SAR #16230

Capitalism is, by definition, not a sustainable undertaking.

Priorities: For all the time, rhetoric and money spent on national security, damned little of it goes to the real threat - global warming. It's just not as sexy as killing Arabs in out-of-the-way deserts and mountains. But our only hope to survive global warming as a social, cultural and economic entity we can recognize is to undertake a mobilization equal to the one that won WWII. Al Qaeda in Yemen is not a threat to the US, burning coal is. Whatever is going on in Syria, as distasteful as it is, is not a threat to the US. Gasoline-dependent transportation is. Instead of spending a trillion dollars a year on useless wars, we should spend at least that much on confronting and defeating the real national security threat – continued global warming.

Blackmail: Erdogan says that if the EU doesn't award Turks visa-free travel by October he will renege on Turkey's promise to stem the flow of immigrants to Europe. The EU should not pay blackmail.

Blowing In The Wind: Wyoming, on the downwind slope of the Rockies, wants to tax those who use 'their' winds to generate electricity – right up to the point that wind generation would not be profitable and thus would not be undertaken. That Wyoming is the largest coal producer in the US has nothing to do with this push for taxation.

And The Rains Came: The epic, 500-year rainstorm in Louisiana is the eighth “once every 500 years” flooding to happen in the last year in the US.

Life, Pre-packaged: Without paying much attention to what we were doing, we have turned what was once “family life” into a series of commodities to be bought and sold. Cooperation, even among close family members, has dissolved in the drive for profit – under the illusion that we can buy back what we give away and it will somehow be better. We've made self-centered self-interest the center of our family lives and wonder why we don't have family lives. Family and friends are not commodities, no matter what the adverts and apps say.

Review: So, how's that nation building working out, Mr. Bush?

He Said, It Says: Obama says that TTP and TITP will not “undermine American regulation,” and those who say otherwise are “making stuff up. No trade agreement is going to force us to change our laws. This is just not true.” But... The Statement of Administrative Action that is the guide for implementing the treaties explicitly says that the agreement “will amend existing federal statutes that would otherwise be inconsistent with the agreement and, in certain instances, by creating entirely new provisions of law.”

Capitalist Morality: Capitalism may be the best economic system ever devised, if you can enjoy bankrupting women and children for profit – or even kill them if the margin looks good.

The Stopped Clock: Trump is correct when he notes that we regularly allow private, for-profit partisan(?) companies to count our votes, to keep our electoral databases hidden in proprietary software that nobody can look at. There is no transparency whatsoever in computerized voting and vote counting. Paper ballots, hand marked, hand counted, pertinently secured – accept no substitutes.

Hot Enough For You? July was the world's hottest month ever – or at least since records began in 1880. And, according to NASA, it was the 10^th month in a row that broke previous temperature records. NOAA, using slightly different criteria, makes it 14 straight months of progressively hotter records.

Revisionist History: Rudy Giuliani, who was mayor of New York on September 11, 2001, says there were no terrorist attacks in the United States during George W. Bush's presidency.

The Parting Shot: