Dumbass

Yeah, it's unconfirmed, but is anybody not thinking this is the fault of some fuckup who couldn't figure out that he's not at home with mommy and daddy, so he oughta to be looking after his own shit for once?

Goddammit, I hate these fuckin' people.

The Forest Service said June 12, 2024, that this campfire ring

is likely where the Interlaken wildfire started.

Abandoned campfire suspected cause of 450-acre Interlaken wildfire burning near Leadville

Investigator believes the campfire was left days before being reported Tuesday when the fire started south of Twin Lakes

A circle of rocks surrounds a burnt out campfire in the forest with fallen trees and some lingering smoke in the background.

An abandoned campfire likely ignited the Interlaken fire burning hundreds of acres south of Twin Lakes in Lake County, according to a U.S. Forest Service investigator.

In an update Wednesday night, the Forest Service said an investigator located a campfire ring left 60 yards from the Interlaken trail and 1.5 miles from the trailhead where the fire likely started Tuesday.

“This campfire was not properly extinguished and continued to burn. It is believed that the campfire was abandoned several days prior to its report on June 11,” the Forest Service said in a social media post.

Officials do not have any leads on who might have started the fire. They are asking anyone who may have information about campers who built a fire near the Interlaken resort between Friday and Tuesday to call a tip line at 303-275-5266.

As of Wednesday afternoon, the fire 12 miles south of Leadville had burned about 443 acres in 24 hours with zero containment.

Pre-evacuations have extended into northern Chaffee County.

There are 135 fire personnel on scene along with four helicopters and a fixed-wing aircraft, according to the USFS.

The Lake County Sheriff’s Office issued an evacuation order to the Interlaken historic district, which is home to a once popular, now-abandoned mountain hotel, and all of County Road 25 on the south side of Twin Lakes.

A pre-evacuation order was issued “until further notice” for Lost Canyon, as well as Balltown, a small residential area on the east side of Twin Lakes and County Road 30.

On Wednesday, the Chaffee County Sheriff’s Office issued a pre-evacuation warning for residents and those recreating between Clear Creek Reservoir to the Chaffee County-Lake County line.

It's Not Selling Well

...but some of the Trump supporters

and just so fuckin' stoopid

Death By Stupid

Hey - I know - let's just stand here and watch the earth kills us.

 

Today's Stoopid

OK fine, I'll chime in on this crap too.

MAGA is fraught with radical skepticism, and melting down as they watch one thing after the next "go against them".

And they're so well-conditioned to look for "signs" of The Great & Evil Librul Cabal in action, they glom onto anything - and I mean any-fuckin'-thing - that helps them deny that they're losing, that they're insistent on following losers, and that they're more and more desperate about being made to feel comfortable with the fact that they're losing - and denying.

They double down, and triple down, and fourple down on denying that they're denying.

The uncomplicated, dumb engine driving political false claims about Taylor Swift

A team won a football game, which is obviously part of a devious plot for Democrats to retain power via a pop star

I am professionally obligated to begin this article by explaining to you who Taylor Swift is, who Travis Kelce is and why I am talking about them. I know this will come off as condescending (if not insulting) to most of you, but for that one person who, this very morning, emerged from a 20-year-long meditative retreat atop Aconcagua and — as one would — opened The Washington Post’s website: Here you go.

Taylor Swift is a musician. More specifically, she is one of the most famous musicians that has ever existed on this Earth, in the company of Michael Jackson, certainly … if not, like, Beethoven. Travis Kelce is a football player who was well-known in sporting circles a year or two ago but who, by virtue of dating Swift, is now also well-known among Swift fans and, by extension, most Americans.

The reason I am talking about them is that Kelce’s team, the Kansas City Chiefs, won a playoff game Sunday that will return them to the championship game. And in response, a surprisingly large section of the American political right decided that this was somehow related to politics.

There are lots of manifestations of this, including multiple presentations on the right’s preferred cable news channel. The iteration that attracted perhaps the most attention, though, came from former presidential candidate and Donald Trump cheerleader Vivek Ramaswamy (speaking of people who suddenly emerged in the public consciousness to polarizing effect).

In a social media post, a prominent right-wing conspiracy theorist linked Swift to … let’s see here … ah yes, George Soros. In response, Ramaswamy offered a prediction.

“I wonder who’s going to win the Super Bowl next month,” he wrote. “And I wonder if there’s a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall. Just some wild speculation over here, let’s see how it ages over the next 8 months.”

The implication (again: forgive my telling you something obvious) is that the Chiefs are being ushered to the Super Bowl … somehow … to secure Swift’s endorsement for President Biden.

This makes a lot of sense because the Chiefs haven’t been to the Super Bowl since, uh, last year, when they won. But before that they hadn’t been since, well, two years before. But that one they lost! But they’d won the year before that.

You can see why they need … someone … to give them a boost. Because otherwise, Taylor Swift wouldn’t endorse Biden, something she hasn’t done since 2020 — the last time Biden ran.

A lot of the responses to this broad line of argument — that the commingling of the Chiefs and Swift is somehow targeted at politics — note that it’s probably not wise for Republicans to side against the NFL. The NFL is wildly popular, and attacking popular things is not a good way to yourself become more popular.

But this backlash from the Fox-News-iverse isn’t about electoral politics. It is about appealing to a more immediate source of power on the right: online and on-air attention.

This was the crux of Ramaswamy’s entire presidential campaign. He understood, having observed Republican politics over the past decade, that attention can be parlayed into a lesser form of power, elected office. Trump blazed this trail, certainly, showing others the path and helping clear it of overgrowth. Ramaswamy’s 2024 bid was centered on jumping into the online conversation and bringing its themes and rhetoric to the campaign trail. It built him a loyal following of similarly online types, enough to get him about 4 percent of the primary vote by the time he dropped out.

But this is the incentive path that’s feeding the Swift clamor. The wilder your assertion, the more traction it’s going to get. Your allies will riff on it and build on it, and you can come along for the ride. Maybe you’ll end up as a member of the House of Representatives from Georgia or Long Island. Maybe you’ll go higher: landing a recurring spot on Sean Hannity’s prime-time show.

It’s important to recognize the overlaying element here: The speculation should leverage the widespread belief on the right that Democrats only get legitimate votes by brainwashing their idiotic base. (Republicans also believe Democrats get lots of stolen votes too, of course — a similarly incorrect theory.) This idea comes up a lot, that Democrats win by snookering college kids or duping credulous city voters into ignoring their apocalyptic surroundings. (This is ironic, given that believing that cities are hellholes requires a credulous acceptance of propaganda from the right, but I digress.)

Republicans losing the presidential popular vote in 2016, the House majority in 2018, the presidency in 2020 and underperforming expectations in the 2022 midterms has built a strong incentive to look for nonpolitical explanations for strong Democratic performance — since many Americans don’t know anyone who holds opposing political views, including Republicans baffled at the idea of voting Democratic. So, particularly given Trump’s insistence that the 2020 race was “rigged” by media and cultural elites … somehow, it is quite fashionable on the right to suggest the existence of intricate plans aimed at securing Democratic votes from glassy-eyed voters.

Like, say, that a football team gets ushered into the Super Bowl to secure an endorsement from Taylor Swift.

I’ve avoided doing so but I can no longer resist: How would this work? Did the Baltimore Ravens take a dive? Did someone pay them? Are they just that committed to Democratic politics that they all agreed to lose? Did the Buffalo Bills before them? And the Miami Dolphins before the Bills? Or does the government have some Havana-Syndrome-esque device that it trains on opponents, causing field goals to go wide right? What’s the mechanism, exactly?

It doesn’t matter, obviously. These are not rational conclusions drawn from observed facts. They are, instead, clout-chasing assemblages of words that, through a process of grim Darwinism, seek rewards in the right-wing conversation.

Never mind that the supposed outcome here — the Swift endorsement — is itself wildly overpowered in the right’s imagination. One of Swift’s first prominent endorsements came in 2018 when she backed the Democrat in Tennessee’s U.S. Senate race. Polling was close; he then lost by double-digits. You think that Swift — whose fan base includes millions of people younger than voting age — is so valuable an endorser that you’re going to rig the NFL? Okay. Sure.

It’s all silly, but the silliness exists over a range that runs from innocuous to bizarre.

I’ll leave you with the wise words of Ramaswamy, almost certainly responding to the (wonderful! desired!) controversy he’d stirred up with his football observations.

“What the [media] calls a ‘conspiracy theory’ is often nothing more than an amalgam of incentives hiding in plain sight,” he wrote. “Once you see that, the rest becomes pretty obvious.”

The natural Step 2 here: When the media points out that my comments make no sense, it proves that I’m right. Okay.

Wait. Actually, I’ll leave you with an observation attached to Ramaswamy’s second post, one that comes from the world’s most prominent seeker of attention by way of posting controversial/bizarre/unnecessarily-political comments.

“Exactly,” wrote Elon Musk.

Today's Near Darwin Event

It’s the guns. pic.twitter.com/HPaPiWT6sv

— Sahara Stevens ❤️🇺🇸 (@Sahara_Stevens) January 8, 2024

It's All A Fucking Circus

Maybe it's nothing but the usual bluff-n-bluster, aimed at drumming up a little free publicity, but are we really willing simply to dismiss it?

If enough of us survive this shit, we're going to be looking back on an era of the most ridiculously stoopid antics ever.

I get that 120 years ago, we had a president who would challenge staffers, and cabinet members, and visiting foreign dignitaries to boxing matches at the White House. But that was at the tail end of the Wild West period, and before we'd figured out that a few concussions could shorten your life by decades.

Not that serious risks to our health or looking like a strutting hyper-macho cock have ever tempered our more idiotic impulses, but c'mon, people.

Why Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg say they’re ready for a ‘cage match’

Only six weeks ago, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg competed in his first jujitsu tournament, taking home a couple of medals and posting a photo of himself on Instagram, his arm raised in post-match triumph. Now, the billionaire has been challenged to a cage match by another billionaire — Elon Musk — and Zuckerberg is apparently game.

Musk has been taking shots at Zuckerberg on social media amid reports that Meta, Facebook’s parent, is working on a social media platform to rival Twitter, which Musk purchased in October. On Tuesday, in a Twitter thread about Meta’s purported plans, Musk appeared to agree with the suggestion that Meta has copied rival social media companies.

Another user told Musk in jest to “be careful” because Zuckerberg now trains in jujitsu.

Then Musk responded: “I’m up for a cage match if he is lol.”

A day later on Instagram, Zuckerberg posted a screenshot of Musk’s tweet, with the caption: “Send Me Location.”

And Musk later tweeted “Vegas Octagon,” referring to the Ultimate Fighting Championship arena.

“I have this great move that I call ‘The Walrus,’ where I just lie on top of my opponent & do nothing,” Musk added.

Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Asked about Zuckerberg’s Instagram post, Meta spokeswoman Elana Widmann told The Washington Post in a statement: “The story speaks for itself.”

It’s far from certain whether the matchup will happen — some combat sports observers are skeptical. That did not stop internet users from musing about how a fight between the two billionaires might look — and who would win. Musk’s fighting experience is unclear, but in recent months Zuckerberg has flaunted his physical fitness. In late May, he posted a photo of himself wearing a camouflaged vest, writing that he had done 300 squats, 200 push-ups and 100 pull-ups, while wearing a 20-pound “weighted pack.”

Zuckerberg has also made no secret of his affinity for Brazilian jujitsu and mixed martial arts, saying on the “The Joe Rogan Experience” in August 2022 that he’d become interested in martial arts “in the last 12 months.”

“It really is the best sport,” Zuckerberg said. “From the very first session that I did, like five minutes in, I was like, ‘Where has this been my whole life?’”

In October, Zuckerberg attended an unusual UFC event in which he and his wife, Priscilla Chan, were among just a handful of spectators watching in person, while most of the seats remained empty. Zuckerberg was still ranked as a white belt when he participated during the May jujitsu tournament in which he won a gold and a silver medal. During one match, Zuckerberg reportedly was choked unconscious at one point, which he denied in an email this month to the New York Times.

At the center of Musk’s exchange with Zuckerberg is Meta’s plan to roll out a social media platform that rivals Twitter. Meta confirmed its plans to news outlets in March. This month, the Verge reported that the new app could be called Threads, and that Meta officials are pitching it as a more “sanely run” platform than Twitter — which has seen an exodus of advertisers since Musk took over in October.

“At least it will be ‘sane,’” Musk tweeted disparagingly about Meta’s purported new platform. “Was worried there for a moment.”

Minutes later, Musk said he’d take on Zuckerberg in the cage.

Oy

A renowned expert on Black People In The American South explains:

How is that racist?

(white people proverb)

Today's Reddit

It's well documented here in USAmerica Inc, that every year, there's at least a few kids working hard to come up with Halloween costumes that are all but absolutely guaranteed to limit their career opportunities.

It may also be true that they've already committed to a work life that never goes beyond clerking down at the local Qwik Mart, and this kinda shit is how they buy their way into the guild.

We Are The Stoopid Country

At the intersection of 

Fantasy

and

Too Fuckin' Stoopid To Live

ABC Channel 4 - Salt Lake City

UTAH COUNTY, Utah (ABC4) – A man has been arrested for the wildfire growing east of Springville after he allegedly told police he was using a lighter to burn a spider.

Fire personnel said when they first got to the fire around 5 p.m. Monday, they saw a man walking his dog up in the mountain where the fire had started.

According to the Utah County Sheriff’s Office, Cory Allan Martin, 26, told law enforcement that he was using a lighter to burn a spider. Martin said he started the fire by accident, setting some brush on fire.

“Not sure exactly why he felt the need to need to have to burn the spider but you know, all the regret in the world doesn’t change the outcome based on whatever reason there was for him doing that, said Utah County Sergeant Spencer Cannon.

Sgt. Cannon says he’s still scratching his head over the incident.

Following his arrest, deputies found marijuana and drug paraphernalia.

Martin was booked into Utah County Jail and is facing a drug possession charge and a reckless burning charge — which carries up to a year in prison and a fine of up to $2,500 dollars.

Uh-Oh

Tourists. Whaddaya gonna do.

Avalanche in Kyrgyzstan

Overheard

If you're manly and you know it, tan your balls

If you're manly and you know it, tan your balls

If you're manly and you know it,
then the only way to show it,
is to drop your pants and tan your manly balls

Bookworms To The Rescue

War is a monument to ignorance - it stinks of the lowest impulses of animalistic brutality.

The proof of that is right here:

But the people we tend to ignore - the ones we kinda like to poke fun at because we regard them lightly, and with a certain disdain for being shy and unassuming - they're always there to look after the records, and to document both our glory, and our often stupidly malicious folly.

WaPo: (pay wall)

Meet the 1,300 librarians racing to back up Ukraine’s digital archives

In early March, two weeks into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Carrie Pirmann stumbled upon a website dedicated to Ivan Mazepa, a 16th century Ukrainian politician and patron of the arts. A 44-year-old librarian at Bucknell University, Pirmann had joined an international effort of fellow archivists to preserve the digital history of a country under siege, and the contents of Mazepa’s website, though obscure, seemed worth saving.

The site held a number of things: Lord Byron poems written about Mazepa’s life and a catalogue of centuries-old articles detailing his various conquests. Pirmann opened her website scraping tool, backing up the site and preserving its content.

Now, the original website is lost, its server space likely gone to cyberattacks, power outages or Russian shelling. But thanks to her, it still remains intact on server space rented by an international group of librarians and archivists.

“We’re trying to save as much as possible,” Pirmann said. “Otherwise, we lose that connection to the past.”

Buildings, bridges, and monuments aren’t the only cultural landmarks vulnerable to war. As the violence enters its second month, the country’s digital history — its poems, archives, and pictures — are at risk of being erased as cyberattacks and bombs erode the nation’s servers.

Over the past month, a motley group of more than 1,300 librarians, historians, teachers and young children have banded together to save Ukraine’s Internet archives, using technology to back up everything from census data to children’s poems and Ukrainian basket weaving techniques.

The efforts, dubbed Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online, have resulted in over 2,500 of the country’s museums, libraries, and archives being preserved on servers they’ve rented, eliminating the risk they’ll be lost forever. Now, all-volunteer effort has become a lifeline for cultural officials in Ukraine, who are working with the group to digitize their collections in the event their facilities get destroyed in the war.

The endeavor, experts said, underscores how volunteers, armed with low-cost technology, training and organization can protect a country’s history from disasters such as war, hurricanes, earthquakes and fire.

“I have not seen anything like it,” said Winston Tabb, dean of libraries, archives and museums at Johns Hopkins University. “We didn’t really have the tools before that made it even possible to undertake this kind of initiative.”

The seeds of this international effort started online. On Feb. 26, Anna Kijas, a music librarian at Tufts University, put a call out on Twitter asking if any volunteers would join her for a “virtual data rescue session” to preserve Ukrainian musical collections which could be lost in the war.

That got notice from librarians and archivists across the world, including Quinn Dombrowski, an academic technology specialist at Stanford University, and Sebastian Majstorovic, a digital historian based in Vienna. They banded together, and amid sleepless nights across multiple time-zones, they recruited, trained, and organized scores of volunteers wanting to help archive Ukraine’s historical websites.

Large parts of the Internet get periodically archived through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which partners with the organization, but SUCHO’s organizers also needed something more advanced, Dombrowski said. In many cases, the Wayback Machine can dig into the first or second layer of a website, she added, but many documents, like pictures and uploaded files, on Ukraine’s cultural websites could be seven or eight layers deep, inaccessible to traditional web crawlers.

To do that, they turned to a suite of open source digital archiving tools called Webrecorder, which have been around since the mid 2010s, and used by institutions including the United Kingdom’s National Archive and the National Library of Australia. They also started a global Slack channel to communicate with volunteers.

To archive, volunteers mostly use the Webrecorder suite, organizers said. There is Archive.webpage, a browser extension and stand-alone desktop app that archives a website as people browse pages. Another is Browsertrix Crawler, which requires some basic coding skills, and is helpful for “advanced crawls,” such as capturing expansive websites that might have multiple features like calendars, 3D tours, or circuitous links for navigating in-site. And more recently, there is Browsertrix Cloud, a more easy to use, automated version of the powerful Browswertrix crawler, which is popular with volunteers.

“It essentially tries to mimic a human browsing the web,” Ilya Kramer, the founder of Webrecorder, said. “And as it does that, it’s archiving all of the network traffic, and then all that is stored into a file … that can be loaded from anywhere.”

Over the past month, SUCHO has developed systematic, and creative, ways to go about its work. There’s a master spreadsheet where volunteers detail all the Ukrainian museums, libraries, and archives that need to have their websites backed up or ones that have been completed. To develop this list, SUCHO’s organizers receive tips from librarians and archivists across the world who may know of a rare museum in Ukraine that needs to have its work backed up.

Other volunteers have become sleuths, using Google Maps to take a digital walk down Ukrainian streets, looking for any signs that might say “museum” or “library” and trying to find out if it has a website that needs archiving.

In other cases, when a shelling happens somewhere, a group of volunteers dedicated to “situation monitoring” alert any volunteers that might be awake to look for institution websites in that region that need backing up, for fear they could go offline any minute.

“These are the moments,” Dombrowski, whose eight year old child occasionally helps archive sites, said, “that future historians will either celebrate or curse the people of our time for either doing or not doing something in a way that can enable them to tell those stories through a larger arc of history.”

In little over a month, volunteers have backed up an exhaustive array of data. According to their website and organizers, volunteers have preserved documents totaling 25 terabytes that include the history of Jewish towns in Ukraine, photographs of excavation sites in Crimea, and digitized exhibitions of Kharkiv’s Literary Museum.

For Majstorovic, the importance of the work he’s helping organize was made apparent a few weeks ago. In early-March, he happened upon the Ukrainian State Archive of Kharkiv’s website. As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was gearing up, he was worried how long the site would remain active, fearing its servers would be susceptible to cyberattacks or shelling.

He loaded the archive’s website into Webrecorder’s Browsertrix tool, and let it do its work. By early morning, it collected over 100 gigabytes of information, including the district’s census records, criminal cases, and lists of people who had previously been persecuted in the region.

Within hours, the website was gone. But still, its records remained. Looking back, Majstorovic says, that’s exactly why he is doing this work.

“If we can save these things, we prove that Ukraine has a history,” he said. “[If] they are gone forever … that just rips a black hole into the history of a place that will last forever.”

How Stoopid Is This Guy?

Pretty fuckin' stoopid.

He thinks it's all just a show. He has no idea what's going on, because he doesn't pay attention, because he seems to believe all he has to do is hit his mark and start talking whatever shit that pops into his pea-sized lizard brain. 

WaPo: (pay wall)

Trump immediately botches what’s happening in Ukraine

If there’s one thing Donald Trump and his allies want you to know about what’s happening in Ukraine right now, it’s that it wouldn’t be happening if he were still in charge.

If only he actually knew what was happening.

Trump opted to appear on Fox News Channel on Wednesday night shortly after Russia announced that it would attack Ukraine. And not for the first time, he seemed woefully unfamiliar with the particulars of an issue of massive import. Trump at one point seemed to think that the United States had suddenly decided to go to war with Russia.

Midway through the interview, Laura Ingraham noted that “we are just learning that U.S. officials are looking at a potential amphibious landing now in Odessa, Ukraine.” The clear implication was that this was Russia engaging in the potential amphibious landing as part of its attack, but Trump took it as the United States itself “looking at” such an action.

After Ingraham broached the topic, the interview cut away to what was happening at the United Nations. When she returned to her guest, he was ready to use the report to go after one of his favorite targets: those same “U.S. officials.”

“Well, I think the whole thing, again, would have never happened. It shouldn’t happen. And it’s a very sad thing,” Trump said. “But you know what is also very dangerous is, you told me about the amphibious attack by Americans, because you and everyone else shouldn’t know about it. They should do that secretly, not being doing that through the great Laura Ingraham. They should be doing that secretly. Nobody should know that, Laura.”

Ingraham quickly cut in and emphasized that this wasn’t, in fact, what Fox was reporting.

“No, those are the Russian — the Russian amphibious landing,” Ingraham said.

“Oh, I thought you said we were sending people in,” Trump said.

“No, I did not. No, no. No, no, no,” Ingraham replied. “That would be news.”

And indeed it would be. While Ingraham’s initial phrasing was indeed a bit ambiguous, the Biden administration has said repeatedly that American troops would not be used even if Russia did invade Ukraine. Just hours earlier, White House press secretary Jen Psaki reinforced this, saying flatly, “We are not going to be in a war with Russia or putting military troops on the ground in Ukraine fighting Russia.”

Were the United States to have so quickly pulled a 180 on that — and, given the gravity of such a decision — it probably would have merited more than a brief reference to what U.S. officials were saying about new developments. And yet Trump seemed to believe the U.S. military was on the move and decided to criticize his own government on the basis of his incorrect assumption.

Perhaps most important, the prospect of an amphibious Russian attack in Odessa has been in the news for weeks, with Russian ships recently entering the Black Sea near Odessa’s commercial ports. “Eleven amphibious ships ring the Black Sea coast, ready to disgorge marines onto Ukraine’s southern underbelly,” Washington Post columnist David Ignatius reported Feb. 13.

This is hardly the first instance of Trump’s being out of the loop on such a major issue. It cropped up repeatedly, early in the coronavirus pandemic. He repeatedly showed a lack of interest in the basics of how Congress works. Trump has even previously displayed unfamiliarity with key issues regarding Russia — for instance, when he misunderstood Vladimir Putin’s comment about Western-style liberalism being “obsolete” to refer to left-leaning politicians in the Western United States.

Earlier in the same interview with Ingraham on Wednesday night, Trump used the opportunity to suggest that President Biden was missing in action.

Ingraham said: “We understand that President Biden is monitoring the situation at the White House now and is going to talk to the G-7 tomorrow. … And he’s going to talk to the nation at some point tomorrow as well. Your reaction to that approach?”

“I don’t think he’s monitoring,” Trump said. “I think he is probably sleeping right now.”

Mere moments later, Trump made pretty clear that Biden’s predecessor, at least, isn’t exactly monitoring the situation very closely.

Today's Reddit

Florida Man is lucky he didn't get blasted into small pieces pullin' this shit in a Stand-Your-Ground state.

Fouling The Nest

This is from The Guardian, which is a bit leftie (see Media Bias / Fact Check), but it seems pretty consistent with practically everything else we've been hearing.

the total mass of plastics on this planet

is now greater than

the total mass of mammals on this planet

The Guardian:

The cocktail of chemical pollution that pervades the planet now threatens the stability of global ecosystems upon which humanity depends, scientists have said.

Plastics are of particularly high concern, they said, along with 350,000 synthetic chemicals including pesticides, industrial compounds and antibiotics. Plastic pollution is now found from the summit of Mount Everest to the deepest oceans, and some toxic chemicals, such as PCBs, are long-lasting and widespread.

The study concludes that chemical pollution has crossed a “planetary boundary”, the point at which human-made changes to the Earth push it outside the stable environment of the last 10,000 years.

Chemical pollution threatens Earth’s systems by damaging the biological and physical processes that underpin all life. For example, pesticides wipe out many non-target insects, which are fundamental to all ecosystems and, therefore, to the provision of clean air, water and food.

“There has been a fiftyfold increase in the production of chemicals since 1950 and this is projected to triple again by 2050,” said Patricia Villarrubia-Gómez, a PhD candidate and research assistant at the Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC) who was part of the study team. “The pace that societies are producing and releasing new chemicals into the environment is not consistent with staying within a safe operating space for humanity.”

Dr Sarah Cornell, an associate professor and principal researcher at SRC, said: “For a long time, people have known that chemical pollution is a bad thing. But they haven’t been thinking about it at the global level. This work brings chemical pollution, especially plastics, into the story of how people are changing the planet.”

Some threats have been tackled to a larger extent, the scientists said, such as the CFC chemicals that destroy the ozone layer and its protection from damaging ultraviolet rays.

Determining whether chemical pollution has crossed a planetary boundary is complex because there is no pre-human baseline, unlike with the climate crisis and the pre-industrial level of CO2 in the atmosphere. There are also a huge number of chemical compounds registered for use – about 350,000 – and only a tiny fraction of these have been assessed for safety.

So the research used a combination of measurements to assess the situation. These included the rate of production of chemicals, which is rising rapidly, and their release into the environment, which is happening much faster than the ability of authorities to track or investigate the impacts.

The well-known negative effects of some chemicals, from the extraction of fossil fuels to produce them to their leaking into the environment, were also part of the assessment. The scientists acknowledged the data was limited in many areas, but said the weight of evidence pointed to a breach of the planetary boundary.

“There’s evidence that things are pointing in the wrong direction every step of the way,” said Prof Bethanie Carney Almroth at the University of Gothenburg who was part of the team. “For example, the total mass of plastics now exceeds the total mass of all living mammals. That to me is a pretty clear indication that we’ve crossed a boundary. We’re in trouble, but there are things we can do to reverse some of this.”

Villarrubia-Gómez said: “Shifting to a circular economy is really important. That means changing materials and products so they can be reused, not wasted.”

The researchers said stronger regulation was needed and in the future a fixed cap on chemical production and release, in the same way carbon targets aim to end greenhouse gas emissions. Their study was published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology

There are growing calls for international action on chemicals and plastics, including the establishment of a global scientific body for chemical pollution akin to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Prof Sir Ian Boyd at the University of St Andrews, who was not part of the study, said: “The rise of the chemical burden in the environment is diffuse and insidious. Even if the toxic effects of individual chemicals can be hard to detect, this does not mean that the aggregate effect is likely to be insignificant.

“Regulation is not designed to detect or understand these effects. We are relatively blind to what is going on as a result. In this situation, where we have a low level of scientific certainty about effects, there is a need for a much more precautionary approach to new chemicals and to the amount being emitted to the environment.”

Boyd, a former UK government chief scientific adviser, warned in 2017 that assumption by regulators around the world that it was safe to use pesticides at industrial scales across landscapes was false.

The chemical pollution planetary boundary is the fifth of nine that scientists say have been crossed, with the others being global heating, the destruction of wild habitats, loss of biodiversity and excessive nitrogen and phosphorus pollution.

Bonhoeffer Revisited

"Reasons fall on deaf ears."

Stupidity - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Overheard

For every 10 stupid people,

there are 10 more who're just as stupid.

@TheTweetOfGod

More On Stoopid

This time we go back to Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

“There is meaning in every journey that is unknown

to the traveler.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

On Stoopid

Sometimes it's just smart people behaving stupidly. But, as Carlo Cipolla points out, in some way or another, we almost always make the mistake of selling The Stoopid short.

5 universal laws of stupidity

1. Always and inevitably, everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
2. The probability that a certain person (will) be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
3. A stupid person is one who causes loss to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring loss himself.
4. Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular, non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and in all places, and under every circumstance, to deal with - or even associate with - stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.
5. A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.

Even in a room filled with articulate,

accomplished,

highly educated people,

there are some who are destructively stupid.

Today's Factoid

Here in USAmerica Inc, there are about 560,000 homeless people. We could provide all of them with healthcare, a 1-bedroom apartment including all utilities and wi-fi - plus a monthly stipend of $1,000 for some food, clothes and a movie once in a while - solely at the expense of America's billionaires, and every one of those billionaires would still be a billionaire.

The way we're doing things is stoopid - we have to do better.

USAmerica, Inc