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Post by jdredd on Aug 25, 2017 0:05:36 GMT -5
www.nytimes.com/2017/08/24/us/bears-ears-utah-monument.html"BEARS EARS NATIONAL MONUMENT, Utah — Parts of this sprawling region of red-rock canyons and at least three other national monuments would lose their strict protection and could be reopened for new mining or drilling under proposals submitted to President Trump by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke on Thursday, according to congressional aides and others who have been briefed on the report. Environmentalists, ranchers, tribal governments and Western lawmakers had been watching closely to see if Mr. Zinke would propose changing the borders of the 1.35-million-acre Bears Ears National Monument, which President Barack Obama established at the end of his term, and other scenic and historic areas under federal protection. Shrinking the monuments would be widely seen as a direct blow to Mr. Obama’s environmental legacy, and would probably prompt the first major legal test of a century-old conservation law." So one of Trumpty's toadies is going to try to re-expand the amount of wilderness to be trashed for energy companies profits, undoing some of the good Obama did. Not my problem, though, and probably won't be missed by oblivious Millennials. I laugh at them.
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Post by jdredd on Oct 10, 2017 11:48:26 GMT -5
www.nytimes.com/2017/10/09/climate/clean-power-plan.html?&hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news"WASHINGTON — The Trump administration announced on Monday that it would take formal steps to repeal President Barack Obama’s signature policy to curb greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, setting up a bitter fight over the future of America’s efforts to tackle global warming. At an event in eastern Kentucky, Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said that his predecessors had departed from regulatory norms in crafting the Clean Power Plan, which was finalized in 2015 and would have pushed states to move away from coal in favor of sources of electricity that produce fewer carbon emissions. “The war on coal is over,” Mr. Pruitt said. “Tomorrow in Washington, D.C., I will be signing a proposed rule to roll back the Clean Power Plan. No better place to make that announcement than Hazard, Ky.” Will this make a difference one way or another for global warming? Who knows for sure? But what the heck, the Boomers can roll the dice by pandering to coal miners now, and if later things go bad it's the oblivious and apathetic Millennials who will pay the price.
Works for me.
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Post by jdredd on Oct 12, 2017 15:34:04 GMT -5
www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/north-korea/2017-09-10/korean-missile-crisis"Even if a war were limited to the Korean Peninsula, the costs would still be unacceptable. According to a detailed study published in 2012 by the Nautilus Institute, a think tank based in California, North Korea has thousands of conventional artillery pieces along the demilitarized zone that by themselves could inflict some 64,000 fatalities in Seoul on the first day of a war. A major attack on South Korea could also kill many of the roughly 154,000 American civilians and 28,000 U.S. service members living there. If the North Korean regime used its large arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, the fatalities would be even higher. Finally, there are a number of nuclear power plants near Busan that could be damaged, spreading radioactive materials, in an attack. All told, one million people could die on the first day of a second Korean war." While the lamestream press obsesses about Harvey Weinstein, the threat of the US starting a "pre-emptive" war, or NK pre-empting the pre-empting, or the US pre-empting the pre-empting of the pre-emptive war continues to grow. Pretexts are cheap. And the oblivious Millennials continue to text each other banalities on their iphones and going into debt for that lame college degree that will give the that pathetic job at some corporation. But they will be the ones paying the costs of not marching on Washington and dismantling the Pentagon brick by brick for decades to come. But that would be counterintuitive, I suppose. They still believe the Pentagon is working to protect them and not working on war for war's sake.
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Post by jdredd on Oct 15, 2017 2:01:34 GMT -5
www.nytimes.com/2017/10/14/opinion/sunday/millennials-freedom-fear.html?mabReward=CTM1&recid=0uyKkVFRzmzDpVCTo1XWDAh6Kw7&recp=0&action=click&pgtype=Homepage®ion=CColumn&module=Recommendation&src=rechp&WT.nav=RecEngine"Young Americans seem to be losing faith in freedom. Why? According to the World Values Survey, only about 30 percent of Americans born after 1980 believe it is absolutely essential to live in a democratic country, compared with 72 percent of Americans born before World War II. In 1995, 16 percent of Americans in their late teens and early adulthood thought democracy was a bad idea; in 2011, the number increased to 24 percent." "Fear, in all its forms, is at the heart of these issues — fear of failure, ridicule, discomfort, ostracism, uncertainty. Of course, these fears haunt all of us, regardless of demographics. But that is precisely the point: Our culture isn’t preparing young people to grapple with what are ultimately unavoidable threats. Indeed, despite growing up in a physically safer and kinder society than past generations did, young Americans today report higher levels of anxiety." "What can be done? It isn’t enough to criticize young people for being overly sensitive and insufficiently independent. They didn’t engineer our security-focused culture. We must liberate them, let them be free to navigate the social world, make mistakes, fail, experience emotional pain and learn to self-regulate fear and distress. If we want future generations to have faith in freedom, we need to restore our faith in them." I guess this is one way of looking at "freedom", that's it's something we should have "faith" in despite what Millennials see around them. Another way of looking at it might be that the Millennials are seeing the rot behind the smiling face of "freedom" that is hiding the dark side of a society where the ruling ethic is dog-eat-dog and "look out for numero uno", an alleged "meritocracy" that mostly benefits the already wealthy and the sly. Cheer up, you are "free" to fail and be crushed by uncaring elites.
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Post by jdredd on Oct 23, 2017 1:52:03 GMT -5
So Trump's secret plan to defeat the Taliban is predictable: Kill more of them. Might work. Or short-sighted Boomers might be leaving the oblivious Millennials a legacy of blood they will have to pay for one way or another. Either way, not my problem.
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Post by jdredd on Oct 26, 2017 0:09:20 GMT -5
While I knew it was a long shot, I was hoping Mullennials might rise up and march on Washington and throw the bum in the WH out. Obviously, not going to happen. I should have realized the M's have ingested the values of our time, which is hyper-individualism. They are looking out for themselves, and Trump is barely on their radar screen. So be it. They are making their bed and will have to sleep in it.
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Post by jdredd on Nov 16, 2017 2:35:09 GMT -5
www.nytimes.com/2017/11/15/us/politics/senate-house-tax-cut.html?&target=comments&hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&modref=HPCommentsRefer&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news#commentsContainer"Another Senate panel, the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, voted on Wednesday to approve legislation that would open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil and gas drilling — an opening long sought by Republicans but ardently opposed by Democrats and environmentalists. That legislation is to be merged with the tax bill, which Republicans are planning to pass using special procedures that protect against a Democratic filibuster in the Senate. Under that strategy, the drilling measure would share the protection from a filibuster. Allowing drilling in the wildlife refuge, known as ANWR, is a cherished goal of the energy committee’s chairwoman, Ms. Murkowski. Given her vote this summer against repealing the Affordable Care Act, Ms. Murkowski is once again a closely watched figure as the Senate plunges back into a debate over health care. But this time, with the prospect of opening the wildlife refuge to drilling, Ms. Murkowski has a major reason to vote yes. “My whole focus this week, you’re going to be shocked to know, has been ANWR,” she told reporters on Wednesday, brushing aside a question about the individual mandate." Ha-ha! The Millennials go on their blind way while Boomers continue to find ways to trash the planet. Will they wake up some day to find life on the Earth not worth living?
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Post by jdredd on Dec 2, 2017 4:29:59 GMT -5
So Trump is reopening a bunch of wildlands in Utah for exploitation. Should I care? I haven't been to Utah for decades and won't go there ever again if I can help it. And the Millennials don't appear to give a sh#t for whatever reason. Nature is out of fashion, I guess.
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Post by jdredd on Dec 7, 2017 15:35:27 GMT -5
The Accountant from Hell, Paul Ryan, after his success at pushing through a big tax cut for the rich, now is making noises at going after Medicare and Social Security. Of course, what that means is going after what the Millennials can expect later, as the Boomers like me are cashing in now. What I find hilarious is that the Millennials will be blindsided. Ignorance and apathy can hurt you.
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Post by jdredd on Dec 13, 2017 12:18:51 GMT -5
www.nytimes.com/2017/12/13/opinion/alabama-republicans-trump.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region®ion=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region&_r=0"Unfortunately for Republicans, the young people more comfortable with those changes — with new industries, new lifestyles and a more diverse America — and who might have played a role in shepherding the party along to apply principles of limited government and personal responsibility in this new context are walking away. T he young people who remain are largely those who share the anxieties of their parents and grandparents and push back against the tides that most millennials have embraced.For Republicans who are dismayed at the direction of the party, counting on a new generation to ride to the rescue may be overly optimistic. In a time of crisis for the party, young people have a choice to fight or to flee. Time is of the essence for today’s Republican leaders to give their more uncertain young supporters something to fight for."
Despite Wall Street having a Trumpgasm, looks like at least some partially enlightened Millennial Republicans are being turned off by the tweeter-in-chief. Not that they are embracing the Dumbocrat gerontocracy.
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Post by jdredd on Jan 5, 2018 0:10:32 GMT -5
www.nytimes.com/2018/01/04/climate/trump-offshore-drilling.html?&hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0"WASHINGTON — The Trump administration said Thursday it would allow new offshore oil and gas drilling in nearly all United States coastal waters, giving energy companies access to leases off California for the first time in decades and opening more than a billion acres in the Arctic and along the Eastern Seaboard. The proposal lifts a ban on such drilling imposed by President Barack Obama near the end of his term and would deal a serious blow to his environmental legacy. It would also signal that the Trump administration is not done unraveling environmental restrictions in an effort to promote energy pro duction."
Ha-ha! I'll be long gone before Trump and his energy company accomplices trash the California Coast. You lazy oblivious Millennials will have to live with it.
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Post by jdredd on Mar 17, 2018 15:51:47 GMT -5
As I probably said before, I was hoping the Millennials would be the generation that would break the consumerist zombie mode, but that's obviously not going to happen. And I bet the next generation, which I call the post-9/11 generation, will be no different either. They all expect a never-ending supply of cheap consumer items, including houses and cars. I guess it's just human nature. So the paradigm of vast quantities of natural resources going into the Middle Class and vast quantities of waste coming out will continue for as long as I am alive which is all I care about anyway.
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Post by jdredd on Mar 26, 2018 1:06:27 GMT -5
It's sure warming my heart to see the Millennials marching again after the collapse of the Occupy movement. Maybe they have been to too many of their fellow Millennial's funerals lately. Maybe you guys on the other side of the cultural divide can convince them that more guns means less gun violence. Good luck with that.
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Post by jdredd on Mar 29, 2018 0:27:01 GMT -5
I started this thread with the idea that bad things are going to happen because of Boomer degeneracy plus Millennial apathy. But the way things are going, we might have decades of business-as-usual to go. I hope you are enjoying it.
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Post by jdredd on Apr 4, 2018 15:02:15 GMT -5
So an Iranian-American Millennial loses it a couple of days ago and shoots up the Youtube office here in lovely California. Maybe she saw one cat video too many. At least she was the only one who died. More fun with guns.
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