The Lights Are Flashing

Ten years ago, it was Social Media and bot farms.

The culture is changing with startling rapidity, especially now that the operative phrase is "Go fast and break things".

A.I. is the new media tool that's being used by (eg) American fascists the way the brand new media tool known as radio was used in the 1920s by European fascists.

The road to tyranny

is crowded with people

telling us we're overreacting

The Big Beautiful Enabling Bill

Buried in the bill is a provision that forbids courts from charging Trump or other Executive Branch officials with contempt for defying court orders.

Since SCOTUS invented 'Presidential Immunity', this little piece of Republican fuckery sets the stage for Trump to become America's dictator.

Call your Senator

202-224-3121

RAISE HELL

The Enabling Act

aka: The Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Reich

Today's Belle

The bank giveth and the bank taketh away.

Foreclosure rates go up as lenders and insurance carriers perceive greater risk.

As the costs of borrowing and insuring your home go up, so does the rate of foreclosure.

A nation of debtors and renters - the American Plutocrat's dream.

On The Farm

A lot of us have memories of our city-dwelling farmer grandparents with the giant gardens (filled with stuff we couldn't even name), who told us old-timey stories of making molasses and persimmon preserves, but very few of us have any real idea of how a farm actually works.

I don't anyway. I can't even do houseplants.

So it's good to get a little education from somebody who literally knows her shit.

The Florida Finagle

I don't like thinking I'm adding to the problem of the Fire Hose Of Shit, but when practically every day gives us another major grift, I don't know how I can just brush it off, and let it become part of a very ugly process of normalizing official corruption.

So - sorry - here's today's shit.

Today's Dark Brandon

I don't want to poke the bear here, but yeah - why has Biden not been arrested?

What about these??

• Hillary
• Fauci
• Comey
• All those Epstein villains
• Fraudsters stealing trillions from Social Security
• Pelosi
• Obama
• and
• and
• and

No Joke

Every day, a guy stops at the newsstand, scans the headlines, and walks on, never buying a paper.

One day the newsie asks him, "You come by here everyday looking at the front pages, but you never buy a paper - what's up with that?"

"I'm looking for an obituary."

"But those are always in back of the papers", says the newsie.

And the man replies, "Not the one I'm looking for."

It's Coming

As Trump's goons continue to dismantle our government, we can expect some more pretty shitty things to happen.

That'll Suck

Earth may already be too hot for the survival of polar ice sheets, study says

If Earth stays at its current levels of warming -- below policymakers’ goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius -- polar ice sheets may melt, causing seas to rise and displacing coastal communities, a study finds.

Ten years ago, policymakers and nation states set the world’s most important climate goal: limiting planetary warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). If the Earth could stay below that threshold, a climate catastrophe and major rise in sea levels might be staved off.

But a group of scientists has demonstrated that if the world stays on course to warm up to 1.5 degrees — or even stays at its current level of 1.2 degrees above preindustrial levels — polar ice sheets will probably continue to quickly melt, causing seas to rise and displacing coastal communities, according to a study published Tuesday in Communications Earth and Environment.

“There was a kind of misunderstanding that 1.5 was going to solve all our problems,” said Chris Stokes, a professor at Durham University in England who focuses on glaciers and ice sheets, and an author of the study. Now, the team surmised that limit is closer to around 1 degree Celsius, though more research is needed to come to an official conclusion.

The team focused on Greenland and Antarctica, behemoth ice sheets that together could raise global sea levels by more than 210 feet if they melted. They are losing around 370 billion metric tons of ice each year at a rate that has quadrupled since the 1990s.

To come to their analyses, scientists pored over more than 150 research papers and focused on three aspects of sea-level rise: recent observations of rapidly melting ice sheets, modeling that uses equations to predict how temperatures could affect the rates of ice melting, and past sea-level change tens of thousands of years ago.

To help gauge how high sea levels could rise over the coming centuries, scientists have looked back at what happened the last time the Earth was as warm as it is now: roughly 125,000 years ago, during a period known to scientists as the Last Interglacial.

Back then, research shows, a wobble in Earth’s orbit had changed how much sunlight hit the northern hemisphere, raising global temperatures. The warmer conditions allowed Neanderthals to venture into northern Europe. Mammoths and giant ground sloths migrated poleward. And the ice caps covering the Arctic and Antarctica began to melt, raising sea levels around the world.

A vast array of ancient evidence — including ice cores, fossils, deep sea sediments and even octopus DNA — allowed the researchers to reconstruct how this sea-level rise unfolded. For example, ancient coral reefs found 25 feet above the current sea surface mark where the water once reached. Bits of bedrock uncovered in the middle of the ocean reveal how icebergs calved off disintegrating glaciers and then drifted across the sea.

This research into Earth’s ancient climate has revealed that ice sheet collapse depends on complex processes and can happen at surprising speed. Pulses of sudden sea-level rise, when the ocean surface may have risen multiple feet in less than a century, indicated that the ice sheets could have crossed temperature thresholds that caused them to shed mass all at once.

The scientists then fed their findings into computer models of the Earth system, allowing them to confirm that the models’ outputs matched what actually occurred. This gave them confidence in the models’ forecasts for the future, and the results were sobering.

“Every fraction of a degree matters,” said Andrea Dutton, a research professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who was a co-author of the study. “We can’t just adapt to this type of sea-level rise. We can’t just engineer our way out of this.”

Around 230 million people live within about three feet of sea level, the researchers noted. Over the coming centuries, if the Earth stays at the same temperature, the sea could rise several meters, displacing entire cities and even states.

Because of gravitational effects, said Stokes, places closer to the equator, including Pacific islands like Micronesia and some Caribbean islands, will experience more sea-level rise.

“It’s an existential threat,” he said. “Some of these entire states are going to be underwater in a few centuries.”

Pro-Mortalism?

"I need to kill you and myself in order to prevent suffering in the future, so I have to blow up this IVF clinic."

Fake lord have mercy. But y'know, we might just make it if we can convince more of these guys to take themselves out of the gene pool.