The wheels are off ...

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The wheels are off. Combine this with the supremes granting the DOGE team launched by Elon Musk unfettered access to information collected by the Social Security Administration, data that includes Social Security numbers, medical and mental health records, and family court information.

In an unsigned order, the court, acting at the request of the Trump administration, temporarily overturned actions by two lower courts that had limited the DOGE team's access to sensitive private information at the Social Security Administration. The high court sent the case back to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., to rule on the merits. ...

Splinterlands awaits ...

Julian West, looking backwards from 2050, tries to understand why the world and his family have fallen apart.

Part Field Notes from a Catastrophe, part 1984, part World War Z, John Feffer’s striking new dystopian novel, takes us deep into the battered, shattered world of 2050. The European Union has broken apart. Multiethnic great powers like Russia and China have shriveled. America’s global military footprint has virtually disappeared and the United States remains united in name only. Nationalism has proven the century’s most enduring force as ever-rising global temperatures have supercharged each-against-all competition and conflict among the now 300-plus members of an increasingly feeble United Nations.

As he navigates the world of 2050, Julian West offers a roadmap for the path we’re already on, a chronicle of impending disaster, and a faint light of hope. He may be humanity’s last best chance to explain how the world unraveled—if he can survive the savage beauty of the Splinterlands.

You will remember this work forever ... Robert E.

Splinterlands awaits ...

 

America’s Natural Federal Regions

Meander: to follow a winding course applies here as America;'s following a meandering course in the throes of breaking up, something indirectly depicted here in the Natural Federal Regions map as the political and philosophical differences among Americans are too deep to paper over, especially in light of Trump, religion and Covid 19. 

For decades now, the United States has been stagnating, proving incapable of enacting meaningful reforms needed to survive the difficult first half of the 21st Century.

The causes of the USA’s terminal decline run deep, with unresolved contradictions piling up over centuries. Americans are only now perceiving the rot because the out-of-control pandemic has revealed its chronic lack of internal investment — and because the ubiquity of cheap communication has revealed the brutality at the heart of the violent State that has come to dominate the Federal Government.

BRT has talked about fragility with emphasis given to our two-party system as there is no flexibility in trying to iron out inevitable political differences residing outside the boundaries of a system as rigid as this. Nooze has a role in amping up the fracture as well. 

Pew Research Center’s political typology

— take the quiz, see where you land. I’m Outsider Left, mostly, if forced to choose.

In America, each party is a forced coalition of identity groups each receiving their news from for-profit media companies who optimize their programming for ratings in order to attract advertisers or subscribers. Money is now considered political speech, allowing the wealthy to buy politicians behind the scenes while the public is encouraged to believe this is normal. This political-media complex creates political division then offers simplistic narratives to describe it, encouraging people to believe this to be true democracy.

Splinterlands awaits. ...

1781

1781, the notion of Federalism is nigh thanks to COVID-19 and the irresponsible and inept actions of The Donald raises the possibility of splintering the country whereby the notion of The United States of America becomes but a mirage of the first order.

Covid-19 is not just changing Americans’ daily lives, it may also transform their system of government. On many important current issues, the U.S. may end up with an arrangement that looks more like the Articles of Confederation than the Constitution.

Consider how this might evolve. First, states and regions are recovering (or not) at dramatically different rates. The worst may be over for much of California and Washington State — but New York City, because of its density and reliance on the subway, may find the problem especially difficult to control. Louisiana is on the verge of catastrophe, while some other states, such as Virginia, are still not sure how bad it will be.

Hence the idea that America is inching closer to what it was under the Articles of Confederation, which governed the U.S. from 1781 to 1789. The U.S. constitutional order has not changed in any explicit manner, but the issues on which the states are allowed to diverge have gone from being modest and relatively inconsequential to significant and meaningful if not dominant.

Example 1

This divergence may create further pressures on federalism. In Rhode Island, for example, state police have sought to stop cars with New York state license plates at the border, hindering or delaying their entrance. Whether such activities are constitutional, most governors do have broad authority to invoke far-reaching emergency powers.

Bringing the concept of splintering to the nth degree is John Feffer's powerful novella Splinterlands where climate change, combined with resource depletion and environmental degradation, becomes an all too real dystopian nightmare of the first order.

1781 indeed.

Meander: To follow a winding course ...

This wonderful illustration depicting 18th century astral environs depicts an age forever gone, where artistry, combined with movable type, created pieces both nuanced and detailed in a way computers can never match. In some ways, this is similar to what one can find on the net when no specific intent is part of the equation. For the past few hours, here are some of the tidbits yours truly has found 12/27/20 ...

How Climate Change Is Ushering in a New Pandemic Era kicks off the tour with Rolling Stone waxing poetic on how COVID-19 is just the beginning of the pandemic circus thanks to Climate Change.

The Archives of an Unfulfilled Genius tells the story of Edward Stringham, the obscure but brilliant The New Yorker collator, who collated the world in his off hours, unknown to all save for Vicki Desjardins, one of the very few who knew just how smart this man truly was.

Thirty-six Thousand Feet Under the Sea, a very long piece from The New Yorker, depicts a group of explorers determined to reach the deepest depths in every ocean in the world.

Sea level—perpetual flux. There is a micromillimetre on the surface of the ocean that moves between sea and sky and is simultaneously both and neither. Every known life-form exists in relation to this layer. Above it, the world of land, air, sunlight, and lungs. Below it, the world of water, depth, and pressure. The deeper you go, the darker, the more hostile, the less familiar, the less measured, the less known.

2050, the real start point for GW is writ large in Robinson's powerful novel titled The Ministry for the Future,  stating just how different the world will become just 30 years from now.  Just started reading Ministry but so far, it walks the walk without issue. 

Splinterlands,  written by John Feffer, talks about the political ramifications coming our way due to yet again, GW. 

National sovereignty ...

 Protesting ecocide.Photographer: Luis Robayo/AFP via Getty Images

Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro, the poster child for ecological collapse by burning up the Amazonian rainforest, portends a dark future where the notion of sovereignty no longer applies when the environment collapses as it will if nothing is done to ameliorate the ever increasing impact GW is having as man moves further into the 21st century. As long as capitalism and its objective of placing profit over the environment continues unabated, collapse becomes a certainty.

As we collectively hurtle into the era of climate change, international relations as we’ve known them for almost four centuries will change beyond recognition. This shift is probably inevitable, and possibly even necessary. But it will also cause new conflicts, and therefore war and suffering.

Since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, diplomats have — in peacetime and war alike — for the most part subscribed to the principle of national sovereignty. This is the idea, enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations, that foreign countries have no right “to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.”

A concept no longer viable ...

An early and tragicomic demonstration of this shift in international relations was the dust-up in 2019 between Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron. Bolsonaro, a populist firebrand, was at that time allowing fires to burn wide swathes of the Amazon rainforest. It happens to be the world’s primary “lung” or “carbon sink,” pulling greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere and storing them in trees. Except now the Amazon was belching carbon back into the air.

Speaking for many, the French president accused his Brazilian counterpart of abetting “ecocide.” Sounds like the new genocide, doesn’t it? Bolsonaro shot back that Macron was a neocolonialist and followed up with a sexist jibe aimed at Macron’s wife. 

The underlying issue was sovereignty: Is a rainforest located in Brazil the business of Brazil or of the world? Would, in a hypothetical future scenario, an alliance led by France be within its rights to declare war on Brazil to prevent ecocide, and thereby humanity’s suicide? (Fortunately, 100 countries including Brazil this week pledged instead to cooperate in phasing out deforestation).

Pledges are but words, meaning nothing. If gw is left unabated, Splinterlands, awaits.