Posted on

What do green cards mean?

It is fortunate how incompetent Musso-lazy and his ‘team’ are at the margins – they do plenty of damage between the lines. People with know-how need not apply, one-way loyalty visible from space, and good help always being hard to find all add up to a thick stack of not understanding how to avoid things like catastrophic wars and spiraling debt pushing up interest rates.

Maybe this will discredit the notion of government as business [ed. Oui, je sais: sweet summer child]. But fascism also wrecks the ordinariness of difficult times and turns them into nightmares, even and especially with a regime that has introduced difficult times on stilts for ordinary people:

“DHS is NOT arresting U.S. citizens by mistake.” “There are no ‘indiscriminate’ stops.” Allegations of “racial profiling are disgusting, reckless and categorically FALSE.” “The pattern is NOT of law enforcement using force.” “ICE does not zip tie or restrain children.”

But that is precisely what is happening, and at a far larger scale than previously reported.

ProPublica has tallied and cataloged more than 500 cases of immigration agents holding citizens during the current administration. Imagine, and it’s not so hard to do, so many fellow citizens going about their daily routines now with escape plans, alerts, and hiding places as part of their stress portfolio. What does that do to people? If you answered which people, that’s a good place to start.

 

Posted on

Hug the Monster

via Romm, an article about a metaphor to change fear into action and extinguish the panic so deadly in a great crisis that seems well, a little too familiar:

“Hug the monster” is a metaphor taught by U.S. Air Force trainers to those headed into harm’s way.

The monster is your fear in a sudden crisis — as when you find yourself trapped in a downed plane or a burning house.

If you freeze or panic — if you go into merely reactive “brainlock” — you’re lost.

But if your mind has been prepared in advance to recognize the psychological grip of fear, focus on it, and then transform its intense energy into action — sometimes even by changing it into anger — and by also engaging the thinking part of your brain to work the problem, your chances of survival go way up.

Around the world, a growing number of people are showing signs of hugging the monster of what the world’s experts have plainly shown to be a great crisis facing us all.

See. Toldya. It goes on:

Established scientists, community and government leaders and journalists, as they describe the disruptions, suffering and destruction that manmade global warming is already producing, with far worse in the offing if humanity doesn’t somehow control it, are starting to allow themselves publicly to use terms like “calamity,” “catastrophe”, and “risk to the collective civilization.”

Sooner or later, everyone who learns about the rapid advance of manmade global warming must deal with the question of fear.

For many years now, the worlds scientists and economists have depicted  upheavals in security plans, financial networks, and food and water systems due to the rapidity with which annual global temperature is rising as a result of excess carbon emissions.

Read the rest. Transform the crisis, indeed.

Posted on

Designing Compensations

So the Obama Administration, in a bold display of having other work to do, is set to announce new fuel efficiency minimums today, though it might be an out for car makers.

At issue is a “technology re-opener” that allows auto manufacturers to fight the standards after 2021 in the hopes that they can re-negotiate rules with a future administration that may be more lenient on the industry. The re-opener potentially gives auto companies an incentive not to develop technologies immediately so they can argue down the road that the standard can’t be met.

And researchers at Caltech are engaged in extreme, Onionesque crazy talk about increasing the power output of some new, vertical-axis wind turbines.

simply by optimizing the placement of vertical wind turbines on a given plot of land.

…

The experimental wind-farm houses two-dozen 1.2-meter-wide vertical-axis wind turbines (VAWTs). Vertical turbines that have rotors and look like eggbeaters sticking out of the ground. Each turbine is 10 meters tall.

Now is simply not the time to suggest these nugget-sized simplistic solutions to the overwhelmingly complex issues facing the world today. What we need are cautious yet controversial, half-baked propositions that allow leaders, as well as ordinary citizens, to pick an arbitrary side and battle to a standstill. Unrest at a loggerheads. No decision. A dead-end into which to channel our hostilities, to let our economic and ecological problems convulse into something much more magnificently horrific than we can now imagine. In a word, or two: more freedom. There’s just no reason to let these so called easy answers peek through and scare people. Bikes. Walking. Cooking your own food. Handholding. Making out…. these were of another time. Let’s calm down and argue about things that matter: like iPhone vs. Blackberry. Now there’s an argument that’s built to last, that means something. Where do you stand?