They want it bad ...

and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it bad so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you, sooner or later, 'cause they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club - George Carlin: The Real Owners ... 

And now, Wall Street is making it's play to make it happen, aided and abetted by the Orange Turd residing in the White House.

The Trump administration is pushing dramatic changes to the American retirement system that will benefit Wall Street but push average citizens into plans that are riskier, less profitable, and loaded with high and hidden fees.

In the past two months, the Trump’s Labor Department has introduced two pending changes to deregulate vulturous private equity firms and multi-trillion dollar retirement managers like Vanguard, Fidelity, and BlackRock. A third proposed change would restrict retirement investments with an underlying environmental, social, or governance mission — mainly to boost the struggling fossil-fuel industry.

If finalized, the result will be death by a thousand cuts to Americans’ diminished retirement nest egg, amounting to an all-out Wall Street looting of American retirement.

Pushing this through is Secretary of Labor Eugene Scalia — son of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia 

George Carlin was right. They want it bad.

The Memory Hole ...

A child’s protest, “No to the policy eradicating Mongolian language and culture.” Courtesy of the Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center.

Seems Xi's bent on deleting Mongolia as an entity by replacing Mongolian with Chinese
 in all their schools.  Time frame ... 3 years.

Chinese will become the primary language of instruction from September 1 in all elementary and middle schools starting from September 1 next. This is introduced as “bilingual education,” but in fact several main subjects will be taught in Chinese only, and the program will be extended to high schools, and further increase the use of Chinese, through two other stages, which will start respectively in September 2021 and September 2022. “This is a decision of the Central Government, the teachers were told. It is not a decision of the Autonomous Region’s government.”

Combine this with ubiquitous surveillance 24/7 on all of China points to the fact Xi wants to create 1984 for real. 

"Who controls the past." ran the Pary slogan, "controls the future:
who controls the present controls the past." - George Orwell

 

Pumice ... manna from heaven :)

Recycling and replenishment, just two of the ways nature continues to remain forever mysterious to us rubes continue unabated. This time, it's a huge floating raft of pumice generated by an underwater volcano floating toward Australia, bringing needed nourishment to the Great Coral Reef.

A gigantic fleet of floating rocks, spewed up from an underwater volcano in the Pacific Ocean, floated across the waves for thousands of miles. Eventually, it made it all the way to Australia, then started on a new project: revitalising the world's largest (and very threatened) coral reef system.

It gets better.

Each one of these small rocks attracts marine organisms, including algae, barnacles, corals, and more. These tiny travellers end up hitching a ride across the ocean, and they can help seed and replenish endangered coral systems at their ultimate destination: for many, the Great Barrier Reef.

"Each piece of pumice has its own little community that has been transported across the world's oceans – and we have had trillions of pieces of this pumice floating out there following the eruption," says geologist Scott Bryan from the Queensland University of Technology in Australia.

"Each piece of pumice is a home, and a vehicle for an organism, and it's just tremendous. The sheer numbers of individuals and this diversity of species is being transported thousands of kilometres in only a matter of months is really quite phenomenal."

Another short clip depicting details about the pumice raft. Stellar without question. :)

Manna indeed. :)

Rinse & Repeat ...

A mobile home was destroyed in Napa County, Calif., on Tuesday. The fires throughout the state have stressed the state’s mutual aid system.Credit...Noah Berger/Associated Press

CA fires 2020. Global Warming is, yet again, the root cause of said fires just like 2019.

Wildfires tore through Northern California overnight, spreading quickly and engulfing homes as firefighters battled to get control of the blazes, which have forced a growing number of evacuations and were likely caused by lightning strikes in recent days.

People were ordered to flee neighborhoods in Vacaville, a city of about 100,000 residents near Sacramento, as a combination of uncontrolled fires northwest of the city began to overtake homes. That group of fires, known together as the LNU Lightning Complex, has destroyed more than 50 buildings or structures and is threatening nearly 2,000 more, the authorities said.

It grew more than 14,000 acres overnight and now covers 46,225 acres in Napa and Sonoma Counties — larger than the size of Washington, D.C. — and is completely uncontained, the authorities said. Four people have been injured in the fire.

Rinse & Repeat applies without question.

 

Wack a Mole ...

[Source images: IULIIA MARCHENKO/iStock; cienpies/iStock; Bigmouse108/iStock; Yuriy Altukhov/iStock; Tatyana Larina/iStock; Bigmouse108/iStock]

Wack a Mole applies to many things on the net from deep fakes to porn as computers, combined with ubiquitous networks allows this kind of content, and more, to run online 24/7. With this in mind, a long and detailed article in Fast Company shows where young people go to play games and access porn without restriction if they have the smarts to make it so.

Sex, lies, and video games: Inside Roblox’s war on porn

Roblox is waging a technological shadow war against condo games: digital sex parties where kids act like adults. With more than half of Americans under 16 playing Roblox, can the company regain control of its own platform?

Roblox today is the product of its over 150 million monthly active users. What began as a sandbox now resembles a scrappy cybernation of teens and tweens whose population rivals that of Japan. And the dollars are real: Players poured more than $490 million into Roblox via mobile devices in the first half of 2020 alone, according to Sensor Tower data. Roblox projects that its user-developers—many of whom are Roblox veterans in their late teens and early twenties—will earn more than $250 million from selling access to their creations this year. The company, which is valued at $4 billion, takes roughly 65 cents of every U.S. dollar when developers cash out.

It gets better.

KIDS BETWEEN THE AGES OF 5 AND 9 SPEND MORE TIME PLAYING ROBLOX THAN DOING ANYTHING ELSE ONLINE ON PCS.

Read the Fast Company piece in its entirety. It's a really smart thing to do.

Smoke & Mirrors I

This wonderful pix by Vilhjálmur Ingi Vilhjálmsson shows, in indirect fashion, the smoke & mirrors nonsense both political parties are dumping on us rubes as America moves ever closer to its version of Armageddon vis a vis 11/3/2020. In this piece titled Smoke and Mirrors I, the focus in on the Dems as without a doubt, they are sweating bullets regarding the true mental state of Joe Bidon as their convention commences on 8/17/2020. (I'm a registered Democrat BTW).

With this in mind, here are two takes on the Dems & Biden.

Mail-in ballot problems ...

Traditionally, in New York State, one registers to vote. You sign a document and submit it to the local Board of Elections. This has long been regarded as a logical and necessary obligation of citizenship, like registering a car or a deed to property. On election day, you go into your polling place, and the volunteer officials open a big book of alphabetized names… and, voila, there you are, along with a record of your signature, going back all the elections you have lived in that voting district. You are who you claim to be, and you get to vote… once.

In New York’s June 23 primary this year of corona virus, 21 percent of mail-in ballots in New York City were invalidated by the Board of Elections for arriving late, lacking a postmark, or a voter’s signature, 84,000 in all. Reminder: this is a country that used to send officials like former president Jimmy Carter around the world to instruct “less developed” peoples in how to hold a fair election. Perhaps Cameroon and Tajikistan can send some counselors to North Carolina now.

Convention history 101 ...

Sometimes in US history, party conventions go their own way, despite the best-laid plans of party bosses. William Jennings Bryan, age 36, hijacked the 1896 Democratic nomination with his rousing “Cross of Gold” speech. In 1912, a fracas between the forces of incumbent President Taft and former President Teddy Roosevelt provoked TR to break away and run on a Progressive Party ticket. (Taft and Roosevelt split the vote and Woodrow Wilson was elected president.)

Given the questions on Biden's mental health ... could a switch happen here? 

Such a brawl hasn’t happened lately, as the convention formalities ossified, and became a largely ceremonial confirmation of the primary election process. But the dodgy primary victory of Mr. Biden — especially the Super Tuesday vote that mysteriously elevated him from the crypt of loserdom to a triumph of the undead — was itself probably an act of DNC-sponsored voter fraud. And since that business was all seemingly settled, Mr. Biden has gone on to demonstrate a gift for falling on his face whenever they dared to trundle him out of his fabled basement. 

Obama/Biden tensions continue unabated ..

‘The President Was Not Encouraging’: What Obama Really Thought About Biden.

From the start, Obama’s personal style meshed better with Clinton’s—in the sense that they were both very disciplined and cerebral—than with Biden’s much more free-wheeling approach. Even if Obama sensed that Biden provided a much-needed complement and contrast, he naturally gravitated toward Clinton.

Former administration officials treated Biden dismissively in their memoirs.

Ben Rhodes, Obama’s former deputy national security adviser, who was known for his mind-meld with the president, wrote in his memoir that “in the Situation Room, Biden could be something of an unguided missile.”

Former FBI Director James Comey recalled in his book that “Obama would have a series of exchanges heading a conversation very clearly and crisply in Direction A. Then, at some point, Biden would jump in with, ‘Can I ask something, Mr. President?’”

Comey continued: “Obama would politely agree, but something in his expression suggested he knew full well that for the next five or 10 minutes we would all be heading in Direction Z. After listening and patiently waiting, President Obama would then bring the conversation back on course.”

Lastly ...

Biden’s own academic career was unimpressive—he repeated the third grade, earned all Cs and Ds in his first three semesters at the University of Delaware except for As in P.E., a B in “Great English Writers” and an F in ROTC, and graduated 76th in his Syracuse Law School class of 85 students. He’s the first Democratic nominee since Walter Mondale in 1984 not to have an Ivy League degree. He was not a binder person, Clinton and Obama aides said.

How does one flunk ROTC?

Addendum: No switch, Biden came thru. The race is on.

Don't worry, Trump & the Repugs are FAR WORSE,

Air Pollution yet again ...

The skyline of downtown Los Angeles, shrouded and obscured by smog, in 1956. 

American Stock/Getty Images

Nixon must be rolling in his grave as the EPA he created in 1970 is now gutted and the specter of increased air pollution, a cancer produced by fossil fuels, continues to kill millions as man mover further into the 21st century. Getting rid of FF, even without ameliorating climate change, would pay for itself by improving the environment in ways just beginning to be understood, a notion powerfully explained in a Vox piece titled Air pollution is much worse than we thought.

In the late 1960s, the US saw regular, choking smog descend over New York City and Los Angeles, 100,000 barrels of oil spilled off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, and, perhaps most famously, fires burning on the surface of the Cuyahoga River in Ohio. These grim images sparked the modern environmental movement, the first Earth Day, and a decade of extraordinary environmental lawmaking and rulemaking (much of it under a Republican president, Richard Nixon).

From the ’70s through the beginning of the 21st century, the fight against fossil fuels was a fight about pollution, especially air pollution.

But there’s an irony involved: The air pollution case against fossil fuels is still the best case!

In fact, even as attention has shifted to climate change, the air pollution case has grown stronger and stronger, as the science on air pollution has advanced by leaps and bounds. Researchers are now much more able to pinpoint air pollution’s direct and indirect effects, and the news has been uniformly bad.

The evidence is now clear enough that it can be stated unequivocally: It would be worth freeing ourselves from fossil fuels even if global warming didn’t exist. Especially now that clean energy has gotten so cheap, the air quality benefits alone are enough to pay for the energy transition.

This conclusion has been reaffirmed by the latest air quality research, presented at a recent hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform by Drew Shindell, Nicholas professor of earth science at Duke University (and a lead author on both recent IPCC reports).

Shindell’s testimony reveals that the effects of air pollution are roughly twice as bad as previously estimated. That is a bombshell — in a sane world, it would be front-page news across the country.

A smokestack emits smoke over Interstate 95 in Baltimore, Maryland, 

on December 17, 2019. Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images

The push for sustainables will not happen as long as Agent Orange remains in the White House

Donald Trump watches EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler announce that the National Environmental Policy Act will be gutted on January 9. Drew Angerer/Getty Images

End Game ...

The air quality benefits arrive much sooner than the climate benefits. They are, at least for the next several decades, much larger. They can be secured without the cooperation of other countries. And, by generating an average of $700 billion a year in avoided health and labor costs, they will more than pay for the energy transition on their own. Climate change or no climate change, it’s worth ditching fossil fuels.

Without a doubt.

In praise of flatulence :)

Bacchus appears frozen in mid-air, blasted from his seat – but is this the result of love or is there a more down-to-earth explanation? (Credit: National Gallery)

The BBC has conjured up a gem, detailing entertaining info about flatulence from such renowned entities as Titian and Shakespeare, info yours truly never knew about even though being an English major back in the Cretaceous and an artist who knows a smidgen about art while practicing it for nearly 60 years. Read the piece, humorous to a fault. :)

The work, inspired by a scene from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, depicts the instant Bacchus’s boisterous posse happens upon a heartbroken Ariadne, abandoned by her lover Theseus on the island of Naxos, and has long been cherished for its sensuous portrayal of ‘the way in which the world seems to come to a stop at the moment when people fall for each other,’  as the art critic Andrew Graham-Dixon has described it.

Smack dab in the centre of his canvas, Titian has carefully, if curiously, positioned a caper flower, whose ivory petals and radiant bristle of exploding stamens are rendered with meticulous botanical detail. Follow the trajectory of the caper's strangely overextended pistil and it catches in its stigma’s crosshairs the floating crotch of Bacchus, who, blasted from his seat, is frozen forever in mid-air, in what is surely among the most ungainly poses in all of art history.

Enter stage left, Othello :)

Famously fond of flatulence himself, Shakespeare couldn’t resist squeezing potty puns into his plays. Hanging in the air behind the phrase ‘thereby hangs a tail’, from Othello, for example, is the lingering whiff of broken wind. Rather than crude blemishes that besmirch his plays’ achievement, however, such coarse scents attest to Shakespeare’s full range of observation, his depth of sensitivity to every clench and contour of being here. They show that, in capturing all of life, Shakespeare holds nothing back (or in) and that his works embrace all of human experience – the serious and the silly, the melodious and discordant, the fragrant and the foul.

In the centre, a caper flower, which is a natural remedy for flatulence, is coupled with a satyr, a figure also associated with the condition (Credit: National Gallery)

Read the BBC piece in its entirety to learn about art, life and reality at it's most primal level. :)

Viceroys +

Into the wind

Tiny Grasshopper

<1/4"

Confidence +

Poised for takeoff

Tenacity +

An inconvenient truth ...

JOHN VACHON, 1939 / LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

The great depression of 2020 is here. With millions out of work, driven in large part by COVID-19, the US is in dire trouble, in many ways, worse off than the Great Depression of the 30s because back then, the environment was viable, manufacturing capability was intact and the populace was unified and eager to get back to work. Today, financialization, ruinous debt and environmental degradation are just some of the problems America is facing and we haven't even discussed climate change. With this optimistic view in hand, an insightful essay by Charles Hugh Smith gives one pause regarding fixed costs and how it applies to possible economic collapse of a most pernicious kind.

A collapse of major chunks of the economy is widely viewed as "impossible" because the federal government can borrow and spend unlimited amounts of money because the Federal Reserve can create unlimited amounts of money: the government borrows $1 trillion by selling $1 trillion in Treasury bonds, the Fed prints $1 trillion dollars to buy the bonds. Rinse and repeat to near-infinity.

With this cheery wind at their backs, conventional pundits are predicting super-rebounds in auto sales and other consumption as consumers weary of Covid-19 and anxious to blow their recent savings borrow and spend like no tomorrow.

But ...

We're already in a post-normal world because the expansion of globalization and financialization needed to fuel the Old Normal has reversed into contraction. This reversal is an extinction event for all sectors and institutions with high fixed costs: air travel, resort tourism, healthcare, higher education, local government services, etc. because their fixed cost structures are so high they are no longer financially viable if they're operating at less than full capacity. 

Only getting back to 70% of previous capacity, revenues, tax receipts, etc. dooms them to collapse.

And there's no way to cut their fixed costs without fatally disrupting all the sectors that are dependent on them.

Most operational costs are mandated and cannot be reduced: union contracts, property taxes, regulatory burdens, tax accounting, debt service, employee healthcare costs, minimum wages, etc.  Other essential expenses such as commercial rent are difficult to renegotiate lower, as the landlord also has the same high fixed costs and any reduction comes directly out of his pocket.

To whit ...

A good example of this collapse dynamic is a restaurant with high fixed costs.  It can't survive financially at 50% of capacity because it can't reduce its expenses by 50%. The owners can reduce staff but there are operational limits on this: even if there are only 10 customers rather than 100, you still need a kitchen and wait staff. Stripped to the bone, the owners might be able to reduce costs by 15% to 20%. In other words, if business rebounds to 80% of pre-pandemic levels, the restaurant can survive but not generate any profit.

It might survive at 70% if the owners do double shifts, but that isn't sustainable. Eventually, the overworked owners burn out and collapse.

Reducing costs is even more difficult for institutions such as hospitals, colleges and government agencies. Most of these institutions are unable to cut more than a few percent of expenses; a 10% reduction in expenses would require the closure of entire departments and eliminating core services.

In essence, it means reconstructing America on a more modest level as the complexification of almost everything thanks to financialization has reached its limits thus making the painful reset inevitable.

Any questions?