Our extended family across the pond is doing us proud.
I’ll say it again people—— JΛKΣ (@USMCLiberal) June 5, 2019
The Brits are killing us in the #ProtestTrump arena.#BabyTrump #TrumpInUK
pic.twitter.com/Iyst7q3RAW
Wednesday, June 05, 2019
Today's Tweet
Our extended family across the pond is doing us proud.
Today's Tweet
I'm lovin' me some of our British cousins.
Aerial view of today's Anti-Trump protest London.— Terrence Daniels (Captain Planet) (@Terrence_STR) June 4, 2019
Thousands of Protesters March down the Streets Of London against Trump's policies & recent Visit.
I'm guessing this wasn't the Parade Trump was hoping for lol pic.twitter.com/k1RJOrOocv
Tuesday, June 04, 2019
Today's Today
Tiananmen Square, 04 June 1989.
Beijing has been blocking these videos.
Once the violence starts, it'll "run its course" almost no matter what. And the government is always going to win as long as the police and armed forces are "loyal" to government leaders.
When this kind of thing happens in a society where the general populace is not well-armed, the optics get really bad really fast, government is seen as the brutal assholes they usually are, and they end up having to make changes and accommodations for people. We've seen that all over the world.
But if we get this shit going here in USAmerica Inc, it's not just going to "run its course".
Beijing has been blocking these videos.
Once the violence starts, it'll "run its course" almost no matter what. And the government is always going to win as long as the police and armed forces are "loyal" to government leaders.
When this kind of thing happens in a society where the general populace is not well-armed, the optics get really bad really fast, government is seen as the brutal assholes they usually are, and they end up having to make changes and accommodations for people. We've seen that all over the world.
But if we get this shit going here in USAmerica Inc, it's not just going to "run its course".
That Report
Here's the report Beau refers to in the video below - actually, it's the foreword from the position paper.
Can we think in new ways about the existential human security risks driven by the climate crisis?
by Admiral Chris Barrie, AC RAN Retired
In 2017-18, the Australian Senate inquired into the implications of climate change for Australia’s national security. The Inquiry found that climate change is “a current and existential national security risk”, one that “threatens the premature extinction of Earth- originating intelligent life or the permanent and drastic destruction of its potential for desirable future development”.
I told the Inquiry that, after nuclear war, human- induced global warming is the greatest threat to human life on the planet. Today’s 7.5 billion human beings are already the most predatory species that ever existed, yet the global population has yet to peak and may reach 10 billion people, with dire implications absent a fundamental change in human behaviour.
This policy paper looks at the existential climate-related security risk through a scenario set thirty years into the future. David Spratt and Ian Dunlop have laid bare the unvarnished truth about the desperate situation humans, and our planet, are in, painting a disturbing picture of the real possibility that human life on earth may be on the way to extinction, in the most horrible way.
In Australia recently we have seen and heard signals about the growing realisation of the seriousness of our plight. For example, young women speak of their decisions to not have children, and climate scientists admitting to depression as they consider the “inevitable” nature of a doomsday future and turn towards thinking more about family and relocation to “safer” places, rather than working on more research.
Stronger signals still are coming from increasing civil disobedience, for example over the opening up of the Galilee Basin coal deposits and deepwater oil exploration in the Great Australian Bight, with the suicidal increase in carbon emissions they imply. And the outrage of schoolchildren over their parent’s irresponsibility in refusing to act on climate change.
As my colleague Professor Will Steffen has said of the climate challenge:
In particular, our intelligence and security services have a vital role to play, and a fiduciary responsibility, in accepting this existential climate threat, and the need for a fundamentally different approach to its risk management, as central to their considerations and their advice to government.
The implications far outweigh conventional geopolitical threats.
I commend this policy paper to you.
Can we think in new ways about the existential human security risks driven by the climate crisis?
by Admiral Chris Barrie, AC RAN Retired
I told the Inquiry that, after nuclear war, human- induced global warming is the greatest threat to human life on the planet. Today’s 7.5 billion human beings are already the most predatory species that ever existed, yet the global population has yet to peak and may reach 10 billion people, with dire implications absent a fundamental change in human behaviour.
This policy paper looks at the existential climate-related security risk through a scenario set thirty years into the future. David Spratt and Ian Dunlop have laid bare the unvarnished truth about the desperate situation humans, and our planet, are in, painting a disturbing picture of the real possibility that human life on earth may be on the way to extinction, in the most horrible way.
In Australia recently we have seen and heard signals about the growing realisation of the seriousness of our plight. For example, young women speak of their decisions to not have children, and climate scientists admitting to depression as they consider the “inevitable” nature of a doomsday future and turn towards thinking more about family and relocation to “safer” places, rather than working on more research.
Stronger signals still are coming from increasing civil disobedience, for example over the opening up of the Galilee Basin coal deposits and deepwater oil exploration in the Great Australian Bight, with the suicidal increase in carbon emissions they imply. And the outrage of schoolchildren over their parent’s irresponsibility in refusing to act on climate change.
As my colleague Professor Will Steffen has said of the climate challenge:
“It’s not a technological or a scientific problem, it’s a question of humanities’ socio-political values… We need a social tipping point that flips our thinking before we reach a tipping point in the climate system.”A doomsday future is not inevitable! But without immediate drastic action our prospects are poor. We must act collectively. We need strong, determined leadership in government, in business and in our communities to ensure a sustainable future for humankind.
In particular, our intelligence and security services have a vital role to play, and a fiduciary responsibility, in accepting this existential climate threat, and the need for a fundamentally different approach to its risk management, as central to their considerations and their advice to government.
The implications far outweigh conventional geopolitical threats.
I commend this policy paper to you.
Admiral Chris Barrie, AC RAN Retired, is Honorary Professor, Strategic & Defence Studies Centre, Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, Australian National University, Canberra. He is a member of the Global Military Advisory Council on Climate Change and was Chief of the Australian Defence Force from 1998 to 2002.
Today's Beau
"...it threatens the premature extinction of earth-originating intelligent life."
Justin King - Beau Of The Fifth Column:
I haven't been able to track it down, but a sociological study from years ago came to the conclusion that democracies will be far less capable than authoritarian regimes when trying to respond as the the enormous disruptions caused by Climate Change really kick in.
Another reason we're seeing such a push towards The Daddy State(?)
Justin King - Beau Of The Fifth Column:
I haven't been able to track it down, but a sociological study from years ago came to the conclusion that democracies will be far less capable than authoritarian regimes when trying to respond as the the enormous disruptions caused by Climate Change really kick in.
Another reason we're seeing such a push towards The Daddy State(?)
The Lines Become Clearer
We're in a fight that is determining whether we continue degrading the republic - while pretending it's still a democracy - and slide full-bore into The Daddy State, or figure out a way to reclaim our little experiment in self-government, and get back to an effort at making some nominal progress towards that more perfect union thing we love to talk about while almost totally (and maybe intentionally) misunderstanding.
JD Mortenson, Law Prof, Univ of Mich, in The Atlantic:
Is the president a king? The question may sound absurd, but you’d be surprised: A great many lawyers, politicians, judges, and policy experts think the U.S. Constitution builds from exactly that starting point. Their argument relies on the first sentence of Article II, which gives the president “the executive power.” That phrase, they claim, was originally understood as a generic reference to monarchical authority. This means, they say, that the American president must have been given all the prerogatives of a British king, except where the Constitution specifies otherwise. The foreign-relations scholar Philip Trimble states their conclusion plainly: “Unless the [Article II] Vesting Clause is meaningless, it incorporates the unallocated parts of Royal Prerogative.”
That last bit - about how the Vesting Clause includes Royal Prerogative - is nine kinds of fucked up, and it's the big tell when it comes to figuring out what the Radical Right is up to.
What it says:
The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.
What it means to normal humans (what we were all taught in Junior High School Civics class):
After years of research into an enormous array of colonial, revolutionary, and founding-era sources, I’m here to tell you that—as a historical matter—this president-as-king claim is utterly and totally wrong. I’ve reviewed more than a thousand publications from the 17th and 18th centuries for each instance of the word root exec-, and have read most of those texts from cover to cover with the topic of presidential power squarely in mind. I’ve read every discussion of executive power and presidential authority that appears in the gigantic compilation of archival materials known as the Documentary History of the Ratification of the United States Constitution. And with the help of a team of research assistants, I’m most of the way through flyspecking the full records of the Continental Congress—including committee reports, floor debates, and delegate correspondence—with the same question in mind.
“The executive power” granted at the American founding was conceptually, legally, and semantically incapable of conveying a reservoir of royal authority. The real meaning of executive power was something almost embarrassingly simple: the power to execute the law. Overwhelming evidence for this point pervades both the Founders’ debates and the legal and political theory on which their discussions drew.
JD Mortenson, Law Prof, Univ of Mich, in The Atlantic:
Is the president a king? The question may sound absurd, but you’d be surprised: A great many lawyers, politicians, judges, and policy experts think the U.S. Constitution builds from exactly that starting point. Their argument relies on the first sentence of Article II, which gives the president “the executive power.” That phrase, they claim, was originally understood as a generic reference to monarchical authority. This means, they say, that the American president must have been given all the prerogatives of a British king, except where the Constitution specifies otherwise. The foreign-relations scholar Philip Trimble states their conclusion plainly: “Unless the [Article II] Vesting Clause is meaningless, it incorporates the unallocated parts of Royal Prerogative.”
That last bit - about how the Vesting Clause includes Royal Prerogative - is nine kinds of fucked up, and it's the big tell when it comes to figuring out what the Radical Right is up to.
What it says:
The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.
The Legislative Branch (the Article 1 guys; the 1st-among-equals guys) will deliberate about how the country should operate; they'll make laws; and they'll hire a guy to run it for them - an executive guy - a guy who'll hire other guys to make sure the will of the people (as represented in Congress) is being faithfully and fairly applied to the daily goings-on in the United States Of America. And even though POTUS can veto a law, Congress can override that veto if they're working together, and that means the president and congress have to work together too -if they wanna get anything done.
That is the conservative take on things. ie: Checks and Balances - trying to make sure not too much government power is in too few hands, and fostering a workable relationship pointed at keeping everybody accountable.
What it means to the Radical Right: (what they've been pimping at us for 40+ years)
Our guy got "elected", and he can do whatever he thinks is OK and if you want something different - well fuck you, we won, get over it.
That's an extraordinarily liberal interpretation of "Executive Power".
- more from Professor Mortenson's piece -
After years of research into an enormous array of colonial, revolutionary, and founding-era sources, I’m here to tell you that—as a historical matter—this president-as-king claim is utterly and totally wrong. I’ve reviewed more than a thousand publications from the 17th and 18th centuries for each instance of the word root exec-, and have read most of those texts from cover to cover with the topic of presidential power squarely in mind. I’ve read every discussion of executive power and presidential authority that appears in the gigantic compilation of archival materials known as the Documentary History of the Ratification of the United States Constitution. And with the help of a team of research assistants, I’m most of the way through flyspecking the full records of the Continental Congress—including committee reports, floor debates, and delegate correspondence—with the same question in mind.
All this work has left me with both the confidence to share this conclusion and the sense of obligation to do so as bluntly as possible. It’s just not a close call: The historical record categorically refutes the idea that the American revolutionaries gave their new president an unspecified array of royal prerogatives. To the contrary, the presidency that leaps off the pages of the Founders’ debates, diaries, speeches, letters, poems, and essays was an instrument of the law of the land, subject to the law of the land, and both morally and legally obliged to obey the law of the land.
"...the presidency...an instrument of the law of the land, subject to the law of the land, and both morally and legally obliged to obey the law of the land."
...The constitutional text doesn’t actually authorize the president to do very much. It enumerates the veto, appointments, and pardon powers. It grants the president “the executive power” and the office of commander in chief. It authorizes the president to receive foreign ambassadors, demand reports from his subordinates, and deliver a State of the Union address. But aside from a few miscellaneous process authorities, that’s just about it.
- and -
- and -
American Madness
American Association For The Advancement Of Science:
Counter to a lot of public opinion, having a mental illness does not necessarily make a person more likely to commit gun violence. According to a new study, a better indicator of gun violence was access to firearms.
A study by researchers at The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston looked into the association between gun violence and mental health in a group of 663 young adults in Texas. Their results were published in the journal Preventive Medicine.
"Counter to public beliefs, the majority of mental health symptoms examined were not related to gun violence," said Dr. Yu Lu, a postdoctoral research fellow at UTMB and the lead author of the study.
What researchers found instead was that individuals who had gun access were approximately 18 times more likely to have threatened someone with a gun. Individuals with high hostility were about 3.5 times more likely to threaten someone.
"These findings have important implications for gun control policy efforts," Lu said.
Each year, an estimated 75,000 to 100,000 Americans are injured by firearms and 30,000 to 40,000 die from firearms, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
"Much of the limited research on gun violence and mental illness has focused on violence among individuals with severe mental illnesses or rates of mental illness among individuals arrested for violent crimes," Lu said. "What we found is that the link between mental illness and gun violence is not there."
For nearly an entire generation, Republicans have blocked most of the funding CDC needs in order to study gun violence. In some states, they've made it illegal for doctors to ask if there's a gun in the home when examining patients who present with (eg) Depression or possible Domestic Abuse injuries.
One of the many shitty things that have come out of Bob Mueller's investigation of the 2016 election is the near-certainty that Russian money was (maybe still is) being laundered through the NRA and injected into (mostly) Republican campaign coffers.
So among the 3 or 4 "absolute top priority items" on the To-Do list is fixing that incredibly stoopid Citizens United thing.
There's no limit on the amount of money you can spend supporting a particular candidate (or an issue that the candidate can stand in front of and claim as his own). As long as that regime is in place, we have a de facto Plutocracy, which makes it harder not to think the republic is already dead, and we're just arguing over who gets to do what with the corpse.
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Today's Tweet
World class professional trolling.
"Here ya go, dumbass - read a fuckin' book."
JUST IN: Queen Elizabeth gifts Trump Winston Churchill's copy of rare book https://t.co/Oe0TlfERCR pic.twitter.com/CVVk46wRvb— The Hill (@thehill) June 3, 2019
Monday, June 03, 2019
Acceleration
It took us longer to go from bronze weapons to iron weapons than it did to go from iron weapons to thermonuclear weapons.
Listen The Fuck Up
John Oliver:
Try to remember that right about 100 years ago, we had very little regulatory regimen in place, and there were people dying of all kinds of nasty shit because of things like Radioactive Water.
Radithor was manufactured from 1918 to 1928 by the Bailey Radium Laboratories, Inc., of East Orange, New Jersey. The owner of the company and head of the laboratories was listed as William J. A. Bailey, a dropout from Harvard College,[1] who was not a medical doctor.[2] It was advertised as "A Cure for the Living Dead"[3] as well as "Perpetual Sunshine". The expensive product was claimed to cure impotence, among other ills.[4]
Eben Byers, a wealthy American socialite, athlete, industrialist and Yale College graduate, died from Radithor radium poisoning in 1932.[5] Byers was buried in a lead-lined coffin; when exhumed in 1965 for study, his remains were still highly radioactive.[4]
Byers's death led to the strengthening of the Food and Drug Administration's powers and the demise of most radiation-based patent medicines. A Wall Street Journal article (1 Aug. 1990) describing the Byers incident was titled "The Radium Water Worked Fine Until His Jaw Came Off".[6]
That regulatory approach worked pretty well. We fostered the world's greatest economy and the world's best and safest products (mostly) for a good long time.
There are always assholes willing to abandon whatever ethics they may once have had in the interest of turning a buck, so I'm gonna hafta insist on Gubmint Interference when it comes to trying to keep those assholes at bay.
Try to remember that right about 100 years ago, we had very little regulatory regimen in place, and there were people dying of all kinds of nasty shit because of things like Radioactive Water.
Eben Byers, a wealthy American socialite, athlete, industrialist and Yale College graduate, died from Radithor radium poisoning in 1932.[5] Byers was buried in a lead-lined coffin; when exhumed in 1965 for study, his remains were still highly radioactive.[4]
Byers's death led to the strengthening of the Food and Drug Administration's powers and the demise of most radiation-based patent medicines. A Wall Street Journal article (1 Aug. 1990) describing the Byers incident was titled "The Radium Water Worked Fine Until His Jaw Came Off".[6]
That regulatory approach worked pretty well. We fostered the world's greatest economy and the world's best and safest products (mostly) for a good long time.
There are always assholes willing to abandon whatever ethics they may once have had in the interest of turning a buck, so I'm gonna hafta insist on Gubmint Interference when it comes to trying to keep those assholes at bay.
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