Casualties have been suffered on both sides of an emerging class war
Landlord kills 2 tenants
A Las Vegas homeowner[,Arnoldo Lozano-Sanchez,] accused of shooting three live-in tenants after an argument over unpaid rent told police he didn’t want to go through an eviction proceeding and wanted to handle things “his way,” a prosecutor told a judge on Wednesday.
- 3rd tenant was shot 9 times but was able to flee and has apparently survived
- Another tenant was in the house and was not injured
Tenant decapitates landlord
A Connecticut man decapitated his landlord with a sword after being told he had to move out because of overdue rent, Hartford police say.
The Hartford Police Department responded to a 911 call Saturday morning from the landlord, Victor King, who said that his roommate Jerry Thompson, 42, had been “waving a sword at him in a threatening and terrorizing manner” amid a rent dispute, according to an arrest warrant filed by Hartford detectives.
The next day, police received calls from a neighbor and then a separate friend of King’s who were concerned about his safety, the warrant said.
Police entered the residence Sunday afternoon to find a grisly crime scene and King’s body “covered by numerous articles of bedding” on the floor, according to the warrant.A medical examiner investigator’s preliminary observations suggested King’s injuries were consistent with a large edged weapon, noting “lacerations to the landlord’s right arm, upper chest and across the neck causing decapitation.”
Surveillance video also caught a male exiting a white Jeep, carrying a “long skinny white object in his right hand,” walking into the residence Saturday afternoon, and exiting about 30 minutes later with the same object, the warrant said.
The thumbnail of the article featuring the man who allegedly killed his landlord (a black man) featured his mugshot. Meanwhile, a white man obsessed with QAnon killed both of his children with a harpoon because he thought they would destroy the world — articles on that story either have no thumbnail or feature the killer smiling and surfing or jet-skiing with his children.
Fueled by winds, wildfire moves near California city
The Caldor fire in the northern Sierra Nevada has burned an estimated 50 homes in and around Grizzly Flats, a town of about 1,200 people, fire officials said at a community meeting.
Gov. Gavin Newsom proclaimed a state of emergency for El Dorado County because of the blaze, which tripled in size between Monday and Tuesday afternoon to nearly 50 square miles (129 square kilometers),
To the north, the Dixie Fire — the largest of some 100 active wildfires in more than a dozen Western states — was advancing toward Susanville, population about 18,000.
Meanwhile, Pacific Gas & Electric announced it had begun shutting off power to some 51,000 customers in small portions of 18 northern counties to prevent winds from knocking down or fouling power lines and sparking new blazes.
Siberian Wildfires are now larger than all other wildfires combined
ABC News clip
Zombie Fire Clip
I requested a translation of this video, which I assumed was in Russian, since Siberia is in Russia. However, it turns out most people in this area speak another language called Sakha, so I was only able to get a partial translation.
“We’ve come to the actual location of the fire, here’s how it looks. This is Mikhail, author of the original video. Here is the place”
The part where they’re talking to each other is all in Sakha, so we’ll just have to narrate what’s happening on-screen.
Third part of IPCC 2021 leaked
A third part of the IPCC 2021 report, not intended to be released until April of 2022, has been leaked.
Global greenhouse gas emissions must peak in the next four years, coal and gas-fired power plants must close in the next decade and lifestyle and behavioral changes will be needed to avoid climate breakdown, according to the leaked draft of a report from the world’s leading authority on climate science.
Rich people in every country are overwhelmingly more responsible for global heating than the poor, with SUVs and meat-eating singled out for blame, and the high-carbon basis for future economic growth is also questioned.
Part three is not scheduled to be released before next March, but a small group of scientists decided to leak the draft via the Spanish branch of Scientist Rebellion, an offshoot of the Extinction Rebellion movement. It was first published by the journalist Juan Bordera in the Spanish online magazine CTXT. [the article, titled The IPCC considers degrowth to be key to mitigating climate change , is worth a read if you have the time and a webpage translator.]
The top 10% of emitters globally, who are the wealthiest 10%, contribute between 36 and 45% of emissions, which is 10 times as much as the poorest 10%, who are responsible for only about three to 5%, the report finds. “The consumption patterns of higher income consumers are associated with large carbon footprints. Top emitters dominate emissions in key sectors, for example the top 1% account for 50% of emissions from aviation,” the summary says.
Providing modern energy to all those who currently lack it (800m people have no access to electricity) would have a “negligible” effect on increasing emissions, the report notes.
Cutting emissions in the next decade will be crucial to any hope of holding global heating within 1.5C of pre-industrial levels, beyond which the impacts of climate breakdown will cause widespread devastation. “Weaker near-term action would place limiting warming to these levels out of reach, as it would entail assumptions about subsequent accelerated policy development and technology development and deployment, inconsistent with evidence and projections in the assessed literature,” the report warns.
The scientists echo the recent advice from the International Energy Agency that no new fossil fuel development can take place if the world is to stay within 1.5C of heating.
CTXT, the Spanish publication that leaked the draft, said it showed that the global economy must be shifted rapidly away from a reliance on conventional GDP growth, but that the report underplays this. “The essential radical change in an economic system whose perverse operation of accumulation and reproduction of capital in perpetuity has brought us to the current critical point is not clearly mentioned,” CTXT wrote.
The IPCC said it did not comment on leaks, and the purpose of the drafting process was to give the scientists time and peace to develop their assessment without external comment. Jonathan Lynn, head of communications at the IPCC, said: “Much of the text cited here – apparently from the first version of the summary for policymakers in the Working Group III second order draft circulated to governments and expert reviewers in January – has already changed in the latest internal draft of the summary for policymakers now being reviewed by authors.”
The IPCC considers degrowth to be key to mitigating climate change (translated from Spanish using Google Translate)
On June 23, something very unusual happened. AFP (Agence France Press) leaked part of the content of the summary for politicians of Group II of the IPCC ( Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ) – the one in charge of analyzing the impacts of climate change. The news went around the world, and the most repeated headline – taken from the report itself – was: “ Life on Earth can recover from major climate change by evolving into new species and creating new ecosystems. Not humanity ” . The anomaly has recurred within two months. Another breach in the once airtight IPCC, another leak.
tidbit from the article’s recap of mitigation techniques analyzed by the IPCC
“The growth in the consumption of energy and materials is the main cause of the increase in Greenhouse Gases (GHG). The slight decoupling of growth from energy use [and largely motivated by the relocation of production] has not been able to offset the effect of economic and population growth ”. This shows that technological developments that allow efficiency improvements and the shift towards low-emission energy sources are not enough. Therefore, a very massive transition in the consumption of materials around the world, can even, temporarily, trigger emissions.
Life on Earth can recover from major climate change … Humanity does not
In reality, the climate is very sane, so much so that it seeks as always and as best it can its balance, its homeostasis. Those of us who are crazy may be the rest. At least the remaining believers in an economic system based on perpetual growth within a finite planet, which also has already exceeded the most crucial planetary boundaries by far. In the heat of the heat wave in Tacoma, Washington, air-conditioned hotel rooms have gone from $ 100 to $ 400. In capitalism money can buy everything, even a ticket to hell. But any socialist project that in the XXI century does not absolutely abjure productivism will fall into almost the same contradictions.
In the words of Antonio Turiel himself: “The atmospheric circulation of the polar latitudes and that of the mid-latitudes are separated by the Polar Jet Current, which prevents the African heat from reaching the North Pole or the cold waves often go down to the Sahara. That’s over: that current depends on the temperature difference between the Pole and the Equator, and because of climate change (and polar amplification) that difference has been reduced and with it the Jet Stream has become lazier and more unstable. Today we are horrified because a broken loop of that Current has bagged incredibly hot air over western Canada, with temperatures approaching 50 ° C and tomorrow, we will see snowing, in the middle of summer, in some parts of Europe. And in a few weeks it will be the other way around: fire in Europe and ice in America. Hence this sudden sense of urgency from someone from the IPCC. This is getting out of hand ”.
“The Holocene is over, that benevolent era that allowed agriculture to develop” – Turiel continues. “The Climate Emergency was for yesterday, but today we are still blinded in our pride of believing that we can fix everything with our technology… just when our technology is failing. Chips, plastics are lacking, copper, lithium or steel are scarce, and without all of them there will be no technology. It is not a temporary shortage, because of the covid or some other cheap excuse that is given. It is a structural problem.[ Heavy machinery and transportation run on diesel, which is in short supply because there is no oil, and it will become increasingly scarce because it is no longer invested, because there is less and less cheap and profitable oil on Earth.] Faced with the greatest challenge of our lives – the climate – we are going to lack resources. We can still respond to this reality, but we have to radically change the chip. It is a pity that these are also scarce ”.
on the issue of nobody seeming to take this seriously enough:
For the philosopher and poet Jorge Riechmann the problem has deeper and more systemic roots. This is how he synthesizes it: “In order not to touch the benefits of capital and the profitability of the investments of the rentiers, one is risking the complete destruction of the world. This does not give more of itself. In an attempt to keep growing, we destabilized the climate and destroyed the Earth’s biosphere – and the geosphere, and the hydrosphere, and the cryosphere … We tragically degraded Gaia. It is not about saving the planet . It would be about repositioning humanity molded by capitalism (from its current bad position or bad position) so that we can have a future ”.
Nabisco workers on strike since August 10
Nabisco workers in Aurora, Colorado and Richmond, Virginia are striking in solidarity with Portland. The AFL-CIO has also joined the strike.