Since 1970, humans have pumped so much groundwater, we’ve altered the Earth’s tilt. “It is, in a way, mind boggling,” the researchers who discovered the tilt, stated. Humans are causing so much polar ice to melt that we are changing time. We are slowing the Earth’s rotation and may have to subtract a leap second very soon.
Scoop: Solar storm is causing farmers' tractor GPS systems to go haywire. Many have shut down planting altogether during a critical period. A Deere dealer said accuracy is "extremely compromised"
This is a reminder of how much modern tractors rely on satellite and internet connections. Many farmers can't or won't plant right now bc tractors have been highly automated to increase yield. Rows are planted so tightly together that humans can't navigate them w/o killing crops
‘Hopeless and broken’: why the world’s top climate scientists are in despair
“The big difference…was that all of the scientists I worked with were incredibly frustrated. Everyone was at the end of their rope, asking: what the fuck do we have to do to get through to people how bad this really is?”
My latest for The Nation. "Universities Like Mine Are Providing an Authoritarian Blueprint for Trump: The potential next president and his allies are looking at the campus-led crackdown on free speech as a perfect dress rehearsal." https://www.thenation.com/article/society/campus-protests/
In an interview I just taped with Rashid Khalidi about #Columbia he said words to the effect of "this is the neoliberal dream of the university--no students, no professors, just administrators and cops on campus"
Facebook/Meta starts talking about the "Extend" phase of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish as predicted:
"“You could imagine an extension to the protocol eventually — of saying like, ‘I want to support micropayments,’ or … like, ‘hey, feel free to show me ads, if that supports you.’ Kind of like a way for you to self-label or self-opt-in. That would be great,”
"Evil doesn’t win because good is dumb. Evil wins because evil is easy. It’s so damnably easy to be stupid and hateful and ignorant and mean. It’s effortless. It’s easy not to regulate your behavior or your emotions because fuck everyone else that’s why. It’s easy to just go through life the way your parents told you to and hate anyone who lives differently..."
It's never not time to share this but expecially not now.
I posted on Boing Boing about "White Trash Wins Lotto," a cast album of a Gilbert and Sullivan-style musical about Axl Rose. (You can download the whole thing for free.)
Josh Marshall reports that no clear information has yet been reported on who the pro-Israel counter-protesters violently attacking student protesters at UCLA are. He's also seen no evidence they were arrested.
Reports uniformly say they were not students and were almost all men. They were wearing balaklavas.
"Ending free speech on college campuses is the leading edge of a bigger war against dissent that could already be lost by Nov. 5, and any contest of the election result that follows."
And while we’re at it, here’s @pluralistic's “Zuck’s Empire of Oily Rags” again, probably the best essay on Zuck’s Evil Empire ever written:
“No one would pay very much for this oil, but there were a lot of oily rags, and provided no one asked him to pay for the inevitable horrific fires that would result from filling the world’s garages with oily rags, he could turn a tidy profit.”
@gyokusai@pluralistic "In corrupt systems, a few bad actors cost everyone else billions in order to bring in millions – the savings a factory can realize from dumping pollution in the water supply are much smaller than the costs we all bear from being poisoned by effluent. But the costs are widely diffused while the gains are tightly concentrated, so the beneficiaries of corruption can always outspend their victims to stay clear." 👍👍
