Earth 4 Degrees Hotter

I am finding this article by Robert Hunziker to be terrifying reading. Much of the life on this planet is going to be wiped out as a result of our specie's ignorance, delusion and stupidity. We are enslaved by a system of oligarchy and corruption and insanity and it doesn't look like we're going to be able to free ourselves from it to avoid this cataclysm.

According to the scientific forum 4 Degrees Hotter: “Less than a billion people will survive.” Expect, on average, more than a million human global warming deaths every week. As such, mass graveyards stacked with bodies would become a new normal.
Prominent climate scientists were quoted in the 4 Degrees Hotter article:
According to Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, one of Europe’s most eminent climate scientists, director of the Potsdam Institute: “At 4C Earth’s … carrying capacity estimates are below 1 billion people.”
Echoing that opinion, professor Kevin Anderson of the prestigious Tyndall Centre for Climate Change stated: “Only about 10% of the planet’s population would survive at 4C.”
A global average of 4C means land temperatures would be 5.5C-6C hotter, especially inland from coasts. The tropics would be too hot for people to live and most of the temperate regions would be desertified.
As a result, half of the planet would be uninhabitable. Populations would be driven towards the poles. Over 136 port cities each with populations of one-half to one million would require sea walls or translocation of nearly one-half billion people.
In Europe, new deserts would spread to Italy, Spain, Greece, and Turkey as the Sahara figuratively leaps across the Straits of Gibraltar. In Switzerland, summer would be as hot as Baghdad today. Europe’s population would be forced into a “Great Trek North” in order to survive.
Even as recently as this century, the European heat wave of 2003 killed 35,000, but it was only a sampler of what too much heat does to the human body. (Source: The 2003 European Heatwave Caused 35,000 Deaths, New Scientist, October 10, 2003)
At the time, and according to the New Scientist, in 2003: “The EPI says it is confident that the August heat wave has broken all records for heat-related deaths and says the world must cut the carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to global warming.”
But, today, that’s a bad joke with CO2 in 2003 at 378 ppm. Today it’s 410. Therefore, “must cut the carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to global warming” has been a total bust!

Read the whole thing and figure out what you can actually do to stop it. Even if it means forgoing eating meat every damned day and renouncing your alleged birthright to fly in airplanes.

Latest Books

So a quick word about the latest books I'm reading.

What the Hell is Wrong With Doug Ford?

I've said it before but I'll say it again; For a financially secure, suburban family with both parents in the house, the Ford children sure turned out to be a bunch of human wrecks. I sincerely believe it must have been an abusive household. We know that Rob Ford's own marriage had its explosions. And we know that everyone pretended things were fine. I'm just making these painful speculations because it's obvious that Doug Ford is one twisted human being.

What sorts of people try to profit off of health care? What sorts of people want to gouge the sick and outright exclude the poor from life-saving medical care? What sorts of people hike the prices of pharmaceuticals needed by tens of thousands of people for the soul reason of profit maximization? We call these people "greedy psychopaths."

And what do we call the politicians who serve these greedy psychopaths? Craven, boot-licking asswipe psychopaths. Like all the Repugnicans and coporate Democrats who think to themselves: "Sure it'd be nice if my constituents could get health care without going bankrupt. It'd be better for the majority of my fellow US-Americans if we had systems like they have in Canada or Europe. But if we did go that way, a few very wealthy people who pay my bills and promise myself and my family lovely things for my services, will be discomfited. So I guess that hundreds of thousands of my fellow citizens will continue to be gouged, bankrupted, and die."

It's an open question whether politics attracts people who are that much more debased than the average person, or whether very average people get debased by the processes they're inserted into. (It's probably a combination. Sick people becoming further debased by a sick system.)

Here in Canada, the Liberals under Paul Martin did a lot of the heavy-lifting to privatize our national health system. With a lot of help from "conservative" provincial governments. In so doing they engaged in a lot of the usual Liberal self-delusion about destroying things in order to save them and outright self-deception about how they were actually "building a country where everyone had a fair shot and fairness and justice and aren't we all as awesome as it's humanly possible to be?"

It's really been the Conservatives; first under Preston Manning and then under stephen harper, who dedicated themselves outright to the destruction of public health care in Canada. And though they do this with the usual ideologically-based twaddle about the "efficiencies" of the private sector and "choice" and other garbage, they're still quite well aware of the fact that the policies they're pushing are going to bring the nightmare of profiteering and gouging and denial of care and death that plays out south of the border.

These people are mentally diseased. But I'm sure they come to their state of affliction by numerous ways. Abusive households; sexually molested, religious insanity, abandonment and other traumas. Plus plain-old stupidity. Not a lot going on upstairs. Too moronic to grasp the extent of their debasement. Zero empathy.

Which brings me back to Doug Ford. He's brazen in his corruption and in his service to oligarchic scum. But the thing is, he seems to be genuinely mystified when people don't like him. He's rich. White. Male. He's a pretty big guy. He probably got to have his way a lot in high school. He's not very academically inclined so he dropped-out of college and went to work in the family business. There his achievements have been middling. But he's "the boss." He dominated his younger brother. Rob was genuinely trying to help individual constituents while holding himself together during the day to get to his next drunken stupor. When Doug became a councilor he used his position more for personal enrichment than Rob did. But as a councilor, Doug Ford found himself as an equal amidst people who didn't have to kiss his ass. And he didn't like it. He didn't like not being able to fire people who disagreed with him. He didn't like his behaviour being held up to scrutiny and accountability.

And now he's premier of Ontario. He actually forces his MPPs to give him standing ovations or they'll be punished. And he's probably convinced himself that their enthusiasm is genuine. Because he's fucked in the head. He's a real piece of shit-work. He's fucking-over Ontario on numerous levels for reasons of his stupid ideology and because of his overall corruption. But he still wants people to like him.

What sort of person would kill someone while driving drunk and then go that person's hospital room with the family and friends of the victim standing beside the death bed, and try to tell them the victim should have been more careful and ask everybody there to be his friend? A truly sick, fucked-up, monumentally stupid person. Like Doug Ford.

Vote For Whatever Party You Like

I mean, first of all, it's not going to matter anyway. Big Oil owns the Liberals and the Conservatives. And, I found out the other day, that one of the NDP's genius managers (the unelected "professionals" who have produced failure after failure) makes some extra cash on the side as a lobbyist for Big Oil as well. Who knows what corporate scum from Big Oil has been talking to the Green Party about whatever?

The main contest (as always) will be between the lying pretty-boy Justin Trudeau, and the creepy Christo-fascist Andrew Scheer. What a dismal state of affairs! Neither side will do anything about the crisis of global warming. We're a few years away from Armageddon and we expect to lower our carbon output by sometime around the year 2555. But, as I said, none of the other parties can be expected to do much different.

But, for gawd's sake; Don't listen to the hypocritical screechings of Trudeau-groupies about the dangers of vote-splitting and how that might give the Conservatives a majority. I say again, I will always say, that if a Conservative majority is such a horrible thought, then abolishing our First-Past-The-Post electoral system should have been job one. But this fear-mongering and voter-shaming that the Libs practice is part of their DNA.  They simply can't help themselves. But I'll never vote Liberal again. I might never vote again.

The methane farts that will erupt as the permafrost CONTINUES to melt will doom us all regardless of what party you hold your nose to vote for.

Artist's depiction of the surface of the planet Venus. I wonder if life first formed on Venus and developed into a technological civilization that started the feedback loops that produced the nightmare world that exists today.

No Referendum on Electoral Reform!

Our first-past-the-post electoral system sucks. It only works properly with a two-party system. It routinely gives massive power to the most dangerously deluded, repulsive party of shit-heads and greed-monsters. It nullifies the votes of at least a quarter of the electorate. It has to go.

But people keep talking about putting the question to the people. But around about 40% of the population will oppose change because they're either die-hard Liberals or die-hard Conservatives who like things the way they are. They are not thinking of the national good but of their own partisan interest.

Another ten to twenty percent won't understand the question. These are the people who, if you stopped them on the street, wouldn't be able to name the prime minister or find Canada on a map.

The fact of the matter is that proportional representation will more effectively reflect the mood of the country, which is what Parliament is all about. It will not take anyone's vote away. It will give a vote (FINALLY!) to those whose votes have been wasted under FPTP.

The Mueller Hearings: Russiagate's Last Fart?

So it turned out that people weren't turned-on by the Mueller Report. Probably because a lot of US-Americans simply don't care and because Mueller couldn't find any evidence of collusion. As a matter of fact, Mueller found that the charges were baseless. Carter Page wasn't a Russian agent. He was a non-entity. Paul Manafort wasn't trading vital election information with the Russians. He was sharing polling data (much of publicly available) to a Ukrainian State Department asset. The Internet Research Agency really is just a troll farm and its spending on Facebuck ads during the 2016 election amounted to $50,000 (with some of those ads being anti-Trump). The Steele Dossier was based on hearsay from foreign sources. Manafort didn't visit Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

All of it, the whole fucking things, was crap. From start-to-finish. So of course, people worrying about their healthcare bills, their jobs, climate change, etc., etc., really can't be expected to care about such piffle.

But the Democratic Party establishment and the Military-Industrial Complex are too invested in "Russiagate" to give up easily. Both of them need to build up Russia as an enemy of the USA in order to justify spending on the military and the Democratic Party itself needs to direct conversation about Hillary Clinton's loss to Trump to anything else besides the widespread unpopularity of neoliberalism. And, sadly, a lot of people (generally the types who would vote enthusiastically for the Democrats or the Liberal Party of Canada) have bought-in to this ridiculousness.

And now the narrative is that Trump obstructed the Mueller Investigation and THAT is why Mueller couldn't find evidence of collusion. But that's absolute nonsense. Here is a list of the 10 instances where Mueller says Trump's behaviour could be characterized as "obstruction" and NONE OF THEM have anything to do with blocking Mueller from investigating things.

Apparently the Democrats in Congress wanted Mueller to testify and Mueller didn't want to. But the Democrats insisted and got their public Mueller testimony. And it was a disaster. Now, Robert Mueller is 74 years old. It's possible he's going senile. It's also possible that acting like a tired, doddering old man makes it easier to refuse to answer questions or feign ignorance on matters of substance. It's also possible that Mueller is well aware that he's part of a cynical political game of distraction and scapegoating and he has little enthusiasm for a live public performance.

Either way, he did not breath life into the Report. And so now, liberal pundits and every other "Russiagate" pusher are saying: "Mueller's job wasn't to ENTERTAIN you! He was talking about IMPORTANT FACTS and if you'd rather be staring at porn or monster trucks then you're the reason this country has turned to shit!" Except that Mueller didn't really provide any facts. He refused to answer 198 of the questions he was asked and often told his questioners to read the Report (which he appeared to have a hazy grasp of himself).

Perhaps with this pathetic little squeaking fart, the whole "Russiagate" obsession is well and truly over. Pelosi isn't going to impeach Trump over "obstruction" or anything else. This whole farce was a waste of time and with this dismal pair of hearings it might well and truly be dead.

rite here/rite now: harper on Immigration

This is part of a series wherein I review stephen jerk-off harper's stupid book: Right Here, Right Now: Politics and Leadership in the Age of Disruption. As stated elsewhere, a friend of mine bought the book and didn't finish it and gave it to me. [Here's my first mentioning of it. Here's part I & part II.]

In my last post I didn't even finish summarizing the introduction. And I guess that I won't except to say that at some point harper says that he finds Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders far more of a threat to civilization than he does Donald Trump or Nigel Farage. Which just goes to show you how big a shithead harper is.

Obviously, harper continued to say stupid things between his introduction and chapter 5, but I'm going to focus on chapter 5 today. "Walls and Doors." Which is about immigration. he begins by bragging:

I feel considerable satisfaction about the immigration agenda that my government pursued. We had, in fact, the largest per capita immigration program in the world -- over a quarter-million entrants per year, close to 1 per cent of the Canadian population. This is not just a number. It represents individuals and families who came to Canada to make better lives for themselves and their children. In the overwhelming number of cases, they contributed to the economic needs of our country and brought dynamism to their communities.

he continues by stating that his "approach" was widely supported by Canadians, "including among New Canadians." I found this confusing. Shouldn't it go without saying that "New Canadians" would support the immigration process that brought them here? It appears though that harper just got confused. he'd started writing about immigration but finished by talking about his whole approach to government: "The Conservative Party of Canada is one of the world's few centre-right parties to consistently win a substantial share of the immigrant vote. More on that later."

Now, gawd nose that my mind has wandered as I've typed these silly blog posts. But harper was writing one of his only books. To establish himself as a thinker. If you can't focus on one thought for the length of a single sentence ... ! Anyhooo, harper's book came out in 2018. he was probably working on it in 2017. This is all before the latest hullaballo about immigration and "illegal immigration" and the Islamic Plot to Impose Sharia Law on All of Us. But there has been plenty of that crapola for well over a decade now. But it's gotten more interesting now with Maxine Bernier's "National Socialist Party of Canada" and the attention on Donald Jerk-Off Trump's child-killing concentration camps at the USA's southern border.

harper admits to having screwed the pooch with the administration of the Temporary Foreign Workers Program. (I wrote about the fall-out here.) Using a variety of tactics, harper attempts to exonerate himself and blame everyone else for what was actually a typical example of his values and his policies. First he mentions that it was the previous Liberal government that had expanded the TFWP from only covering skilled workers to include unskilled workers. Then he says that he had his concerns about it from the outset, stating that he preferred workers who could aspire to citizenship. But, he says, he was very busy and took the advice of those who told him that Labour Market Opinions showed a need for TFW's in all the areas that his government was rubber-stamping approval for hundreds of thousands of workers. (WAY MORE than the Liberals had done.)

Supposedly, then Minister of Employment and Social Development, Jason Kenney was also too busy??? Or wasn't it his fucking job to be keeping an eye on such a major issue? harper blames Canadian businesses (and foreign-owned businesses) for lying about their needs. he then makes no observations about such obviously toxic behaviour. he says that his government started to investigate the issue after the outcry of workers across the country losing jobs or losing the chance to apply for jobs because of the program. Which is bullshit since the Labour Movement had launched several court challenges long before harper and Kenney were forced to announce "reforms" to the program.

In the rest of the chapter it appears that harper is trying to angle the Canadian conservative movement to take a stand against "excessive" immigration. He quotes a Politico article: "Yes, immigration hurts American workers" that argues "Wage trends over the past half-century suggest that a 10 per cent increase in the number of workers with a particular set of skills probably lowers the wage of that group by at least 3 per cent."

In all honesty, I'm not prepared to declare whether immigration is long-term good for workers or long-term bad. There are studies that point one way and other studies that point another way.

But what I do know now is that harper's treatment of this issue is shallow and probably cynical and corrupt. He's focusing on immigration as the source of workers' stagnant or falling wages rather than any of the myriad number of other policies that he continues to support. And he's doing this because it's better to have ordinary shlubs screaming about powerless immigrants rather than about the deliberate suppression of trade unions, because the first approach is called "divide and conquer" and the latter actually strengthens the working class and weakens the capitalist class.

harper spends the rest of the chapter going on and on about how US workers are right to be concerned about immigration and how Trump is getting their support for finally doing something about it. Traditional Republicans, harper says, had been wedded to a dogmatic view that all immigration is a net gain for everyone, whereas "liberals" (like the Democratic Party) simply rejected the complaints of ordinary US-Americans as "bigotry" because that's just how liberals roll.

A few things: How does harper argue that Canada had the highest per capita rate of immigration in the world and that this has produced no backlash [he's wrong; see the racist "Yellow Vest Canada" movement, the openly racist party of simpleton Maxine Bernier, and the rise of white supremacists all across Canada] but that the richest country in the world (the USA) is riven with dissension over this issue? It can't be because Canada is taking in skilled-workers that are in short supply here in Canada whereas the USA is taking in unskilled workers who drive down the wages of service-sector workers/warehouse and factory workers etc. Because Canada doesn't recognize the foreign credentials of skilled immigrants. They all end up driving taxis or "ubers" or working in factories and restaurants.

And, a lot of skilled, educated Canadians and US-Americans are incensed at the importation of skilled temps from India and elsewhere working in computer programming and other areas.

Also, harper makes no effort to find out the sources of "illegal" immigration to the United States (which to racist, right-wing fuckwads includes people applying for refugee status, even though simply not wanting your family to starve to death is as good a reason as any). harper (the coward) says nothing about the coup in Honduras (and the government of which his asshole government was the first to recognize) has created a crisis of landlessness, unemployment, crime and murder. (Remember this is the same stephen harper who thought it was a good idea to select as many Christian Syrian refugees as he could who were fleeing war and devastation ... caused primarily by the USA and Saudi Arabia ...  and leaving Syrian Muslims to their fates.) The sickening abuses currently going on at the USA's southern border is the manifestation of the dullard harper's mewling criticisms of immigration.

And, again, make no mistake about it: harper is attacking immigration because he has no intention of ever deviating from the real causes of worker immiseration in Canada and the rest of the G7 countries. He will continue to advocate for the shredding of social supports; "free trade" deals that export jobs; the suppression of trade unions [the statistics about the deleterious effects of this will never enter into a book by stephen jism-brain harper], and tax-cuts for the wealthy that lower public revenues, increase debts and "justify" austerity while failing to produce the promised "investment" and growth, decade-after-decade.

I'd call harper a "monster" except he's such a gutless fuck that if you shouted "Boo!" at him, he'd squeal and shriek and shit his pants. This was a vile chapter in a stupid book by a contemptible human being.