ComradeKayAdams

On offense: Allen, Diggs, and Dawkins all have respectable chances. Moss will likely steal too many of Singletary's carries and red zone opportunities needed to generate Pro Bowl numbers. On defense: White is the only obvious one. Hyde, Poyer, and Edmunds all have good chances too. Hughes and Milano are dark horse candidates. Oliver has the physical talent to make it. I really like Vernon Butler in this defense, so I'll offer him as my super sleeper Pro Bowl surprise pick. On special teams: I'm going to throw in Bass as my wild crazy fun pick...IF he makes the roster.

Incentivized multilateral trade negotiations, followed by multilateral sanctions as a last resort. Is anyone offering a better solution? I’m seeing the problem more through anthropological lenses. China likes money just as the West likes money. Also, China does not have a monopoly on predilections for using brute force to solve problems or to gain economic benefit. See: American post-WW2 foreign policy in the Cold War and in the War on Terror. While the UN is definitely a flawed organization, America’s own track record on unilateral international problem solving is not exactly impeccable.

Why only half-convinced?! You see, this is why y’all are so distrustful of government. You haven’t elected ME yet to solve your problems. “I have a plan for that.” – Liz Warren, 2020. “I have a PPP post for that.” – RealKayAdams, 2020. Unfortunately there’s no Holy Grail of energy. Not even nuclear fusion. All energy sources have benefits and drawbacks. Our energy solution for the future will involve some differently weighted combination of multiple sources. I personally think solar energy should and will be a major component of our overall future energy solution. I enjoy numerical lists, so I’ll list solar’s drawbacks here and put in parentheses why I’m generally not worried for each: 1. Low power density (I don’t think the math will ever work out for solar being a sole energy source, but it’s not an issue to me because we should expect to supplement solar with other renewable energy sources…including my favorite high power density source that I’ve already mentioned in earlier posts…nuclear fission). 2. Low solar energy conversion efficiency (there’s an 85% thermodynamic limit and current solar tech is at about 20%, but that number will keep going up as scientists and engineers play around with different materials, processing methods, and clever nanotech designs). 3. Resource mining concerns for rare earth metals (this is my only big concern with solar, and Chinese foreign relations complicate matters because China currently mines 95% of the world’s supply. Rare earth metals aren’t actually “rare.” They’re just harder to mine because they tend to be more diffuse in the ground compared to most veins of more conventional metals. I cautiously support increased worldwide ore mining so long as the mining and processing techniques are done in environmentally ethical ways…so I’m looking for sufficient government oversight here). 4. Material and production costs (this has been going down naturally, especially following the pandemic’s recent obliteration of the global transportation economy, and it should continue going down as worldwide mineral resource mines for solar energy open up while government subsidization/taxation policies change). 5. Fossil fuel consumption during entire solar panel product life cycle (it’s an issue now, but won’t be one later as renewable energy becomes more ubiquitous). 6. Large land/space requirements (I’ve seen lots of creative “Tetris-like” ideas for product stacking, urban placement, and desert placement). 7. Effects on flora like desert plants (not much of a problem if placed intelligently and responsibly, and I’ve also seen creative ways they can be placed to minimize desert habitat impact). 8. Effects on fauna like birds (the mirrors-and-towers solar thermal collector designs are bad, but the much more common photovoltaics are not. There are clever ways to deter certain birds in the desert from crashing into large panel arrays, but overall I can think of MANY more man-made things that are dangerous to flight-based wildlife…one being man-made global warming and the ways it disturbs migration patterns, for example). 9. Waste disposal (a perfectly manageable problem if we have active recycling programs for panels after their approximate 25-year life cycle). I figure solar panels powering homes and buildings would be the easiest item to check off on Biden’s list. I’m not optimistic on electric cars, solar cars, or solar/electric hybrid vehicles within the next 10 or so years. This sentiment has more to do with American transportation market behavioral habits and less to do with the potential of the technology. I’ll address your concerns in the order presented: 1. Which professional climatologists are you thinking of who made 4-5 degree Celsius predictions in 1995?? Predicting 4-5 degree increases within 25 years would require an absolute worst-case perfect storm (no pun intended) of multiple simultaneous positive climate feedback loop sources to trigger. All the reputable climatologists I’m familiar with (James Hansen types) have been very reasonably accurate with their models and with their early 21st century predictions, dating back to the late 80’s and early 90’s. 2. A 0.55 degree Celsius change is definitely NOT a typical Earth occurrence within a 25-year period and especially not within a single year. You would need something like unusually strong volcanic activity to initiate such a change. You might be thinking of LOCAL mean surface temperatures? I’m referring to GLOBAL mean surface temperatures. 3. Going back in time 750+ years beyond the start of the Industrial Age only reinforces my argument. What global mean surface temperature data are you looking at where you don’t see the obvious aberrant temperature climb beginning around 1900? The Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age were notably more tame in comparison, and those two had their biggest rapid temperature deviations due to specific volcanic eruptions. If you wanted to go back even further in time like 20,000 years or so, the warming and cooling data follows what you’d expect from cyclical changes in the Earth’s axial tilt. 4. Sea rise is measured with a combination of satellite laser altimeters and tide stations. Very large numbers of measurements are taken and averaged out, but I don’t know the technical details behind how the exact equipment calibrations and calculations are done. You’re better off e-mailing someone from NASA to get a good answer. Maybe also look into LIGO in Louisiana or check out the 2012 Gran Sasso FTL neutrino anomaly controversy to see how laser-based precision measurements are done. By the way, 3.5 inches of sea rise isn’t trivial. Humans who live and work intimately along coastlines will notice that. 5. Any climate data can be available to the public as soon as it has been published in a peer-reviewed scientific paper. More often than not, though, you’ll have to do a bit of extra work beyond internet searches to find it. You may have to subscribe to scientific journals or directly e-mail scientists. I don’t know how freely computational model code will be given out, however. 6. Your last sentence concerns me. Would full data disclosure be enough? Because it doesn’t really sound like climate scientists could do anything to gain your trust. Can you identify for yourself a set of new data or facts that would cause you to reverse your stance on MMGW (in case you were wondering, yes I do have my own list of evidence I need to see in order to reverse my opinion on MMGW)? Do you also harbor similar skepticism for fossil fuel CEO’s or for scientists, think thanks, and politicians directly funded by the fossil fuel industry? What is your degree of skepticism for other scientists, engineers, doctors, surgeons, dentists, lawyers, mechanics, etc…anyone else with specialized expertise? Correct, there is no such thing as steady-state weather and the same goes for ice sheet sizes during any interglacial period between ice ages and greenhouse Earths. If you were to look at a plot of ice sheet size versus time, you’ll see a bunch of higher frequency peak-to-peak squiggly lines showing the seasonal variation, with these lines following a lower frequency peak-to-peak trend as you zoom out to look at the larger timeline picture. This lower frequency trend is the climate variation that we care about. It’s always varying naturally, too. So why then all the modern-day fuss, you ask? Two reasons: 1. A process of elimination for explaining the magnitude and speed of the recent climate-based ice sheet shrinkage. Ice ages mostly follow the Milankovitch cycles that dictate the Earth’s orbit around the sun (eccentricity, axis tilt, axis precession). These changes happen gradually, with a few acceleratory exceptions like large meteorite strikes, supervolcanic activity, or quirky positive climate feedback loops at the beginnings and ends of ice age cycles. These quirky feedback loops include large ice/snow solar reflection alterations and unique features of plate tectonic positioning that affect ocean currents and therefore atmospheric winds (i.e. weather). All of this can be ruled out (for the most part!!) for the recent climate data we see. So can solar activity variation and Earth-Moon or Earth-Jupiter orbital dynamics variations. So can any major sudden shifts in greenhouse gas concentrations specifically due to large plant population changes, animal population changes, or microorganism behavior that were not human-induced. That just leaves us with human behavior as realistically the last and by far the best explanation. And because increased human behavior during the Agricultural Revolution and especially during the Industrial Revolution match up well with the increases to greenhouse gas concentrations, it makes logical sense that the ice sheet size reductions do too. 2. As humans of the Industrial Age, our cities and our agriculture have grown accustomed to a relatively specific climate stage. So ANY major and sudden changes to large climate factors like ice sheet sizes, whether they happen naturally or anthropogenically, will be highly problematic and are something to avoid if we have the ability to do so. But isn’t there also money to be had in DENYING man-made climate change? If you’re alarmed with the influence that Big Solar and Big Wind and Big Geothermal might have on government, why not also the influence that Big Oil and Big Natural Gas and Big Coal are having? The Boomer-driven environmental movement of the late 60’s-70’s was excellent. As a Millenial, I give you all a well-deserved “thank you!” for your activism. But regular water and air pollution form a class of environmental issues completely distinct from greenhouse gas pollution. Agreed. That’s why healthy international relations are critical to the management of environmental issues. I’m including our enemies along with our allies. The US contributes about 15% of global carbon emissions. China contributes almost double that. This is a major reason why I’m a proponent of internationally coupled cap-and-trade systems for the “big” emitters, like power plants and certain material manufacturing industries. I interpreted the article to mean the prolonged heat wave preceded the fires. You can still easily measure atmospheric temperatures separate from the extra heat coming directly from the wildfires. Any argument flirting with “weather equals climate” reasoning can get tricky. I don’t know exactly how they calculated the given probabilities that this was due to global warming, but the numbers don’t seem outlandish given the unusual duration and magnitude of the heat wave. Regardless of the cause, the result is definitely not good for further global warming. The Siberian permafrost is an especially critical piece to climate stability. I’ll go ahead and take a general guess as to how they did it. They’re probably using historical records of daily high temperatures at a bunch of different Siberian weather stations. They’re probably setting the early 20th century data as the baseline data and the early 21st century data as the MMGW-affected data. Then they probably took a bunch of different reputable climate computational models (probably several dozens), ran simulations, and compared the simulations to the actual observed Siberian weather station data. They then probably discarded any poor-performing models, kept the well-performing models, and performed a bunch of fancy statistical analyses on the total results to come up with that mysterious probability ratio of 600. I THINK this is generally how they do heat wave studies, but remember that I am a layperson and not a climatologist, so take this explanation with a grain of salt.

Like most human conflicts, this is ultimately about natural resources. The Xinjiang region has a lot of them that the Chinese economy badly needs. The Uyghurs are culturally very different from the Han Chinese and have been flirting with separatist movements for decades. China is doing everything they can get away with in order to make sure Xinjiang doesn’t break off into an independent country. They’ve tried mass migration of Han Chinese into the province. They’ve tried free speech suppression. Now they’re trying “re-education” camps. The CCP clearly feels that they cannot afford to lose control of Xinjiang’s natural resources. The solution? The international community needs to make it economically more favorable for China to stop this genocidal behavior rather than to let it continue in secret. Biden and Trump both could be doing a lot more to talk about this issue in public. It better be raised during one of the three scheduled presidential debates.

Imagine the amazing gameday chant at New Era: “Steeelllaaa!!!!!” It’s not beyond the realm of possibilities. PETA already went after the Packers a couple decades ago. For those who don’t already know, their franchise name honors a canned meat company that agreed to sponsor Lambeau’s team back in 1919. Needless to say, PETA’s protests didn’t work. But the culture of 2020 is very different than it was back around 2000. So why not go after a team whose namesake gained his reputation by helping to slaughter a species to near extinction? The American bison population, after all, dropped from 50+ million at the time of the Louisiana Purchase to less than a thousand by 1900. Well…as a proud PETA member but also an outspoken critic of their marketing department, I have to say that it would be incredibly pointless and would only generate more bad publicity and animosity toward our cause. We already have a lot on our plate at the moment (um bad choice of words?) and much bigger fish to fry (ooh there I go again!) regarding animal rights ethics. Besides, animal rights lobbyists don’t have nearly the same national clout that other SJW groups have. Vegetarians and vegans probably make up about 5% of the total American population, with most of that number not even watching football or knowing of the Bills’ existence. I see others have already mentioned this stuff, but I’ll reiterate anyway: Native Americans don’t seem to be remotely bothered by this alleged Bills name controversy, either. That’s partly because Cody was a super popular American and a major advocate for Native American civil rights. But most don’t even know the team history or Buffalo Bill Cody’s history for that matter. The Bills name also pays homage to the popular 1946-49 AAFC franchise more so than to Buffalo Bill Cody, kind of in the same way that the red/white/blue team colors since 1962 pay homage to the old 1920’s NFL team. For these reasons alone, the name and the colors of the Buffalo franchise should NEVER change. Now the Red$%^** name is an entirely different situation. It’s a couple orders of magnitude more offensive to Native Americans than Buffalo Bill Cody. The team founder, George Preston Marshall, was also one of the most outspoken bigots in pro sports history. So that doesn’t help…

A couple random thoughts on the presidential election: 1. Trump is doomed: It’s possible that we still have systemic errors in the polling data. Anything’s possible in 2020. But I believe the systemic errors from 2016, which mostly consisted of the underreporting of working-class whites, were corrected by the 2018 mid-terms. I believe Trump’s reelection problems are real and that his reelection campaign team would be wise to take the polling numbers very seriously. The current percentage point gap is large enough to overshadow Biden’s weaknesses with voter enthusiasm and voter economic trust. A silver lining for Trump is that he still has 2.5 months to work on getting everything under control. He’ll be largely judged on that first debate performance on September 29, on the pandemic status in October, and on the directly related economic status in October. In 1988, even Dukakis was somehow leading HW Bush by 17 percentage points at about 3.5 months before that election. So why my Trump reelection negativity? Well…Covid-19 issues are not likely going away this fall (see: nation-wide school re-opening concerns despite the Trump administration’s “bullying”), the foreclosure/eviction crisis could easily pull down the economy as early as next month, and Trump appears to be inherently (read: psychologically) incapable of acknowledging the magnitude of either. The polls are reflecting this emerging sentiment among centrist moderates and independents. 2. Sleepy Joe is sleepy: I may have been completely wrong to doubt Biden’s lazy campaign strategy. I badly underestimated his national appeal and the emotional nostalgia he evokes, blinded probably by my own longstanding biases against him for policy reasons. The once-in-a-century pandemic has entirely changed the 2020 campaign dynamics. A strong campaign ground game and constant public appearances don’t appear to matter. Neither does the party convention that traditionally launches and energizes a presidential campaign for the home stretch. Optimizing Latino, black, and Millenial turnout isn’t essential either. Biden’s mission is to focus on the retired white demographic in swing states who are scared of Covid-19, avoid sundowning for 3 night debates, let MSNBC and CNN continue handling his entire marketing campaign, sit back, relax, maybe take a long nap each day, and watch the opponent melt down with his complete lack of human empathy and his Kudlow-nomics dogmatism. Joe and Kamala would make a perfect ticket with a semi-witty campaign slogan of “sleeping our way to the top!” Ba dum tss. Yeeesh you really have it out for the Bernie people, no? Polling data from the Democratic presidential primaries showed a massive ideological divide within the party between young voters (for the pro-Bernie progressive left wing) and old voters (for the pro-Biden neolib centrist wing), with the split falling somewhere around age 45. This divide is too obvious to ignore. The age demographics bluntly favor the progressive revolutionaries over time. If Biden and his VP choice either lose in November or can’t fix America’s economy within the next 4-8 years, you better believe the Bernie fanatics will be emboldened. And those “bums” are a cantankerous bunch, as we’ve seen this summer. The Dudes will likely NOT abide. EXACTLY. Trump should be attacking Joe Biden like he is Hillary 2.0. The whole corrupt/establishment/neolib/neocon shtick would be much more effective and accurate than whatever he’s doing now. He’s using the playbook that was supposed to be reserved for Bernie and then mixing in miscellaneous cultural topics like falling statues instead of properly addressing the pandemic and the economy, two issues that actually concern most Americans. One might say Trump has adopted a SJW-heavy playbook akin to Hillary’s in 2016 instead of using his own 2016 populist playbook. Trump should be aiming for independent swing voters, not reinforcing his base which is already enthusiastic for November. And yes, no one outside far-right fearmongering Fox News circles actually believes “Joe Biden will be the most progressive candidate since FDR,” as Bernie himself absurdly claimed (what about LBJ?). Most far-leftists, moderates, and independents understand that Biden will govern more or less like Obama. If Obama was considered far-left to someone, then fine I guess. Biden doesn’t need to worry about the “radical left” Bernie people in November anymore. They’re sticking with Biden at approximately the 85% level I predicted earlier. The latest poll I saw had them at 87% in support of Joe, with 4% defecting to Trump.

Thanks, 3rdnlng (I guess that means I have 5 or 6 readers, not 4 or 5). I’m always appreciative of constructive negative feedback that challenges my ideas. I should clarify my carbon tax idea from previous posts. I shouldn’t have described it as a traditional sin tax (or Pigouvian tax, to be more accurate) because the revenue collected would be almost inconsequential to me. The main goal is to rapidly decrease gasoline consumption behavior and rapidly increase renewable tech innovation. The extent to which these two things are happening in real time, in accordance with greenhouse gas emissions standards set by the scientific community, is what I’d use to determine the efficacy of the taxes. It seems horribly impractical to rely on estimated calculations of marginal social costs of carbon pollution into the future in order to establish carbon taxation levels in the present, especially when you also need to factor in effects that the tax levels would have on the present overall economy. I probably wouldn’t even bother setting aside generated carbon tax revenue solely for future environmental damage reparations. I’ll cover ACA, M4A, and all big-government concerns in the Trump Economy thread. So you can read and comment later as you feel is necessary. I recommend sitting down for that one and making sure your blood pressure is at a healthy level before proceeding. Just so you know, I consider myself a pragmatist and not an ideologue. So if y’all can convince me that government intervention is not the best solution for any particular issue I take up, then I will quickly discard that pro-government idea. My default position, believe it or not, is to require as little government involvement in our lives as necessary. It’s that tiny little detail of what’s considered “necessary,” however, that apparently separates me from most on this message board. Seems like we’re overdue for a lovely demand-side economics conversation! My laundry list of programs consists of 4 beyond a strict constitutionalist Republican’s tolerance levels: health care, education, public housing options, and public works projects. Because there’s nothing truly novel about these ideas, the good news is that we have plenty of data (historical and current, national and international) to examine the successes, the pitfalls, and the funding. See my above comments to 3rdnlng on environmental Pigouvian taxes. Spoiler alert: no, you won’t agree with my economic thoughts. Not initially… Are we at “different ends of the political spectrum?” I guess so. We have huge differences on a few key (expensive) issues for sure, but I was also known to multiple campaign Bernie Bros as a secret right-wing canvassing saboteur. You have no idea how much grief I took for my moderate stances on immigration, second amendment, PC culture, protectionism, nuclear energy, Russiagate, Trump impeachment, etc… We share the same concerns about government waste and corruption. We both theoretically want to keep government as small and efficient as possible and keep politicians as accountable to the people as possible. I know we both agree that waste and corruption are present in our military, but we both also don’t want to abandon the idea altogether of a publicly funded military. You see where I am going… Yup, I hear Joe Biden is calling for zero power plant carbon emissions by 2035 and zero net greenhouse gas emissions for the entire economy by 2050. These are okay goals, but I don’t see how they can be done without nuclear energy, which will anger many environmental leftists if that’s what Joe is proposing. And if that’s the case, then the impetus to build these generation 3+ nuclear plants should have begun years ago in order to realistically make these deadlines…like during the Obama regime. We also know Joe is still big on fracking (a huge methane polluter, among other pollutants) as a “bridge” energy source because those companies fund his campaign and because he badly wants to win Pennsylvania. This is the same strategy that Obama and Hillary Clinton used. I guess Joe Biden can say anything he wants on climate change solutions because none of it is legally binding. Obama used lots of nice and beautiful pro-environment words too for 8 full years, the first 2 during which he had the support of both the House and the Senate. Obama’s record on lifting the crude oil export ban in 2015, increasing domestic oil production by 80%, and on leading the domestic natural gas drilling boom told a different story…a story of environmental equivocation that masked the Establishment’s foreign policy agenda under the guise of “energy independence.” I doubt Joe will operate any differently than Obama on climate change because he has hinted at this numerous times in the past and because they share the same energy corporate benefactors. I know, I know…jobs jobs jobs. But there are jobs in renewable energy too. Some politicians are just not as serious about climate change as others. Then again, Joe’s opponent is climate change hoaxer, Donald Trump. I give up. Oh gosh I could list a lot more than one, but some people here get angry at my post lengths. So if I choose just one, it will be the big one: global land/surface mean temperatures (+0.55 deg. Celsius) and sea level (+85 mm) continuing to rise in lockstep with carbon dioxide atmospheric concentration (+55 ppm) from 1995 to now, in accordance with theoretical greenhouse gas canon (data source: NASA). We could get pedantic and quibble over the exact numbers that various scientists predicted in 1995, but the data trends from the past 25 years are obvious and more so when you zoom out to a timeline beginning just before the Industrial Age. Similar data trends from the past 25 years hold for a bunch of other important stuff, like ocean acidification and ice sheet sizes. Yes, technically this is true. Our overall carbon emissions have improved over the past 15 years or so. This is almost entirely due to natural gas replacing coal. The problems are the following: the decrease isn’t happening fast enough here in the US, overall worldwide carbon emissions have been increasing by a lot more, and fracking has now led to lots of methane released into the atmosphere which is much worse than carbon dioxide.

Woah someone read my post!! Thanks, KRC! The basic premise is that financial hits from gas taxes on a destitute person’s individual budget will be offset by benefits from other various GND programs, including health care benefits and public transportation options. But there are a lot of moving policy parts in such grand legislative proposals, many of which may end up not being synchronized, so that some citizens may experience incidental financial hardship during the country’s renewable energy transition process. That is why I’d strongly support temporary “fuel stamp” eligibility programs or gas tax reimbursements or circumstantially dependent transportation subsidizations through employer applications. Since we already tax people for driving cars in the form of gasoline excise taxes, this is not uncharted policy territory. There’s nothing unethical about (reasonably imposed) fuel taxes, either. Taxing forms of transportation that pollute is obviously not the same as taxing breaths of air or directly taxing public water consumption or anything crazy like that. All environmental taxes aim to curb bad behavior and incentivize good behavior. Gas taxes would aim to expedite renewable tech innovation while also helping to pay for greenhouse gas damages, which ultimately our government will be financially responsible for fixing in the years ahead. Next Saturday morning, I can post a thorough explanation of my taxation and budgetary proposals in the Trump Economy thread. By this point, however, you probably know my politics and can guess where the conversation is heading. I’m most closely aligned with Tulsi Gabbard on policy issues (about 90%...with that other 10% including her decision to endorse Joe Biden and sell out to the Democratic Party establishment…sigh). As you can also tell by now, I prefer responding with detailed lengthy (long-winded?) paragraphs instead of a few short sentence sound bites. Otherwise, I find that online political discussions tend to break down from simple misunderstandings that then quickly entice mudslinging from opportunistic internet trolls. Think of Real, Green, and Skeptical more like Freud’s ego, superego, and id and less like Moe, Larry, and Curly. The true psychological concern is why I spend so much time composing political thoughts on an obscure internet football message board, knowing that maybe only 4 or 5 people read them…hmmm…

I was vaguely familiar with Michael Shellenberger beforehand as a bigly pro-nuclear environmentalist. It looks like he really has it out for climate change fearmonger lefties, with which to some extent I agree. But he also has a new book to sell and seems to have identified a sizable combined niche market of engaged climate change skeptics and rebel environmentalists. Telling people that everything is actually okay and that they hardly have to change anything about their habits is always a strong marketing ploy. Scanning the link and looking through the table of contents of his new book, “Apocalypse Never”… 1. Here’s what we likely agree on: merits of nuclear energy, wind energy limitations, biofuel disdain, doubts on achieving international carbon neutrality via non-nuclear renewable energies alone. 2. Where we may agree on some points but disagree on others: bans on plastic straws/bags and general policies toward plastics, practical implementations of a solar energy infrastructure, green policy successes of various European countries since 1970’s, lab-grown meat’s effect on climate. 3. A VERY hard sell, but I’ll listen to his argument: insufficient solar energy tech advancements, warmer climate not making natural disasters worse, overrated importance of Amazon rainforest and broad deforestation/reforestation/soil carbon sequestration issues, non-issue of Malthusian population growth versus food supply. 4. Just…no: non-causal role of humans in Holocene extinctions (?!?!?!), everything he says related to the factory farming subject (increased industrial agriculture preventing zoonotic pandemics, vegetarianism reducing individual carbon footprints by only less than 4%, global land use for meat having shrunk by size of Alaska...this is an archetypal anti-vegan argument being made here with very common examples of statistical cherry-picking, logical sleights of hand, and language gymnastics used to fit the agenda). Ok well technically we’re both against free-range grass-fed meat, but I’m approaching that one also from ethical grounds while he’s making the purely environmental argument. Has anyone here read this book? I won’t financially support someone as stridently pro-factory farming as this guy, but I’m willing to read his book this summer if I stumble upon a free online PDF version somewhere. As I’ve ranted about here in the past, my first immediate thought is that these “OMG only X number of months left until Kevin Costner’s Water World dystopia!!!” claims are neither accurate nor persuasive. My next immediate thought, however, is that something is probably getting lost in translation between the original sources (IEA, Jim Hansen) and these online conservative editorials. If I were magically in control of the entire MMGW communication pipeline, I’d focus strictly on reporting the current status of all the climate data benchmarks and climate tipping points*, along with both the estimated max and min time limits based on whichever specific “doomsday” climate model** calculations were used. It’s not quite as sexy and captivating as some of these climate alarmism headlines, but I think people appreciate and are more receptive to scientific honesty. * A side note on what I mean by climate tipping points: remember that these are the positive climate feedback loop sources we talked about earlier that would lead to accelerated planetary warming and irreversibilities on the order of civilization timespans. Off the top of my head, some of these include the East and West Antarctic ice sheets, the Greenland ice sheet, the Amazon rainforest, the North American boreal forests, and the Siberian permafrost. Early signs of the degradation of the polar ice sheets, for example, show that the advancement through these “points-of-no-return” markers has unfortunately been underway this century. ** Side notes on what I mean by “doomsday” climate models: they come in many wonderful computational flavors. The degrees of freedom include limits on allowed mean global temperature increases since the beginning of the Industrial Age, different levels of international efforts toward greenhouse gas emissions reductions, and probabilities that countries will meet these standards in the future. Some models go by greenhouse gas atmospheric concentrations instead of global mean temperatures. The 1.5 degrees Celsius limit models are the more ideal ones, but also the least practical to be met. I think I’ve seen deadlines for 1.5 degree models that range approximately between the year 2030 with moderate emissions reduction efforts and 2050 with major reduction efforts. The 2 degrees Celsius limit models are much more realistic to stay under by 2100, but they’re also likely to trigger too many of those tipping points to certain extents, as well as lead to intolerable devastation of our global food supplies (examples: drastic disturbances to pollinating insect migration patterns, greater scope of desertification coverage, greater frequency of droughts, larger ocean hypoxic dead zones) and various collapses of ecosystems (such as 90+% of the coral reefs worldwide due to ocean acidification). No one wants to touch those 3, 4, or 5 degree models for good reason. We’ve already blown past the 1 degree limit.

Woah it’s been kinda quiet here the past month…fine, I’ll talk to myself. Don’t mind me! << TLDR Summary: hybrid carbon pricing legislation is totally where it’s at. Carbon taxes for small emitters at state/local level, cap-and-trade permit markets for big ones at national/international level, happiness for all. >> Skeptical Kay Adams: “Hey, Kay! Everyone at PPP has been absolutely DYING to hear your thoughts on carbon pricing legislation. So you gonna talk about it or what?!” Green Kay Adams: “Oh wow! Oh gosh, Kay…and here I was thinking maybe nobody cared about the global warming topic anymore. Well sure, let’s begin!” 1. The Debate: Economists haven’t reached an agreement yet as to which of the two types of carbon pricing systems is best, but right now carbon taxation methods seem to be winning the international popularity contest ahead of emissions trading schemes (i.e. cap-and-trade). There are also hybrid systems of the two that haven’t really been studied too rigorously. These ones happen to be what interest me the most. 2. My Proposal: a hybrid carbon pricing system that features carbon taxes at the state level for small emitters (like cars) and carbon cap-and-trade at the national level for large emitters (like the concrete industry). I would also remove all applied fossil fuel subsidies and consider renewable energy subsidies as needed during the energy transition process. While nationalizing the entire energy industry seems to be a popular option for a small handful of eco-socialists, I feel that the private market is more than capable of efficiently handling everything provided it has these government-imposed corrections for carbon negative externalities. 3. Brief Overview of Benefits: my proposal is primarily a cap-and-trade one, so it still maintains the most salient features of these plans that make it popular with environment-first minded people. Namely, it’s easy to have scientists set the appropriate limits for the major polluters at the supply level and then have the private market determine the price at the demand level. It’s also easier to couple cap-and-trade systems with other countries, since man-made global warming (MMGW) is fundamentally a global problem and since we have to account for companies wanting to set up shop in other countries where it could be cheaper to pollute. Cap-and-trade is also the best system for dealing with the dreaded “green paradox,” where industries are inclined to ramp up their pollution early in anticipation of beating increased restrictions over time. Unfortunately cap-and-trade permit markets can also be volatile, and I think it’s a really good idea to minimize market instability specifically throughout the transportation and food sectors of the American economy. So that is why I prefer keeping a simple carbon dioxide (and methane too!) tax at the state level for automobiles and meat/dairy products and such, since localized economic oversight may be our safest bet for securing overall stability. 4. Addressing Drawbacks: the #1 problem is going to be the high level of political cooperation required, not just within the US but also between other countries. My best response to that is to say we should increase MMGW awareness among voters, get back into the Paris Agreement, and carefully set up government oversight committees to referee the cap-and-trade permit market and the allocation of emissions permits. Another major concern is how any economic shocks from the energy transition process will affect the most economically vulnerable citizens (i.e. the working class). Aside from careful monitoring of carbon pricing legislation, I’d say that it is imperative that this legislation be carried out in parallel with other Green New Deal (GND) components that can financially help the working people, such as enhanced social welfare programs and urban infrastructure renovations that make public transportation more accessible. A final warning I should mention is that a lot of our accumulated knowledge of carbon pricing implementations come from European countries, which clearly don’t have the diffuse transportation layout demands that we have here (Canada may be our closest analogue, although their population is mostly concentrated close to their southern border with us). Our smartest options for countering any uniquely American economic shocks will be to undergo major civic infrastructure upgrades (including high-speed rails?), have job retraining programs for former fossil fuel workers, and expand emergency supplies of the DOE’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve for the duration of the energy transition process. Skeptical Kay Adams: “I don’t know, Kay. Still seems like a lot of effort to address a problem we don’t even know is real.” Green Kay Adams: “Kay, first address point #2 from the MMGW science section of my/our previous post. Also, please provide scientific papers or article reviews from dissenting scientific opinions on MMGW.” Skeptical Kay Adams: “Are you getting cheeky with me, Kay? I’m not too comfortable with you playing economic God, either. Look at you…intruding into our private markets, capriciously choosing energy industry winners and losers like this...deplorable.” Green Kay Adams: “You disappoint me, Kay. In my/our previous post, please recall point #3 from the problems section with finding MMGW solutions. Also, please feel free to take up any specific economic concerns with any of your favorite qualified professional economists. Greenhouse gas emissions are negative externalities that MUST and CAN be addressed.” Skeptical Kay Adams: “But how are you going to PAY for your Green New Deal utopia, Kay? Tax us all to death?!” Green Kay Adams: “Settle down, Kay. That’s another debate entirely which I will take up in the Trump Economy thread at some point soon. Until we meet again, old friend!” Skeptical Kay Adams: “Wait! Wait! Kay, come back. Can you also respond to the three posts above?” Green Kay Adams: “Sure, why not, Kay? I have nothing better to do with my life this morning. But not before I post a delightful meme commemorating our wonderful discussion.”

Sounds like you’re more of a “Jeffersonian environmentalist” while I’m more of a “Hamiltonian environmentalist.” These are terms I’ve coined just now, so I don’t think anyone else talks like this… What I mean is that I’m more likely to look at environmental problems from a top-down centralized authoritarian perspective, while you may look at solving them from a voluntary point of view at the individual or local community level first. Am I describing your point of view correctly? I’ll just continue on like I am… So I think that grassroots problem-solving is effective for many areas of civic society, especially when it comes to political parties. However, many (most?) environmental problems are time-sensitive and involve highly complex interrelationships between localities. From a historical case perspective (I’m thinking of the 1970’s and onward), I think these sets of problems just respond much better and faster to federally enforced solutions. I’d also argue that many of my environmental solutions revolve around the reallocation of financial resources and don’t necessarily lead to increases in costs for the individual. Sounds like verbal environmentalist subterfuge??? Oh dear…I’ll try to explain myself better in the global warming thread… On the subject of GMO’s: I’m cautiously supportive of them. Of course we need to be mindful of the myriad ways GMO foods could adversely affect the human body, the human digestive tract, the surrounding flora and fauna, and the general environment at large. And despite being the extremely pro-first amendment person that I am, I do demand full compulsory commercial disclosure of all GMO foods on their packaging. But looking at it also from a practical perspective, GMO foods have dramatically increased yields to feed much more of the world population while reducing pesticide use. When you think about it, the entirety of the collective human food supply (flora AND fauna) has been dramatically modified through selective breeding anyway since the beginning of the agricultural age about 10,000 years ago. All of the ancient versions of our foods look so much different than the modern ones, with this natural evolutionary process occurring even without the specific influence of people in white lab coats. Surprisingly, I had never heard of Deep Space 9 until now. I’m adding it to my growing list of PPP personal recommendations on my desk which, oddly enough, I see includes a related written memo: “alien propulsion technology: Deranged Rhino: GW hoax thread.” If you like John Carpenter movies, I also recommend “The Thing” (1982). Normally I’m not big into horror films, but this one is easily the best I’ve ever seen. And speaking of Antarctic ice…I need to check up on the global warming thread today. BUT…I haven’t forgotten my main purpose here: the good people demand a trenchant attack on neoliberalism and on the continuing decay of the American Dream under Trump’s economy. In due time, I shall happily oblige!

I don’t understand the point of entertaining such hypotheticals as whether or not Trump loses and refuses to leave office?? It’s a weird theory that people like Bill Maher have been peddling for years now. Why not stick to complaining about stuff that Trump has actually done wrong? There’s plenty of that to work with without conjuring up nonsensical crisis situations. The answer, by the way, is that Trump will leave office if he loses. In the unusual case that he doesn’t voluntarily leave, his national approval will fall to single digit percentages and the US military will forcefully remove him from office. Give Trump supporters some credit. They do genuinely care about law and order, the Constitution, the democratic process, and the peaceful transition of power in the spirit of George Washington. I would consider Tulsi far-left. Her domestic economic agenda is similar to that of AOC and Bernie. If Tulsi comes across as centrist, it’s because she often pushes back on a lot of the SJW leftist rhetoric and hasn’t fallen in line on political partisan issues like backing Hillary in 2016, Russiagate, and Trump’s impeachment. She’s also willing to engage in cordial discourse with right-wing media figures, which seems to be a major no-no these days if you want to call yourself a Democrat. You’re parroting a 9-months-old baseless accusation from everyone’s favorite sociopathic warmonger-in-a-matronly-pantsuit. Accusing a military veteran of treason without evidence should normally be considered pretty despicable behavior. Tulsi is the most articulate voice on dovish foreign policy that the left has seen since Dennis Kucinich. She speaks very precisely on matters like the military-industrial complex (MIC), regime-change imperialism, entangled international alliances, putting American soldiers in harm’s way, attracting foreign policy blowback domestically as well as abroad, bankrupting the US with an overextended military, and jeopardizing our country’s moral standing in the world. Let’s all stop falling for Hillary’s and the mainstream media’s agenda! The same argument holds in the case of Jill Stein, except there we have Hillary also unfairly denigrating third parties and their supporters…ugh. You’re falling into a logical fallacy where you equate aligned policies with aligned motives. Let’s first review the agendas of the international players, shall we?? I’m dramatically oversimplifying things to keep this post short (i.e. not mentioning Israel)…but we have 3 main players here: 1. Putin: Russia’s economy is a bit lopsided and overly dependent on its gas and oil exports into Europe. This is why they are so heavily invested in Middle Eastern affairs, particularly with pipelines that run through Syria. Putin needs to protect this market at all costs in order to maintain power and relevance. This is Russia’s major weakness that the US can easily exploit (and did so under Bush and Obama). There are also murmurings of Putinian dreams for a unified Slavic white ethnostate a la USSR, but this smells more like neocon neo-McCarthyite propaganda than practical reality to me. 2. Tulsi: I outlined her motives above. She shares a lot of foreign policy overlap with Trump, though they differ greatly on the MIC budget, Venezuela, Yemen, and Iran. They’re also both way too into the anti-Islamic terrorism drone wars for my tastes, but I digress… 3. Establishment: this includes the Bush/McCain/Romney losers on the right and the Obama/Clinton/Biden/Pelosi/Schumer losers on the left. They love war and they love making money off of war. They love sending the working class abroad to fight for their wars. They love Iraqi oil. They love mineral resources and drugs in Afghanistan. They love overthrowing foreign governments in favor of capitalist puppet regimes. They love NATO and the War on Terror because promoting fear of Islam, Iranians, and anything Russian is good business for their war profiteering endeavors. They also love Kamala Harris and Susan Rice as Biden’s VP choices because they know either of the two will happily continue the warmongering industry. Ok, so as you can probably see if you buy my argument above, Tulsi’s foreign policy for America would have involved staying out of Russia’s way while Biden’s foreign policy (as was that of almost every other 2020 Democratic presidential candidate) is the opposite. This is why Putin naturally liked Tulsi the most. It had nothing to do with Tulsi being a secret Russian asset. I’ve also noticed that there’s an overly simplistic foreign policy dichotomy emerging where Trump = pro-Russia and Biden = pro-China. If that were the case, I’d personally much prefer taking my chances aligning with Russia since China is the much greater economic (and military) enemy in the long run, while Russia is currently the other major nuclear superpower so…yeah you don’t want misunderstandings and escalated situations with Putin.

Wait, you sure you wanna be ideologically associated with me in any way? Remember I’m the forum’s resident Green New Deal chica… I like your optimism for the U.S. economy, and in many ways I can understand it. Normally I’m not big into braggadocious American exceptionalism talk, but the evidence is strongly in favor of our country being the best in terms of work ethic (per capita GDP, longstanding Protestant work ethic reputation, etc.) and ingenuity (Silicon Valley, scientific research output, Hollywood, music industry, etc.). So I’m very bullish on the American people. It’s also true that all the other economic players around the world each have their own set of massive internal issues, including China and the EU. What I’m very bearish on, however, are practically all of our country’s institutions of power as well as the partisan bickering that makes it difficult for us to solve even the simplest of problems, like funding a police department. This stuff will hinder the U.S. from becoming the best economic version of itself. We do share the same long-term economic vision that is centered on extreme high-tech. Future economic superpowers will be those who can take advantage of space. Martian and lunar colonies are the eventual goals, but more immediately we can focus on fully automated space mining of our moon, Mars, the asteroid belt, and the 200+ moons of the other planets in our solar system. This would blow away China’s monopoly of rare earth metals, for example. Typical luddites fixate on all the big technological challenges or on difficult psychological questions that come with humans in space for extended periods of time. I see America’s historically optimistic disposition as uniquely suited to tackle these issues. I think government has a necessary role to play in expanding into outer space, even if it’s more of a pure funding role while private companies like SpaceX compete for these funds and manage the operations (rendering entities like NASA obsolete). I also like your helium comment. This is such an underrated and rare natural resource (its weight and chemical inertness allow it to easily and quite literally vanish into thin air). There could be huge unknown reservoirs of it on Mars, too. Thank you for the Brainstorm recommendation. I tend to find old movies more entertaining than new ones. Here’s a recommendation of mine that I believe is very relevant to the thread topic: John Carpenter’s “They Live” (1988), a cinematic MASTERPIECE starring the LEGENDARY film actor, Rowdy Roddy Piper. “I have come to chew bubblegum and kick a$$…and I’m all out of bubblegum.” So Shakespearian!! At this point, does anyone NOT believe the virus will be lingering with us throughout the summer and fall? The smart and safe solution is to stay focused on navigating out of the current economic crisis. Pass some combination of legislation for continued small business payroll protection, temporary M4A (not just for Covid-19) to protect the unemployed, rent/mortgage/student loan/credit card deferments, and at bare minimum another round of stimulus checks of at least $1200. Deficit hawks had most of the past two decades to challenge Bush, Obama, and Trump on this subject. They failed horribly. Prioritize this issue next year. It’s an important issue, but not the most important in 2020. MS-DOS? Was that an earlier version of the infamous Central American crime gang? So let’s think about those 50% who make more with unemployment benefits than by returning to work. Are some of them lazy government freeloaders ready to take advantage of a technicality? Maybe. I see this laziness trope come up a lot in political news commentary. But what about their motivation to secure employment-based health care in the midst of a pandemic for themselves and their families? What about their desire to secure a job or get their old job back before losing a game of economic musical chairs? What about their urge to return to a sense of normalcy and to restore a sense of purpose in their daily lives? A large portion of the recently unemployed are relatively low-wage service industry workers who may be afraid of getting the virus by going back to work and passing it along to loved ones in high-risk health categories. Many families also can’t afford day care, so the parents may need to prioritize staying at home with their kids right now. Some may even be using the extra time off to develop new work skills instead of catching up on all their favorite TV shows. And of course, many are still honestly looking but can’t find employment or anything that meets their reasonable criteria (hours, location, etc.). We shouldn’t automatically attribute the worst motives to such a large percentage of our fellow Americans. I personally can’t partake in callously ridiculing other people as lazy for not willingly toiling at often unfulfilling dead-end jobs, with often grossly substandard pay, in potentially unsafe and germ-friendly working conditions. Actually, I can’t think of a more damning indictment of modern America’s particular form of capitalism than the imagery of professional/managerial class types, with the benefit of being able to work from home during this Covid-19 pandemic, chastising front-line essential worker types about not getting back to work for their financial wheel-spinning crumbs (ooooh my inner Marxist is showing! I forgot I’m on PPP. I should cover up…). Wait so do the Larry Kudlows of the administration give President Trump the bad economic news too? Or is that it? Everything looks good right now and nothing looks bad? Are the large weekly numbers of new unemployment claims that keep rolling in merely mirages? What about those surveys taken that show many small businesses never coming back? Or recent reports of all the states and cities facing budgetary crises due to lost tax revenue from the Covid-19 shutdown? I could go on like this. Larry only lists recovery statistics that don’t really tell us much of anything this early in time, aside from the fact that economic activity immediately jumped following an unprecedented pandemic shutdown. And then Larry magically projects these trends all the way into next year, blithely ignoring any of the many other future economic factors in play. Maybe this was just a 1-minute highlight clip that left out a full and more balanced economic report, but Larry does have a reputation for over-the-top supply-side positivity bias and a major blind spot for how working-class consumption impacts macroeconomic activity. If Trump wants to surround himself with “yes” men unwilling to provide full information needed to make smart decisions, well then I guess it’s his own legacy and re-election at stake. If I was at that table, I would not have allowed Trump to get complacent with the gravity of the economic situation. If I was in the room, I would have also pressed Mr. Kudlow on why they won’t reveal the names of the small businesses receiving PPP loans. Or why the American people aren’t allowed any transparency in how big businesses from the CARES Act are maintaining payroll (Boeing?!) and becoming eligible for future bailout rounds. Or what Larry means by more deregulation as a key solution, which in his world would include a rollback of everything Wall Street was supposed to have learned from the Great Recession.

Of the 346 Hall of Fame members, only 4 have made it in primarily for their special teams play: Lou Groza, Jan Stenerud, Morten Anderson, and Ray Guy. 3 kickers and 1 punter. No returners and no gunners. There are 26 head coaches and 26 contributors who were elected not for their play on the field. Is it then reasonable to so willfully exclude special teamers from Hall of Fame conversations? Excluding all of those players who regularly made significant impacts on the outcomes of every game played? Steve Tasker was the greatest gunner in NFL history. He singlehandedly decided multiple important games and heavily influenced many more on one of the best dynasties the AFC/AFL had ever seen. It doesn’t even matter if the NFL were to completely ban special teams beginning today. You can’t tell the full story of the professional game without including the absolute greatest of the great talents on what was at least once considered a full third of the game. I assume the HOF Seniors Committee will rectify this sorry mistake soon enough. By the way, I don’t understand all the passionate hate here for broadcasters like Tasker (or Beth Mowins for that matter, whose uniquely husky voice I find quite appropriate for the medium)?? Focus on the game, people!

Yes, one of those other 31 teams will almost definitely pick Bass up as soon as he’s released. The best-case scenario for the Bills would be to have both kickers perform really well throughout preseason, followed by a Hauschka trade for a late-round 2021 pick. Bass is the physically superior talent with a longer career ahead. By all accounts, he has the mental fortitude to handle the pressure of the position and the work ethic to quickly learn the wind nuances at New Era Field. The Vedvik versus Bojorquez battle is also interesting. Vedvik seems to have a stronger leg and offers more versatility as a kicker/kickoff specialist.

My short and honest reply: I’m not entirely sure yet! At the moment, my best guess is that the move to a fiat currency has had a relatively minimal impact on the specific problem we’re discussing (real wages versus costs of living over the past 40 years) compared to other factors I’ve mentioned, but that it could potentially have a very major future impact during this 2020’s decade. I included this factor in my group of 12 causes because we know that one of the Federal Reserve’s main jobs is to manage inflation and deflation (setting interest rates and preventing bank panics are relevant too). So I didn’t want to exclude the possibility that the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971 (a critical event in U.S. economic history!) and the beginning of our defined problem soon after wasn’t entirely coincidental. Nevertheless, inflation seems to have been relatively free of volatility all these years, while the particular price-versus-time plots for housing and higher education expenses and health care differ greatly from the comparably more stable plots of most other goods and services. This is partly why I suspect other factors have had greater influences on our problem: mainly comorbid neoliberal policies suppressing suitable wage growth-versus-time plots, in addition to consumer demand behavioral changes and government interventions into these 3 specific cost-of-living markets. My thoughts on the gold standard are that moving away from it was an overall positive and necessary decision. A fiat currency gives our country so many more options for solving big problems, whether they be ending economic recessions or funding major wars or managing major natural disasters. I do MOSTLY believe in Modern Monetary Theory which supports “artificially” pouring money into the economy during the bad times, without getting so worked up over austerity measures and balanced budgets. Having said that, Ron Paul proponent types are also correct when they warn us that fiat currencies make us more susceptible to certain dangerous forms of government economic mismanagement. Fiat currencies do also tend to encourage reckless government spending. So we are right to be bothered by the fact that our national debt is about $26.3 trillion when our average annual federal tax revenue is about $3.3 trillion. Any policy of running deficits must have limits. I’m concerned that Modern Monetary Theorists haven’t defined what that approximate limit may be for the U.S. or what the economic signs would look like if we start to approach our debt limit. We are likely not anywhere close to something like a Weimar Republic hyperinflation danger zone, but I also need to hear from our political leaders some outline of a plan to pay off the debt during the good economic times, such as ideally the time immediately following the pandemic. By the way, I’m open to all sorts of ideas for proper oversight of our national banking system and of the management of our fiat currency, even outside-the-box ones like a fourth branch of government for the Federal Reserve with similar checks-and-balances appointments as the Supreme Court. I‘m less into Jefferson versus Hamilton “end the Fed” types of debates that challenge the worthiness of the very existence of our national banking system, but I’ll have ‘em if the people want ‘em! I think automation of many blue-collar jobs and some white-collar jobs is inevitable. But at what pace should we allow the process to proceed? And what are the displaced workers to do with their lives? My answer to the first question is “at a slow pace.” My answer to the second question is “dunno, but probably more careers relying on human creativity (tech innovation, creative arts, etc.) until AI advancements replace that too, at which point we will need to go to war with our robot overlords. In the meantime, major across-the-board changes in our nation’s education infrastructure would be wise.” I doubt globalization is anywhere close to being dead! The globalists are the ones currently pulling the strings on the Biden puppet’s carcass. On the Republican side, the globalist rats (McConnell, Bush, Romney types) are also biding (Bidening??!!) their time for the day Trump can be replaced, be it this November or November 2024. From a nationalist’s perspective, it might be wise to begin thinking about uniting the populist anti-establishment wings of each main party. The Trump people and the Bernie people, as soon as they can settle a few of their other policy differences… I like the comment about not providing free security for Europe and the rest of the world. That money badly needs to be redirected toward domestic matters.

Some questions to think about (but no need to actually answer them here): what estimated percentage of the looters and rioters were Bernie supporters? What percentage of the looters and rioters were politically motivated? What estimated percentage of the Bernie campaign’s army of volunteers participated in the looting and rioting? What percentage of the paid Bernie campaign staff participated in the looting and rioting? Most importantly, what actual data are these estimates based on? And what are the sources providing this data? I’m not at all implying that Antifa types weren’t involved. What I’m suggesting is that I don’t think the numbers were very large, nor do I think many of these idiots were ever active in the actual political process. I doubt very many rioters even put in the effort to vote for Bernie, nor do I think these people ever had the aptitude for rising through the political ranks and obtaining political power over the rest of us. We should be careful before attempting to paint a very large and complex political movement in one fell stroke. I doubt many here would appreciate it, for example, if I used that same broad brush and began similar painting of my own. A sample of my artwork: “I think I heard someone mention that they heard about a bunch of Proud Boys who volunteered for Trump’s campaign and posted on Stormfront about showing up to Charlottesville with tiki torches and MAGA hats. The Trump administration is a dangerous burgeoning white nationalism movement that will inevitably ethnically cleanse all blacks and cage all Mexicans from coast to coast if Trump secures a second term. A friendly reminder to vote Biden on November 3 and avoid genocide.” Please take a deep breath and relax, TakeYouToTasker. I almost won Right-Wing Fearmongering Bingo with this single post of yours! I had Trotskyite, gulag, re-education camp, communist, democratic socialist, Scandinavia, Soviet Union, and Chavez all on my card. All I needed was a combination of Marx and comrade, Lenin and Engels, or Stalin and KGB to win (I could have also won with just Menshevik or Khrushchev or Sputnik or Bolshevik, though that would have been unusual to see these mentioned in a post…). What are the policy prescriptions that make Bernie a communist? I know he calls himself a democratic socialist and has praised the Nordic model numerous times. But he also wants to abolish democracy along with socializing the production AND consumption of our entire economy?! If you can point to evidence from Bernie’s campaign website or from his 30-year Congressional voting record, that would help. If you cite particular speeches or writings of his, can you provide links or full quotes so we can examine the context for ourselves?

<< TLDR Summary: Trump’s pre-pandemic economy was overrated. Wage growth isn’t keeping pace with the increase in costs of living. I mostly blame years and years of neoliberalism, but that’s oversimplifying the problem. I’ll discuss proposed solutions at another time. >> Really nice post, Cinga! From my worldview, you’ve just asked the most important political question one can ask in contemporary American politics. Your question is specifically related to housing, but let me rephrase and broaden it slightly: “Why hasn’t wage growth kept pace with the costs of housing and education and health care, and how do we fix this problem?” I say this is so important because it relates to economic metrics for upwards social mobility, i.e. the American Dream. If this dream is more myth than reality, great social and political instability shall ensue… But before thinking about causes and solutions to this defined problem, we first need to acknowledge that there IS in fact a greater problem. Many will describe the pre-pandemic Trump economy as excellent (or at least good enough) and will point to traditional conventional economic numbers like GDP and unemployment to assert that case. My claim is that the Trump economy has actually been performing at unacceptably sub-optimal levels and that we’ve been looking at the wrong economic metrics (such as wage growth and costs of living that we’re discussing here), ignoring an entire socioeconomic class of people, and allowing for a certain acceptance of low socioeconomic standards to seep through the collective American consciousness. And just to reiterate, this isn’t intended to be a “Trump=bad economy, Obama/Biden=good economy” diatribe in disguise. I view the fundamental economic problems as having transcended the Rep-Dem political duopoly for decades now. From a generation-to-generation perspective, we are seeing an alarming decline in net wealth accumulation (that is, relative to chronological life stages and adjusted for population size and inflation) for Millenials. The Great Recession and the Coronavirus Recession (Depression?!) didn’t exactly help matters, but I don’t think these alone can explain the complete story. Generation Z is on deck now, so the economic landscape needs to change course soon or we may be looking at years of serious political and social uprisings ahead. Ok, so what has caused this problem? Let’s ignore boring technical supply and demand curves of housing, education, and health care and think about more relatable history lessons. So the 1970’s were a chaotic and very critical transition era for our economy. Look beyond the obvious energy crisis and think about the end of the Bretton Woods monetary system, the mass emergence of women in the workforce, and the beginning of major trade deals with China. This era also fueled the 1980’s Reagan Revolution policies that would follow but had been brewing during the preceding two decades (Ayn Rand popularity, 1964 Goldwater). The 1990’s NAFTA deal was an important development as well (Ross Perot campaigns!). Oh yeah and the 2008 Great Recession which was also kind of relevant to the housing market (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, subprime mortgages, Dodd-Frank, financial derivatives). So with history now on everyone’s mind, let me just list the 12 possible causes that I’ve identified and see what people wish to discuss later: 1. Major paradigm shifts and evolutions in American consumer spending habits. 2. Specific government policy interventions into the housing, education, and health care markets. 3-4. Reaganomics policies that Trump has prioritized fighting the libertarian corporate wing of the Republicans over: loss of manufacturing jobs due to globalization, illegal immigration. 5-7. Reaganomics policies that Trump has not addressed, much to the chagrin of the progressive left: no social safety net, decline of labor unions, business/bank/Wall Street financial deregulatory practices. 8. A Reaganomics policy on which the Democrats recently have successfully shifted the Overton window leftward: insufficient/nonexistent minimum/living wage laws. 9. A Reaganomics policy that I believe could be related to the problem at hand in subtle ways and that everyone can actually agree with (in principle): minimizing government waste and government program inefficiencies. 10. A major issue that both political parties have contributed to and which strikes at the heart of laissez faire economics: corporate socialism and crony capitalism and government corruption and the general macroeconomic effects from absurd wealth concentration. 11. A super technical but super important underlying issue: Federal Reserve monetary policies, including the national debt and austerity policies. 12. A rapidly emerging concern that no one really knows what to do with: technological automation of manual labor jobs. As for how we go about solving the problem? Yikes I will definitely need more time and caffeine to answer that one. First, I’ll probably have to take us on brief side tours into the wonderful subjects of political philosophy and economic theory before I begin proposing practical solutions here that we can debate. Look for Chapter 1 of my Kay-munist Manifesto in the weeks ahead!

Oh by perks I mostly meant health care coverage while working in the US. Maybe certain benefits for housing and education, too. Just stuff to help them navigate their temporary lives in our country without major hardship.

JetsFan20, it looks like the fellas at PPP roughed you up a little bit yesterday, so I’ll try to be more gentle. Buuuuuuut…every sentence in this post of yours looks wrong to me: 1. Our moral standing in the world will NOT skyrocket with Biden. It repeatedly plummeted with every international military misadventure Biden openly supported. One prominent example among many: the 2015 European migrant crisis, on Joe’s VP watch, following the total destruction of Syria. 2. I doubt Joe will ever accede to the progressive wing during his waning few political years. Look at his extensive Congressional voting record and his list of campaign donors. Or for that matter, many of his relatively recent quotes: “nothing will fundamentally change,” “I will veto M4A if it passes through Congress,” “I have no empathy for the plight of younger people.” 3. Joe Biden is not a man of integrity. His entire career has been plagued with racism (1994 crime bill, working with segregationists), plagiarism (1988 campaign), inappropriateness with females (all the recorded touching, Tara Reade), and corruption (gosh where do I start? Ukraine Hunter scandal, for one). 4. Bernie, AOC, and Warren will be working with Biden, Schumer, and Pelosi for sure…but it will not be to improve the well-being of the people and their communities. Neoliberalism and crony capitalism don’t help a large majority of the “people.” All 6 are proud to work together as team blue, but in practice have transformed into political WATERMELONS…green on the outside, mostly red on the inside (note: I’ve been dying for a while now to slip this term in somewhere). I’m referring specifically to the career Congressional voting records for Biden and Schumer and Pelosi, Warren’s for the past several years, and Bernie’s and AOC’s especially within the past few months. The latter 3 have quite suddenly morphed into complete establishment Dem lapdogs once it became apparent Biden had the nomination. Look at all of their votes and efforts on the coronavirus bailout bills, for example. Notice the continued lack of pushback for greater transparency on the businesses that receive federal bailouts? Bernie also forgot to show up for his crucial Freedom Reauthorization Act vote, presumably because he was too busy talking up his “good friend” Joe to gullible prog voters. Have Bernie, AOC, and Warren adequately supported fellow progressive Dem candidates this November? Not really, no, and this is especially true if these are candidates who have been primarying establishment Dem incumbents. Here in NYC, AOC has apparently decided to endorse Jerry Freaking Nadler. My single litmus test for so-called Dem “progressives” is that you either enthusiastically support Shahid Buttar right now over Pelosi or you are a political fraud and stop talking to me ever again. 5. Hmmm, actually I think your last sentence is correct! We WILL be able to visit Europe soon again and hold our heads up high. Is the pandemic travel ban still a thing? P.S. I don’t recommend handing out any more $1000 bills to Joe. Why not take that money and donate instead to a local private charity of your choice? One that works directly with inner city minority communities? Neoliberalism is my happy word. I LOVE seeing it used on this message board forum. It means more people are waking up! I think you and I may be the only Bernie supporters on PPP who have ditched the Democrats. I call us the Briahna Joy Gray voters. I’ve seen a couple other Bernie supporters here too, but I think they’re sticking with the Dems for the Supreme Court selections. I call them the Jeff Weaver voters. Then you have a dozen or so PPP liberals who are either proud moderates or just hate the Orange Man and want him out at all costs. Most of them may in fact be one guy with multiple user names. And then finally you have the sea of conservatives, libertarians, Republicans, and general right wingers at PPP who dominate discussion but are ultimately all very decent people (I think). Most of them (I think) are older, white, financially secure males from the professional/managerial classes, so the eclectic Bernie movement is more likely to come off as a strange and unfamiliar and potentially threatening political phenomenon to them. Do handle them as you would a box of fine dining room china. I know what you were intending to say about older southern blacks. My observation from the Dem primaries was that the black vote actually mirrored the white vote in terms of the generational divide. Millenials of both skin colors preferred Bernie by a giant margin, while Boomers of both skin colors preferred Biden by a giant margin. This was true across all regions of the country and not just in the South. It turns out that the Bernie campaign had major structural flaws with both African American outreach and Boomer outreach. So the blame for the movement’s demise should be distributed in many directions. I’d start with cable news media who disproportionately brainwash older Americans. Your thoughts on prog left strategy moving forward? Mine is to completely break off from the Democrats immediately, continue organizing (peaceful) worker strikes and protests, vote Green in November to get above the 5% national threshold, build up the Greens (or any new third party) beyond November, quash the super PC SJW woke movement and prioritize neoliberalism/environment/military-industrial-complex issues from a populist anti-establishment perspective, fully destroy either one of the two big parties from the outside by 2024 (I prefer to take down the Dems but a post-Trump neocon Rep resurgence could be ripe for destruction as well), and begin restructuring American society into a European-style social democracy by 2028 as soon as Millenials/Gen Z up their voting reliability. Phew.

I’m referring directly to globalization, the weakening of labor unions, the dismal social safety net, the automation of jobs, and insufficient minimum wage laws. In a somewhat more subtle way, I’d add corporate socialism, certain business and bank deregulatory measures, a dangerous deregulatory culture specifically within Wall Street, and the general set of economic policies that jeopardize the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. The latter two impact everyone, of course, and not just the working class. Meh, not really. I kind of expect everything to be politicized nowadays, even a pandemic. Sad but true that liberals would be biased toward any decision imaginable that would possibly hurt Trump, even if it’s an unnecessarily lengthened mandatory quarantine period that harms the entire economy (LA County being the most egregious to me). It’s also true, though, that liberals tend to live in urban areas where the dense populations make them more susceptible to infection, so it’s understandable why they’d be more fearful of Covid-19. Left-leaning people also tend to be more likely to trust authority figures in science and government, and they also tend to value human lives over dollar bills (hah!). I wonder if this political dichotomy would hold if the pandemic happened on Biden’s watch? I gotta admit, it’s been amusing to watch us leftists completely flip opinions on the coronavirus danger during the Floyd protests and now flip back again for Trump’s rallies. And we wonder why our opponents don’t take us seriously?! My opinion remains that all of our political leaders were embarrassingly unprepared for a pandemic, should have aggressively quarantined and paused the economy in early March, should have had the government FULLY support its citizens during that time, and then could have begun the reemergence process a short month later in staggered stages with all the proper sanitation implementations. I don’t know what exactly “cancel all rent” entails. I don’t know what English words or slogans mean anymore! All I know is that a government-mandated rent and mortgage deferment for a couple months or so would have made a lot of people’s lives a lot less stressful. I’m always happy to see people recognizing that real wage growth has stagnated for decades! But now look at line graphs of nominal wage growth from the Paul Volcker era through the first three years of Trump’s term, and then compare with the line graphs of costs of various important goods and services (try: housing, education, health care, transportation, utilities, food, clothes, insurance, etc.). See an interesting trend? Now do the same for the years between Truman and Ford. Turns out that neither Obama nor Trump look too impressive. By the way, I’m going by data compiled from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Inflation-adjusted wage growth has actually fallen in 48 of 50 states (Arizona and Louisiana are the lone exceptions) from Obama’s term to Trump’s term. You may have confused nominal wage numbers with real wage numbers. And yes, I believe the working class suffered under Obama as well. He was a below average president on the economy (on foreign policy and climate change too). Leftists praise him because he was charismatic and because he wasn’t George W. Bush. To me, Obama failed because he didn’t adequately address any of the fundamental economic issues I listed at the top of this post. I’m basing my fears of a rent and mortgage crisis on two sets of surveys. The first set describe how a frighteningly large majority of Americans (up to 80%?) were living paycheck to paycheck before March with savings only within the hundreds of dollars. The second set describe how a frighteningly significant percentage of Americans during this pandemic haven’t thought they could pay rent for the next month (off the top of my head, I remember reading that a third of American renters didn’t pay in April). Also, I believe you may be speaking way too generally when you say unemployment benefits are too generous. Unemployment benefits and costs of living vary wildly by state. If I’m (hopefully) wrong about this crisis, then either the surveys were faulty, or the unemployment benefits supported people long enough before they found new employment, or the government actually stepped in to help, or maybe people found enough gas money between couch cushions during their quarantine??

I wish I could bask in some of this economic optimism, but I’m not mentally there now. I get the desire to glom onto any positive news, and yes there is a powerful collective psychological component at play in economics that can singlehandedly fuel recoveries and that we want to nurture. But we always knew the economy would bounce back to SOME degree immediately following the quarantine, even if the details were poorly understood since an economic crisis like this has never played itself out before in our lifetimes. Ok so perhaps here is where l have major disagreements in opinion with many of y’all, but to me the basic fundamental predicament still remains in that our entire political class has quite insufficiently intervened in the economic side of the pandemic (and the health one too). Furthermore, the deep economic structural flaws that were oppressing the American working class before March have only been amplified from the effects of the quarantine. The worst very likely has yet to come and could possibly start as early as August with a renter/homeowner housing calamity. I’ll use a fun football analogy to frame the situation: the economic recovery is the Bills. The Patriots are neoliberalism. The refs are our crony capitalists and political leaders. Let’s maybe say Ernie Adams is the Federal Reserve. The Bills are losing to the Patriots 28-0 late in the first quarter. EJ Manuel (small business employers) just completed a totally sweet 20-yard post route across midfield to TJ Graham (low wage employees living paycheck to paycheck). We’re all celebrating and starting to believe the Bills can pull this off. Wait…stop. Lame football analogy. I’ll explain myself better in this thread (with facts and data!) when I have more time later this month.

I’m surprised and, quite frankly, a little disappointed that I haven’t seen any related internet memes yet that feature Will Ferrell’s character from Wedding Crashers. Ya know…the meatloaf guy! These CHAZ dorks are super embarrassing. It’s time to stop playing make-believe and start acting like adults with basic problem-solving skills. How many of the wonderful denizens of CHAZ bothered themselves to vote in the Democratic primaries? Oh right, that would only legitimize “the man.” Or something.

<< TLDR Summary: please reconsider the “defund the police” slogan. >> Good post, Mr. Persons. Correct, language is constantly evolving. I’m sure Noam Chomsky and Richard Dawkins were smiling as they read your post. Unfortunately, the evolution of language is also a major contributor to miscommunication between people of different classes, generations, races, geographical regions, and even political affiliations…as we’re now seeing in real time. Today I won’t push back on the merit of “defunding” the police, to use your intended meaning of the word. We agree on many of the institutional changes that need to happen within American police forces, though I’m not convinced that your process of getting there is the best one. Maybe I will soon? The argument that this drastic method is necessary to break those irrationally intransigent police unions is a compelling one, but I need to learn more. Any specific articles you recommend I read? Should I finally finish watching The Wire series?! What I want to discuss is the merit of the marketing strategy behind the slogan, “defund the police.” Defunding only references the first of many steps that likely need to be taken. It’s a severe use of the word which has definitely captured national attention and sparked discussion, but I’m concerned about the transition from the bull-in-the-china-shop attention-capturing phase to the persuasion phase. Right now the polling numbers show roughly two-thirds of Americans do not agree in any way with the “defund the police” movement. BLM is a bottom-up grassroots organization that can’t so easily control the messaging like a top-down organization can. We may be passing a point in time where the BLM movement is losing much of its power leverage, in much the same way that additional quarantine enforcements are no longer on the political table following the public Floyd protests and the upcoming Trump rallies. Anyone with a TV or internet connection by now should be aware of the police brutality crisis toward blacks. Those who are unsure, indifferent, or outright hostile to the solution-seeking stages are probably pulling further away as each day passes with more news of protests and outbreaks of riots but inadequate discussion of solutions. This country has had plenty of race protests and riots by now. How much positive change has actually resulted from each of them? Take the infamous LA Police Department, for example: 1943 Zoot Suit riots to 1965 Watts riots to 1992 Rodney King riots to where they still are today. Why did nothing fundamentally change? I’d like the BLM movement to consider changes to their use of language. Try alternate words like “reform” the police. Or try word qualifiers like “Camden” defund the police. Or try newly invented words like “floydund” the police or whatever to change the trajectory of the public discourse. I would also reconsider recent efforts to change the Webster’s Dictionary meaning of the word “racism” into one with a unidirectional power dynamic component to it. Maybe introduce a phrase like “racially insensitive” into the vernacular to replace the “racist” label that is used so often. This isn’t about capitulation. This is about the efficacy of an activist movement’s communication. A large majority of Americans are moderate-minded people inclined to favor institutions of law and order. The reality is that more of their support is needed to force Democratic Party political leaders of all levels (local, state, national), as well as black community leaders, to enact positive change in multiple areas (police relations, economic class politics, stable black family structures…yeah yeah I know, that last one is supposed to be a white nationalist talking point…). A very personal example of how the misuse of words can derail a movement: Bernie’s 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. As you know, “socialism” in America is a word hopelessly laden with all sorts of residual Cold War fearmongering that the more successful American progressive/populist movements of the early twentieth century didn’t have to worry about. Bernie’s campaign was a top-down organization that had no excuse for failing to control the language in a national discussion. I would have used “social democracy” and dropped “socialism” altogether. And to be more precise, social democracy should be differentiated with a qualifier like “permanent” or “finalized” social democracy since the original meaning of this phrase is supposed to represent a transitional stage on the way to replacing capitalism for good. I once recommended rebranding with newly invented singular words like “Bolshevista” to represent transitional social democracy and “Sandernista” to represent our permanent version. These did not catch on because I was a lowest-level campaign volunteer and because no one ever listens to me. But maybe when dealing with time-sensitive political movements, sometimes it’s just best to stick with more familiar word qualifiers to convey your message. Example: I often use country qualifiers to clarify nuanced political positions I have. Sometimes I’ll call myself a supporter of German-style socialism. Hmmm but I can see how that could be misconstrued, so I should stop doing that.

Let me tell y’all something about Paw Patrol. I KNOW Paw Patrol. I’ve watched multiple episodes while babysitting my nephew and niece. I have purchased very awesome Paw Patrol toys for their birthdays. Paw Patrol is about teamwork and service to the community. I also know Chase, the dog in question. He’s no Derek Chauvin. He’s one of the many good ones. He is a natural leader with a strong moral compass. I am a firm believer that vigorous free speech is good and PC cancel culture is bad. Anyone who is given the power to determine what is considered “healthy” speech and “unhealthy” speech for everyone else’s consumption should be met with deep suspicion. And from a left-wing political strategy perspective, I also believe the PC police/cancel culture/SJW’s/super woke crowd are distracting voters from the deeper and more subtle systemic issues that plague our country: crony capitalism, media corruption, neoliberalism, the military-industrial complex, climate change, etc. Taking the serious issues of systemic racism and police brutality to such laughably absurd extremes within the free speech domain only further alienates moderates, Boomers, and the white working class from left-wing politics. I don’t know when (or if?!) the pendulum of public consensus will swing back on these PC cultural issues. All I know is that it’s time we stand up right now in defense of Paw Patrol. I think Nickelodeon’s headquarters are here in Manhattan. Anyone else with me?! Someone may also need to order a pallet of bricks. Updates to come. “Chase is on the case,” indeed. Chase has ALWAYS been on the case. And Chase WILL continue to be on the case if Kay has her say. I, too, stand with Paw Patrol. Do you? #IStandWithPawPatrol