Thank God for the Charlottesville Nazis! For a moment there, it was looking like we were actually going to have a few days to stop and reflect on the state of America without being subjected to some new form of manufactured mass hysteria. Seriously, just a few short weeks ago, as the corporatist ruling classes’ ridiculous attempt to convince the world that Donald Trump is some sort of Russian sleeper agent appeared to be finally fizzling out, a significant number of leftist types were beginning to wonder if maybe, just maybe, the fact that the United States government is controlled by a global corporate plutocracy that has no allegiance to any nation, or people, or to anything other than itself, and that is in the process of demonizing and potentially deposing an elected president … that maybe that might be something to focus on, not exclusively, by any means, but alongside other vital issues, like defending the rights of transgender drone pilots and purging syllabi of oppressive pronouns.

Fortunately, thanks to the Nazis of Charlottesville, this dangerous moment of doubt has now passed. If you were listening closely on August 11, you could hear the collective sigh of relief whooshing out of Resistance quarters like a hypnagogic idiot wind as roughly one hundred white supremacists marched into town with their tiki torches barking N.S.D.A.P. slogans and otherwise making asses of themselves. Corporate media apparatchiks, mandarins of the Internet Left, professional and amateur Naziologists, and assorted other Nazi experts immediately went to DEFCON 1, signaling imminent Nazi invasion. Photos of bug-eyed, torch-bearing Nazis, their mouths wide open in mid-Nazi shriek, veins bulging out of their Nazi necks, were released to the public and circulated widely. Millions of conflicted leftists (many of whom had been feeling uneasy about collaborating with the corporate plutocracy in their efforts to delegitimize Trump, and every last American who voted for him), upon seeing glossy, color close-ups of these Nazis waved in front of their faces, responded as every Good American has been conditioned to respond since early childhood. They instantly switched off their critical faculties and began reenacting the Second World War … or rather, the mythical version of it wherein the USA defeated the Nazis, which is one of Americans’ favorite pastimes.

Look, I don’t mean to make light of Charlottesville. We’re talking actual neo-Nazis, with actual Nazi flags and haircuts, shouting actual Nazi slogans, and the Ku Klux Klan, and heavily-armed militia, and just garden variety racist rednecks … all of which have been standard features of American life for decades, and longer, but this is no time to reflect on history, or try to put things into perspective. Also, one of these Nazi morons ran over people with his car the next day, killing one woman, and injuring many others, which renders any critical thinking about the actual size of the Nazi menace (which remains ridiculously small, as ever) or the motives of the corporate media in blowing it up all out of proportion tantamount to Nazi sympathizing, and I’m already in enough trouble as it is.

Plus, Charlottesville was just the beginning … kind of like a Nazi Tet Offensive. Just one week later, on August 19, literally forty to fifty Nazis (cleverly disguised as Trump supporters, libertarians, and right-wing oddballs) occupied a public gazebo in Boston, and were right on the verge of expressing virulent Nazi views to the cops surrounding them. Luckily, just in the nick of time, a contingent of approximately forty thousand anti-fascist Resistance members arrived on the scene to deny them a platform, and chase down anyone wearing one of those MAGA hats and verbally abuse them.

You’d think the Nazis would have gotten the message … but no, last Sunday, August 27, another ten or eleven Nazis (many of them posing as “Trump supporters,” as if that didn’t make them Nazis, and some of them even going so far as to attempt to pass themselves off as “Latinos”) audaciously tried to assemble in Berkeley. The Resistance showed them no mercy this time. Thousands of peaceful counter-protesters quickly frightened the Nazis away, then squads of masked-up anti-fascists hunted down any Nazi-looking stragglers, “apparent alt-righters,” and nosy photographers, and stomped the living Hitler out of them. This alarmed the more liberal Resistance, which set about branding the anti-fascists who beat the crap out of the folks the liberals had branded Nazis “domestic terrorists.”

read more:

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/09/01/the-united-states-of-manufacture...

CORPUS CRISTI, Tex. — For the first time in the 10 days since Hurricane Harvey made landfall, the Coast Guard did not have to carry out rescue missions in storm-ravaged Southeast Texas on Sunday. Instead, the service began moving a number of helicopters out of Texas and into Puerto Rico, Florida and Georgia, in anticipation of another landfall threat brewing for the U.S. coast: Hurricane Irma.

“As soon as one ends, we need to make sure we are ready for the next event,” Adm. Paul Zukunft, the Coast Guard commandant, said Monday as Irma, already a Category 3 hurricane, churned in the Atlantic. It is still too early to determine exactly where and when Irma will hit, but model forecasts indicate it is increasingly likely to hit the United States. The National Hurricane Center warned in a 5 a.m. update Monday that Irma could directly affect the British and U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, the Bahamas and Cuba. A significant percentage of model forecasts have Irma striking the U.S. East Coast as early as Saturday or Sunday, with tropical storm winds arriving in Florida as soon as Friday.

Predictions will improve over the coming days, narrowing in on exactly which part of the coast will endure the season’s next major hurricane.

read more:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/09/04/texas-cont...

The region is lucky that Harvey already sucked out a lot of the energy from the Gulf... but it still could get a double whammy, aided of course by global warming...

Note: see Harvie Krumpet and Irma La Douce.

...

PAWELEK: We've had properties that just have minor damage, window leaks, roof leaks. We have a lot of properties that have anywhere from an inch to seven feet of water in the first floor.

ALLEN: That leaves many renters with an apparent dilemma. Your apartment was flooded. You're looking for a place to stay, and your landlord wants the rent that was due the beginning of the month. Do you pay? Here's what renter Whitlee Hurd told NPR's Rebecca Herscher this week after her apartment flooded.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

WHITLEE HURD: Hell no. Excuse my language. I don't know if you can cuss. Hell no. For what? No. Why should I have to pay for them?

ALLEN: But Hurd and other renters even, those whose apartments were damaged and may even be uninhabitable, do have to pay the rent. Fred Fuchs is an attorney with Texas RioGrande Legal Aid.

FRED FUCHS: Under Texas law, they remain legally liable for the rent.

...

ALLEN: Housing experts say as Houston rebuilds after Harvey, it has certain advantages over New Orleans after Katrina and New York and New Jersey after Sandy. For one thing, unlike those other areas, before the disaster, Houston had a housing surplus. Ted Jones, chief economist with Stuart Title Guaranty Company, says after a building boom, Houston was left with too many apartments and a vacancy rate of eight to 12 percent.

read more:

http://www.npr.org/2017/09/02/548175755/after-hurricane-harvey-many-in-h...

...

PAWELEK: We've had properties that just have minor damage, window leaks, roof leaks. We have a lot of properties that have anywhere from an inch to seven feet of water in the first floor.

ALLEN: That leaves many renters with an apparent dilemma. Your apartment was flooded. You're looking for a place to stay, and your landlord wants the rent that was due the beginning of the month. Do you pay? Here's what renter Whitlee Hurd told NPR's Rebecca Herscher this week after her apartment flooded.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

WHITLEE HURD: Hell no. Excuse my language. I don't know if you can cuss. Hell no. For what? No. Why should I have to pay for them?

ALLEN: But Hurd and other renters even, those whose apartments were damaged and may even be uninhabitable, do have to pay the rent. Fred Fuchs is an attorney with Texas RioGrande Legal Aid.

FRED FUCHS: Under Texas law, they remain legally liable for the rent.

...

ALLEN: Housing experts say as Houston rebuilds after Harvey, it has certain advantages over New Orleans after Katrina and New York and New Jersey after Sandy. For one thing, unlike those other areas, before the disaster, Houston had a housing surplus. Ted Jones, chief economist with Stuart Title Guaranty Company, says after a building boom, Houston was left with too many apartments and a vacancy rate of eight to 12 percent.

read more:

http://www.npr.org/2017/09/02/548175755/after-hurricane-harvey-many-in-h...

It’s that season again. An ominous swirl forms in the Atlantic, citizens batten down or evacuate, TV weather reporters put on rain slickers and, as predictably as National Weather Service bulletins, some End-Times pastors and other provocateurs on the right attribute the storm to a wrathful God’s vengeance on liberals.

The storm surge has already washed up Jim Bakker, whose televangelism never quite recovered from his sex scandal and prison sentence for fraud. After Hurricane Harvey, he declared that “this flood is from God,” punishment for the former mayor of Houston attempting to subpoena ministers’ sermons.

Bakker said this while promoting his “Tasty Pantry,” a bucket of dehydrated food to help survive the apocalypse, and while sharing his set with Pastor Rick Joyner, who agreed storms don’t “happen by accident.”

Likewise, Pastor Kevin Swanson has said the path of Hurricane Irma would be altered by God if the Supreme Court quickly made abortion and gay marriage illegal, “before Irma does her damage,” as Right Wing Watch noted.

Read more:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/did-lesbians-cause-hurricanes-

Note: Gus Leonisky is an atheist.

see also: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/us/hurricane-irma-earthquake-fires.html

By Lorraine Chow, EcoWatch

Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, BP and Royal Dutch Shell—the five biggest investor-owned fossil fuel producers in the world—over the costs of climate change.

The two Californian cities join the counties of Marin, San Mateo and San Diego and the city of Imperial Beach that have taken similar legal action in recent months, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.

San Francisco city attorney Dennis Herrera and Oakland city attorney Barbara J. Parker filed separate lawsuits on Tuesday in the superior courts of San Francisco and Alameda County on behalf of their respective cities.

They seek to hold the companies responsible “for the costs of sea walls and other infrastructure necessary to protect San Francisco and Oakland from ongoing and future consequences of climate change and sea level rise caused by the companies' production of massive amounts of fossil fuels,” according to a joint announcement from the attorneys.

They claim that the oil and gas giants have known about the link between fossil fuels and climate change for decades but continue to sell their products anyway, thus creating “an ongoing public nuisance that is causing harm now, and in the future risks catastrophic harm to human life and property, including billions of dollars of public and private property in Oakland and San Francisco.”

Read more:

https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/09/22/san-francisco-becomes-first-major-...

The argument is valid to a point that we were all consumers of the fossil fuel industry and that, as we knew better, we should have stopped using the poison. This would have sent the fossil fuel industry to the wall. Stop buying. They go broke. Simple. So the argument is in the deceptive manner in which they enforced a denial of the relationship between fossil fuel and global warming. At this level our media is at much fault as the fossil fuel suppliers. This is where media organisations like the NYT, The Washington Post, the Fox networks have let us down on enforcing a much better knowledge of the problem than they have done so far, mostly giving the problem lip service with little conviction. 

The next speaker at the Andrew Olle Lecture (2017) is the Managing Editor of the NYT, Joseph Khan. Perhaps one of the questions that should be put to him is "why has the NYT been so timid on the subject of global warming?" Revenue from advertising? Lack of understanding the sciences? Afraid of the denialists? I say timid because despite having quite a few good articles exposing the problem, overall, the NYT is still holding fire — but I have Joseph's answer already at hand that "they" are doing a lot about global warming awareness, to which I would say bollocks. "A lot" is not enough.

Actually, I am confident that the spiel by Kahn will be yet again about the Donald and the Russian connection which as this stage has reached boredom status of fake news, but not for the vengeful paper that supported Hillary to the hilt...

We should expect better from the NYT on global warming, but not from the Fox and associated Murdoch media outlets, though we can hope. 

Read again and again — and tell everyone:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/33287

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