A great timeline of Earth’s temperature from 20,000 BC until now shows natural climate variations and what happened once humans started influencing the climate in the early 1900s. These screenshots show the timeline from ~20,000 BC - ~19,300 BC, ~9700 BC - ~8600 BC, and ~2500 BC until today. Notice that at ~20,000 BC, the climate was a heck of a lot cooler than it is now. Temperature change was natural until ~1920, which was after the industrial revolution had been underway for about 80 years. Thanks to Raven for bringing this chart to my attention.
This should give people some feel for how temperature variation influences climate. A 2ᵒ C increase is going to be a big deal. If we stay on the current path, things will start to get real ugly late this century.
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Americans are sleepwalking into a dictatorship.Why aren’t they more afraid?
Worldview: A second Trump presidency could spell the disintegration of the Nato alliance, and would have far-reaching consequences for the wars in Ukraine and the Middle EastTrump leads all other Republican candidates by double-digit figures in opinion polls. “Trump will soon be the presumptive Republican nominee for president,” Robert Kagan, a prominent neo-conservative commentator, predicted in the Washington Post. “When that happens, there will be a swift and dramatic shift in the political power dynamic, in his favour… There is a clear path to dictatorship in the United States, and it is getting shorter every day.”
The sense of alarm is shared in Paris and London. “Is American democracy entering its last year?” Piotr Smolar, Le Monde’s Washington correspondent, asked rhetorically.“There is no point in pretending that a man who believes that any election he loses is rigged, that the judicial system is rotten and corrupt, and that his political enemies belong in jail, is a believer in democracy,” Edward Luce wrote in the Financial Times.
It is one of the mysteries of the American soul that, as David Remnick writes in the New Yorker, “Tens of millions of Americans seem undeterred by the prospect of absolutism, cruelty and corruption on the horizon.”
The majority of respondents to a YouGov poll in August, and four out of five Republicans, believe the Biden administration has manipulated the justice system to undermine Trump. They would find it perfectly logical for Trump to appoint special prosecutors to pursue his enemies.
The answer in the sleepwalking question is in the question itself. Enough Americans aren't afraid either because they are sleepwalking, or because they want to live their miserable lives under the iron fisted rule of a kleptocratic dictator.
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Our good friends at PLOS Biology have published an Earth-shattering discovery about how to lower human male aggression. An article, A chemical signal in human female tears lowers aggression in males, comments:
Rodent tears contain social chemosignals with diverse effects, including blocking male aggression. Human tears also contain a chemosignal that lowers male testosterone, but its behavioral significance was unclear. Because reduced testosterone is associated with reduced aggression, we tested the hypothesis that human tears act like rodent tears to block male aggression. Using a standard behavioral paradigm, we found that sniffing emotional tears with no odor percept reduced human male aggression by 43.7%. To probe the peripheral brain substrates of this effect, we applied tears to 62 human olfactory receptors in vitro. We identified 4 receptors that responded in a dose-dependent manner to this stimulus. Finally, to probe the central brain substrates of this effect, we repeated the experiment concurrent with functional brain imaging. We found that sniffing tears increased functional connectivity between the neural substrates of olfaction and aggression, reducing overall levels of neural activity in the latter.
Research is now focusing on the chemical identity of the signal factor(s) responsible for reducing male aggression. Human female tears were collected like this:
We conducted a long-term screen for women who can cry with ease, ultimately identifying 6 regular donor women. First, we harvested emotional tears from human female donors (6 regular donor women, age range 22 to 25 years) using methods previously described. Donors completed .... specific questionnaires with each donation, on questions such as .... the nature of emotions during donation. Because tears that trickled down the cheek and into the collection device may have collected skin-bound signaling molecules not originating from tear fluid, as a control substance, we trickled saline down the cheeks of the very same donors and collected it in a similar manner. .... To obtain tears, the donor women watched sad film clips in isolation and used a mirror to place a vial and capture the tears trickling down their cheeks. A typical donation used in this study contained approximately 1.6 ml of tears.
One can imagine that the US government working feverishly on tear bombs that will calm things down in international situations of insufficient calm. Police could use tear grenades (not tear gas grenades) to de-escalate unduly chaotic local situations.
Fig 4. Tears reduced activation in the
brain substrates of reactive aggression
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From the Violent, Ignorant Dictator Supporter Files: The HuffPo writes:
Colorado Secretary Of State ‘Extremely Concerned’About Pro-Trump ViolenceColorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold received 64 death threats and more than 900 threats of abuse within three weeks of the case being filed to keep Trump off the state ballot“I’ve been concerned about violence and threats of violence since Donald Trump incited the insurrection,” Griswold, who has been Colorado’s Democratic secretary of state since 2019, said in an interview. “I’ve received hundreds if not thousands of threats at this point.”Jena Griswold - she gets lots of threats by thugs
“I did not file this case. I’m part of this case because I’m the secretary of state,” Griswold said. “Within three weeks of it being filed, I received 64 death threats and over 900 non-lethal threats of abuse. I stopped counting after that.”
“So yes, I’m extremely concerned,” she added. “It just underlines that Donald Trump is a major threat to American democracy, elections and stability. He uses threats and intimidation against his political opponents. When he doesn’t win elections, he tries to steal them. He is a dangerous leader for this country.”
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Huge win for DJT at the USSC: The Hill reports:
The Supreme Court declined to take up whether President Trump can be prosecuted for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, punting for now the question on the limits of presidential immunity as the former president seeks to toss the case.
The refusal, which had no noted dissents, comes as an appeals court weighs a motion from Trump to dismiss the case; he argues he has absolute presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts.
Special counsel Jack Smith’s gambit to skip over an intermediate appeals court and bring the issue directly before the Supreme Court was aimed at keeping the schedule of the trial — the first of Trump’s four criminal proceedings — on track.
It looks like the USSC supports DJT’s tactic to delay until after the election. If the three Dems on the bench agreed with this, they should be impeached along along with all six corrupt, radical Repub authoritarians. IMO, whoever on the court agreed with this is a traitor.
Once again, we clearly see the grievous damage that waiting too long to prosecute traitors causes to democracy and the rule of law. This could be the death knell of American democracy, civil liberties and whatever is left of the rule of law.
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