Monthly Archives: June 2021

House Upon The Sand

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This is my two-part rant of 30 June 2021.

Andrew Bacevich writes:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/06/29/the-passing-of-the-present-and-the-decline-of-america/

This is the kind of commentary, and commentator that pisses me off. Yes, an honorable, intelligent, patriotic former career soldier, and highly respected military-political commentator comes to forthrightly state that the war-crazed dysfunction of the American state now seems fatally terminal, and one might have found glimmers of that realization as far back as 1969, such as in Kurt Vonnegut’s new book that year Slaughterhouse 5, though Bacevich finally acceded to it in mid-Trump Administration.

WOW! I fucking knew this in 1968 as an 18 year old! I read SH5 in 1969, and Catch-22 in ’68, and had read Helen Hunt Jackson somewhere between 1963-1967 (which was before Dee Brown’s “Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee” was published).

Okay, so now the old West-Pointer Bacevich has finally read SH5, and published his erudite books on the stupidity of American militarism, and been forthright about his previous white American exceptionalism careerist wrong illusions, and made sincere and public efforts to advocate for an inclusive, just, “progressive” America, and write as here about the complete toxicity of Trumpianism and the Republicans, and the pathetic flaccidity of the less than B-minus grade Bidenites — great, all welcome and good (and Stan Goff would tell me to be accepting of anyone’s personal redemption — okay), but DAMN! it took long enough!

The whole damn Vietnam War genocidal catastrophe wasn’t enough to wake you up by 1975? by Reagan-time? by Bush II time and the Iraq War? How come so many of us dumber unimportant people can figure this stuff out decades before you super-informed, super-plugged-in brainiacs and lever-pullers?

Well, okay, you’re good now Bacevich, and thanks for the accurate insights about today. I’m guessing that just as (some) serious people like Bacevich have woken up to the evils of American militarism 50 years after the Vietnam War, that equally in 50 years time we’ll see a heartening swelling in the ranks of today’s serious lever-pulling people who have woken up to the Planetary Crisis encompassing global warming climate change, collapsing biodiversity and its attendant social inequities. And then (forgetting about all the bodies buried since then) they’ll want to do something about it. By then palm trees might sprout in Greenland, and we may even have a smaller world population (involuntarily).

Okay, rant, part 1, is over. Now for part 2.

From Wikipedia: The Oklahoma City bombing was a domestic terrorist truck bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, United States, on Wednesday, April 19, 1995. Perpetrated by anti-government extremists Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, the bombing happened at 9:02 am and killed at least 168 people, injured more than 680 others, and destroyed more than one-third of the building, which had to be demolished.

From Wikipedia: On June 24, 2021, at approximately 1:30 a.m. EDT, Champlain Towers South, a 12-story beachfront condominium building in the Miami suburb of Surfside, Florida, experienced a sudden partial collapse. At least 12 people died, and 11 others were injured.[as of 30 June 2021] About 35 people were rescued from the uncollapsed portion of the building, 2 people have been rescued from the rubble, and 149 people remain missing as rescue operations continue… As of June 28, 2021, 12 people are known to have died during the collapse, and 11 more have been injured. 11 of the 12 fatalities have been publicly identified, including two Venezuelan nationals and two Cubans. Up to 149 people remain unaccounted for.

So, it looks like the Champlain Towers South will have snuffed out 162 lives. “Missing” and “unaccounted for” are the terms used to describe people that have been killed but whose bodies have yet to be recovered, and for whom, illogically, their loved ones hope (and who can blame them!) that they will miraculously return alive.

So this building collapse — in all probability — nearly equals the death toll of the Oklahoma City terrorist bombing of 1995, though it did not cause any noticeable number of other injured. But the Oklahoma tragedy was “terrorism” and required a swift and vigorous government response, both to care for the victims and to apprehend and punish the perpetrators. But the Surfside (Miami) building collapse tragedy is not “terrorism” by rising seawater intrusion climate change undermining heedless shoreline real estate development, so: hold your horses!, let’s not rush to judgment!, let’s not act hastily — meaning at all — about that uncertain “climate change” scare tactic. Yeah, sure Gomer.

The mainstream finger of blame is pointing to faulty building construction and maintenance — which is undeniable — but that mainstream public consent-directing ministry (“of Truth”) has a massively pregnant silence about (the unthinkable!, the unmentionable!, don’t “politicize” tragedies!) CLIMATE CHANGE! But, well, “the possible excessive ingress of salt water” MIGHT have also been involved.

The bottom fell out and has been falling out not only of the Champlain Towers South, but of the whole damn Idiocracy clinging to and dangling from their high hopes of exponential prosperity for the ‘serious’ and ‘worthy’ (a.k.a. “exceptionalist”) denizens of the United States of Amnesia. Victims R Us.

“And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand.” — Matthew 7:26, King James Bible.

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Deadly Collapse Of Illusions In Miami

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Here is video of the Miami beachside condominium that collapsed at ~1 AM on 24 June 2021 (https://youtu.be/KR29pLccutY). There are many news stories about this now.

An engineering professor at Florida International University has used satellite data on ground elevation (a measurement technique used since at least the late 1970s) to write about the steady sinking of land in Miami, including the site of the condo, since 1990. There is a lot of beachside construction in Florida on landfill. This condo was actually built on sturdier ground (I’m guessing an ancient barrier island), but landfill is right next to it on the west side, where other similar buildings are located (and thus a bit further from the shoreline).

In 2018, a building inspector engineer issued a warning that there was serious damage to the building stemming from an inadequacy of foundation integrity. Nothing was done. In another report, I read that the development-friendly local and state authorities had freed the Miami real estate industry from “excessive” regulations by only requiring building inspections every 40 years! (I find this hard to believe, but it was a news report posted on the internet).

By now it is clear that the cause of the collapse was the softening of the ground under the building by the infiltration of seawater over the years since the building’s construction. Because such a large building is very heavy, especially in comparison to a simple beachside bungalow, the weight of the structure put tremendously higher downward pressure on the ground below its foundation, diminishing the integrity of the increasingly soaked soil, and thus speeding its ultimate loss of cohesion.

Now, some words about structural stability in a gravitational field. Earth’s gravity arises from its huge mass (compared to anything else humans are used to) and it points toward the Earth’s center, which means “down.”

Buildings, bridges and many other structures erected by humans on the surface of the Earth are designed to remain stable by having rigid vertical structural members (i.e., columns) to transmit the weight of the structure into the ideally “solid” ground below, which in turn distributes the pressure of the building’s weight (as mechanical stress) into the body of Planet Earth. The contact zone between the building and the Earth is usually a cross-braced foundation structure.

Those weight-bearing vertical supports are cross-braced by horizontal rigid structural members (i.e., beams, and in stronger designs by triangular frames: trusses). This way the entire building has the structural integrity of a “block”: the Earth holds it up, and its cross-bracing holds it together.

Essential to the building’s stability is the integrity of the earth below it: its solidity. When that solidity is lost, such as by water infiltration softening, and becomes nonuniform, then the building can begin to sink in a lopsided manner. Such tilting means that now gravitation forces no longer align perfectly with “vertical” columns (since they are tilted) but also has “lateral” components of force directed along the cross-bracing (which is also tilted).

Such new lateral forces transmitted by the cross members against the sides of the columns add a sideways momentum now pushing to tilt the building over, and are also forces working to tear the building apart from top to bottom.

At some point of building tilt, such unevenness of the distribution of gravitation stress throughout the structure, now no longer strictly vertical, puts more tensile or compressive stress (depending on the orientation of the member) than one or more of the structural members can sustain without buckling; or some of the bolted, riveted or welded joints between members can sustain to keep from ripping open.

Such structural failures remove pathways for the building’s gravitational stress to find its way to ground. So the structural members of the building’s frame that are still connected see an increase in the stress they must contain and transmit to Earth to hold up the building.

This takes those still intact members and joints more quickly toward their failure points, and the weakest among them give way. In this way an accelerating cascade of structural failures occurs, and the entire building can seem to suddenly “deflate” and collapse.

Such a collapse will be seen to propagate through the building as a wave of “deflation” from the regions of first failures to last failures, which, depending on the configuration of the undermining forces, can be left-to-right or vice-versa, and bottom-to-top or vice-versa.

The World Trade Center Towers building collapses of 11 September 2001 occurred from the top down: the dynamic force of collapsing mass above any given floor (the conversion of gravitational potential energy into mass acceleration) being beyond the yield strength of the vertical columns and cross-bracing joints at each floor-level, which were only designed — with a significant safety factor — to withstand the static stress imposed by gravity. The collapse of the smaller World Trade Center Building 7 proceeded from the left to the right because of a buckling of a column weakened by fire softening.

The Miami condominium collapse of 24 June 2021 progressed from bottom to top, first on the “left” side, and then on the now laterally unsupported “right” side (as seen in the video captured by a surveillance camera).

I would guess that what is happening now in Miami — and elsewhere — is a scramble to point fingers assigning blame and to evade responsibility; people seeking to sue somebody for losses of relatives, property and illusions; to get insurance payments, or to avoid paying them; to protect their money, investments, property and advantages of location; and to run away from their fears and hide from facing up to the realities of implacable Climate Change (in the form of sea level rise for Miami) plowing steadily into the American “good life.”

Climate Change is like an enormous steamroller that is inching slowly but implacably along the open road of our projected expectations, to roll over and flatten our comfortable situations.

Since we are all “cemented in place” in those personal comfort situations, that steamroller is bit by bit squashing us: first ‘here’ then ‘there’; some by sea level rise; some by hurricanes razing all; some by wildfire; some by deepening and eternal heat and drought; some by waves of disease pathogens sprung from out of formerly deep recesses in the wild; some by the increasing withdrawal of food availability; and some by the infighting all this sparks among us and that causes casualties from our war with ourselves.

First we lose our illusions, then we lose our money, and finally we lose our lives.

Those who refuse to face reality and relinquish their illusions will cause the most damage to their fellow human beings, by being rabidly competitive, as they slide down the cascade of suffering longer and ever obsessed to the death with their unrelieved anxieties of avoiding losses and pain. Those who jettison their illusions and face reality will a least gain the comfort of finding the company of similar people.

Even as the steamroller inches forward toward us, for everyone “the future is uncertain, and the end is always near.” One can pin oneself to an obsession with “the end,” and its avoidance; or one can open oneself to an appreciation for the processes of life, and to the sharing of such appreciation.

Climate Change is now our great teacher, and its lessons range from stark terror to transcendence. We have no choice but to live out those lessons, but we do have some choice in which of those coming experiences we can aim our personal selves to.

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Photos from the news story (series) linked in two comments, below:

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The beachfront looks like an ancient barrier island to me (my guess). The “flats” behind it look like landfill (“reclaimed land”). I suspect all this land is “wet” below a shallow depth from the surface. I also suspect that depth has been decreasing with the sea level rise over previous decades, and which continues.

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27 June 2021, using Picture #1 for reference:

The surveillance camera that took the video of the collapse is located at the left-most, furthest ‘up’ seaward-side corner of the blue pool seen to the left in this photo, just below the large area of greenery. The camera was pointed diagonally across that pool, straight at the central portion of the building that collapsed. That central portion collapsed first, from the side closer to the surveillance camera and then dragging its backside (the side furthest from the surveillance camera) down. To me it seems that “the bottom dropped out” and not that the roof collapsed and pancaked down pulverizing the building. After that central section was all down, the squarish tower portion closest to the beach tottered, twisted ‘slightly’ clockwise as viewed in this picture, and then also collapsed by “the bottom dropping out.” You can see the higher pile of rubble left by that tower section collapse. I would guess that the section of ground (subsurface) between that outer tower section and the part of the building still standing, and aligned parallel to the shoreline, is the area of greatest weakness and loss of integrity. It is also possible (as others are commenting) that there had been a weakening of the reinforcing steel inside the concrete columns of the building because of the corrosive action of salty sea air and underground flooding since 1981 when the building was constructed. The conclusions of the forensic engineering reports, which will doubtless take many months to finally arrive at, will be interesting — if they are not distorted by CYA.

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On Just Societies

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In his book, “Republic,” Plato lays out his political philosophy for the establishment and maintenance of a stable, well-ordered and just society. In his time societies were city-states, like Athens in the time of Socrates, Plato and Diogenes. The essential element of Plato’s scheme is the “guidance” of the city — “governing” is too strongly “micro-management” of a word — by a class of “guardians” who were carefully selected and trained from youth for the task, and who were wholly devoted to it for their lifetimes: basically philosopher-guru-priests.

However, I note that the viability of Plato’s political formulation for the construction and operation of just societies rests primarily on the incorruptible moral character of its central and guiding personnel, the guardians, and secondarily on the reasonably stable decency of behavior of the citizens: that is to say, their morality.

Please note that by “moral” I do not at all mean “religious”; there is no functional correlation between the two (and in my view more likely an anti-correlation).

At least since the end of the Neolithic, the idea developed that a stable, well-ordered society (whether just or unjust, but always to the liking of its rulers) could be established solely by political means, such as in: monarchies, parliamentary democracies, socialist and communists states (most pointedly those sharply Marxist materialist), and dictatorships (whether purely materialistic or theocratic).

By political I mean social arrangements for societal management that are constructions external to the individual person. Note that such political structures can include elements of physical compulsion on individual behavior, and elements of thought-control by indoctrination and propaganda to capture, shape and distort individual thought, and that such political structures will still be external to the individual as a moral being.

So, I do not believe it is possible to ensure the stable continuation of any momentarily just society, whatever its political structure, solely on the basis of the forced maintenance of that political structure, nor solely on the basis of a change of political structure whether that change is reformist or revolutionary. Justice as societal stability requires a taproot into incorruptible moral character by a majority of the citizens. Justice is good politics and good political structure, and is a natural outgrowth of good and intelligent morality, which in turn is individually personified as character.

Given the above, I believe that any social movement aiming to “permanently” evolve, reform or revolutionize a society in need of anything from improvement to drastic change in order to make it universally just, has to base its efforts on developing the moral character of its movement adherents and the mass of citizens it wishes to convince, for lifetime incorruptibility. Here, we have faith that a society with a majority of its citizens being of incorruptible moral character will ensure the continuation of such in succeeding generations, by the operation of its educational systems.

Of course any serious movement for social change will act politically whenever it can to counter existing injustices and respond to humanitarian emergencies. But it must never lose sight of its chronic fundamental task regardless of the frequency and variety of crisis flare-ups it reacts to during the daily spectacle.

Yes, this prescription for engineering permanent social change for the better is an idealization that may seem impossible to implement, as witnessed by the history of human civilization, but I think it is nevertheless true and has been the most powerful force that has helped bring about whatever degree of decency any of our human societies possesses today.

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For Americans, the 1950s began in 1947, as Gore Vidal bemoaningly told us, and collapsed in 1964 after June 21. The 1960s began on 1 January 1959, in Havana, and disappeared steadily from October 1973, vanishing completely by 1978. The 1970s erupted on 11 September 1973 and died on 4 November 1980, when the Collapse of American Civilization lurched downward into freefall, which it continues plunging to this day as our Neoliberal Dark Age. While it is still deeply submerged, scattered faint glimpses of the Next Age have broken through the pall of our Neoliberal Dark Age with increasing frequency since 17 September 2011. Whether that Post Fossil Capitalism Next Age is strangled in zeitgeist utero by neofascism, or withered in its infancy by global warming, or lives to emerge into the open and break free to flourish, is for the future to tell.

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Climate Change is like an enormous steamroller that is inching slowly but implacably along the open road of our projected expectations, to roll over and flatten our comfortable situations.

Since we are all “cemented in place” in those personal comfort situations, that steamroller is bit by bit squashing us: first ‘here’ then ‘there’; some by sea level rise; some by hurricanes razing all; some by wildfire; some by deepening and eternal heat and drought; some by waves of disease pathogens sprung from out of formerly deep recesses in the wild; some by the increasing withdrawal of food availability; and some by the infighting all this sparks among us and that causes casualties from our war with ourselves.

First we lose our illusions, then we lose our money, and finally we lose our lives.

Those who refuse to face reality and relinquish their illusions will cause the most damage to their fellow human beings, by being rabidly competitive, as they slide down the cascade of suffering longer and ever obsessed to the death with their unrelieved anxieties of avoiding losses and pain. Those who jettison their illusions and face reality will a least gain the comfort of finding the company of similar people.

Even as the steamroller inches forward toward us, for everyone “the future is uncertain, and the end is always near.” One can pin oneself to an obsession with “the end,” and its avoidance; or one can open oneself to an appreciation for the processes of life, and to the sharing of such appreciation.

Climate Change is now our great teacher, and its lessons range from stark terror to transcendence. We have no choice but to live out those lessons, but we do have some choice in which of those coming experiences we can aim our personal selves to.

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Einsatzgruppen Were Militarized Police

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80 years ago today, on 22 June 1941, Operation Barbarossa — the Nazi German invasion of the Soviet Union — was launched. The warfare between the Nazis and the Russians, which lasted until the end of WWII on 8 May 1945, made up the overwhelming majority of the military action and produced the greatest number of war deaths and casualties of the entire European War of 1939-1945 (in my mind I think of this fraction as 80%).

Here in the United States we are well versed in the folklore and stories of the actions, tragedies and victories that emerged from the War In Western Europe during WWII, but we are much less aware of the magnitude of the Russian (Soviet Union) contribution made, and sacrifices suffered, to secure victory for the Allies (the “United Nations”) in May 1945. Without diminishing the dedicated, painful and heroic contributions of the U.S.A, and its Allies, it is nevertheless a fact that, by and large, Nazi Germany (and its fascist Eastern European allies and proxies) was defeated by Russian guns carried forward by an ocean of Russian blood, and the Russian state and the Red Army were fed large transfusions of American military supplies to supplement their own industrialized war machine.

Hitler had planned Operation Barbarossa not merely as a war of armed political conflict and territorial conquest, but as a war of annihilation: Jews, and Communists with any degree of political or administrative power, were to be killed. The Nazi’s estimated (in written reports) that the number of Jews they wished to eliminate from Europe totaled 11 million. Specialized militarized “death squad” troops were formed to execute Jews (primarily) as Nazi armies raced eastward through Poland (from 1 September 1939) and then during Operation Barbarossa into the Baltic States (which Stalin had recently annexed), Western Russia (nearly up to Moscow), the Ukraine, Crimea and Southern Russia (as far as Stalingrad = Volgograd). Those death squad troops were called the Einsatzgruppen.

From Wikipedia: Einsatzgruppen (“deployment groups”; also “task forces”) were Schutzstaffel (SS) paramilitary death squads of Nazi Germany that were responsible for mass killings, primarily by shooting, during World War II (1939–45) in German-occupied Europe. The Einsatzgruppen had an integral role in the implementation of the so-called “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” (Die Endlösung der Judenfrage) in territories conquered by Nazi Germany, and were involved in the murder of much of the intelligentsia and cultural elite of Poland, including members of the priesthood. Almost all of the people they killed were civilians, beginning with the intelligentsia and swiftly progressing to Soviet political commissars, Jews, and Romani people as well as actual or alleged partisans throughout Eastern Europe.

Since Hitler had promised to establish a ‘1000 year Reich,’ the Nazis saw no need to worry about negative consequences to their genocidal campaign because in a few short generations after establishing their regime across Europe (and the world?) there would be few to have such raw memories of the atrocities and losses to mount any opposition. As one person commented: who today remembers the Crusades with enough anger to mount opposition to and make war on the descendants of its perpetrators?

A riveting and harrowing history of the Einsatzgruppen is presented by a 2009 four-part documentary series hosted on Netlfix: Einsatzgruppen: The Nazi Death Squads. [weblink at bottom].

Nearly all the visuals of this series were supplied by the many photographs and movies taken by German Nazi officers, but also by members of the killing units manned by Romanians, Hungarians, Ukrainians, Latvians and Lithuanians, which were both encouraged by the German Nazis (where underlying antisemitism and a thirst for pogroms, and hatred of Russians, communists and Stalin’s NKVD existed) or such other killing units were directly supervised by the German Nazis. In a few cases Jews and anti-nazi partisans were surreptitiously able to take photographs of killing actions that were kept hidden until after the war and used as evidence in war crimes trials.

Most of the rank and file of the Einsatzgruppen had been policemen, and were men of limited education; repetitive actions of brute force motivated by simple bigotry, sanctioned by their obedience to superiors, and spiced up for too many of them by committing torturous atrocities as entertainment. The officers, on the other hand, were quite well educated and intellectual, they directed and guided this genocide machine as true believers in the inhuman vision behind it.

As I watched this tragic history unroll, I recalled that Telford Taylor had publicly stated that by the standards set by the Nuremberg Trials that American officials should be liable for war crimes prosecution over their perpetration of the Vietnam War. From Wikipedia: Telford Taylor was an American lawyer best known for his role as Counsel for the Prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials after World War II, his opposition to Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, and his outspoken criticism of U.S. actions during the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s.

And I thought of the My Lai massacre of March 1968, which was an infamous American cluster of war crimes that was not at all an isolated event as the US military claimed but actually just a typical action in an entire campaign made up of such actions conducted by US military forces in South Vietnam. The South Vietnamese Army, which was trained and lavishly supported by the U.S., were routine savage perpetrators of atrocities to Communist Vietnamese prisoners and also regular peasants caught up by the military operations. The parallels here between America’s South Vietnamese Army ally, to the non-German proxies during Operation Barbarossa, are quite close.

I also recalled that the murders of civil rights workers and voting rights activists Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner (the Freedom Summer murders) in Neshoba County, Mississippi, occurred on 21 June 1964, during the Civil Rights Movement. That was 57 years ago yesterday. Members of the local White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the Neshoba County Sheriff’s Office, and the (local city of) Philadelphia Police Department were involved in the incident. None of the police departments or government agencies and officers of the State of Mississippi took any action to investigate the disappearance of the three civil rights workers after 21 June 1964, and they were certainly not interested in seeking to uncover any crime and prosecute its perpetrators as related to this incident. The remains of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were discovered by federal investigators on 4 August 1964, and federal prosecutions followed. The federal government acted because of intense national public outcry against first the disappearance of the civil rights trio and then their murders, and that outrage had erupted out of the new largely national awakening that had been sparked by the Civil Rights Movement.

There is a parallel between Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner facing the the guns of their killers — pogrom-thirsting bigots and policemen who were backed by the political powers of local and state public officials — on the night of 21 June 1964, and the millions of Jews who faced the guns of their killers in Eastern Europe during 1939-1944 — also pogrom-thirsting bigots and policemen who were also often enough their own countrymen.

And then one thinks of today, of George Floyd, of Black Lives Matter, and of the logic of “defund the police.” That logic becomes very clear to anyone who comes to experience police activity as even remotely similar in any way to Einsatzgruppen activity. For them it is better to disband the police than allow for a continuation of civilian murders (especially and disproportionately of minorities, particularly Black Americans) by armed operatives employed and legally immunized by the governing political authorities, under the justification of “keeping the peace” and guarding “public safety.”

I realize all this sad and painful history is not pleasant to think about, but I think it is helpful for Americans to know about it accurately, and not filtered by fantasies and preferred biases, so that our society in the present day and into our collective future can be significantly bettered, to really ensure everybody’s public safety, and to keep the peace in a just and compassionate manner.

Einsatzgruppen: The Nazi Death Squads
https://www.netflix.com/title/80134093

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Planet Earth Is Heating Up Faster

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Planet Earth Is Heating Up Faster

A new scientific paper just accepted for publication by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) shows that, on the basis of both computations and experimental measurements, the net rate at which Planet Earth is absorbing solar energy has increased between years 2005 and 2019. Planet Earth is heating up — global warming — at a faster rate, and that rate is increasing.

In my article here, I will first quote the abstract of this paper (“Satellite and Ocean Data Reveal Marked Increase in Earth’s Heating Rate,” by Norman G. Loeb, Gregory C. Johnson, Tyler J. Thorsen, John M. Lyman, Fred G. Rose, Seiji Kato, 15 June 2021; https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2021GL093047), and then give my interpretation of the overall scientific conclusion, in plain English.

Abstract from the AGU paper:

Earth’s Energy Imbalance (EEI) is a relatively small (presently ∼0.3%) difference between global mean solar radiation absorbed and thermal infrared radiation emitted to space. EEI is set by natural and anthropogenic climate forcings and the climate system’s response to those forcings. It is also influenced by internal variations within the climate system. Most of EEI warms the ocean; the remainder heats the land, melts ice, and warms the atmosphere. We show that independent satellite and in situ observations each yield statistically indistinguishable decadal increases in EEI from mid-2005 to mid-2019 of 0.50±0.47 W m-2 decade-1 (5%-95% confidence interval). This trend is primarily due to an increase in absorbed solar radiation associated with decreased reflection by clouds and sea-ice and a decrease in outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) due to increases in trace gases and water vapor. These changes combined exceed a positive trend in OLR due to increasing global mean temperatures.

MG.Jr. Interpretation:

Earth’s increased temperature has melted ice and snow and reduced cloud cover, which means that less solar radiation (light) is reflected back into space — a warming effect. Note that clouds, snow and ice fields are white and highly reflective of light; bare ground and the ocean surface have much lower reflectivity. Planet Earth’s net reflectivity is called the albedo; and it has decreased.

Even though the increased average global temperature has warmed — stored heat in — the oceans (a 91% effect, as only 9% warms the lands and air) and thus caused greater evaporation of water (and snow melt and ice melt) into the atmosphere, fewer clouds are forming because the higher air temperature keeps the water vapor from condensing as quickly as in previously cooler times. Note that clouds are cold, they are made up of water droplets and ice crystals: condensate from cooled vapor.

However, the ever increasing atmospheric load of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases that humans cause to be emitted, along with the increased water vapor in the atmosphere, just noted, make for a denser gaseous “filter” or capture medium for the outgoing Infrared Radiation (Outgoing Long-wavelength Radiation = OLR = HEAT) that cools the Earth.

For Planet Earth to be in thermal equilibrium — at a steady average global temperature — the rate of heat-energy radiated out into space (cooling) must equal the rate of light-energy absorbed from the Sun (heating).

The quantity of thermal-energy emission per unit time (OLR) from any isolated body (like Planet Earth suspended in space) increases as its temperature increases. This phenomenon is known as the “blackbody radiation” effect in physics, and quantified by the Stephan-Boltzmann Law. So, one might have hoped that with Planet Earth’s now higher average temperature that it would reject heat (and cool) at a higher rate; and in that way seek to maintain a steady planetary temperature.

BUT the AGU paper shows that the decrease of Earth’s light reflectivity (albedo), combined with the increase of its OLR (heat) absorptivity by the atmosphere, overwhelm the also increased rate of heat (IR or OLR) emission from the planetary surface back towards space.

The net effect is an increase in the rate at which originally-solar energy is absorbed by Planet Earth, and hence an increase in the rate at which Planet Earth’s average temperature is increasing. This is a self-reinforcing effect, a.k.a.: a vicious cycle.

Immediately ceasing “all” (the vast majority of) emissions of carbon-dioxide and greenhouse gases is the first essential step to SLOWING the rate of global warming and attendant “climate change”, and the absolute beginning of a very long process of global temperature equilibration:

1, from a slowing of the rising trend of temperature;

2, until temperature reaches a plateau; because it takes decades to centuries for the oceans and lands to reach a temperature equilibrium — think of equilibrium as “uniformity,” though that analogy is not exact;

3, and then the slow (decades to centuries) re-absorption of CO2 from the atmosphere by the surface waters of the oceans and photosynthesis (plants);

4, with a gradual (centuries to millennia) reduction of global temperature.

It took 200,000 years to clear away the global warming “hyperthermal” event known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), which occurred ~55.5 million years ago.

The sooner the emissions of greenhouse gases cease: the lower the height of the inevitable maximum temperature plateau, and the shorter the duration of the period before temperature returns to “normal” (as in the Holocene). Regardless, that duration will be vastly longer than a human lifetime, and even many human generations.

The social and political implications of these scientific findings quickly become obvious on honest reflection.

[Thanks to Peter Carter for the AGU reference.]

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The Lethal Hypnosis

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The Lethal Hypnosis

The more stupid you are, the easier it is to be racist. The more racist you are, the easier it is to be more stupid. Racism — and gun toting — is the pathetic effort by ignorant people, who are fearful about their irrelevance, to hide their lack of self-confidence behind racist bravado and “manliness.” Self-cure is the only way out of it, but the individual has to become motivated for that by going through some difficult or traumatic experience. They can’t just be talked out of it by “friends.”

The 2nd Amendment is both a religion and a mental illness. That illness is the psychosis of seeing oneself as a self-guiding unit entirely divorced from the organic integration known as Nature. One is then the hunter, the survivalist, the extractor, miner, chemical factory farmer and rancher, the conqueror, the capitalist, the owner, the dominator.

The biome within our gut mirrors the biodiversity without; the deforestation and soil denudation without has its connection to the parallel destruction of our gut biome, and consequently of our immune system. When we are thus weakened we become allergic to and even poisoned by the food that Nature provides, and the many microbes that flood the entire World Biome that is both outside us and within us.

That the biome within mirrors the biodiversity without, and vice versa, is an incredible insight (for those of us who did not previously have it) wonderfully presented in Episode 3 of the new television series HUMAN: The World Within (https://www.netflix.com/title/81139212).

So many of our autoimmune diseases are from the loss of microbial biodiversity within our guts. Those microbes feed on the insoluble fiber within the vegetables and fruits that we eat. We feed on the sugars, carbohydrates and protein those foods convey to our guts where they are processed to produce glucose, which is absorbed with the aid of insulin by our blood and carried to all our cells to feed those 37 trillion little metabolic engines.

Each of us is organically entwined within Nature, whether we recognize that fact or choose to believe in the anti-organic schizo-materialistic psychosis. We are not only connected through our guts to the World Biome and World Biodiversity without, but we are also connected with each other — whether we like it or not (and I do not always like it) — not merely through conscious awareness and volition as expressed in our acknowledged emotional attachments and in our civic awareness and political attitudes, but also through many unconscious connections made by both our physical reflexes mediated by our electro-chemical nervous systems, and our instinctual emotional reactions mediated chemically by our amygdalas sprouting from our brain stems, and even by our thoughts, memories, feelings and behaviors triggered by our olfactory systems sensing pheromones: each others’ smell, and also some of the immense olfactory sensory field of the external world that all other animals and insects sense so much more of than we do. Up to half of a dog’s brain is connected to olfactory sensors.

The economic structures in that part of the Human World we called Developed are nearly all capitalistic, despite how they are labeled in each national jurisdiction, and the political structures erected by their capitalist owners to maintain their capitalist economics are thus entirely dominated by the mentality of anti-organic schizo-materialistic psychosis. That illness within the human species infects the Natural World as a whole, so that it reacts feverishly in the manner which we have labeled “climate change” and “biodiversity loss,” and which pathological complex includes the vast inequities in the Human World, all of which is encompassed by the name: Planetary Crisis.

To the psychosis mind all problems invade the human isolates from an external world, and all solutions to those problems are technological assaults against it. But look at the human history of “developed economics”: nothing ages faster than technology, and nothing matures more slowly than human thought and morality. The difference between the collisions of deer-in-the-headlights, and “developed” humans-facing-climate-change, is that the humans have their eyes closed.

Snapping our species out if its lethal hypnosis by the anti-organic schizo-materialistic psychosis will doubtless require a widespread traumatic shock equivalent to that required to snap a racist individual out of his or her racist mental fog and into a genuine thirsting for self-cure from that malady. One symptom of the popular denial of our interconnectedness during this time of the COVID-19 pandemic is the laxity displayed by many regarding compliance with the infection-prevention protocols: conscious person-to-person social distancing, the wearing of exhalation-filtering face masks, and becoming doubly vaccinated with the newly developed anti-viral serum.

In essence, a responsible recognition of our interconnectedness would see us all expand the mesh-spacing of our social network, while containing our effluent breath plumes, and immunizing ourselves as soon as possible; all so the SARS-CoV-2 virus does not propagate further through our species by exploiting our human interconnectedness that so many ignore and are even hostile to. Much COVID-19 death is a consequence of denialism by anti-organic schizo-materialistic psychotics.

Can we humans overwhelmingly snap into an awareness for organic reintegration before being decimated by our own fearful and willful denial of it? Uncertain. Yet, Nature, which includes our marvelous human bodies, is wondrously responsive to new conditions, including new human attitudes and actions, so we already know that the organic reintegration of humanity into the long cycles of healthy Nature, and thus the ensuring of long-term sustainability for all planetary life, is more likely to occur the sooner we try to achieve it. All must change now. It is that simple.

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Gold, Swords, and Tumulus Grave Goods Forever?

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Gold, Swords, and Tumulus Grave Goods Forever?

From our Neolithic Past to our Radioactive Present — and future? — gold, swords, and tumulus grave goods of hoards of icons of materialistic wealth have been our chosen markers of human achievement; in all a genuflection to the triumph of materialism over intellect and spirit.

Socialism is the economic ideology of abundant prosperity, democracy is its political ideology, and peace is its mythology.

Prosperity is the warmth of good living generated by the consumption of natural resources into the entropy of waste products. The expansion of prosperity is fueled by the diminishment of Nature and the increase of enslavement by the expansion of imperialism vacuuming in new resources to the homeland from ever farther afield. The military, like a wildfire, is an expanding ring of consumption whose center is a widening desert of entropy: resource scarcity and waste with a smattering of capstones of wealth atop pyramids of power. War is the collision of expanding rings of militarism; conquest is the collapse of one against the pressure of another.

A diminishing access to prosperity leads to a narrowing and heightening of political power, and a popular sharpening of competition for resources with a consequent hardening of attitudes of overt racism, and an increasing fragmentation of society into a steepening hierarchy of classes based on submission to and patronage by superiors, until society ultimately degenerates into a dictatorial kingship over a realm of desperation. Fascism is the populist submission in industrialized societies to rising kingships over realms of expanding scarcity.

Sustainability within the Natural World is the conception of frugality as freedom and not poverty. Sustainability is the submergence of human identity into Nature, and seen as a release and not a collapse, instead of being an ever heightening emergence above it. Sustainability is the conceptualization of civilization as organic within the Natural World, instead of a construction caging it. Sustainability is seeing human empowerment as coming from submission to Life, instead of from defiance of it, and of seeing Life as anarchic instead of hierarchical.

God reigns if all are dead. God is dead if all are alive, if all are each infinitesimal glints from the underlying sea of godliness that is Life.

I looked up into the day, shielding my eyes against the brilliance of the sun infusing warmth into my skin, to see low wispy white clouds streaming across the top of my wooded canyon while slowly roiling within themselves, as invisible cascades of crystalline air surged with turbulent reverberations over the hilltops and down into the canyon, splashing into near-chill breezes soughing through the forest green ringing with birdsong scintillating the leaves and rippling their dappled network of reflected sunlight, to brush against me as I stood immersed in wonder once again under the soaring of a black hawk, amazed to be experiencing this immensity of Life, this great outside beyond human limitations. I am a brief instance of all this, and that realization is my share of the eternal.

[Image by Caitlyn Grabenstein]

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When Ozymandias Is Forgotten

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When Ozymandias Is Forgotten

Zionism is racism, which is why so many Americans support it. American political consciousness has as its consensus a rainbow coalition of varieties of racism; and racism is a religious faith whose sacrament is money, whose mythology is real estate, and whose original sin is genocide.

Global warming climate change is the coming Great Flood for which we will ever be absent a Noah, because there is no True God to inspire a True Noah. God is dead because we are our own gods, who are dying in the rising tide of entropy seeping out as the lifeblood from the body of the True God we have murdered.

So many of those whose lives will be cut short, and whose dreams will be cut off, are innocent of the crime; but it is ever the privilege of wealth in its pyramid death cult to sacrifice abundances of young life on the altars of its mausoleums: glorious memories imagined that will only blow in the wind as dust in the not so distant unknown.

For some: ideas liberate the mind, and time offers promise.
For others: ideology cages mind, and time is a sentence.
Gratitude is the experience of Everlasting Life, and
No soul immersed in gratitude is ever alone.

The warmth of sunlight on skin, the brush of cool breeze against the cheek, the ringing of birdsong through the trees, the blushing of day into night before the eyes, the slow cascade of wispy cloud down the mountain, the sparkle of moonlight in the brook, the density of quiet in the dark, are all the eternal caress and lullaby by the Mother, always sustaining a refuge of love, always welcoming home her lost children.

I stretched my legs and curled them under the blankets while the cat pressed his weight down into them, walking and coiling above. I ringed them into a bowl, a plush crater, and he settled his body pressing against them. And thus we slept through the late night dark into the bright of morning: connected in the eternal.

The struggle for life is real, but we misuse it.
Wisdom is life lived in the calm of grateful awareness.

If I am moderate in my speech, it is ignored in favor of existing biases. If I am immoderate in my speech, it sparks thought which is met with denial and a hostile defense of ignorance, which is always threatened by any truth however moderated its appearance. So to be truthful to myself I must offend the delicate sensibilities of your falsity.

Socrates was insufferable, and was insufferably responded to. Plato was elegantly snobbish in playing Socrates without hazard. Shelley was Dionysian, but with his lordly airs could never be Euripidean; his Ionian reflection was Keats, that flowering of the sublime into the radiance above Wordsworthian mulch. Bukowski, that guttural Boudu, played at Diogenes without his wit or insight. Ginsberg, as frenzied Whitman, played Kerouac in the feminine; Kerouac played Ryokan as cool jazz Nietzsche; Ryokan was pure moonlight on the river; and Camus was the river of conscience into Melville’s sea of morality. Our taste in poets, for those that are true poets, reflects on our flaws not theirs. True poets are diamonds of imperfection forged out of the coal of humanity.

When Ozymandias is forgotten we will have let go and been enfolded.

5 June 2021

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Nate Hagens, on Earth and Humanity

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Watch the video presentation “Earth and Humanity: Myth and Reality,” (2:52:15) by Nate Hagens, linked below. Hagens presents an analysis and grand synthesis of the multi-entwined crises of unsustainable human society living in the rapidly degrading world climate of an increasingly resource-depleted and increasingly inhospitable Planet Earth.

I guarantee that you will find many of your own views on this topic reaffirmed by Hagens, and also that he will challenge at least one of your cherished beliefs about it. This is good for serious people, it prompts them to think anew, and to rethink their assumptions.

What impresses me about Hagens’ analysis is that it is based on a wealth of data — the lifeblood of any real scientific or economic analysis — and that it is a multidimensional systems analysis, and not merely a “one note Johnny” narrow expertise (just finance, or just physics), single “smoking gun” caused problem (as the “overpopulation” reductionists claim) or a promotion of a single route to salvation solution (as the “nuclear power” reductionists claim). Hagens’s is an integrated description of the dysfunctional global system, which Nature plus Humanity has become, rather than merely being an uncoordinated list of a myriad of disconnected disasters, pathologies, ruins and wrecks.

Hagens does make specific recommendations near the end of his video, aimed at getting us (particularly in the U.S.A.) to begin dealing with our ongoing global systems failure in a substantive manner. After that he adds a few seconds of wordless video that will delight all lovers of wildlife.

Any abstraction of Hagens’ presentation to a single phrase would wash away all its insights and nuance, and would be unjust to the cause of transmitting understanding to the public. But, if you want an indicative soundbite, here is my maximally reductionist summary: humanity needs to scale back its use of energy very very significantly, and permanently, and now — an energy diet — just like a forever-maintained eat-less food-calorie diet needed to break an individual free from obesity.

Hagens’ video will make any serious person think (and we all better get serious), and that is the first essential step for us ever having a chance to get out of the mess we’re in.

Earth and Humanity: Myth and Reality
16 May 2021 (Nate Hagens)
https://youtu.be/qYeZwUVx5MY

The following two paragraphs are my abstraction and consolidation of internet descriptions of Nate Hagens, with much of this information drawn from The Post Carbon Institute (https://www.postcarbon.org/our-people/nate-hagens/).

Nate Hagens has a Masters Degree in Finance from the University of Chicago and a PhD in Natural Resources from the University of Vermont. He is a former editor of The Oil Drum and worked on Wall Street for a decade before “seeing the light.” Since 2003 Nate has shifted his focus to understanding the interrelationships between energy, environment, and finance and the implication this synthesis has for human futures. Previously, Nate was President of Sanctuary Asset Management and a Vice President at the investment firms Salomon Brothers and Lehman Brothers. Currently, he teaches a systems synthesis Honors seminar at the University of Minnesota ‘Reality 101 – A Survey of the Human Predicament.’

Nate focuses on the interrelationship between debt-based financial markets and natural resources, particularly energy, and the unplanned for risks from the coming ‘Great Simplification.’ He also addresses the evolutionarily-derived underpinnings to status, addiction, and our aversion to acting about the future and offers suggestions on how individuals and society might better adapt to the coming decades.

Jeff Gibbs 2019 video “Planet of the Humans,” released publicly on Earth Day 2020, was the most important presentation on the realities of our global “climate change” crisis to be made available in many years (https://planetofthehumans.com/). Nate Hagens’ new video “Earth and Humanity: Myths and Reality” is of much grander scope and at least of equal importance. See it and don’t get defensive, then refine your own stance from your points of disagreement with Hagens, and/or improve his systemic analysis, which is the type of thing needed to converge politically on what in all honesty would have to be called a World Plan for guiding human civilization through a transition — the Great Simplification — to a post carbon future, without suffering a catastrophic and life-ending collapse.

As a 20th century mechanical engineer who focused himself on the 19th century science of thermodynamics (and got away with a career in experimental nuclear explosions), I’ve said all what little I was competent to say about the physics and economics of “climate change.” So at this point all I can offer on the topic is bad poetry, and I’ll spare you that. But I can also recognize the value of new presentations like those of Gibbs and Hagens, and urge others to see them, study them, and act on them.

I am mindful of the urgent and totally justified demand posed by the next generation onto us world-controlling and world-destroying adults, through the voice of Greta Thunberg, for “action!” Nate Hagens’ systemic analysis is a very important step toward answering the questions of “what actions?” and “how do we implement them?”, and of actually working on Greta’s demand.

[Thanks to Isabel Ebert for pointing me to Nate Hagens’ video.]

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ADDENDUM:

Richard Heinberg both appears in “Planet of the Humans,” and leads the Post Carbon Institute.

The Most Colossal Planning Failure in Human History
May 2021
Richard Heinberg
https://richardheinberg.com/museletter-339-the-most-colossal-planning-failure-in-human-history

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