Imagine taking pride in this fucking gold plated cesspool we call the US.

It boggles the mind.

I hear you about the long arm of history, and I might even agree, but not just our society, our species was put on notice we are risking the habitability of our only shared, sole habitat in the medium term a century ago. Now it’s here, it’s accelerating, we are feeling amuse bouche of our reverse terraforming project, scientists are finding new runaway effects their conservative estimates didn’t account for, and still humanity collectively shrugs because we can’t disrupt our global economy short term even to literally have a future for our species. We, the US, are among the leaders in the world in terms of accelerating that destruction.

I likely would have more of an attitude of not for us, for our children if that weren’t the case. But physics doesn’t care that we are the slow learners and selfish fucks. I hold the shame and guilt in my heart for my son’s likely hellish future that I really can do nothing about short of becoming an ecoterrorist which for the record I’m not planning on becoming.

Time is no longer a luxury humanity possesses. We needed to take drastic, draconian, lifestyle altering changes decades ago, and we still aren’t willing to entertain such things today, with shattered heat and earliest cat 5 hurricane ever records.

I was part of Occupy, and it was mostly the fellow peasants being hurt from this system laughing us off the street. I made phone calls for Bernie’s primaries.

I still vote the least non-progressive out of harm reduction, and will vote for Harris, as I would have for Biden’s corpse, just as I did voting for his corpse the last cycle, and Clinton before when not many showed up. But I no longer have hope. That’s just so I can look myself in the mirror and say I did the right thing in the face of madness.

Good on you if you have hope, rage against the dying of that light. I’ve seen too much to believe that the nobility of the human spirit will prevail.

All the idiot Americans cheering about scapegoating single mothers as welfare queens since the 80s, never an utterance by anyone with power of all the DO NOTHING private investors that drop their chips from their last trip to the exploitation casino and demand all the profit for no labor whatsoever.

“Fuck you, I’m an owner, pay me.”

Prior to the Jack Welch Ronald Reagan betrayal, the model was correcly “customers first, employees second, investors third.”

Everything falls apart when you give every spare penny to the people who A) dont DO anything to make the money they demand and B) demand the companies they own sabotage their missions and futures to goose net profit for the current quarter so they can profit and walk away having severely damaged those company’s ability to do what they existed for, only to demand it of other companies.

This is an admisson of no future.

They’re throwing crew out of their boat full of holes to assure investors they’re ship shape… for the next quarterly profit report.

Their corpse will be long since picked clean of their patents, assets, and trademarks by 2030.

I mean they absolutely will when civilization collapses due to climate collapse and accompanying weather events, famine, droughts, and plagues.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/07/the-climate-is-changing-so-fast-that-we-havent-seen-how-bad-extreme-weather-could-get/

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-39810-w

I take solace in knowing that they can build all the luxury bunkers they want, but they will one day come to realize they are their tombs, protecting them from the world and species they damned, including for any of their muh legacy nepo babies huddled underground with them, for a couple million years.

Modern conservative malice is matched only by modern conservative ineptitude.

There isn’t a way to reject all facts and data about the world you don’t like and still remain competent. You can’t send someone to the moon by rage tweeting that NASA shouldn’t exist and then building a giant slingshot because it feels like the right way to do it.

As someone largely opposed to the idea of a celebrity, I still agree and have for awhile.

He knows how the sausage gets made. He knows and disdains the rot, and he has the rarest of things for a democrat: a magnetic personality.

I’ve wanted President Jon Stewart since I saw how he advocated for 9/11 victims benefits to an indifferent Congress and won.

I Wouldn’t expect any less from this gold plated cesspool founded on genocide, slavery, and exploitation.

“herp derp but we saved the world and beat the Nazis!” Yeah, we fought and defeated the Axis… after they decimated our pacific fleet and brought the war to us. Prior to that, eugenics were popular here, and practiced. Hell, some of our most infamous capitalists supplied and financed both sides of that war, after all, private profit is what America is all about.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/hitlers-willing-business-partners/303146/

We’re dogshit, all the way back to the zealots fleeing Europe to be bigger religious prudes and nutters. The only amazing thing about our country is its ridiculously massive, undeserved ego.

Covid kind of disillusioned me to the whole “all humanity needs is a common enemy/suffering to get right” concept.

Same, if we can’t even, in actions not rhetoric, start from a baseline of “we’re all in the same boat, we all have needs and seek happiness, how do we maximize everyone’s well-being to facilitate that?” then we’re still just savage animals wrestling in the dirt, but with the dangerous capacity to devise technologies for selfish ends we aren’t wise/evolved enough to truly appreciate the consequences of using.

“According to The Atlantic, an asteroid that weighs more than 1.7 quadrillion metric tons could sterilize Earth by raising the temperature of its water above 100°C. This asteroid would be 10–1,000 times heavier than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs and would be between 60–96 kilometers (37–60 miles) wide.”

The Atlantic article itself is paywalled, but yes, and it’s entirely dependent on the mass of said Asteroid.

Maybe the 10 commandments posted in every Louisiana classroom will stop the asteroids.

Whenever I dare to hope about the lofty, admirable star trek future, I remember that space is completely unforgiving and we just aren’t up to the task for anything more than a token selfie by the best dozen humans we can possibly produce with great effort and training.

As a species, we aren’t going to spread out there. Still too primitive, and probably too self-destructive to make it out of this phase of evolution. This might be one of those great filters scientists postulate as to why there aren’t signals from innumerable civilizations out there.

We aren’t even capable of caring for one another, let alone the EASIEST to maintain, most naturally human friendly habitat we would ever encounter in the cosmos as we evolved to fit it. No airlocks, the air/water/waste recycling was already fully automated, all we had to do was not recklessly grow/metastasize to the point we strain the absolutely massive system out of greed and glut, and stop carelessly shitting where we sleep. We all know how that’s been going since we figured out how to make dead animal poison rocket us accross town.

Master space? Master planetary defense? We can’t even defend this world from our own habitual consumerism. We’ll be lucky if we aren’t scattered tribes living near the old hardened structures of the before times for emergency shelter from the new normal weather events in a hundred years. We’re already starting to argue over the resources it’s taking to rebuild population centers from the current new normal. We have played pretend we were since human civilization began, but we are NOT and never have been this world’s owners or masters, and we are still very much its subject.

And Reminder, what we’re doing and have been doing in decades won’t be undone for millions of years. The Earth is a self-correcting system, and the damage we’re doing is inconsequential to its 3.8 billion year old, beautiful story of life growing out of every crevice, just not on a timescale humans can benefit from or even truly appreciate.

Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell - Great Filter

I, for one, would like to hear Elon beg.

Oof. Oligopolies/duopolies shouldn’t exist, but here we are.

If by mankind you mean about 30kish sociopath families on the backs of billions and to the detriment of the long term climate our only habitat, then sure.

And to be fair, those 30kish sociopath families would largely agree they’re the only mankind that counts.

https://www.investopedia.com/new-class-of-global-elite-have-emerged-8357556#:~:text="Centi-millionaires" are individuals,a wealth advisory firm said.

Sorry about my gutter trash mouth btw, I’ll work on that.

I have just come to acceptance with who we are, and enjoy the accidental poetry of our reckless worship of greed/gluttony/growth/metastasis being our, accelerating going by the latest science still going on deaf ears, end.

I also enjoy all the very corporate culture like bargaining that’s going on with cold, hard, unflinching physics. Oh we won’t make our non-binding emissions goals and grid standards, so we’ll just roll those back, the climate will understand!

We’re tackling our own self-inflicted, reverse terraforming climate disaster with the stages of grief because we refuse to stop and change how we live to find homeostasis with this world, so this isn’t going to end well, and just like with clean coal/corn ethanol/plant a tree offsets/planet scale carbon scrubbers and all the other private profit driven snake oil “solutions,” we aren’t going to science up a magic bullet to save us from the epically irresponsible actions of our epically irresponsible species.

Unlike a lot of sectors though, Airbus knows what they’re doing and is a high profile alternative, and unlike the US, hasn’t yet completely internalized our sociopathic greed disease to our degree, despite the global economic pressure we inflict on other nations encouraging them to betray and cause harm to their own societies and citizens if it means an extra nickel of short term private profit.

Don’t worry though, the UK has fallen to the greed disease, and our capitalists are bribing and coercing their way eastward, and they won’t stop until they either are physically stopped by something like climate change, or successfully make the world forget that Economies are lowly tools that are supposed to exist solely to benefit the people of the society they are a lowly tool for.

I freely admit I’m a broken record on the topics I’m passionate about. Man-made climate change being one of them.

My post history on all my accounts is testament to this.