climate terror

John Scheve has a few things to say about our current climate chaos. We were making some progress (not much, but some) towards lessening the climate chaos, until the orange egomaniac started reversing our progress.

No one wants to say this but the Mediterranean and even the Bay of Biscay will soon be mostly dead marine biomes as well as enhanced catalysts for severe thunderstorms, torrential flooding rains, tornadoes, stronger mid latitude cyclones, heavier winter snowfall and even Medicanes in late summer.

Marine Heat Waves (MHWs) are becoming perpetual though annually oscillating in intensity and are generally amplifying year to year. The more sheltered and shallow the body of water the more rapid the heating in calm sunny conditions. When the uppermost ocean is highly stratified as it is increasingly, MHWs can intensify stunningly fast even in the open deep Pacific. The North Pacific marine heatwave which is worst in the NW Pacific now, has recently warmed at a staggering 1 to 2 degrees C per week under calm sunny conditions with sinking air under an atmospheric high pressure dome. These conditions are increasing over the oceans in tandem with MHWs in an amplifying mutual feedback.

Generally speaking, climate and marine feedbacks and mutual amplifications are kicking in with ferocious speed now as global atmospheric warming accelerates - both far faster than modeling predicted. Climate models ignore many feedbacks and amplifications and use linear extrapolations for others which has rendered them useless. Plus climate sensitivity is likely 2 to 3 times greater than modeled due to the accelerating Earth Energy Imbalance caused by our increasing greenhouse gas emissions and the surprising relative reduction of outgoing long wave energy from the upper atmosphere associated with cloud reduction and cloud dimming over warmer ocean surfaces and higher levels of water vapor (the most powerful greenhouse gas).

If we don’t find a way to stop the accelerating heat absorption of the world ocean we will not stop the trajectory towards extinction we are now in.

Image: Sea Surface Temperature Anomalies (SSTAs) showing an SSTA for the date of + 5.2 degrees C (+ 9.4 degrees F) in the open Mediterranean Sea as of yesterday from earth.nullschool.net

John Scheve

RU liberal?

Are you a liberal? Douglas Wood has a metric.

YOU’RE A LIBERAL IF: Perhaps you were raised, as I was, in a Republican household. You may have even, in years and decades past, voted for Republican candidates, even for President. And you may have thought yourself a somewhat ‘moderate,’ middle-of-the-road, plain-old-vanilla good citizen.

If so, then it may come as quite a shock to learn that you have become, in the age of MAGA, a lib’rul. Or, worse than that a f—ing lib’rul. Or a r—tard. Or a f—-ing r—tard. Or a f—tard. Or a socialist, or a commie, or scum or vermin or an ‘enemy of the people.’

Well. Be not confused, my friends. It’s alright. Turns out that it’s not that hard, in the world of MAGA, (which has the intellectual depth of a rain puddle) to identify what a liberal is now. (Yeah, we’ll just stack all those other names under the same liberal category.) So here we go. YOU are now a liberal if…..

If you read.

Books.

If you think.

If you believe in the Constitution.

If you are somewhere ‘left’ of fascist.

If you don’t beat Capitol Police with ball-bats.

Or spear them with flagsticks.

Or spray them with mace.

Or try to hang a vice-president.

If you believe in elections.

And don’t try to overturn them.

If you don’t believe in pardoning—and paying off—violent insurrectionists.

If you think black people and brown people and any people who aren’t *president should still have the same voting rights.

If you believe voting actually IS a right.

If you think immigrants are human beings.

If you think the United States of America should not be building concentration camps.

If you think that public lands should be in public hands.

If you believe in education.

If you realize that vaccinations have saved approximately 154 million human lives, with a 40% global decline in infant mortality.

If you have a trans friend or member of the family.

If you think that women—like men—should have control of their own bodies.

If you think that Christianity (like others) is a fine religion—but is to be found in the Bible and in the hearts of believers, not coming out of the braggart mouths of idiots and bigots and a former Fox talking head now renamed the ‘Secretary of War.’

Good God.

If you think that war is a deadly serious business.

And not a game.

Or a propaganda exercise.

If you think for yourself and don’t let a cult leader do your ‘thinking’ for you.

If you have a spine and a brain.

If you honor the memories, lives, deaths, and sacrifices of generations before—many of whom fought fascism, and who the current ‘commander in chief’ labels as losers.

If you believe that bone spurs are not the same as military medals.

If you think that governmental corruption on an industrial scale is a bad thing.

Along with nepotism.

And galactic stupidity.

If you think that Air Force One should be an American plane and not a ‘gift’ from Qatar.

If you think reporters and cabinet members are not ‘decoys.’

If you think that democratic South Korea is a better ally than communist dictatorship North Korea.

If you value clean air, clean water, wild things and wild spaces for future generations.

If you think our United States protected wilderness areas should not be handed over to multi-national, corrupt corporations.

If you think that Abraham Lincoln was a better President than the Creature currently in the White House.

If you know who you are.

And don’t need a cult leader to tell you.

Yeah, there’s more. Lots more. But that’s probably enough to tell you if, in this strange new world, you are now a proud, flag-waving liberal. So, my advice… embrace it. Own it. Wear it like a badge of honor. Get a button. Write it on your hat. Or a lawn sign. And don’t let anybody—any mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging, Fox-watching, election-denying, fascist-loving, civics-flunking, America-destroying ‘conservative’ tell you otherwise. And, Oh! Remember. There was a time when the name/label Conservative also meant something as well. Something good and decent and intelligent and patriotic. No more. But maybe, someday.

Someday….

(This is my latest Substack post. You can support/subscribe to me there at Notes From The Campfire@douglaswoodauthor. Thanks!)

Douglas Wood is an American author, speaker, musician, and wilderness guide.

BlueRev

Travel with Natalie. The Group of Pedophiles (GOP) is losing its mind about what Jon Ossoff recently said on the campaign trail. LOL. Who knew the GOP was such a clusterfuck of snowflakes? Do they all have dirty minds? What are they hiding? This one appeared on the Blue Revolution (Blue Rev) site.

Day 2 of the 1000% completely manufactured faux-outrage at Jon Ossoff and the entire Democratic Party for the subtle, kinda weird and funny suggestion that Trump likes traveling with a White House aide, and they write weird letters to each other. 

I think at this point they've moved on from the psychological warfare on you, and the media, which entailed making you feel absolutely crazy for having to listen to levels of hypocrisy this staggering. 

I think they're now trying to make sure that the MAGA base dutifully repeats that Jon Ossoff is some kind of misogynist, over and over again, until they don't remember why they've even saying it, but that all the other drooling idiots around them keep saying it. 

I think they see Ossoff as a potential threat. In 2 years from now, most Americans will not remember why MAGA attacks him for this. But MAGA leaders know that all you have to do is repeat something over, and over, and over again, so that people get more confident in repeating it, and so that maybe a sizable number of people who pay no attention to politics and have zero media literacy will shrug, and think to themselves "well, there must be something to this, since everyone yells about it all the time." 

This is what "Hillary's emails" were about. Ask a random MAGA, or even a non-MAGA person who pays little attention to politics, and they have no idea what the phrase is even referring to...but they also somehow know that she's corrupt for it. 

We need to fight back at this psychological warfare, not by lying like they do, but by telling the truth. And we need to say it over and over and over again, even after we're sick of it, because this is what they've done, to great effect. 

And here is that truth...yes, again...

Donald Trump was court-ordered to pay $5 million to his rape victim last month. Dozens of women have accused him of sexual assault, long before he ran for office, which he is on tape bragging about. He routinely berates female reporters and female politicians in the most sexist ways imaginable, including by yelling "Quiet Piggy" when they ask legit questions (he did this THE SAME DAY as Ossoff's alleged offense). 

He is on record, for decades, saying he loves hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein, that he likes the same kind of girls "on the younger side." Trump is on video dancing at parties with Epstein while he gawks at young girls. He wrote Epstein a birthday card mentioning their "wonderful secret" together. 

The White House, for some reason, called it "a hostile act" for congress to release the Epstein Files, which they then fought for a year, and then a heavily-redacted document came out showing he was in them 38,000 times. 

As everyone here knows, we could go on for several more paragraphs. 

Ok so, again, what did Jon Ossoff say? That Trump likes traveling with his White House aide. 

There is no contest here. 

There is no substance whatsoever to MAGA's assertions here. 

There is an attempt to gaslight you so that you come off as having "TDS" for pointing out facts. And there is a concerted effort to train the cult on what exactly to say. 

Realize that this is psychological warfare from these people. If you are a person of substance who is willing to entertain arguments from all kinds of people, they will use your tolerance and intellectual curiosity against you. They will do and say anything...ANYTHING to protect their emperor, and allow him to do and say and act however he wants. 

That's what this is. 

Let's be clear. And let's keep being clear.

And if you haven’t yet, folks, and you want to feel productive, please please sign up for postcards to flip congress. We might run out soon. Click here: bit.ly/BRPC26

Blue Revolution

electric gloves?

So now ICE thinks they need electric-shock gloves to help them "control" their victims. These gloves won't stop their lying about what they do and how their "victims" react. With all the billions ICE has been given by the Vichy Republicans, you'd think maybe they would outfit them with body cams. But, fuck no, they don't want a lasting record of how they are abusing their victims. ICE has become Trump's personal police force, his brownshirts, his SS. And so much of the US is in denial.

Dear Porkchop,

You miserable fucking apostle of human misery.

We thought we’d reached the bottom of your particular moral septic tank somewhere between family separation, CECOT, Alligator Alcatraz, mass detention, deportation raids, threats against sanctuary cities, and your remarkable insistence that physical appearance can enter the “totality of the circumstances” when immigration agents develop reasonable suspicion.

And now?

Electric-shock gloves.

t’s been widely reported that ICE intends to spend as much as $20 million putting electric-shock gloves directly onto immigration officers’ hands, and naturally your furious oversized head emerged from the federal enforcement machine to defend the idea. Because somewhere in America, Porkchop, there apparently remains a human being insufficiently terrified of ICE, and you simply cannot fucking have that.

You explained that the devices provide officers another option short of deadly force.

Then you opened your mouth and reminded everybody exactly who we’re dealing with: “It’s another device to help someone get compliant when they are not.”

Compliant.

There it fucking is.

That word could be carved into the monument eventually erected to this obscene chapter of American history because compliance is the gravitational center of the Tom Homan universe.

Government commands, human complies.

Government grabs, human complies.

Government detains, human complies.

Government separates parent from child, human complies.

Government puts you on an airplane, locks you in a concentration camp, or removes you to foreign confinement while lawyers race desperately through American courts trying to determine what remedies remain available, and human fucking complies.

Now ICE wants electricity available literally at its agents’ fingertips.

This isn’t some philosophical exercise involving a hypothetical future government. You helped develop the deterrence logic behind family separation and Donald Trump’s administration turned it into international infamy. You’ve championed mass deportation, defended the administration’s CECOT removals, and spent years treating sanctuary jurisdictions like nests of sedition because local officials possess the apparently radical belief that municipal government doesn’t exist to function as your fucking DoorDash for deportees.

At some point, the pattern stops requiring interpretation. You believe deeply in the coercive power of government. You believe consequences deter behavior. You believe fear works. You have acknowledged believing family separation could affect migration decisions.

Whenever Americans recoil from where that philosophy leads, there you are again, face crimson, jaw clenched, that neck vein pounding against your collar like it’s trying to escape, explaining that everybody simply needs to follow the law.

That’s your magic trick. You take human suffering and run it through the bureaucratic meat grinder until it comes out sounding administrative.

A terrified father becomes an alien.

A crying child becomes a dependent.

A raid becomes an enforcement operation.

A cage becomes detention capacity.

A deportation becomes a removal.

A foreign prison becomes a destination.

Pain becomes compliance.

Somewhere inside that linguistic slaughterhouse, the human being disappears.

That’s what makes you dangerous, Porkchop. It isn’t the yelling. The yelling is almost funny. It isn’t your appearance, even though every vein north of your sternum appears to be holding an emergency meeting.

Your words should frighten anyone who understands why constitutional restraints exist. Constitutional rights weren’t invented for people the government likes.

Due process isn’t necessary when everybody agrees.

Habeas corpus isn’t important when nobody is wrongfully detained.

The Fourth Amendment isn’t particularly useful when every officer is correct.

These protections exist precisely because governments make mistakes, abuse power, become frightened, become angry, lie, and often become populated by men so absolutely convinced of their righteousness that they begin mistaking obedience for justice.

History will have questions about this era. It will ask about separated families, the deaths in these camps, due process strained by accelerated removals, the private companies making fortunes from expanded detention, wrongful arrests, deportations, and a government purchasing electric-shock gloves for immigration enforcement.

Eventually it will encounter your name: Thomas Douglas Homan, career immigration officer, former acting director of ICE, White House border czar, and relentless salesman for the proposition that government-inflicted suffering becomes morally clean once somebody stamps ENFORCEMENT across the paperwork.

So keep screaming, Porkchop. Keep telling America everything is necessary, lawful, controlled, professional, and absolutely nothing like what our own fucking eyes are telling us. Your neck vein can keep hammering against your collar like a hostage tapping Morse code against a radiator. We’ll keep documenting, because beneath the uniforms, acronyms, contracts, detention beds, airplanes, concentration camps, foreign prisons, and electrified gloves remains one stubborn fact your philosophy seems incapable of processing:

Those are human beings. Not inventory. Not statistics. Not beds. Not targets. Not removals. Not fucking units requiring compliance.

Human beings.

And no amount of yelling can make us forget it.

Sincerely,

The people you haven’t managed to make compliant.

Fear and Loathing: Closer to the Edge

Terafab

Elon Musk is at it again. Now he wants to build a gigantic semiconductor manufacturing plant in SE Texas which he claims will be the largest building in the world. I have friends who live in the area, only a few miles away and they are pissed. Musk ran me and my wife out of South Padre Island with his earth-shaking rockets, and now my friends might have to move from where they've lived for the past 15 years. 

This article appeared in The Texas Reporter, a left-leaning site that riles up lots of people, because this is Texas.

THE LARGEST BUILDING IN THE WORLD IS BEING BUILT IN GRIMES COUNTY, TEXAS

And when they say large, they mean something on a scale that is difficult to comprehend.

The image here is a rendering of Terafab, the enormous semiconductor manufacturing complex planned by SpaceX and Tesla near Gibbons Creek Reservoir in Grimes County, east of Bryan-College Station.

HOW BIG IS THIS THING?

The announced vision is roughly 100 MILLION square feet of floor space.

For comparison, the New Century Global Center in Chengdu, China, generally recognized as the world’s largest building by floor area, has about 18.9 million square feet.

So if Terafab reaches its announced size, it would be more than five times larger than the current record holder.

This isn’t really one gigantic warehouse. Renderings depict a sprawling industrial campus of enormous interconnected structures.

WHAT ARE THEY ACTUALLY GOING TO DO THERE?

Make computer chips. Lots and lots of them.

Terafab is supposed to be a vertically integrated semiconductor operation, bringing together logic chips, memory and advanced packaging rather than relying on a long chain of separate suppliers and facilities.

Those chips are intended to feed the enormous computing needs of Musk’s companies, including Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robots and autonomous vehicles and SpaceX’s plans for advanced computing infrastructure.

The basic idea is that Tesla and SpaceX expect to need so much computing power that Musk doesn’t want their future dependent entirely on outside semiconductor manufacturers.

WHY GRIMES COUNTY?

The site is around Gibbons Creek Reservoir, roughly 15 to 20 miles east of Texas A&M University.

This is another piece of an extraordinary concentration of Musk-related operations in Texas, alongside Tesla’s enormous Austin-area factory and SpaceX operations in Starbase, Bastrop and McGregor.

HOW MUCH WILL IT COST?

Here’s where the numbers get really wild.

The announced first phase represents an investment of about $16.8 billion and is expected to create roughly 3,000 jobs.

Earlier Grimes County documents described $55 billion in initial phases and as much as $119 BILLION in total capital investment if all contemplated phases are constructed.

That would put this in an entirely different category from an ordinary factory development.

IT WILL NEED A LOT OF POWER

County documents indicate the complex could include semiconductor manufacturing, AI facilities and natural-gas-fired power generation associated with the operation.

That matters because advanced chip manufacturing and AI computing require staggering amounts of electricity.

TAX INCENTIVES ARE PART OF THE STORY

Grimes County approved a reinvestment zone, a Chapter 312 tax abatement and a Chapter 381 economic development agreement for SpaceX.

SpaceX committed to billions of dollars in investment and the creation of thousands of jobs as the project develops. Local school districts have also considered major tax incentives connected with the development.

AND YES, THERE IS LOCAL OPPOSITION

For people who actually live in Grimes County, this isn’t simply a cool giant-building story.

Residents have raised questions about water consumption, electricity, roads, noise, light pollution, environmental effects, tax incentives and what an industrial development of this magnitude could do to the character of a rural Texas county.

Supporters see thousands of jobs, billions of dollars of investment and an opportunity to make Texas one of the most important semiconductor manufacturing centers on Earth.

Critics want considerably more scrutiny of what taxpayers and the surrounding community will be giving up in return.

Either way, the scale is almost absurd.

If the full vision actually gets built as announced, people could someday point to rural Grimes County, Texas, and say:

That’s where the largest building on planet Earth is.

The Texas Reporter

communist?

Our once-mighty country continues to disintegrate, while MAGA and the GOP still seem to think Trump is "making America great again." I'm not sure how much of the US will be left come election day.

Donald Trump is much closer to being a communist than anyone in the Democratic Party.

We are living in a world where today's Republican Party and Fox News defend a sitting president who praises and defends dictators like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un, while he frequently lashes out at and criticizes allies such as Canada, Italy, South Korea, and basically the entirety of NATO.

There's a clear pattern of Trump admiring dictators and trashing leaders of democracies — and Republicans keep defending him.

That's how radical today's GOP has become.

In 2012, then-Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney called Russia one of this country's top adversaries.

By 2016, when Trump was elected, Republicans were okay with their president kissing the ass of the Russian dictator. Something he's continued to do for the past decade.

Now they're apparently okay with Trump talking about his "great relationship" with Kim Jong-un, a brutal, serial-killing dictator who is guilty of endless crimes against humanity and wants nothing more than to see this country fail.

I know I say this a lot, so I apologize, but let's all just take a moment to sit here and imagine what Republicans and the conservative media would be saying right now if Barack Obama, Joe Biden, or any Democrat, for that matter, heaped the same praise on Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un as Trump has.

And they want to call Democrats "communists"?

Please.

Yes, there are some issues with the far left and the so-called "Democratic Socialists." I've written about them on my Substack, but you're not seeing leading Democrats praising actual communists such as Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un — two men who would love nothing more than to see the United States and all of NATO fail.

Here's a fun fact: There are roughly ten companies in which Trump has had the government acquire an equity stake.

All the while, many Republicans are out there freaking out over Zohran Mamdani's push to open city-run grocery stores to help lower prices — while defending a president who praises communists, talks about his "great relationship" with them, frequently attacks leaders of democracies, and has his government seize equity in roughly ten companies.

Government ownership of businesses and production, praise of communist dictators while criticizing leaders of democracies — sounds very "commie" to me.

While nothing this lowlife piece of crap does surprises me, it's still astonishing to sit here and look at how far the Republican Party has fallen from even just a few years ago.

Honestly, what the f*ck are we doing? Can it not be bipartisan that we should all condemn and denounce any president who would talk about his "great relationship" with Kim Jong-un while attacking one of our closest allies for nearly a century, all because South Korea — like everyone else in the world — told this imbecile "no" when he demanded they come help bail him out of the mess he's made in Iran?

This is why I've continued to say that I don't care what is or isn't wrong with Donald Trump; he's completely unfit to be this nation's president. He's an immature, emotionally unhinged, incompetent buffoon who would happily reduce this country to ashes, just as long as he felt doing so benefited him in some way.

Allen Clifton

Robert Reich

Checking in with Robert Reich.

Trump claimed this past week that his job approval ratings are “fabulous” — they’re “above 60%.”

He also asserted that the United States is enjoying “the greatest economy we’ve ever had.”

And that the U.S. has “total control” over the Strait of Hormuz. “I THINK WE WILL KEEP IT,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform.

Trump’s braggadocio doesn’t just mask his failures. His statements wildly contradict the calamities he’s created for America and the world.

To be sure, since he first entered American politics, we’ve been shocked and outraged by his lack of morality, scruple, or shame. It’s been difficult to conceive of such a person because we’ve always been taught to distinguish right from wrong and to do the right thing. Yet Trump has no conception of right and wrong. He isn’t unethical. He’s non-ethical. He isn’t immoral. He’s amoral.

But his latest fabrications are so contrary to the realities of his monumental failures — his losing war with Iran, the near-collapsing U.S. economy, and his underwater approval ratings — that they’re not merely non-ethical or amoral. How can they be explained?

One possibility is his conman brain still firmly believes the public will go along with whatever he says and thinks he can manufacture success even when he’s going down the toilet.

But this can’t explain the extreme dissonance; he reads the same polls everyone else reads, and he knows the public isn’t buying.

Another possibility is that the sycophants surrounding him are telling him he’s wildly successful and don’t want to inform him of the depths of his failures for fear of his reaction.

Yet he constantly watches television, and even the networks he favors — such as Fox News — have lately been broadcasting his cataclysmic failures.

So what’s really going on? How can his assessments be so utterly unhinged from the enormity of his defeats?

The only possible explanation is that he’s finally lost his grasp on reality. He’s dangerously delusional. Trump is losing his mind.

It’s hard for most of us to take in the full import of this. Even those of us who detest him find it difficult to accept the seriousness of his dementia because we think of him as loathsome rather than oblivious.

We’ve spent so many years seething that no one has held him accountable for all the awful things he’s done that we’re disoriented by the possibility he’s now unaware. We don’t want to let him off the moral hook by reason of insanity. Yet what moral compass do we use to judge a president who is wildly and dangerously delusional?

This has become the wrong question. The problem is no longer Trump’s lack of ethics or his amorality. The current challenge is how to survive under a madman.

If he is no longer responsible for what he says or does, we should move beyond shock and outrage to outright fear. He could blow the world up. We must call on our elected representatives to remove him from office via the 25th Amendment as soon as possible, by reason of insanity.

What do you think?

Robert Reich