Crop failure by 2030!?….oops, try 2022.
Unprecedented drought and unheard of global temperatures right now. Massive crop failures worldwide, and more just not being planted for lack of water.
We aren’t on the road to global catastrophe, we are knee deep in one. Thousands if not tens of thousands will die This week in Europe as a direct result of human caused climate change. Over 1500 died in Spain and 1000 in Portugal from heat just in this one event, over 4200 across Europe….so far. Crop losses will multiply that exponentially.
We are on the downhill ride into mass extinction and we already ripped our brakes out and pulled the steering wheel off and are arguing over how hard to stomp on the accelerator.
If the ecological cost of burning gasoline was included in the price, it would be well over $10.

Now ask the cow how to make a good Bolognese...

(I know I know, Bolonia is in Spain vs. an Italian dish from Bologna...)

That's what even Trump appointed election officials are telling us all. I don't watch CNN for the 86th time. Why are you incapable of remembering anything?

The other side hasn't SHOWN a thing, they're making accusations but have no evidence, proven time and time again in court. Pay attention.

It is wasn't wholly fair, there were multiple attempts to suppress voting. By fair I mean there was no massive or consequential cheating and half the irregularities of 2016, maybe a few singular instances but far less than normal. There were hundreds of thousands of mail in votes lost, and nationwide >60% went to Biden. That far exceeds anything even claimed in court.

I'm curious how the party not in charge allegedly fixed it. The only explanation I hear is nonsense involving Venezuela, Spain, Soros, and Cuba.

If they fixed things so trump votes become anti trump votes, Clinton would have won by 10 million and not campaigned half as much. Get real, if they fixed the vote this year, why did Republicans retain the Senate? Same ballots, but dems only cheated for president? Asinine.

It might have Ben, but it was incredible destructive to the nation, our union, trust in government, and national security....all for one man's fragile insecurities.
His legal rights are used up. It's been weeks since it was impossible for him to win in courts. With his current team, it would be impossible even if he had a case, but he doesn't. Grow a pair, stop whining, and learn to live with it.

Every day he stomps his feet screaming means another 1000 dead for his ego.

Proof? Evidence? Anything besides empty words from crybaby loser liars to back that up?

Republican led election officials uniformly say there was no significant cheating, less than normal, zero evidence of irregularities, no evidence of electronic vote changing, no dead people voted, and no baby eating lizard people taking votes to Spain so Venezuelans could flip votes, then returning these flipped votes through communist Cuba to be counted.

Show me a scintilla of evidence, since you've repeatedly excused, backed up, and reveled in lying and are completely untrustworthy. So far all cheating has been Republicans getting caught stealing ballots despite what OAN says. 300000 undelivered votes thanks to trump lackey Dejoy ignoring court orders to search for them to mention just one. The thousands of "affidavits" don't count since they've been tossed out of court as unreliable twaddle.

Newt,

This is in response to your comment on my statement about Biden needing to lose in '20.

I recently wrote this as a reply to one of my readers (I write under a number of different names in other places).:

Dear <name>,

>I took some time to absorb what you wrote. It's a lot to juggle. The Atlantic has an article in the July-August issue on the worst and best case scenario in CLO defaults. I'll read more.

I read the article you mentioned, and while it's certainly good, it also misses a very important point that explains the mess we're in: the collapse of Lehman and Bear-Stearns, while catastrophic in their own ways, were not the nightmare that caused the Fed to freak out in 2008 -- AIG was. Had AIG gone under and the counterparty default contracts triggered, we'd be on the barter system right now. We came within hours of not having an economy in the western world. The $700b ($.7t) the Fed coughed up to stop this from happening calmed the panic, but did nothing to resolve the underlying issues. These issues continued to compound during the 2011-2020 stock run-up and now we're at the point where the Fed is throwing trillions of dollars at every piece of bad debt they can find just to keep the whole thing from imploding into an economic black hole. It is important to note that in September '19, the credit markets started freezing because of the debt that was already on the books then, -before- CV-19 started rolling, and it took $3t just to get them unlocked again. Absolutely nothing has gotten better since then, and I would argue things have gotten dangerously worse.

In an odd coincidence, the NYT ran an article today about the looming bankruptcy crisis. They're calling for 30-60 days before things start imploding, but I'll stick to my estimate of ~90 days. There's some talk about extending the $600 benefits (we'll see) and chatter about another stimulus check, but that's kicking the can as well as telegraphing how bad things really are. When the Republicans are getting behind free money, you know we're in some uncharted territory. For all intents and purposes, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) -- the reason the Fed is backstopping debt and printing money like crazy -- is the hill the US economy will live or die on. Should the US dollar come unpegged as the world's de facto currency or should inflation begin (and there's already worrying signs this is happening), that's game over.

Please don't take anything I say as the Word of God; please do your own research and come to your own conclusions. Everything I've said is an opinion based on my education, experience and way of thinking. Your mileage may vary.

Here is the article I mentioned: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/18/business/corporate-bankruptcy-coronavirus.html -- might be paywalled, but clear your cookies for the NYT and you should be able to read it.


>Frankly, it's the physical danger in my area of the States that concerns me. There are the guns and bullying. During some BLM demonstrations in the Midwest, locals were standing around with semi-automatics. I drive a Prius for the fuel efficiency. Pick up trucks enjoy tailgating, trying to intimidate me. This behavior isn't going to change with a change of President but will get worse is we don't change. This ideological push to takeover the country instead of ruling by compromise started around the same time we came to the US in 1981, Reagan's first year. I was so shocked when I heard talk radio for the first time; this wasn't the country I had left in the 1970s.


And now we come to the giant pile of sweaty dynamite that's just waiting for the right shock to set it off. I could give you a prolonged lecture about how this all started in 1978 with California's Proposition 13, or how David Stockman's tragically prescient warnings were blatantly ignored, but Haynes Johnson does a far better job at this than I ever could in his 1991 book "Sleepwalking Through History", as does Kevin Phillips in 2006's "American Theocracy". Honestly, at this point, the prelude is academic. The reality of the situation is that a large swath of adult Americans are appalling ill-educated, innumerate and devoid of even the most basic critical-thinking skills. These people are now locked out of the Information Economy. They lack the most basic skills required to compete in the 21st century job market and thus will watch their standard of living sink into the abyss. These people are not blind to this fact because they're living with the reality of their situation every single day. They're totally without hope, cut off from all avenues of control over their own lives and they feel utterly abandoned by the very people who're supposed to be helping them. The reason you're seeing bullying and behavior like that is because these same people are totally removed from any avenues of recourse and the only people they can take their anger out on are people like you and me. Their anger is being stoked on a daily basis. FOX News and the GOP are experts at this and have a host of boogeymen to keep the anger from being pointed their way: ANTIFA, BLM (black Americans have always made a perfect target), "coastal elites" and, of course, Liberals.

Trump's election was a warning, not an outlier. Trump was the primal scream of these people and Liberals and the Democrats as a whole chose not to listen because they found the sound so abhorrent. The rage will only get worse and the number of people enveloped by this rage will only grow as economic conditions worsen. At this point, it no longer matters who wins in '20. Winning the election will be like winning the deed to the World Trade Center one second after the first jet hit. The damage has already been done and no steps are being taken to repair it; if anything, people are actively making it worse either through ideological blindness, deliberate malfeasance or outright stupidity. It took almost 50 years to get to this point and the endemic issues will not be undone in a single generation, much less a single election. Until the people who voted for Trump feel a sense of real hope, a sense of control over their lives and a genuine expectation of recourse for their grievances, they will keep right on voting for Trump, or people like him.

My unfortunate suspicion is that this country will rip itself to shreds long before those reforms are enacted.

Side note: the fundamental difference between the United States and Europe is that European history has forced the nations of Europe to live with the consequences of their actions. Not so the United States. Europe has suffered for her sins. Not so the United States. The two bloodiest wars in human history were fought on European soil. Not so the United States. The United States has never faced true suffering, nor has it ever had to live with the ramifications of its own actions. Both these facts are about to change and a nation whose character is built on a mythology of individual action and violence is going to have to face reality. The people of this nation are not prepared for this and they will not like it.

Second side note: many people are erroneously comparing the current situation to the Wiemar Republic. This is a lack of historical understanding. A more apt comparison would be to Spain in late 1935.


>As for re-opening, we could have gotten some control if the "leader" had simply donned a mask and used realistic thinking. People could go back to work more safely, wash hands, stay a certain distance. But his hubris led the way, so now we'll have a roller coaster for months and years that will affect the economy even more. France is a good comparison because they were unprepared also, having slashed the public healthcare budget for the last twenty years. But when they laid down the rules, troops patrolled the streets to be sure they were followed. So far, they've flattened the curve (for now), and used different economic incentives, such as paying part of employees' salaries to keep them employed.

At this point, the pace of re-opening is a difference between very bad and much worse. Had $3t been used to pay the yearly salary of every American, we could have saved lives and the economy, but we didn't. The history of 2020 will be littered with "what-ifs". However, the first thing you learn when studying history is that what-ifs are useless because things are what they are and you can't change that. It's already obvious we're going into a second wave. If previous pandemics are any indication of what's to come, this second wave will be many times worse than the first. The wait for a vaccine is indeterminate, but if we're going for herd immunity, ~70% of Americans will need to catch the virus. To date, ~1.5% have. If the US population is ~330 million, ~230 million will need to catch the virus. Call the mortality rate 2%, that means ~4.6 million Americans will die. That's a lot of dead Americans and grieving families.

Take care,

(my actual name)

I'm not sure that all of Spain considers it ok to be as "masculine" as some proportion of Spanish men (but not all) think they should be.

I mean--what could be more masculine than the running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain? Hemingway, the famously macho writer, literally wrote about it.

But--when a WhatsApp group calling themselves the "Wolfpack" harassed and raped an 18 year old girl there in 2016--and received a "sexual assault" but not a rape conviction for their actions---the lighter sentence was not well received. The guys think they they should appeal to go free; the other half of the country is outraged.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/05/spain-court-upholds-wolf-pack-verdict-of-sexual-abuse-rather-than-rape-pamplona


https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-43915551

I think if you asked the average woman in Spain, they would say aggressive machismo and misogyny aren't attractive features of masculinity, and they would prefer to be treated as equals by strong men rather than objects by insecure men....but that's just my guess....I haven't polled them.

It is about blaming things on something someone made up called 'toxic masculinity'. Please explain to me why we have so many 'issues' with it here in the USA when there are countries like Spain and others where it is considered OK to be masculine?

I feel we can narrow it down to one simple factor, a collegiate system in which we are now taught that everything white is bad, everything male is bad, and everything conservative is bad. There is no backlash on this because if you complain, YOU ARE THE TOXIC PERSON!

Let me give you an example and bear in mind that I think Trump may be the worst president we have had. Jim Carrey, who is notably liberal and PC (lately anyway) created a painting comparing people who voted for Trump to apes. A de-evolution artwork. Hardly a peep from anyone, but if you compared other groups to apes you would be branded a racist and more. It's perfectly fine to take potshots at anything liberal people consider to be bad, but god help you if you do it to something they care about.

tl;dr I think it is a stupid fucking commercial that they put out to increase sales with Proctor & Gambles female slanted brands. They might lose a few razor related sales, but there are a shitload of white knights out there that will fall in line to argue that men are just assholes and should be beaten down to accept their new role. Since I use an old fashioned safety razor from Merkur, I can't boycott them, but I would if I could.

Your video, Spain-1 US Navy-0, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Canadian devil's advocate here.

We've got incredibly strict gun laws up here by comparison to the US. So our country has done the 'more than nothing' on gun laws. 3 days before the LA shooting we had a terror attack up here in Edmonton but the attacker used vehicles and a knife.

If we accept the rationale that current levels of freedom to own guns is leading to higher body counts and that restricting those freedoms will reduce body counts, that rationale is slippery.

Here's the parallel.

If we accept the rationale that current levels of freedom to 'practice religion' is leading to higher body counts then restricting those freedoms will reduce body counts.

Because, the Attacker in Edmonton was a Somali refugee. They had an ISIS flag in their car. The US tried to extradite him before Canada welcomed him with open arms. Canadian police even investigated him before when a co-worker reported him advocating genocidal ideas about Shiite scum.

We had a lot of potential red flags that we could have acted harder on or used for profiling and in this case having him in jail would've prevented the attacks.

The thing is, it is NOT immediately self evident that restricting those freedoms is objectively the best answer.

Personally, banning automatic weapons as my country has seems a very sane thing to do. Countering myself though, would the Catalonians in Spain be getting beaten up for holding a vote if the residents had automatic weapon in their basements or would the police show a little more respect to the citizen's than they did?

SPD (Germany): 23%
PSOE (Spain) : 22.6%
SPÖ (Austria): 26%
PS (France): 10%
PvdA (Netherlnds): 5.7%

Those are just some of the latest election/polling results of social-democratic parties in continental Europe. Corbyn's Labour came in at 40.1%. Yet somehow, Corbyn (and Sanders) is painted as the destroyer of his party's electability.

Watch all the trolls come out of the woodworks again, after claiming for months and months that Corbyn would be the ruin of Labour. And keep track of all the hacks who will still maintain that neoliberal party apparatchiks are the only option to win elections. The mental gymnastics will be hilarious, and the smear campaigns against Corbyn will be even more ferocious. They cannot let anyone challenge the neoliberal consensus and get away with it.

Edit: https://twitter.com/TKMarx/status/873157244967432192

I've been to bull fights in Spain (when I was very young) and Mexico. Also cock fights in Mexico and Thailand, and water buffalo fighting in Thailand. Water buffalo fights are very different than bullfighting though: two buffalo bulls lock horns and push each other around to establish dominance until one tires out and runs away. Injuries / deaths to the "losing" buffalo are possible but pretty rare. Actually, it ends up being pretty similar to fights that males would do to establish dominance in nature without any human intervention.

Basically, I'm not strongly opposed to or in favor of any of those. Cruel and unnecessary? Sure. But nature itself is frequently pretty cruel also. I don't feel the need to support any of these activities by paying to watch or betting on outcomes, but I don't really begrudge those that do. Often a lot of cultural momentum to overcome if you want to put these things in the past (where they belong?).

Upvote because this video was well done in technical terms, and because it makes an argument against bullfighting (and arguably other similar practices) to those that support it without being too abrasive about it.

A sad footnote, I just read that Phil Chevron died of cancer in 2013. He wrote some great songs like "Thousands are Sailing".

And "Rabinga", from the "Straight To Hell" soundtrack. That was a bizarre movie, with The Pogues, Joe Strummer, Courtney Love, Dennis Hopper, Grace Jones in a spaghetti western in Almeria, Spain.

Here is the problem, Mr. Schlosser is a journalist, not a Nuclear Scientist. He does not understand, or has chosen to ignore for propaganda reasons, that an unarmed warhead is EXTREMELY unlikely to perform the exact sequence of events that need to take place to have a nuclear reaction happen.

Yes, he is fully correct in that we have had numerous 'butt-clenching' moments in which we could have started WW3 due to a malfunction or human error. But in the other cases he mentions, such as the bombs that landed on Spain, the lightning bolt on the tower, and the wrench on the rocket, the chance of the warhead going up while being unarmed is infinitesimal. They simply don't go 'boom' because of a collision or explosion. Now you could have a 'dirty bomb' type incident where the radioactive materials could be spread and come into contact with humans, but that is about it.

The cases that have been officially listed as Broken Arrows were because they involved an active bomb, like the one in Florida. Everything else he mentions in this video is his 'belief' and is conjecture.

Now, before I get unloaded on, I wish we didn't have nuclear weapons. I don't agree with Trump that we should renew the arms race, I think he is nuts since we have more than enough weapons to blanket the cities of the world more than a couple of times. If you add all the nukes from the Big 3 (USA/Russia/France...yes, France) there are enough to cover every single inch of the world.

The problem is, who bells the cat? If we give up all of our weapons, we are at risk. I wish we weren't, but we would be. If we bring down our numbers gradually, there are still other countries that may not, like North Korea. How do we trust the other country is actually following through? In a perfect world, we would all lay down our weapons and sing kumbaya, but as Heinlein wrote: "...Anyone who clings to the historically untrue and thoroughly immoral doctrine that violence never settles anything I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms."

PS...Yes, I know Starship Troopers is a controversial novel with overtones of Militarism and Fascism. However, there are quotes that ring true no matter what 'ism' people attach to the overall story. If you doubt that, look at the utter disbelief and depression that overcame liberals when Trump won. "He simply was supposed to, it was impossible, not like this, we have no hope, etc" were the feelings of the people who gave him no hope of winning. I, having lived and read enough to get a fair picture of how fucked up we are as a species, had little doubt he could pull it off. We elected a former Wrestler as governor, a former actor as governor, and a former actor as President. We overlook mass genocide in other countries. We ignore climate change. We spend hundreds of billions on defense and less than 10 on space exploration, all the while living on a planet that is already critically overpopulated (and is growing almost exponentially).