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Rolla Peace News February 10, 2025 |
Dear Friends:Editor's notes:In this newsletter is: 1. THE MISFIT MATHEMATICIAN (Tom's column, http://tomsager.org) a) Gaza: Genocide, Ecocide, Arbocide, ... and More b) Donald Trump Threatens BRICS Nations c) Some Recent News About Afghanistan, Graveyard of Empires d) Revenge of the Polar Vortex e) The Warmest January on Record f) A Short-Lived Record g) Donald Trump v. The English Language h) The Chips Are Down Gaza: Genocide, Ecocide, Arbocide ... Gazans returning to their homes are finding nothing but piles of rubble. Everything has been destroyed: homes, electricity generation, hospitals, sewage disposal, water purification, farm land, ... everything. Rebuilding will likely be a multi-generational task ... if it is possible at all.“Killing lots of people and winning a war are not the same thing.” —Fred Reed Nevertheless, the ceasefire is holding for the most-part and Gazans are returning home to bury their dead and rebuild as best they can. A reported 80% of Gaza's trees have been destroyed. How much carbon has been added to our overburdened atmosphere? How much climate warming will result? Raw sewage flows into the Mediterranean. I doubt it will stay in one place. Expect contamination to spread. Asbestos, heavy metals and heaven only knows what else are picked up by the wind, spread far and wide and deposited everywhere. This has been a war without winners. All humanity has lost. Worst of all, we've lost our own humanity as we sat back and watched the destruction of Gaza. But, I think Israel will come out the biggest loser of all. For generations, Israel will be known as a nation of cruel, brutal, insensitive people. I wonder, do the Israelis even care? Here's a few posts you may find informative: Damage to Environment Diseases of War Complicity of Arab Nations Ethnic Cleansing Donald Trump Threatens BRICS Nations Donald Trump has threatened the members of the BRICS bloc of nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran and United Arab Emirates, with others waiting in the wings to join) with 100% tariffs, should they try to replace the US dollar as the world's major international currency standard.“Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value — zero.” —Voltaire The move away from the dollar has been going on for years and will likely continue. Why would any country leave themselves open to financial manipulation, sabotage and sanctions if they have a choice? Certainly, there are advantages to having one standard world currency for international trade. However, I think the time when one country will be permitted to dominate and manipulate the standard are over. If the United States had not abused its position as custodian of the dollar, I think this could have gone on for years yet; but it is too late now. I suspect the inflation we are feeling is to some degree the result of the move away from the dollar, which is likely to continue. Note on Dr. Seuss adaptation above: While discussing this snippet, my wife remarked to me that the whole world has gone crazy. My response was that I knew the world had gone crazy when the “woke folk” started attacking Dr. Seuss. I wrote an essay on this a few years back. In my opinion, Dr. Seuss is still The Greatest. Some Recent News About Afghanistan, Graveyard of Empires I have mentioned my admiration for the Afghan people over and over again in this newsletter. They have certainly earned the moniker, Graveyard of Empires, many times over, having defeated The British, The Soviets and the United States, allied with nearly the entire world, over the course of three centuries. No others have come even close to this anti-imperial record.“Foreigners should not give orders.” Since their victory over the United States and allies in 2021, Afghanistan has banned the cultivation of opium poppies which flourished under the corrupt US dominated occupation government. Cultivation of opium poppies fell 90% between 2021 and 2023. While the UN believes that opium made a comeback in 2024, the US Peace Institute claims that opium poppy cultivation continued to fall in 2024. Poppy cultivation in Afghanistan has been replaced mostly by wheat, providing the Afghan people with food, instead of providing foreigners with drugs to get high on and damage their physical and mental health. In the meantime, The United States, which spends billions unsuccessfully attempting to prevent the import of dangerous drugs across its borders, continues to prevent Afghanistan from accessing funds which, although belonging to the Afghan people, are held illegally by the United States. Poppies are a cash crop, much more lucrative than wheat. One would think that folks concerned about dangerous drugs would be supporting Afghanistan, helping to control poppy cultivation rather than standing in their way. Unfortunately, western humanitarian aid organizations have mostly pulled out of Afghanistan in the wake of its liberation from foreign domination. Yet another war on the horizon According to Ryan Grim et al. in the Dropsite News, the Pakistani military is trying to entice the United States military back into Afghanistan. Lots of luck, General. Donald Trump doesn't like war. He'd rather (in the words of Tom Lehrer) “kill them off by peaceful means”. A US return to Afghanistan under Trump would be unlikely. The United States already has more than it can handle in the Middle East, the western Pacific and The Ukraine. Trump demands return of abandoned military hardware Donald Trump has demanded the return of billions of dollars of US military hardware abandoned in Afghanistan. Afghanistan's reply: No @#$#!! way. (I would have added, US troops were lucky to have made it out of Afghanistan with their shirts on, and, without Taliban support, many probably wouldn't have. But then, I'd never have made it as a diplomat.) International Criminal Court seeks warrants for Taliban leaders The International Criminal Court (ICC) is seeking arrest warrants for Taliban leaders on the charge of violating the Rights of women. My response: Where was the ICC when the United States and allies bombed the crap out of Afghan women for 20 years running. Whatever one may think of the Taliban's policy toward women, I know of no instance of the Taliban dropping bombs on women. Afghan collaborators held in inhumane conditions Many Afghans who collaborated with the US occupation and were evacuated along with the US military in 2021, languish in third countries in inhumane conditions, waiting for permission to move on to the United States as promised. Revenge of the Polar Vortex The Polar Vortex usually forms in September. Stratospheric winds circle the pole from West to East around 60° North, keeping frigid air bottled up around the pole. Generally, the polar vortex stays up in the stratosphere minding its own business; but sometimes it wiggles and wobbles, bends and stretches and breaks and reverses, affecting terrestrial weather. This occurred in January of this year, causing unprecedented snow and cold on the nothern coast of the GULF OF MEXICO. Pensacola received 8.9 inches of snow trouncing the record of 3 inches set in 1895. Temperatures dropped to 2°F at New Iberia, LA, beating the previous record of 17°F set in 2018. The weather disturbance then crossed the Atlantic and hit Ireland, Scotland and Norway as Storm Eowyn with a low pressure of 939 mbar and 135 mph winds. Storm Eowyn caused two fatalities and left over one million without power. Eowyn was Europe's fifth most intense windstorm on record. Note: The title of this snippet may sound like the name of a grade C horror movie; but I can assure you that there is nothing grade C about the horror and destruction caused by climate-change induced extreme weather. January 2025: The Warmest January on Record Copernicus Climate Change Service (CCCS) reports that at 1.75°C above their 1850-1900 estimate, January 2025 was the warmest January on record, beating out the previous warmest January 2024 by almost 0.1°C. Typically, I wait for NOAA to report monthly global temperature anomalies, but given the ongoing attacks on federal data, I decided to go ahead and report the CCCS January temperature anomalies now. NOAA's estimates tend to be more conservative than those of CCCS. Messing with NOAA would be a tremendous mistake. We all rely on NOAA for our weather forecasts as well as other climate and weather data. A Short-Lived Record Last month I reported that 2024 set a record for year to year increases in atmospheric CO2 at 3.53 parts per million (ppm). Actually, the record was even stronger. December 2024 marked the largest increase in atmospheric CO2 over any two consecutive non-overlapping 12-month periods. But that record was short-lived: The February 2024 through January 2025 average for atmospheric CO2 came in at 224.93 ppm, 3.57 ppm greater than the average over February 2023 through January 2024. No wonder that climate-change icon and former director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, James Hansen, has remarked that limiting global temperatures to 2.0°C above pre-industrial times is dead. It won't happen. Donald Trump v. The English Language Here's a list of English (oops, American) language words and phrases banned by Donald Trump: Gender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual, non-binary, nonbinary, assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth, biologically male, and biologically female.“Did you know the ocean's oysters So how do you describe a life-long biologically female person who, through no fault of her own, was assigned male at birth? (perhaps by some bureaucrat who couldn't tell the difference) With the word, transgender, banned, how do you describe the sexuality of oysters? Will our oyster shuckers and oyster fishermen still be able to make a living? In his famous poem, The Walrus and the Carpenter, Lewis Carroll suggests a novel way of dealing with transgender oysters — eating them. Perhaps, this is what the Trump administration had in mind when it banned the word, transgender. My favorite Douglas Florian poem is The Starfish, which always makes me think of Donald Trump: The Chips Are Down“And though it's true Deepseek, which was developed on a shoestring budget in China, rivals or beats the best Artificial Intelligence systems developed anywhere in the world, in spite of the embargo on exporting the most powerful computer chips from the United States. Deepseek has caused the value of computer chip-maker Nvidia's stock to plummet 15%, which immediately brought to mind the line in the Jim Stafford song, Cow Patti, quoted above.“Ya gotta watch your step, Stafford must have been clairvoyant to have written this song some 40 or 50 years ago. Or perhaps, it's just serendipity at work. More importantly, Deepseek shows that a group of poorly-funded bright dedicated youngsters can still compete with the best that a well-endowed establishment has to offer. Deepseek also shows how fragile our economic underpinnings are. Who would have thought that an event like the creation of Deepseek could have brought down a giant like Nvidia. Note: As of the time of writing, Nvidia stock appears to be making a come-back. Incidentally, it took Deepseek three tries to find the humorous relationship between the Stafford quote and the fall of Nvidia's stock. The third try included a hint that virtually gave it away. I would expect that a reasonably intelligent human being who is knowledgeable of current events would have seen the connection immediately. Queries and Deepseek's responses are posted here. Rolla Peace News is written occasionally (perhaps once a month) and distributed by email. It is posted on the web at http://tomsager.org (click on Rollaites for Peace: near the top of rightmost column).Wage peace, Tom yushasager (at) yahoo.com |