threat assessment- W76-2

The USS Tennessee left a port in Georgia last month, and Hans Kristenson of FAS said Wednesday that the submarine is the first U.S. ship to patrol with the W76-2 on board—an occurrence which arms control groups says will make nuclear war more likely.

The warhead has an explosive yield of five kilotons, about a third of the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan in 1945, which killed 80,000 people instantly and tens of thousands later from radiation exposure.

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American West

“The beautiful old gnarled trees are devoured  in the mouth of the mobile mulcher, knocked down and chewed up, defecated out its ass-end in fragments. The howl and whine of the engine and the spinning blades, the torturous topping of the trees, the cracking and crushing of trunks and limbs, the shattered spitting out of beings alive seconds before – it is almost too much to bear. What’s left is a flattened, denuded, tread-smashed wasteland, a bombed Dresden of pinyon-juniper.”
    -- Christopher Ketcham

Ketcham urges you to enter the public lands and find out the truth about them. You will be shocked. You will find desert and steppe full of oil and gas fields; mines of coal, copper, silver, and gold “stabbed into cliffs and mountains”; loggers clearcutting forests; livestock ranchers overgrazing grasslands and slaughtering wildlife; and the government carving roads for all business, domestic and foreign, to keep exploiting our public lands for private profit.
    -- Evaggelos Vallianatos

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blast from the past

Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius created the first model of CO2-induced climate change in 1896

When [Arrhenius] was done, he made a striking prediction: If you doubled the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, it would raise the world’s temperature by 5 to 6 degrees Celsius. Remarkably, that analysis holds up pretty well today, even in an age where climate analysis involves far more information and variables and are crunched by cloud supercomputers. Despite having done his work by hand, using data that even he regarded as woefully inadequate, Arrhenius reached “a conclusion that millions of dollars worth of research over the ensuing century hardly changed at all,” as Isabel Hilton wrote in 2008. The era of modern climate modeling was born. …[Arrhenius] expected it would take 3,000 years — fully 30 centuries — for CO2 levels in the atmosphere to rise by 50%. Instead, [they] shot up by 30% in only one century.

David Olney 1948-2020

happy MLK day

"The evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and evils of racism."
    -- Martin Luther King, Jr., March 30, 1967

to the Wall motherfuckers

The new Wild West of the border wall is an authoritarian dreamscape where the boss man faces no limits and no obligations. It’s as though Marshall Wyatt Earp, reborn as an orange-haired easterner with no knowledge of the actual West, were back in charge, deciding who’s in and who’s out, what goes and what stays.

The Department of Homeland Security, under authority conferred by Congress, has declared more than 50 federal laws inoperable along sections of the U.S. boundary with Mexico, the better to build the border wall that Donald Trump has promised his “base.” Innumerable state laws and local ordinances have also been swept aside. Predictably, the Endangered Species Act is among the fallen. So are the National Historic Preservation Act, the Wilderness Act, laws restricting air and water pollution, and measures protecting wildlife, landscapes, Native American sacred sites, and even caves and fossils.

    -- William deBuys

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makes sense

Kristin

....of throwing muses

war

The war is “a great big noisy rather stupid game that doesn’t make any sense at all. None of us know what it’s all about or why. Here we are going at it hammer and tongs, and I bet you those fellows over there feel exactly the same way about it, the enemy… Then one day I suppose it will all end as suddenly as it began. We’ll go home till some other bunch of criminal fools sitting around a large table shoves us into another war and we go at it again… Do you remember my father used to be a professor of biology at Queen’s? He always used to say: “man is a savage animal who periodically to relieve his nervous tension tries to destroy himself.”
    -- Errol Flynn, The Dawn Patrol

WWIII hysteria

Americans (most of whom had never even heard of Soleimani until their government murdered him, and many of whom can’t find Iran on a map) took to Twitter to call for the immediate nuking of Iran from orbit. Mayor Bill de Blasio ordered a division of heavily-armed anti-“terror” forces to stand around in New York City with their rifles in the classic “sling-ready” position to prevent the Iranians from swimming the Atlantic (along with their communist killer dolphins), crawling up onto East Hampton Beach, taking the LIRR into town, and committing some devastating “terrorist” atrocity that would be commemorated throughout eternity on key rings, T-shirts, and jumbo coffee mugs.
    -- cj hopkins

world-war-iii

Sith Lord Pompeo

So what did we do? We put together a campaign of diplomatic isolation, economic pressure, and military deterrence. The goal is two-fold. First, we wanted to deprive the regime of resources, resources it needs to perpetrate its malign activity around the world. And second, we just want Iran to behave like a normal nation. Just be like Norway, right? (Laughter.)
    -- Sith Lord Pompeo, speech at the Hoover Inst.

....it can be argued that Pompeo was eager for the United States to provoke a military confrontation with Iran, just as Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was eager to begin airstrikes against North Vietnamese targets in August 1964. Even though he knew there were serious doubts on the part of the U.S. commander in the Gulf of Tonkin that an American ship had been attacked by North Vietnamese patrol boats on Aug. 4, McNamara did not inform President Lyndon Johnson, and went ahead with the order for retaliatory strikes that night....Similarly, Pompeo apparently led Trump to believe that there was no doubt that pro-Iranian militia forces had killed an American in Kirkuk, despite the genuine uncertainty about the provenance of the attack.
    -- Gareth Porter

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bloodstains

we like war

Baghdad- what really went down

The US did not plan to kill the vice commander of the Iraqi Hashd al-Shaabi brigade Abu Mahdi al-Muhandes when it assassinated Iranian Brigadier General Qassem Soleimani on Thursday at 11:00 PM local time at Baghdad airport.

The US plan was to assassinate an Iranian General on Iraqi soil, not to kill a high-ranking Iraqi officer. By killing al-Muhandes, the US violated its treaty obligation to respect the sovereignty of Iraq and to limit its activity to training and offering intelligence to fight the “Islamic State”, ISIS. It has also violated its commitment to refrain from overflying Iraq without permission of the Iraqi authorities.

    -- Elijah J. Magnier

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red flag

in Iran, the red flag was raised over the minaret of the Jamkaran Mosque in the holy city of Qom. It is the first time in history that the red flag has been raised over the minaret of Jamkaran. According to Shia tradition the red flag symbolizes blood spilled unjustly and is also a call for revenge.

meanwhile in Tehran

that was fast....

....its only Jan 3rd

If it is true the United States killed Iranian Quds Forces Commander General Qassam Soleimani in Iraq yesterday, unverified by the Iranians as I write this, then there is no hyperbole or exaggeration too great to encapsulate what may befall tens of millions of families. The equivalent of the killing of General Soleimani would be as if the Iranians assassinated General Richard Clarke, the US four star general in charge of all US special operations, but only if General Clarke had the name recognition of Colin Powell and the competency of Dwight Eisenhower. Those Iranians in government and civil society who want restraint, de-escalation and dialogue will find it hard to argue against retaliation. After more than 20 years of Iran enduring insult after insult, provocation after provocation, and attack after attack, I find it hard to believe there are many Barbara Lees in the Islamic Consultative Assembly.
    -- Mathew Hoh

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regenerative farmer

before farmland was cultivated, it had soil carbon levels of from 3% to 7%. Today, those levels are roughly 1% carbon. If every acre of farmland globally were returned to a soil carbon level of just 3%, 1 trillion tons of carbon dioxide would be removed from the atmosphere and stored in the soil – equal to the amount of carbon that has been drawn into the atmosphere since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution 200 years ago. The size of the potential solution matches the size of the problem.

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beam us up

As Australia burns, and Greta fulminates, it is the dark histories of race, subjugation and violent appropriation that must be reconciled before we can begin the work of repairing the planet. David Hammon, the New York and Los Angeles artist, notes, in an interview with Calvin Tompkins, published in the December 9, 2019, New Yorker, that, “Trump is the truth about America, because America has been like this forever. White people haven’t seen it, but we have.”

“You know, the reason we never see aliens is that everyone in the galaxy knows that this planet is a bad planet. They all know to stay away.”

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