AAAAHH

Donald Trump, who was impeached by congress for revoking aid to Ukraine and then asking the Ukrainian president to dig up dirt on Joe Biden, says he can end the Ukraine war in a single day. He has yet to provide much of a concrete plan for this besides telling Putin, “If you don’t make a deal, we’re gonna give them a lot. We’re gonna give more than they ever got.”

Sounds like a continuation of what we are already doing. And if Trump is elected and he doesn’t immediately give Ukraine up to Russia, I am sure this is exactly what will happen. The proxy war will continue–perhaps it will even escalate as Trump tries even harder to hammer the same nail that Biden has been hammering for over a year now.

Donald is a politician just like any other. He thrives on national mood. That is why interest rates weren’t monitored when everyone was feeling good during the post 2008 recovery or the Covid eco-boom. You don’t fuck with the ship until it starts sinking. Why would Trump stop a production line that bolsters our own economy and stimulates our weapons manufacturing? His rhetoric about disliking war and killing will dissolve like mist.

Since 2019, the company SpaceX has been launching satellites into low orbit around the Earth. These objects work together to form an internet infrastructure. In theory, this network of satellites could provide internet connectivity to the entire world. Ukraine uses the service, for example, to maintain internet connectivity on the battlefield.

We are crowding our skies with a new kind of technological infrastructure. When governments speak of this system, they call it a “constellation.” We are literally placing new stars in the sky every week.

The infrastructure exists, but it is not open or free. The utility can be used at the whim of its owner.

“A combustible personality, the 52-year-old’s allegiances are fuzzy. While Mr. Musk is hailed as a genius innovator, he alone can decide to shut down Starlink internet access for a customer or country, and he has the ability to leverage sensitive information that the service gathers. Such concerns have been heightened because no companies or governments have come close to matching what he has built.

In Ukraine, some fears have been realized. Mr. Musk has restricted Starlink access multiple times during the war, people familiar with the situation said. At one point, he denied the Ukrainian military’s request to turn on Starlink near Crimea, the Russian-controlled territory, affecting battlefield strategy. Last year, he publicly floated a “peace plan” for the war that seemed aligned with Russian interests.”

This magnificent technology has the potential to offer an internet connection to every corner of the globe no matter how remote. It has the power to crack open oppressive governments by offering the citizens of every nation access to a web beholden to the First Amendment. Free speech, uncensored news, and a real connection with other people across the globe.

This is exactly what it should be used for.

“The July 3 account, reviewed by Hearst Newspapers, discloses several previously unreported incidents the trooper witnessed in Eagle Pass, where the state of Texas has strung miles of razor wire and deployed a wall of buoys in the Rio Grande.

According to the email, a pregnant woman having a miscarriage was found late last month caught in the wire, doubled over in pain. A four-year-old girl passed out from heat exhaustion after she tried to go through it and was pushed back by Texas National Guard soldiers. A teenager broke his leg trying to navigate the water around the wire and had to be carried by his father.

The email, which the trooper sent to a superior, suggests that Texas has set “traps” of razor wire-wrapped barrels in parts of the river with high water and low visibility. And it says the wire has increased the risk of drownings by forcing migrants into deeper stretches of the river. “

America has fallen so low that it has taken to making war on pregnant women and children.

Back in 2014, I was slamming communists way before it was cool. Now that everyone around me has a prefrontal cortex, they are stupefied that I resist the current trend of bemoaning China.

Why aren’t you joining the new cold war hoorah, Aaron? What are you, a commie and a China simp? Yes. Three reasons:

1: It doesn’t make sense to cry about the people that make the phone in your pocket. If you had real principles and weren’t just following a moaning herd, you would ditch the smart phone. That shackle in your pocket ties you to all the surveillance and slavery of the 21st century. Life is comfortable with that phone in your pocket though, so you bark without teeth. Replace [phone] with a number of other essential products. Walk into a Home Depot or a tractor supply and try to buy a well priced tool or glove that doesn’t have MADE IN CHINA stamped on it. Try to buy a washing machine with American components. The same Americans that moan and piss about Chinese Communism forget that Americans benefits directly from Chinese Communism every day. It is extremely convenient for us that there is another country across the globe filled with hundreds of millions of people willing to work jobs that are beneath us.

2: I still remember the spirit of 2020. Before militarism and salute emojis swept over public discourse, we were talking about police reform. We were talking about how insanely understaffed our hospitals are. We were talking about how we don’t have the capacity to make our own shit when a pandemic shuts down global trade. We were talking about the cost of education. We were talking about how absolutely fucked over working people are in the face of corporate profits.

I still believe that the best way to subvert Chinese Communism is to build an America capable of standing on its own two feet.

3: All the 21st century McCarthyists I meet tend to be virgins.

🫡

The debt crisis of 2023 made me realize that a lot of problems in America could be solved if our country could pay for itself. The amount of song and dance that goes into preventing tax hikes on the wealthiest brackets is stupefying. We borrow so that companies can profit.

RAISE TAXES 2024~!!!

Our nation used to lend and build. Now we borrow and spend. We can barely muster the energy to help ourselves, let alone support the world. If you sincerely want to compete with China (and aren’t just blowing smoke out of your ass for the sake of having a cultural enemy to unify yourself with others), then we need to be in a position to do what China is doing. We build shitty AI chat bots while they build highways. We used to build highways too, remember that? And during that period, America had a corporate tax rate multiple times the current rate. In order to write off those taxes, companies had to perform meaningful research or invest in their own employees. Let’s get back to that.

I just wrapped up a revisit of a children’s book from the fifth grade. The novel is called The Sign of the Beaver, published in 1982 and written by Elizabeth George Speare. The story features a boy, Matt, left to his own devices in the Maine wilderness while his father travels south to pick up Matt’s mother and sister. The story is a modern Robinsonade in the vein of My Side of the Mountain (Jean George) in that, rather than a shipwreck, the Crusoe figure’s remote situation is entered into in-part voluntarily. Matt is left to care for a cabin that he and his father constructed together in the spring. There are corn and pumpkins growing in the backyard, Matt has a kitchen with some flour and molasses, and he was even left with the family rifle. Of course, inexperience leads Matt to make a number of errors that ultimately leave him with a sprained foot, a face full of bee stings, and no gun!

Matt does not survive and thrive by his white man’s grit and cunning like in some of the older stories. No, he learns to live in the wilderness with the help of the local Indians that had been secretly watching him from the forest. Attean, the grandson of the chief, visits Matt every day to learn to read “the white man’s signs.”

“White man come more and more to Indian land. White man not make treaty with pipe. White man make signs on paper, signs Indian not know. Indian put mark on paper to show him friend of white man. Then white man take land. Attean learn to read white man’s signs. Attean not give away hunting grounds.”

I’ve read a lot about the didactics, or teaching capability, of Robinsonade stories, so I was intrigued when Matt decides to use his own copy of Robinson Crusoe to teach Attean to read. Throughout their lessons, Matt’s perspective on Crusoe changes in relation to the reality of wilderness survival that he lives every day. For example, Crusoe relies upon the wreckage of a ship to supply him with the tools he needs to survive. When Matt loses his fishing hook to a snapped line, he thinks he is screwed. Attean shows him, however, that a new fish hook can be carved from scraps of wood in no time at all.

“”White man not smart like Indian,” [Attean] said scornfully. “Indian not need thing from ship. Indian make all thing he need.”

[…]

After Attean has gone, Matt kept thinking about Robinson Crusoe and all the useful things he had managed to salvage from that ship. He had found a carpenter’s chest, for instance. Bags of nails. Two barrels of bullets. And a dozen hatchets — a dozen! Why, Matt and his father had come up here to Maine with one axe and an adz. […] He could see now how it must have sounded to Attean. Come to think of it, Robinson Crusoe had lived like a king on that desert island!””

The analysis of novel within a novel gets even more intriguing when Matt and Attean reach the part where Crusoe recruits his native servant Friday. Attean is immediately offended by Friday’s depiction as a submissive servant:

“”Nda!” [Attean] shouted. “Not so.”

Matt stopped, bewildered.

“Him never do that!”

“Never do what?”

“Never kneel down to white man!”

“But Crusoe had saved his life.”

“Not kneel down,” Attean repeated fiercely. “Not be slave. Better die.””

In the scene they had just read, Friday places Crusoe’s foot upon his head and swears to be Crusoe’s “slave” forever. Attean storms off, leaving Matt to wonder at how they will possibly complete the book. Matt decides to skip future portions of the story that contain demeaning representations of Friday, like the part where the first English word that Crusoe teaches Friday is “master.” Matt laments that the novel does not make this task easy:

“…it would have been better perhaps if Friday hadn’t been quite so thickheaded. After all, there must have been a thing or two about that desert island that a native who had lived there all his life could have taught Robinson Crusoe.”

So, therein lies the thesis (in a way) of Matt’s impromptu textual analysis–why does Friday, an Indian that in theory possesses all the superior ability and knowledge that Attean demonstrates to Matt daily, have to play student to Crusoe? From here, the novel expands outward beyond Matt’s safe cabin clearing into the wild forest. There, real experience fills in Crusoe’s gaps. Attean teaches Matt how to snare animals with root fibers. Attean teaches Matt how to shoot a bow so that he does not need to rely on bullets for meat. Attean saves Matt from a bear attack. Attean shows Matt the secret to navigating the woods via Indian Sign. Matt faces again and again the fact that the Indians have long ago figured out the most efficient methods of surviving the Maine wilderness. When Matt is finally brought to see the native village, Attean’s home, for himself, he scrambles to take in as much of their labor practices as possible. Every little trick catches his attention. He admires the work of the women processing grain, even though Attean dismisses it as squaw work. (The indians are sexist)

Matt realizes, also, that the white men like himself that had been colonizing America were not employing a Native American degree of foresight. The beavers, once plentiful, were just about gone. The wildlife was thinning. The metal traps they used were barbaric and wasteful, leaving animals to die or escape maimed. Throughout The Sign of the Beaver, Matt is made to see himself from the perspective of the other. It is a pleasant fantasy to think of the world we might live in today if Friday had taught Crusoe to live sustainably. Unfortunately, the original myth of expansion was based on a narrative of opulence. Colonizers assumed an endless blank slate to impose themselves upon. Alas, the frontier was not empty, and it certainly was a bottomless well of resources.

I love that Speare’s novel includes its own mini-textual analysis of the founding Robinsonade. Of course, she wasn’t the only person to do this. Robinsonades have been interpreting and reinterpreting Defoe’s original novel for literally over two centuries. With each iteration, authors have weigh the wonder of Crusoe’s myth against the reality of a shrinking world.

The Supreme Court is continuing its trend of making environmental policy decisions with a recent ruling on the Clean Water Act of 1972. Here is the summary of the act from epa.gov:

“The Clean Water Act (CWA) establishes the basic structure for regulating discharges of pollutants into the waters of the United States and regulating quality standards for surface waters. The basis of the CWA was enacted in 1948 and was called the Federal Water Pollution Control Act, but the Act was significantly reorganized and expanded in 1972. “Clean Water Act” became the Act’s common name with amendments in 1972.”

This law tends to enter the courts because real estate developers like to buy up cheap land, build on it, and then sell it for mega profits. Wetlands tend to be great picks given their waterlogged nature; not many people are willing to invest the money and effort into draining, filling, and building upon a swamp. Folks also tend to see swamps as valueless. So, sometimes a developer will try to convert a piece of worthless watery land and then somebody brings the Environmental Protection Agency down upon them. When these cases get to the Supreme Court, the court has to make policy decisions about questions like “what’s a body of water?” and “should people be allowed to pump sewage drainage into a vernal pool?”

One of the issues at play in this particular case is the issue of seasonality. Some bodies of water are not always visible from the surface all year. Sometimes a piece of land can go years without showing any sign that it is actually a wetland. Sometimes land that is converted long ago suddenly erupts into a swamp given the right conditions. This phenomenon is annoying for farmers and home owners… but could it also serve a larger environmental purpose? I’ll let Robert Leo Heilman make a case of his own:

“The Willamette Valley was a vast wetland, with beaver ponds, marshes, and islands between the main channels. Flooding was an annual event. The river channels were choked with debris, which slowed down the river current and spread it out, allowing the soil washing down the mountains to settle out and build up. The marshes were home to huge flocks of geese and ducks. Thousands of herons and cranes and swans, osprey and eagles lived there. Fish and amphibians and insects provided food.

The Missouri Bottoms below my house must have been a smaller version of the same sort of marsh. For years I’d looked out over that land, but it never occurred to me that the river used to run all year round through several shallow channels.

Several things suddenly made sense to me. Old Highway 99 runs along the hillside on the opposite side of the valley. I knew that it followed the old Applegate Trail and that the pioneer trailed followed the Indian trade route, but why did it go up on the hillside instead of through the flatter bottoms where the freeway runs? Because the bottom was a swamp–you couldn’t walk through there, let alone drive a wagon through it.

I understood how thirty feed of topsoil had built up. A single channel would never had slowed down enough to leave that silt behind, but a marsh, one that became a seasonal lake every spring, would.

I recalled passages from settlers’ diaries that mentioned the huge flocks of waterfowl, so thick that to hunt them, they simply startled the birds into flight and fired randomly into the air, bringing down ducks and geese with every shotgun blast. Where had these uncountable thousands of birds lived and why weren’t they around anymore?

The South Umpqua, as we see it now, a single channel with banks twenty to thirty feed high, is a modern creation. The marsh was drained for farmland, forcing the water into a single channel, which flowed faster and cut its way down through the soil to bedrock.

What’s the effect of that? For one thing, the soil eroded from the mountains no longer settles in the valley, it washes downriver to Reedsport, where the Army Corps of Engineers dredges it to keep a navigable channel open.

The wetlands used to store water and did it much more efficiently than any dam because the water was stored in the soil, keeping the groundwater table higher. Along with storage the marsh provided filtration and cooling, so not only is there less water now, but what we have isn’t as cool and clean as it used to be.

Of course, we’ve lost the wildlife habitat too. Wetlands are tremendously productive. In order to make wheat fields and hay ground and pasture, we’ve drained our wetlands, but in terms of sheer protein per acre, the “dismal swamps” were much more productive than the farmland that replaced them.

Someday we may decide to restore the marsh. We may decide that the benefits of erosion control, flood control, water storage and filtration, and wildlife enhancement outweighs the value of the crops that the land produces.”

Where developers see useless, waterlogged land, it is possible to find something of incredible human utility. The current Supreme Court, a conservative one, have taken a short sighted view. Surely, they see the capital to be gained from building and dumping on wetlands to be higher than leaving the swamps alone. However, in the long term, areas where groundwater accumulates protect us from flooding, keep our water supply clean, and nurture soil.

It happens again and again; Americans fail to comprehend their relationship with the land and break cycles that have kept the environment stable for a thousand centuries. In the early twentieth century, farmers in America’s bread basket reduced some of the richest soil on the planet into a dust bowl. In timber country, where Robert Heilman lived and worked, industrious people undermined the systems that kept the mountains and the lowlands productive and self-cleaning. Can you imagine that? A natural swamp can produce more protein than an industrial farm? Hard to imagine in 2023–the birds are gone.

The Supreme Court is selling America the Beautiful on the cheap. We won’t know what we have lost until the flooded McMansions are all we have left.

“The San Fernando Valley, down in Los Angeles, is also an alluvial plain. Though they’ve built a city on it, the essential nature of the place hasn’t changed. It’s still a catch basin for the runoff from the surrounding mountains, and every once in a while nature reminds them of that fact with a flood.

Back around the turn of the century, Los Angeles County was the top farming county in California. I can still remember driving through the San Fernando Valley as a child and seeing the farmers working their fields while housing projects were springing up all around them. My father once told me about coming to Los Angeles in the 1930s. He used to hunt ducks and geese in the marshes of the San Fernando Valley. The old nickname for the valley was “The Frog Pond,” and people still call it that sometimes.

To see the place now, it’s hard to imagine how it was when waterfowl wintered there and condors still soared above the hills. But the change came in a single generation, in the thirty years between my father’s early manhood and my own.

My father came to a place of beauty to start a family because his birthplace couldn’t provide a decent living. I had to do the same thing because my birthplace had become a wasteland of concrete and asphalt and smog and crime. I’m hoping that my son won’t have to do it all over again, that maybe this time we’ve found a place that will stay beautiful and safe.

It’s hard to say whether that will happen or not. Dangerous changes come, sometimes unexpectedly and sometimes slowly. But if this place is to survive, the Umpqua River, the living heart of these valleys, needs to be watched over and cared for so it can continue to take care of us, its people.”

(For more, read Overstory: Zero by Robert Leo Heilman)

Dang, can I keep this cake and also eat it?

Have AI’s learned how to draw hands?

You pay twice. You pay at the pump, like a good little capitalist, and then you pay out of your taxes, like a good little socialist. Oil companies are currently having our cake and eating it too.