I’ll have a post up on the Gulf Stream/AMOC news tomorrow, but I had other things to do today, and I’m too fried for a real post. Instead, you get the good folks at Some More News to explain how billionaire philanthropy is a scam.
There’s a scene in the 1981 film Time Bandits (spoiler warning), in which Kevin the landscaping angels who kidnapped him find themselves in a flat, barren landscape, with mist in the air, and the bones of strange creatures strewn about. They’re following a divine map, but it’s leading them so far into the desert that they might never find their way out. It’s a fair concern, given that time God “guided” the Israelites on a 40-year version of an 11-day trek, but just when the group is close to giving up, they hit a wall. An invisible barrier.
Randall shatters it with a skull, and they continue on their quest into the lair of Evil, but what if the barrier hadn’t broken? What if they’d come all that way, braving ogres and giants, shipwrecks and cannonfire, only to die in that desert, and become just a few more bones littering the ground outside the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness?
When I hear Republicans (and some Democrats) demand that we build a wall along the southern border, this desert full of bones always comes to mind. At first, it felt too “extreme” to say, but there has never been a question that every barrier erected along that border means more people dead. It has also become increasingly clear that Border Patrol and the people howling for a closed border absolutely do want to fill that desert with bones. They want to kill anyone trying to cross that border from the south who doesn’t go through a checkpoint. They don’t care that US law states that all humans have a right to enter the United States, by any means, to request asylum. Those who do so have a right to have their request considered, before any action is taken to deport them. When they talk about “The Law”, what they mean is “what we think ought to be the law”, and they feel fully justified in “enforcing” that, regardless of the actual legality, or the harm done. They look at some of the most desperate and powerless people in the world, and they want them to die.
They are sadistic, murderous extremists, and I no longer feel any hesitation in labeling them as such.
Honestly, I haven’t felt much hesitation about that for a while now. Desantis committed human trafficking for political gain, and conservatives across the US cheered him on, but now Gregg Abbot has taken things to another level, by actively trying to kill and maim anyone trying to cross using razor wire barriers and traps in and around the Rio Grande. Content warning for descriptions of horrifying violence, and discussion of hate speech going forward.
The trooper, who works as a medic, sent the email to a sergeant on July 3 detailing some of the things he witnessed while on patrol in Eagle Pass — where Gov. Greg Abbott recently ordered the deployment of a floating barrier in the Rio Grande to deter migrant crossings.
“I believe we a have stepped over a line into the in humane. We need to operate it correctly in the eyes of God,” the trooper wrote in the email, which DPS provided to The Texas Tribune. “We need to recognize that these are people who are made in the image of God and need to be treated as such.”
The trooper said in the email that he was out on patrol around 10 p.m. June 25 when he and other troopers came across a group of about 120 people, including small children and nursing babies, who were “exhausted, hungry and tired” along a fence line on the U.S. side.
“We called the shift officer in command, and we were given orders to push the people back into the water to go to Mexico. We decided that this was not the correct thing to do. With the very real potential of exhausted people drowning. We made contact with command again and expressed our concerns and we were given the order to tell them to go to Mexico.”
The trooper wrote in the email that five days later, a 4-year-old girl who attempted to cross the razor wire “was pressed back by Texas Guard soldiers due to the orders given to them.” The temperature “was well over 100 degrees” and the girl passed out, the email said, adding that she had received medical treatment.
That same day, a man rescued his child who got stuck on a barrel in the water covered with razor wire, according to the trooper’s email. During the rescue, the man got a “significant” cut on his left leg, the trooper wrote. A 15-year-old boy also broke his leg trying to walk around the wire in the river and his father had to carry him across to the U.S. side, the trooper wrote.
Later that night, troopers found a 19-year-old woman stuck in the razor wire having a miscarriage, the trooper’s email said.
“Stuck in razor wire”
If that phrase doesn’t give you a reflexive chill, take a moment to really think about what it means.
And think about what it means that someone would see razor wire, and try to cross it anyway. We hear a lot about how dangerous the journey north can be, and when you see people willing to risk shredding their bodies like that, it’s hard not to conclude that they must be fleeing something genuinely awful; so awful that no amount of deterrence will dissuade them. It’s very clear that the people who want a closed border don’t actually care whether someone has a legitimate asylum request. They neither know nor care about the history or conditions of the countries from which people are fleeing, and if we’re honest, they don’t even see these people as human.
In addition to the buoy barrier, it appears that there are barrels wrapped in razor wire, presumably to tempt anyone crossing the river to use the barrels as floats, only to be cut up or – in the case of the child mentioned above, stuck on the blades of the wire. It also seems that there’s razor wire just in the water, where nobody crossing would be able to see it. This is, as said in this interview, torture. It’s also attempted murder, because in case anyone needed to hear this, slashing someone with a blade while they’re trying to cross a river dramatically increases their chances of drowning, not to mention the danger from the injury itself.
The Biden administration has not been great on the border issue. They didn’t stop separating children from their families, and they’re continuing to push for unreasonable – and unconstitutional – restrictions at the border. That said, this stuff with the razor wire was too much for them, and the DOJ has sued Texas for failing to remove the barriers as directed:
The DOJ suit, filed in the U.S. District Court in the Western District of Texas, seeks an injunction to block the state from placing more of the wrecking ball-sized, razor wire-topped buoys, which have already reportedly injured several people. The complaint accuses Texas and Abbott of violating the Rivers and Harbors Appropriation Act by erecting the barrier in a U.S. waterway without permission.
“This floating barrier poses threats to navigation and public safety and presents humanitarian concerns,” Associate U.S. Attorney General Vanita Gupta said in a statement. “Additionally, the presence of the floating barrier has prompted diplomatic protests by Mexico and risks damaging U.S. foreign policy.”
The lawsuit came on the same day that Abbott defiantly refused a DOJ request to dismantle the 1,000-foot barrier, which was installed along with netting and razor wire in and along the river that Mexicans call the Río Bravo near Eagle Pass in Maverick County.
“Texas will fully utilize its constitutional authority to deal with the crisis you have caused,” Abbott wrote in a letter to U.S. President Joe Biden in response to the DOJ’s request. “Texas will see you in court, Mr. President.”
In a weekend CNN appearance, U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) called Abbott’s anti-migrant efforts “barbaric” and “extreme cruelty.”
“For him, this isn’t about border security—it’s about using taxpayer money to feed red meat to right-wing extremists,” Castro said of Abbott on Twitter.
It is also, I think, not just about immigration. This is how they want to respond to global warming. They know that global warming is already causing migration, just like they’ve always known that their efforts to close the border were killing people. Their solution to climate change is to maintain US power, and to use that power to force poor countries to keep supporting the rich ones, and to murder anyone who steps out of line. For that plan, climate change is actually a benefit, because it will make it that much harder for poorer nations to stand on their own, and to try to improve their conditions. At the same time, it will make it harder for people to survive the journey to the US and the crossing. They absolutely want that desert full of bones – they’d string bodies up along the wall as a warning, if they could – but deaths that happen before reaching the border make them happy too.
There were a few articles that went around, during Trump’s first (and hopefully only) term as President, about how folks close to him were big fans of a book called The Camp of the Saints. This book, beloved of Stephens Bannon and Miller is a revolting work of propaganda from a French white supremacist who died in 2020 (good riddance), and it tells the story of a fleet of refugee boats sailing from India to France. The basic overview is that the Indian refugees are described throughout the book in disgusting and dehumanizing terms, as a liberal French society welcomes their approach, and the conservative “heroes” recommend that the boats be sunk at sea (sound familiar?) to save France from the zombie-like horde.
I do not recommend you read the book, but I do recommend you check out this overview of it by Youtuber José. I’m putting emphasis on this book right now, because I think it is extremely relevant to the current international fascist movement. Fascists seem to be driven by an obsession with humiliation and disgust. They constantly think and talk about cuckoldry, and the defeat of the “West”, and when they talk about groups of people they hate, they always find ways to invoke disgust. My first encounter with it was a website I found, back in highschool dedicated to hating Matthew Shepard, a gay college student who was tortured to death in 1998. It was filled with graphic descriptions of what the website’s creator apparently thought gay people did, and all of them, including body fluids and excrement, could have come straight from the pages of The Camp of the Saints. Likewise, fascists love describing their targets as diseased – another thing immigrants apparently share with LGBTQIA people.
There are many groups under attack right now, but all of them are facing the same threat, and it is a very real threat. Fascists are actively coming for trans people and asylum seekers, just as the Nazis did in the early days. Defending those groups should be enough motivation for any decent person, but even if it’s not, they never stop there, because they always need people to blame and punish for their society’s problems.
I think it’s likely that the courts will rule against Abbot and his death traps, but they will keep hurting and killing people in the meantime. More than that, this will not be the last such attempt. If you take anything away from this let it be that, as long as fascists have any power, they will use that power for these ends. What’s happening at the border is shocking, but it’s not actually very far from what’s considered acceptable in US political discourse. Plenty of Democrats support closing the border. Plenty of Democrats support US meddling in South and Central America, and want to continue doing it. Part of the reason fascists have power in the US, is because the Democrats are a center-right party within a government that has spent decades supporting and aiding fascist groups all over the world, in the name of opposing left-wing movements. This is why I don’t have much faith in the Democratic Party’s ability to fend off rising fascism, and why I think it’s so important for us to build organized, collective power that’s not centered around elections or beholden to political parties. There is ample evidence that even if the Democrats are in power, they won’t do what’s needed without relentless pressure from the left. We are fighting fascism, with all of the horror and death that brings, and that means being clear about both the danger, and what tools and allies we do or do not have in that fight.
If you found this post valuable, please share it around. If you like the work I do, and want me to do more of it, consider giving me a couple dollars over on Patreon, to help me make ends meet. This stuff is unpleasant to read and to write about, so also make sure you’re taking care of yourself.
My understanding of the mammals that lived when the (non-avian) dinosaurs were still around, was that they were generally little rat-like critters that lived generally little rat-like lives, as omnivorous scavengers and opportunists, that also served as prey. Apparently, my education on dinosaur-mammal relations has been lacking, because apparently there were mammals that ate dinosaurs. This seems to be something that paleontologists have known for a while, but they recently found a fossil in China’s “Dinosaur Pompeii” of a Cretaceous Psittacosaurus in the process of being killed and eaten by a Repenomamus:
“The two animals are locked in mortal combat, intimately intertwined, and it’s among the first evidence to show actual predatory behaviour by a mammal on a dinosaur,” explains Dr. Jordan Mallon, palaeobiologist with the Canadian Museum of Nature and co-author on the study published today in the journal Scientific Reports.
The fossil’s presence challenges the view that dinosaurs had few threats from their mammal contemporaries during the Cretaceous, when dinosaurs were the dominant animals. The rare fossil is now in the collections of the Weihai Ziguang Shi Yan School Museum in China’s Shandong Province.
The dinosaur in the well-preserved fossil is identified as a species of Psittacosaurus, which is about the size of a large dog. Plant-eating psittacosaurs are among the earliest known horned dinosaurs and lived in Asia during the Early Cretaceous, from around 125 to 105 million years ago.
The mammal in the fossil pair is a badger-like animal, called Repenomamus robustus. Although not large by dinosaur standards, it was among the largest mammals during the Cretaceous, at a time when mammals had not yet come to dominate the Earth.
Prior to this discovery, palaeontologists knew that Repenomamus preyed on dinosaurs including Psittacosaurus because of fossilized baby bones of the herbivore found in the mammal’s stomach.
“The co-existence of these two animals is not new, but what’s new to science through this amazing fossil is the predatory behaviour it shows,” says Mallon.
The image is an artist’s rendition of the moments before the two animals were killed by the volcanic mudslide. The Psittacosaurus is a stocky, beaked dinosaur, with longer hind legs than fore, and a thick tail. It’s braced on three legs, with one front limb raised to ward off the attacking mammal. The Repenomamus, a badger-like mammal appears to be leaping onto the unfortunate dinosaur, climbing up onto it like a weasel attacking a hare. The two animals are fighting against a stump, with trees in the background, and smoking volcanoes in the distance.
It’s nice to know that eating dinosaurs is about the oldest tradition we have, as mammals.
“That’s nice, but it’s nowhere near enough” is something of a mantra around here. We are still far, far behind where we need to be if we want global warming to be anything other than totally catastrophic, and I find it infuriating to see politicians who’ve been avoiding or opposing action longer than I’ve been alive, patting themselves on the back for ill-conceived quarter-measures. That’s why this message from Beau of the Fifth Column is not one I’m especially excited to hear. That said, I think he has a point.
Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was asked for the GOP solution to global warming, and he responded that they’d plant a trillion trees. Whether or not you think that’s an adequate plan, Beau makes the case that those who want climate action should vocally celebrate this, and avoid criticism. If they get positive feedback for this idea, and it catches on, then the conversation shifts from whether we should do anything at all, to which approach is best, with the need to act now being taken as a given.
That’s progress worth making. It should have been made decades ago, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is progress worth making.
I think it’s also worth noting that while the Democrats have started doing things about climate change, those things are still a kind of low-urgency economic “nudging” that might have been enough if it had started in the 90s. Nobody in the US government is taking the problem seriously, but if the GOP does start spending money on planting trees, the Dems will lose their coveted status of being not quite as bad as the Republicans, and that would increase pressure on them to do more.
And more than that, the GOP adopting their trillion tree plan would normalize the need for climate action in their base. McCarthy and his ilk have earned our scorn a hundred times over on this subject, but their power is real, and their obstruction is damaging. I think Beau makes a good tactical case for celebrating this.
I’m procrastinating on a couple of rather grim posts, and I was looking for something chill to write about on this cool and rainy day, when I came across something rather astonishing. I want to say that while I do think sharks are really cool, they’ve never really been a special interest of mine. That’s why it strikes me as odd that I am now writing a third post about sharks and temperature, none of which have had anything to do with global warming. It started with the recent eruption of the Sharkcano, and we learned about sharks that make their living in and around the natural hot tub of an active volcanic crater. Then, there was the discovery that hammerhead sharks hold their breath to dive, to avoid being chilled by the cold of deeper waters.
And now, we have the novel discovery that basking sharks are warm-blooded, after a fashion. Basking sharks are filter feeders, like whale sharks, megamouths, and baleen whales. They’re big – second only to the whale shark – fairly slow-moving, and they just cruise around, inhaling copepods. They are also, we now know, one of the vanishingly small minority of fish that internally regulate their own body temperature, and it was discovered right in my back yard!
The image is a color-adjusted photo of a basking shark, and frankly it looks like something from a cartoon. The shark is swimming from right to left, and its head is closer to the camera than its tail. This slightly exaggerates the size of its head, but not by much. It looks as though someone took a relatively ordinary shark, and gave it a giant muppet-like shark hat to wear. It has a large, bulbous nose, with two small eyes behind it. Below is a massive, gaping cavern of a mouth, that acts as a trawling net as the rest of the shark pushes the mouth around. This is less of a shark, and more of a mouth with a shark attached to it. It’s near the surface, so the sunlight is forming a pretty dappled pattern on its gray-brown skin. This image was uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Greenfire Productions.
Approximately 99.9% of fish and shark species are “cold-blooded”, meaning their body tissues generally match the temperature of the water they swim in – but researchers have just discovered the mighty basking shark is a one-in-a-thousand exception.
Instead, these sharks keep the core regions of their bodies warmer than the water like the most athletic swimmers in the sea such as great white sharks, mako sharks and tuna.
The latter examples are so-called “regional endotherms” and are all fast swimming, apex predators at the top of the food chain. Scientists have long reasoned that their ability to keep warm helped with this athletic predatory lifestyle, and that evolution had shaped their physiology to match their requirements.
However, an international team of researchers led by those from Trinity College Dublin, has now shown that gentle, plankton-feeding basking sharks are also regional endotherms despite having very different lifestyles to white sharks and tunas.
This surprising discovery has implications for conservation, as well as raising a plethora of ecological and evolutionary questions.
Haley Dolton, PhD Candidate in Trinity’s School of Natural Sciences, was lead author of the study that has just been published in international journal, Endangered Species Research. She said:
“The basking shark is a shining example of how little we know about shark species in general. That we still have lots to uncover about the second biggest fish in the world – such a huge, charismatic animal that most people would recognise it – just highlights the challenge facing researchers to gather what they can about species to aid in effective conservation strategies.”
Basking sharks gained legal protection in Irish waters just last year, with the species having undergone significant population declines throughout the NE Atlantic in the last century. But they still face many challenges in the future.
Haley Dolton added: “Regional endotherms are thought to use more energy, and possibly respond differently to ocean warming than other fish species. So lots more work will need to be done to work out how these new findings regarding an endangered species might change previous assumptions about their metabolism or potential distribution shifts during our climate crisis, which is something marine biologists are focusing on as our planet and its seas continue to warm.
“Hopefully this kind of research will continue the momentum needed to effectively protect these incredible animals in Irish waters and further afield.”
Well, ok, it is a little about global warming, because everything is during a catastrophic warming event, but the sharks were doing this before we started mucking up the atmosphere. It seems as though a lot of the heat is generated by their primary “drive shaft” – the cruising muscles that keep them constantly moving forward, but I hadn’t realized that the ability to heat your own body is reflected in how your heart’s put together:
To make the discovery, the research team (including scientists from University of Pretoria, Marine Biological Association, Queen’s University Belfast, Zoological Society of London, University of Southampton, and Manx Basking Shark Watch) first undertook dissections of dead basking sharks that washed up in Ireland and the UK.
They found that the sharks have cruise-swimming muscles located deep inside their bodies as seen in white sharks and tunas; in most fish this “red” muscle is instead found toward the outside of the animals.
They also discovered basking sharks have strong muscular hearts that probably help generate high blood pressures and flows. Most fish species have relatively “spongy” hearts, whereas basking shark hearts are more typical of the regional endotherm species.
Next, the team designed a new low-impact tagging method to record body temperature of free-swimming basking sharks off the coast of Co Cork, Ireland. Researchers were able get close enough to 8 m basking sharks to safely deploy the tags, which recorded muscle temperature just under the skin for up to 12 hours before they automatically detached from the animals and were collected by the researchers.
These tags revealed that basking shark muscles are consistently elevated above water temperatures, and to almost exactly the same extent as their regionally-endothermic predatory cousins.
Nicholas Payne, Assistant Professor in Trinity’s School of Natural Sciences, was senior author of the study. He said:
“These results cast an interesting new light on our perception of form versus function in fishes because until now we thought regional endothermy was only found in apex predatory species living at high positions in the marine food web.
“Now we have found a species that grazes on tiny plankton but also shares those rather uncommon regional endotherm features, so we might have to adjust our assumptions about the advantages of such physiological innovations for these animals.
“It’s a bit like suddenly finding that cows have wings.”
As Dolton said, it’s a good reminder of how little we know; not just about sharks, but about oceanic life in general. For all the problems in the world, I’m glad to live in a time when I get to learn new things like this.
Today was for other work, so I’m going to tap in Ze Frank to tell you about the most prestigious of pachyderms: The elephant!
I’ve been fortunate enough to see African elephants in the wild a few times (though I’m not sure I’ll do so again), and it was really neat! I also had the more somber experience of seeing a dead elephant, attended by an army of vultures, with what appeared to be mourners standing a little way off. They’re fascinating creatures, and I really hope that we can, somehow, help them avoid the extinction we’ve pushed them towards.
I like going to new places. Getting there is often so miserable and expensive that it’s not worth it, but I’m fond of my memories of stuff like climbing Kilimanjaro, or teaching juggling to kids in Cuba, or writing in a garret overlooking an Italian river valley. I’ve been fortunate to be able to do some traveling on other people’s dime, and I sincerely believe that travel should be available to everyone, regardless of wealth. That said, I do think that there are limits on that, because simply going to a place is not a neutral act. We need to accept that there are some places that, out of respect for the land and the people, we just can’t visit.
I did a research project and presentation in college, about the impacts of eco-tourism, and it quickly became clear that even when we’re not aware of the animals nearby, they’re generally aware of us, and we make them nervous. I’m too lazy to try to find the exact research I cited, but two studies stand out in my memory. The first was about the effects of traffic on ducks (equipped with monitors) nesting near a road. Basically, every time a car went by, the ducks heart rate elevated. The other study looked at penguins that nested near a boardwalk, where tourists were allowed to get near enough to see them, but not actually close. The penguins in direct line of sight of the boardwalk, even through gaps in bushes, also had an elevated heart rate when they could see humans.
That may not sound like a lot, a faster heartbeat means more calories burned, which means more food is needed, which could take away from things like egg incubation. Similar problems have been recorded for cheetahs dealing with tourists in Kenya’s Maasai Mara. Another problem I heard about, when I was in the Bahamas helping with iguana research, was tourists feeding the lizards stuff like bread, which messed up their digestion. Travel is great, but it’s pretty clear that there need to be limits on how many people can go to a given place, and on what they can do there.
Well, there ought to be limits if we want those places to be there for future generations, or if we respect the people who live at tourist destinations, because that’s the other part of all this. Tourists are not there to help the locals. They often do, by bringing in money, but that’s within the context of a system that has forced a number of poor colonies into a situation where tourism and ecological beauty are the only things that haven’t been extracted and removed for profit. As with so much else, we need to change how we do things, and stop pretending that we don’t affect the world as we move through it. We need to listen to locals, like the Native population of Hawaii, when they ask people to stop coming there. There’s lots of information on this sort of thing on the internet, of course, but since you’re already here, why don’t you check out this video from Some More News, which just so happens to be on this very topic!
I really want to go to Lechuguilla, but even just me going there could damage it in ways that might never be repaired. I’m satisfied with the pictures and video that exist, and grateful that I live in a time where that’s available to me.
As you are no doubt aware, the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists are both on strike over absurdly low pay, while studio executives rake in hundreds of millions of dollars. This is the first time in around 60 years that both writers and actors have been on strike together, and when you dig into the issue, it’s not hard to see why. Because streaming is new, existing labor agreements don’t apply to it, and under capitalism, everything is allowed for the rich by default, so the bosses get a nice little window where they’re allowed to just not pay their workers for the success of the products they generate, and suffer no consequences.
This trend of finding “clever” ways to underpay workers is just part of capitalism. I don’t know if paying workers is the expense that capitalists resent the most, but it’s clear that they very much want slaves, not paid professionals. Like all other capitalists, they want to pay as little as possible to the people who make them their millions.
Now, some of you may be thinking, “now hang on – that’s a little extreme, isn’t it? These people aren’t literally cartoon villains, so they’ve got feelings, right?” Well, they’re not cartoon villains, but they might as well be. I like to describe strikes as a form of siege, and I mean that quite literally. Lives are on the line, and if the peasant surrounding the castle don’t have enough supplies, they stand to lose everything. Hollywood executives also see it that way, and they’ve made clear that they intend to destroy lives before fairly paying the people who created their wealth:
According to a recent Deadline report, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) is in the strike for the long haul—with a plan to let the Writers Guild of America (WGA) “bleed out” before resuming negotiations. “The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses,” one source told the trade.
I’ve talked before about how capitalists and the government collude to use desperation as a very literal weapon against the working class, and this is yet another example of that. Hollywood has a long history of going out of its way to screw anyone who might cut into the only thing they actually care about, which is profit. While these obscenely wealthy executives and owners often plead poverty when opposing fair pay, it’s nice to have the reality that’s always been obvious, made explicit. The only limit on what they do, is what they think they can get away with or afford the penalty for. That includes holding out till people lose their homes, but it also includes pettier efforts to attack striking workers, like aggressively pruning trees, out of season, right where they would otherwise provide shade and comfort for striking workers:
The image shows a row of curbside trees along a street. The trees have almost no leaves at all, having had their entire crowns cut off. They are casting sparse shadows on the sidewalk (bottom left corner of the picture), and you can see a small garden pavilion shading a table, a couple chairs, and some boxes. Closer to the camera, in the bottom left corner, there are a couple coolers. On the bottom center and right, there are five traffic cones on the edges of a stack of what look like big steel or rubber plates. You can see a glass building in the background, along with some un-pruned trees. The sky is blue with wisps of white cloud.
The Los Angeles city controller’s office says it is investigating the trimming of tree branches on a stretch of roadway outside Universal Studios. The studio’s owners NBC Universal have denied making conditions for striking actors and writers more difficult in the intense heat.
In a series of posts on social media, LA city controller Kenneth Mejia said that the trees concerned are “LA City managed”, and that while public works agency StreetsLA are responsible for tree maintenance “a business can also obtain a permit to trim a tree”.
Strikers on picket outside Universal Studios’ Gate 8, on Barham Blvd, first reported the work on Monday, complaining that a line of ficus trees that had provided shade from what is forecast to this week become 33C (91F) heat had been severely cut back.
In a statement to Deadline, NBC Universal denied it had targeted strikers: “We understand that the safety tree trimming of the ficus trees we did on Barham Blvd has created unintended challenges for demonstrators, that was not our intention. In partnership with licensed arborists, we have pruned these trees annually at this time of year … We support the WGA and Sag’s right to demonstrate, and are working to provide some shade coverage.”
NBC Universal has also denied that it is refusing to create safe pathways for strikers around ongoing construction work on another part of its studio site, after the writers’ union WGA and actors’ union Sag-Aftra filed a complaint to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
The unions have complained that NBC Universal have not installed a temporary pedestrian lane in Lankershim Blvd, resulting in dangerous conditions for strikers attempting to maintain a protest there, and that “picketers [are forced] to patrol in busy streets with significant car traffic where two picketers have already been struck by a car”.
The reason you don’t usually prune in July, is that they spend the summer storing resources in their root system, before going dormant, at least above ground, in the winter. If you prune in the summer you are starving the trees, and possibly making them grow out of season to try to make up for the loss:
In general, avoid pruning landscape trees in mid- to late summer (July, August and September), unless it’s very light, because you can induce an off-season growth spurt, which can leave some species, such as ficus, vulnerable to freeze damage. Hot-weather pruning can also delay or shorten dormancy for deciduous trees and is especially damaging to eucalyptus and pines.
There’s no real horticultural reason for the pruning, so it seems as though it was done purely to make picketing workers suffer more during a heat wave. It did, however, ping some people’s legal radar, leading Universal Studios to be reported for a potential violation of California Tree Law, and it seems that LA is investigating:
Our Office is investigating the tree trimming that occurred outside Universal Studios where workers, writers, and actors are exercising their right to picket.
The trimmed trees are LA City managed street trees.
(Before and after photos below) pic.twitter.com/xczw0bTdh9
— LA City Controller Kenneth Mejia (@lacontroller) July 19, 2023
Trees can be trimmed by a StreetsLA Urban Forestry Division (UFD) crew as part of its trim cycle, or as part of a Council District’s trimming allotment.
A business can also obtain a permit to trim a tree. StreetsLA issues permits to businesses & conducts follow-up inspections.
— LA City Controller Kenneth Mejia (@lacontroller) July 19, 2023
Trees should be trimmed every 5 years. 🌳
Our 2019 StreetsLA audit uncovered resource constraints & lack of modern data mgmt tools that led to troubling delays in the City’s trim cycle. Trees were trimmed every 18 yrs & has since worsened to every 21 yrs.https://t.co/Hhadkkgltj
— LA City Controller Kenneth Mejia (@lacontroller) July 19, 2023
The city has said that they did not issue a permit for this pruning. I hope Universal gets slapped with a maximum penalty, but I doubt that will do much. I’ve had some trouble finding what potential penalties they might face, but from what I can tell, the biggest possible expense would be if they’re forced to replace the trees, plus a fine. It has oft been said that a fine just means that it’s legal if you’re rich enough, and there’s no question that these corporations are rich enough, even if they do have to replace the trees. No, the only way to hold them accountable, within the system as it exists, is for everyone to show solidarity for striking workers, and make it clear that if the industry refuses to pay its workers, the the industry will no longer have any workers to exploit.
This is a problem that will never actually go away, in a capitalist society, because such a society most empowers those whose only purpose in life is the ruthless exploitation, use, and abuse of other human beings. When someone creates a new and useful technology, capitalists look at it and see a new way to avoid paying workers. That is the core of what capitalism is, and why there will always be a need for strong unions within this economic system. Without that pressure from the bottom, which capitalists and the government work so hard to eliminate, the pathological greed of the owning class will always consume the entire system, resulting in monopolies, poverty, and devastating crashes.
In the end, it comes down to this: Strike actions are a compromise. They are the moderate option – a polite siege, if you will. The workers are simply withholding their labor. They are not literally laying siege to the homes of their overlords. They are not taking the wealth they are owed by force. The executives here are just fine taking from those poorer than themselves – it’s basically their only real job – but they seem to have forgotten that that can go both ways, it’s just that the folks at the bottom don’t have cops to do the actual violence for them. I’ll let Ron Pearlman explain:
The idea that “we don’t do that anymore”, or “that doesn’t happen anymore”, is one of the most destructive tropes in the popular discussion of history. In recent years, the rise of fascism and open white supremacy has disabused most people of the idea that those problems are “behind us”, but I sometimes worry that that’s only for those particular issues. This is an issue with almost everything that has been deemed part of a barbaric past that we’ve outgrown. I remember talking to someone around a decade ago, who agreed that labor unions were necessary back in the early 1900s, but they made their point, got us our rights, and now they exist to help themselves, rather than the workers, and we don’t need them anymore. I heard similar things about feminism as a movement, as well. At every step of the way, every movement for change is constantly denounced as unnecessary, but the second change is achieved, that movement is necessary in retrospect, but has now completed its task, and is now unnecessary. A truly depressing number of people seem to accept this reasoning on a truly depressing number of topics.
And so, when it comes to climate change, I worry. It’s hard for me to tell, sitting here inside my skull, whether it is now common knowledge that fossil fuel companies knew about climate change, and lied to prevent anything from being done. I think most people know about that. Honestly, I think most people who oppose climate action are aware of the reporting on oil company lies, they just don’t care. What worries me is that some people may think that all that corruption and lobbying and shady dealing stopped when it became public knowledge that they had been doing it.
You know, “Oh, you caught me. Shucks, well I guess I can’t do that anymore!” and then the movie ends, the good guys win, and we move on to the next problem.
I think most people who’re likely to read this blog (or any other blog on this network) are fully aware that all that bad stuff has continued unabated, or even escalated. I don’t know how representative that is of the general population, but I hope that I’m being too cynical when I worry about this. Regardless, that worry is why I want to highlight this recent reporting, which exposes how hundreds of lobbyists have been ostensibly working for universities and environmental groups, while on the fossil fuel payroll:
More than 1,500 lobbyists in the US are working on behalf of fossil-fuel companies while at the same time representing hundreds of liberal-run cities, universities, technology companies and environmental groups that say they are tackling the climate crisis, the Guardian can reveal.
Lobbyists for oil, gas and coal interests are also employed by a vast sweep of institutions, ranging from the city governments of Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia; tech giants such as Apple and Google; more than 150 universities; some of the country’s leading environmental groups – and even ski resorts seeing their snow melted by global heating.
The breadth of fossil-fuel lobbyists’ work for other clients is captured in a new database of their lobbying interests which was published online on Wednesday.
It shows the reach of state-level fossil-fuel lobbyists into almost every aspect of American life, spanning local governments, large corporations, cultural institutions such as museums and film festivals, and advocacy groups, grouping together clients with starkly contradictory aims.For instance, State Farm, the insurance company that announced in May it would halt new homeowner policies in California due to the “catastrophic” risk of wildfires worsened by the climate crisis, employs lobbyists that also advocate for fossil fuel interests to lawmakers in 18 states.
Meanwhile, Baltimore, which is suing big oil firms for their role in causing climate-related damages, has shared a lobbyist with ExxonMobil, one of the named defendants in the case. Syracuse University, a pioneer in the fossil fuel divestment movement, has a lobbyist with 14 separate oil and gas clients.
“It’s incredible that this has gone under the radar for so long, as these lobbyists help the fossil fuel industry wield extraordinary power,” said James Browning, a former Common Cause lobbyist who put together the database for a new venture called F Minus. “Many of these cities and counties face severe costs from climate change and yet elected officials are selling their residents out. It’s extraordinary.“The worst thing about hiring these lobbyists is that it legitimizes the fossil fuel industry,” Browning added. “They can cloak their radical agenda in respectability when their lobbyists also have clients in the arts, or city government, or with conservation groups. It normalizes something that is very dangerous.”
Precisely.
The fossil fuel industry, and anyone working to further their interests, should be treated as pariahs. They should be unwelcome everywhere they go. I’m not talking about coal miners, oil rig workers, and all those, I’m talking about the people working to prevent any kind of political or legal change that would give us a fighting chance at avoiding extinction.
I know corruption has become so normalized in the US that many people seem unable to see it, but this is beyond ridiculous. In addition to the fossil fuel lobbyists, any environmental group that hires these people knowingly should also be shunned, and made to understand exactly why it’s happening. I don’t care what side-stepping justifications the people involved offer for what they’re doing. This isn’t a game, and we don’t have time to indulge their bullshit. It’s well past time to pick a side.
I hadn’t intended to do two video posts in a row, but my post on sedimentary archeology is going to take more work than I thought, and I’ve recently added miserable stuff like job hunting back into my routine, so here we are. Fortunately, we’ve got a new video from the always-excellent Mexie, on why you should kill your lawn. This video doesn’t just go into why lawns are bad, but also into the history of how they became such a scourge upon North America.