referendum on issues that people actually care about: concentration camps run by for-profit companies (no previous authoritarian regime ever managed that!)…does the state legislature or a woman have ultimate control of her pregnancy…does every American (regardless of wealth) have a right to medical treatment or can that continue to be left to pharmas and insurance companies…what sort of gun access should every American male over the age of 18 or 21 have…why so many people still in prison for marijuana possession…should we spend some less money on war and more on peaceful needs like lead-free water pipes and universal daycare?  But crisis after crisis gets ignored.  As long as business is good…

Now it’s clear the Second Amendment now has overrun the First.  The first doesn’t just guarantee freedom of speech, but “the right of the people peaceably to assemble.”  Forget mere life, liberty and pursuit of happiness—how about the right to go to a festival, a school, a store or a night club and not be killed?  Now the gunners who run red states and the Trumparty have made holy the need of young men to have huge magazines that fire dozens of rounds in lightning speed.  To these gunners gun freedom is far more important than a handful of people here, a dozen there, getting shot.  Guns rule in Trumpland just as they have for decades.   Police kill the killer as fast as they can or he kills himself.  Still many rounds per minute are deadly. States cannot deal with this. The Gilroy killer moved to Nevada so he could buy an assault weapon, then went home to Gilroy to kill.  Are we needing border checks between every state?  We may as well dissolve the U.S. into multiple nations with closed borders.  I, for one, am ready for the Pacific States of America.

Maybe a wall around Texas?  It’s had four of the ten worst mass killings in the U.S. in the past sixty years.

On most serious issues we no longer have an active or concerned national government.  Medical fraud by insurance and pharma companies, gun violence by white nationalists, urgency to move to sustainable energy tech now, disintegrating infrastructure (see Flint, water), ever more expensive college education, corporate purchase of lawmakers (money=speech), a President who obeys only those laws that are convenient, a minimum wage below $8 per hour for decades.  None of these problems will be dealt with by our national government. Climate crisis?  Coastal cities that should be moved to higher ground?  Carbon dioxide and methane and fracking and fossil fuels? You gotta be kidding.  Profits are holy, full speed ahead.

This weekend’s gun fun will fade from the news and be buried by most of us in sub-consciousness. In most states, and nationally, nothing will happen even though the NRA is morally bankrupt and financially troubled. Can the next non-Trump administration please find out how much Russian money is being laundered to help the NRA? Butina was not an accident.

Now most Americans will just be more likely to shop online.  Why risk a store when you can have it delivered and not even have to answer the door?  Going out to public places?  Let’s order a pizza and stream some escapism.  Community meeting, church, cafe? Too risky.   Meanwhile the federal government is prevented from researching gun violence, let alone its prevention or reduction.

Through private research we know a lot about the shaping of the mass killers in America.  It is hard for Congress to even allow discussion of domestic terrorism.  Too close to alienating those white supremacists who form a hard core at the center of Trumparty.  We now learn that the El Paso killer is the third this year to use a specific fanatics’ online site.  How many must die before 8chan dies?

Sickest factoid, so far, this weekend:  Dayton shooter killed his younger sister!

Let us not shrug and think the timing of these killings are entirely random.  2020 presidential candidates from the non-Trumparty have been talking as if they don’t like locking up toddlers and separating families just for the sheer torturous fun of it.  That further terrifies the terrorists who believe all manner of dark scenarios. Here in Oregon in rural areas I regularly see big signs saying “The legislators are coming for your guns.” So the heat and fury among haters  is being increased by open discussion of immigration. And it’s hot.  Research in all parts of the globe show us that crime increases with the temperature.  Just one more handy thing to realize about global warming…crime will get worse in hotter places, not to mention those where there will be little or no drinking water.  There has not been a single mass shooting during a blizzard or at a ski lodge, so far.  Cold tends to keep things cool.

The golfer-in-chief remains aloof. Most of these shooters are now his people.  He is not going to ever clearly oppose white nationalism because it is a strong thread running through Fox News and other propaganda sources blaming immigrants for everybody’s anxiety or bitterness.  U.S. attacks by white domestic terrorists far out-number those by any other group.  Surely though, if you buy the immigration panic, it is the fault of those from Honduras that the world no longer hankers for West Virginia coal, or cars made in Ohio.  If you need a better job, lock ’em up. If you wanna party safe or attend a festival, better go to Mara Lago…or stay home.

Click here for deeper look at 8chan.

Here’s more on the El Paso gunner his likely anti-immigrant passion.

YOUR LIFE IS NOT YOUR OWN

In our for-profit medical morass you may think you are in charge of your life, but I got old news for you.  Not only is your primary care physician the gate-keeper to what other experts and doctors you may consult, not only is any private insurance company you pay able to approve or reject claims for surgery, drugs or other treatment, no, we now see that even pharmacies can say “No” to a treatment  both doctor and insurance company have approved.  And they can do so without ever seeing the patient or reading the case history.  You want that cancer treatment, borrow a couple million and get it on your own.

Read here of a retired couple of educators in Fresno faced with a stubborn, not to say greedy, pharmacy company.

As long as there is profit in the medical business, patients will not be the primary concern of doctors, insurance profiteers or any level of the pharma business.  Did somebody mumble “death panel?”