The Arizona Ruling — Religious fascists cower before the shit storm they have created.

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

April 10^th 2024

http://www.zeppscommentaries.online

The Guardian tried to cover Trump’s ever-shifting stance on abortion rights again today, and wound up trying to pretend this was a coherent response:

Asked if Arizona’s ruling went too far, Trump replied: “Yeah, they did. That will be straightened out. As you know, it’s all about state’s rights. It will be straightened out. I’m sure the governor and everybody else are going to bring it back into reason and that it will be taken care of, I think, very quickly.”

The Guardian managed to miss that the ruling that caused this week’s shitstorm was an exact example of what happens when the laws regarding abortion are left to “state’s rights.” Arizona’s supreme court absurdly upheld a law passed by the territorial legislature in 1864, back before Arizona was even a state, that outlawed all abortion other than to save the life of the mother. Other states are considering even disallowing that one life-saving restriction as part of their holy crusade.

But it gets worse. Trump has frequently brayed that he made the overturning of Roe vs. Wade possible. The Guardian failed to mention that.

The Guardian utterly ignored a video Trump made LESS THAN TWO DAYS EARLIER in which he said, “They [Democrats] support abortion up to and even beyond the ninth month. The concept of having an abortion in the later months, and even execution after birth. And that’s exactly what it is. The baby is born, the baby is executed after birth is unacceptable, and almost everyone agrees with that.”

That would be disgraceful coming from a drunken misogynistic wife-beater in a sleazy bar pissed on cheap whiskey. It would even be disgusting coming from an even lower life form, an evangelist drunk on Jesus. This is coming from a thieving, lying sewer rat of a man who wants to be President again.

How much do you have to hate women to even believe that they would cheerfully terminate their pregnancies in the ninth month? Or even the third month? As for women getting abortions “after the baby is born” that’s a lie on the level of “Jews drink the blood of Christian babies.” It’s a disgrace, and no person saying such a thing can lay any claim to decency. Trump certainly cannot. Trump is trash. This proves it.

It misrepresents what Roe vs. Wade stipulated. There’s a reason—and it’s not medical—why people speak of “trimesters” in pregnancies. No sudden change occurs at the end of 90 days, or 120 days. It’s just that Roe vs. Wade laid out restrictions states could impose on the fundamental right to an abortion: In the first trimester, governments could place no restrictions on women’s ability to choose to abort pregnancies other than imposing minimal medical safeguards, such as requiring abortions to be performed by licensed physicians [per Wikipedia, cited]. In the second trimester, increasing risks to the mother’s health gave states a compelling interest that allowed them to enact medical regulations on abortion procedures so long as they were reasonable and “narrowly tailored” to protecting mothers’ health [per Wikipedia, cited]. And finally, in the final trimester, “From the beginning of the third trimester on—the point at which a fetus became viable under the medical technology available in the early 1970s—the Court ruled that a state’s interest in protecting prenatal life became so compelling that it could legally prohibit all abortions except where necessary to protect the mother’s life or health [per Wikipedia, cited].

Do I even have to say that no state has ever allowed the killing of an infant under any circumstances? Women-hating drunks might believe it. Religiously insane zealots might believe it. And Donald J. Trump may believe it. But it is not true.

Even as many Republicans are suddenly realizing that they went too far in trying to appease the zealots and alienated a huge majority of voters, a lot of them who were fulsomely “pro-life” last year are suddenly “pro-choice” or “let the states decide.” The first is hypocritical. The second is disingenuous as well as hypocritical.

At the time Roe vs. Wade was delivered, only five states had it generally legal (and doctors were free to refuse for any or no reason). In 13 states it was legal in cases of risk to woman’s health, rape or incest, or likely damaged fetus. In 31 states it was legal in cases of risk to woman’s life. And in Pennsylvania it was illegal under all circumstances, a draconian and murderous stance that several states are now avidly pursuing.

A lot of Republicans are trying to have their cake and eat it too. They were “pro-life” before, but now they either want states like Arizona or Pennsylvania or Alabama to decide what rights, if any, you can have, or they have pretended to cave entirely and say Arizona went too far. Trump, of course, stands for both sides of that giant back-step.

Republicans are not to be trusted. Zealots are definitely not to be trusted. (Their own bible approves of abortion when infidelity is suspected). And Trump was never trustworthy to begin with.

The Economy is Great — Except for 90% of us, that is

The Economy is Great

Except for 90% of us, that is

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

December 4^th 2023

http://www.zeppscommentaries.online

One thing I hear fairly often—and I wager you do, too—is a plaint from liberal and/or Democratic pundits that goes something like this: “The economy is doing great. Unemployment is down, inflation is down, productivity is up, and the stock market is roaring. Why doesn’t Biden get credit for that?”

That’s all true as far as it goes. Part of it is that the media doesn’t much report good news because it’s boring. Having some idiot on Faux News winge that he paid $90 for a turkey is much more entertaining than noting that turkeys cost less than they have in five years. (We paid $23 for ours, and it was a damned good turkey). It’s easier to remember what some overpriced bird cost some overstuffed and self-important pundit than what people’s own turkeys cost in the checkout—or that such things as eggs, milk, and veggies had shown similar declines.

Part of it is a historical oddity in social psychology: societies as a whole become more discontented and restive as things begin to improve. We really are making our way back from the twin disasters of COVID and Trump. The dim light of early dawn is somehow more depressing than the depth of darkness a few hours earlier.

The main part of the answer is in the part of that quote, “productivity is up, and the stock market is roaring.” Both usually come at the expense of middle class people. They aren’t good news for the very people who are most sour on the economy.

The indicators cited really don’t speak to the welfare of the working class. Yes, there are more jobs. But by the standards of other developed nations, they remain shit jobs. Minimum wage remains $7.25 an hour in the most backward states. Most jobs don’t offer health insurance (and shouldn’t—that should be a public sector function). Many offer no vacation time. Maternity benefits remain crappy even as the GOP moves to outlaw abortion and birth control. There’s no job security; in most states an employee can be laid off without warning, and for no reason given. Then there’s the sleazy low-end outfits that call their victims “independent contractors” which eliminates otherwise legally required things such as overtime, minimum wage, or scheduled hours, and the shittiest ones even require their subjects to provide and/or pay for work related items, such as computers. Because regulation was pared down beginning with Reagan, the government does little to combat such abuses as wage theft, cheating employees on overtime, and job safety and health measures. The lowest states are fighting to bring back child labor, an absolute disgrace in what is purportedly the richest country on Earth. Who can love a system that enslaves children but where plutocrats whine loudly about having to pay to provide those children with food? Even in the Confederate south, most slaveowners had more decency than that, and man, is that one fucking low bar!

Even with full employment, 80% of full-time workers have less than $400 in their bank accounts in case of emergency. Most have none, and are skipping meals to pay rent, feed the kids, and pay $150 a month for TV so rich assholes can pontificate to them about how good they have it, riding on the backs of beleaguered billionaires.

Plutocrats spend billions on that propaganda, and on the legalized bribery of elected officials to push the notion that only they are deserving and that the poor are nothing but a burden. Faux News has spent billions and billions of dollars persuading us that single mothers on welfare are the problem and carefully don’t mention the thousand or so billionaires who have been dismantling the economic system and raping it to death.

The Koch brothers tried rebranding fascism as “Libertarian Party” and when that failed, simply started taking over the once-sane GOP and populating it with the same broken and twisted creatures and fought so hard against civil rights, worker rights, compassion or fairness, beginning with Donald Trump. Those crazy bastards that have paralyzed Congress didn’t come out of nowhere; they were homegrown by the fascistic plutocracy. Most of the mainstream media is owned by corporate entities that are part of this same cabal, and they lean heavily on their “journalistic” outlets to complain that the problems are liberalism and throwing money at social problems, and not Wall Street types dismantling, destroying, and packaging out once-useful companies. Look at what Musk has deliberately done to destroy Twitter, once a semi-respectable source of information. Everyone has tales to tell of good companies that provided decent jobs and good service that fell apart after being bought out by some semi-anonymous hedge fund entity.

Most people sense the system is deeply flawed and purposefully broken. And the very worst problems remain unaddressed.

This attack on the US has been going for decades, and featured six major prongs by the interests that wanted to create a power vacuum by destroying the peoples’ government:

Deregulation: lots of whines about the burden of regulation that somehow failed to create the richest and most powerful country on Earth. Now we have deregulation. Feeling particularly rich or powerful now? Ninety-nine percent of you will say no.

Tax Reform: AKA trickle down, or supply side. Top tax brackets fell from 90% to 20%. Working people made up a bit of the difference. But we’re still $23 trillion in the hole. It wasn’t school lunches for kids that caused that: it was billionaires cheating the country.

Tort Reform: essentially makes it impossible for regular people to sue major corporations.

State’s rights: take power from the federal government and give it to corrupt, petty, venal states like Mississippi or Louisiana. Gape in amazement as civil rights vanish along with worker rights and environmental protections.

Freedom of religion: Make pets out of gullible zealots and promise to let them inflict their idolatry on others in return for their votes. Notice that you aren’t free from religions you don’t believe in any more?

Combine liberalism and social justice with communism and other authoritarian regimes in the public mind. Spend billions on propaganda to promote this and all the other prongs.

It all leads to plutocratic authoritarianism.

A lot of people, including one of the main architects of this attack, David Koch, have looked at Donald Trump and his followers, and the vicious excesses of the so-called Christian Right, and realized that, in line with historical precedent, their movement has attracted a dark element of broken and twisted creatures who revel in the suffering of others and live only to serve their masters and share a few crumbs from the table. Scratch a strutting and bellicose MAGAt and find a cold concentration camp prison guard, or the block party commissar.

Fascist regimes, like theocratic regimes, begin as cruel and incompetent, and go downhill from there.

I’m not sure it can be reversed. But it must be if we are to avoid the fate of such regimes.

But even though Biden can’t wave a magic wand and fix all these things, he at least wants to. And you can bet your life (and you probably are) that Trump and his lot in the GOP will only make things worse.

You want a decent job that pays for a good home, security and decent medical care? Reject the GOP.

And yes, that includes people who cheered for that six pronged attack and expected a sane outcome. The dream is over. Time to wake up.

Breaking Logjams — A week of pleasant surprises

Bryan Zepp Jamieson
October 2nd, 2023
http://www.zeppscommentaries.online

A few weeks back, I posited that if just six Republicans could stand on principle and break with the party, the looming budget crisis could be averted. Given the grim lockstep cowardice the GOP had shown up until then, I figured six would be the best I could hope for, and that retribution from the rest would be so severe their own option would be to leave the party and become independents.
I’m happy to say I was wrong.
Six Republicans didn’t break ranks: a hundred and twenty six did. It may be quite a while before we learn the exact behind-the-scenes machinations that led to this (especially since the MAGAt crowd are still a clear and present danger to all who oppose them and want specific targets to punish) but a majority of House Republicans realized there is safety in numbers, and absolutely flattened the leverage the “Freedom Caucus” was holding over them, the House, and the country.
How pervasive was the defection? I was amazed to learn that my own congressman, a lunar-landing-denying dingbat from the heart of our infamous demented neighbor, Shasta County, was one of the defectors. That was not on my dance card. That wouldn’t have been on a Bernie Sanders masturbatory fantasy!
For those just getting back from a weekend recreation and are just now catching up on the news, the continuing resolution is for 45 days (until November 15th, meaning before the Thanksgiving break and with the pressure of the holiday season looming). It is, however, a “clean” resolution. No spending cuts, in particular none of the draconian cuts to child care, law enforcement, and the IRS that the demented Trumpenfascists of the MAGA crowd wanted. Funding for Ukraine was excluded, but both Houses vow to take it up separately, and since the measure will enjoy majority support in both Houses and in both parties, I doubt Zelenskii is losing any sleep over that.
With 126 defectors, even Kevin McCarthy felt brave. He was one of the defectors. I wonder if he had to resist the impulse to blow a raspberry at Matt Gaetz as he voted. Given the Republican level of decorum in the House, it wouldn’t have been out of place.
Gaetz is swearing he will move to kick McCarthy out of the Speakership, even though anyone with the simple ability to count to 218 realizes that putting someone he likes in as Speaker is mathematically impossible. In fact, he may not even be able to kick McCarthy out: there are rumors flying that he and the Democratic Party members are confabulating, discussing scenarios where a large chunk of Democrats may actually vote to defeat the motion to vacate and let McCarthy keep his job. Part of that, of course, will mean taking a more centrist position, but between the 126 Republicans who have clearly signaled that they have had enough of the vicious and destructive MAGAts, and a number of Democrats would would sooner have to deal with a sane opposition party, McCarthy might get to keep his job.
One especially tasty rumor making the rounds is that the quid pro quo for Democratic support might include votes to expel some or even all of the Freedom Caucus. This Trump Rump group includes some of the most unsavory and unpatriotic members of Congress, including Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, Jim Jordan, Andy Biggs, Scott Perry, and Paul Gosar. The best of the 45 or so members are merely repulsive. The worst are traitors. About a dozen of them asked for pardons from then-President Trump in the wake of the January 6th insurrection, a prima facie admission of guilt and more than adequate grounds for expulsion.
Expelling just a few of these people would, in the short term, break the back of the GOP, but by destroying the power of the MAGA caucus, also put them on the road to recovery. And yes, that’s a good thing: any democracy needs at least two opposing parties that are willing to negotiate with one another. It’s a fundamental element the fascists in the MAGA crowd overlooked in their lust for power.
If the Dems want to, they can get GOP support and start moving the budget negotiations forward. Or they can let them shoot themselves in the foot one more time before the next elections, and ride a populist wave to majorities in both Houses and the White House. The GOP have never won one of these extortionist showdowns, and in the last two, got clobbered. Seems the senile old man in the basement somehow outwits the entire Trump brain trust, every time.
This vote also shows that Trump’s power is rapidly crumbling. Last weeks’ court finding of massive fraud and the resultant suspension of his business license in New York state did extreme damage to his finances, and the expected avalanche of plea bargains in Georgia and Washington have begun. Trump is going down, and there’s nobody in the party to take his place. DeSantis? Gaetz? Taylor-Greene? Don’t make me laugh.
It’s a ray of hope. America may escape the worst crisis it has faced since the Civil War.
In other news, the death of California’s celebrated Senator, Dianne Feinstein (RIP, Di), put Governor Newsom in a difficult position. He had three estimable candidates to choose from, all of whom were planning to run for Senate next year. Barbara Lee, Adam Schiff, and Katie Porter. Further, he had vowed to put a black woman in the Senate In The Event Of. That would have been Lee, my own preference.
But Newsom surprised pretty near everyone and chose a different black woman, EMILY’s List President Laphonza Butler. Butler, a fundraising giant in the Democratic party and a labor leader, is a moderately-left Democrat who falls about half-way between Feinstein and Lee politically. She’s also LGBTQ, which Newsom probably considered as his repudiation of the hate-filled far right of the GOP.
Butler was named with no preconditions, which means she is free to run as the incumbent next year, or not. She’s a close ally of Kamala Harris, and is likely to boost Harris’ chances going forward.
The Senate remains fairly stable. It passed the CR by a 91-8 vote the other day, showing solidarity against the fascist right. This is a good thing.
As for the next few weeks in the House, well, pass the popcorn. It probably won’t be constructive, or polite, but it will be massively entertaining.

The Climate Crisis — It’s here.

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

July 17^th 2023

http://www.zeppscommentaries.online

We have a house in the mountain west that sits at 3,309 feet altitude. That’s right: exactly one kilometer. We moved here in 1993, and for the first 22 years, we never saw the thermometer climb above 100F. Not even in 2008, when the thermometer downtown that logs the official temps here registered 108 degrees, a record that still stands. That day it was 99 here, but for me, the writing was on the wall.

We finally did break 100 in 2015. It reached 102, which we considered insanely hot.

Since then, summer days over 100, if still not commonplace, aren’t that unusual. We had four such days last year, including one where it tied the 21^st century record of 104.

We’ve had three so far this year, with more in the offing by the end of the week. Day before yesterday, it reached 105.2, a temperature you expect in places like Redding, or Bakersfield.

The change in night time lows is even more dramatic, if less obvious. The July night in 1994 when Levy crashed into Jupiter, we saw a low of 64, the first, and until last year, only time it had failed to fall below 60. Those cool nights were what made the place habitable even as averages for July crept above the ninety degree mark over the decades.

But then last year, we had a night where it only got down to 69. We got a heat pump a few years earlier, and used to joke that some day we would have to try the A/C setting and see if it actually worked. It turns out it works really well, and at a surprisingly reasonable cost. During that heat wave last year, we ran the A/C about a half dozen times, and our bill only went up about $10 above what we normally see for July.

The writing is still on the wall, only there’s a lot more writing and the wall is in serious need of a repaint. I expect to see lows above 70 and highs above 110 in the next decade. And that’s if we’re lucky.

We’re feeling the effects of climate change more here than most people on the flats, because mountains, like the polar regions, are seeing exaggerated climate change since 1970.

And our current heat wave, record-setting as it is, is tiny compared to some of the record temperatures we’ve seen in recent years. China set a national record of 52.2C (126F) the other day. Iran broke their record, hitting 54. Other countries that had long-standing national heat records shattered this year alone include Laos, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. Canada hit 121F just two years ago, an event that led to the destruction of Lytton, British Columbia. It hit 104 in London. Yes, London, England. Even Antarctica got in on the act, hitting 67F in 2021. Regional, provincial and civil records set in the past 3 years are far too numerous to count. Looking down the list, any casual browser will be struck by the fact that the large majority of record heat extremes are from this century, even in places where reliable records go back 200 years or more.

It’s getting hotter. That’s no secret, of course, and at this point the only people who deny it are conspiracy theorists and oil company flacks, and of course, most of the Republican party.

But this year is different. What I’m seeing in my secluded little backwater town is manifesting world-wide and on a global scale. For six straight days, the average surface temperatures for the planet ran more than 1.5C (2.4F) above the baseline going back to 1970.

Climateanalyzer.org

Ocean surface temperature anomalies are even more eye-popping. While below the record set 10 days ago, ocean temperatures are still the hottest ever recorded, and the extra degree or so, which may seem small, represents an amount of stored energy that dwarfs that of the energy used by humans world wide over decades. If you consider the oceans as a kind of ‘heat battery’ these numbers are utterly terrifying. That heat has to go somewhere, and ‘back out into space’ isn’t one of the options:

Climateanalyzer.org

Sea surface temperatures of 99F were recorded in the Florida Keys, and in the Atlantic on the east coast of Florida, 97F was recorded. The Atlantic. Those are temperatures never seen outside of the Red Sea or the Persian Gulf, both shallow and nearly stagnant bodies of water in the hottest locale on Earth.

It’s going to have massive disruptive effects on both air and ocean currents, and will create even more chaos and variability in weather pretty much everywhere over the next few years.

That heat is going to stir things up, and by a lot. Weather has been a headline story all over the world already this year (in the 80s we averaged 14 billion-dollar weather catastrophes per year. Now, and adjusted for inflation, we’ve had 44 such events so far this year.

El Nino plays a role but it’s still just getting started. It isn’t expected to peak until November or December, and yes, it looks to be the biggest one since 1997.

So expect weather to be wild, and get even wilder. We’ve passed a benchmark, from ‘climate change’ to ‘climate crisis’ and it’s just getting started.

It’s not too late to save ourselves, but our own stupidity and negligence and greed have ensured that we—and the rest of life on Earth—will be paying a very high price, and that bill has now arrived.

PS: We’re having a nice cool afternoon in this strange hot world. At ten of four, it’s only 95. Why, it might not even break 100. Remember that as “the good old days.”

The Debt Ceiling — Republicans hate black males, but love blackmail

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

April 29^th 2023

http://www.zeppscommentaries.online

Imagine that you are the owner of a small business. Tax time is approaching, and you’ve spent much of the previous month conferring with your tax accountant agency, ensuring that they have all the proper documentation and a full assessment of all credits and liabilities. Your main preparer has told you will will owe a certain amount on your income, but that comes as no surprise. Just part of the cost of doing business.

But then, a week before the tax deadline, your preparer comes to you with an offer he thinks you can’t refuse. He’ll send in the documents and a check, but only if you fire 10% of your employees, raise prices for your customers, and buy lower quality raw materials for your product. And he wants you to hire only people who attend his church. Or he’ll withhold the tax documents, leaving you to face a load of penalties, a possible audit, and damage to your credit.

Under the law, that is extortion. It’s a felony. The accountant would face many years in prison for pulling such a stunt. He’s abusing your legal obligations for his own gain.

The Republicans in the House are pulling that type of stunt right now. It’s not the first time they’ve used a constitutionally dubious provision in the law to threaten to ruin the credit of the United States. They’ve been doing it, always during Democratic administrations, going back to when it was the brainstorm of the vicious and feckless Newt Gingrich during the Clinton administration. He was the first to hit on the idea of blackmail as official legislative policy. (He and the Republicans tried a similar stunt with the budget, and that blew up massively in their own faces when the country discovered that holding the budget hostage included shutting down Social Security checks, national parks, post offices and many other beloved government functions. Newt, beaten badly on that and facing personal scandal, backed down.

But the Republicans knew a good blackmail ploy when they saw it. Simply threaten to withhold mandated action and demand things that could never ever pass legislatively, such as cutting veterans’ benefits or food stamps or school funding, and leave the Democratic administration to take the blame for it since it would be his signature on a non-bill no member of Congress could be held responsible for.

In 2011, the Democrats called their bluff, and the early stages of a fiscal avalanche that is default began. It cost the country an estimated $2.4 trillion (yes, trillion, with a “tr” – 2,400 billion) and provoked a mild but long-lasting recession.

Republicans can’t govern. Even when they had a Speaker who wasn’t a beholden wimp, and a reasonable majority, they couldn’t get a budget passed, but had to punt the ball down the field, in the form of a “continuing resolution” which basically rubber-stamped the previous years’ budget onto the next one. Between the inflexibility and inflation, it amounted to a slow strangulation of the economy. But, knowing the majority of voters hated what they wanted to see done, they didn’t dare put it out there in black and white, but instead, simply tried to blackmail the country.

They’re at it again, and between the civil war that exists between the zealots and the banksters, and the tiny amount of votes they have in the House (5) they can’t even really say what it is they want. The poison-pill laden extension McCarthy managed to get through by just two votes took a meat-cleaver approach: The plan would cut a wide swath of government spending to last year’s levels, a decrease of about 9%. From that point, growth would be capped at 1% annually over the next 10 years. More of that slow strangulation Republicans so love, and nobody’s fingerprints on the pain. One of the few specifics was to cut the $80 billion or so left from funds to battle COVID, although the Administration has already earmarked that money, reallocating it to veterans’ health care and medical research. It would eliminate Biden’s $400 billion student debt relief, a program Republicans hate because it is popular and prevents the cost of education from making a life-long fiscal slave of the student. It cuts increases to the IRS because the IRS is inconvenient to plutocrats, who resent having to give 1% of their income to the country that wet-nursed them. It would repeal incentives for electric vehicles and sustainable energy because that might annoy the fossil-fuel companies that pay for those Republicans. And they would mandate work for people on Medicare or food stamps because employers would welcome would-be workers who are destitute, desperate, and with no options. It’s the capitalist dream, you know.

None of these poll well, but the Republicans don’t really care about cutting the deficit. (If they did, they would repeal the Trump tax cuts and the huge incentives paid to oil companies, and reduce funding for military allocations, but they won’t.) They just want to threaten the country to weaken Biden, and hope that whether he accepts the blackmail or he doesn’t that he, and not the Republicans, will be blamed for the ensuing fallout.

It’s tawdry, it’s cynical, and it’s a betrayal of the country. It’s the entire Republican package, rolled up into one sleazy political gambit that less than 1/100th of one percent of the country would benefit from.

Ask Biden to stand firm on his demand for a “clean” debt-ceiling raise. Allow no blackmail from these vicious sleazeballs.

SOTU 2023 — Biden—his time

I had been kind of ignoring the State of the Union address in recent years. They were pretty bland and formulaic under most presidents—yes, folks, the state of the union is strong and gawd bless the troops. And under Trump, as with most things under Trump, it was a grotesque travesty.

But I had a feeling I might want to watch this, and boy, am I glad I heeded that sense.

Biden staged a masterwork in challenging the GOP in the most conciliatory way possible. It was amazing to watch. He started out lavishing praise on the GOP for all the bipartisan legislation that got passed (some of which only had a handful of GOP votes and caused considerable discomfort amongst the Republicans, who really hate to be seen as cooperating with the Democrats in any way, shape or form.

Then he put the Republicans on the spot by making them sit on their hands while reciting facts that brought thunderous applause from Democrats and the vast majority of Americans watching: the twelve million new jobs, the lowest unemployment since 1969, the rise in working class pay, the explosion in domestic manufacturing jobs, the CHIPS act, the IRA, the COVID relief measures. Republicans had to show they oppose all those things.

Then he spoke about the deficit, which has been falling at record levels since he took office, and noted that a full quarter of the national debt had been racked up under “my predecessor.” While he hid it extremely well (I don’t want to play poker against Joe Biden) this last caused the MAGA caucus to lose their little minds and start screaming at him.

He didn’t try to shut them down, but then, why should he? HE wasn’t the one being embarrassed by them. Instead, he invited them to stop by the White House and he would give them the facts and figures.

He was able to goad the Coo-Coo Caucus a couple of more times, on abortion rights and gun control, and there were loud shouts of “order!” which is was interest to note came, not from Democrats (THEY weren’t embarrassed by these fools, either) but Republicans.

Biden, with surgical skill, went on to recite a number of issues where the majority of Republicans at least tacitly agree with him (debt ceiling, pay for school teachers, etc.) and and really worked the intraparty divisions that exist within the GOP. Biden put his thumb in the gap and twisted, mentioning securing the border and stopping fentanyl.

Watching Kevin McCarthy was a treat. Yes, I just said that. He isn’t a good poker player, and his growing discomfort over the antics of the MAGAts eventually turned into an open glare after the fifth or so outburst from the “Toilet Training is for Sissies” contingent.

So Biden managed the very neat trick of taking the role of “Together, we can make it work” and simultaneously opening the rift between the crazies and the rest of the country wider. And there was no duplicity involved, which is the amazing thing. He did it simply by saying what he had accomplished, what he wanted to accomplish, and why he wanted to do so, and watched as Voltaire’s prayer was answered. “I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it.” Biden defeated the zanies and zealots with the one weapon they cannot counter: sweet reason and even temperament.

It made for the most entertaining SOTU since the days of Clinton, and while the zanies aren’t going to shrivel up and blow away, Biden has done a tremendous job of defanging them by making the show their fangs in response to friendly overtures.

Listening to Huckabye now. She is a hero because her mom survived cancer, and Trump was the greatest leader in history, and Biden has surrendered to a Chinese balloon. She isn’t staging a great comeback. Trump was a great hero. OK, Huckster. Whatever. Not one word about policy or goals; just the usual pseudo-patriotic pablum mixed with the usual god-flogging. America is in danger and god hates us, waaaaugh!

So: all in all a satisfying evening.

One thing for sure: the people who caught the SOTU in order to hate-watch are going to find it a whole lot harder to dismiss Biden as senile or foolish. He’s neither, and he’s smarter than most of you.

Zealotry Aborted — Kansas shows America not ready for religious fascism

Zealotry Aborted

Kansas shows America not ready for religious fascism

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

August 5^th 2022

www.zeppscommentaries.online

The only thing about the Kansas vote to reaffirm the state Supreme Court upholding the right to abortion that surprised me was the amount it won by: 59-41. I figured it would pass, but I wasn’t expecting the blowout margin.

Poll after poll has shown that the usurpation of the Constitution by the zealots (Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Comey Barrett) on the federal Supreme Court is wildly unpopular, and free states are hustling to encode abortion rights if needed, and vowing to provide such rights to enslaved women in the zealot states. That’s why Kansas wasn’t a surprise so far as the result went. Abortion, and separation of church and state, cross partisan lines. It’s one thing to say that Kansas is one of the reddest states in the union; but not all Republicans march in lockstep with the preachers and demagogues that dominate that beleaguered party. And independents in particular will break ranks when it comes to maintaining rights and freedoms.

Kansas all but invented the term “prairie populism.” Often deeply religious, and conservative, but also strong-willed and independent. They may like and respect their Sunday preacher just fine, but they aren’t about to let him dictate how they should vote, or what rights the church can take away that the Constitution promises.

Kansas is one of the most heavily propagandized states in America, with all radio and much television devoted to reactionary Protestant broadcasting, or the endless lies and undermining of freedom that stems from hate radio. I figured that there were maybe 5% of the voters there brainwashed enough to cut off their own noses to “own the libs.” Well, it’s happened before. Look at the obviously incompetent, unfit, and inept trolls in Congress who got there despite having nothing—nothing at all—to offer other than snark and clownish defiance.

I’m happy to see that I was wrong, by about 7% of Kansas’ population. I figured abortion rights would win, but I was expecting a 52-48 margin. That it went the way it did is cause for considerable optimism.

One phenomenon that may have underlay the result was the open, gleeful, and acquisitive viciousness and cruelty that the zealots and the fascists of the GOP displayed. A few days after the Supreme Court decided to kick the rights of hundreds of millions of people under the nearest Bible, a nightmare scenario emerged, of a ten year old rape victim who had to travel to a neighboring state for an abortion. Any reasonable or rational people would look at that situation and consider making the new law less strident, more humane. There is no situation in which any government, no matter how god-burdened, should force a ten-year-old to give birth to her rapist’s baby.

The Washington Times is one of the shabbier exercises in propaganda journalism given birth by a different set of Zealots, the Moonies, although they dumped the rag a few years back, but it’s still a rag. That exercise in dysfunctional journalism cast doubt on the story, writing, “If there was a 10-year-old girl out there who had been impregnated, certainly there’d be a criminal investigation into her rape.

“But Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost said this week that there was “not a whisper” of evidence to back up the story. ‘The bottom line is it is a crime if you’re a mandated reporter to fail to report. It’s also the fact that in Ohio the rape of a 10-year-old means life in prison,’Mr. Yost said on Fox News.” Yost either had no idea what he was talking about and didn’t bother to fact check first, or he was flat-out lying. The rape and rapist had been reported, and he is awaiting trial. But that didn’t stop zealots from sending death threats meant for the girl for the crime of getting raped and being a political embarrassment to them.

And then there’s the lies. Several “justices” on the Supreme Court lied, blatantly and with malice, declaring before the Senate and while under oath that Roe Vs. Wade was “established law” and they would respect stare decisis, which is the legal notion that precedent should determine legal decision making in a case involving similar facts. They lied, and got appointed under fraudulent circumstances.

All the anti-abortion crowd who said they just wanted to limit abortion, and didn’t want to interfere with contraception or a woman’s right to private medical counsel immediately started passing pre-written laws contradicting those stances. Some states are even trying to make it illegal to go to another state for an abortion, or even protest against the law.

Religious zealots believe that they have to be cruel in god’s name either because a) god is cruel, or b) god is kind, but wants to test his followers by making them be cruel. Zealots also believe that it’s ok to lie to “unbelievers” (everyone else) in the name of god. The zealots and corrupt toadies on the Supreme Court have unleashed this miasma of humanity loose on the land, and hideous stories of repression, cruelty, and oppression are emerging every where.

It’s how theocracies—all theocracies—work. The starry-eyed idiots who declare that life would be perfect if we put [god, allah, jesus] in charge miss an important fact: god isn’t running the show. It never has. It doesn’t exist. What a theocracy is is a group of politicians who find god to be the perfect figleaf for their own corruption and viciousness. God is the trump card that ends debate. You end up with The Church running the country, and it’s accountable only to an imaginary doormat that says whatever it is The Church wants it to say and says so on its behalf. It’s the ultimate scam, the Saudi Arabia, the 14^th century Europe, and Cromwell’s England. The lowest misery of history, repeated over and over.

Kansas voters may or may not have figured that out. But a significant number of them realize that these people, these zealots, are not to be trusted, and allowed to run loose, will destroy America and everyone in her.

The naked face of religious and fascist zealotry has been exposed. People who wanted to believe are turning away.

London Broil – Climate Crisis is here

London Broil

Climate Crisis is here

July 20^th 2022

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

www.zeppscommentaries.online

Of course, it’s not at all unusual for it to be seven degrees warmer in London than it is here in the northern California mountains. On a January day, when it is 30 degrees with blowing and drifting snow (an increasingly rare event, to be sure), I would be totally unsurprised to learn it was 37 and raining over there. After all, cold drizzle epitomizes London. Even in summer, if you factor in the time difference it wouldn’t be unusual to get up and find it’s 55 here at sunrise, and in London it’s mid afternoon and 62.

But yesterday, it was 97 here. Thirty years ago it probably would set a local record for the date. Even now, it’s warmer than usual.

But afternoon on the same date, London saw a high of 104.2 degrees. It shattered the all-time record for London by three full degrees (reliable records go back 350 years there!). We still don’t know the full extent of the damage; we can only hope for a low death toll. We saw blazes along the M-25 that looked more like the fires one might see alongside US101. Airports closed because runways melted. Because of thermal expansion, railroads added some 5 miles of track that didn’t exist that morning.

I remarked, half-jokingly, that the firefighters were probably relieved to find their hoses actually work. Usually, I said, when a vegetation fire breaks out, they just quietly wait around for the next rain to put it out. (Actually they acquitted themselves quite well, given that most had never seen conditions quite like those that hit England yesterday). Bad news for the fires today: it’s 40 degrees cooler and raining. Back to normal…for now. Only not quite the same normal.

It came on a day when professional coal grifter and greedhead Joe Manchin killed the climate change initiative once and for all after 18 months of bad-faith bargaining. As fires ignite this summer, he stands to become America’s Guy Fawkes. Reviled. For centuries.

Much as I hate to imagine the misery Europe and the UK went through yesterday I’m hoping it has the same galvanic effect that Kim Stanley Robinson’s horrific fictional heat wave in Delhi had on world resolve to address climate change in “Ministry of the Future.” If it doesn’t, other near-future events will. But we’re past the point where we can avoid massive damage and loss of life.

I live in one of the wettest parts of California. Our average precipitation during the 20^th century exceeded that of London’s; or Seattle’s! Just a hair short of 50” in liquid amounts a year, mostly in the form of snow.

We just got notice Sunday that we are going on severe water rationing effective immediately. Outdoor watering is limited to one day a week, before 10am and after 7pm. And it might get much worse without notice. We could end up having to import drinking water, like many other small towns in the central valley.

We live on the low slopes of a 14,000 foot mountain, and over the past two decades, the glaciers have been melting and weakening. Last June, the heat dome that destroyed Lytton, BC and sent temperatures into the hundred-and-oh-my-gods in the PNW brushed us. We didn’t have record-breaking heat in town, but on the higher slopes of Shasta, temperatures soared. The Konwakiton Glacier collapsed, sending a huge debris flow down the aptly-named Mud Creek. Half a mile wide and up to thirty feet deep, it buried the main N to S route east of the mountain, taking out a new bridge and adding thirty miles to the commute of a small settlement in the area north of the flow. It’s now a slow motion avalanche, threatening the main water pipeline, the pumping house, and could even move into parts of the town itself. (I’m on a hill on the other side of town, and won’t get buried). So climate change just got real for us.

But like the debris flow, the climate crisis is a slow moving avalanche. While unlikely spots like London and Lytton bake in temperatures normally seen in the middle east or the Outback, California has experienced an ongoing and self-reinforcing cycle of drought, heat, and creeping disaster.

Consider: temperatures rise. In the winter, even when there isn’t a drought, less of the rain falls as snow because the snowline is higher. Even a modest increase can have a huge loss in snowpack. Consider the area of a cone, one half the way up and three quarters the way up (πr(r+√(h²+r²)) where r is the radius of the circular base, and h is the height of cone, for those who don’t have to pull off a shoe to count to 11). Mountains are very roughly conical, so you get the idea.

And then consider that the snow in the areas that still get snow will have less snow, and what there is will melt faster.

But there’s more. Increased heat means a faster rate of evaporation, resulting in drier ground. At my altitude, snow, which used to be around through April, is gone by early March if it was there at all. So soil covered by snow and wetted as the snow melts is now drying out during that critical period. Further downslope, there is no run-off. Things desiccate.

Dry soil warms faster than moist soil, increasing air temperature at ground level. This results in a decrease in water vapor, increasing the heat. (Water takes 10,000 times the energy to heat the same amount as dry air does).

Because of this, what used to be normal amounts of precipitation only add to the water deficit since it melts and evaporates away faster. And for the past two years, we’ve barely had two-thirds of normal, so what might be an inconvenient drought is now a crippling drought.

This is the vicious cycle that California—and much of the west—is in. Alaska is burning, the Canadian and Russia arctics are losing their permafrost, releasing vast amounts of methane (the stuff the Manchin lobby are promoting as “clean, safe propane” this week) making things worse.

I’m afraid there’s worse news. For the past two years, the world has seen a La Niña, a swing in the vast El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle that is driven by trade winds and upwelling of colder waters. La Niña tends to depress global temperatures by a degree or two. All these heat records we see over the past two years are happening at a time when generally, the world should be a bit cooler than normal. Early indications suggest that we may have an unprecedented third straight winter of La Niña conditions, which is bad news for California since it often means drier than normal winter.

However, the opposite of La Niña is El Niño, which elevates global temperatures by up to two degrees. Going by past history, I estimate there is a 75% chance of a routine El Niño in the next three years, and a 33% chance of a major El Niño in the same period. Ready for a significant rise in temperatures over and above what we have now? It’s dead certain to happen. Along with knock-on effects like drought, fire, floods, crop failures and mass migrations. And as always happens in such cases, war.

We can’t avoid it any more. But if we stop letting idiots like Manchin profit off our slow avalanche, we might salvage enough that our grandchildren might survive.

It’s no longer a significant crisis. It’s existential. Ask any Londoner. Ask a former resident of Lytton.

Ask anyone from my own town.

Zealots — The battle is joined

Zealots

The battle is joined

June 25^th, 2022

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

www.zeppscommentaries.online

Nothing exposes the utter ethical and logical bankruptcy of zealotry than the two decisions the once-and-not-bright-future Supreme Court handed down this week.

First, they celebrated the ever-growing piles of dead children by ruling that states could not put any limitations on concealed-carry except, of course, for “sensitive areas” such as…the Supreme Court. They don’t want to have to take the same risks they want to impose on the rest of us.

Then two days later the Court struck down Roe vs. Wade, ruling that states had the right to put limitations on abortion, including making it illegal under any and all circumstances.

So in the space of just 48 hours, the Court ruled that the Court could not impose limitations on the second amendment, and then ruled that states could impose limitations on the ninth and fourteenth amendments.

The first ruling ensures greater numbers of dead people, including children. The second was done in the nebulous name of “saving children.” It’s the kind of inconsistency that lies at the heart of the zealot’s mindset.

Zealotry is hard to tell apart from insanity. Zealotry is an externalized morality and intellect, one aptly described by Voltaire who said, “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.” Most (but far from all) zealots aren’t lacking sanity—they merely reject it.

Donald Trump isn’t a zealot. It’s perhaps an interesting paradox that nihilism is a good emotional defense against zealotry. If you believe in nothing, you are much less likely to believe absurdities, right? Of course, the drawback is that nihilists also commit atrocities, and unlike many zealots, do so with the full recognition of what their actions entail—they just don’t care. In fact they may even enjoy the suffering they cause.

Trump is a nihilist posing as a zealot. So today, he praised the court ruling on abortion as “God made the decision.” Of course, he then went on to take the credit from God, saying that the decision wouldn’t have been possible without his three disgraceful Supreme Court picks. Anyone who thinks God and Trump are interchangeable on any level has one shit God. They already had a shit President.

The zealots control the Court. They have a stranglehold on Congress. They threaten to take over the entire country in the next six months. It’s not something new in history: Zealots have taken over many countries in history, and the result, without exception, is misery, deprivation, and slaughter. All the worst “revolutionary governments” in history were controlled and largely were composed of zealots; revolutionary France, Nazi Germany, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Kampuchea, Lenin’s Russia, Pinochet’s Chile, Iran’s Islamic Republic, Cromwell’s England…the list is endless.

Usually countries so afflicted need decades to recover. Some, such as the Congo or Cambodia, never do fully recover.

When zealots take over, personal and legal freedoms cease to exist. The same people who like to claim rights are God-given don’t hesitate to ensure they are God-taken, and as always, God is an obliging doormat who shares all of a zealot’s most cherished beliefs.

The Court decisions this week show how close to the maw of authoritarian zealotry America has already come. Clarence Thomas, disgraced justice on that same court, publicly stated in his decision that the court now needs to “revisit” rulings upholding the right to contraception and same-sex marriages. No word on how the esteemed judge feels about mixed-race marriages or laws against slavery.

States run by zealots are rushing to put laws into effect that make it criminal to give or receive abortions, to travel to other states for abortions, or to even advocate for the right to an abortion. Some are trying to outlaw “morning after” pills, along with contraception. A couple of states are trying to fig leaf their assault on the rights and freedoms of women by promising to expand state assistance to mothers and their young children, but in the few cases where any details are available, the measures are ridiculously inadequate, showing their mitigation measures to be nothing more than a half-hearted swipe at the pretense that they are “caring about the children.”

The hearings by the January 6^th Select Committee, and the reception they are getting, show that there are still many people in America who value justice and freedom and rationality.

I think we’re going to need every single one of those types of people. This isn’t just an assault on rights and freedoms; it’s the opening shot in a war that can only be prevented by enough people facing the zealots down and saying, “Enough.”

Zealots won’t back off. They won’t settle for a half loaf. They’ll take it all, and laugh at your suffering.

Resist as hard as you can now, or you will be fighting for “life, liberty and freedom” later—and it won’t be cheap.

But don’t despair. We’re not dead yet. Voltaire also said, “‎Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.”

Sing as you resist.

GOP Gun Bravado — Justifying piles of dead kids

GOP Gun Bravado

Justifying piles of dead kids

May 25^th 2022

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

Stephen King tweeted today, “The cable news washing machine is asking what motivated Salvador Ramos to kill all those children. The answer is simple: He did it because he could.”

King is in the unfortunate position of feeling some responsibility for school shootings. Back in 1977—yes, 45 years ago—he wrote a novel, “Rage” under the pseudonym of Richard Bachmann. School shootings were nearly unheard of back then, and King wrote it both as a horror story and as a cautionary tale. He’s not to blame for the horror that envelops our lives now, no more so than “All Quiet on the Western Front” was responsible for World War II.

But King is an expert on the dark side of human nature, and when he wrote “Rage,” he knew the potential was there. Unlike stories about vampires and other-dimensional westerns, this depended on just three elements: the rage that lies within many teens, the vulnerability of school children, and the American love affair with guns. King felt responsibility because at heart he’s a decent human being: but the school shootings we’ve seen would have happened whether he wrote “Rage” or not.

But there’s the thing: even if some child assassin stood up and declared, “Yes, I shot those kids because I was inspired by ‘Rage,’” King’s moral and ethical positions would still be better than that of nearly every elected Republican in the country.

Yes, King described a possible horror with considerable psychological and mental accuracy; there’s a reason he’s one of the best-selling authors of all time. He accurately portrays the human condition. But as school shootings became common, he acknowledged his role, and took “Rage” out of active sales. And he has been one of the strongest voices in the country for gun control.

Compare to the heartless, gutless, cowardly Republicans who lean on increasingly empty talking points to justify their inaction in the face of the ongoing slaughter of children. (Read that line again and ask if it’s even possible for a human to find a lower stance to take.) None of them will say, “It’s time to address the problem.” Most will try to pretend it isn’t a problem they can address, and prattle on about mental illness, or video games, or protecting us from government—yes, the same government they are a part off. Kids are getting shot to protect them from government officials who let them get shot because second amendment, which is there to protect the kids from feckless politicians like…um, them.

The reason it has taken so long to identify the dead is that AR-15 bullets, which turn humans into hamburger, left many of the bodies unrecognizable. They had to depend on DNA for a lot of the piles of guts on the classroom floor. Lots of closed-casket funerals coming up, thanks to the Republican Party.

As many have pointed out, other countries have people who are mentally ill, video games, and have oppressive governments. If you want to annoy one of those paranoid nuts who believe the constitution was written by people who wanted the government they created overthrown violently, just point out that the USSR, one of the most repressive regimes on Earth, fell to an unarmed populace with only a few dozen shots being fired. Meanwhile, we have idiots running around pretending they can protect us from the military, robbers, and apparently, ten-year-old children.

There’s no lower position a human can take. They would need to climb a very tall ladder just to reach the level of cowardly filth.

But they are cowards. The best way to change their minds is to make them open to the same risks they inflict on us.

Therefore, I call on the NRA to allow anyone who wants to to carry a loaded weapon into their convention Friday. Just like they can just about anywhere else in Texas. I don’t want to see more death, so I’ll be happy to keep my fingers crossed for them. I’m sure the NRA will welcome all thoughts and prayers, both in advance and in the event of any bloody aftermath.

Republican politicians, tell your guards and police escort to take a few weeks off. Go out like a normal person, and take the same risks that you want the rest of us to take. Is that too much to ask?

They let our children die because they are moral and ethical cowards. There is no inner humanity to reach within them. Abbott, Cruz and Trump made that clear already this week. Let Trump bloviate to the NRA with a room full of loaded guns and no Secret Service. Oh, they can have a security guard—he’s entitled to the same amount of protection school children can get. He can have fun explaining how he was the greatest president of all time because one of his first acts was to make it easier for the mentally ill to get guns, all the time sweating profusely whilst scanning the room, ready to duck behind his little wood rostrum In The Event Of. The amount of grotesque gun bravado espoused by this lot will vanish quickly.

I don’t want an assassination—that would only make things worse. But I do want him to feel the same fear every schoolkid is feeling tonight.

They are cowards, these gun heroes. Trump alone is a novel of cowardice in action.

Make them take the same risks the rest of us face, and watch them cave like Halloween pumpkins in January. Unlike King, who is courageous, they will crumble if they have to accept responsibility for their actions.