Just as I was about to step off into the minefield...

 ...looks like I might be getting a mine-plow;

Here's the sad part.

This was a mistake on the part of the Oregon Health Authority.

Despite my age, and my position as the Designated Geezer in a house with two kids in public school, I was not "eligible" per the Oregon vaccination schedule to get my Anti-COVID Armor until late-mid-April. Despite a fair sized chunk of the Oregon public, like the rest of the country, being unwilling to even GET this goddamn shot. Despite the simple epidemiological reality that the single best way to beat this bug is to get as many needles in as many arms as fast as possible...I should have been shit out of luck.

But.

The OHA has, at least, been willing to honor it's fuckup and not shot-block those of us who jumped on the chance to schedule this thing.

So...

Bang Bang Crazy (GFT Edition)

 

Over at Nancy Nall's place the inevitable discussion about who gets to get shot down in the streets (grocery stores, rub-and-tug-shops...) because freedum!!! 

One of the commentors made the following remark:

“…let’s give the olde white guys credit in 1787: they’re thinking about muzzleloading black powder rifles…”

To which I replied that I think it’s even simpler than that; these guys were thinking with their wallets. And, to a great extent, their “republican” ideology. It wasn't the weapons. It was the fiscals and the politics.

The thing the gunsuckers always elide is the first section of that amendment: “A well-regulated militia…” The rich guys who wrote the foundational documents 1) were appalled at the expense of a standing army (and navy, which is insane when you think of how important maritime commerce was to the infant U.S., but, Jefferson, FFS…) and 2) were deeply committed to the idea that a standing army was a “danger to liberty”. All those soldiers with no citizen cred, just waiting for the demagogue to come along and coup with them? 

No way, Citizen Jose’!

So their idea was that the Good People of the country would flock to the standards when danger threatened and form “the nation in arms” (and keeping in mind that their model were the colonial militias, which largely kept their weapons (and almost all their propellant – the black powder) in a local “magazine” where it would be issued when that alarm was sounded).

So it wasn’t even the notion of every swinging richard running around with a military-grade firearm that would have bugged them. It was the notion that that firearm was for using on their fellow citizens for random whackadoodle reasons and that wasn’t a good reason to keep those firearms locked up in the magazines.

And let’s not EVEN go into the notion that they wanted every Joe and Molly to have a bang-stick to prevent “tyranny” coming from the new U.S. government, because the moment that happens Shay’s and the whiskey rebels will need a moment to whip the fuck up on your head.

Nope. The current firearms priapism is a symptom of the prion disease that has eaten the brains of waaaaayyyyy too many Americans, including nearly all “conservatives”.

 You'd think that at this point...

 But, no. I mean, Sandy Hook! Rando homicidal looney guns down adorable kiddies. That doesn't shake you? You insist it was a fake, or "crisis actors", or whatever?

The crazy has gone too deep, and there's no digging it out now. 

(And the title of this post comes from Jim Wright's series on this whole nonsense. They're archived here and are all worth a read, as is his "Bang Bang Sanity" essay that discusses some commonsense ideas that will help put a lid on this nonsense. 

Not that We the People will.)

We're toast

 Okay, so. It's time to talk about the weather.

Well, no. And that's part of the problem.

We hear the words "climate" or "global warming" and we think about the difference between a winter night and a summer day. That's how we're sort of hardwired; humans are a more-evolved sort of ape, but we're still an ape, and we tend to look first for shelter, food, and sex (okay, we're a sort of bonobo kind of ape, but, still...) and only then do we bother to spend time scratching our heads over more abstract ideas.

But we have a tough time wrapping our monkeybrains around those ideas. "Climate" is weather, right? And we still have cold weather, it still snows, so how can it be "warm"?

So you get people like this nitwit and his snowball "disproving" the notion that humans are somehow forcing change in climate patterns.

It's commonsensically obvious that the notion is not "disproved" but is, instead, more likely than not...

...when you consider the single biggest change in the Earth's atmospheric cycles that humans have effected; the Industrial Revolution.

We - in the sense of "we" as a species different from our closest anthropoid relatives - have been around for probably about four to five million years or so. Our ancestors (since they weren't our species of homo sapiens) figured out tool-using some two million and change years back, and very late after that - probably no more than about 100,000 years ago - figured out the beginnings of "farming".

Real honest-to-John-Deere big-league farming doesn't come along until Sumer and Egypt, though, about 10,000 years ago. Small-scale "industry" in the form of stuff like working metals comes along seven or eight thousand years ago.

The big leap comes in the 19th Century - well, it begins about 250 years ago, but doesn't seriously take off until the mid-1800s - and the big kicker comes in the last three-quarters of the 20th Century with the internal combustion engine.

Suddenly - in geological terms, in a fraction of a picosecond - humans are burning all kinds of things that release gases into the air, the sort of gas-emissions that before this needed immense natural processes like million-year-long flood basalt eruptions to produce.

Now here's the thing: we've been here before. The last time we had this much CO2 in the air was in the Miocene, the geological epoch than ran from about 5 million to 20 million years ago. The Miocene are was pretty toasty, too.

And note how this compares to today:

It's not so much that we humans are dumping carbon into the sky; Nature does that just fine. It's that we're dumping 400ppm carbon into the sky in the middle of a glacial period where the average CO2 is running something closer to 250ppm.

Now.

Here's one rendition of what we think the Miocene looked like:

Y'know what evolved in the Miocene?

Grass.

Seriously.

Your lawn started as the first species of the family Poaceae some time near the end of the Mesozoic, about 70-80 million years ago (we've found bits in dinosaur shit, so we've got a timeline) but the real explosion came as the climate warmed and dried, about 10-20 million years before present. Grass went from being a fairly minor part of the Cenozoic flora to dominating huge land areas.

And with the grass came the animals. Horses, right? "Horse" at the beginning of the Eocene 50-odd million years ago was a dinky thing the size of a Labrador retriever. By the end of the Miocene 45 million years later we're looking at Black Beauty. Well, okay, no. But the thing was recognizably a "horse".

My point here is that the sort of things that happen when you change the climate this much are big things. Species evolve. Species become extinct. Entire ecosystems change, even appear, like "grasslands", where nothing like them was before.

And we're driving ourselves headlong into just such a climate change right now.

So. Does this mean that we're looking at "extinction"?

I doubt it.

Modern human industrial capability enables us to modify our surroundings too much for even a Miocene-like climate to destroy us. We'll adapt to the changing conditions, find ways to grow food and make shelter in different places on the land surface, in ways that many other species can't.

(Which, I should note, is also part of this whole "climate change" macguffin; we're looking at a "sixth extinction", a loss of species that we haven't seen since meteor strike at the end of the Mesozoic and the final curtain for the dinosaurs)

But this sort of adaptation will, inevitably, produce human dislocation and suffering on a scale we've never seen. Coastal submergence will endanger many of the cities we've built. More severe weather like droughts, wildfires, monsoons, tropical cyclones will disrupt our ways of living.

People living in places that lack the high-end industrial capability of the First World, in particular, will get hammered. People getting hammered won't just lie down and die in place. They'll try and go to where they can live, which means mass migrations. Human history has examples of this, like the mfecane of southern Africa, and they are seldom pretty or pleasant.

So, to recap:

1) We're pretty much 99.9% certain to be driving ourselves into a warmer Earth, and

2) That's very likely to produce some truly appalling horrors for many, many people.

You'd think that anyone looking at this would conclude that we could at least try and do something to prevent, or mitigate, the former so as to avoid, or mitigate, the latter.

But when you look around, we're not doing anything of the sort, really.

Why not?

Here's my short answer; because in a lot of ways we're still fucking monkeys.

If it's not directly related to food, shelter, or sex, we have a hard time both visualizing the importance of something and giving a shit about it. The old monkey-brain just wants that tasty snack and a piece of that sweet bonobo ass over there and to hell with tomorrow's problems.

In other words, both as individuals and as groups, we're damn poorly designed to deal with massive, slow-rolling, long-term, complex problems. We have enough fucking trouble setting up a Zoom meeting.

Another problem is that in order to mitigate the long-term climate problems we'd have to make short-term decisions that are likely to cost us, both in real money and in changes to the way we live now, that may not be drastic but will be, at least, 1) irking, and 2) force us to admit that there are problematic things about the "way we live now".

That's really difficult to get people to do.

I mean, we know - know as in "damn fucking certain" - that we're going to have an immense earthquake along the Pacific northwest coast of the United States. Immense. Huge, like Day of Judgement huge. In order to prevent massive loss of life we'd need to spend millions - probably billions - to harden things like bridges and pipelines, retrofit old buildings, pay to move people out of vulnerable places. And, every so often, one of our newspapers or television stations does a little piece about that and reminds us that if we don't tens of thousands of us are going to be totally fucked (as in "dead" or "the living will envy the dead" sort-of totally fucked).

Then we look at the immediate cost, emit a little squeak, and go back to ignoring the whole thing.

Thus with "climate change".

The GQP is, obviously, worse. Being in the pocket of extraction industries that would be defenestrated by the changes we'd need to make doesn't help, of course. Being all-in on "conservative" things like fast food burgers, big lawns, and coal-rolling pickups means that they're going to reflexively oppose your solar panels and soy burgers; your typical Chevy-owning Republican is the human truck nutz of climate change denialism.

But that means that the "mainstream" Left in the US is going to have a hard time selling the idea that it's not an issue of individuals recycling pop cans and driving a Leaf, but a Marshall Plan-level of social and economic redirection.

Good luck getting those corporate donations when you're going to wrench Pepsico and Amazon in ways that will reduce their immediate profit and force them to radically restructure their way of doing business...assuming they CAN; the extraction industries are going to pitch an obvious bitch to prevent the derailing of their gravy train.

Industrial capitalism is simply a grossly poor candidate for recognizing complex, non-immediate threats, analyzing and selecting corrective measures, and taking appropriate actions to effect them. The particular brand of short-term-profit-taking return-to-the-Gilded-Age vulture capitalism that we've been willing to let return to power since the 1980s is even worse.

So.

Nope.

We're pretty much just in for a horrific century or two as the human race feels the impact of the Holocene Thermal Maximum.

I wish I didn't believe that, but I just don't see a way around it.

Spring forward

 I turned the clock forward this morning not long after the Little Cat did her usual meowing, myurping "OMFG I AM SO HUNGRY!!!" dance on my pillow, the sixty-fourth time in my life that change has occurred.

I've always lived with the time change, one hour in the spring, another in the fall, part of the cycle of the year like the solstices and equinoxes. I don't really even think about it, or, at least I hadn't until recently. It was just something you did twice a year.

But apparently the time change is now a Thing. Twice a year now I run across messages from friends and acquaintances complaining about the time change as if it was the biannual equivalent of flying across eleven time zones. The news feed always seems to cough up a piece about how many people die or are maimed each year by the time shift.

This is all relatively recent; as short a time as a decade ago I don't recall seeing this bellyaching about the clock or, if I did, it was treated like a sort of flat-Earth crankism.

Now?

The Oregon state Senate passed a bill requiring the state to remain on daylight savings time year-round.

We're not alone; apparently something like a fifth of the U.S. states have one of these "permanent DST" bills as state law. Doesn't matter if the feds don't concur, mind, you. But there's federal legislation, too, so who knows?

Here's the weird part about all this.

Humans have been doing this time-change thing since before the Paleolithic. It's call "sunrise", and it's because humans are predominantly diurnal and our activity is largely confined to the daylight hours. Mostly because our night vision sucks, but for whatever the reasons we tend to become active in the light and retreat into somnolence in the dark.

But that change occurs two or three minutes a day over the course of the year. To try and do that now that we're slaves to the mechanical clock? 

Unpossible.

So, instead, we do it all in a jump twice a year, so that "sunrise" will match roughly with the old liturgical hour of Lauds and "six a.m." with Prime and Vespers with "the lighting of the lamps".

I'm not sure whether it's me, or just peculiarity of fussing about something that is a practical accommodation to human behavior that predates the relentless ticking of the clocks, that seems so weird.

Friday Jukebox: Warning Signs Edition

 Fun rockabilly number for a sunny Friday afternoon.

Enjoy.

Darth Maul returns

Sorry about the hiatus. Got some bad medical news. No, no, not The Plague...but, still, it's taking some time to process. I'll be here this weekend with an update.

Meanwhile, here's another cat picture (with The Bride, who was taking power-nap lessons from the moggies...:

Darkness and not light

 

Worthwhile read from Fred Clark on the trace of fear, anger, and hatred that connects the current "conservative" panic that has become the animating force of the GQP with the earlier conspiracy-theory pogroms like the Salem witch trials, the "New York Conspiracy Panic of 1741" and the "satanic panics" of the 1980s and 90's like the McMartin and Kern County hysterias.

"Moral panics are not sparked by sincere, well-meaning convictions of those who wish to see wrongs righted and justice done. They are sparked by the sincere, inescapable conviction that, in the words of the prophet Amos, the day of justice would be, for them, darkness and not light. The recognition that justice would not mean well for us."

The link between the QAnuts, the "conservative" hate for the Black Lives Matter protests this past summer, and the "Stop The Steal" idiocy draws all of this together.

The people inside all of these are, more than anything else, terrified of "The Others" gaining the sort of power and control over them that they have always had over "The Others"; these wretched subhumans (who are, however, secretly powerful and dangerous) are using the Deep State or the Swamp or the black power of Antifa to swarm over the Good People who just want to Make America Great.

It doesn't make any sort of sense, of course. It's like the weird Nazi ideology that simultaneously insisted that the Jews were the worthless, degenerate scum of the cursed Earth while also running the political and financial world.

It's exactly the sort of thinking that turns a small-time New York real estate grifter, con man, frightened little germaphobe into a bare-chested hero of the People.

Here's the problem with all this.

As Clark pointed out in a pair of earlier posts, the people involved in all these "moral panics" included some deeply cynical sonsofbitches that pushed this sort of Pizzagate nonsense for the handle it gave them over their marks and dupes.

Those people are just Nazi-grade evil, Steven-Miller-type "first up against the wall" bastards.

But the rest?

There are certainly a large number of stupid and gullible people in that group. But there just aren't enough stupid, gullible people to make up a large enough group to take over the U.S. government for extended periods of time; government is simply too complex and difficult to do for large numbers of stupid and gullible people to do it.

So among this group there has to be a fairly large percentage of intelligent, competent, critical-thinking people who want to believe these implausible, ridiculous fairy tales.

As Clark points out in the last of the linked posts:

"That requires more self-deception than any of us is capable of on our own. That degree of self-deception requires a group.

This is why the rumor doesn’t really need to be plausible or believable. It isn’t intended to deceive others. It’s intended to invite others to participate with you in deception.

Are you afraid you might be a coward? Join us in pretending to believe this lie and you can pretend to feel brave. Are you afraid that your life is meaningless? Join us in pretending to believe this lie and you can pretend your life has purpose. Are you afraid you’re mired in mediocrity? Join us in pretending to believe this lie and you can pretend to feel exceptional. Are you worried that you won’t be able to forget that you’re just pretending and that all those good feelings will thus seem hollow and empty?

Join us and we will pretend it’s true for you if you will pretend it’s true for us. We need each other."

It's sad to think that someone needs something like that to be able to live with themselves.

But how else can you explain the notion that otherwise-competent people believe that someone like bland corporate hack Joe Biden, the guy who represented MasterCard in Congress, is a communist puppet who wants to outlaw guns and Christianity and make every toddler attend Drag Queen Story Hour?

But...how else do you explain it?

How else do you explain things like the Texas governor's reaction to his state's catastrophic public power disaster, or his ramming his citizen's collective dicks into the COVID meatgrinder?

How else, in a pandemic on a scale unprecedented for a century, do you explain this?

I can't. Other than what Clark is talking about; that a relatively huge minority of my supposed fellow Americans want to believe that me and people like me are evil traitors who want to utterly burn down "America".

On the Left there are people who are not happy with how things are. But as Cohen notes, even these people will compromise and cooperate if that means the public good.

On the Right, there are people - in the case of the "Relief Plan" vote in the tweet above powerful, well-educated people, people who are supposedly familiar with the inner workings of the U.S. government and through it armed with all the sources of potential knowledge and understanding of the Plague Year - who have convinced themselves that their political adversaries are literally so evil and dangerous that the most anodyne of their proposals must be utterly, furiously, and sometimes even violently, fought against.

 They will not compromise or cooperate, for who can "compromise" and "cooperate" with Evil?

And that brings us to the point where we're going to discuss climate change

Into the minefield, ready or not

 Ah, yes…vaccination.

Y’know, I’m absolutely pleased that my son can have at least some of his senior year back at Roosevelt.

I’m excited that my daughter can see her freshman friends again.

I’m very, very glad that my wife working as the school secretary at Astor Elementary is fully vaccinated against the return of students.

So it’s difficult to express how absolutely, completely, incandescently furious I am that within a month these three will be returning home from interacting with who knows how many COVID-infected randos and bringing who knows how massive a viral load to me, who at 63 is NOT vaccinated and, more to the point, cannot GET vaccinated in time to escape the path through this fucking plague pit because my state government apparently considers me expendable if it means getting the schools open.

At least when I was a GI the Army got me a yellow fever shot before sending me out into the mosquito-infested cuna grass.

I checked everywhere. Under 65? Nope. "Multigenerational household"? Nope. There's just no route for me to get protected from this goddamn disaster. I just have to hope like hell my family doesn't bring home a round for the revolver as we begin to play "COVID Roulette" or dance to "The NoPo Minefield Tango"

I don’t expect anyone in the state government to do anything to help me protect myself, since they obviously knew this would happen when they reopened the schools in March rather than next fall and decided in a very Trumpy way that satisfying the people who have been grousing about online teaching (which DOES suck, I get that...) was worth people like me “taking the (fucking) punch”.

But it doesn’t make me any less furious at the whole pack of sonsofbitches that after nearly a year of me being extra careful and doing all the right public health things I was asked to do that this fucking COVID crapshoot is their gift to me.

Sorry. I’m more than a bit irked with my supposed “leaders” at the moment.

Nineteen

It's so difficult to imagine you as a woman grown.

You were, you will be, always one day old, the day we gained and lost you.

But before I lost you, while you were still tiny, you grew strong in my heart and straight and tall in my thoughts. You were my grown girl before the day you were born.

I couldn't believe that day would never come.

 But it didn't, did it, love?

You never grew past that day.

How could I have guessed? How could I have known, that the hug I would give you nineteen years ago tomorrow would be the first and last we would ever share? That the only place you would ever grow would be in my heart?

I will always miss you, darling. But this day most of all, the first and last day I would get to hold you, hoping even as I knew I could not hold you, that you had gone on before me, impatient, to that place where all the stars go out.

But I know that, after all these long years, that you will always go on, and I and your mother will always be left here behind, empty of you and aching for you and grieving for the loss of you, both the you we lost that day and the you who would have been standing before me today; strong and straight and tall, my daughter, my dearest heart.

Let me hug you one last time before you go.

You're so big. I'm so proud of you. 

Goodbye, love. Goodbye.

 Bryn Rose Gellar March 1, 2002-March 2, 2002