Are you a Parrhesiastes

Record high day time temperatures. Record high night time low temperatures.

But, the damned Republicans won't even allow the two word phrase "climate change" to be uttered!  How fucked up are they?  Don't they have children and grandchildren whose futures they worry about?  Do they believe that they can somehow live in a bubble, like how they lead lives insulated from us browns and non-Christians?

Scientists being scientists, well, in their reports they don't use words like "fucked up."  Instead, they carefully phrase it like this: "natural causes are not sufficient from our data to actually cause the spatial pattern and the warming rate that we are observing now."  And what we are observing now is unparalleled.

The speed and extent of current global warming exceeds any similar event in the past 2,000 years, researchers say.
They show that famous historic events like the "Little Ice Age" don't compare with the scale of warming seen over the last century.
The research suggests that the current warming rate is higher than any observed previously.

If only the fucked up party, aka, the GOP, would read and listen!  And if only 63 million hadn't voted to power a mad sociopath!

Even if the sociopath is removed from the White House through impeachment, 2020 becomes a critical time:

The sense that the end of next year is the last chance saloon for climate change is becoming clearer all the time.
"I am firmly of the view that the next 18 months will decide our ability to keep climate change to survivable levels and to restore nature to the equilibrium we need for our survival," said Prince Charles, speaking at a reception for Commonwealth foreign ministers recently.

Why so?

One of the understated headlines in last year's IPCC report was that global emissions of carbon dioxide must peak by 2020 to keep the planet below 1.5C.
Current plans are nowhere near strong enough to keep temperatures below the so-called safe limit. Right now, we are heading towards 3C of heating by 2100 not 1.5.
As countries usually scope out their plans over five and 10 year timeframes, if the 45% carbon cut target by 2030 is to be met then the plans really need to be on the table by the end of 2020.

We all remember how the sociopath withdrew from the table, thanks to 63 million irresponsible people!

Speaking truth to power--which is where the big word in the title of this post comes in--has made very little impact.  Despite the track record of defeats, a few activists like Greta Thunberg soldier on.  Good for them, and for us.

Earlier this month Opec declared Thunberg, and with her the other young climate activists, the “greatest threat” to the fossil fuel industry. Thunberg tweeted them her thanks. “Our biggest compliment yet.” Hers is a voice totally unlike the world’s usual power-cacophony: clean, simple, inclusive, the voice of someone refusing to beguile. She talks ethics to politics without flinching. She cuts through the media white noise and political rabble-rousing to get to the essentials. This is a communal voice and Thunberg is its lightning conductor, and no wonder: when you hear her speak or you read her speeches you know you’re in the presence of the opposite of cynicism – of a spirit, in fact, that rebuffs cynicism and knows that the way we act, every single one of us, has transformatory impact and consequence. “The real power belongs to the people.”

I hope that we the people will quickly and decisively demonstrate that we have the power.

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Angry old men are ruining my country!

As one without any affiliation with any political party, I tend to piss people off when I critique their favored political idea or person.  There are limits to which I can accommodate people's blind faith in their politics or politicians.  But, if they cross those lines, then, well, that's why I have had the instructions on top of the comment form:

DO NOT bother to say anything even remotely positive about the fascist in the US or in India, and
DO NOT even attempt to defend the supremacists in these countries.

I am plainly tired of those fucking people who fucking believe in supremacists!

Where was I?  Yes, how I tend to piss people off ;)

Back in 2008, when Obama was a candidate, I was not all too enthused about him, and was hoping that Senator Clinton would become the Democratic Party's nominee.  But, charmed by his personality, his cool, and smartness, along with a heavy dose of misogyny and Hillary-hating, the party loyalists went for Obama.  Interestingly enough, most of the people on my campus and elsewhere here in Eugene who were big time Obama supporters in 2008 were also big time Berniacs in 2016.  Says something, right?

I noted how Bush's economic adviser, Greg Mankiw, referred to Obama as better than McCain when it came to tax policies.   Two years into his presidency, Obama opposed--yes, opposed--same-sex marriage!  As Obama was gearing up for his re-election, I wrote that the best GOP candidate was already in the White House.  I wrote there, "It is just that the Republicans have rushed so far to the right extreme that they don't realize that Obama is way to the right of where many Democrats hoped he would be."

The far-right GOP elected the anti-Obama and ended Hillary Clinton's political aspirations.  A strange combination of trumperteers and Berniacs coming together to defeat Hillary Clinton.

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Sometimes I think I am angrier at the Berniacs than I am at the trumpeteers because of this: The trump supporters made their racism and hatred and misogyny and Islamophobia and more very clear.  They were out and proud with that shit.  Berniacs knew how to hide their misogyny. Berniacs were clueless that economic inequality has an overlap with racism, but that they are not synonyms.  In his old-man rhetoric, Sanders almost always implied white Americans when he talked about ordinary Americans.

Now, every day is one more disaster. Instead of calming people down as a leader, trump is rejoicing in the chaos that he knows well that is creating. And Bernie Sanders is exploring another run in 2020.  Fuck off!