Up From Facebook

You've heard about the recent flooding in Texas and North Carolina. But that’s far from all. There’s a reason it’s called “global” climate change. “The disaster comes during a week in which extreme heat and extreme weather have battered the planet. Parts of northern Spain and southern France are burning out of control, as are parts of California. In the past 72 hours, storms have torn the roofs off of five-story apartment buildings in Slovakia, while intense rainfall has turned streets into rivers in southern Italy. Same story in Lombok, Indonesia, where cars floated like buoys, and in eastern China, where an inland typhoon-like storm sent furniture blowing down the streets like so many sheafs of paper. Léon, Mexico, was battered by hail so thick on Monday it covered the city in white. And North Carolina is, again, enduring 10 inches of rainfall.   “There is no longer much debate that climate change is making many of these events demonstrably worse. Scientists conducting a rapid an...

Trump has flip-flopped on deporting workers in the agriculture and hospitality sectors. But his Ag Secretary has it figured out. “There’s been a lot of noise in the last few days and a lot of questions about where the president stands and his vision for farm labor,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins told reporters during a press briefing with Republican governors Tuesday.   “Ultimately, the answer on this is automation, also some reform within the current governing structure, and then, also, when you think about there are 34 million able-bodied adults in our Medicaid program, there are plenty of workers in America,” she continued.” Of course, the cuts don’t start until after the mid-terms, to protect the GOP congressmen from accountability. Meanwhile, ICE is driving out immigrant workers now. Who will pick the produce this summer and next? What a clown. However much they’re paying Rollins, it’s too much. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/where-things-stand/trump-official-sugges...

During the COVID pandemic, the livestock dewormer ivermectin gained notoriety as a treatment for COVID. Of course, there isn’t an atom of evidence that ivermectin is effective against coronavirus infections. But the fact that it was ridiculed by the scientific and medical communities proved, by the logic of anti-vaxxers, that it works. “Currently four states -- Tennessee, Arkansas, Idaho, and Louisiana -- have passed OTC ivermectin laws. “In April 2022, Tennessee passed SB 2188/HB 2746, becoming the first state to make ivermectin available OTC. The legislation authorizes "ivermectin suitable for human use" to be sold or purchased OTC "without a prescription or consultation with a pharmacist or other healthcare professional." For 3 years, Tennessee was the only state to have OTC ivermectin.” Look, when I was growing up, pot was illegal. Nobody who used it died from it. Now, there are OTC pot dispensaries everywhere I go. But nobody claims it’s an antiviral.   The ive...

ICE's new funding level is larger than the combined budgets of the FBI, DEA, ATF, Bureau of Prisons, and U.S. Marshals Service. Who are these people? “ ICE was generally known as a place made up of people who couldn’t get jobs at the more established and reputable federal policing agencies — so, FBI, U.S. Marshals, DEA, ATF, etc. Because of this, it has a high proportion of people who are there because they want to wear a uniform, knock people around and act tough. That’s an aspect of every policing organization. But more professional organizations do their best to weed those people out on the front end and instill discipline that keeps those impulses in check. There’s much less of that at ICE. So it’s never had a good reputation within federal law enforcement.   “Another fact about ICE is that you get used to dealing with a population with very few rights and protections (few   de jure   and even fewer   de facto ). That’s a context that is going to bring out the wo...

For eight years, we had rooftop solar. We wouldn’t have done it except that because of state law, Ameren paid half the cost. We also got a 30% tax rebate on the difference.   Since we moved, there are too many trees around our house for rooftop solar, but there are more solar panels in our neighborhood here in RI than in the one we left in St. Louis. In Rhode Island, ca.90% of electricity is generated with natural gas, but we recently contracted with a local solar farm for ours. Thanks to Trump’s Big Bad Bill, building solar will get more expensive. Gas, oil and coal will replace part of that, but they won’t keep up with demand. “Donald Trump and the GOP’s  irrational energy agenda  deliberately sidelines wind and solar energy — the  lowest cost ,  fastest-to-deploy  sources of energy generation available — to prop up a  dying  fossil fuel industry that won’t be able to meet rising demand.  “The consequences will be  severe : hundreds of...

I’ve been a bit baffled recently by comments by friends expressing anxiety about NYC mayoral candidate   Zohran Mamdani. Yeah, I ignore the right-wing wind machine over at Fox. But since I stopped reading the gray lady, I missed the propaganda and misdirection she’s been pumping out.  “ The Times   has it out for Zohran Mamdani. The record is clear. It is time to examine receipts. The latest attack on him is journalistically unconscionable, and so is the editors’ reaction to legitimate criticism. In a story played by its editors on its home page and boosted by its reporter as his   scoop   — when it was obviously planted by the right-wing based on the   theft   of documents from Columbia —   The Times   said   teenaged Mamdani ticked boxes for Asian and Black or African-American on his application, implying he was trying to cheat — to DEI — his way in.” *snip* “Of course, this comes after  The Times ’  anti-endorsement  of...

The words “socialism” and “Marxism” have long been synonymous with the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. Oddly, because neither country was socialist or Marxist. Lenin and the Bolsheviks (bolshevik means “majoritarian,” even though it was a minority party, a triumph of propaganda) crushed Marxist/socialist worker-led organizations after the 1917 Revolution (really a coup, another triumph of propaganda). Lenin was accused of right-deviation by Trotsky and others for abandoning Marxist worker-led socialism. Ultimately, Lenin seized power as a kind of holding action in the belief that the true Marxist revolution would begin in Germany, as Marx predicted. Socialism in a rural agrarian society like Russia was Marxist heresy. When Lenin died in 1924, Stalin took over and consolidated what was, in effect, a Tsarist dictatorship without the dynastic element. When Mao seized power in China in 1949, he followed the Stalinist model of top-down dictatorship by terrorism. So how did ...