AMUSING, INTERESTING, OUTRAGEOUS, or PROFOUND

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• Oil giant Shell gets Friends of the Earth case overturned; will not be required to reduce emissions

• Sea levels set to rise permanently even if global warming is reversed
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• Bird flu begins its human spread, as health officials scramble to safeguard people and livestock
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• It’s not normal for the East Coast to be on fire
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• Fossil fuel rise drives planet closer to critical climate safety limit

• PFAS may be contaminating drinking water for up to 27% of Americans – study

• Fossil fuel CO₂ emissions increase again in 2024
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• Nearly half of tropical coral species face extinction, report shows

• 2024 predicted to be first full year above 1.5°c of global warming
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• Growing pollution in Pakistan’s Punjab province has sickened 1.8M people in a month, officials say
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• Thousands flee as fourth major storm in a month hits Philippines
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Previously

Everything is a complicated series of complicated things, with a zillion moving pieces and interlocking mechanisms. Climate is the hugest of these extremely complex entities, and the most obviously gone sideways. Donald Trump's plan is to ignore it. He doesn't believe it's even a problem.

Other systems are wobbling, too — the economy, the food supply, the electric grid, even the parts of American health care that actually function. Most of what keeps America going are things like that, things you don't even think about, but it's all precarious. If one or two factors go kablooey, it'll make other things go kablooey, too.

And here comes Donald Trump. He doesn't understand or even want to understand the intricacies and subtleties of anything, but he's eager to "make America great again" by 'fixing' everything.

Let's deport millions of immigrants, and dismantle the Federal Reserve, and deregulate everything, and put high tariffs on imports, and shutter the Department of Education, and pull out of NATO and fire a lot of Generals and make the military uncertain of its mission ... and more and more, and so much more.

Trump is about to start the biggest tear-down and re-build of American government in the history of American government, and what's his first step? Get rid of everyone who knows how things work, and instead put crooks and cronies in charge.

That's where we are, and Trump isn't even president yet. We don't know what wackiness he'll decide next week or next month, but we know that Republicans will acquiesce to anything he wants, and Democrats will say "Oh my" but offer no resistance.

Since we don't know what's coming, we can't guess the specific consequences and irreparable damages, but have you ever played pick-up-sticks? Remember the way things topple when you mess with them, if you're not careful? Well, careful is something Trump has never tried.

I'm a senior citizen, and my 'escape plan' has always been to die of old age before everything goes completely to hell. That strategy is in peril, unless I get cancer real quick.

Complete collapse is coming sooner than even we pessimists had anticipated.

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Being old, death gets my attention, so I read the obituaries. This is a collection of recent obits, mostly of people whose work touched my life, because I want to say thanks (or maybe give 'em a final fuck you).

There’ll be a roundup like this occasionally, until I’m on the list myself.

   
• Natasha Alexenko
activist     (archived link)

• Frank Auerbach
artist     (archived link)

• Kenneth Bronstein
atheist

• Bruce Degen
artist, The Magic School Bus

• Lou Donaldson
sax man     (archived link)

• Janey Godley
comedian     (archived link)

• Roy Haynes
drummer     (archived link)

• Ella Jenkins
Singalong with Ella

• James Ledbetter
media critic, Village Voice     (archived link)

• Trevor Sorbie
Dorothy Hamill's hairstylist     (archived link)

• Paul Stephenson
activist     (archived link)

• Grant Ujifusa
reparations for Japanese-Americans     (archived link)

• Baltazar Ushca
ice harvester     (archived link)

• Andrew Young
forgotten person     (archived link)

   
Previously dead

• Arkansas cop gets four months in prison for sexually assaulting three children
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• Scandal-plagued sheriff wins another term in north Texas

• Guns, steroids and $1-million found in home of state trooper under investigation: report
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• For attempting suicide, Peoria Jail restrained man in a chair for five days
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• Tennessee Police Chief indicted on seven counts

• Federal jury awards $2.3M to man assaulted by police outside his home in 2017
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• Chicago to pay $4.5m to settle 3 police misconduct cases
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• Hennepin County pays $3.4 million to settle lawsuit for wrongful death of jail inmate Lucas Bellamy

• County pays $300,000 to 11-year-old whose pet goat was seized and killed by cops because she backed out of a 4-H auction

   
Previously

• Earth on track for hottest year in recorded history, passing critical 1.5º warming threshold
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• A warming climate continues to ravage sea ice at both poles
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• Drought conditions cover a record swath of the U.S.
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• The world promised to tame methane, but emissions are still rising
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• Horrific details emerge of how victims died in Spain’s flash floods
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• Microplastics promote cloud formation, with likely effects on weather and climate

• Record air pollution hospitalizes hundreds in Pakistan
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• Warming seas wipe out Greece's mussel harvest
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• Toxic smog in Pakistan is so bad you can see it from space
    (archived link)

• Record global warming risks aggravating war and violence
    (archived link)

• White truffles, Italy's gold, menaced by climate change
    (archived link)

   
Previously

... the entire case against Backpage was a travesty of justice. The company actually worked closely with the feds (and even received commendations) to stop any actual human trafficking on their platform, but refused to help the feds go after consenting adult sex work. After that happened, a bunch of government actors turned on the company and falsely painted it as knowingly helping sex trafficking. ...

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20191120232636/https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2010/11/7/918462/-Armistice-Day-was-sacred

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... All empires fall. It is up to us to imagine their alternatives. To live as though the future we are dreaming is already named. To be unafraid to answer its call in the dark, and come into a new world of our making. "And joy filled him from head to foot," writes Ende, when Bastian has finally realized his greatest wish is love. ...

    (archived link)

However bad you’re expecting it’ll be with Donald Trump as president again, it’ll be worse than you’re expecting.

Check me on this, but my recollection is that during Trump’s first term, things were (relatively) mild for a few years, but grew more and more horrendous as his term continued. After the midway point, there were nonstop jawdropping crudities and cruelties — another ghastly nomination, gawdawful statement, or a stupidity to top the previous day’s stupidities — every day.

It took him a while to warm up, because being president was something of a surprise, even to Trump. I’m sure he ran in 2016 just for the publicity, and winning caught him (and all of us) off guard. He was new at being Godzilla on the world stage, and it took some time for him to get the hang of it.

Now, though, he’s an experienced monster, with Project 2025 and a team of loyal suck-ups surrounding him from his first day, so everything’s going to be worse, lots worse, right from the start.

What outrages and obscenities can we expect from Trump?

Climate change: Trump will again pull America out of all climate change accords, and do all he can to bring us back to being powered by coal and perhaps whale oil. There will be no recovery from the damage he’s about to do, and it’ll finalize a perpetually hellish future for America and the world. Of course, we weren’t doing a fraction of what was needed even before Trump, so the looming climate catastrophe was bound to happen anyway, but Trump will make it happen sooner.

Abortion: Sorry, ladies. Your time of having almost-equal rights is at an end. Either by law or by a Supreme Court decision, abortion will be banned, in all 50 states. Women who have sex will be legally obligating themselves to give birth and raise a child. Many millions of women’s and children’s lives will be ruined, which is the intent. My suggestion is tubal ligations and vasectomies, and fast, before those options are also illegalized.

Israel will have carte blanche, even more than they’ve had in the past, to do anything without even the mildest statement of rebuke from American government. Best we can hope is for full evacuation of Gaza, but its utter annihilation, until there aren’t two bricks held together by mortar, is very much a possibility.

Ukraine will see the complete cessation of US weaponry and funding after Trump takes office on January 20, 2025, and sanctions against Russia will be lifted, so you might as well erase Ukraine from your world maps.

Regulation of big business, which has always been vapors anyway, will completely vanish. There will be no more of those very rare days when you’ve read that some corporation is being sued by a government agency. How quaint.

Those are the certainties, but by the nature of Trump, there’ll be surprises, so there’s really no knowing what else to expect. His Supreme Court has granted Trump unprecedented “presidential immunity,” so dang near anything goes.

Perhaps the ACLU will be banned. Perhaps transgender Americans will be stripped of citizenship until they resume their birth genders. Perhaps Yellowstone will become FritoLay Yellowstone Park. Everything previously unthinkable is now possible.

During his 2024 campaign, Trump spoke of deporting all immigrants, sending the military to guard the border with Mexico, ending the Department of Education, locking up his opponents, shutting down anti-MAGA (i.e., mainstream) media, imposing crippling tariffs, sending the National Guard into American cities to round up the homeless, pardoning all 1/6/2021 insurrectionists … and more, much more that I’ve forgotten.

For each of these items, if he’s successful, the ramifications will be dreadful, but there are two hopeful things to remember.

First and most obviously, Trump is a bullshit artist, always happy to lie. Much of what he’s promised, he has no intention of even trying. (How’s that wall coming, Donald?)

Second, many or most of the outrageous things he will attempt are blatantly illegal, so there’ll be lawsuits. In at least some of these cases, lower courts will rule against the Emperor’s atrocities, and even the fully owned Supreme Court might balk on lesser items, if only to retain credibility for ruling in Trump’s favor on the major items.

Still being optimistic, it’s too early in the fascism for Trump to order judges removed from the bench or executed. That’ll come later.

But he’s already stacked the courts, and the stacking will continue and get worse. Republicans will control the Senate, so every heinous judicial nominee will be confirmed, meaning the courts will block him less and less often, over the coming years.

What’s worst to me is knowing that there won’t be an “after.” Trump will abrogate the 22nd Amendment and become President for Life. When he dies we’ll have President J D Vance, who’s every bit as evil but much smarter, younger, and worse in every way.

If elections are still allowed, they’ll be sham elections, with full cooperation from the Democrats, since they won’t nominate anyone who could actually win.

In closing, I should mention that this collection of cynicism and despair was written off the top of my head, without consulting any experts’ articles on what Trump is planning. The coming reality, then, will certainly be much, much worse than what I’ve predicted.

Being old, death gets my attention, so I read the obituaries. This is a collection of recent obits, mostly of people whose work touched my life, because I want to say thanks (or maybe give 'em a final fuck you).

There’ll be a roundup like this occasionally, until I’m on the list myself.

   
• Dorothy Allison
author, Bastard Out of Carolina     (archived link)

• Geoff Capes
tough guy and parakeet breeder     (archived link)

• Virginia Carter
feminist physicist and advisor to Norman Lear

• Elwood Edwards
"You've got mail!"     (archived link)

• Jim Hoagland
journalist, Washington Post     (archived link)

• Shawna Hughes
in county jail     (archived link)

• Patricia Johanson
artist     (archived link)

• Linda LaFlamme
rock'n'roller, It's a Beautiful Day     (archived link)

• Bernard Marcus
billionaire bastard     (archived link)

• Murray McCory
backpacks     (archived link)

• Samantha Jo Moss
forgotten person     (archived link)

• Tyka Nelson
sister

• Phyllis O’Donnell
surfing champion     (archived link)

• Ollie Olsen
rock'n'roller, The Young Charlatans

• Alan Rachins
actor, Dharma & Greg     (archived link)

• Edward Ramos
in county jail     (archived link)

• Madeleine Riffaud
French resistance     (archived link)

• Murray Sinclair
Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission

• Warren Washington
climate scientist     (archived link)

• Michael Whitfield
forgotten person

• Richard Winfield
free press activist     (archived link)

   
Previously dead