Baby Boomers are coming to get you!

There’s even now a tendency in some corners of what passes for a left to turn to generational shaming and hate.  The real problem, I have been told in all seriousness, is Baby Boomers – that is, all U.S.-Americans born between 1946 and 1964.  This “Generation of Sociopaths” (the openly insane title of a book, penned by a Millennial venture capitalist, that purveys contempt for all those loathsome creatures who had the audacity to be delivered from their mother’s wombs in post-World War II America) is accused of looting the commons, perverting democracy, generating savage inequality, ruining the environment and more, all in service to it endless pursuit of narcissistic self-glorification. (My sincere apologies.  I was born in 1958).
     -- Paul Street

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unraveling

The externalities of a pillaged, ravaged planet, billions in poverty, and diminished resource base are not taken into account by mainstream economics. If rare earth minerals and metals were properly accounted for, a car would likely cost six figures, and a computer five figures. This would be an unobtainable and untenable situation for the average middle-class American, as only the rich could afford such luxuries, and thus, the majoritarian tyranny of our narcissistic and ahistorical culture continues.
    -- William Hawes

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house of strombo

word- merry christmas

Losing the capacity to express oneself may be a small price to pay for the societal benefits obtained by preventing wholesale use of dangerous words. But it does mean that the vocabulary you have acquired over a lifetime will soon be obsolete. You will be denied the use of many of your most cherished descriptors. Whole phrases may eventually be banned. It might be wise, therefore, to consider using your most powerful, poignant, defiant, descriptive or critical words very soon, while you still can. Otherwise those words could end up like stranded assets, left in the mind to rot.
    -- Paul Dean

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christian nation

The biggest problem with the Republican tax plan has nothing to do with taxes.

The most insidious part of the GOP tax bill is a provision pushed for by the religious right for the past 25 years. Contained in this small section of the bill is a provision that will set the country on the road to Theocracy.

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ring of fire

The Thomas fire has now swept through territory once lightly populated with Chumash Indians who regularly burned their food-gathering lands. As Kat Anderson has shown in Tending the Wild, Native American Knowledge and the Management of California's Natural Resources, 2006, local Indians managed their wild food resources by burning the land to encourage their growth and to create clearings in which they could better hunt game. While the coastal Chumash relied heavily on sea food, inland groups harvested acorns as their staple supplemented with chia seeds, the fruits of the holly leafed cherry and small game. The untouched wilderness eulogized by John Muir was in fact a carefully managed environment, with swathes of chaparral charred in controlled burns where the plants had long co-evolved with regenerative lightning-sparked conflagrations.
    -- John Davis
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by the numbers

3.  Mandates automatic Medicare cuts of at least $25 billion in 2018 and $400 billion over 10 years. In effect, seniors will pay for tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy as automatic spending cuts are triggered because the tax cuts add $1.5 trillion to the national debt. Automatic cuts altogether will total $136 billion in 2018 and include reductions in agriculture subsidies, student loans, military retirement and more. [Congressional Budget Office (CBO)]

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the water will come

New York City is a sea level rise hot spot, with sea levels rising there 50% faster than the global average, due to subsidence of the ground and ocean current dynamics. With 72,000 buildings worth over $129 billion currently standing in flood zones, it is good that The Big Apple is one of the most proactive cities in the world when it comes to sea level rise adaptation. In response to the $19 billion in flood damage from Hurricane Sandy in 2012, New York City is scheduled to break ground in 2019 on a $750 million, ten-foot high flood wall along the east side of Manhattan, part of a $3 billion barrier system informally called the “Big U”, designed to protect lower Manhattan from storm surges.
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