This is, counterintuitively, degrowth in action.

Replacing twenty years’ worth of kerosene, gasoline, wood, etc, with a single solar microgrid, is an example of providing higher quality of life with fewer resources.

Good to see some good news these days.

If you want to understand why Schumer and Dem leadership caved to Trump’s budget yesterday, read this article.

Trump is promising political prosecutions of his most prominent political opponents.

Schumer believes him.

Schumer doesn’t have the guts to take that heat.

Schumer - and the Democrat old guard in general - made their bones in an America where political opposition to the ruling party came with little or no personal or financial risk. Schumer and his ilk built careers and comfortable fortunes, enjoyed the financial benefits of corporate lobbying, dabbled in what was technically insider trading and tax evasion and campaign finance violations, secure in the knowledge the FBI would pursue only the most egregious cases of fraud and they could enjoy the benefits of power as long as they didn’t get too greedy.

And now Schumer is looking at an America where political opposition comes with very real personal consequences. Where opposing the ruling party means law enforcement will go through your record with a fine toothed comb looking for skeletons to drag out of your closet.

Civil rights warriors of the 60s signed up for that. The men and women who risked beatings and jail time to march against segregation aren’t going to back down from threats of prosecution now.

Leftists and anarchists signed up for that. The people who risked arrest to protest George Floyd’s murder, who marched in protests where windows were smashed and cars firebombed knowing Patriot Act provisions could see every one of them charged as terrorists for the actions of a few - people who know the FBI is monitoring them already and looking for an excuse - aren’t going to stop just because Trump confirmed rhe FBI is out to get them.

Fat happy pampered Senators who’ve never seen the inside of a jail cell in their life?

Fat happy pampered Senators who’ve been getting rich off dubiously legal campaign donations and insider trading for decades?

Yeah, they’re going to back down and submit to Trump rather than risk making themselves a target of Trump’s FBI.

And yesterday they did.

An America where the opposition party leadership is the target of political prosecutions needs leadership willing to risk those prosecutions. Willing to lead the opposition from jail if that’s what it takes to stand up for what they believe in.

Fighting authoritarianism means risking your life and freedom for what you believe in.

Current Dem leadership don’t have the guts.

Quick history moment:

The US government has always treated politically motivated vandalism as domestic terrorism.

The FBI defined Earth First!, Earth Liberation Front, and similar radical environmental groups as terrorist organizations decades ago, because they spiked trees and burnt subdivisions and SUV dealerships.

The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act makes it an act of terrorism to vandalize a factory farm or animal research lab - even nonviolent protest that “intimidates” employees is illegal.

Some of y’all are acting like burning car dealerships was protected speech before Trump. Come on.

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Love to hear how you think digital currencies aren’t digital currencies.

Not all digital currencies are cryptocurrencies. CBDCs are digital implementations of government-backed fiat currencies. If you don’t understand the difference I don’t have time to try to convince you, sorry.

by your flawed metrics, solar power is “hype”.

Solar power produces energy. Cryptocurrency produces nothing and wastes energy doing it.

at least 130 countries are working on developing national cryptocurrencies.

CBDCs aren’t cryptocurrencies.

As for the rest, “It’s good because it’s making lots of money” isn’t as persuasive an argument as you think it is.

Unfortunately, I think the United States will take exactly the wrong message from its internal climate refugees.

Lifeboat ethics.

“We have to close our borders and deport refugees from other countries so we can help our own climate refugees.”

“Millions of illegals!”

“Actually, the people you’re referring to are legally in the United States with temporary protected status…”

“They’re still here illegally because I say so, illegal illegal lalala”

“Climate change isn’t real, but if it was, we would need to pump more oil and natural gas in the United States to make our energy sector strong for the oncoming crisis.”

“Oh, and don’t buy solar panels from China, because they’re dirty foreigners.”

And Walz, who spent the whole debate staring at the podium scowling like a rotten jack-o’-lantern, was so out of it he couldn’t effectively call out Vance’s bogus definition of clean energy and bring up the Build Back Better plan and Biden’s investments into the US energy economy.

What the fuck.

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You’re doing Gaia’s work

Love it!

Yep. I think it’s Roundup. Used to be people used chemical herbicides with more discretion to avoid harming crops, so bugs could live on weeds in patches or at the edges of fields.

Nowadays you just plant a strain of corn or soybeans that’s immune to Roundup and soak your entire field in glyphosate multiple times a year. So the only insects that have food or shelter anywhere near you are ones that can live on your crop - and then you spray pesticides to kill those.

Result: millions and millions of acres of essentially sterile agricultural monocrop.

And more and more land is being turned into agricultural monocrop - not because a growing population needs more food, but because of bad laws and subsidies. Almost 100 million acres in the US - 40% of the American corn crop - is used to produce fucking ethanol, which burns more fossil fuel to produce than it replaces and is only profitable because of massive government subsidies procured by energy and agricultural lobbyists.

We are wiping hundreds of square miles of land clean of life in order to turn one fossil fuel into another less efficient fossil fuel. It’s species wide insanity.

And that being said: even though agriculture is a much bigger contributor to the ongoing insect omnicide than suburban pest spraying, when you keep the chemicals off your lawn and allow native plants and flowers to grow, it does help your local bugs, and you are making an impact.

Preach.

Housing is a human right.

Private land ownership violates that human right.

All land should be held in trust for the people as a whole and managed by the government for the benefit of the people. Including the houses and apartments on that land.

We should not have private homeowners. We should not have private landlords. We should have socialized housing, just like we should have socialized medicine. Apartment buildings and neighborhoods should be managed by tenant associations, with strict legal limits on their authority over individual tenants, and government facilitators to provide expert advice on building management and keep meetings running smoothly.

But we are a long way from implementing that.

It boggles my mind how people still insist there’s a “free market” in rent when we have proof of giant property management corporations colluding nationwide to raise rents.

This shit is why we need rent control.

Because during bad times the ones that make bad decisions don’t survive or at very least are removed from positions of power.

It’s more common for bad leaders to make the bad decisions that cause the bad times, and then either be deposed by violence or cling to power with violence, making everything worse. See Stalin, Mao, and also the entire history of sub-Saharan Africa after colonialism.

I’m certainly not a fan of American electoral democracy, but one can say that at least it’s mostly peaceful and allows in theory the people to make a choice between qualified and vetted candidates. In “hard times” the mechanisms created by civil society to select competent leaders tend to break down. So rather than removing bad leaders from power in hard times, it becomes even harder to remove such leaders, and even harder to determine whether a leader is good or bad until after he’s in charge of the army’s salary.