US LOSES LEADERSHIP!

Not to worry–yet. The AMERICAN economy is still larger than China’s. We still spend far more on our military than any nation, ever. We are still the only nation with more guns than people…as far as we know. Yet we don’t even make the top ten in homicide rate! The old mystique of the OK Corral seems to have faded.
Now we have lost leadership in daily covid cases. All that vaccination (that nearly half of Republican men say they will not get) and those masks seem to be working. This country is now a weak second to world-ruling Brazil when it comes to covid cases and admitted deaths. Cases: Brazil leads 72K over 56K; deaths Brazil tops US, 2200 to 1200.
Get used to it, American may not dominate in many categories going forward. We long ago lost the CO2 crown. China now produces almost twice as much CO2 emission as we do.

SUICIDE BY PLASTIC?

Can our species avoid self-elimination?

Currently our species is hell-bent on destroying anything that your great-grandparents would have recognized as life on earth. Not only is climate change now endangering entire ecosystems and all the living things therein, virus to mega-fauna. No, we have carelessly launched a suicidal process of plasticizing the entire planet and destroying any chance for our species to survive. Not to fantasize about the sorts of conspiracies Putin promulgates through his minions, but to look at the science of sperm eradication in our species, is, well…to look into a future where the languages will be spoken by dolphin (with any luck), ravens and parrots. The babble of the Tower of same…will have been silenced. This is being done by us to us, no extraterrestrials required.

Long an advocate of a clean planet Erin Brokovich (yes, the real one, not the movie character) has written a stunning summary of where we are in curtailing human reproduction. Sure, there are too many of us now, but are there enough viable frozen sperm to keep the species going after all living males are sterile? This is all up to us, the cockroaches and earthworms shall not intervene on our behalf. Nature is indifferent. With a heedless shrug, Ma Natura will mutter, “You are not inevitable, nor necessary.”

Can we  overcome our plastic addiction and the force of convenience marketing and corporate plasticaters’ profits? Do not expect plastic makers to care, now or later. Profit rules. For half a century the petroleum people have had research results showing how burning their products produced chemicals dangerous to human life. So what? Show me the money! People love their cars! Somebody else’s problem!

There has been a modern surge of in vitro fertilization. Not long ago it accounted for only 2% of U.S, births. Could it become required, then impossible. Here is explanation of the process.

This threat to our species’ tomorrow has been brought to the fore by a woman who has been researching this sperm die-off for a quarter century. Click here for a webinar on the subject. Put down that plastic cup. Can we return to wearing cotton and wool and drinking out of glass containers?

SOME DAYS MATTER MOST

We are passing by some significant anniversaries.
Small but precious–it’s been one year since the city of Stockton started paying a $500 monthly stipend to randomly selected low and middle income adults there. It was granted to only 125 people, as an experiment. Now some early results are in.
American conservatives always see the rest of society through a blurred lens of money and 1950s white culture. So one of the strongest objections the white-wing makes to ideas about guaranteed income: it will allow people to quit working, be lazier and stay home drunk in front of the TV. That’s as much BS as the trickle-down theory that tax cuts for the 1% will somehow leak into the lower levels of society. Click here for summary of the half-way findings on Stockton’s two-year experiment. Those getting the stipend actually now have more full-time jobs than the unpaid sample group–in spite of covid. As my wife said, based on her days as an impecunious single mom–you may need a pair of decent looking shoes to apply for a job. It matters. Or you may need to own a car or laptop…

We are on the anniversary of two much bigger events–both still reverberate in the lives of billions of people. The New York Stock Exchange was founded on this day in 1817. It is now the single most important financial casino on earth. The average amount of money that changes hands on a typical trading day (ignoring that much of the “trading” is done with virtual money or isn’t paid for at the time) is several times the national GDP of Morocco which is less than $200 billion per year. The NYSE and similar institutions and the huge organizations and fortunes that utilize them have made greed central to the politics, societies and behavior of our era. That same greed is pushing us ever close to making the earth uninhabitable for us and most other living organisms. If you want to exercise reincarnation, better come back as an algae.

The second anniversary today is for the 1917 revolution in Russia-USSR-Russia. That event took some 19th Century vision, twerked it badly and created generations of excuse for authoritarianism. Karl Marx and his followers were typical of most educated white men of their time. They were the only ones that mattered. He know nothing, and cared little, for ethnic or gender groups beyond his own Euro intellegentia. He also saw people are economic factors in an economy that was the center, if not the purpose, of life. If only money and its control, capital and its use, are crucial then having power over the economy becomes the goal for any political party or cabal. Marx to Lenin to Stalin to Putin. Not inevitable surely, but not surprising either. White men taking power, subjugating all others and going for the money. There is only a shift in skin tone as you follow the parallel thread through recent Chinese history. If the economy is the purpose of human life, than controlling everything for the sake of the financial institutions makes perfect sense. Many Americans are no better–there is a certain Lt. Governor of a Lone Star State who openly said people should go back to work and be willing to die of covid for the sake of the economy.

Finally, it is now almost ten years since the Fukushima tsunami and nuclear disaster. The quake hit on March 11. Clean-up is still not done. A tiny sample of how destructive even our much-touted technology can be in the face of the real world.

MRS. MCCONNELL INTERESTED IN GETTING EVEN WEALTHIER?

How could that be possible as she is married to that straight-arrow, honesty exemplar Mitch McConnell? Would he ever do anything cynical or self-aggrandizing? Heaven forefend. Just because his in-laws funnel money from China to the Mitch, there should be no worries about his upstanding incorruptibility. But Elaine, it seems, may have…oh hell, click here.