First, the local tribes just walked around it. Then, when the British were about to land their forces from the water side, the Dutch had sense enough to know they were cooked, so they gave up.
"Fixed fortifications are monuments to man's stupidity." -- George S Patton
A wall - didn't work for New Amsterdam, or Hadrian, or the GDR, or the Chinese, or or or.
Elasticity is a thing. We can get a spike in prices long after supply has caught up with demand. We can see unemployment drop even after the economy starts to go south. Etc So 45* can crow about how US carbon emissions have been nice and low - surprising everybody by saying something that's more or less true - even as his "cabinet" and "policies-makers" are busily pulling shit on us that all but ensure a worse-than-normal outcome down the road. And that down-the-road thing can come up pretty fast - there's always a Snap-Back. Chris Mooney and Brady Dennis, WaPo:
U.S. carbon dioxide emissions rose an estimated 3.4 percent in 2018, according to new research — a jarring increase that comes as scientists say the world needs to be aggressively cutting its emissions to avoid the most devastating effects of climate change.
The findings, published Tuesday by the independent economic research firm Rhodium Group, mean that the United States now has a diminishing chance of meeting its pledge under the 2015 Paris climate agreement to dramatically reduce its emissions by 2025.
The findings also underscore how the world’s second-largest emitter, once a global leader in pushing for climate action, has all but abandoned efforts to mitigate the effects of a warming world. President Trump has said he plans to officially withdraw the nation from the Paris climate agreement in 2020 and in the meantime has rolled back Obama-era regulations aimed at reducing the country’s carbon emissions.
“We have lost momentum. There’s no question,” Rob Jackson, a Stanford University professor who studies emissions trends, said of both U.S. and global efforts to steer the world toward a more sustainable future.
The sharp emissions rise was fueled primarily by a booming economy, researchers found. But the increase, which could prove to be the second-largest in the past 20 years, probably would not have been as stark withoutTrump administration rollbacks, said Trevor Houser, a partner at Rhodium.
“I don’t think you would have seen the same increase,” Houser said, referring to the electric power sector in particular.
Beau Of The Fifth Column There are very few people outside of Cult45 who think he has the authority to use a Declaration of Emergency to build his wall. And there are plenty of people who are pretty confidant that he doesn't have the actual balls to follow thru on his threat - to claim he has that authority.
One great Take-Away:
Even if you support what he wants to do, if you support the way he wants to do it, then you're betraying American democracy.
I'm going to stay with my thinking that it's a fool's errand trying to predict what this particular Ass Hat POTUS is going to do - because that's his basic game.
He sets it up with, "Maybe I will and maybe I won't", and once you've predicted he'll go one way, he'll almost always go some other way - usually, picking something he never mentioned before, which catches us more or less off guard, which is how he wants it.
The thing I try to keep in mind is that there are no guiding principles in place with Donald J Trump.
There are principles. They do exist. They're lofty-sounding and noble and familiar. But everything is fungible. Everything is situational. Every "principle" can be bent and shaped in order for it to be smash-fitted to whatever immediate need presents itself.
Maybe it's because I've been binge-ing The Sopranos on HBO the last few days, but holy crap - 45* has come into pretty sharp focus for me.
There's an NFL team in Washington DC, and there's a controversy that kinda comes and goes concerning the name of that team - a name that I try not to use, so I'll go with "Taters". Anyway, the controversy is always about what the name is intended to mean by the people who use the name in normal conversation. Which is pretty sly. It's a tactic that deflects the criticism by trying to flip the script in order to put the one who's objecting to the word on defense, having to explain why its use is insulting. (remember: when you're explaining, you're losing) This is, of course, a cop out that's no different from the bullshit excuses that get thrown around whenever we have to argue about Confederate memorial statuary and the battle flag of the Army Of Northern Virginia and various other really stoopid shit that should never even pop up on the social radar. Anyway, the 2018 midterms gave us a good way to illustrate the point on how to convince someone that the NFL needs to pressure Dan Snyder to change that name. There's a very simple test available to anyone in the DC area. All you have to do is walk up to this woman - US Rep Sharice Davids...
...and say, "Hey, Redskin, congratulations on being elected to Congress!" Now, I think you'll survive this encounter - survive physically anyway - but assuming she resists the perfectly reasonable urge to stomp your ass til there's nothing left of you but a greasy spot on the rug, I'm betting you'll come away with a slightly different perspective on the subject.
In high school, he made silk-screen shirts and decks of cards with secret compartments inside. But over the past several years, most of his projects were digital — that is, until he had the idea last year to make physical flip-flops out of President Donald Trump's tweets.
"Take a scroll through Donald Trump's 40,000 tweets, and you're sure to catch some contradicting opinions," Morrison told Business Insider over email. "I wanted to highlight this hypocrisy."
Morrison had a full-time job in the advertising industry at the time, but he got to work on producing his flip-flops. He sourced his own materials and printed and packaged every flip-flop by hand.
He made 1000 pairs, and they sold out in less than a month.
45* is that guy who desperately needs you to think he's got it all dialed in. But then he starts talking and you realize his strangle-hold on the obvious has him mesmerized to the point that he believes that what he's saying is just as amazing to you as it is to him, when it's actually what keeps him from making any cogent connections between his idiotic ideas and whatever normal people might consider reasonable and actionable plans.
“my favorite way to listen to the president is slowed down to 1/2 speed because it reveals how often times his logic is indistinguishable from that of a drunk person” - via @arlenparsapic.twitter.com/lfGu1FdU2J
Water is kinda the main thing we need to be concerned with. Even the Druids knew that much. JR Roberts, Daily Camera OpEd: Next time you lift a glass of water to your lips, take a moment. Please reflect on where it comes from. Most people haven't a clue.
Rivers from snowpack? Only partly. Less understood is that the mountains are not really like steep roofs that shed their meltwater bounty directly to us down surface watersheds. Our mountains are more like deeply-stacked sponges. Their underlying fractured rock substrata hold far more water in their cracks than reservoirs do. Underground water flows into and out of rivers and streams all the way down and out onto the plains.
To have enough clean water, we must maintain the health and volume of our deep, spongy, groundwater exchanges.
Call Gov. Jared Polis. Demand revisions to the Colorado Water Plan that include more attention to our support base of groundwater resources. Stop pollution and protect the vital health of aquifers and wetlands.
You're drinking from a deep, giant sponge. Please, think deep.
In the last few weeks of 2018, the Trump administration set the stage for a big battle over water in the new year. At stake is an important rule that defines which waters are protected under the Clean Water Act. The Trump administration seeks to roll back important protections for wetlands and waterways, which are important to drinking water and wildlife.
This is just one of the upcoming water battles that could serve to define 2019. It's also poised to be a year of reckoning on the Colorado River, which supplies water to 40 million people and 5.5 million acres of farmland. A long-anticipated multi-state agreement is close to completion after an ultimatum from the federal government. And it could also be a landmark year for water management in California, with several key issues coming to a head.
Big things may also happen on the water infrastructure front and in efforts to address clean-water concerns. Of course, underlying many of the water issues is the specter of climate change, which is bringing both severe droughts and floods and exacerbating water-supply problems.
The system of Corporate Welfare because of the revolving multi-dimensional doors between Congress, the Executive, and the Private Sector - all of that has to be squashed. It's hard not to go along with the "radical left" when they tell me there's only the illusion of choice - a false image of democracy - here in USAmerica Inc. Do your reading:
We have some real problems, and pushing back against those who want to keep this thing under a Minority Rule regime will take decades - generations prob'ly. But we know how to start. Because we have started - we gave ourselves a fair start last November. We know we've finally got the thing going, even as we struggle with fully recognizing that we've actually begun anything. Yeah, OK, that last bit was a little weird and wishy-washy. The point though is that we've taken the good first step in that Confucius-ey journey of a thousand miles.
HR1 is a solid message, and a great place to start the 116th Congress.
AOC's proposal to raise the marginal tax rate is a good one.
Bernie's ideas on Single Payer Healthcare are good ones.
Hillary's approach to a graduated minimum Wage Raise is a good one.
We didn't fuck it all up yesterday. We're not going to get all of it unfucked by tomorrow. And one election don't mean jack shit if we go back to letting the bad guys keep us divided. If we let the Bots and the Trolls convince us that our fellow travelers are the enemy. That it can only be a choice between Perfection and Nothing-At-All. I'm not against the BernieBros - I'm not fed up with the HillBots - Im not going to shit on Left-Leaning Libertarians - just because I don't align perfectly with everything they say. I'm even going to work on being more OK with Republicans for that matter - as long they're not completely fuckin' crazed, and there's some common ground that I think I can find.
I'll not be perfect in this quest. It's more than a little likely that I'll be as combative and caustic and asshole-ish as I've always been. I won't be withdrawing from the field and ceding the outcome to anyone. But I'm going to try to be more aware that I need help from as many people as possible to get the things on my agenda done.
