Small blog update, and a video

For the rest of November, I’m going to be doing low-effort posts for the most part. I’m behind on my novel, and the sad truth is that if I want to be able to keep writing, I need more sources of income. As wonderful as my patrons are, they form a pretty small crowd that hasn’t grown much over the last year, so I think it would be foolish to assume that that will change after another year or two.

I intend to keep posting daily, but for the rest of this month, and probably periodically going forward, I’ll be taking time for other work. I doubt it’s just me, but I find it hard to remind myself that yes, writing a novel is work that I actually have a responsibility to keep doing in my current situation, and it’s sometimes discouraging to work on something that only has a possibility of paying off months or years down the line.

Anyway, for a change of tone, here’s a two-parter on U.S. policing, and how it interacts with U.S. culture – television in particular. There are content warnings in the videos, but if you know anything about our “justice” system, you already know this is gonna get dark.

Chevron’s greed and callousness underscore the need for revolutionary change.

Steve Donziger, who became famous for essentially being captive for years for exposing corporate human rights abuses, has shared a document leaked from Chevron, the company whose crimes he exposed.

The memo reads as follows:

Lago Agrio,
June 25th, 1980
OTE-276-80

DRILLING, WORKOVER & PRODUCTION PITS

Ing. René Buoaram

Attenion: Mr. E. K. Johnson

A study has been completed regarding the cost and necessity of eliminating possible contamination of the enviornment by the earthen pits used in the drilling, producing, and workover operations in the Oriente Region. The Study was requested in your memorandum No. 628 dated June 12, 1980.

In general, the possibility of polution by our current waste disposal into pits is very minimal when liquid levels are monitored and drains are maintained in good operating condition. It is our recommendation that the pits not be lined, filled nor fenced. Further, we recommend that the siphons continue to be used to keep the oil in the pits and the water drained from the pits.

First, the current pits are necessary for efficient and economical operation of our drilling and workover programs and for our production operations. The alternative for using our current pits, is to use steel pits at a prohibitive cost. The additional cost to transport the pits for each workover and swapping operation would also be expensive. A second alternative is to fill the old pits, dig new pits, and line the new pits. The cost to fill the old pits would be US$ 5,180 per well or US$ 1,222,480 for the 236 wells. The cost to dig new pits would be US$ 472,000. Linning the new pit would cost US$ 2,503,488. The total cost of eliminating the old pits and lining new pits would be US$ 4,197,968.

The cost of fencing the current pits would be an additional US$ 700,316. However, it has been our experience that the barbed wire used for these fences would be stolen within a very short time and render the fences useless.

The design of the current syphon system in our pits is such that the oil is retained in the pit and only water is drained from the pit. The water that is discharged from the pit is of low salinity that has little or no detrimental effect on the environment. To attest to this fact, no yellowing or dying vegetation can be found throughout this area of operation.

Therefore, it is recommended that the pits neither be fenced, lined, nor filled, and that the siphons continue to be used.

D. W. Archer

District Superintendent

Again, they’ve spent US$ 2 billion avoiding accountability for the consequences of this decision. When I say that we need to work on environmental cleanup, and on preventing pollution from the new technologies we use to replace fossil fuels, that includes stuff like this, and it includes all forms of resource extraction. This kind of careless waste “disposal” isn’t even close to being unique to the oil industry. It’s the default for everyone, everywhere, and the profit and political power gained from over a century of ruthless and irresponsible profit-seeking is being used not just to shield those most responsible from accountability, but also to prevent any change for the better, for as long as these ghouls can cling to their wealth and power.

 

Data on the economic toll of heat waves underscore the need to prioritize climate justice.

A few days ago, I wrote about how the increasing damage from powerful hurricanes is on track to being more than the U.S. economy can absorb. Unfortunately, it’s not just hurricanes, and it’s not jut the U.S. Since the 1990s, the global economy has lost 16 trillion dollars due to the various effects of heat waves:

Geography professor Justin Mankin and doctoral candidate Christopher Callahan, Guarini ’23, combined newly available, in-depth economic data for regions worldwide with the average temperature for the hottest five-day period—a commonly used measurement of heat intensity—for each region in each year. They found that from 1992 to 2013, heat waves statistically coincided with variations in economic growth and that an estimated $16 trillion was lost to the effects of high temperatures on human health, productivity, and agricultural output.

The findings stress the immediate need for policies and technologies that protect people during the hottest days of the year, particularly in the tropics and the Global South where the world’s warmest and most economically vulnerable nations are located, the researchers report.

“Accelerating adaptation measures within the hottest period of each year would deliver economic benefits now,” says Callahan, who is the study’s first author. “The amount of money spent on adaptation measures should not be assessed just on the price tag of those measures, but relative to the cost of doing nothing. Our research identifies a substantial price tag to not doing anything.”

The study, “Globally Unequal Effect of Extreme Heat on Economic Growth,” is the among the first to specifically examine how heat waves affect economic output, says Mankin, the study’s senior author and an assistant professor of geography. “No one has shown an independent fingerprint for extreme heat and the intensity of that heat’s impact on economic growth. The true costs of climate change are far higher than we’ve calculated so far.”

Dishonest actors sometimes point to deaths due to cold as a reason why we shouldn’t be worrying about climate change, but that argument ignores several factors. The first, of course, is that we are at the beginning of this warming event. While we can see a great deal of measurable change already, the sheer scale of what is happening makes it hard to remember that it’s actively getting worse. The second is that a lot of those deaths are due to the same economic system that has destabilized our climate. Lack of shelter, lack of adequate heat, and lack of adequate medical care all combine to make people far more vulnerable to all sorts of weather conditions, and the sad reality is that someone can die of hypothermia in pretty “warm” conditions.

Beyond that, there’s also the simple fact that we are a species that evolved on a cold planet. Our history has been hundreds of thousands of years of ice ages, and warmer inter-glacial periods, like the one we’ve been in for the last few millennia. We have many more tools for keeping ourselves warm than we have for cooling off. Deaths due to cold, would be pretty easy and cheap to prevent, but as a society we don’t value life very much.

And, of course, the statistics for cold deaths tend to focus on fairly wealthy countries that have harsh winters, and that choose to maintain a certain level of poverty, “for the economy. The growing problem of heatwaves is not only global, but is predictably hitting poorer countries harder:

“Our work shows that no place is well adapted to our current climate,” Mankin says. “The regions with the lowest incomes globally are the ones that suffer most from these extreme heat events. As climate change increases the magnitude of extreme heat, it’s a fair expectation that those costs will continue to accumulate.”

[…]

The study results underscore issues of climate justice and inequality, Mankin says. The economic costs of extreme heat—as well as the expense of adaptation—have been and will be disproportionately borne by the world’s poorest nations in the tropics and the Global South. Most of these countries have contributed the least to climate change.

The researchers found that while economic losses due to extreme heat events averaged 1.5% of gross domestic product per capita for the world’s wealthiest regions, low-income regions suffered a loss of 6.7% of GDP per capita.

Furthermore, the study revealed that to a certain point, wealthy subnational regions in Europe and North America—which are among the world’s biggest carbon emitters—could theoretically benefit economically by having periods of warmer days. The economies of other principal emitters such as China and India would be harmed by a greater intensity of extreme heat events given their regional baseline temperatures, the researchers found.

“We have a situation where the people causing global warming and changes in extreme heat have more resources to be resilient to those changes, and, in some rare cases, could benefit from it,” Mankin says. “It’s a massive international wealth transfer from the poorest countries in the world to the richest countries in the world through climate change—and that transfer needs to be reversed.”

 That last sentence could easily describe much of the last couple centuries of global politics and economics. It also follows what seems like an increasingly open hatred of anyone who’s struggling, and a belief that such people should be punished for their misfortune. It feels like a very superstitious, Calvinistic perspective – that those at the bottom are suffering because they deserve to be suffering, and therefor we should punish them for the sins they must have committed to be so cursed by God/The Free Market. That’s where we see people waving away a housing-first approach to homelessness, because of vague assertions about drug use or the preferences of people without adequate shelter, in my opinion. While it may not be unique to United States, it feels like a very USian outlook on life, and the flip side to the prosperity gospel that infuses that country’s culture.

And after a certain point, it’s hard not to see this as white supremacist eugenics at work in the climate denial movement, especially when you look at the other political projects funded by fossil fuel corporations and their owners.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Hurricanes are on track to being too much for the U.S. economy to handle

It kinda feels like hurricanes are getting worse, doesn’t it?

Back in August, I talked about how we’ve entered what I call The Age of Endless Recovery after researchers at UC Davis actually put numbers on how extreme weather events are hurting economic growth in the United States. Since then, the hurricane season has hit, devastating communities from the Caribbean north. The thing is, a lot of our awareness of these events depends on news corporations choosing to cover them. There’s been a lot of news about named storms, but I haven’t seen nearly as much attention paid to the drought in China, for example (and yeah, I haven’t been better on that). I also can’t help but think about the way crime reporting has convinced many people that violent crime is increasing, even as the trend has been in the opposite direction. I also know that the rhetoric about extreme weather getting more frequent and worse has led some people to think that climate scientists have been predicting that hurricanes specifically will be getting more frequent and worse. The actual prediction has been that while rising ocean temperatures will increase the number of tropical cyclones, the increase in wind shear will lead to a decrease in the number of those cyclones that survive long enough to become actual hurricanes. So, fewer hurricanes. The problem is that the warmer water that makes more of those cyclones will also make the hurricanes that do form much more likely to be powerful. I’ll let Peter Hadfield explain in this old Potholer54 video:

 

I think the effect of this is that it will feel like there are more storms, because there are more that are big enough to require politicians to request aid, and get good ratings over multiple news cycles. Unfortunately, this isn’t just a matter of things making sense on the surface. Research out of UW Madison found that hurricanes really are getting stronger:

In almost every region of the world where hurricanes form, their maximum sustained winds are getting stronger. That is according to a new study by scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration National Center for Environmental Information and University of Wisconsin–Madison Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies, who analyzed nearly 40 years of hurricane satellite imagery.

A warming planet may be fueling the increase.

“Through modeling and our understanding of atmospheric physics, the study agrees with what we would expect to see in a warming climate like ours,” says James Kossin, a NOAA scientist based at UW–Madison and lead author of the paper, which is published today (May 18, 2020) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The research builds on Kossin’s previous work, published in 2013, which identified trends in hurricane intensification across a 28-year data set. However, says Kossin, that timespan was less conclusive and required more hurricane case studies to demonstrate statistically significant results.

To increase confidence in the results, the researchers extended the study to include global hurricane data from 1979-2017. Using analytical techniques, including the CIMSS Advanced Dvorak Technique that relies on infrared temperature measurements from geostationary satellites to estimate hurricane intensity, Kossin and his colleagues were able to create a more uniform data set with which to identify trends.

“The main hurdle we have for finding trends is that the data are collected using the best technology at the time,” says Kossin. “Every year the data are a bit different than last year, each new satellite has new tools and captures data in different ways, so in the end we have a patchwork quilt of all the satellite data that have been woven together.”

I actually really like this article, because of its links to Kossin’s other work, because in addition to being stronger, he’s found evidence that they’re traveling further (makes sense to me), but moving more slowly, which means much more flooding:

Kossin’s previous research has shown other changes in hurricane behavior over the decades, such as where they travel and how fast they move. In 2014, he identified poleward migrations of hurricanes, where tropical cyclones are travelling farther north and south, exposing previously less-affected coastal populations to greater risk.

In 2018, he demonstrated that hurricanes are moving more slowly across land due to changes in Earth’s climate. This has resulted in greater flood risks as storms hover over cities and other areas, often for extended periods of time.

“Our results show that these storms have become stronger on global and regional levels, which is consistent with expectations of how hurricanes respond to a warming world,” says Kossin. “It’s a good step forward and increases our confidence that global warming has made hurricanes stronger, but our results don’t tell us precisely how much of the trends are caused by human activities and how much may be just natural variability.”

Now, those of you who’ve been paying attention will know already that there’s no such thing as a natural disaster. In this age of science and technology, we have both the knowledge and the resources to largely disaster-proof our populations. Horror shows like Hurricane Katrina, or any recent catastrophic storm, are almost always so devastating because those in power didn’t think that adequate infrastructure was worth the expense. We prioritized money over life, and so life was lost. You may also be familiar with the saying, “an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure”. If we prepare for conditions that we know will occur; if we build real levees and sea walls, if we reinforce and maintain the electrical grid, if we move communities away from places where sea walls won’t work – if we do the things that science has shown will help to mitigate the harm done by extreme weather events – we can save both lives and money.

Unfortunately, that is not the trend we’re on right now. A new study out of the Pottsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research shows that we’re on track for hurricanes that do more damage than the US economy can handle:

“Tropical cyclones draw their energy from ocean surface heat. Also, warmer air can hold more water which eventually can get released in heavy rains and flooding that often occur when a hurricane makes landfall,” says Robin Middelanis from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and Potsdam University, lead author of the study. “It’s thus clear since long that hurricane damages will become bigger if we continue to heat up our Earth system.” While we might not have more hurricanes in the future, the strongest among them could get more devastating.
“Now, one of the important questions is: can we deal with that, economically? The answer is: not like this, we can’t,” says Middelanis. “Our calculations show, for the first time, that the US economy as one of the strongest on our planet, will eventually not be able to offset the losses in their supply chains on their own. Increasing hurricane damages will exceed the coping capacities of this economic super-power.”

I think it’s worth noting here that for poorer countries, natural disasters are probably at or beyond that threshold already. It’s also worth remembering that the poverty of those countries is almost invariably due to the abuses of imperialist powers. Haiti is probably the best example, at least in the “New World”, as they were forced to pay France for the crime of winning their independence, and have been repeatedly invaded, robbed, and otherwise harmed by the United States in particular. As we work to change our relationship with the environment, we must also work to end these economic injustices that have been deliberately maintained by the rich and powerful of the world. Unfortunately, this research shows what we’ve known for a long time: if we don’t change course in a big way, even wealthy nations are going to get stuck in a downward spiral, and they will absolutely steal more resources from poorer nations in an attempt to maintain their own comfort. The grim reality is that our entire system, from food production, to infrastructure, to trade, is all set up to work in climate conditions that no longer exist. The farther away we get from those conditions, the more things will break down.

The scientists looked at the 2017 hurricane Harvey that hit Texas and Louisiana and already then cost the enormous sum of 125 billion US Dollars in direct damages alone, and computed what its impacts would be like under different levels of warming. Importantly, losses from local business interruption propagate through the national and global supply chain network, leading to additional indirect economic effects. In their simulations of over 7000 regional economic sectors with more than 1.8 million supply chain connections, the scientists find that the US national economy’s supply chains cannot compensate future local production losses from hurricanes if climate change continues.
“We investigated global warming levels of up to 5°C – which unfortunately might be reached by the end of our century if climate policy fails us,” says Anders Levermann, head of complexity science at PIK and scientist at New York’s Columbia University, a co-author of the study. “We do not want to quantify temperature thresholds for the limit of adaptation of the US economy’s national supply chains, since we feel there’s too much uncertainty involved. Yet we are certain that eventually the US economy’s supply chain capacities as they are now will not be enough if global warming continues. There is a limit of how much the US economy can take, we just don’t know exactly where it is.”

“Bad for people”

Ironically, in the case of hurricane Harvey it is in particular the oil and gas industry in Texas which suffers from the impacts of hurricanes driven by global warming – while global warming is in turn driven by the emissions from burning oil and gas, plus of course coal. The fossil fuel extraction sector is big in that region of the US, and it is vulnerable to cyclone damages. The computer simulations show that production losses in the fuel sector will be amongst those which will be most strongly compensated by countries like Canada and Norway, but also Venezuela and Indonesia, at the expense of the US economy.
“When things break and production fails locally, there’s always someone in the world who is happy to make money by selling the replacement goods,” says Levermann. “So why worry? Well, reduced production means increasing prices, and even if that means it’s good for some economies, it is generally bad for the consumers – the people. Also from a global economic perspective, shifts due to disrupted supply chains can mean that less efficient producers step in. It’s a pragmatic, straightforward conclusion that we need to avoid increasing greenhouse gas emissions which amplify this kind of disruptions.”

It seems likely that I have different political and economic goals from the people who wrote this article, but I think their analysis is solid when it comes to how global warming will affect the United States, absent significant change. It’s important to remember that even within the economic framework that neoliberals claim to believe is so perfect, the rising temperature means disaster on the horizon. It’s also important to remember that the people in power almost certainly know this, and rather than trying to change course, they seem to be preparing to set themselves up in fortress bunkers while the rest of us starve, burn, drown, or agree to serve them in exchange for the scraps they decide to give us (I’ll probably have a rant about that out soon).

In the end, it comes back to the same thing. We need revolutionary political change if humanity is to have a future worth fighting for. Giving all the power to pathological money hoarders has led to global catastrophe, and there is no real plan, within this political and economic system, to make the world better. At most, some of the people at the top are hoping for a technological miracle that will save everyone else without them having to give up anything. Revolutionary change doesn’t have to mean war, though people in power tend to choose that over losing their power, but it does mean we need lots of people working together in an organized fashion. Things aren’t likely to collapse all at once, but it seems pretty clear where we’re heading. Our ruling class sees all of us as expendable, and as less important than their hoards, so we will have to figure this out for ourselves.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Fascist voter intimidation is a problem that will not go away by itself.

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

― Jean-Paul Sartre

It brings me no joy to say that I think this Sartre quote will be important to keep in mind over the next few years. Even without the recent rise in open antisemitism from the right, I think the general idea is important to keep in mind, when dealing with the presence of a growing fascist movement in society. That “they don’t believe in words” bit applies to pretty much all of reality. Whether this is a deep belief, or just a worldview they adopt to justify what they want to do anyway, concepts like “truth” and “reality” are about who has the power to impose their will, not about any kind of verifiable fact. They’ll say otherwise, of course, just like they’ll lie about anything else, but it’s like with Trump – the absolute truth is whatever suits their goal in the given moment.

When it comes to elections, their goal is power. That’s not the same as saying that their goal is to win an election. They do want to win the election, of course, but only so they can use that power to make it harder for anyone else to win the next election. Ultimately, their only use for elections is to provide an appearance of legitimacy, while they feel they need it. If they feel that pretense is no longer necessary, they will shed it just as quickly as they’ve shed the pretense that they’re not racist, or not transphobic.

The same holds true for so many of their so-called beliefs, that unless you happen to know how to decipher their obscurantism and lies, you often have to infer their actual goals from the effects of their actions and the direction in which they seem to be heading. They may say that they’re OK with legal immigration, and that race has nothing to do with it, but at the same time, they’re lying about what constitutes legal vs illegal immigration. They may say that they care about law and order, but they ignore or actively seek to violate laws that go against the hierarchy they believe should exist. For fascists, that hierarchy means “us” at the top, and “them” at the bottom. It’s very, very similar to this famous Frank Wilhoit quote:

Conservatism Consists of Exactly One Proposition, to Wit: There Must Be In-Groups Whom the Law Protects but Does Not Bind, Alongside Out-Groups Whom the Law Binds but Does Not Protect.

When they say “law and order”, they’re talking about a self-serving definition of natural law, and natural order, from a Social Darwinian perspective. Anything is justifiable in defense of that version of law and order in particular. Imprisonment without trial, planting evidence, perjury, torture, murder, theft – anything is justifiable.

That’s why efforts to subvert democracy are on any list of characteristics of fascism. It’s not because fascist regimes in the past were authoritarian – though they were – it’s because fascism as an ideology views the concept of “fair play” as weakness. Victory and power are all that matter, hence the Nazi slogan of “Seig heil” – hail victory. That’s also why we should expect fascists to keep trying to scare people out of voting:

Consider this: Two armed individuals – dressed in tactical gear – were spotted at a ballot drop box in Mesa on Friday night, according to Maricopa County officials. The pair left the scene when the County Sheriff’s Office arrived.

“We are deeply concerned about the safety of individuals who are exercising their constitutional right to vote and who are lawfully taking their early ballot to a drop box,” Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates and Recorder Stephen Richer said in a joint statement on Saturday.

There’s reason for concern, especially with candidates who have questioned the results of the 2020 election running as GOP nominees this year – including a full slate of them in Arizona, which became a hotspot of election denialism in the wake of Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in the state. And across the country, there’s concern about how some GOP-controlled county boards run by election deniers will oversee this year’s elections.

Read this report from CNN’s Kyung Lah. The Arizona Secretary of State’s Office has already referred to the US Department of Justice and Arizona Attorney General’s Office a separate report of voter intimidation:

The unidentified voter reported that they were approached and followed by a group of individuals when the voter was trying to drop off their ballot at an early voting drop box on Monday.

CNN on Thursday obtained from the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office the report in which the voter detailed the alleged incident. It occurred, the voter wrote, around 6:40 p.m. at the Juvenile Justice Court drop box in Mesa, within Maricopa County.
The voter wrote that a “group of people” filmed, photographed and raised accusations against them as they attempted to return their early ballots.

The voter wrote that a “group of people” filmed, photographed and raised accusations against them as they attempted to return their early ballots.

See for yourself. “There’s a group of people hanging out near the ballot dropbox filming and photographing my wife and I as we approached the dropbox and accusing us of being a mule,” the voter said, adding that the group took photographs of them, their license plate and followed them out of the parking lot.

Part of the incident was captured on surveillance video, as seen here.

Arizona has referred six cases of voter intimidation to the Department of Justice, for its current primary, but this problem goes well beyond the long-standing U.S. tradition of voter intimidation by fascist vigilantes. Florida governor Ron Desantis has already shown that he’s willing to engage in human trafficking for a PR stunt, but he’s also arresting people for “voter fraud”, because they mistakenly believed they were allowed to vote. To be clear, they voted under their own names, and most of them did so after requesting and receiving explicit permission to do so from the Florida Department of Elections:

Of the 19 people arrested by DeSantis’ Office of Election Crimes and Security, 13 were Black and 12 were registered Democrats. Most had applied to register to vote under Amendment 4, a voter-approved 2018 ballot measure meant to restore voting rights for 1.4 million former felons. The stakes transcended Florida and criminal justice reform—a botched state voter purge of purported former felons played what one federal civil rights commissioner called an “outcome determinative” role in the 2000 U.S. presidential election.

Most of the applicants who were arrested were approved by the Florida Department of Elections, which sent their voter registration cards ahead of the 2020 elections. All were charged with third-degree felony voter fraud, a crime punishable by as many as five years behind bars and up to a $5,000 fine.

“The arrests are a grotesque abuse of power by Gov. DeSantis,” ACLU of Florida continued. “Although the governor and Legislature claimed that they passed S.B. 7066 in 2019 to ‘clarify’ Voting Restoration Amendment 4, in reality, the law created an unworkable pay-to-vote system that is intentionally difficult and complex to navigate.”

Bear in mind that in the United States, being arrested and charged with a felony can have devastating affects on your life. Even if you don’t miss work because the cops took you away, many places will still fire you for having been arrested. If you have a conviction on your record, your rights are already limited in most of the country, whether or not you have a conviction on your record. I say that because while a judge has thrown out the case, the disruption to these people’s lives is still very real, as is the message it sends. It doesn’t matter if you think you’re allowed to vote – you might get arrested for doing it anyway.

This will not end here. Remember – the only limit on what they will do, is what they think they can get away with, and they will never stop pushing that boundary. This is also not something that can be solved solely by voting. I really, really wish it was, but when you have a fascist party openly working to subvert democracy (Remember when the GOP candidate successfully sued to stop a recount?), it’s hard to come to any other conclusion. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s time to grab your muskets and rise up, but it does mean that you should be considering what it would look like to participate in organized resistance that goes beyond protesting authorities who’ve already shown they’re happy to attack and maim protesters and journalists. The momentum of our political and economic system is pushing us towards fascism, and the Democratic Party as it currently exists is neither willing nor able to actually change that. The leadership of the party all benefit from the system as it is, and many of them have done so for decades. Voting is still important, in my view. It can get small improvements, like Biden’s recent pardon for federal cannabis convictions, and while that’s not nearly enough, it’s still going to make a few thousand people’s lives a bit easier going forward.

But that’s not enough to change the momentum. The reality is that democracy requires more work than most people have been putting into it. That’s also largely because of systemic problems. Most people’s childhood education doesn’t include stuff about community organizing, how to run a union, or how to form an underground resistance against an authoritarian regime. Once we’re in the work force, a lot of people barely have time to get enough sleep, let alone do more work that doesn’t even come with a paycheck. And yet, somehow, we have to find a way to do more, or at least to do differently. We have to rediscover how to build, sustain, and wield collective power, and we have to figure out what it would look like to have actual self-governance in a modern society.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

 

Coverage of cops needs to change.

I am not a journalist. I write about news, but I’m pretty much always a secondary or tertiary source. All of that is to say that I’m not an expert in this field, so maybe I’m missing something obvious when I ask:  Why would so-called “news” organizations ever report police statements as fact?

The recent ubiquity of cameras has revealed something that was always there – police do not make our communities safer. They do not serve us. They serve themselves, and they serve the ruling class. In fact, through civil asset forfeiture, they play an increasingly large role in preventing class mobility – stealing from those who have little enough to begin with, apparently just because they can. If the United States was actually a free and just society, governed by and for the people, civil asset forfeiture would never have been made legal in the first place. If we had the kind of democratic power our leaders pretend we do, then I have to believe these laws would have been changed after John Oliver shined a big spotlight on them in 2014. Apparently the only state that’s actually made a meaningful change is apparently New Mexico.

Between 2000 and 2020, police stole at least $68 BILLION dollars from innocent people in the United States. Again, under the law, you do not have to be convicted of anything for the police to just take your property, and you have to hire an attorney on your own dime if you want to get it back. Might be hard to do if they’ve just stolen all your money, or your car, or your home.

More than that, cops lie constantly, and at this point it’s been so widely reported that I cannot believe anyone in the news industry is unaware. By the time we saw the cavalcade of lies from the Uvalde PD, nobody who had been paying even a little attention was surprised by their craven dishonesty.

When the subject of police violence comes up, I sometimes hear people say that even though cops do kill around three people per day. that’s not that many out of the hundreds of thousands of interactions every day. Even ignoring the less direct harm done by police theft and police dishonesty, the focus on killings often leads to us overlooking the non-lethal violence that police inflict on the communities that pay them:

>Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that since 2015, more than 400,000 people have been treated in emergency rooms because of a violent interaction with police or security guards. But there’s almost no nationwide data on the nature or circumstances of their injuries. Many of the country’s roughly 18,000 law enforcement agencies don’t tally or make public the number of people who need medical care after officers break their arms, bruise their faces, or shock them with Tasers.
Researchers point out that only a tiny portion of arrests involve force. But when police do use force, more than half of the incidents ended with a suspect or civilian getting hurt, according to a 2020 analysis. It’s unclear how serious the harm is. “We need better data on injury severity,” said Matthew Hickman, a professor at Seattle University and one of the study’s authors.
Most experts agree that injuries at the hands of cops remain underreported.

And, of course, that doesn’t even start talking about the prevalence of white supremacy in law enforcement.

I don’t think any of this is new to my readers at this point, or if it is maybe you’re new around here? Maybe I need to write about this more often. Obviously, I don’t think that the corporations who own most “news” coverage in the United States serve the public interest any more than the cops do. If you want more of a breakdown of the problems of crime reporting in the US, you can go here. The point of this post was to say that I think the tendency towards passive reporting, and police-friendly reporting continues to help cops get away with a level of abuse and criminality so extreme that I’ve had people deny its reality to my face “because they would have heard about it”.

They should have heard about it, but for all our media love sensationalism, they love protecting the rich and powerful far, far more. If they actually saw themselves as serving the interests of the public, this is what their reporting would look like (content warning for extreme grief):

Some More News: Mental Health and Mass Shootings

I always find it odd how resonant my head seems to be when it’s loaded up with snot. I’m grateful that this continues to manifest as a head cold, and I hope it stays that way. I don’t know if I have brain fog, but I’m certainly glad I decided not to try to do any real writing today.

Here’s Cody’s Showdy talking about mental health and mass shootings (and how the “mental health” line is a bigoted dodge that hurts everyone, especially those of us struggling with mental health problems. I also do not believe for a second that any of these powerful people – as ignorant and incurious as I think they are – actually think that “mental health” is the driver of mass shootings. They’re lying for the same reason they always lie – to prevent any kind of systemic change.

 

Why don’t we have “good” cops? Ask the ones we do have…

I remember seeing an article going around, back in June, about the funeral of a police officer who’d been “accidentally killed during a training exercise”. I had other things on my mind at the time so I didn’t look into it much, but I remember assuming that he was deliberately killed by other officers for either investigating a crime one of them committed, or for reporting misconduct. I honestly didn’t expect to hear about it again any time soon, but just today I saw the same funeral picture, this time with a Jezebel headline supporting my initial suspicion:

LAPD Officer Killed in Training ‘Accident’ Was Investigating Gang Rape by 4 Other Officers

The lawyer of a Los Angeles police officer killed in what the LAPD called a training accident back in May said the officer, Houston Tipping, had been investigating an alleged gang rape perpetrated by four LAPD officers in 2021 when he was killed. Tipping’s lawyer, Bradley Gage, claimed on Monday that one of the four officers who allegedly participated in the gang rape was present when Tipping was killed.

There was a time in my life, long ago, when some of this would have surprised me. Hell, there was a time not too long ago that I still believed that some, or even most cops were “good”. I’ve learned a bit more since then – enough to realize that I had been taken by the propaganda that fills the culture of the United States like some kind of cursed fog. According to the cops, Tipping died when he was trying to demonstrate a grappling move by some sort of ledge, and both officers fell off. The attorney representing Tipping’s interests here has a different perspective:

At a July news conference, Gage showed reporters MRI scans revealing that Tipping had staples in his head due to the injuries he sustained leading up to his death. Gage also cited sworn declarations from a nurse and a paramedic and alleged that Tipping had suffered spinal cord injuries, a collapsed lung, broken ribs, and liver damage consistent with being fatally beaten. “When you look at all these horrific injuries, the truth is something went seriously wrong here,” Gage said. “I cannot fathom anything other than a severe beating.”

In June, Gage first filed a damages claim against the LAPD on behalf of Tipping’s mother, Shirley Huffman, alleging that he had been beaten to death as part of a training exercise to “simulate a mob.” According to the claim filed by Gage, Tipping died after being repeatedly hit in the head, causing bleeding and multiple fatal neck fractures.

At this point, it’s more reasonable to assume any police statement is more likely to be a lie than the truth. They lie far more often than they attack people, and they attack people all the time. I don’t know what sort of person Tipping was, but given that he was a cop, he probably wasn’t great. That said, it was good that he was investigating the crime committed by his colleagues. People with power over others have a tendency to use that power to get away with sexual harassment, assault, and rape. Few people have more unaccountable power in the United States than the police, so it should not surprise you that they commit sex crimes all the time.

And Tipping’s fate shows what can happen to anyone who tries to hold them accountable. As with all the other police atrocities we’ve been seeing, it’s worth remembering that this stuff is not new. Non-white communities in particular have been sounding the alarm on the horrors of policing for decades, and have been largely ignored. All that has changed is that now they’re being caught on camera more often, so now we can see them lying.

I don’t know what will come of this story. Ideally, the people responsible would be put on trial for murder or manslaughter, and would be blacklisted from police or guard work in the future. It may be that because they got caught killing a fellow cop – you know, an actual person – they’ll actually face prison time. It seems more likely to me that they’ll either get a slap on the wrist for getting caught, or maybe they’ll just be fired. As ever, I’d love to be proven wrong, but LA is notorious for the viciousness and corruption of its law enforcement:

The allegations against the LAPD suggesting officers may have killed Tipping because of his investigation come amid years of whistleblowing and reports about “shadow-gangs” within the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. These gangs allegedly comprise a sort of shadow government within local law enforcement to cover up officers’ crimes. As of July, at roughly the same time Gage and the LAPD were disputing the circumstances that led to Tipping’s death, LA County Sheriff Alex Villanueva’s former chief of staff publicly admitted he’d once belonged to the alleged “Grim Reaper” deputy gang within the county sheriff’s department.
In August 2020, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors paid a $5.5 million settlement to a young woman who said a LA County Sheriff’s Department had raped her in 2017 when she was 15. The detective in question had faced two prior allegations of sexual misconduct that included committing a lewd act with a child and unlawful sexual intercourse. The Los Angeles Times recently reported on the LAPD’s history of systematically declining to discipline officers for sex crimes and then concealing these crimes from the public.

This is why I no longer believe reform can work. Better training is a waste of everyone’s time, because new cops are told to ignore that training the second they tart actually working, and because old cops will just ignore any training that doesn’t rank their ego above the life of every other human they interact with. Abolition isn’t something that will happen overnight, or in isolation from the rest of society, but until it does happen, this will continue. From what I can tell, we cannot expect other outcomes from creating a class of unaccountable people with power over life and death. Hell, even giving them far less power to kill doesn’t remove this dynamic, as the UK has shown. Replacing our current police with “better people” will not change the fundamental purpose served by the institution. We need first responders, but we do not need cops. Trying to reform them is useless, and continuing to have them destroys countless lives on an ongoing basis.

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Nord Stream gas leak underscores the need to end all fossil fuel use

From what I can tell, there are still rather a lot of people clinging to the notion that we’ll be able to keep the fossil fuel industry by just capturing all the carbon that’s emitted, and storing it. That line of thinking is useful in two ways – first and most importantly, it justifies continued obsession with short-term profits. The second is that it’s a framing of the problem that doesn’t require systemic change. At it’s core, I think the popularity of this idea comes from its appeal to the group of insatiable ghouls who would rather see humanity go extinct than lose their ill-gotten fossil fuel empires. It’s the bedtime story they tell themselves to quell those rare pangs of conscience, and to give their sycophants an excuse to maintain their blind loyalty.

The reality is that we must end the extraction and use of fossil fuels, and we must do it as quickly as we can.

Even if the day-to-day operations of fossil fuel corporations didn’t do massive environmental damage, and leak unforgivable amounts of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, the fact remains that the infrastructure is both prone to failure (because the corporations are too greedy to spend on improvements), and it’s also vulnerable to attacks. We do not currently know for sure whether the Nord Stream pipelines burst due to accident, negligence, or a deliberate attack, but no matter what the cause turns out to be, we are all being hurt by this:

Scientists fear methane erupting from the burst Nord Stream pipelines into the Baltic Sea could be one of the worst natural gas leaks ever and pose significant climate risks.

Neither of the two breached Nord Stream pipelines, which run between Russia and Germany, was operational, but both contained natural gas. This mostly consists of methane – a greenhouse gas that is the biggest cause of climate heating after carbon dioxide.

The extent of the leaks is still unclear but rough estimates by scientists, based on the volume of gas reportedly in one of the pipelines, vary between 100,000 and 350,000 tonnes of methane.

Jasmin Cooper, a research associate at Imperial College London’s department of chemical engineering, said a “lot of uncertainty” surrounded the leak.

“We know there are three explosions but we don’t know if there are three holes in the sides of the pipe or how big the breaks are,” said Cooper. “It’s difficult to know how much is reaching the surface. But it is potentially hundreds of thousands of tonnes of methane: quite a big volume being pumped into the atmosphere.”

Nord Stream 2, which was intended to increase the flow of gas from Russia to Germany, reportedly contained 300m cubic metres of gas when Berlin halted the certification process shortly before Russia invaded Ukraine.

That volume alone would translate to 200,000 tonnes of methane, Cooper said. If it all escaped, it would exceed the 100,000 tonnes of methane vented by the Aliso Canyon blowout, the biggest gas leak in US history, which happened in California in 2015. Aliso had the warming equivalent of half a million cars.

The Aliso Canyon gas leak was the first time I can remember that the public was able to actually see greenhouse gas emissions in a major way, thanks to this infrared footage:

I don’t know if anyone had their minds changed by that incident and the coverage of it, but if so it clearly wasn’t enough. I’ve said in the past that one of my concerns with nuclear power is the danger posed by war and by terrorism. I still think we should be using nuclear power, but I think that security and the dangers of a rapidly changing climate are both valid concerns if we’re going to massively increase our use of that technology. Fossil fuels have all of the same problems, except that they are already driving us towards extinction at a rate few believed possible even a couple decades ago.

This leak, to use an overly-appropriate simile, is like pouring gasoline on a flame.

I believe the warming of our climate has already gained enough momentum that it would keep warming for centuries even if we cut off all fossil fuel emissions tomorrow. I believe we can influence that, and in time possibly even reverse it, but it’s important to understand that we are already rolling down that hill. Our current emissions mainly serve to accelerate us further out of control.

And this? Well, I suppose time will tell how severe of a problem it is, but we did not need this right now. We really didn’t. Things were going badly enough already.

Prof Grant Allen, an expert in Earth and environmental science at Manchester University, said it was unlikely that natural processes, which convert small amounts of methane into carbon dioxide, would be able to absorb much of the leak.

Allen said: “This is a colossal amount of gas, in really large bubbles. If you have small sources of gas, nature will help out by digesting the gas. In the Deepwater Horizon spill, there was a lot of attenuation of methane by bacteria.

“My scientific experience is telling me that – with a big blow-up like this – methane will not have time to be attenuated by nature. So a significant proportion will be vented as methane gas.”

Unlike an oil spill, gas will not have as polluting an effect on the marine environment, Allen said. “But in terms of greenhouse gases, it’s a reckless and unnecessary emission to the atmosphere.”

Germany’s environment agency said there were no containment mechanisms on the pipeline, so the entire contents were likely to escape.

The Danish Energy Agency said on Wednesday that the pipelines contained 778m cubic metres of natural gas in total – the equivalent of 32% of Danish annual CO2 emissions.

We’re not going to see a global spike in warming that’s clearly due to this leak. It’s a lot, but it’s not that much. That’s the good news. That said, this would not have happened if sundry global “leaders” were not continuing to build new fossil fuel infrastructure as though change is neither wanted, nor needed. I suppose for them, it’s not. They can just leave when things get rough. It will be interesting to see what changes are attributable to this leak – it wouldn’t shock me if there was measurable local warming associated with the methane plume and prevailing winds. This is just speculation but it’ll take time for that much gas to disperse around the world, which means it should be in higher concentrations in some areas for a while.

The real problem is that I can say with complete confidence that this will not be the last massive natural gas leak. There will be more. If greed and lust for power continue to fuel war around the world, then whether or not this pipeline was attacked, others definitely will be, wherever warring nations depend on this energy source. More than that, changing weather conditions will also lead to pipeline ruptures, and the day to day operations of the natural gas industry are already criminally destructive to the climate. Even if all emissions were captured at the smokestack and tailpipe, the gas leaked daily, and the gas leaked from incidents like this will continue adding speed to our “downhill” tumble into global warming hell. At this stage, the mere existence of the fossil fuel industry is a global security risk.

Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that we’ll see the needed change any time soon. That means that we keep looking for ways to build collective power, and we keep preparing to help our communities through disasters when they hit. There’s a lot of grim news out there, so just remember that it’s not over till it’s over. Till then, we fight.

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