Today's Quote

I can do without Claire McCaskill as often as not, but she's got her moments.

Let's be honest. If America were all white, there would be universal healthcare and free college like in the other Euro & Scandinavian countries. The only reason we don't have it here is because white people don't want brown and black people getting "free stuff." 

--Claire McCaskill

Today's Pix

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Continuing Daddy's Legacy

Failure is a family tradition.

Forbes:

Ivanka Trump’s latest memoir on empowering working women is so far a moneyloser for its publisher, Portfolio, a division of publishing giant Penguin Random House, Forbes has found. 

From its May 2017 release through the end of the year, Trump’s book Women Who Work sold 31,900 copies, according to data from NPD Bookscan, which tracks 85% of the U.S. domestic book market. That means the book, which advises women on how to excel in both their social and professional lives, has raked in about $1.1 million. Portfolio received an estimated $566,000 from all the sales, while it paid a $787,500 advance to Trump prior to her joining her father’s administration as an advisor. The First Daughter will receive another installment of her advance in the upcoming months. Altogether Forbes, with help from publishing experts, estimates that Portfolio, which did not respond to multiple requests for comment, has lost at least $220,000.

Today's Quote

Coolidge is something of a hero for libertarians. When he's shown to have countervailed what most of them would tell you is a core principle for them, it makes me think there really is something to my own belief that a libertarian is a Progressive-In-Waiting.

Not really dumb or evil - just underdeveloped.

Today's Tweet

It's downright karmic.

"The people who push such unhinged smears are doing Putin’s destabilizing work for him."

Indeed. Describes u & Donald to a T.#ElectionSecurity #DitchMitch #MoscowMitch #GrimReaper #GOPComplicit #CountryOverParty #VoteBlueToSaveDemocracy #IndependentVotingBlue@MurphyCartoons pic.twitter.com/uY11XH7xNb

— (((Jana Ben-Moshe))) (@jb_in_motion) July 30, 2019

Today's Today

HAPPY EARTH OVERSHOOT DAY!

It's your choice - you can become Green, or you can become Red.

Justin King aka: Beau Of The Fifth Column:

The Scariest Thing

Kate Marvel, Scientific American:

Cahokia was larger than London, centrally planned, the Manhattan of its day. Most people there would have come from somewhere else. There were defensive foundations, playing fields, and a magnificent temple. There would have been sacred ceremonies and salacious gossip. It must have been a very exciting place to live.

And then, relatively abruptly, it ceased to exist. We know of the city only because of the physical traces left behind. Few stories of Cahokia have survived; it disappeared from oral tradition, as if whatever happened to it is best forgotten. The archaeological record shows traces of the desperation and bloodshed that almost always accompany great upheavals: skeletons with bound hands, pits full of strangled young women.

- and -

I am often asked what frightens me most about climate change, whether I lie awake at night thinking about ocean hypoxia or arctic permafrost or other feedback processes that could turn a bad thing into a catastrophe. I am scared of the physical changes that await us on a warming planet, but the most important feedback process is the least well understood. The scariest thing about climate change is what it will make us do to each other.

The New Republic:

National crises make governments vulnerable to autocracy—a rather obvious assessment, perhaps, but one rarely seen in debates about climate change. Take the Maldives, an atoll nation in the Indian Ocean. Rising seawater is projected to consume most, if not all, of the country this century. In 2008, the Maldives chose its first democratically elected president, Mohamed Nasheed. Almost immediately, he made climate change preparations central to his administration. He announced plansto move 360,000 Maldivian citizens to new homelands in Sri Lanka, India, or Australia, and he promised to make the Maldives the world’s first carbon-neutral country. Nasheed also demonstrated a flair for the dramatic, staging an underwater Cabinet meeting that turned him into a viral climate celebrity. “What we need to do is nothing short of decarbonizing the entire global economy,” he said. “If man can walk on the moon, we can unite to defeat our common carbon enemy.”

In 2012, the military deposed Nasheed, forcing him to flee the country at gunpoint after mass protests over economic stagnation and spikes in commodity prices. His eventual successor, Abdulla Yameen, has since suspended parts of the constitution, giving himself sweeping powers to arrest and detain opponents, including two of the country’s five Supreme Court justices and even his own half-brother. Meanwhile, Yameen has tossed out Nasheed’s climate adaptation plans and rejected renewable energy programs, proposing instead to build new islands and economic free zones attractive to a global elite. “We do not need cabinet meetings underwater,” his environment minister told The Guardian. “We do not need to go anywhere. We need development.”

If any lesson can be drawn from the power struggle in the Maldives, it is that people who feel threatened by an outside force, be it foreign invaders or rising tides, often seek reassurance. That reassurance may come in the form of a strongman leader, someone who tells them all will be well, the economy will soar, the sea walls hold. People must only surrender their elections, or their due process, until the crisis is resolved. This is perhaps the most overlooked threat of climate change: Major shifts in the global climate could give rise to a new generation of authoritarian rulers, not just in poorer countries or those with weak democratic institutions, but in wealthy industrialized nations, too.

Our social structures have never been very good at keeping pace with either technology or the kind of disruption that Climate Change is bringing - has brought.

And we've got a triple whammy going

• Automation and globalized trade that drives economic disruption
• Climate Change that drives political disruption
• Oligarchs & Plutocrats who think they control things well enough to keep themselves above it all

So my default is still in effect: Hopeful but not optimistic, even though more of us are starting to get woke.

The Coming Campaign

Tim Wise on MSNBC



Here's the beginning of the Tweet thread Joy mentioned:

1/ Just a reminder that the folks who refuse to call Donald Trump a racist, thought Barack Obama was one. Why? Here's a short list: 1) Because of a small tax on tanning bed visits (bc "only white people" use these)...https://t.co/5BHRtJDVfqhttps://t.co/k8JuCboqOC

— Tim Wise (@timjacobwise) July 28, 2019

Today's Tweet

“If Trump really thought that I was a con man, he’d be nominating me to his cabinet!”

Al Sharpton with the comeback of the year: “If Trump really thought that I was a con man then he’d be nominating me to his cabinent!”pic.twitter.com/8JxAzUYjKa

— Ryan Knight 🗽 (@ProudResister) July 29, 2019

Today's Eternal Sadness

Stephen Romero

LA Times:

A shooting at the famed Gilroy Garlic Festival on Sunday evening left at least three dead and 15 injured, sending hundreds of terrified visitors running for their lives.

The popular food festival at the “Garlic Capital of the World” in Santa Clara County was about to close around 5:30 p.m. when at least one gunman opened fire. Authorities said police officers fatally shot the assailant, but they were continuing to investigate whether he had an accomplice.

Gilroy Police Chief Scot Smithee said witnesses reported that a second man was somehow involved, but police were still searching for him. He said the gunman was able to circumvent the festival’s security by entering from a creek area and cutting through a fence.

The gunman was not immediately identified, and Smithee said the motive was unclear.

KNTV reported that 6-year-old Stephen Romero of San Jose was killed in the shooting. His mother and grandmother were also injured, according to the NBC station.

- and -

Jack Van Breen, lead vocalist and guitarist for TinMan, told KGO-TV that the band was playing an encore when he heard a pop. He turned in the direction of the noise and saw a man “in a green top with a gray handkerchief kind of around his neck and what appeared to be an assault rifle.”

“He started shooting again in the direction of where all the food people were dining,” Van Breen said. He directed his band members to clear the stage, which they ducked beneath so they couldn’t be seen.

Van Breen told the Associated Press he heard someone shout: “Why are you doing this?” and the reply: “Because I’m really angry.”

America is sick in the head.