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Showing posts with the label Putin

Hope Dies Last

I hope that the face of this boy being arrested in Moscow for demonstrating against the regime is the symbol of the future Russia. Getting detained at the ripe age of 10 or 11 must have been a defining moment in the life of this young man. To me, it does not look like he was soaking in the constant barrage of propaganda that became much worse by January 2022.  Most internet links between Russia and the world are now severed, and over 80% of all Russians get their daily propaganda poison pills from state TV.  No independent media outlets are left in this Soviet Union 2.0 Putin is erecting. Narodonst ' (the little people or "Prols" in the "1984" nomenclature.) must now march in lockstep, as they have had to for the last eight centuries, starting from the Mongols, and with a short, unhappy pause in the 1990s. Let me then take you back to the old Soviet Union 1.0 and its vassal state, the communist Poland that controlled most of my life prior to 1981.  Here are the ...

Green New Deal VI - Urgency and oil production constraint

Amid an ongoing Arctic heat wave , the Greenland ice sheet is in the middle of its biggest melt season in recorded history. It’s the latest worrying signal climate change is accelerating far beyond the worst fears of even climate scientists. This is how the RollingStone put it, following an unspoken rule of never discouraging too much the clueless and faint at heart.  The reason is clear, we don't want 299 million Americans to freeze like deer in headlights, and exclaim: "Let's have an insanely rich farewell party before it all ends!". Free-floating ice floats jammed into the Ilulissat Icefjord during unseasonably warm weather on July 30, 2019 near Ilulissat, Greenland. Ten billion ton of water melted in a single day. I am a geoscientist, and in my book this is an instantaneous positive feedback to global heating that must be very bad for humans. Image Source: Sean Gallup/Getty Images. My take on this 100-year ice melt on Greenland that just happened for the ...