01-10-2020, 02:04 PM
(01-10-2020, 08:26 AM)Skabungus Wrote: I live is rural, gun toting, Trump loving Michigan. At the store the other day, I heard a farmer who lives up the road from me complaining that climate change had just put his brother's cottage in Lake Michigan, because the 3 foot rise in lake level had eroded about 50 feet of beach in the past year. I kept my mouth shut because nobody likes to hear "I told you so" In Miami it's becoming common for the sidewalks to get wet after the high tide: the water coming up from the ground. Salt water that is. My Aussie gaming friends haven't messaged in a couple weeks. Go figure.
Levels of the Great Lakes have nothing to do with global warming except that above 4C (39F) water expands as it warms. Excess water in any of the Great Lakes flows toward the St. Lawrence Seaway. One or more of the Great Lakes (especially Michigan or Huron) could expand, but only of some land shift (an earthquake) blocks an outlet such as the St. Clair or Detroit River, in which case Lakes Huron and Lake Michigan to flow through Chicago instead. The post-glacial lake that preceded Lake Michigan drained through the Chicago River into the Chicago River, the Des Plaines River, and the Illinois River; such could happen again. More likely is that climate change shifts the grain belts so that the border between the corn and wheat belts goes through Mount Pleasant instead of Battle Creek. (The big cereal-processing plants are in Battle Creek because of the wheat and grain belts have their boundary there). Crop production could fall as soil moisture becomes less reliable due to the absence of a real winter -- and even more so if summer rains start to fail. I have seen conflicting stories on whether southern Michigan would become more like Kentucky (Cfa -- no real dry season, but above-freezing winters) or like the Sacramento Valley (Csa -- hot dry summers but rainy, chilly winters).
By all means, mail something to your Aussie friends. They will appreciate it. Even a card is more durable -- far more durable -- than an e-mail message.
Quote:Humankind seems to always wait until it's fifty eight minutes past eleven before getting its act together. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsA3PK8bQd8
People will continue to parse the facts and argue about syntax until the world comes down on their heads. It's just the way we do things.
The American economy is run by right-wing authoritarians in the position of demanding that everyone else make the world as the economic elite wants it. Anyone who wants anything other than to maximize quick profits for them is to be shut out of the system, and people get rewarded well for substituting spin for truth and toadying for political debate. As in the last Crisis it will take either an apocalyptic war or another Great Depression to force change in the ways that our quasi-aristocracy operates, if not overthrown them. The Great Depression that began with a three-year economic meltdown so constricted profits for elites that it made what survived of Big Business concern itself with survival than with buying the political process. This time the elites got the meltdown similar in severity and destructiveness ended after a year and a half -- and with their recovery they had the funds for imposing the economic fascism that we now endure.
The right-wing authoritarians represent a shift of Big Business and bureaucratic elites from being a creative elite that solves problems to a dominant elite (terminology from Arnold Toynbee) that takes everything that it can and imposes poverty (which includes debt) upon everyone else. The terms of survival for the common man are to be heavily in debt and to work as hard and for as many hours as possible (second jobs) on behalf of a Master Class that gets aristocratic power and excludes any competition. As that happens the elite does everything possible to pit the proletariat against the intelligentsia while profiteering and entrenching power. Consider this: our democratic institutions were designed for a society largely of small-scale entrepreneurs and yeoman farmers incapable of getting more than they produce or create. One can see the change in a mere forty years as small business has given way to oligopoly as a norm, and bureaucratic elites become hereditary (that is the nature of bureaucracy -- the trend existed with the Soviet nomenklatura which became the exploiter class and became oligarchs as the society abandoned all pretense of socialism. See also China).
We have yet to solve our problems. Those who profit most from the nastiness of our system have been getting richer, and sybaritic indulgence is about as hard to shake as is heroin.
Quote:I remain an optimist. In some ways I see it as a required cleansing. We have the ability to fix our situation in a matter of a decade, and we will, after much pain and suffering including the disappearance of entire nations, mass dislocations, famine and war. It will require much pain and suffering, but we'll get it together.
The same economic meltdown that gave FDR America foisted the Antichrist upon Germany. So beware! We have Donald Trump, who has pitted the proletariat against the intelligentsia with the promise of making people not in the elite miserable while telling the elites to follow the dictum of Aleister Crowley: Do what thou wilt. Just think of what Jeffrey Epstein got away with for several decades. Donald Trump was one of Jeffrey Epstein's good friends, noticing that "he likes his women young". But "Do what thou wilt" implies that others are prey.
We solve global warming now -- or at least slow it enough for people to adjust to slow change that we cannot fully stop until we are at a different equilibrium -- or this Crisis Era offers the dubious solution of entrenching power in questionable elites and the calamities that kill perhaps a quarter of the world's population (if you thought World War II horrible, then wait until you see what happens when much of the world becomes uninhabitable or inundated -- and death comes on the scale of the Black Death or the Mongol invasions, which were even more horrific) in the Crisis of 2100, and because elites of our time became unaccountable.
Those with the assets and power have often operated under the delusion that they can demand anything of others so long as such does not kill too many of the others, and that they have no responsibility toward Humanity as a whole or any ethical code. Such people bring famines, persecutions, and catastrophic war. Donald Trump is exactly the person to bring such about -- except that he is too old to do so. A younger, more dynamic, more coherent -- and much less scrupulous person -- could bring such about. Mussolini was 39, and Hitler was 43, when they acceded to power. Trump is the supposedly-safer Boomer, and who said that Obama is a characteristic X? A mature Reactive (like Washington, Cleveland, Eisenhower, or arguably Obama) well fits an age that has tired of rancorous crusades and is more concerned with the workable than with the ideal. The callow and cynical Reactive like Hitler or Mussolini gambles with everything because he can. To get through this Crisis we will need to seek something workable and sustainable -- or we will have such imposed upon us.
Quote:I look at S&H's work and recognize that, it speaks about a people, in a nation in a time gone by. The "givens" of their world view are soon to change. The very idea of nation state is becoming a blurry concept. Unrest, and fracture are the standard now, as opposed to the exception. I still find S&H a valuable tool, but I find myself wondering if they even considered an acceleration in the climate crisis of this magnitude. I doubt it.
S&H offer patterns that have worked in the past. Maybe nationhood doesn't mean so much anymore -- unless the nation be some monstrous Evil Empire. People can cross borders easily in the Schengen Zone as if they were crossing state lines in the United States. Thus a German can easily visit places that used to be German only to realize that the people there have well adapted to German architecture and street plans but speak a language that has not been a favorite for language-learners. (Speaking of which -- Polish is a language worthy of learning. Difficult -- but no harder than Russian).
We Americans need to do the following in this Crisis Era lest we impose calamity upon ourselves and upon our progeny.
1. Restore full democracy
2. Undo the concentration of political power
3. Separate economic and political power
4. Reduce the regional divides of economic results so that people can live well in West Virginia or Mississippi.
5. Revitalize the economy for the proletariat
6. Restore respect for intellectual achievement and artistic creativity
7. Make gross ignorance a cause of shame instead of pride.
It may be America's 'model minorities' who show the way. The alternative could be a monstrous order that works people to exhaustion, drains them with exorbitant costs, and numbs people with the worst 'opiate of the masses' available -- culture-free entertainment. I can imagine how depraved a thoroughly-rotten order could go... something like the entertainment in Roman circuses in which Christians were offered to half-starved bears and Big Cats. We would be more sophisticated; we might instead offer the pariahs to sharks or crocodiles in expensive aquaria with superb technology of transmission of reality TV at its conceivable worst. If you think that we could never go so low, then guards in Nazi death camps occasionally entertained themselves by having large predators attack helpless inmates of those camps. People from the land of Goethe and Brahms turned dogs against helpless people, including against the definitive model minority of the time.
The Germans would have been better off had they been paying attention to Goethe and Brahms instead of to the 20th-century Antichrist, don't you think?
...Personal and public life have normally shown that really-bad habits, like greed, addiction, and superstition, merit the efforts to free people from them. We solve our problems or our problems take us over. It's up to all of us to live in ways that justify optimism.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.