Preface. This is a book review of “Pandemic Politics” about the myriad ways Trump mishandled the covid-19 pandemic. With the 2024 election coming up, it is a good time to remember how spectacularly Trump failed in managing covid-19.
In 2016 Trump said “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” He was far too modest, he killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and lost few supporters.
Preface (long). Summary of changes in Republican platform from 1960 to 2012:
Our Nation’s History is filled with the stories of brave men and women who gave everything they had to build America into the Greatest Nation in the History of the World. Generations of American Patriots have summoned the American Spirit of Strength, Determination, and Love of Country to overcome seemingly insurmountable challenges. But now we are a Nation in SERIOUS DECLINE. After nearly four years of the Biden administration, America is now rocked by Raging Inflation, Open Borders, Rampant Crime, Attacks on our Children, and Global Conflict, Chaos, and Instability.
For decades, our politicians sold our jobs and livelihoods to the highest bidders overseas with unfair Trade Deals and a blind faith in the siren song of globalism, allowing our Borders to be overrun, our cities to be overtaken by crime, our System of Justice to be weaponized. They rejected our History and our Values. Quite simply, they did everything in their power to destroy our Country. In 2016, President Donald J. Trump was elected as an unapologetic Champion of the American People. He reignited the American Spirit and called on us to renew our National Pride.
A few of the many items on the platform:
Fisher’s article describes the Republicans as going from moderate to conservative, but I think the word extreme is better. Let’s call Republicans Extremists in the next election.
If that sounds extreme, consider the definition of extremist: a person who holds extreme or fanatical political or religious views, especially one who resorts to or advocates extreme action. “political extremists” synonyms: fanatic, radical, zealot, fundamentalist, hard-liner, militant.
Today the Extremist partie’s main voters are Evangelists and the National Rifle Association (probably a large overlap). NO COMPROMISE has become the platform of the Republican Party. Sure seems Extremist to me. Consider these facts as well:
Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report ]
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The Republican Party, viewed through its quadrennial platform documents, is consistently business-oriented and committed to a strong defense, but has morphed over the past half-century from a socially moderate, environmentally progressive and fiscally cautious group to a conservative party that is suspicious of government, allied against abortion and motivated by faith.
Influenced by the rise of tea party activists, this year’s platform, adopted Tuesday at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, has shifted to the right, particularly on fiscal issues. It calls for an audit of the Federal Reserve and a commission to study returning to the gold standard. There are odes of fidelity to the Constitution but also calls for amendments that would balance the federal budget, require a two-thirds majority in Congress to raise taxes and define marriage as a union between one man and one woman.
The new plank urges the transformation of Medicare from an entitlement to a system of personal accounts, increased use of coal for energy and a ban on federal funding to universities that give illegal immigrants in-state tuition rates.
What it means to be a Republican has changed enormously over the past half-century. The GOP opposed a Palestinian state as late as 1992, went silent on the issue for eight years, then endorsed the idea in its past two planks. During the George H.W. Bush presidency, Republicans acknowledged global warming and boasted of efforts to commit billions of federal dollars to finding solutions. The party then spent two election cycles saying there was too much “scientific uncertainty” before accepting in 2008 that humans have a role in altering the climate.
The GOP, like its opposition, has responded to ideological, demographic and social changes by hardening some of its positions and adopting entirely new planks, all part of an effort to create a coalition capable of winning national elections. In the Republicans’ case, that meant adapting and appealing to a new base in the South from the 1970s forward, becoming the dominant party of white suburbia, and finding ways to marry its traditional pro-business foundation with less affluent, more socially conservative voters.
Many positions Republicans often tout as traditionally conservative are actually relatively new to GOP ideology. Indeed, although the party’s stance on the issues has shifted rightward over the past 20 years, Republicans have studiously avoided using the word “conservative” in platforms.
Even the party’s most conservative platforms avoid the word conservative, which first appears in 1992. From the 1960s to 2008, platforms liberally criticize “liberals,” but “conservative” is used almost exclusively to refer to judges.
From the 1960s through the ’80s, each plank reads like a snapshot of its time, capturing the frustrations of the party or the pride of those in power, sometimes wryly needling Democrats, other years slamming them hard. But from the 1990s forward, the platforms exhibit a sameness of rhetorical style, a reflection of the cut-and-paste reality of the computer age, in which entire sentences appear over and over in successive planks.
Even as ritual expressions of solidarity with the Philippines or calls to abolish inheritance taxes survive each round of platform construction, the party line changes markedly on many issues.
The platforms of 1980 and 1992 are the party’s big pivots, both in positions and rhetoric. But the roots of today’s Republicanism become clear during the 1964 conservative uprising that led to Barry Goldwater’s presidential nomination.
The optimism of 1960 — brimming with hope about new nations, weapons and ideas — gives way four years later to worry about “moral decline and drift” born of “indifference to national ideals rounded in devoutly held religious faith.”
In 1960, the platform calls for “vigorous support of court orders for school desegregation” and affirms the rights of civil rights protesters. The 1964 plank calls for “discouraging lawlessness and violence” and “opposing federally sponsored ‘inverse discrimination.’
On foreign policy, Republicans remain mostly consistent, calling for increased defense spending to combat communism.
If the fiery rhetoric of 1964 presaged the Reagan and tea party revolutions, the path was not smooth. The Richard M. Nixon years brought a return — in the platform, if not in the coarser approach revealed in the Nixon White House tapes — of a more moderate message.
And the party’s attitude on the balance between civil liberties and aggressive security measures shifts dramatically after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The 1996 and 2000 platforms oppose President Bill Clinton’s decision to close Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House, promising to reopen the street. But later platforms embrace George W. Bush’s emphasis on the vigorous expansion of the government’s role in homeland security.
Preface. Although I thought Chris Mooney’s book “The Republican Brain” was brilliant, I couldn’t help but thinking that conservative and liberal viewpoints must be embedded in our genetics and how we evolved socially over the last 300,000 years.
What follows are excerpts from my kindle notes on Garcia’s book, which goes in depth into this topic from an evolutionary point of view. It’s really interesting, and it explains why women tend to be more liberal and men more conservative.
“Evolutionary psychology is a field that rests on the understanding that we humans have spent 99% of our history in small bands of hunter-gatherers, living in environments very different from those in which we currently reside. Survival in those environments was harsh, with perpetual threats from predators, starvation, disease, and violence from outside tribes. These are the environments in which our political predispositions evolved.”
Preface. Whenever collapse begins, racist white republican groups, many who were or are in the military, could make regions of the country deadly for minorities, liberals, non-Christian religious groups ad so on, forming small armies going home to home to take food, cattle, money, guns, and anything else of value as Stalin ordered done in Ukraine several times, killing over 5 million people (see Red Famine: Stalin’s war on Ukraine, in the top 10 horrifying books I’ve read in my life, and Putin is going even further in many ways by flattening a large percent of homes and buildings, and infesting 30% of Ukraine with land mines). The same people who tried to help Trump on Jan 6 at the capital.
Belew documents how they have far more guns and other weapons than you can possibly imagine from bank robberies, dozens of illegal and often violent crimes, and selling drugs. Above all, stockpiles of weaponry that military men have stolen from where they’re stationed:
Preface. This is a book review with excerpts from the first half of “How Democracies Die” by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. A few main points:
We tend to think of democracies dying at the hands of men with guns. But democracies may die at the hands of elected leaders—presidents or prime ministers who subvert the very process that brought them to power. Some of these leaders dismantle democracy quickly, as Hitler did in the wake of the 1933 Reichstag fire in Germany. Or erode slowly, in barely visible steps. Newspapers still publish but are bought off or bullied into self-censorship. Citizens continue to criticize the government but often find themselves facing tax or other legal troubles. This sows public confusion. People do not immediately realize what is happening. Many continue to believe they are living under a democracy.
Preface.
This is a book review of “Conservatives without Conscience” by John Dean.
It is the best book I’ve read in explaining the history of conservatism and leaders like Newt Gingrich on the increasing authoritarianism of Republicans, It also explains why authoritarian Republicans, who tend to have been selected and voted in by evangelicals, have no morals and act against the nation’s best interests. And why they don’t criticize Trump’s racist, sexist, war mongering tweets.
Preface. One of the many items I found of interest in this book “The Power Worshippers” was that it wasn’t until 1979, six years after Roe v Wade, that conservative activists seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a way to deny President Jimmy Carter because he was threatening to tax religious segregated (racist) schools.
Preface. This is a book review that has key excerpts of “Foxocracy”, by Tobin Smith, who worked at Fox for 14 years and was friends with Roger Ailes as well as the staff that decided what the propaganda of the day would be. He learned all about the psychology behind the show, including using techniques of Nazi propaganda.
What’s most alarming is that millions of families have been torn apart when members have gone down the Foxhole. It is addictive, because like World Wrestling Entertainment, the right-wing newscasters win every time against purposefully chosen much weaker liberal punching-bags. It’s a good feeling for the majority of fox viewers, many of them among the 54% of America’s working poor who are barely getting by.
The Trump WWE fans don’t care if the game is rigged, they know WWE is rigged, but are addicted to the fuzzy warm feelings they get when their team wins. So they don’t mind being fooled by Fox. Top that off with a large percentage of Fox viewers being evangelists who believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible. Who could possibly be easier to fool? They don’t want facts. They don’t care about facts, they are cult members who will likely never snap out of it because they don’t want to.
Preface. Joe Bageant grew up in poor, conservative Winchester Virginia, which is like tens of thousands of other small towns in America. He is one of the few who escaped and got a college education. When he retired there in 1999, he knew hundreds of people, and gives readers a visceral, gut-level understanding of what life is like in Republican bible-belt territory. He paints vivid portraits of the locals he knows and cares about, the feudal economics that keep them poor, how Christian fundamentalism is woven into their lives, and why they vote against their own interests. Best of all, he’s funny.
Preface. In the 70s and first half of the 80s population and immigration were on the platforms of ALL environmental groups. Today in mainstream media and most environmental groups, only nasty, racist people who hate black and brown people are mentioned. Never an interview with an ecologist, or discussion of limits to growth. Certainly the IPCC has no models of how less population would affect climate change, though it obviously would, since the reason for deforestation, wetland and biodiversity loss and all the other existential crises occur is to feed ever more people driving ever more cars burning ever more fossils to growth food, refrigeration, cooking, heating, cooling, and manufacture ever more goods for ever more people.
The Sierra Club was instrumental in making the topic of population and immigration taboo and politically incorrect because David Gelbaum gave them over $100 million dollars in exchange for not taking a position on these issues anymore (Weiss KR (2004) The Man Behind the Land. Los Angeles Times). And $100 million more since then according to Wikipedia.
I did a google search on population growth and climate change and looked at hundreds of results. I found three, only one of them mainstream. You have to go back to 2009 to start seeing articles on their connection. The dozen or so mainstream articles that do mention these two topics deny there is a connection, how dare anyone suggest such a racist thing. Kind of like the argument pro-gun advocates use to deny the need for gun control by saying “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people”.
Meanwhile, without free contraception and abortion world-wide through family planning, taxing more than one child, and other measures that are not harsh and voluntary, we come ever closer to Mother Nature solving the problem for us with drought, heat waves, and more — which has been the death of many civilizations in the past. With peak production of both conventional and unconventional oil in 2018, declining oil in the future will be the coup de grace, since for now we can buy our way out of it and stay alive with help from fossil fuels, such as to get the last fish in the ocean with giant ships and spotter planes in the Antarctic, air-conditioning in heat waves, refrigeration, industrially grow food for 8 billion people with gigantic tractors and combines and so on.
Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Women in ecology Podcasts: WGBH, Financial Sense, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity, Index of best energyskeptic posts
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Population growth is the increase in the number of humans on Earth. For most of human history our population size was relatively stable. But with innovation and industrialization, energy, food, water, and medical care became more available and reliable. Consequently, global human population rapidly increased, and continues to do so, with dramatic impacts on global climate and ecosystems. We will need technological and social innovation to help us support the world’s population as we adapt to and mitigate climate and environmental changes.
Human population growth impacts the Earth system in a variety of ways, including:
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Global population surpassed 8 billion this week, a shocking milestone because back in the 1990s this threshold was not expected to be breached until 2050. Whether you’re a dour Malthusian or a technological optimist, one thing is undeniable: The 2.7 billion people added to global population since 1990 makes the task of averting a climate catastrophe vastly more challenging than it was when global warming first arose as a mainstream concern.
Getting to zero net emissions in 1990—when fossil fuels were putting 22.4 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) into the atmosphere—was hard enough. Now, we have to eliminate those emissions along with roughly 14 billion tons of annual GHG emissions resulting from population growth.
One of actions to take is family planning, which until now has been largely absent from the conversation around global warming. Most of the expected 2 billion people will be born in the poorer nations. These nations burn fewer fossil fuels, but all aspire to raise their standard of living, which, given today’s energy mix, means more GHG emissions per capita. Even without economic growth, that population increase would mean roughly four billion additional metric tons of CO2 going into the atmosphere each year. That’s about a 10% increase, and, as of today, the world has never been able to voluntarily reduce annual emissions.
Population should be part of climate discussions, but I cannot remember a time when family planning has been featured in international efforts. Yes, it’s a hot button topic in many of the emerging nations, many of which take affront when the rich nations ask them to stabilize their numbers. But its absence from the agenda from last week’s COP27 is a tell that the Congress of Parties process is not a serious effort to really tackle the risk of climate change.
Population growth is the elephant in the room for climate change, but it is also the elephant in the room for ecological issues such as tropical deforestation, desertification, the extinction crisis, the destabilizing of earth’s life support systems on land and in the oceans; demographic issues such as involuntary migration, fresh water, and food insecurity; and political issues such as civil unrest and state failure. Slowing population growth will reduce pressures on all of these issues and threats.
Population growth is a fraught issue. In the last few decades, a major driver to limit family size has been the demographic shift towards urban areas. In cities, additional kids become a liability because of the higher costs of housing and food. This shows that people can change attitudes towards family size quite rapidly, given incentives and access to family planning. For governments, the incentive should be the prospect of a climate Hell if population continues to increase by several hundred million people every decade. Many emerging nations have made great strides in lowering infant mortality, but, all too often efforts on maternal and infant health are not coupled with access to family planning, which is one reason why human numbers surpassed 8 billion two decades ahead of schedule.
Laubichler M (2022) Population growth, climate change create an ‘Anthropocene engine’ that’s changing the planet. Salon.com
Behind a paywall for me, but I found this summary: “”Human population growth is the root cause of climate change” is a 2021 letter and comment in The BMJ by Jonathan Austen. The letter argues that population growth and increased consumption are the main causes of climate change. It suggests that population growth could be addressed through financial incentives for smaller families and free access to contraception. The letter also claims that population stability would lead to less deforestation and construction, which would have a significant impact on climate change”.
CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCIV) — South Carolina is growing, but not all growth is good. At least that is what Leon Kolankiewicz, an environmental scientist with NumbersUSA and lead author of “From Sea to Sprawling Sea,” an environmental impact study that explores how U.S. population growth has driven rural land loss across four decades, said.
“You are making it very difficult to achieve your climate goals by increasing the number of energy consumers, it just doesn’t work”. From 1982 to 2017, 35 years, South Carolina lost 2,126 square miles to what Kolankiewicz described as urban sprawl – the loss of rural land to urbanized development. “This pace of development, rural land loss, is accelerating,” Kolankiewicz said. “So that, quite understandably, has a lot of South Carolinians concerned or even upset.
Though politicians, including Gov. Henry McMaster, have praised South Carolina’s population growth, and paraded it around as proof of a “booming” economy, environmentalists like Kolankiewicz are concerned that urban sprawl, brought about by an increase in population, can steer areas like the Palmetto State – and the United States – into an existential crisis. “We face an issue of how human beings are going to live when there are 330 million of us in this country,” Kolankiewicz said. “We can’t keep doing that. It is unsustainable. You’re robbing Peter to pay Paul. Losing rural lands to urban sprawl can cripple the environment. Wildlife loses natural grazing land, farmers lose farmland and deforestation only adds to dramatic drops in air quality,” Kolankiewicz explained.
In his study, he contends that even if the loss of habitat and farmland continues at the lower rate of the 2002 to 2017 period, the average destruction of 1,200 square miles per year across the United States would be unsustainable for a country that desires the continued capability of food independence and stewardship of the animal and plant life currently living within its borders. “You can’t have growth in any object or entity in a finite system,” Kolankiewicz said. “Neither the United States, the biosphere, nor the world as a whole was growing in terms of resources to accommodate ever-increasing human demands.”
Kolankiwicz, who also wrote:
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No doubt human population growth is a major contributor to global warming, given that humans use fossil fuels to power their increasingly mechanized lifestyles. More people means more demand for oil, gas, coal and other fuels mined or drilled from below the Earth’s surface that, when burned, spew enough carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere to trap warm air inside like a greenhouse.
According to the United Nations Population Fund, human population grew from 1.6 billion to 6.1 billion people during the course of the 20th century. (Think about it: It took all of time for population to reach 1.6 billion; then it shot to 6.1 billion over just 100 years.) During that time emissions of CO2, the leading greenhouse gas, grew 12-fold. And with worldwide population expected to surpass nine billion over the next 50 years, environmentalists and others are worried about the ability of the planet to withstand the added load of greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere and wreaking havoc on ecosystems down below.
Developed countries consume the lion’s share of fossil fuels. The United States, for example, contains just five percent of world population, yet contributes a quarter of total CO2 output. But while population growth is stagnant or dropping in most developed countries (except for the U.S., due to immigration), it is rising rapidly in quickly industrializing developing nations. According to the United Nations Population Fund, fast-growing developing countries (like China and India) will contribute more than half of global CO2 emissions by 2050, leading some to wonder if all of the efforts being made to curb U.S. emissions will be erased by other countries’ adoption of our long held over-consumptive ways.
“Population, global warming and consumption patterns are inextricably linked in their collective global environmental impact,” reports the Global Population and Environment Program at the non-profit Sierra Club. “As developing countries’ contribution to global emissions grows, population size and growth rates will become significant factors in magnifying the impacts of global warming.”
According to the Worldwatch Institute, a nonprofit environmental think tank, the overriding challenges facing our global civilization are to curtail climate change and slow population growth. “Success on these two fronts would make other challenges, such as reversing the deforestation of Earth, stabilizing water tables, and protecting plant and animal diversity, much more manageable,” reports the group. “If we cannot stabilize climate and we cannot stabilize population, there is not an ecosystem on Earth that we can save.”
CONTACTS: United Nations Population Fund, www.unfpa.org; Sierra Club’s Global Population and Environment Program, www.sierraclub.org/population; Worldwatch Institute, www.worldwatch.org.
