#fatal existential crisis occurred

[ankhbot]

Every Time We Say Goodbye.

Jadal - Meen Shaf Habibi | جدل - مين شاف حبيبي

[tempestofbenares]

When Idiot Savants Do Climate Economics

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has assumed Nordhaus is to be trusted. The integrated assessment models used at the IPCC are based on Nordhausian visions of adaptation to warming that only marginally reduces global gross domestic product. If future GDP is barely affected by rising temperatures, there’s less incentive for world governments to act now to reduce emissions.

Nordhaus’s models tell us that at a temperature rise somewhere between 2.7 and 3.5 degrees Celsius (˚C), the global economy reaches “optimal” adaptation. What’s optimal in this scenario is that fossil fuels can continue to be burned late into the 21st century, powering economic growth, jobs, and innovation. Humanity, asserts Nordhaus, can adapt to such warming with modest infrastructure investments, gradual social change, and, in wealthy developed countries, little sacrifice. All the while, the world economy expands with the spewing of more carbon.

His models, it turns out, are fatally flawed, and a growing number of Nordhaus’s colleagues are repudiating his work. Joseph Stiglitz, former World Bank chief economist and professor of economics at Columbia University, told me recently that Nordhaus’s projections are “wildly wrong.” Stiglitz singled out as especially bizarre the idea that optimization of the world economy would occur at 3.5˚C warming, which physical scientists say would produce global chaos and a kind of climate genocide in the poorest and most vulnerable nations.

A journal article published last year declared that Nordhausian integrated assessment models are “inadequate to capture deep uncertainty and extreme risk.” They fail to incorporate “potential loss of lives and livelihoods on immense scale and fundamental transformation and destruction of our natural environment.”

Nordhaus’s work doesn’t appropriately take into account either extreme risk or deep uncertainty.”

In other words, the economist who has been embraced as a guiding light by the global institution tasked with shepherding humanity through the climate crisis, who has been awarded a Nobel for climate costing, who is widely feted as the doyen of his field, doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Among most scientists, it’s lunacy to discuss optimization of anything anywhere when the globe hits even 2˚C warming. Climate researchers Yangyang Xu and Veerabhadran Ramanathan, in a widely cited 2017 paper, defined 1.5˚C warming as “dangerous” and 3˚C or greater as “catastrophic,” while above 5˚C was “beyond catastrophic,” with consequences that include “existential threats.” The late Will Steffen, a pioneering Earth systems thinker, warned alongside many of his colleagues that 2˚C was a critical marker. At 2˚C warming, we could “activate other tipping elements in a domino-like cascade that could take the Earth system to even higher temperatures.” Such “tipping cascades” could lead quickly to “conditions that would be inhospitable to current human societies,” a scenario known as hothouse Earth.

Drought and heat have already reduced global cereal production by as much as 10% in recent years, according to Steffen. “Food shocks are likely to get much worse,” he wrote in a 2019 piece co-authored with Aled Jones, director of the Global Sustainability Institute at Anglia Ruskin University. “The risk of multi-breadbasket failure is increasing, and rises much faster beyond 1.5˚C of global heating. … Such shocks pose grave threats — rocketing food prices, civil unrest, major financial losses, starvation, and death.” 

Climate change could exacerbate vulnerabilities and cause multiple, indirect stresses (such as economic damage, loss of land, and water and food insecurity) that coalesce into system-wide synchronous failures. … It is plausible that a sudden shift in climate could trigger systems failures that unravel societies across the globe.

What these scientists are describing is global civilizational collapse, possibly in the lifetime of a young or even middle-aged reader of this article.

According to the “Climate Endgame” report, the current trajectory of carbon emissions puts the world on track for a temperature rise between 2.1˚C and 3.9˚C by 2100. This is a horrific prospect. Earth systems analysts tell us that habitable and cultivable land in a 3˚C to 4˚C warming regime would be so reduced and ecosystem services so battered that the deaths of billions of people could occur in the next eight decades or less.

Kevin Anderson, professor of energy and climate change at the University of Manchester in the U.K. and Uppsala University in Sweden, asserts that “something like 10% of the planet’s population — around half a billion people — will survive if global temperatures rise by 4˚C.”

Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and a leading researcher on climate tipping points and “safe boundaries” for humanity, projects that in a 4˚C warmer world, “it’s difficult to see how we could accommodate a billion people or even half of that.”

By contrast, when Nordhaus looked at the effects of 6˚C warming, he did not forecast horror. Instead, we should expect “damages” of between 8.5 percent and 12.5 percent of world GDP over the course of the 21st century.

A 2016 study by economists David Anthoff, Francisco Estrada and Richard Tol of the University of Sussex offers one of the more egregious examples of Nordhausian nonsense. (Tol is one of Nordhaus’s protégés, and Nordhaus is listed as a reviewer.) The three academics boldly assert that shutdown of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, or AMOC — a pivotally important Earth system that loops warm equatorial water toward the Arctic and cold water back south — could have beneficial effects on the European economy.

Over the last several thousand years, the AMOC has functioned to keep Europe relatively warm in winter because of the warm water it draws northward from the equator. The slowing and eventual shutdown of this system could plunge Europe and broad parts of the Northern Hemisphere into extreme cold. Such a shutdown is a growing likelihood as glacial melt pours into the North Atlantic and alters the delicate balance of salt water and fresh water that drives the looping current. 

For Tol, Anthoff, and Estrada, however, collapse of one of the Earth systems that undergirds the climatic stability of the Holocene might be a good thing. “If the [AMOC] slows down a little, the global impact is a positive 0.2-0.3% of income,” they concluded. “This goes up to 1.3% for a more pronounced slowdown.” They argued that while climate heating cooks the rest of the world, European countries will benefit from a cooling effect of the current’s collapse.

This sunny assessment comes as a surprise to James Hansen, father of climate science, who has calculated that a massive temperature differential between the poles and the equator would occur with an AMOC shutdown, producing superstorms of immense fury across the Atlantic Ocean. According to Hansen, the last time Earth experienced those kinds of temperature differentials, during the interglacial Eemian era roughly 120,000 years ago, raging tempests deposited house-sized boulders on coastlines in Europe and the Caribbean. Waves from the storms were estimated to have surged inland to 40 meters (131′) above sea level.

Under these extreme conditions, what would happen to shipping lanes, coastal cities and ports, and trans-Atlantic traffic of all kinds? For the climate simpletons Tol, Anthoff, and Estrada, the question doesn’t come up. “It will be a helluva lot stormier on the North Atlantic, especially for Europeans,” Hansen told me in an email. His study team concluded that shutdown of AMOC “is in the cards this century, possibly by mid-century, with continued high emissions.”

It gets worse. Simon Dietz and his fellow economists James Rising, Thomas Stoerk, and Gernot Wagner have offered some of the most ignorant visions of our climate future, using Nordhausian math models. They examined the consequences to GDP of hitting eight Earth system tipping points that climate scientists have identified as existential threats to industrial civilization. The tipping points are as familiar as a funeral litany to anybody schooled in climate literature: loss of Arctic summer ice; loss of the Amazon rainforest; loss of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets; release of ocean methane hydrates; release of carbon in permafrost; collapse of the AMOC; and collapse of the Indian monsoon.

Dietz and friends came to the astounding conclusion that if all eight were tipped, the economic cost by 2100 would amount to an additional 1.4% of lost GDP on top of the roughly 8 to 12% that Nordhaus projected.

Think of this projection in commonsense terms: A negligible effect on world affairs when the Arctic during summer is deep blue rather than white; when the jungle of the Amazon is no longer green but brown savannah or desert; when in Greenland and the West Antarctic, white ice is barren rock. A transformation of immense proportions on the Earth’s surface, in the atmosphere, and in terrestrial biotic communities. Ocean methane hydrates have an energy content that exceeds that of all other fossil fuel deposits. Permafrost holds an amount of carbon roughly twice the current carbon content of the atmosphere. With the weakening or collapse of the AMOC, Europe could be plunged into conditions akin to the Little Ice Age, with drastic reduction of the land area suitable for wheat and corn farming. Increased variability of the Indian monsoon would jeopardize the lives of over a billion people.

“The claim that these changes would have effectively zero impact upon the human economy is extraordinary,” wrote Keen. The reality is that if all eight Earth system tipping points were reached, humanity would be in terrible trouble.

Nordhaus estimates that as economic activity heads poleward with warming, the massive reduction in GDP in the tropics will be offset by optimal adaptation in the Global North. “Massive reduction in GDP,” of course, is not explicitly understood by Nordhaus as food system collapse across the equator, followed by social collapse, mass death, wars, and biblical exoduses that produce cascading nonlinear effects drawing the world into a nexus of unknowns.

Andrew Glikson, who teaches at Australian National University in Canberra and advises the IPCC, has written about the coming era of mass human death, what he calls the Plutocene, the natural successor to the Anthropocene. Global governments, he charges, are “criminals” for ushering in the Plutocene in pursuit of short-term political and economic gain. I first reached out to him during the black summer of bushfires that raged across Australia in 2020. Glikson’s mood was foul then, and it has not gotten better since.

“The governing classes have given up on the survival of numerous species and future generations,” he told me, “and their inaction constitutes the ultimate crime against life on Earth.” Part of the reason for inaction is the false cheer that Nordhaus has spread with his math-genius, climate-idiot models.

[bigcountryrecycling]

7 causes of air pollution & what are the main air pollutants?

Introduction

Air pollution refers to the presence of harmful substances in the air, adversely affecting humans, animals, plants, and the environment. It poses significant health risks and contributes to environmental degradation on a global scale.

What is Air Pollution?

Air pollution occurs when the indoor or outdoor environment is contaminated by chemicals, physical substances, or biological agents that change the natural characteristics of the atmosphere.

What causes air pollution?

1- The Burning of Fossil Fuels

Burning fossil fuels releases significant amounts of carbon dioxide, a gas that alters the climate. Using dirty fuels like coal, gasoline, and diesel to power our cars, heat our homes, and run our industries contributes to an environmental and existential crisis. A recent study found that, in addition to harming our climate, the burning of fossil fuels is responsible for about eight million deaths annually.

2- Forest Fires

The size and frequency of wildfires are increasing due to climate change. These fires release significant amounts of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and fine particulate matter into the atmosphere, exacerbating climate change and increasing the likelihood of more forest fires. The resulting air pollution can lead to respiratory and cardiovascular problems.

3- Waste in Landfills

Landfill sites emit several toxic gases as bacteria break down the waste we dispose of, including ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, methane, and carbon dioxide. These gases not only produce unpleasant odors but also have significant health and environmental impacts. They contribute to the climate crisis, and even short-term exposure can cause respiratory problems, eye, nose, and throat irritation, headaches, and nausea. When we discard items, we contribute to this pollution, reminding us that nothing is truly disposable and that our actions have lasting consequences.

4-Fishing Fleets

When considering the environmental impact of our diets, we often focus on factory farming. However, the fishing industry also contributes significantly to air pollution. A study revealed that fishing boats trawling the ocean floor emit as much carbon dioxide as the entire aviation industry.

What are the main air pollution?

1-Carbon Monoxide

Carbon monoxide is a colourless, odorless gas that can be harmful, even fatal, when inhaled. It is produced when combustion processes are incomplete, which means that most forms of burning generate some carbon monoxide. Major sources include road transportation and industry. Home heaters, generators, barbecues, and cigarettes also pose significant risks. Short-term exposure to small amounts of carbon monoxide can cause dizziness, muscle pain, and headaches. Prolonged exposure or exposure to large amounts can lead to weakness, confusion, heart and lung issues, loss of consciousness, and even death.

2-Methane

Animal farming is the leading source of methane pollution, with emissions from animal waste and the digestive systems of cows, sheep, and goats contributing approximately 32 percent of human-caused methane emissions. Methane significantly contributes to the formation of ground-level ozone, a dangerous air pollutant, and is also a potent greenhouse gas.

3-Ozone

Ozone is a gas present both in the atmosphere and at ground level. In the atmosphere, it forms a protective layer that shields us from the sun's harmful ultraviolet rays. However, at ground level, ozone is harmful to both people and the environment. It is created through chemical reactions involving other pollutants. Globally, ground-level ozone contributes to hundreds of thousands of premature deaths and causes tens of millions of asthma-related emergency hospital visits each year.

4-Ammonia

The majority of ammonia pollution originates from animal farming, specifically from animal waste and the fertilizers produced from it. This pollution can be extremely harmful to sensitive habitats, damaging waterways and endangering aquatic life. Additionally, ammonia exposure can cause eye damage and, in severe cases, even death in humans.

What are the effects of air pollution?

1-Greenhouse Gases

One of the most severe impacts of air pollution is climate change. Burning fossil fuels and raising animals for meat, dairy, and eggs release significant amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. To safeguard our planet, we must alter our behaviours and practices.

2-Effect on Wildlife

Air pollution significantly harms the ecosystems that wild animals depend on. It can destroy vegetation and insects, creating a ripple effect that impacts all other life forms. Additionally, air pollution directly affects wild animals by disrupting their endocrine systems, causing organ damage, diseases, and even death. This is one of the many ways that farming animals negatively impacts wild animals.

3-Diseases

Air pollution contributes to numerous health conditions in people, such as stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), various cancers, asthma, and lower respiratory infections. Additionally, research indicates a connection between air pollution and type 2 diabetes, systemic inflammation, Alzheimer's disease, and dementia.

What are air pollution solutions?

1-Use Clean Energy

Consider switching to a clean energy provider that utilizes renewables such as wind and solar to power homes, avoiding the use of fossil fuels. Check out the available providers in your area to make an environmentally friendly choice for heating and lighting your home.

2- Use Public Transportation

The combustion of fossil fuels is contributing significantly to the deterioration of our climate. By reducing our reliance on them, we can better safeguard our planet. Opting for public transportation wherever feasible is a crucial step in this direction.

3-Conserve Energy

Conserving energy is crucial for safeguarding air quality, necessitating minor adjustments in our daily routines. This includes actions like turning off lights, avoiding standby mode for devices, lowering thermostat settings, reducing driving distances, air drying clothes, improving home insulation, opting for renewable energy providers, and minimizing resource wastage by reconsidering consumption of animal products like meat, milk, and eggs. These changes collectively contribute to substantial environmental benefits.

4-Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle

Reduce, reuse, and recycle are three key principles aimed at minimizing the environmental impact of human activities. "Reduce" refers to decreasing the amount of waste generated by using less and being more efficient in resource consumption. "Reuse" involves finding new ways to use items instead of throwing them away, thereby extending their lifecycle. "Recycle" means processing materials to make new products, reducing the need for raw materials and lowering energy consumption compared to manufacturing from scratch. Together, these actions promote sustainability by conserving resources, reducing pollution, and minimizing landfill waste.

Conclusion

Air pollution is a complex issue stemming from various sources, including vehicle emissions, industrial activities, agricultural practices, deforestation, household chemicals, waste disposal, and energy production. The main pollutants—carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, particulate matter, volatile organic compounds, ammonia, and ozone—pose serious health risks and environmental challenges. Addressing these problems requires collective action and sustainable practices. That's where Big Country Recycling steps in, providing eco-friendly recycling solutions to help mitigate pollution and promote a cleaner, healthier environment for everyone. Choose Big Country Recycling, and be a part of the solution today!  Recycling is a sustainable practice. If you have any scrap and unused metal such as Copper or Aluminum and you are looking for a good Copper Recycling or Aluminum recycling services, please contact Big Country Recycling. Contact them today to learn more about their Recycling Services or to get a quote for your materials. Or call +1 325-949-5865.

Source: https://metalrecyclingsanangelotx.weebly.com/blog/7-causes-of-air-pollution-what-are-the-main-air-pollutants

[livethinking]

A new world: a year of pandemic

The pandemic spread last year and occurred ‘till today has scared us, made us all victims of a shared existential vertigo, shaking the foundations of those were our convictions. In other words, it has shown us that values and norms – i.e. the culture –, which political rhetorics tried to preserve, are now problematic, that means they’re not able anymore to answer those questions future asks, to find a solution to the serious issues of the present. Pandemic has shown us, with painful cruelty, that the ways with which we were dealing with the (environmental, economical, financial, social and cultural) crisis weren’t the right ones; on the contrary, they were worsening the already fatal condition the whole world was throwing itself into. However, at the same time, the pandemic has given us time, slowing down our lives (more and more hectic due to the needs of the capitalistic system, whose first value is the consume, so that a production based on quantities), to turn our look onto what’s happening and making a deeper judgement on the events, on problems and issues of our time, and then find solutions, gather energies to make a change in history and courage to take also definitive decisions, to sacrifice our system of ideas and values we, choose which of them to save and which taking from other normative systems, if not even cultural. Like the victory of the democratic Joe Biden against the republicans Donald Trump at the 2020 elections that suggests us a more and more distancing of society from populist ideas and strengthen of minoranze in politics; like Black Lives Matter manifestations as consequences to the murder of George Floyd, an Afro American citizen, committed by two police agents, and an almost global mobilisation in supporting the now famous Movement for the defence of Black people rights and battles against structural racism, developed as emulation of the protest occurred in the US and in some Foreign nations, such as France and Italy. There were environmental actions as well, the total lockdown of the last spring demonstrated how nature can regenerate very quickly when polluting industrial productions and the extensive use of gasoline cars stop; indeed, Countries like Italy has been planning projects for a more sustainable development, such as governmental bonus for the rebuild of housing buildings in order to reduce the impact on the environment, that are also a response to a more and more unrecoverable economic crisis. Surely this is little compared to upheavals provoked by the pandemic, to the getting worse of already serious conditions, to the tragic contingencies that the whole global population is facing. In many Countries, the percentage of people on the verge of poverty increased, many people were fired and many enterprises closed down definitely. In other Countries have been coup-d’état or, like In Italy, occurred serious government crisis.

The election of Joe Biden is due not just to the ability of the new president to grado those that are the current needs of a nation like the US, but also due to the incapacity of populism (the ideology behind Donald Trump’s politics) to read the reality and consequently to plan strategy to solve the most urgent issues, as a worsening economic crisis and improving sanitary facilities in order to deal with Covid-19 pandemic. Incapability hidden with galvanising the gut feelings, that increase the hate against minorities, which are already consider the scapegoat for problems caused actually by an inefficient politics or by issues occurring in every Western society. This hate against minorities that wasn’t prosecuted by institutions and Trump’s administration (and thus justified) brought those minority communities to ally and strengthen each other, and so influencing the election of the last Fall. The culmination of this sensation of insecurity and inadequacy perceived by minorities, especially by the black people, was the great manifestation of June 2020 as consequence to the killing of George Floyd perpetrated by a white policeman, not last, neither the first murderer of this kind; indeed this one was just another in that long list of black American citizen killed by the police. Murders that are rarely prosecuted and seldom the perpetrators are brought in a tribunal. A scary phenomenon that has increased especially during Trump, just because the former president wasn’t able to condemn these action of racist violence, and that has lead a popular indignation, since it’s clear and evident these crimes is provoked by systematic hate, and not as a tragic consequence to the necessity to protect the people. These behaviours aren’t tolerable anymore, especially after years and years of battle for black people’s and other minorities’ rights and this unacceptability leads to Black Lives Matter movement manifestations bursted in biggest cities of the US and the world. Manifestations that were threatened by Donald Trump through the idea to bring the army to stop those that were just pacific riots. Thus, if we suppose these manifestations, along with the distress lived by the other ethnic, sexual and gender minorities because of a governement whcih closed the eyes before these clearly episodes of systematic hate, brought to the victory of Joe Biden, to these we can add the battle of Jacey Abrams, who proved that were racial reasons for exclude people from voting. Her battles helped more people from a minority to vote, who preferred, as polls proved, the democratic candidate because Joe Biden, just taken office, aims to support better the minorities, with the collaboration of Kamala Harris, the first black woman as Vice President , who has always highlited his will to support to the battles for civil rights and create a more equal society during his electoral campaign.

Black lives matter. And much.

The election was also affected by the inefficiency of the past administration to handle the spread of the virus, sharing anti-scientific beliefs and a lack of strategy for strengthening the medical and scientific field while, on the contrary, Joe Biden has already planned.

In other words, this global pandemic revealed the real face of populism, a political and ideological movement that gives voice to the most visceral feeling of the people, capable to convince through a fallacious rhetoric but actually it can’t hold the reins of a nation which is irremediably changing and such ideology doesn’t manage to read the mutation of our societies (so that’s mute and deaf to the new generation). Moreover, the tendency of populism to go against the so-called technicians provoked not few troubles: many government of this kind didn’t follow the suggestions of the scientific community to contain the contagion. A tendency that was followed by tragic consequences, as thousand of deaths and many people who got a permanent damage to lungs, and that teaches us to give more attention, even mediatic, to scientists, researchers and the research for a vaccine shows us the quick progress of medicine and science made, if institutions support them. Institutions that prefer to sacrifice the scientific research, more and more necessary, in order to meet other economic requirements in a world based on epistemological thought and that demands more technical and sanitary innovations. Next to the issue of scientific research, there is that of technology: Countries like Italy and others have noticed they need a more efficient national telecommunication system and give support so that everyone can use and get electronic devices and a good internet to follow lessions and working from home. 2020 and Covid-19 pandemic showed us Greta Thunberg was right: it’s needed to slow down and reduce the environmental impact. The strict lockdown of the last Spring proved how quickly nature can regenerate itself and so that it’s needed little to deviate our path to the irreversible process of deterioration of the planet. This time, it’s the nature itself that gave us a second chance.

Coronavirus pandemic has been having a great impact on our lives, on our society, culture and economy. It has pushed us to reevaluate our values and believes, to reviews our strategies and ideologies. It gave us the time to slow down, give each other a look, observe the world and it’s thousands of societies, think about our era and helped us figure out what would have been dangerous for the development for a more right and equal world, our mistakes and gave a chance to remedy. These were, are and will be painful, tragic, scary moments and we are all victims of a serious existential crisis because we’re aware that we aren’t going to be same as before, that the world is different and in our future this will be evident. We are in a new world and we’re different as well.

Viviana Rizzo @livethinking

Article in Italian here

[nonatowers]

good evening my precious peeps. tis i, rosie, rising from the grave in these crazy times to check up if y’all are still holding up? good work, go fetch yourselves some motivational cookies, it’s been long 12 months for us. 

so while lazily scrolling the tags again, i didn’t see much new stuff except the same old things (which, tbh, is what my anxiety needs rn so thanks). yet this is not what i am up to talk about again so let’s cut to the chase:

my personal input to the whole “s 3 is total trash“ debate. 

first of all, as long as people don’t bother each other about their preferences, i couldn’t care less.

people are entitled to their own opinions and it’s fine like that. that’s how discussions are made and encourage us to share more ideas and dwell deeper into matters. however, some of my friends that recently watched psycho pass (because I need more people to talk about it and convinced them to giving it a try. though I had them all skip s2 out of worry to loose them there ahah) have kept asking me in regards of the commonly used argument against s3, namely being the lack of literary input. and as a local lit/phil major, this is up my alley to answer I suppose? i’ll try to keep it short and watered down.

it has to be made very clear that season 3 is a whole lot more political in its core themes, which is a major motif in all things cyberpunk. futuristic utopias/dystopias always have a heavy correlation with the political doings of past and present, and while we know painfully little about the past (leading up to sybil’s establishment, more precisely) we have been given insights about the present - namely an ex-idol with extremely questionable traits being voted for governor, despite publicly being outed for just a face behind an AI that does all the talking. basically, it’s gone to hell. we been knew. (don’t even ask how my political science friend felt about it, she can write a 90 page essay about what political trash fire is about to break loose). so, whether it was s3 or not, sooner of later the psycho pass world had to talk about the politics of their world- japan isn’t just made out existential crisis and talking weapons, after all. 

i do not know how many active readers in terms of philosophy are in this fandom, but as a major in it, i should tell you guys that the most likely reason as to why there apparently isn’t much philosophy going around in s3 is because of those very politics. political philosophy is a big topic in general, but in s3 the aspect of artificial intelligence is added into the mix and as of now, there isn’t that many reliable texts, dare I say?, in the regards of AI in politics, from a philosophic point of view. at least as of now. the discussion itself has started and is ongoing, and a few publications have been made already (i personally only know of the german ones, feel free to share whatever international texts you guys have your hands on), however, if we look at it historically and consider that AI hasn’t been taken that serious until a decade and a little more ago (around the time siri and co became a daily thing) we might have to wait a little longer for more publications to pop up. majority of what is out right now is hypothetical talks from several years ago, which isn’t up-to-date in most cases and hence kinda hard to use for a fictional society in 2120. and if you read through the more timeless ones, you’ll realise that a good portion of what those publications talked about has been kinda talked about in s1 already. and from a story telling pov, there is only so much you can put things on repeat. everybody that expects discussions from s1 to reoccur to the same extent as when they occurred first, i have bad new for you; the chances are kinda slim. s1 itself was planned to be a one-time thing anyways, which is why the discussions that had been begun there were also sort of finished there, leaving some space for viewers to think further for themselves. you cannot expect them to recycle all that again without being accused of unoriginality (again). and with the digital age becoming more and more established in our current days, i think it was a safe guess to go with the political themes for the recent season.

as a lit major and lover, lemme tell y’all, I wanna rip apart s3 for many annoying mistakes/illogical moves in storytelling they did, but alas, who wants to read a raging rosie these days? as a phil major though i think it should be said that what s3 did was pick a topic that is currently in discussion and on the uprising globally, and on top of that, this is going from the european/american scene. i do not know how the japanese philosophy scene is working with this topic as of now, so its possible that while going for the political route and the will-gibson-reminiscent AI theme, they simply had too little input to work into the season. at least without avoiding major controversies (bcs people tend to steer away from an epoch’s early texts for the longest time due to possible radical views that, if disagreed with fatally, can turn into digging your own grave which, as a show that has to make profit to continue being funded, is the very thing you should NOT do).

with this input, you guys go ahead and merrily continue your discussions (respectfully, please!). and let me know if you want to read a raging rosie go aggretsuko on s3’s literary composure and how it drives me up the wall.

with that said, rosie’s out! stay safe everyone!

[crushedbyhyperbole]

Close Call

A/N:  An @the-ss-horniest-book-club​ Drunk Drabble prompt from @littledarlinhavefaithinme​ thank you again ladies of the HBC <3 this is probably more angsty that I originally thought but I started writing, got about ten words in and the angst-o-rama occurred XD  And I think I got a bit weird with the narrative... let me know if it’s kooky.

Warnings:  themes that some may find disturbing related to loss, pain, terror, existential crisis on the horizon etc. Also.. sex, yay! 18+ only please!

Detective Sergeant Barnes can count on one hand the number of times he’s been terrified in his life. Not just scared or riding the adrenaline-fuelled fear of fight or flight, but really truly terrified.  In fact, he can count them on three fingers. The three fingers he currently has buried in the wet heat of your quivering womanhood, massaging your sweet spot until you’re climbing the walls in ecstasy.

But I digress.

The first time he felt it, it’s as rookie.  A GSW to the shoulder left him in agony and bleeding to death in a gutter on a street he’ll never forget.  The price of life - four days in a coma and almost cost him an arm.  The same arm that’s pressing your hips down against the mattress while he devours you, licking and sucking until you cry out, almost agonised by the intensity he brings.

But I’m drifting again, aren’t I?

The second time he was terrified, it wasn’t for himself.  Steve, his best friend in forever, took fatally ill.  He’d always had gammy lungs and a crappy immune system but Bucky thought it was the end of the line for them.  He sat by that little punk’s bed, watching while the drugs did nothing and the Doctors were baffled by how bad the kid got and how quickly.  Bucky’s heart broke into a million pieces as he grieved the friend he thought he’d lose.  The very same heart that is filled with so much love for you that it overflows into all aspects of his life with you.  Even now, lay between your legs, drawing prayers to God and Jesus from you with his worship, he’s reminding you what it feels like to be alive.  Reminding himself.

But that’s nothing. Not compared to this…

The third time Bucky felt the icy hooks of terror was today.  Coming off the graveyard shift with his partner Sam, he’d been on surveillance all night when the call came through to his phone: hit and run.  As a homicide detective, this wasn’t unusual, only the victim was still alive.  You were still alive, but the details were sparse.

All the bonds that held his heart together melted and froze at the same time.  That tightness in his chest, the panic, the crawling terror under his scalp.  Sam had drove to the hospital because Bucky was a mess.  His body forgot how to make tears, almost forgot how to breathe for fucks sake.  And there you were, sat on a gurney in your running clothes with your legs dangling over the sides, smiling at the nurse who was looking you over.  Smiling!

He tore the curtain back and was at your side in seconds, breathless not just from running.  That’s when the tears came, both yours and his, and as you slumped in his embrace you let your brave face slip and succumbed to what would be one hell of an adrenaline come down.

You could barely talk, tears flowing every time you tried to tell him what happened.  So Bucky held you in between visits from the nurse, kissed you gently everywhere he could, and stroked your hair.  He had to prove to himself that you were still with him, had to fill his senses with you because the alternative was to go find that fucking driver and rip them limb from limb.

When you were finally released, Bucky carried you to the car and from there he carried you to your bed. He took great care to be gentle as he disrobed you, laying kisses over every inch of your skin.  He needed you to know how terrified he was without saying the words; he didn’t want to give them power over either of you, instead letting his desire to worship you and your continued existence flow through him.

It’s this desire that drives him now to chase every dark thought from every shadowy corner of your mind, to fill your whole being with the golden glow that is his love for you, to drown the ache of potential loss in the depths of pleasure.  And as he takes those three fingers, on which he’d counted his true terror, and replaces them with his cock, your joint sighs carry you towards the release you both seek.  Sweat-slicked skin and stuttering breaths adhering you together, not wanting to let more than a sliver of air between you.

Never wanting to be apart.

[notwiselybuttoowell]

When we try to project how the climate might change in the future, we confront three big uncertainties: how much greenhouse gases humans will emit, how the accumulation of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere might change as a result, and how sensitive atmospheric temperatures are to this.

On the first of these we have some reason for modest optimism. The world has made progress on slowing the rise in emissions over the past decade. Global carbon dioxide emissions have still been rising, but only at half the rate they were in the 2000s. Use of coal – the most CO2-intensive fossil fuel – peaked in 2013 and has been declining since. We have succeeded in making clean energy cheaper, and low-carbon sources now provide more energy than coal worldwide. Nightmare scenarios where global emissions triple by the end of the century now seem far less likely as we see them near a plateau.

At the same time, there is an ever-growing gap between where we are today and the emissions reductions needed to limit warming to globally agreed-upon targets. CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere over time, so reducing emissions does not stop the world from warming. To stop global temperatures from rising, our emissions need to go all the way down to zero.

The news on climate sensitivity is more mixed. Scientists have long struggled to pin down exactly how much the Earth will warm if the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere were to double, and have had some recent success on that front. The bad news is that we can effectively rule out low levels of warming, so we can no longer trust to luck and hope that we can still let CO2 build up and warming will be small. The slightly better news is that very high levels of warming also seem less likely than previously thought – but this is a less certain result.

Feedbacks may also be important. Today, about half of our CO2 emissions are absorbed by the oceans and land vegetation, but this could weaken as the oceans become warmer, and as drier soils, more frequent fires and thawing permafrost result in more CO2 being released. Many of these processes are included in our climate models, but it is still unclear how fast these changes will occur and what the overall effect on the build-up of CO2 in the atmosphere will be.

Current policies adopted by countries put us on track for very roughly around 3C (5.4F), of planetary heating by the end of the century, compared to the time before the industrial revolution. But heating could well be substantially higher – or lower – than this best estimate. Also, these global average numbers are not the full picture: land regions, where we all live, will heat around a third faster than the planet as a whole, and the polar regions faster still.

Uncertainty is not our friend. Because expected damages increase faster the hotter it gets, we stand a real risk of catastrophic impacts if we end up with an unlucky combination of a highly sensitive climate and faster accumulation of CO2. We will also have fewer options to stop or reverse this by the time it happens. These uncertainties are why it’s all the more important to control the one thing we can: our future emissions.

Humans are remarkably adaptable, using technology to live comfortably in some of our planet’s most extreme environments. It is very unlikely that global heating – at least by itself – could pose an existential risk to our species. At the same time, our ability to adapt rapidly to changes in our environment depends in part on access to technology and the resources to adopt it. The climate crisis is better thought of as an existential risk multiplier: in a world characterised by extreme poverty and inequality, conflict and weak institutions it could help push some societies over the brink. The severity of climate impacts depends not just on our emissions but on how well we tackle political challenges.

We also need to acknowledge that the natural world largely lacks our adaptive capacity. The climate crisis is already wreaking havoc on fragile ecosystems such as coral reefs. Unmitigated, it could drive many of the world’s species to extinction as they are unable to survive changing temperatures. Deforestation, pollution and other environmentally damaging activities make the natural world more vulnerable to disruptions from climate change. Addressing them can help make nature more resilient.

This crisis will not be solved quickly or easily, and overheated polemics are not helping. While it won’t be good for us, it also won’t be the literal end of the world. But the apocalypse is a needlessly high bar to take action. Though most of the challenges we overcome as a species are not existential risks, they are nonetheless critically important. We see a real risk that dwelling on doom may serve to obstruct climate action rather than motivating it, promoting fatalism and further polarisation. There is also evidence that fear is not a very effective tool to engage people around the climate. But dismissing the severity of climate impacts and the real possibility of worst-case outcomes is also an extremely dangerous gamble. The risks are serious enough, and we need a common understanding of the urgent need to tackle them.

[onlineindus1]

Islamabad: 8  Octtober 2019: While only two nuclear weapons have been used in war so far – at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II – and nuclear stockpiles are down from their the peak they reached in the Cold War, it is a mistake to think that nuclear war is impossible. In fact, it might not be improbable.

The Cuban Missile crisis was very close to turning nuclear. If we assume one such event every 69 years and a one in three chance that it might go all the way to being nuclear war, the chance of such a catastrophe increases to about one in 200 per year. Worse still, the Cuban Missile crisis was only the most well-known case.

The history of Soviet-US nuclear deterrence is full of close calls and dangerous mistakes. The actual probability has changed depending on international tensions, but it seems implausible that the chances would be much lower than one in 1000 per year. A full-scale nuclear war between major powers would kill hundreds of millions of people directly or through the near aftermath – an unimaginable disaster. But that is not enough to make it an existential risk.

Bioengineered pandemic

Natural pandemics have killed more people than wars. However, natural pandemics are unlikely to be existential threats: there are usually some people resistant to the pathogen, and the offspring of survivors would be more resistant. Evolution also does not favor parasites that wipe out their hosts, which is why syphilis went from a virulent killer to a chronic disease as it spread in Europe.

Unfortunately we can now make diseases nastier. One of the more famous examples is how the introduction of an extra gene in mousepox – the mouse version of smallpox – made it far more lethal and able to infect vaccinated individuals. Recent work on bird flu has demonstrated that the contagiousness of a disease can be deliberately boosted.

Right now the risk of somebody deliberately releasing something devastating is low. But as biotechnology gets better and cheaper, more groups will be able to make diseases worse.

Most work on bioweapons have been done by governments looking for something controllable, because wiping out humanity is not militarily useful. But there are always some people who might want to do things because they can. Others have higher purposes. For instance, the Aum Shinrikyo cult tried to hasten the apocalypse using bioweapons beside their more successful nerve gas attack. Some people think the Earth would be better off without humans, and so on.

The number of fatalities from bioweapon and epidemic outbreaks attacks looks like it has a power-law distribution – most attacks have few victims, but a few kill many. Given current numbers the risk of a global pandemic from bioterrorism seems very small. But this is just bioterrorism: governments have killed far more people than terrorists with bioweapons (up to 400,000 may have died from the WWII Japanese biowar program). And as technology gets more powerful in the future nastier pathogens become easier to design.

Superintelligence

Intelligence is very powerful. A tiny increment in problem-solving ability and group coordination is why we left the other apes in the dust. Now their continued existence depends on human decisions, not what they do. Being smart is a real advantage for people and organisations, so there is much effort in figuring out ways of improving our individual and collective intelligence: from cognition-enhancing drugs to artificial-intelligence software.

The problem is that intelligent entities are good at achieving their goals, but if the goals are badly set they can use their power to cleverly achieve disastrous ends. There is no reason to think that intelligence itself will make something behave nice and morally. In fact, it is possible to prove that certain types of superintelligent systems would not obey moral rules even if they were true.

Even more worrying is that in trying to explain things to an artificial intelligence we run into profound practical and philosophical problems. Human values are diffuse, complex things that we are not good at expressing, and even if we could do that we might not understand all the implications of what we wish for.

Software-based intelligence may very quickly go from below human to frighteningly powerful. The reason is that it may scale in different ways from biological intelligence: it can run faster on faster computers, parts can be distributed on more computers, different versions tested and updated on the fly, new algorithms incorporated that give a jump in performance.It has been proposed that an “intelligence explosion” is possible when software becomes good enough at making better software. Should such a jump occur there would be a large difference in potential power between the smart system (or the people telling it what to do) and the rest of the world. This has clear potential for disaster if the goals are badly set.

The unusual thing about superintelligence is that we do not know if rapid and powerful intelligence explosions are possible: maybe our current civilisation as a whole is improving itself at the fastest possible rate. But there are good reasons to think that some technologies may speed things up far faster than current societies can handle. Similarly we do not have a good grip on just how dangerous different forms of superintelligence would be, or what mitigation strategies would actually work. It is very hard to reason about future technology we do not yet have, or intelligences greater than ourselves. Of the risks on this list, this is the one most likely to either be massive or just a mirage.

This is a surprisingly under-researched area. Even in the 50s and 60s when people were extremely confident that superintelligence could be achieved “within a generation”, they did not look much into safety issues. Maybe they did not take their predictions seriously, but more likely is that they just saw it as a remote future problem.

Nanotechnology

Nanotechnology is the control over matter with atomic or molecular precision. That is in itself not dangerous – instead, it would be very good news for most applications. The problem is that, like biotechnology, increasing power also increases the potential for abuses that are hard to defend against. The big problem is not the infamous “grey goo” of self-replicating nanomachines eating everything. That would require clever design for this very purpose. It is tough to make a machine replicate: biology is much better at it, by default. Maybe some maniac would eventually succeed, but there are plenty of more low-hanging fruits on the destructive technology tree.

The most obvious risk is that atomically precise manufacturing looks ideal for rapid, cheap manufacturing of things like weapons. In a world where any government could “print” large amounts of autonomous or semi-autonomous weapons (including facilities to make even more) arms races could become very fast – and hence unstable, since doing a first strike before the enemy gets a too large advantage might be tempting.

Weapons can also be small, precision things: a “smart poison” that acts like a nerve gas but seeks out victims, or ubiquitous “gnatbot” surveillance systems for keeping populations obedient seems entirely possible. Also, there might be ways of getting nuclear proliferation and climate engineering into the hands of anybody who wants it.

We cannot judge the likelihood of existential risk from future nanotechnology, but it looks like it could be potentially disruptive just because it can give us whatever we wish for.

Unknown unknownsThe most unsettling possibility is that there is something out there that is very deadly, and we have no clue about it.The silence in the sky might be evidence for this. Is the absence of aliens due to that life or intelligence is extremely rare, or that intelligent life tends to get wiped out? If there is a future Great Filter, it must have been noticed by other civilisations too, and even that didn’t help.

Whatever the threat is, it would have to be something that is nearly unavoidable even when you know it is there, no matter who and what you are. We do not know about any such threats (none of the others on this list work like this), but they might exist.Note that just because something is unknown it doesn’t mean we cannot reason about it. In a remarkable paper Max Tegmark and Nick Bostrom show that a certain set of risks must be less than one chance in a billion per year, based on the relative age of Earth.You might wonder why climate change or meteor impacts have been left off this list.

Climate change, no matter how scary, is unlikely to make the entire planet uninhabitable (but it could compound other threats if our defences to it break down). Meteors could certainly wipe us out, but we would have to be very unlucky. The average mammalian species survives for about a million years. Hence, the background natural extinction rate is roughly one in a million per year. This is much lower than the nuclear-war risk, which after 70 years is still the biggest threat to our continued existence. The availability heuristic makes us overestimate risks that are often in the media, and discount unprecedented risks. If we want to be around in a million years we need to correct that.

[ankhbot]

12/05/2024 12:09PM

انا مغفل

[big-sky-crypto]

The COVID-19 Outbreak. Are We Overreacting?

I am writing this on March 18, 2020, and it almost seems as if the world is coming to a halt. Schools are closing, businesses are closing, events are being canceled, there is panic buying of food and above all Toilet paper (what the hell is up with that?), people are sheltering in place. It seems like everyday life is grinding to a halt.

So what is the cause of all of this Panic? A virus called COVID-19. Okay, so what is COVID-19?

COVID-19 is a respiratory illness that can spread from person to person. COVID-19 is a new strain of the coronavirus which has been around for almost 60 years. The first case of COVID-19 occurred in China on November 17, 2019, but Chinese authorities did not acknowledge the new virus for several weeks. And Chinese authorities did not publicly concede there was human-to-human transmission until January 21, 2020, when there were already approximately 400 cases.

Fast forward to today and there are over 81,000 cases in China, over 7000 cases here in the U.S. and almost 210,000 cases worldwide. Thankfully new cases in China have been slowing since the peak on Feb. 12, 2020, but for most of the rest of the world, the number of new cases is still increasing. I realize that it is still early in this outbreak but if we look at the number of cases versus the world or country population the number of cases is still minuscule. The number of cases to date is only 0.0027% of the world's population and here in the U.S., the percentage is 0.0021%. The fatality rate in people who have symptoms of the disease is estimated to be about 1.4% which is higher than the common flu virus but for the majority of people, the symptoms will be fairly minor.

So the reason that I am asking if we are overreacting is because of the impact this outbreak is having on the U.S. and global economies. The U.S. stock markets are down from the peaks in February to their lows today anywhere from 28.5% to 32.5%. The oil market is getting absolutely crushed which is down from its peak in January about 64%. Bond yields are now at historic lows and even the price of gold which initially was rising is now falling. As a result of people being afraid to travel the travel industry is in the process of being destroyed. The airline industry has seen many flights being grounded and huge staff layoffs. Some analysts are saying that if this lasts more than one or two quarters the airline industry may never fully recover. The impact on the cruise industry seems to be even worse, the viral outbreak has become an existential crisis for the industry. All of this combined threatens to push the U.S. and global economies into a recession at best and possibly even as a worse case into a depression.

So what I am asking is are the actions being taken here in the U.S. and around the world Justified? And if so at what cost? I wrote an article (link below) back in September of 2018 about if another financial crisis was on the horizon. My concerns at the time were the dangers of mounting U.S. corporate debt and what type of event could push the economy into a recession which could then lead to another financial crisis. One of the events I mentioned was a black swan event, my worry now is that this outbreak could well prove to be that event. Like I said earlier it may be way too early to make assumptions about how bad COVID-19 might get relative to a regular flu outbreak or if the steps we are taking are too drastic. But I still have to wonder in the end what the cost of all of this is going to be, in lives, in jobs and how much damage this is going to do to the U.S. and global economies.

https://www.bigskycrypto.com/post/could-there-be-another-financial-crisis-on-the-horizon

I hope everyone stays safe and healthy.

Donald Hancock

www.bigskycrypto.com

[abrahamjrijo]

The Cure for Sanitized Hands

I

I sit here at my home in Kerala, where the weather could kill coronaviruses and, where I can barely make it to the end of the day. I read jittery WhatsApp messages and nonchalantly scroll down the bottomless Facebook feed. Lazy days actually, but feels like a gallows humour. I move from newspaper articles to scientific journals about the epidemic and then as a reprieve to a book and to memes, like an old man trying to get across the room clutching one furniture then the other. It is depressing—but this time, not the cosmic variety of depression to which I am often prone to.

I mean, the situation is grim— the reality of it.

From what I gather, an epidemic like this happened in 1918, when a less-racist Spanish flu swept the world. Death was more than the numbers of the two great wars put together-- between 50 and 100 million people.

“Think about that”, says the Guardian writer,  implying that a pandemic is twice as deadly as a World War III, if it were to happen, and adds that it would reshape history like no war would. Did you know that Gandhi was affected by the flu in 1918? And the poet TS Elliot too?

The Coronavirus is deadly, because it is deceptive: many would show mild to no symptoms but would act as carriers. In fact, we are actually fighting an enemy we don’t fully see. The fatality rate for India with a feeble medical infrastructure will be quiet high. Even if a lock-down would bring down the rate of fatality, by taking the pressure off the healthcare system, we may have less intense ‘second-wave’ once the lock-down lifted.

The situation is unprecedented in the living memory.

Another Guardian article quotes 107-year-old Joe Newman of Florida, one of few remaining survivors the Spanish flu, telling NBC News, “There are those of us who say, well, this too shall go away. And it will. But at what cost, at what expense?”

His words are terse and sobering.

Those who survive the pandemic, the economy will kill. All major economies are going to a slump. With careers, and along with with-it people’s identities at stake, many will begin to ask existential questions. It would be a time many will increasingly turn to spirituality for succour, not necessarily of the established religions.

 II

Amid all the cacophony, one thing wriggles out its head—the communal nature of this crisis, that it is not a matter of me “staying safe”, but a matter of we as a nation helping each other out.

I know, this sounds like a cheesy government PR campaign. But like all truths, it is simple and when I realized it made me say, “How could I have missed it.”

Washing hands with soap and avoiding crowded places are analogous to driving safe, it can only take you so much. When you obey the traffic rules you make the road safe, not just for yourself alone. And when you drive rashly, well you get it.

But what I want to get at is this:  a person drives with a high beam on a single lane road and thinks that this would make him see better and consequently, helps him to be safer. But we know that this is not the case: the high beam blinds the driver of the oncoming vehicle and makes the road less safe. Similarly, much of our precautions often work against us.

Case point: panic buying.

In the nearby towns, people jostle each other in supermarkets to stockpile on what they think would make them comfortable during the doomsday, should it come. Police had to intervene and the queue stretched out into the pavement.

Fear is its fuel. For a moment imagine that the doomsday has arrived. And like we feared, there is scarcity. And then, people who don’t have enough to eat will resort to looting. How those of us who have hoarded, leaving nothing for others claim to have better behaved that the those who have looted? Can we say with honesty, “I brought the stuff with my money”, like in ordinary circumstances?  All semblance of culture and civility will be stripped off at this point. In fact hoarding not only doesn’t work for anyone, but it works against everyone.

In another instance, at a live chicken shop, they grabbed whatever chicken they could, skinned it and handed it over to those who would first raise their hand into the crowded shop. It feels like a society in the throes of anarchy.

This frenzied buying would kill humanity in us before the disease could strike our body.

One thing is clear from this: people are more scared of an apocalyptic end like in the movies than actually contracting the disease. If they had feared the disease more, they would have avoided crowding the shops.

 III

One of the first cases of corona in Kerala was detected in a small town called Ranni, some 30 odd kilometres from my home. A family had returned from Italy, the epicentre of the crisis, and didn’t report of their travel history. They were asymptomatic and went about their business as usual. They and a neighbor of theirs, were later confirmed to have the disease. All their secondary and tertiary contacts of around 800 people have been isolated and those who showed symptoms tested. However, others in the area who even didn’t have any contact with the infected people are being shooed away from shops, like dogs. These people, have no symptoms nor were in the primary or secondary contact, are starving.

We have returned from Bangalore in the neighbouring state of Karnataka. In the city there is no incidence of local transmission, yet we informed local authorities and have isolated ourselves till everyone can safely assume we haven’t smuggled the virus into the state. Our neighbours, when they came to know that we have arrived, on the sly informed the health officials about the “suspects” in the neighbourhood. The officials came and found that we are already in their records and have not stepped outside since we came.  

Well, if you didn’t get it, this was an insult to us, who were too scrupulous to have taken the situation lightly.

One more story: in our neighbourhood, a person who has come from the middle east was in home isolation. He had asked his wife and children to move out and quarantined himself after informing the authorities. His neighbours informed the health officials that he was seen roaming around, when in fact security camera footage installed in his home proved otherwise.

Part fear, part malice, part ignorance—a crisis not always brings the best in people, especially if heroic acts cannot have an audience.

In the famous lecture delivered by Canadian author Sheila Heti in March 2006 at New York, (the title of which sound cruelly rhetorical at the moment) ‘Why Go Out?’, she talks about how you can quit people, like you would quit smoking.

During this time of “social distancing” many concede that friends are equally bad, sometimes even worse.

Except, people are not cigarettes; they are not what we use to get a false sense of satisfaction. Heti demonstrates this through a charade game her friend organised in London, as an alternative to concerts, bar and house parties. The aim of the game is not to get together and have “fun”, or learn the game, but to get “good” at it.

To be good at charades one needs to have a better sense of what the other person is trying to communicate for which empathy, interpersonal skills, creativity, being a good communicator and also requires you to be a good listener. These are not exclusive charade skills, but essential life skills. Essentially, what it says is that if you are not good at charades you are not a good person. By getting good at the game you naturally transform your psyche.

It demolishes what we intuitively think about friendship—as a way for us to unwind, a means to celebrate our miserable birthdays and anniversaries, a crutch when we lose our jobs and to have conversations that make us feel good.

We could stay at our homes, smelling of hand sanitizer. We would be healthy, we can watch TV eat our favourite food and think how nice we are unlike the people who went around spreading the disease. Hati says,

“We could be demi-gods in our little castles, all alone, but perhaps, at heart, none of us here wants that. Maybe the only cure for self-confidence and courage is humility. Maybe we go out in order to fall short… because we want to learn how to be good at being people… and moreover, because we want to be people.

“Social distancing” does not mean we “quit people.” If we do, we do it at our risk. It is a pandemic and it should be viewed not just as a matter of personal hygiene. Personal hygiene is important primarily not because you don’t want to get the flu, but you don’t want others to get it. Unless we see the well being of other people as our well being we will not succeed in overcoming the crisis Think about the health workers who keep this monster from swallowing world all of a sudden. Just think.

When we deal with people there is the risk of getting the disease, being rejected, and most of all it confronts our own stubborn believes about our own goodness. But the risks we take far out-weighs the benefit we reap.

So, what can be done? Obey the official guidelines, trust your government when it says essential commodities will be made available—don’t fall for panic buying, don’t go out unless it is absolutely necessary, wash hands… should I go on?

Then, above all care for others. Call people who are in isolation, provide food or whatever you can provide, yet do it all in a safe way.

Here are a few more tips of getting yourself ready, I lifted from the website of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Create a household plan of action:

1.    Talk with the people who need to be included in your plan. Meet with household members, other relatives, and friends to discuss what to do if a COVID-19 outbreak occurs in your community and what the needs of each person will be.

2.    check icon

3.    Plan ways to care for those who might be at greater risk for serious complications. There is limited information about who may be at risk for severe complications from COVID-19 illness. From the data that are available for COVID-19 patients, and from data for related coronaviruses such as SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, it is possible that older adults and persons who have underlying chronic medical conditions may be at risk for more serious complications. Early data suggest older people are more likely to have serious COVID-19 illness. If you or your household members are at increased risk for COVID-19 complications, please consult with your health care provider for more information about monitoring your health for symptoms suggestive of COVID-19. CDC will recommend actions to help keep people at high risk for complications healthy if a COVID-19 outbreak occurs in your community.

4.    Get to know your neighbours. Talk with your neighbours about emergency planning. If your neighbourhood has a website or social media page, consider joining it to maintain access to neighbours, information, and resources.

5.    Identify aid organizations in your community. Create a list of local organizations that you and your household can contact in the event you need access to information, health care services, support, and resources. Consider including organizations that provide mental health or counselling services, food, and other supplies.

6.    Create an emergency contact list. Ensure your household has a current list of emergency contacts for family, friends, neighbours, carpool drivers, health care providers, teachers, employers, the local public health department, and other community resources.

[kendrixtermina]

Thank you for the rant that put into words everything I couldn't! Only 1 thing to add, onto the point about ascribing ulterior motives to fans of "objectively bad" characters - YES, that's it, and also partly why the Nazi/coloniser/imperialist/etc. accusations get thrown around! As if people can't like things they hate without being stupid/evil. (Also, offtopic but I'm glad I'm not the only one comparing Dimitri and Sayaka lol, the Holy Tomb scene reminded me strongly of Sayaka vs Elsa Maria.)

It’s basically the same plot to an extent (for all that there are also differemt subplots going on in each one):

Heroic, noble character sets super high expectations of themselves and defines themselves in opposition to “selfish” people, breaks and loses all hope or self-preservation when they can’t live up to those impossible standards, eventually slide into self-hate and vindictiveness and there’s a lingering sense of tragedy because they were once good and noble. 

In both cases, you have black and white thinking as a main character flaw, and a breaking point occurring when the character, being a 3D human being, can’t think of themselves as “wholly good” anymore - because the only alternative is “wholly bad” and all you have left to do is to direct your badness at other bad people. In the end most ppl can’t live on hate alone and need something to sustain themselves. 

Personally I’ve never bought the interpretation that the girls were “punished for their hidden selfishness” - rather, though they definitely have responsibility for their actions, they were tricked to begin with. Those aren’t mutually exclusive. The fault was not so much that they were “selfish” but that they a) acted out of incomplete self-knowledge and b) ought to forgive themselves for making human mistakes. 

Perhaps Claude could be compared to Kyoko then in that he claims to be completely self-interested to hide from the vulnerability that his inner idealism would create but though acting like a total gremlin early on eventually ends up acting heroically in the latter part of the story. Though he never becomes quite as completely ruthless/jaded as early series Kyoko, nor does Edelgard ever get quite as nihilistic as Homura, though she also has some degree of resigned fatalism, hard-boiled coldness in the face of resignation and an attitude that “no one will believe me about the truth and no one will understand me”  because she starts out knowing a lot of stuff that the other’s don’t causing her actions not to make much sense to them. (A2 from Nier:Automata would be another good parallel: “I didn’t betray [Organization the MCs work for] - it was US who were betrayed!” She starts out knowing some, but not all, about how everything in the setting is fake, causing one of the MCs to get a fixation on killing her when he’s thrown into an existential crisis. But unlike Dimitri, 9S actually finds out that everything is fake. )

With Homura that’s her main thing (and she kinda wants to save Madoka against her will without ever understanding what matters to her), whereas with Edelgard it’s only ever an undercurrent while on the surface she totally wants to defy destiny and though she does shrug off losses as inevitable when they happen, she never stops trying to prevent them. (even on non-Cf routes she does stuff like agree to talk with Dimitri and offer to let Claude go at Gronder)

Of course you could also cast Byleth as homura since she’s the stoic one with the timestravel power, but Byleth is much more of a team player.

XD The parallel kind of popped into my head since both stories involve time travel shenanigans, a complete shattering of the assumptive world, and a plot that first looks like a classical example of the genre but has more and more subversions the more you find out about what’s going on behind the scenes. 

[elenawesley20-blog]

Covid-19, the Climate Crisis and Lockdown – a chance to end the war with nature

With the coronavirus, we are truly attempting to relieve the vengeance blow from nature. It's a second to be unassuming and understand our finitude in a wondrous and vast common request.

Covid-19 has pushed an effectively powerless and emergency ridden worldwide economy over the edge. Enormous worth has been deleted from slamming financial exchange costs. Numerous observers are discussing the arrival of monetary conditions like the extraordinary budgetary accident of 2007-2009. The most impressive nations on the planet from China to the US have come to a standstill.

 Coronavirus Live Updates

This pathogen, conceivably from fragile animals like a pangolin or a bat, has incited the most noticeably awful worldwide pandemic since the Spanish influenza (1918-1920), which slaughtered 100-million individuals. Passing rates are going up all around. Conservative patriots in Europe and the USA have been befuddled as this infection has hopped supremacist outskirt systems, and tainted all populaces. Residents are not, at this point worried about their supremacist messages, but instead about how to endure.

Governments the whole way across the world are seized with the test of ensuring their populaces, at any rate that is the thing that it appears given the individuals focused talk. The geo-governmental issues of Covid-19, overwhelming the whole globalized world in its quick spread, is additionally a shot over the bow of carbon private enterprise. First class utilization of extraordinary creatures, at significant expenses, in Wuhan, China released the quick and deadly retribution of nature.

This doesn't imply this is a "Chinese infection" as the supremacist Donald Trump has recommended. We are on the whole vulnerable and are attempting to live through the dread, loss of motion and dangers brought by this pandemic. Overnight, employments have vanished, paycheques have contracted, friends and family are in basic wellbeing circumstances battling for their lives and yearning is thumping on the entryway of many. Social insurance frameworks, debilitated and commodified through many years of marketisation, have or will be overpowered. 

However exactly the same elites that caused the issue are not worrying about the concern of the results of their activities. For atmosphere equity governmental issues, these shameful acts are not new. World class use and utilization of petroleum products is connected straightforwardly to extraordinary climate stuns, for example, heatwaves, dry seasons, floods and twisters, for example, which sway those most defenseless the hardest. However there is no ramification for those mindful and the petroleum derivative industry, carbon-dependent states, and the rich carbon-based shoppers proceed just as atmosphere science doesn't exist.

'Dark Swan' occasion, or declining foundational emergency

In the business world, Covid-19 will in general be diminished to a "dark swan occasion". An abrupt or unanticipated occurring, with extraordinary result and defended afterward. The thought was at first promoted by Nassim Nicholas Taleb's five volumes on vulnerability including the renowned Black Swan, which has been portrayed as one of the most well known books since World War II. While in his work, the idea has a more extravagant philosophical establishing, it has become some portion of ordinary hazard the board talk. Business hazard investigations missed the probability of a Covid-19 pandemic and it surely was not a worry. Its event, be that as it may, can't be clarified as a dark swan occasion.

It spread from a "wet market" including sorted out wrongdoing coops, connected to shadowy worldwide poaching, and pirating systems that take wild animals from their living spaces and spot them on first class menus. Insatiable Chinese private enterprise, with its craving for assets and catching markets, similar to the West, comprehends nature as a site of removing esteem; nature must serve the juggernaut of aggregation.

South Africans are currently acquainted with the hungers and reach of this private enterprise because of the demolition of our rhino populace simply for their horns. Wet markets additionally exist in different pieces of South and East Asia, and have not been limited, leaving open the potential outcomes of new floods of pandemics.

For a long time, disease transmission specialists and tree huggers have been worried about the general wellbeing results of such markets, given that creature to human transmission of fatal infections is a well established truth and has been involved in avian influenza (from winged creatures), MERS (from camels) and ebola (monkeys), for example. These creatures are likewise damaged and kept in dangerous conditions.

Atmosphere researchers have just cautioned mankind that further warming of the Arctic, for example, won't just discharge destructive ozone depleting substances, for example, methane, yet additionally pathogens that have been solidified into ice sheets. Like Covid-19, the compounding atmosphere emergency and its worldwide stuns, are not dark swan occasions, however hazardous fundamental emergency inclinations delivered by a hard-wired rationale dependent on the duality of private enterprise versus nature. Science has given us understandings and alerts, but then the worldwide entrepreneur framework continues driving us towards mischief and decimation.

Carbon free enterprise and forced aggregate self destruction

A world drove by the individuals who spot benefit above human and non-human life, is putting all of us in peril. We are not given a decision as the eco-cidal rationale of worldwide private enterprise pulverizes the conditions that support life. Our planetary hall – biosphere, seas, woods, land and water sources – are on the whole being commodified and obliterated to make a couple of affluent.

On a planetary scale, we are surviving a forced aggregate self destruction. As neoliberalism gets tyrant and transforms into the second happening to totalitarianism to protect the abundance of the couple of, it is uncovering a basic actuality: It's not learning exercises about the damage it is exacting. Rather, it needs to guard no matter what an actual existence devastating framework.

Today, without precedent for quite a while, I cried. I felt everything within me: the profundity and enormity of my torment, my distress, my despondency, my mourn, my concern, my disarray, my yearning, my gloom – I felt everything and sobbed, sobbed for the trouble I've kept covered up so since quite a while ago, sobbed for the friends and family I miss so beyond a reasonable doubt, sobbed for the affliction and vulnerability of the world, sobbed for reasons I don't comprehend.

A large number of us sob for the aggregate self destruction we are surviving. This isn't about victimhood, yet about understanding the profundity of emergency and the direness to defeat this widespread test of our eradication. It is a cognizant knowing established in profound wells of agony, tension and existential enduring developing in commonness among the youthful as a result of the aggregate self destruction being forced by financialised carbon free enterprise.

Lockdown and the ANC's epidemiological neoliberalism

Covid-19 has tossed us into a condition of special case. From an atmosphere equity viewpoint, this is a dress practice for a world that breaks 2 and 3 degrees Celsius in which atmosphere stuns on a worldwide scale risk life-supporting socio-biological frameworks, for example, nourishment, water and wellbeing frameworks through insufferable temperatures. Awakening at that point is past the point of no return.

This is the basic reason of atmosphere equity activism, given that atmosphere science is mentioning to us what

[lodelss]

The Case for Letting Malibu Burn

Mike Davis | Ecology of Fear | Metropolitan Books | September 1998 | 20 minutes (5,921 words)

  “Homes, of course, will arise here in the thousands. Many a peak will have its castle.”

—John Russell McCarthy, These Waiting Hills (1925)

  Late August to early October is the infernal season in Los Angeles. Downtown is usually shrouded in acrid yellow smog while heat waves billow down Wilshire Boulevard. Outside air-conditioned skyscrapers, homeless people huddle miserably in every available shadow.

Across the Harbor Freeway, the overcrowded tenements of the Westlake district—Los Angeles’s Spanish Harlem—are intolerable ovens. Suffocating in their tiny rooms, immigrant families flee to the fire escapes, stoops, and sidewalks. Anxious mothers swab their babies’ foreheads with water while older children, eyes stinging from the smog, cry for paletas: the flavored cones of shaved ice sold by pushcart vendors. Shirtless young men—some with formidable jail-made biceps and mural-size tattoos of the Virgin of Guadalupe across their backs—monopolize the shade of tienda awnings. Amid hundreds of acres of molten asphalt and concrete there is scarcely a weed, much less a lawn or tree.

Thirty miles away, the Malibu coast—where hyperbole meets the surf—basks in altogether different weather. The temperature is 85°F (20 degrees cooler than Downtown), and the cobalt blue sky is clear enough to discern the wispish form of Santa Barbara Island, nearly 50 miles offshore. At Zuma surfers ride the curl under the insouciant gazes of their personal sun goddesses, while at Topanga Beach, horse trainers canter Appaloosas across the wet sand. Indifferent to the misery on the “mainland,” the residents of Malibu suffer through another boringly perfect day.

Needless to say, the existential differences between the tenement district and the gilded coast are enormous at any time. But late summer is the beginning of the wildfire season in Southern California, and that’s when Westlake and Malibu suffer a common lot: catastrophic fire.

According to previous estimates, Westlake (including adjacent parts of Downtown) has the highest urban fire incidence in the nation: one of its two fire stations was inundated by an incredible 20,000 emergency calls in 1993. Some tenements and apartment-hotels have continuous fire histories dating back to their construction in the early twentieth century. The notorious Hotel St. George, for instance, experienced fatal blazes in 1912, 1952, and 1983. Moreover, almost all of the deadly tenement fires in Los Angeles since 1945 have occurred within a one-mile radius of the corner of Wilshire and Figueroa, Downtown.

Malibu, meanwhile, is the wildfire capital of North America and, possibly, the world. Fire here has a relentless staccato rhythm, syncopated by landslides and floods. The rugged 22-mile-long coastline is scourged, on the average, by a large fire (one thousand acres plus) every two and a half years, and the entire surface area of the western Santa Monica Mountains has been burnt three times over the twentieth century. At least once a decade a blaze in the chaparral grows into a terrifying firestorm consuming hundreds of homes in an inexorable advance across the mountains to the sea. Since 1970 five such holocausts have destroyed more than one thousand luxury residences and inflicted more than $1 billion in property damage. Some unhappy homeowners have been burnt out twice in a generation, and there are individual patches of coastline or mountain, especially between Point Dume and Tuna Canyon, that have been incinerated as many as eight times since 1930.

At least once a decade a blaze in the chaparral grows into a terrifying firestorm consuming hundreds of homes in an inexorable advance across the mountains to the sea.

In other words, stand at the mouth of Malibu Canyon or sleep in the Hotel St. George for any length of time and you eventually will face the flames. It is a statistical certainty. Ironically, the richest and poorest landscapes in Southern California are comparable in the frequency with which they experience incendiary disaster. This was emphasized tragically in 1993 when a May conflagration at a Westlake tenement that killed three mothers and seven children was followed in late October by 21 wildfires culminating on November 2nd in the great firestorm that forced the evacuation of most of Malibu.

But the two species of conflagration are inverse images of each other. Defended in 1993 by the largest army of firefighters in American history, wealthy Malibu homeowners benefited as well from an extraordinary range of insurance, land use, and disaster relief subsidies. Yet, as most experts will readily concede, periodic firestorms of this magnitude are inevitable as long as residential development is tolerated in the fire ecology of the Santa Monicas.

On the other hand, most of the 119 fatalities from tenement fires in the Westlake and Downtown areas might have been prevented had slumlords been held to even minimal standards of building safety. If enormous resources have been allocated, quixotically, to fight irresistible forces of nature on the Malibu coast, then scandalously little attention has been paid to the man-made and remediable fire crisis of the inner city.

* * *

From the beginning fire has defined Malibu in the American imagination. In Two Years Before the Mast, Richard Henry Dana described sailing northward from San Pedro to Santa Barbara in 1826 and seeing a vast blaze along the coast of José Tapia’s Rancho Topanga Malibu Sequit. Despite—or, as we shall see, more likely because of—the Spanish prohibition of the Chumash and Tong-va Indian practice of annually burning the brush, mountain infernos repeatedly menaced Malibu through the nineteenth century. During the great land boom of the late 1880s, the entire latifundio was sold at $10 per acre to the Boston Brahmin millionaire Frederick Rindge. In his memoirs, Rindge described his unceasing battles against squatters, rustlers, and, above all, recurrent wildfire. The great fire of 1903, which raced from Calabasas to the sea in a few hours, incinerated Rindge’s dream ranch in Malibu Canyon and forced him to move to Los Angeles, where he died in 1905.

From the time of the Tapias, the owners of Rancho Malibu had recognized that the region’s extraordinary fire hazard was shaped, in large part, by the uncanny alignment of its coastal canyons with the annual “fire winds” from the north: the notorious Santa Anas, which blow primarily between Labor Day and Thanksgiving, just before the first rains. Born from high-pressure areas over the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau, the Santa Anas become hot and dry as they descend avalanche-like into Southern California. The San Fernando Valley acts as a giant bellows, sometimes fanning the Santa Anas to hurricane velocity as they roar seaward through the narrow canyons and rugged defiles of the Santa Monica Mountains. Add a spark to the dense, dry vegetation on such an occasion and the hillsides will explode in uncontrollable wildfire: “The speed and heat of the fire is so intense that firefighters can only attempt to prevent lateral spread of the fire while waiting for the winds to abate or the fuel to diminish.”

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Less well understood in the old days was the essential dependence of the dominant vegetation of the Santa Monicas—chamise chaparral, coastal sage scrub, and live oak woodland—upon this cycle of wildfire. Decades of research (especially at the San Dimas Experimental Forest in the San Gabriel Mountains) have given late-twentieth-century science vivid insights into the complex and ultimately beneficial role of fire in recycling nutrients and ensuring seed germination in Southern California’s various pyrophytic flora. Research has also established the overwhelming importance of biomass accumulation rather than ignition frequency in regulating fire destructiveness. As Richard Minnich, the world authority on chaparral brushfire, emphasizes: “Fuel, not ignitions, causes fire. You can send an arsonist to Death Valley and he’ll never be arrested.”

A key revelation was the nonlinear relationship between the age structure of vegetation and the intensity of fire. Botanists and fire geographers discovered that “the probability for an intense fast running fire increases dramatically as the fuels exceed twenty years of age.” Indeed, half-century-old chaparral—heavily laden with dead mass—is calculated to burn with 50 times more intensity than 20-year-old chaparral. Put another way, an acre of old chaparral is the fuel equivalent of about 75 barrels of crude oil. Expanding these calculations even further, a great Malibu firestorm could generate the heat of three million barrels of burning oil at a temperature of 2,000 degrees.

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“Total fire suppression,” the official policy in the Southern California mountains since 1919, has been a tragic error because it creates enormous stockpiles of fuel. The extreme fires that eventually occur can transform the chemical structure of the soil itself. The volatilization of certain plant chemicals creates a water-repellent layer in the upper soil, and this layer, by preventing percolation, dramatically accelerates subsequent sheet flooding and erosion. A monomaniacal obsession with managing ignition rather than chaparral accumulation simply makes doomsday-like firestorms and the great floods that follow them virtually inevitable.

For a generation after Rindge’s death, his widow, May, struggled to keep the family Shangri-la isolated and intact in the face of state attempts to push a highway through the rancho. Like one of the iron-fisted heroines played by Barbara Stanwyck, the so-called Queen of the Malibu closed the ranch roads in 1917, strung barbed wire along the perimeter, and posted armed fence-riders with orders to “shoot to kill.” In one episode during the 1920s, Rindge cowboys provoked a tense confrontation with deputy sheriffs after driving away a road survey crew at gunpoint. Hysterical newspaper headlines warned of “Civil War in Peaceful Southern California!”

But the pressure during the 1920s boom to open the coastal range to speculative subdivision was unrelenting. In the hyperbole of the era, occupation of the mountains became Los Angeles’s manifest destiny. “The day for the white invasion of the Santa Monicas has come,” declared real estate clairvoyant John Russell McCarthy in a booklet published by the Los Angeles Times in 1925. In anticipation of this land rush, the county sheriff had been arresting every vagrant in sight and putting them to work on chain gangs building roads through the rugged canyons just south of Rancho Malibu. (Radical critics at the time denounced this system as “deliberate real-estate graft” meant only to enhance land values in mountain districts “which the population of this city does not even know exists.”)

Widow Rindge, in any event, would not be allowed to stand in the way of “the march of adventuring Caucasians,” as McCarthy put it. After one of the most protracted legal battles in California history, the court granted the state right-of-way through Rancho Malibu. Opened to traffic in 1928, the Pacific Coast Highway gave delighted Angelenos their first view of the magnificent Malibu coast and introduced a potent new source of ignition—the automobile—into the inflammable landscape.

The indefatigable May Rindge continued to fight the road builders and developers in the courts, but in the end the costs of litigation forced her to lease choice parts of Malibu beachfront to a movie colony that included Jack Warner, Clara Bow, Dolores Del Rio, and Barbara Stanwyck herself. The colony’s unexpected housewarming was a lightning-swift wildfire that destroyed 13 new homes in late October 1929. Exactly a year later, walnut pickers in the Thousand Oaks area accidently ignited another blaze, which quickly grew into one of the greatest conflagrations in Malibu history.

*The 1930 Decker Canyon fire was a worst-case scenario involving 50-year-old chaparral and a fierce Santa Ana. Faced with a five-mile front of towering flames, 1,100 firefighters could do little except save their own lives. As the firestorm unexpectedly wheeled toward the Pacific Palisades, there was official panic. County Supervisor Wright, his nerves shaken by a visit to the collapsing fire lines, posted a hundred patrolmen at the Los Angeles city limits to alert residents for evacuation. Should the “fire raging in the Malibu District get closer,” he gasped, “our whole city might go.” Ultimately, this apocalypse (which may have given Nathanael West the idea for the burning of Los Angeles in his novel Day of the Locust) was avoided—no thanks to human initiative—when the fickle Santa Ana abruptly subsided.

In hindsight, the 1930 fire should have provoked a historic debate on the wisdom of opening Malibu to further development. Only a few months before the disaster, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr.—the nation’s foremost landscape architect and designer of the California state park system—had come out in favor of public ownership of at least 10,000 acres of the most scenic beach and mountain areas between Topanga and Point Dume. Despite a further series of fires in 1935, 1936, and 1938 which destroyed almost four hundred homes in Malibu and Topanga Canyon, public officials stubbornly disregarded the wisdom of Olmsted’s proposal for a great public domain in the Santa Monicas. The county of Los Angeles, for example, squandered an extraordinary opportunity in 1938 to acquire 17,000 acres of the bankrupt Rindge estate in exchange for $1.1 million in delinquent taxes. At a mere $64 per acre, it would have been the deal of the century.

A monomaniacal obsession with managing ignition rather than chaparral accumulation simply makes doomsday-like firestorms and the great floods that follow them virtually inevitable.

Instead, in December 1940, an impecunious and heartbroken May Rindge was forced to put her entire empire on the auction block. Potential buyers were advised to make “an early selection” of “ocean-front lots, sites for villas, hotels, golf clubs, estates, beach and yacht clubs, income and business lots, small summer home places, ranchitos, 100–640-acre ranchos, and acreage for further subdivision.” The disconsolate Queen of the Malibu died two months later.

During the Second World War—severe drought years on the West Coast—hundreds of firewatchers were sent into the Southern California mountains to guard against rumored Axis saboteurs. A few months after the watchers were withdrawn, 150 Malibu homes were incinerated in another November fire. Yet this new disaster failed to discourage a postwar migration of artists, printers, book-dealers, poets, screenwriters, and architects (including Olmsted himself)—many of very modest means, some seeking to escape the scrutiny of McCarthyism—who envisaged Malibu as Carmel south. In an engaging memoir of this period, UCLA librarian Lawrence Clark Powell described a genial way of life devoted to Mozart and beachcombing.

He also provided a classic account of the onslaught of the terrible firestorm of Christmas week 1956, which, burning its way to the sea, retraced the path of the 1930 blaze.

The wind was still savage when we went to bed at ten, the sky swept clear, aglitter with stars, Anacapa flashed its warning light. The cypresses, pines and eucalyptuses were noisier than the surf. Cats’ fur threw sparks when stroked. We slept in spite of the sinister atmosphere.

I woke abruptly at four to see “a fierce glow in the sky.… God, the whole face of the mountain was burning, in a long line just below the summit, and moving toward us on the wind. Fear dried my mouth. I knew doom when I saw it.”

A Forest Service analysis of this disaster, which killed one person and destroyed one hundred homes, stressed the impossible challenge of combating such erratic and untamable natural forces.

Malibu fires combine most known elements of violent, erratic and extreme fire behavior: fire whirls, extreme rates of spread, sudden changes in speed and direction of fire spread, flashovers of unburned gases complicated by intense heat and impenetrable smoke held close to the ground.

Indeed the conflagration, which coincided with a waxing of Cold War anxieties, had unexpected political repercussions. “If the government could not defeat wildfires in the Santa Monicas,” critics asked, “how would it deal with possible nuclear holocausts?” Accordingly the Eisenhower administration acknowledged the Malibu blaze as “the first major fire disaster of national scope,” and Congress—more concerned with the credibility of a vast civil defense establishment than with the tragedy of local homeowners—debated how to provide “complete fire prevention and protection in Southern California.” (Large Malibu fires, moreover, would later be used by researchers to model the behavior of nuclear firestorms.)

According to fire historian Stephen Pyne, the Malibu blaze also marked the transition from the traditional forest fire problem to a “new fire regime” characterized by the “lethal mixture of homeowners and brush.” This artificial borderland of chaparral and suburb magnified the natural fire danger while creating new perils for firefighters who now had to defend thousands of individual structures as well as battle the fire front itself. “Whereas it was often remarked that chaparral, particularly that composed largely of chamise, is a fire-climax community, it is now joked that the same is true of the Southern California mountain suburb.”

Ultimately the 1956 fire—followed by two blazes, one month apart, in 1958–59 that severely burned eight firefighters and destroyed another hundred homes—proved the beginning of the end for bohemian Malibu. A perverse law of the new fire regime was that fire now stimulated both development and upward social succession. By declaring Malibu a federal disaster area and offering blaze victims tax relief as well as preferential low-interest loans, the Eisenhower administration established a precedent for the public subsidization of firebelt suburbs. Each new conflagration would be punctually followed by reconstruction on a larger and even more exclusive scale as land use regulations and sometimes even the fire code were relaxed to accommodate fire “victims.” As a result, renters and modest homeowners were displaced from areas like Broad Beach, Paradise Cove, and Point Dume by wealthy pyrophiles encouraged by artificially cheap fire insurance, socialized disaster relief, and an expansive public commitment to “defend Malibu.”

By declaring Malibu a federal disaster area and offering blaze victims tax relief as well as preferential low-interest loans, the Eisenhower administration established a precedent for the public subsidization of firebelt suburbs.

In the absence of fire-risk zoning of the sort that Olmsted had earlier advocated, the only constraint on development was the limited supply of water for firefighting and domestic consumption. The completion of a trunk water line, connecting Malibu to Metropolitan Water District reservoirs, was the signal for a new land rush. The county’s Regional Planning Commission promptly endorsed developers’ wildest fantasies by authorizing a staggering 1,400 percent expansion of the Malibu population over the next generation: from 7,983 residents in 1960 to a projected 117,000 in 1980. Although the California coastal acts of 1972 and 1976, under the populist slogan “Don’t Lock Up the Beach!” eventually slowed this real estate juggernaut (as well as squelching such nightmarish proposals as a Corral Canyon nuclear power plant and an eight-lane freeway through Malibu Canyon), the urbanization of the Malibu coast—Los Angeles’s “backyard Big Sur”—was a fait accompli.

Yet, even as they were opening the floodgates to destructive overdevelopment, county and state officials were also turning down every opportunity to expand public beach frontage (a miserable 22 percent of the total in 1969). Nor did they show any interest in creating a public land trust in the mountains, which were now entirely under private ownership, right down to the streambeds. Consequently, most of Malibu remained as inaccessible to the general public as it had been in the Rindge era. (For people of color, moreover, it was absolutely off-limits.) As historians of the coastal access battle put it: “The seven million people within an hour’s drive of Malibu got Beach Boys music and surfer movies, but the twenty thousand residents kept the beach.”

Returning for a final look, UCLA librarian Powell bitterly decried the aristocratization of his beloved coast:

In a feverish buying and selling of land, the coast has become utterly transformed and unrecognizable. Each succeeding house, bigger and grander, takes the view of its neighbors in a kind of unbridled competition.… Once lost, paradise can never be regained.… Developers have bulldozed the Santa Monicas beyond recovery.

The Malibu nouveaux riches built higher and higher in the mountain chamise with scant regard for the inevitable fiery consequences. The next firestorm, in late September 1970, coupled perfect fire weather (drought conditions, 100-degree heat, 3 percent humidity, and an 85-mile-per-hour Santa Ana wind) with a bumper crop of combustible wood-frame houses. According to firefighters, the popular cedar shake roofs “popped like popcorn” as a 20-mile wall of flames roared across the ridgeline of the Santa Monicas toward the sea. With the asphalt on the Pacific Coast Highway ablaze and all escape routes cut off, terrified residents of the famed Malibu Colony took refuge in the nearby lagoon. Firebrands fell like hellish rain on the beach, and day became night under the gigantic smoke pall. Coalescing with another blaze in the San Fernando Valley, this greatest of twentieth-century Malibu firestorms ultimately took 10 lives and charred 403 homes, including a ranch owned by then-governor Ronald Reagan.

Furious property owners—ignorant of the true balance of power between fire suppression and chaparral ecology—denounced local government for failing to save their homes and demanded new, expensive technological “fixes” for Malibu’s wildfire problems. “Elected officials, acutely sensitive to Malibu’s national prominence in political fund-raising, were quick to oblige. A celebrated example occurred in the late 1970s when the Malibu Colony was being pounded by the heaviest surf in a quarter-century. Larry Hagman, Dallas’s J. R. Ewing, is reported to have told Jerry Brown, the governor of California: “Jerry, do something. Goddammit, we’re in real trouble. Get your ass down here!” In short order, Malibu was declared a disaster area and National Guardsmen were helping sandbag Hagman’s—and sometimes Brown date Linda Ronstadt’s—homes.

Meanwhile, developers—racing to stay ahead of proposed “slow growth” coastal legislation—redoubled their subdivision efforts. The subsequent boom only provided more fuel for the three successive “Halloween” fires that consumed homes in October 1978, 1982, and 1985. The first two blazes both began in Agoura and roughly followed the route of the 1956 fire through Trancas Canyon, while the third repeated the itinerary of the 1930 Decker Canyon conflagration.

The 1978 fire, which consumed million-dollar homes in the Broad Beach area (where Powell had lived in the more humble 1950s), also set a new speed record: the fire crossed 13 miles of very rugged terrain in less than two hours (the 1970 fire had taken twice the time). One eyewitness described how the rampaging fire front “turned thousands of wild rabbits into balls of flaming fur that darted insanely about, only to start new fires at the spots where they fell.” The surviving beasts—domestic pets and wild animals alike—“mingled in chaos with human evacuees along the beach at Point Dume while oblivious surfers rode the waves.” Traumatized Malibu residents, also battered by disastrous floods and landslides in 1978 and 1980, could be forgiven for imagining that nature was getting angrier at them.”

* * *

A Brief Postscript:

When most of us build or buy a home, we carefully appraise the neighborhood. In Malibu the neighborhood is fire. Fire that revisits the coastal mountains several times a decade. In the past sixty years, ten of these frequent events have turned into all-consuming firestorms. The latest conflagration, the Woolsey Fire, has incinerated 1,500 homes and killed at least three people. It started in dry grasslands just south of Simi Valley, the site of the notorious trial of Rodney King’s assailants, then crossed a freeway to ignite dense coastal sage vegetation on the northern flank of the Santa Monica Mountains. The range’s deep canyons, perfectly aligned with the seasonal Santa Ana Winds, once again as bellows, accelerating the fire’s rush to the coast where it burned beach homes. The large number of residences lost attests not only to the ferocity of the conflagration but also to the amount of new construction since the 1993 firestorm.

Why more mansions in the fire-loving hills? Because of a perverse fact: after every major California blaze, homeowners and their representatives take shelter in the belief that if wildfire can’t be prevented, nonetheless, its destructiveness can be tamed. Thus the recently incorporated City of Malibu and the County of Los Angeles responded to the 1993 disaster with aggressive regulations about brush clearance and fire-resistant roof materials. Creating ‘defensible space’ became the new mantra, and it was soon echoed across California in the aftermath of other great fires, such as those that swept San Diego County in 2003 and 2007, burning 4,500 homes and killing 30 people. So instead of a long-overdue debate about the wisdom of rebuilding and the need to prevent further construction in areas of extreme natural fire danger, public attention was diverted into a discussion of the best methods for clearing vegetation (rototillers or goats?) and making homes fire-resistant. And if edge suburbs and backcountry subdivisions, in fact, could be fire-proofed, then why not add more? Since 1993. almost half of California’s new homes have been built in fire hazard areas. Yet, as a contemporary Galileo might say of defensible space, ‘still it burns.’ In the last eighteen months 20,000 homes and perhaps a 1,000 lives have been lost in one super-fire after another.

When most of us build or buy a home, we carefully appraise the neighborhood. In Malibu the neighborhood is fire.

Such fires are both old and new. Two different causalities are involved. First vegetation and topography, annually orchestrated by our dry hurricanes, define persistent fire patterns and frequencies. Without human intervention, however, lots of small fires ignited by late summer lightning create an intricate patchwork of vegetation of different ages and combustibility. The one-hundred-thousand-acre firestorms that we now experience annually did occur occasionally in the aftermath of epic droughts, but in a ‘natural’ fire regime they were rare. Fire prevention in the twentieth century, however, nurtured large areas of chaparral and forest into old age, creating perfect conditions for great fires. But as long as so many California towns were surrounded by citrus groves and agricultural land, fire even in its new, larger incarnation was usually stopped before it encountered housing. Today our horticultural firebreaks are gone, strawberry fields are now aging suburbs, and the quest for beach fronts, mountain view lots and big trees has created fire hazards that were once unimaginable.

Climate change, meanwhile, is coming to California in the form of drought and extreme summer heat, along with episodes of record torrential rain. Although scientists debate whether or not median annual precipitation averaged over decades will actually decline, more of it will fall as rain not as snow, a serious concern given that our water system depends on the Sierra snowpack to store and modulate the release of the water that irrigates cities and agribusiness. Moreover, rainfall is no longer an accurate predictor of fire risk. The winter of 2016-17 was the wettest in the history of Northern California, and spring brought the most glorious wildflower display in generations. But July was torrid and coastal temperatures, usually in the 70s, broke 100°F for a week. The greenery of spring was punctually baked into a bumper crop of brown fire-starter. When the winds began to blow in October, first Santa Rosa, north of San Francisco, and then Montecito, just south of Santa Barbara, caught fire. Three thousand homes were lost and several dozen people, mostly elderly and unaware of the approaching menace, died. But nature in California saves one last act and when the heavens opened up on Montecito’s bare burnt hills in January another 25 people disappeared in the fast-moving debris flows. This same encore awaits Malibu and the Sierra foothills over the next few months.

Finally, a word or two about Malibu and Paradise. The two cities share three common characteristics: both are very white (the Black population of Malibu is 1.5%; Paradise, 0.1%), relatively geriatric (double the state’s median percentage of over-65s), and inhabit notorious fire corridors.

Indeed the Paradise area plays in the same elite fire league as Malibu with six massive blazes since 1950, including back-to-back fires in the summer of 2008 that necessitated evacuations that gridlocked Paradise’s roads ─ the shape of chaos to come. But otherwise the cities are avatars of two completely different Californias. Home values in Paradise are half of the state’s median and a tenth of Malibu’s ─ making it one of the last affordable places in the state. Household income in Paradise is $13,000 below the state median; Malibu’s $60,000 above. Paradise also has a unique distinction: nearly 20 percent of its under-65 population is enumerated by the last Census as disabled. This extraordinary proportion of elderly, sick and disabled people undoubtedly contributed to the huge, inconsolable death toll. Two kinds of Californians will continue to live with fire: those who can afford (with indirect public subsidies) to rebuild and those who can’t afford to live anywhere else.

***

Excerpted from Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster by Mike Davis. ©1998 Mike Davis Published by Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company. Excerpted with permission.

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[its-veso]

All roads lead to Rome: Why is Italy on everyone’s mind?

This time it’s not because of Juventus or the largest pizza in the world. Rather, it’s the Italian budget and its potential impact on the European Union and the Euro.

Not too long ago, Greece was on the financial precipice. Amongst Greece’s problems were sky-high interest rates, low GDP, years of deficits, poor productivity, and the list goes on. For months there was bitter debate amongst EU members about how to deal with Greece and its refusal to accept austerity measures. The final decision, like all decisions that come out of the fierce polarizing debate, raged on well after the action was taken. And the repercussions were brutal, culminating in the decision by the UK to leave the EU.

For a while the EU was teetering on the edge, prompted by political division in domestic politics that called for the ending of the EU. Economically, member states became further separated into the “haves” and “have-nots”, with the “haves” beginning to wonder aloud why it should sacrifice its own hard work to bail out its lazy irresponsible members.

In time the EU drew a line in the sand, with a solution that brought an unsteady truce. But the entire world continued to watch and wait, pensively looking over its shoulder for a potential economic cancer that might finally be fatal. Investors always felt that if a truly large member state was imperiled, it might finally topple the EU.

Italy is a critical element of the strength of the EU and represents its third-largest economy. Italy has also been running a budget deficit consistently over the last 20 years. Its debt to GDP ratio is the fourth highest in the world, eclipsed only by Lebanon, Greece, and Japan. So when it provided its proposal to spend 2.4% more than it brings in over the next three years, it sent shockwaves through the EU and the world.

The impact was immediate. Bond yields jumped 20% in a week to their highest levels since 2014. The Euro dropped 2% against the USD. Suddenly the sky-high debt levels, the criticality of Italy to the EU and the memories of Greece were pushed to the forefront of investor’s minds. EU President Jean-Claude Juncker gave voice to the critical concern of investors, “We have to do everything to avoid a new Greece — this time an Italy — crisis.”

Compounding this is the seeming willingness of Italy’s government to withdraw from the Euro. With its size and status in Europe, Italy represents a much larger danger than Greece ever posed. If the Greek issue was existential, the challenge posed by a defaulting Italy is potentially catastrophic.

The reports of Italian government’s agreement to cut back to 2% spending through 2021 is a good sign of the willingness of Italy to continue to work with the EU. Whether it actually occurs remains to be seen. But, the fundamental economic problems remain. The bonds and Euro weakness were not just a sign that investors have written Italy as a potential danger. It is a sign that investors believe that the Italian peril might be driving the EU to its final conclusion.

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References

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https://therapistfortherest.wordpress.com/2018/10/04/opioid-advanced-treatment

W

hat We Now Know that You Knew Before:

The War on Addicts and the Path to Recovery

The War began before any of the new combatants were born.  It began as legitimate.  It began as a worthy attempt to combat what had been tried, one hundred years prior, with alcohol.  Sadly, the 2nd foray of the United States Government into controlling its populations’ personal choices is ending in much the same way as the first; with violence, the rise of a criminal underclass, the destruction of the family and with more and more users of the illicit and legal but non-medical substances.  The opioid crisis often referred to as an epidemic has once again put a face on the beast of addiction.  In this study, I will examine the birth, growth, spread and evolution of opiate use in the United States.  I will then set about relaying how our government, medical community, religious and recovery community is responding.  I will discuss the newest data and how new methods of treatment are having unprecedented affect (Netherland, 2015).

Introduction

In the basement of Hell sat the executives around a cauldron of boiling oil where they were slowly dropping in piece-by-piece of opium plant bulbs.  But it wasn’t opium, it just looked like it and smelled like it, in fact it did everything that opium did but it was better for it wasn’t illegal and they believed if they worked the angle just right…they could get doctors to be the new face of the new ad campaign…not for the heart of America.  But it’s eternal spirit and soul.

The year is 2006 and two physicians from the Dominican Republic have just opened the 4th Pain Management Clinic in the sleepy little town of Deerfield Beach, Florida.   The Pain Clinic on A1A is a Non-emergency clinic, it opens Sat morning at 630 and there is a line before the door opens, occasionally before the sun comes up.   In the line are men, women and some children drinking Fanta Orange in dirty Elmo shirts.  They are young and old, variegated ethic and racial mixes.  Some are wealthy, arriving in Porches’ or Lamborghinis, some are working on their broke down cars in the parking lot.  Several young Haitian boys are riding their bikes in the parking lot, occasionally stopping to discuss and collude with those in line and standing about.  There are three large men with neck tattoos and scrubs on moving about the line and speaking quietly to anyone who causes a problem or is too loud.  There is a tension in the air and fear bubbles.  These men and women have come to Florida from as far away as New Hampshire and Maryland, from West Virginia and Missouri. Some have flown but 90% of the patients drive.   In the overflow parking lot across the street people are getting in and out of cars with license plates from Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Ohio and Virginia.  At 8 a.m. a semi pulls into the lot and backs slickly into a yellow lined spot.  Getting out are two burly men dressed in medical scrubs.  The 2nd part of the operation is hanging out its shingle and it says MRI’s 235$.  The MRI machine cost three quarters of a million dollars and is mobile, just an everyday occurrence in Opioid-Land.  In order for the Board Approved pain physician to see you, you must have an MRI, so they have brought the machine it to the scene of the crime (Joseph, 2017).

As the line begins to wrap around the building as the morning wears on, water is passed out.  But that is not the story here.  They are addicted Americans and they are standing on the chopping block, for this is “ground zero for the systemic and flagrant abuse of the people that the medical community is supposed to be protecting.”  (Garland, 2015) They are some of the sickest persons in America, for everything they do, every day, is to keep taking opiates to “stay well.”  The body’s detoxification process from any analgesic is painful.  It affects the stomach muscles and nervous system.  The only way to avoid this is the ingest more opiates.  Between the years of 2005-20015 the state of Florida, in 3 counties alone, sold 7 out of every 10 opioid pills sold in the United States.  70% of an infinite number.  (McIntosh et. al., 2000) This staggering figure adds up to enough pills for every American to take 3 a day for 2 years. So, it goes on for years and years, America’s descent into the worst epidemic of pharmaceutical and heroin abuse in our nation’s history, which started with but a small lie.

How it Evolved

In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s the medical community was on top of the world.  Anti-depressants, such as Prozac, were introduced onto the market and were a huge success.  AstraZeneca, Roche, Purdue and Eli-Lilly were growing exponentially through the increased efficacy of their product design branches.   The small firm of Perdue was at this time looking very closely at the current pain management drugs and had developed a new way to treat pain. (McIntosh et. al., 2000) The drug was called OxyContin but there were others, Norco, Percocet, Darvon. Darvocet and RoxyContin all basically hit the market at the same time.

On December 12, 1995, the Food and Drug Administration approved for use the opioid analgesic OxyContin. It hit the market in 1996. In first fiscal statement Purdue claimed OxyContin accounted for $45 million in sales for its manufacturer, Stamford and the Connecticut-based pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharmaceutical. By 2000 that number would be inflated from $1.1 billion to $3.12 billion. The strong opioid accounted for 30 percent of the painkiller market.   Three of every 10 pills were OxyContin and by then end of 2012 seven out of 20 prescriptions for painkillers were written in the state of Florida. Purdue controlled nearly a third of the entire United States market for pain pills. (SAMHSA, 2013-2016).

The Pharmaceutical Companies, referred to as Big Pharma, primarily Purdue at the beginning, were utilizing a study done by their research teams and an independent auditor that claimed unequivocal success of the new class of analgesics.   The study said simply that people would not get addicted to this drug like they had with Morphine Sulfate.  From 1996 to 2015 the study done by Perdue would be found wanting, from 1996-2015 America grew dependent, nay addicted to another face of heroin.  Legal and pro-offered heroin.  Where they could always find a ready supply, the small urgent-care clinics that popped up like gold had just been found.  The enslavement, debasement and fatal nature of the opioid addiction in the United States of America is staggering and sickening.  Generations of Americans are dying.   The author of this study has known personally 73 people who have died from overdose of heroin or narcotic pain pills.  It is worse in some places than others, but none left totally out of the problem.  In Maryland, Delaware and West Virginia there are now triple the deaths from pain medication and heroin than vehicle related deaths.  It is now the single greatest existential threat to Americans.  It is destroying a way of life for anyone who has lived through a loved one being involved opioid drug addiction.  The Center for Disease Control released a study in 2014 that indicated what Americans living in the interior already knew, that opioid addiction is everywhere.  Quite simply there is no longer any safe place in America. Illegal narcotic use is at an all time high and white, suburban, educated, wealthy and rural kids were the ones shooting these drugs into their veins (CDC, 2014).

Pill–Mills to Heroin Delivery

The direct influence of large Pharmaceutical Companies to be so absolutely evil is but one face of the endemic.  Capitalism cannot be judged for it is but a system but couple it with greed and little governmental oversight and what emerges is an unregulated caustic virus seeking to destroy the American family.  The next evolution was from the pseudo-legal pill-mills to the heroin.  How did this occur?

America is known for many things but restraint is not one.  America is a country of massive over reaction.  In the 1980’s the scourge of crack cocaine led to the systemic and habitual imprisonment of African Americans, Latinos and the nation’s poor.  This is not in debate.  This is fact.  Because of our draconian drug laws the United States has a greater percentage of its population locked up than any other country in the world.  Housing inmates costs the country almost $600 billion a year.  Despite the rising imprisonment rates over the last 20 years, addiction is up.  The rates of arrest and prosecution are way up. (American Medical Association, 2012 par.1-38)    This schism can be firmly be attributed to mandatory sentencing over drug convictions and over-zealous drug laws in general (McGinty, 72).

So, America became addicted then jailed and yet the numbers of overdoses and deaths keep rising. Incarceration is not the answer.  Like General Petraeus said regarding the war with Islamic terrorists, “you cannot kill your way to victory.”  (  America cannot imprison its way to health.

In 2010 America woke up a bit, it woke up to its children with needles their arms, overdosing and being imprisoned with no succor in sight and what did it do.  It shut down the rampant pill mills that were providing the pills to half of America and began to regulate and keep careful track of the physicians that were writing the prescriptions for opioid.   This had an effect. (Meier, 2007) The non-medical use of opiate pain pills went down drastically, then the government began looking a general prescribing practices and doctors began slowly to step into the light that they had been ignoring.  No longer would these drugs be made so readily available.  This was good but…we have a neighbor to our south who when we need a cup of sugar, has got enough to keep everything sweet.

So, the war now rages on in a new role, a revamped and upgraded new way to wage war.  The cartels, including Sinaloa, Knight Templar, Juarez, Zetas, Gulf and Brownsville, have been operating for a long time and the entire US illicit-drug market is controlled by these seven Mexican cartels, according to the US Drug Enforcement Administration’s 2015 National Drug Threat Assessment Summary:

Trafficking heroin, meth, cocaine, and marijuana, these organizations will continue to dominate throughout the US, according to the DEA.  Estimated to be worth more than three hundred billion dollars a year, the global industry has pumped huge resources into criminal empires decade after decade (2015).

These gangs have adopted entirely new ways of doing business within the borders of the U.S., far away from the border wars.  They now deliver heroin to your doorstep, like a pizza.  The violence surrounding the drug deal is gone.  The drug dealers are Mexican country boys from Jalisco and Nuevo Laredo.  They don’t practice violence and seek to just make enough money to support loved ones at home.  If they get arrested then they are deported and sneak back across eventually to do it again.  Put up a wall, they will climb under or fly over.  When there is a need and a supply, nothing can stop the production and distribution of heroin.  So what is to be done?

We Do Recover

People are dying. People are living in a perpetual state of self-destruction, suicide rates

  among users are the highest since the mid 80’s, Hepatitis C is rampant, HIV is once again

  making itself known through shared needles and sexual exchange for drugs.  In the face of all of this, a golden thread of reality can be seen woven into the black and red of our nations fabric.  In the early 1920’s the Washitonian’s and the Oxford Group pioneered a new way, a spiritual way to recover from alcohol dependence and addiction.  In the 1950’s Narcotics Anonymous came along side of Alcoholics Anonymous to support those struggling with drug addiction. (Meier, 2007) Its methods were simple.  Meet with the group.  Develop a moral stance on life.  Repay what ills you have done and find a meaning or a god to help. (Rattan, 208) There are 12 steps in all and the end product is having been overall a huge success, yet it is still not enough.   The newest studies indicate that a year of peer based recovery is recommended now to be done in stages.  Detoxification, Stabilization, Recovery, Reward. (Meier,2007) The rate of the addicted and dying are much greater than those recovering (Joseph, 2016). Why?  The reasons why are plentiful including inertia, the will of the government to switch tactics and the large corporate interests which now include a privately-owned prison sector that is invested in keeping America incarcerated

At this point with heroin and pills and new synthetics all one the market and being aggressively sold the only way to stop this plague is for the United States Government to take an active role in creating and implementing grass roots plans for extended and expensive rehabilitation efforts.  Unfortunately, the news on this front is very bad.  Very bad.  The Trump presidency is proposing:

gut the budget of the White House “drug czar” by 95 percent, effectively eliminating the decades-old Office of National Drug Control Policy, the lead federal agency responsible for managing and coordinating drug policy, according to a memo that its acting director sent Friday to agency employees. The draft budget plan comes as the nation is struggling with an escalating opioid epidemic. Ending opioid addiction was a centerpiece of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and he drew support from many of the rural areas and small ­working-class towns hit hardest by the drug crisis. In March, President Trump commissioned a new addiction task force to help combat the opioid crisis, tapping his friend and former rival New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) to lead the fight (SAMHSA 2017).

But in a memorandum from the acting chair of the Drug Czar Agency, Mr. Baum, said the government’s proposed reductions for the fiscal year that begins on Oct. 1st 2017 “reflects a nearly 95 percent reduction in the agency’s budget. The proposed $364 million cut would leave a budget of just $24 million and eliminate its two major programs.” (McGinty, 12).

If this happens and there is little help from the Trump Administration

  Conclusion

The newest information that we have in the fields of Addictionology and Recovery is

  hard but crucial to hear.  The addicted brain will not turn itself off.  America will not recover on its own.  The government must step in, to a greater degree, in order to save a generation of young lives.  Lives that Matter.  Addicted Lives Matter.  Warden Daley of the Orleans Parish Prisons system said, “it is much less expensive to provide an option to go to Drug Counseling classes than to house an inmate, in the short run almost equivalent, over the course of the years the drug addict would be in and out of the system, millions and millions in wasted time, life and money.” (2013) America is also recognizing that law mandated minimums for drug crimes are a merciless idea.  Lengthy sentences are being reduced and people are given the opportunity to obtain some State and local help for addiction while incarcerated.  Large-scale drug dealers can afford lawyers and bonds, most addicted person cannot, therefor the law is immediately set against them.  Some pharmaceutical companies have reacted poorly and have been sued and penalties extracted but it is trifling in relationship to the problem it generated. Some malevolent doctors in South Florida, Ohio and Oklahoma have gone to jail and “out-of-state residents can no longer get prescriptions written for them in Florida for painkillers.” (SAMHSA, 129) The painkiller scripts are still being written and many people will continue to abuse and die from the medications. But heroin and the synthetics such as Fentanyl an CarFentanyl now are now an added threat.  These drugs are killers and only immense interdiction by the Drug Counseling community backed by DEA and Office of the President can halt the trend towards the loss of our nation’s youth (125).

This has been a study on the resurgence of an epidemic addiction in America. It can be traced back to the companies that study, construct and create the drugs and the physicians that were utilized as proxy drug dealers.  I thoroughly examined how wealth motivated the businessmen coupled with greed of medical doctors who operated without governmental oversight.  This miasma has produced tan addiction cycle among American youth that will not fix itself.  America must renew it commitment to examine why the war on drugs continues to fail and what the lasting effects will be.   An entire generation left to fight and die alone?  It is now time for the war on drug addicts to be over and Americans to heal (Meier, 2007).

        Drug Enforcement Agency. (2015). District Office, Map 2. United States: Areas of           Influence of Major Mexican Transnational Criminal Organizations within the        DEA Field Divisions Area of Responsibility. DOI. 2552536626.2

          References

Drug Enforcement Agency. (2015). District Office, Map 2. United States: Areas of           Influence of Major Mexican Transnational Criminal Organizations within the        DEA Field Divisions Area of Responsibility. DOI. 2552536626.2

International Journalists Addiction. (2016).   Terror in the New Golden Triangle. Report Issued to Advise.  New Haven, Conn.

Joseph, Benjamin. (2002-2015). Eye witness accounts.

Kaplan, L. (2008). The role of recovery support services in recovery-oriented systems of care. Rockville, MD: Centre for Substance Abuse Treatment.

“Lawyer Behind West Virginia County Lawsuit Against Opioid Distributors”. NPR.org.   Retrieved 2017-7-12.

McGinty, E. (summer 2017). “Criminal Activity or Treatable Health Condition? News     Media Framing of Opioid Analgesic Abuse in the United States”. Psychiatric     Services. 67: 405–411.

McIntosh, J., & McKeganey, N. (2000). Addicts’ narratives of recovery from drug use:     constructing a non-addict identity. Social Science & Medicine, 50(10), 1501-         1510.

,). Narcotic maker guilty of deceit over marketing. New York Times, 10.

Nelson, L. S., & Perrone, J. (2012). Curbing the opioid epidemic in the United States: the             risk evaluation and mitigation strategy (REMS). Jama, 308(5), 457-458.

Netherland, J. (Summer 2017). “The War on Drugs That Wasn’t: Wasted Whiteness,         Dirty Doctors, and Race in Media Coverage of Prescription Opioid Misuse”. Cult Med Psychiatry. 40: 664–686.

Pletcher, M. J., Kertesz, S. G., Kohn, M. A., & Gonzales, R. (2008). Trends in opioid       prescribing by race/ethnicity for patients seeking care in US emergency            departments. Jama, 299(1), 70-78.

Rattan, A. K., Koo, K. L., Tejwani, G. A., & Bhargava, H. N. (1992). The effect of                       morphine tolerance dependence and abstinence on immunoreactive dynorphin           (1–13) levels in discrete brain regions, spinal cord, pituitary gland and peripheral  tissues of the rat. Brain research, 584(1), 207-212.

Regier, D. A., Farmer, M. E., Rae, D. S., Locke, B. Z., Keith, S. J., Judd, L. L., & Goodwin, F. K. (1990). Comorbidity of mental disorders with alcohol and other        drug abuse: results from the Epidemiologic Catchment Area (ECA)            study. Jama, 264(19), 2511-2518.

Ross, H.E., Lin, E., & Cunningham, J. (1999). “Mental health service use: A comparison of treated and untreated individuals with substance use disorders in Ontario”. Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, 44, 570−577.

Abuse, S. (2016). Mental Health Services Administration (SAMSHA) Results from the    2016. US Department of Health and Human Services.

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Center for Behavioral         Health Statistics and Quality. Treatment Episode Data Set       (TEDS): 2001-2011.   National Admissions to Substance Abuse Treatment Services. BHSIS Series S-65,             HHS Publication No. (SMA) 13-4772. Rockville, MD: Substance Abuse and        Mental Health Services Administration, 2013.

Scharse, R. (1996). “Cessation patterns among neophyte heroin users”. International        Journal of Addictions, 1, 23–32.

  Published by Dr. Benajah CC Joseph

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