https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/09/06/roaming-charges-116/
~~ recommended by newestbeginning ~~
American zombies. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair
Nature is not mute. It is man who is deaf.
– Terence McKenna
+ The school year in America hasn’t officially opened until there’s been a school shooting.
+ School shootings are American Exceptionalism in action. No other country does them like we do. None even come close. USA! NRA! USA! NRA! USA! NRA!
+ A country that tolerates the routine shootings of its own school children as the cost of doing business in our weird notion of a “free society” is unlikely to feel any empathy for Palestinian children killed by the weapons we sell Israel. Violence is our chief export; indifference to the bloodshed is our national characteristic.
+ While crouched in a classroom with her classmates as bullets were firing from the shooter’s AR-25 down the hall, a 16-year-old student texted her mother “I know I’ve not been a perfect daughter. I love you. I’m sorry.” This is how we build character in America.
+ Two public school teachers were murdered today protecting their students. Let the smears on them as brainwashing purveyors of communism, gender ideology and critical race theory begin…
+ Last year, the shooter threatened to kill people at school. Because there wasn’t “probable cause,” the FBI made no arrests and Georgia lacks a red flag law, the local police didn’t remove guns from the then 13-year-old’s home.
+ The father of the Georgia school shooter told the Georgia Bureau of Investigation that he purchased the AR-15 rifle for his troubled son as a Christmas present, just as Jesus would’ve wanted his birth celebrated.
+ I wonder where Dad got the idea?
Xmas card of Rep. Andy Ogles, GOP-TN.
Xmas card of Rep. Lauren Boebert, GOP-CO.
Xmas card from Nevada lawmaker Michele Fiore.
Xmas message of Rep. Thomas Massey, GOP-KY.
+ JD Vance, who now speaks at outdoor rallies inside a box of bulletproof glass, said that school shootings are now “a fact of life” in America.
You take the good
You take the bad
You take them both and there you have
The facts of life
The facts of life
+ Number of school shootings in the US by year…
2024: 45
2023: 82
2022: 79
2021: 73
2020: 22 (Pandemic school closures)
2019: 52
2018: 44
2017: 42
2016: 51
2015: 37
2014: 36
2013: 26
2012: 13
2011: 15
2010: 13
2009: 22
2008: 18
+ States with the highest per capita school shootings since 2008
Louisiana: 32 shootings; 0.69 shootings per 100,000 people
Maryland: 32 shootings; 0.52 shootings per 100,000 people13 s
Alabama: 25 shootings; 0.50 shootings per 100,000 people
Tennessee: 33 shootings; 0.48 shootings per 100,000 people
Mississippi: 13 shootings; 0.44 shootings per 100,000 people
Arkansas: 13 shootings; 0.43 shootings per 100,000 people
North Carolina: 41 shootings; 0.41 shootings per 100,000 people
Georgia: 41 shootings; 0.38 shootings per 100,000 people
+++
+ Of all the issues for Harris to break from Biden on, she decided to go easier on the one percent. Well, it proves that she can break from Joe and if she doesn’t on genocide in Gaza it’s simply because she doesn’t want to…
+ Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Republicans have won the national popular vote only once–in 2004, when Bush narrowly surpassed the ineptly run campaign of John Kerry.
+ The 2020 presidential election was the first time that any candidate received more votes than the number of eligible voters who chose not to vote.
+ US Presidential Election Results by % of Eligible Voters
2020
Biden: 34% (won), Didn’t Vote: 33%, Trump: 31%2016
Didn’t Vote: 40%, HRC: 29%, Trump: 28% (won)2012
Didn’t Vote: 41%, Obama: 30% (won), Romeny: 28%2008
Didn’t Vote: 38%, Obama: 33% (won), McCain: 28%2004
Didn’t Vote: 40%, Bush: 31% (won), Kerry: 29%2000
Didn’t Vote: 46%, Gore: 26.2%, Bush: 26% (won)1996
Didn’t Vote: 48%, Clinton 25% (won), Dole: 21%, 3rd Parties 6%1992
Didn’t Vote: 42%, Clinton: 25% (won), Bush: 22%, Perot 11%1988
Didn’t Vote: 47%, Bush: 28% (won), Dukakis 24%1984
Didn’t Vote: 47%, Reagan 31% (won), Mondale: 22%1980
Didn’t Vote: 47%, Reagan: 26% (won), Carter: 22%, 3rd Parties: 5%1976
Didn’t Vote: 46%, Carter: 27% (won), Ford 26%
+ A rational person would return this endorsement to sender…
+ And you thought The Nation couldn’t sink any lower. Think again..
+ Harris expends more words to say less than any politician since John Kerry, who she begins to resemble more and more. Kamala shares Kerry’s remarkable facility to flip-flop on policy positions, but does she windsurf or, as Mugger Smith wondered, have a craving to spread Dijon mustard on a Philly cheesesteak?
Q: “What can we do about lowering the cost of daycare?”
+ JD Vance: “…Maybe Grandpa and Grandma want to help a little bit more. Maybe there’s an uncle/aunt who wants to help a little bit more…”
+ The problem is Grandpa died at 54, Grandma lost her leg to diabetes. Aunt Martha’s working two shifts at Dollar General and Uncle Elmer is a greeter at Walmart.
+ Maybe they can lower the legal child labor age for the morning shift at McDonald’s to 5?
+ Speaking of child care, here’s a word scramble from Vance’s running mate, speaking at the Economic Club of New York Forum…
Q. If you win in November, can you commit to prioritizing legislation to make child care more affordable? And if so, what specific piece of legislation will you advance?
Trump: Well, I would do that and we’re sitting down, you know that I was, uh, somebody, we had, uh, Senator Marco, uh, Rubio, and my daughter Ivanka was so impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about that, because, child care is child care. You couldn’t, you know, it’s something, you have to have it. In this country, you have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to, but they’ll get used to it very quickly, and it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send products into our country. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers we’re talking about including childcare. That’s gonna take care, I, I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time. Coupled with, uh, the reductions I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country because I have to stay with childcare but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about here, including growth, but growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just told you about. We’re going to be taking in trillions of dollars and as much as childcare is talked about as being expensive it’s relatively speaking not very expensive compared to compared to the kind of numbers we’re going to be taking in. We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people and then we’ll worry about the rest of the world. We’ll take care of other people. But this is about America first. It’s about making America great again. We have to do it. Because right now we’re a failing nation. Thank you for that question.”
+ What was it that Bobby Jr. said the other day about the nation deserving a leader who could speak complete sentences?
+ This you, Bobby? “Even in Hitler’s Germany you could cross the Alps into Switzerland, you could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.”
+ The question to Trump was on childcare, the “answer” was about tariffs on China, which are supposedly not only going to pay for childcare but wipe out the deficit. When Trump took office in 2017, the federal deficit stood at $19.95 trillion, when he left in 2020 it had swelled to $27.75 trillion.
+ Total amount of US government spending $6.7 trillion. Total value of US imported goods is around $3 trillion. Total revenue raised by previous Trumpariffs on China: $80 billion.
+ Trump continues to falsely claim that not a single US troop was killed in action for the last 18 months of his administration. According to the Pentagon’s Defense Casualty Analysis System database, four times as many U.S. troops died in combat during Trump’s presidency than during the Biden-Harris administration. Do they have a similar database that tracks how many people US troops killed under each administration?
+ The data also reveals that military suicides reached new highs under Trump, not seen since the Vietnam War: 318 in 2017; 363 in 2018; 366 in 2019; and 406 in 2020.
= Today’s message on the afterlife comes from our contemporary Aquinas, Donald Trump: “…If you’re religious, you have, I think, a better feeling toward it. You know, you’re supposed to go to heaven, ideally not hell, but you’re supposed to go to heaven if you’re good.” Amen to that.
+ Two months after the French elections were won by the left coalition. Macron finally nominated a Prime Minister for France, His pick? Center-right politician Michel Barnier is known internationally as the top Brexit negotiator for the European Union. The choice of this career insider, a clone of Macron, is sure to infuriate most French voters who have rejected the centrist politics of Macronism in two consecutive elections.
+ Though he survived longer than Liz Truss, Keir Starmer’s Labour Party continues to bleed support, while the rightwing parties in the UK rebound…
LABOR: 30% (-3)
CONSERVATIVES: 26% (+2)
REFORM: 19% (+1)
LIBERAL DEMOCRATS: 11% (-1)
GREEN: 7% (-1)
+ After 20-plus years of austerity and Brexit, the wages of British men are lower now in real terms than they were at the beginning of this century, down by 11% since 2000.
+ Tony Blair releases the Farage within: “We’ve swapped out single people coming from Europe … for families from Asia and Africa. How has this helped us?”
+ Blair went on to callously opine that tragedies like the 2107 Grenfell fire, where 72 residents perished, cannot be completely avoided: “This is a difficult thing to say, but it’s the honest truth – however good your system is and however well-intentioned it is, and however hard people work, they’re going to make mistakes.” Blair was responding to Grenfell Inquiry chair Sir Martin Moore-Bick concluded the British government was “well aware” of the deadly risks posed by combustible cladding and insulation in the apartment tower a year before the fire broke out but “failed to act on what it knew.”. Moore-Bick also found that UK government officials were “complacent, defensive and dismissive” on fire safety while cutting red tape was prioritized over the safety of the residents. Blair combines the worst of Thatcher, Clinton and Obama into one heinous package.
+ According to data from the World Bank, China is solidifying its status as the world’s global factory. Just 20 years ago, China’s industrial output stood at only a fifth of America’s and Europe’s total output. Now Chinese firms are producing as much industrial output as the US and the EU combined.
+ Two decades of data from the Critical Technology Tracker, published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, shows that China now leads in the development of 57 out of the 64 key technologies of the future, i.e. 90% of the technologies. The US leads the other 7.
+ Nvidia’s loss in market cap on Tuesday ($278.9 billion) was greater than the value of all the chips they have sold to GenAI companies.
+++
+ Bidenmentalism in a nutshell: “On my watch, we’ve responsibly increased our oil production to meet our immediate needs – without delaying or deferring our transition to clean energy. We’re America. We can do both.” Sorry, Joe, you haven’t and you can’t…
+ The Global temperature in August 2024 tied with August 2023 for the warmest of any August on record. Up in Svalbard at 78° north latitude in the Arctic Ocean, the average temperature for August was a hitherto unfathomable 51.8 F (11 C)…
+ For three months, the temperature in Phoenix averaged 99F…On Wednesday, the temperature in Phoenix reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit for a record 100th straight day.
+ US gasoline demand, the world’s single largest pool of oil consumption, has almost certainly peaked for good, according to a report in Bloomberg.
+ Meanwhile, solar prices are falling. Solar module price falls to a record low of $0.096/W, according to Bloomberg’s Global Solar Market Report. The record low prices drove global installations to a new high in 2024. The report says 592 GW will be installed in 2024, an increase of 33% from last year’s record high.
+ A study out of UC Davis shows that ride-sharing apps like Uber and Lyft are luring people from using more sustainable modes of travel, like walking, cycling and public transport: “More than 50% of ride-hailing trips taken by surveyed riders in California replaced more sustainable forms of transportation — such as walking, cycling, carpooling, and public transit — or created new vehicle miles.”
+ Since 2004, Saudi Arabia’s oil production has fallen and America’s has more than doubled.
+ The Energy Information Agency estimates that North America’s liquefied natural gas (LNG) export capacity will more than double between 2024 and 2028, from 11.4 billion cubic feet per day in 2023 to 24.4 Bcf/d in 2028, if projects currently under construction begin operations as planned.
+ In the first half of 2024, 80% of new electricity capacity in the US came from solar and batteries.
+ Only 15 countries account for more the 98.5% of the world’s new coal power generation. But two of those 15 countries, China and India, are responsible for 86% of that capacity.
+ A decade ago, nearly 40% of UK electricity came from coal. Today the UK’s last remaining coal-fired power station is Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station in Nottinghamshire, England, which is itself slated to close at the end of September.
+ The hotter the temperature, the less well students do on exams. Over 13 years in NYC alone, “upwards of 510,000 exams that otherwise would have passed likely received failing grades due to hot exam conditions.” The study published in the estimates that these failed exams delayed or stopped around 90,000 graduations.
+ The ocean heat content of the Gulf of Mexico has smashed previous all-time record highs and this week stands at 126% of the average for the date.
+ A study from the World Bank predicts that climate change will exacerbate tensions around access to water. The report says that the global supply of fresh water per person will fall by 29% between 2000 and 2099. But all regions will not be equally affected. For example, Africa’s water supply could drop by 67%, while Europe’s could increase by 28%.
+ South Korea’s top court ruled last week that the country’s measures to fight climate change were insufficient to protect the rights of its citizens. This is the first climate litigation ruling of its kind in Asia.
+ Norm Schilling, a horticulturist in Las Vegas, on the damage to desert plants from this summer’s extreme heat: “We saw damage to plants this summer that had never shown heat stress before…The heat we’re seeing now is a new paradigm. It’s like the ground is shifting beneath our feet.’”
+ More than 20% of the Amazonian rainforest is already gone and much of what remains–dried out by a mega-drought and seared by extreme heat–is going up in flames…
+ It was 100F here in Greater Stumptown yesterday and heading toward 95F today with thick bands of smoke. And where’s there’s smoke…
+ Desperate for some good news? How’s this: California’s seven known wolf packs have given birth to 30 pups this year, bringing the total wolf population in the state up to at least 65 animals.
+++
+ How the Police are defunding the rest of the government…In Philly, police misconduct lawsuits have cost the city $60 million in the last year and a half. In NYC, the city has shelled our $2.2 billion to settle similar suits in the past decade.
+ The murder rate in Houston is on track to reach a five-year low, while fatal crashes could reach a five-year high by the end of the year. In the first half of 2024. the number of people killed in Houston traffic crashes outnumbered the city’s homicides.
+ I assume you heard about the “corn sweat” that fueled record humidity levels across the Midwest in August. Where’s all of that corn going? More than 40 percent of it is manufactured for biofuel, while 36% goes to animal feed. Much of the rest is exported.
+ In an attempt to track plastic recycling in Houston, Brandy Deason, now dubbed the James Bond of Plastic, dropped Apple AirTags in her recycling bin, which led her to find out that the city of Houston has collected 250 tons of plastic since 2022 and not recycled any of it. Most of it hasn’t even gone to the recycling center.
+ During a hearing on Thursday on the election interference case in DC:
Defense Counsel: Justice Thomas directed us to raise this issue…
Judge Chutkan interjects: “He directed you to do it?”
Defense Counsel: Well.. he didn’t direct us to…
+ Then a few minutes later this exchange took place…
Defense Counsel: That’s what SCOTUS called for in writing and I’m an originalist.
Judge Chutkan, raises her eyebrows: You may be an originalist but I’m a trial judge.
+++
+ First, they’ll come for the civil servants, then the professors…JD Vance on a podcast in 2021: “There is no way for a conservative to accomplish our vision of society unless we’re willing to strike at the heart of the beast. That’s the universities.” (Vance’s wife, mother-in-law and father-in-law were all university professors.)
+ JD Vance has also lashed out at “professional women” who put their careers above bearing children, claiming that their career choices put them on “a path of misery.” Vance’s wife, Usha, has three degrees, clerked for three federal judges, including John Roberts and Brett Kavanagh, and handled complex litigation and appeals for a top law firm. Sounds pretty miserable…
+ With the decriminalization of marijuana, binge drinking has declined significantly among men aged 18-25 (who spend $105 a month on alcohol) over the last 20 years.
+ Globally, infant mortality rates have plummeted over the last 50 years. falling by more than two-thirds, from around 10% in 1974 to less than 3% today. A recent study published in The Lancet estimates that 40% of this decline has been driven by increased access to crucial vaccines. Based on these figures, vaccines are estimated to have saved at least 150 million children over the last 50 years.
+ A study out of the University of Pennsylvania found that high school students in Turkey who had access to ChatGPT while doing practice math problems did worse on a math test compared with students who didn’t have access to ChatGPT.
+ Transit time between cities, if the US had high-speed rail lines:
NYC to Boston: 75 minutes
Dallas to Houston: 75 minutes
CHI to Minneapolis: 125 minutes
CHI to Toronto: 150 minutes
NYC to Montreal: 125 minutes
Phoenix to LA: 117 minutes
Vancouver to SEA to Portland: 90 minutes
ATL to Charlotte: 75 minutes
+ Every day it seems Elon Musk reveals a little more of his true character. This week he endorsed the idea that democracy can exist only under the control of “high-status males.”
+ They call it car bloat. While vehicles across most of the world are getting smaller and more efficient, the reverse is true in the US, where the size and weight of cars, trucks and SUVs are growing with lethal consequences on the highways. According to the Economist, “For every life that the heaviest 1% of SUVs and trucks save, there are more than a dozen lives lost in other vehicles.”
+ Steven Thrasher, whose vitally important book The Viral Underclass I quoted from in last week’s Roaming Charges about Kamala Harris’s disgusting defense of the use of unpaid prison labor to fight California’s wildfires, has been suspended from his teaching duties at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, while he’s being investigated for his actions during student-led anti-genocide protests on campus. Thrasher wrote on Twitter: “My fall LGBTQ reporting & virus classes were canceled & I’m not allowed to teach at Medill while I’m “investigated.” Whatever happens, I’ll be fine— like Medill, I “write boldly & tell the truth fearlessly”— but I’ll neither stay nor go quietly.” The humiliation is entirely Northwestern’s, not Steve Thrasher’s, who distinguished himself by defending students against a brutal crackdown by police…
+++
+ The second Russiagate is even more absurd than the first. The Biden-Harris Justice Department alleges that Russia funneled $10 million through RT to fund a Tennessee-based “content provider” called Tenet Media to distribute videos and commentary from some of the most ludicrous misfits in rightwing media: Tim Pool, Lauren Southren, Benny Johnson and Dave Rubin. The Russians asked their US asset to recruit Benny Johnson and Tim Pool to make some content and offered $2 m a year each. Johnson said he wanted $5 million. Pool, who apparently didn’t realize how deep his funder’s pockets were, demanded a mere $100,000 per episode to inanely inveigh against the wokeness of the US military.
+ According to the indictment, Tucker Carlson’s video of his visit to a Russian grocery store was apparently too over-the-top to be spread as Russian propaganda on its US-based outlets…
+ The day after the RT indictments were announced, Putin sarcastically (I presume) endorsed Kamala Harris, saying he liked her laugh: “She laughs so expressively and infectiously that it means that she is doing well.”
+ Ken Klippenstein: “Covert operations by RT employees…targeted millions of Americans as unwitting victims of Russia’s psychological warfare,” DOJ said in a press release. But the influence campaign generated fewer views than my Twitter account; and I’m just a guy!”
+ Yet more proof that the sanctions aren’t harming the Russian economy, if they can throw away millions on these comical cretins…
+ Speaking of Russia, Steven Segal is Lavrov’s new Humanitarian Affairs envoy?
+ James Gaddis, a cartographer in the Florida DEP Office of Park Planning, was fired after he leaked details on the DeSantis administration’s secret plans to add golf courses, pickleball courts and lodges at state parks. Gaddis said he felt compelled to act in order to “stop the madness.”
+ In Louisiana, the primary medication to treat life-threatening postpartum hemorrhaging is being pulled off emergency carts because of a new state law that reclassified misoprostol as a controlled dangerous substance…
+ Trump comes out for the legalization of recreational marijuana (as long as you don’t smoke it in public). How things have changed in the last two decades. As Cockburn and I reported in our biography of Al Gore, in 2000 the Big Al still wanted to jail cancer patients, like his own sister, who were using marijuana to offset the side effects of chemotherapy…
+ Trump may have succeeded in outflanking Harris on what should have been a slam-dunk issue for her. As I reported in last week’s Roaming Charges, the Biden-Harris DEA told the NPR station in Columbus, Ohio last week that it still reserves the right to arrest people on federal marijuana possession charges, even in states that have legalized recreational marijuana. Once a prosecutor, always a prosecutor.
+ Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson thinks the Great Depression was an economic false flag event: “The Great Depression was pretty well planned … I know it really sounds like a conspiracy theory. I don’t completely understand it, but I just feel it in my bones…” Don’t tell Ron, but Hamas did it!
+ Roberto Bolaño’s business card…(Poet and Slacker)
+ King Harald V of Norway: “Norwegians are girls who love girls, boys who love boys, and girls and boys who love each other. Norwegians believe in God, Allah, Everything and Nothing.”
+ Still the greatest correction note of all time…
Through the Smoke and Fiction of Books and Pages Burning
Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…
Metamorphosis: How Insects are Changing Our World
Erica McAlister & Adrian Washbourne
(Smithsonian Books)
Leaving the Twentieth Century: Situationist Revolutions
McKenzie Wark
(Verso)
Creation Lake: a Novel
Rachel Kushner
(Simon and Schuster)
Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this month…
Smoke and Fiction
X
(Fat Possum)
Roll With Me
Duke Robillard
(Stony Plain)
Baila Mi Son
Los Reyes 73
(Mr. Bongo)
Acquiescing to Our Own Enslavement
“We have become a civilization based on work itself. We have come to believe that men and women who do not work harder than they wish at jobs they do not particularly enjoy are bad people unworthy of love, care or assistance from their communities. It’s as if we’ve collectively acquiesced to our own enslavement.” – David Graeber
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