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ancianita

ancianita's Journal
ancianita's Journal
December 31, 2020

Same Ish, Different Year

Cops. Bottom to top, the metaphor for enforcing all law, bottom to top.

Let us commit to building back better -- forcing the good enforcers to enforce the rest.
Bottom to top.

Until then, Happy New Year -- one love!







Chorus

Let's talk about Good Cops! (Where they at? Where they at?)
The triumph of evil is just a failure to act
by all these
Good Cops! ( Where they at? Where they at?)
If you're dirty and you need someone to cover your back
you need a
Good Cop! (Where they at? Where they at?)
You'll never see em snitch on someone wearing a badge
Cuz they're the
Good Cops! (So Listen Up, Listen Up)
If you're not locking up the bad cops, you ain't good enough

Yeah
Where all them good cops at?
People keep telling me bad apples make good cops look bad
But if 99% of cops are as good as they say
They should be able to lock a couple bad apples away

And yet they don't. Not because they can't but because they won't
Cuz their highest duty is protecting and serving their own
The first rule of policing means when in doubt they'll shoot
And if they make a mistake other cops will hide the truth

Even if they want to report a cop, they know that they can't.
You're as good as DEAD on the force if you get labeled a rat.
Plus the union rep will protect them from ever losing their job
And you wonder there's criminals enforcing the law?
just ask a...

Good Cop ... chorus

Police are trained to lie to make an arrest
But they're not required to help you when you make a request
They have no affirmative duty to either serve or protect
And they're immune from prosecution if they choose to neglect.

Look at the precedent set by Taliaferro, Douglas and Warren.
No one protected Jessica Gonzales's daughters
And when she went to court to hold someone accountable for it
SCOTUS told us that it was legal for the cops to ignore her.

That's cuz a cop is an enforcer and his job's to collect
Stealing money, kicking asses and cashing forfeiture checks
Writing ridiculous tickets and waging war on drugs
Our city budgets are funded by waging war on us.

Thanks to the...

Good cops ... chorus

Sometimes a cop'll say, "its not my fault
I'm just doing my job, I'm not the guy who writes the laws
I was following orders, honoring the oath I swore."
And I'm like Nuremberg. War Trial. Principle Four.

And some people seem to believe that if they don't do crime
That the cops will leave them alone and that they'll just be fine
"Go ahead and tread on the Constitution, we don't mind"
I can't believe that these people can even be so blind.

See what they don't understand, is that the problem at hand
Is systemic, it goes beyond a single woman or man
When good people let evil people keep on laying the plans
The banality of evil lies in obeying commands.

Just ask a...

Chorus
December 31, 2020

DISCUSSIONS ON CLIMATE CRISIS -- THE PROBLEM


previous posts
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1017628074
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100214775507


Startup sources on the problem

Non-Fiction
David Wallace-Wells. The Uninhabitable Earth (2019)


The Uninhabitable Earth, -- published two years after the UFNCCC -- convinced me that CC is much worse than we think; that humanity’s capacity is too small, its inertia too big, to save its only home. I stopped thinking that any planning or action would make any life and death sense unless humans could see positive outcomes that could give relief and hope and not just escape from existing disasters.


MORE ON THE PROBLEM

2. Our Energy


Top ten nations in CO2 emissions in millions of tons
(https://www.climatetrade.com/which-countries-are-the-worlds-biggest-carbon-polluters/) :

China -- 10,065+
United States -- 5,416
India — 2,654 .
Russia — 1,711
Japan — 1,162
Germany -- 759
Iran -- 720
South Korea -- 659
Saudi Arabia -- 621
Indonesia -- 615

https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10/100-fossil-fuel-companies-
investors-responsible-71-global-emissions-cdp-study-climate-change
https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/holding-major-fossil-fuel-companies-accountable

19 Big Fossil corporations out of 100 :
Saudi Aramco, Amin H. Al-Nasser, President & CEO, Yasir Al-Rumayyan,president
Chevron, Michael Wirth, chairman & CEO
Gazprom, Viktor Zubkov (Chairman), Alexey Miller (CEO)
Exxon-Mobil, Darren Woods (chairman & CEO)
National Iranian Oil Co. Bijan Namdar Zangeneh, chair Masoud Karbasian CEO
BP British Petroleum, Helge Lund, chairman, Bernard Looney CEO
Royal Dutch Shell, Charles O. Holliday (chair­person), Ben van Beurden (CEO)
Pemex, Octavio Romero Oropeza , CEO
Petroleos de Venezuela, Asdrubal Chavez, President
Petro China, Zhou Jiping (Chairman), Wang Dongjin, CEO
Peabody Energy, Glenn L. Kellow, President & CEO
ConocoPhillips, Ryan Lance, Chairman & CEO
AbuDhabi National OilCompan, Hashem Hashem, CEO
Kuwait Petroleum Corporation,
IraqNational Oil Company, President of Iraq
Total SA, Patrick Pouyanné, Chairman & CEO
Sonatrach, Algerian government
BHP Billiton, Ken MacKenzie (chair­person), Mike Henry (CEO
Petrobras, Eduardo Bacellar,Pres; Roberto Castello Branco CEO
(source KSR, Ministry For the Future (2020) and Wikipedia)

More names from an older map


Executive decisions for Big Oil’s actions will be made by about 500 people (boards,etc.)
— good people, patriotic politicians concerned for their beloved nations’ citizens;
hard-working corporate executives for shareholders; mostly men, family men, well educated, well meaning, pillars of their communities, givers to charity, wanting the best for their children.

These men work to promote and enable -- with TRILLIONS in yearly US subsidies
— humans to burn 40 gigatons (gigaton = a biliion tons) of fossil carbon per year.


Scientists have calculated that we can burn about 500 more gigatons of fossil carbon before we get to the average global temp of 2 degrees Celsius, after which dangerous cascading disasters will happen to Earth’s bioregions -- billions of crude sludge oil tonnage in oceans, tonnage of natural gas and CO2 in air -- and food production.

https://www.nasa.gov/press-releasse/nasa-noaa-analyses-reveal-2019-second-warmest-year-on-
record
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/202009

Already more sun energy stays in Earth systems than leaves it by 0.7 of a watt per square meter of Earth’s surface.
A wet-bulb temperature of 35 will kill humans.
Wet-bulb temps of 34 have already been recorded since 1990, once in Chicago.
Climate danger is evident.

To be continued this Tuesday…
December 31, 2020

Ask every Senator what Section 230 is.

from "Section 230 Isn't A Subsidy; It's A Rule Of Civil Procedure"

https://twitter.com/brianschatz/status/1343388107052208128


For non-lawyers "rules of civil procedure" may sound arcane and technical, but the basic concept is simple. When people want to sue other people, these are the rules that govern how those lawsuits can proceed so that they can proceed fairly, for everyone. They speak to such things as who can sue whom, where someone can be sued, and, if a lawsuit is filed, whether and how it can go forward. They are the rules of the road for litigation, but they often serve as more than a general roadmap. In many cases they are the basis upon which courts may dispense with cases entirely. Lawsuits only sometimes end with rulings on the merits after both parties have fully presented their cases; just as often, if not more often, courts will evaluate whether the rules of civil procedure even allow a case to continue at all, and litigation frequently ends when courts decide that they don't.

Which is important because litigation is expensive, and the longer it goes on the more cost-prohibitive it becomes. And that's a huge problem, especially for defendants with good defenses, because even if those defenses should mean that they would eventually win the case, the crippling cost involved in staying in the litigation long enough for that defense to prevail might bankrupt them long before it ever could.

Such a result hardly seems fair, and we want our courts to be fair. They are supposed to be about administering justice, but there's nothing just about letting courts being used as tools to obliterate innocent defendants. One reason we have rules of civil procedure is to help lessen the danger that innocent defendants can be drained dry by unmeritorious litigation against them. And that is exactly what Section 230 is designed to do as well.

An important thing to remember is that most of what people complain about when they complain about Section 230 are things that the First Amendment allows to happen. The First Amendment is likely to insulate platforms from liability in their users' content, and it's also likely to insulate them from liability for their moderation decisions. Section 230 helps drive those points home explicitly for providers of "interactive computer services" (which, it should be noted, include far more than just "big tech" platforms; they also include much smaller and non-commercial ICS providers as well, and even individual people), but even if there were no Section 230 the First Amendment would still be there to do the job of protecting platforms in this way. At least in theory.

In practice, however, defendant platforms would first have to endure an onslaught of litigation and all its incumbent costs before the First Amendment could provide any useful benefit, which will likely be too little, too late for most if not all of them. The purpose of Section 230 is therefore to make sure those First Amendment rights can be real, and meaningful, and something that every sort of interactive computer service provider can be confident in exercising without having to fear being crushed by unconstitutional litigation if they do.

What people calling for any change to Section 230 need to realize is how these changes will do nothing but open the floodgates to this sort of crushing litigation against so much that the Constitution is otherwise supposed to protect. It is a flood that will inevitably chill platforms by effectively denying them the protection their First Amendment rights were supposed to afford, and in the process also chill all the expressive user activity they currently feel safe to enable.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20201229/12003745970/section-230-isnt-subsidy-rule-civil-procedure.shtml?fbclid=IwAR0bXwTVMIaJ5WM-0rf2GuRyH1jL98c3T-lRP_hGlxQfF0i_94cS8iSyM0Q

Removing 230 still makes McConnell a Trumpist.
Refusing $2,000 covid aid still makes McConnell a tool of the .01%.
May GA remove him in 6 days.
December 30, 2020

Governor Cuomo Briefing December 30 2020

Day 305

Cuomo start 16:10 The New Moynihan Train




The Actual Covid Briefing of this Afternoon




New Year love to the guv.




December 30, 2020

Speaker Pelosi Presser December 30 2020

Start 20:35




December 29, 2020

Climate Crisis -- The Problem pts. 1,2...; The Work pts. 1,2...; The Goal

I believe that DU is ahead of the nation’s curve on climate change knowledge, sharing, and activist engagement, for which, overall, there need be no “right” approach, but approaches that just work, and are widely shared.

The climate crisis has been on our minds, no matter how understandably unreal it might still feel. But from what I’ve seen, young people will not wait for elders to get it and get going.
If we feel we’ve lived through a tough 2020 — life & death hardships, grief, sorrow; public & leadership inertia, ignorance, cruelties — Joe knows that 2020 has just been the tip of the climate iceberg compared to what our grandchildren will live through if we don’t learn, imagine, take risks and do whatever is necessary right now.

This layperson’s aspiration:
That these climate discussions — The Problem, The Work, The Goal — encourage our startup sharing of
updated climate crisis information,
sources from the last 5 years,
discussion of world climate problems,
climate policies & decisionmakers,
climate global and national climate projects, operations, organizations & job opportunities,
climate sources limited to scientific, expert based planners, funders, orgs, ongoing projects, open source, non-paywall sites.

Shared sources (as up-to-date as possible), sourced ideas, any information are needed and welcome.
New and relevant thoughts and analyses of the above are needed and welcome.

Knowing climate language helps.…

Climate Glossary
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_climate_change

Climate Change Definition:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change

A global map of the The Problem
CO2 EMISSIONS PER CAPITA PER COUNTRY FROM 2017 (more each year than previous years)


Another mapped perspective on emissions


NOW, ON TO PARTS OF THE PROBLEM

1. Our Politics.

Politics Can and Should Be in Keeping With Global Activity in Service of the Biosphere and the Future.
The problem is that for most nations, including America, politics suffer inertia, not paying enough attention to either.

Political inertia can be lessened when…

Our politics assumes that the evidence we’ve seen proves that climate change is not a hoax;
that global climate change is irrefutable

https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climatechange-temperatures/evidence-for-man-made-global-warming-hits-gold-standard-scientists-idUSKCN1QE1ZU

Our politics is led by climate science, scientists, climate numbers only, mainstream expert sources only, and not by emotional media hype, not by he-said/she-said media distraction.

Our discourse assumes
— no more denial;
— no more conflicting polls of scientists,
— no more power games,
— no more vanity pretenses of concern,
— no more conflicting personal "what about my …” bases for argument;
— no more speculation;
— no more spectatorship;
— no more predictions without sourced data;

No more personal, organizational, national conflicts that slow momentum, add to inertia.
In sum, climate priority, positivity and imagination.

Yes, climate problems are vast, bottom to top.
All the more reason
— to stay informational and analytical;
— to talk more on-topic, be less emotional and personal experience (acceptable, but not derailing) when we consider possible topics (just examples) like…
— how humans, bottom to top, deal with change;
— how no functional human ever need be jobless again, or work again in the traditional sense;
— how climate change leadership commitment must be made a litmus test for elected office.

Continues Thursday…

December 28, 2020

Governor Cuomo Briefing December 28 2020

Day 303

New: the problem of attempted vaccine distribution fraud. 13:20, 33:09

December 27, 2020

Kim Stanley Robinson On Governments' Importance In Upfront Organizing For Climate

I'll be posting climate issues on Tuesdays and Thursdays, because we need to be constructively intelligent in defending the Biden administration when it returns good governance next year to the #1 national security problem of Climate. Start 2:45



Notes:

Climate change will force post-capitalism.

We want to avoid tipping points from which there will be no return — ocean rise from Antarctic melt, and the 6th Great Extinction, and 2.0 Centigrade average global temperature

At the current speed of burn of 500 gigatons of fossil fuel, we have until 2040 at which point the 1.5 - 2.0 C average global temperature will make life on Earth more dangerous
The quicker we slow that down, the longer we have to mitigate and eliminate CO2 that’s already ruining every ecosystem,
Add to that the 2,500 gigatons of coal, oil and natural gas still buried.

Buried fossil fuels are still on the books of corporations as “assets”
and already claimed by nation states as "natural resources.” worth 1.6 quadrillion US dollars
The neoliberal order will want to “do its fiduciary and political duty” and burn that fuel, and pocket a mere trillion for themselves.

Algorithmic Axiom #1 Prime Directive — More Is Better = the main corporate criteria for how quarterly profit and shareholder value are the measures of how well or ill we’re doing on the planet. It's brought us to a Big Turn in energy use, however.
— the president of the World Bank said “we need to put a price on carbon”
admitting that the pricing system of carbon is too low and the market system has failed, because the cost of carbon is greater than its pricing;
— the down press of polluting energy results in bankruptcy because
— the true cost — externalities that we now see -- are kicked toward future generations
— we are in an intergenerational ponzi scheme.

Predatory dumping on the future assumes that the future will be richer than the present which is WRONG.

Discounting the future is our greatest global error:
— low discounting values the future, and the future needs our help;
— high discounting of the future is what our economy now does, as if it doesn’t matter;
We are at The Turn of a political decision — which is economic — not a scientific, technical decision, which is:

IT IS WRONG TO BELIEVE THE FUTURE WILL PAY ITS WAY OUT OF OUR ENERGY MISTAKES TODAY.


Health, extinction, ocean acidification are things we cannot buy our way out of.

Inequality is 1% owning 42% of wealth — a global oligarchy that everyone sees,
5% of the comfortable, 95% of the precariat.

Privatizing risk and health goes on.
Consumption kills the poorest of the planet, deforestation and de-oxygenation result.

The system is killing people and the biosphere — not by accident, but by design.

THE NEW PATH:
SOLVING CLIMATE & ECOSYSTEMS CHANGES CAPITALISM AND EVERYTHING ELSE.


How to save the world:

— our human impact = population X appetite X technology

— stabilize population — give women their equal rights, education, etc., which results in population replacement to 1.8 children per woman, and stabilizes the environment;
— clean tech is improving; we must swap out from dirty fuel tech to a clean tech by paying ourselves for doing it; saying “it’s too expensive” to clean our energy is THE upfront saving of the future at a bargain;
— feeling fears is easier than feeling hopes;
— imagining a better future is harder than imagining the end of the world.

The Lever that changes the situation:
— the 'free hand’ market, with no liquidity controls on finance, sees itself as “efficient”;
but it is not resilient or robust. Why? Big 5 Banks in the US are leveraged out such that
they only hold 3 - 5% in assets (CIFI = “too big to fail” which assumes human harm);
when corporations are over-leveraged, they depend on people;
so bundled debt is how they save, but overextend, themselves;
thus proving that people are the ultimate asset AND can bring down the banking
system — ON PURPOSE.


— governments of nation states that can make money fungible
— people can force this, (yes, we can) — force strategic non-compliance as “free speech" forgiveness of debt, then
refuse to go down with the big fossil and banks,
— the answer is NOT to restructure debt,
— the answer is to NATIONALIZE banks — “the people will bail you out but now we own
you."
— at that point, the government takes over as a national credit union, and all profit goes into the treasury
— Thomas Piketty claims that human wealth will be horizontal and Keynesian
— which creates a government surplus and thus controls everything else.

In other words,
people would control government,
government would control finance,
finance would work for The People as the system is needed to work: free health care, education, college, 100% employment, private corps themselves would then have to pay a living wage

AI and tech will not take over the human future — that’s a bad dystopian story.

Post capitalism will still have capital and function according to what is good -- what is good for the land or the greatest good for the greatest number,
the necessities are socialized as public utilities, and
there can still be companies making a profit for those who want to pay “the true cost” of extra things.



"Shall not perish from this Earth” by Lincoln is a utopian science fiction we want to make real.


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Gender: Do not display
Hometown: New England, The South, Midwest
Home country: USA
Current location: Sarasota
Member since: Sat Mar 5, 2011, 12:32 PM
Number of posts: 36,019

About ancianita

Human. Being.
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