Franklin-Folger map of the Gulf Stream by Benjamin Franklin in 1779. The founding fathers and mothers were not science illiterate superstitious sales sluts like the suicidally ignorant trash in the US government today
The Gulf Stream has been known and charted for centuries, beginning with the Spanish expeditions in the sixteenth century (e.g., Peterson, Stramma, & Kortum 1996). It was first mapped accurately in 1769 by Benjamin Franklin working together with whaling captain Timothy Folger. The narrow current along the coast of the United States is remarkably accurate. The widening envelope of the Franklin/Folger current after separation from Cape Hatteras is an accurate depiction of the envelope of meandering apparent in the satellite image we use today.
Franklin noted on his frequent trips between the United States and Europe that some trips were considerably quicker than others. He decided that this was due to a strong ocean current flowing from the west to the east. He observed marked
changes in surface conditions and reasoned that this ocean current might be marked by a change in sea surface temperature. Franklin began making measurements of the ocean surface temperature during his travels. Using a simple mercury-in-glass thermometer, he was able to determine the position of the current.
The Pentagon Budget is a Total rip off of the American people ending up in the hands of grifter contractors: no protection, just American's impoverishment
The Pentagon has terrible IT systems. Leaving a "quantity" field blank in a purchase order form caused the computer to place an order for 990,000 units, for a total of $3.5 trillion. The order never went' through, but the system also had no way to unwind the transaction, so it was just left on the books, and mysteriously deducted later, creating an accounting overhang a third the size of the US GDP.
When the military manages to actually order things, it doesn't keep track of things. Key military materiel like nuclear weapons has historically not even been assigned serial numbers or tracking tags (the Air Force once accidentally shipped nuclear nose-cones to Taiwan, where they were expecting a shipment of helicopter batteries) (oops).
To make things worse, the system is genuinely full of waste and pork, which any kind of real audit would uncover. The military contractors who benefit from these scams have gotten so rich from them that they can afford to buy key Congressmen on the relevant committees, and so every legislative attempt to force the military to genuinely account for itself has died.
TAKE ACTION
Stop Bayer’s Sneak Attack!
Eleven corrupt State Attorneys General from Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Louisian
Eleven corrupt State Attorneys General from Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Carolina, and South Dakota, have petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency on behalf of Bayer (Monsanto), Syngenta (ChemChina), and Corteva (Dow-DuPont-Pioneer) to take away your right to know about pesticide toxicity—and your right to sue these companies for failure to warn.
Juries awarded billions in compensation to Roundup-exposed cancer victims, because Monsanto knew its herbicide caused non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma but failed to warn its customers.
Bayer should change their product formulations, but they want to change the law instead. They’re pressuring state legislators, telling them they’d sooner take Roundup herbicide off the market than make weed-killers that won’t give farmers cancer.
Georgia’s legislature is the first to cave. A law that would deprive Georgia’s pesticide victims of their right to sue awaits Governor Brian Kemp’s signature.
The federal Environmental Protection Agency, long controlled by Monsanto, won’t admit that Roundup causes cancer, so they don’t require the weed killer to be labeled as a carcinogen. Bayer’s theory, submitted by the eleven State Attorneys General, is that if the EPA ignores the cancer risks so should the states and the courts.
In 2019, Trump’s EPA told California that it couldn’t require cancer warnings on glyphosate-based herbicides like Roundup. Then, in 2022, Biden’s EPA said it could, as long as it included a disclaimer that the EPA doesn’t think glyphosate causes cancer.
The eleven State Attorneys General want the EPA to go further and prohibit “any state labeling requirements inconsistent with EPA findings and conclusions from its human health risk assessment on human health effects, such as a pesticide’s likelihood to cause cancer, birth defects, or reproductive harm.” Bayer’s hoping this will relieve them of their duty to warn under state tort laws that give injured people the right to sue.
TAKE ACTION BY MARCH 24: Tell the EPA to Stop Bayer’s Sneak Attack on Pesticide Warnings!
GEORGIA: Tell Governor Brian Kemp to Veto Bayer’s Get Out of Jail Free Card! Call Governor Kemp at (404) 656-1776, message him up on Facebook, X or Instagram, or email him through this contact form.
NATIONWIDE: Tell Your State Legislators, Ban Roundup, Don’t Bail Out Bayer!
LEARN MORE ABOUT ROUNDUP & CANCER: ‘Watch the documentary ‘Into the Weeds’
It's not about supporting killing, it's about demanding an end to killing
“I’m not gonna lie, this is how you can tell the news is owned by billionaires because the news was like, uh, ‘this devastating, terrifying, harrowing attack in New York’, and I’m not saying… look a murder did took place… I’m not saying it couldn’t have been listed as those things, I’m just saying ‘you’re the news!’ You play horrific stuff all the time. You’re the same news that when those pagers were going off in the Middle East, exploding, you were like ‘check this out!’”
Josh Johnson nailed the media double standards here. When it’s one of their own, violence is the most despicable, unacceptable thing ever, yet journalists ignore, and often cheer on, violence every day. When Israel launched its pager terror attack in Lebanon that left doctors without genitalia and nurses without eyes and children without limbs, the media couldn’t hide its glee. It was the most despicable reporting I’ve ever seen so I’m certainly not taking lectures on morality from these people.
We’ve heard talk from politicians about how supporters of Mangione must be evil incarnate, and how it is, of course, a huge concern that the working class use the internet. We must find a way to do more internet censorship. Perhaps internet service providers can price gouge internet users like health insurance companies price gouge their customers. $500 a month for broadband access? Now there’s an idea…
In all seriousness, there is always an agenda with the ruling class, and their decisions always benefit themselves to the detriment of you. Whatever actions they take in response to the murder of Brian Thompson will be no different. They see us as the enemy and wonder why so many of us see them the same way. Josh Johnson does his best to explain to them here:
“I don’t want anybody to die, I don’t celebrate death in any way, but I will say if you feel in the wake of this thing happening, that you [CEOs] have to scrub all mention of you, all knowledge of your existence off the internet, then maybe, just maybe, take a look at how you do business…”
Johnson was referring to how CEOs are frantically deleting their LinkedIn profiles and all other social media so they don’t become targets. It doesn’t occur that they could simply stop being bastards. If a CEO acknowledged the flaws in the system and suggested no one should be left without healthcare, that person would not be a target. The ones who use algorithms to kill are the targets.
Now before we go any further, I must clarify where I stand on Brian Thompson: I don’t think it was right for Luigi Mangione to kill him, the same way it would not be right to stab a serial killer walking down the street. That serial killer should be behind bars, but Brian Thompson wasn’t behind bars. That’s the problem.
Law enforcement wasn’t protecting the public from people like Brian Thompson, it was protecting people like Brian Thompson from the public. Ironically, by failing the public, the law ultimately failed Brian Thompson too. As Josh Johnson points out:
“Brian was part of a system, a system that didn’t care about Brian either. That man was heading to a meeting when he was murdered and investors still had the meeting.”
The minutes from the meeeting show that it went ahead on time, even though the attendees had apparently been notified.
People like Brian Thompson created a system where you don’t get to survive unless you give insurers money, and even if you give them money, they will often reject your claim anyway. It’s the ultimate form of extortion and it’s only legal because the criminals make the law.
If your business model revolves around denying people medical care so you get a higher bonus, your business model is monstrous. If you intentionally employ an algorithm because it will coldly increase the number of rejections, thus making you even richer, you deserve to be hated.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think people should execute CEOs in the street, I think police should drag Brian Thompsons into court. Unfortunately, the US doesn’t have a real democracy so this is never going to happen. Even though a majority of Americans want universal healthcare, they’re not allowed to have it. The system is one of abject cruelty, and the biggest surprise is that it’s taken so long for a killing like this to happen. Johnson again captures it perfectly:
“A murder did happen, someone did kill someone in cold blood, they just didn’t kill an innocent man. That’s also what feels so conflicting about it, a killer killed a killer. This dude was the CEO, a lot of people died under his watch, through his policies, through what United Health does.”
I do feel a degree of sympathy for Luigi Mangione. I certainly feel the pain and anguish that drove him to act, but I also think what he did was stupid, if for no other reason than he has probably ruined his life. I know this take will get me cancelled by some, but I think a person should go to jail for killing someone. However, I also think that in the circumstances, Mangione’s sentence should be significantly reduced.
From where I’m sitting, the crime is not murder so much as taking the law into his own hands. The last thing we should want is for vigilantes to go around killing people, even if those people are fucking awful.
If I was on that jury, there is no way I’d be convicting Mangione of terrorism-related charges, but if there was a lesser charge for reckless behaviour or something, I would find him guilty and let the judge decide the sentence.
While I don’t consider myself a supporter of Mangione, I must say supporting Mangione does not make you a terrible person, same way it wouldn’t make you a terrible person if you supported someone who killed Dr Harold Shipman. Sympathy in this case is perfectly normal.
Many of Mangione’s supporters are working class Americans who’ve seen loved ones have health insurance claims denied, or couldn’t afford health insurance in the first place. These are people who’ve lost loved ones due to a brutal healthcare system. If they are diagnosed with cancer tomorrow, not only will they not be covered, they will be expected to work while they’re dying. Given the monstrousness of what working class Americans must endure, of course, many will feel sympathy for Mangione, and not an ounce of sympathy for Thompson.
It’s sad when any human life ends, but I’m not going to shed tears for a mass killer like Brian Thompson. Enraged conservatives are telling us two kids are now without a father, but how many other kids are in that position because Thompson’s algorithm killed their parents? As Johnson points out:
“I know he was a person, so was my cousin, so was my brother, so was my sister, so was my friend. ‘This man had children, he leaves children behind, this is a senseless death, it did not have to happen’ … Yeah, I know about avoidable deaths, I’m a customer.”
The ruling class never sees the working class as victims, and while you could cry “but the law”, you would do well to remember the ruling class makes the law, and they’ve made it perfectly legal for people like them to kill people like you.
The correct moral position is that violence is wrong, but if you’re pushing the message that violence is fine when its against people you don’t care about, you can’t act surprised when we don’t care that a killer on your team is killed. You can’t even be surprised when some people cheer it on. This is the climate you created!
A cop kills an innocent black guy in the US and the media spends weeks telling you the cop is a great family man while pointing out anything the victim ever did wrong.
Guess what? The working class is just doing what the media does in reverse, but the difference is, they’re not motivated by racism or authoritarianism, they’re motivated by liberation. The people who cheer for Luigi Mangione are far better than the journalists in the mainstream media, and here’s why: their message is not “kill CEOs”, it’s “please stop CEOs killing us”.
The solution here is not to censor the internet to protect Brian Thompsons, it’s to change the law to protect the public from Brian Thompsons. If the ruling class - who love to say the first role of government is to protect the public to justify an illegal war - can’t take the most basic steps to protect the public, they’re not fit to be in their roles.
Any system that financially incentivises people to kill others is a system that is going to result in killing. The reason socialists like myself oppose the capitalist system is primarily because of its incentive structures. It’s not just about denying people healthcare, its about destroying the environment, poisoning water supplies, cutting down rainforests, exploiting workers, price gouging customers, I could go on.
We need a system where there is no financial incentive for destructive behaviours, and that only comes with ending top-down power and replacing it with bottom-up leadership. People like Brian Thompson should never have been given the power to decide who lives and dies.
I’ll end with this quote from Josh Johnson:
“When you put profit over the person, you are also lost in that thing, and I think that’s a harrowing thing. I think for CEOs that was like a terrifying moment because it was the first time they saw that we see them the way they see us. That’s gotta be scary.”
Our patchwork system of family leave is an unequal, bureaucratic nightmare. Democrats have betrayed a promise to improve it.
With last week’s elections behind us, the Democrats, who have never not let a learning opportunity go to waste, turn their eyes to the midterms, where they will pursue a familiar strategy: (1) ratfuck the left flank of their own party in the interest of getting in good with their friends across the aisle; (2) be ratfucked by said “friends” across said aisle; and, (3) on the off-chance they do win, use that mandate to do nothing their constituents actually want.
Consider what happened after the Democrats won control of the presidency, House, and Senate in 2020. For a moment, it looked like life might get more manageable for non-wealthy Americans as the Biden administration promised to pass a laundry list of supposedly radical new programs. But, as Lydia Kiesling writes, that feeling was quickly replaced by horror as the Build Back Better act was shorn of key elements like paid family leave. And Jordan G. Teicher explains how Biden’s “America the Beautiful” conservation plan leaves our environmental future in the hands of the country’s capricious billionaires.
Meanwhile, the GOP continues to take a more successful tack: undermining democracy itself in a bid to secure a permanent majority—a playbook that Dave Denison traces back to its Reagan-era origins, noting that both Trump’s allies and opponents within the party ultimately want the same thing.
Speaking of destructive garbage, in our latest issue, Allyson Paty documents her accumulated trash and considers the wrongheaded individualism of the zero waste movement. And on another note entirely, Francesca Wade dives into the correspondence of writers Diane di Prima and Audre Lorde.
Ilhan Omar, Bernie Sanders, Merkley, Markey, Barragán Introduce "Bill to End Corporate Handouts to the Fossil Fuel Industry". In 2019 alone, the oil, gas, and coal companies that receive these handouts spent $190 million lobbying Congress – for an over 11,000 percent return on investment.
“It’s past time we end the billions of taxpayer subsidies to fossil-fuel companies,” said Rep. Omar. “Our focus right now needs to be on getting the American people through this difficult, unprecedented time, not providing giveaways to polluters. Taxpayers provide $15 billion in direct federal subsidies to the fossil fuel industry every year. That ends with this bill. I’m proud to be leading the fight for a greener future with my colleagues.”
“At a time when we are dealing with the coronavirus pandemic and an economic decline, it is absurd to provide billions of taxpayer subsidies that pad fossil-fuel companies’ already-enormous profits,” said Senator Sanders. “Big Oil made more than $2 trillion in profits over the last two decades. We need more safe, healthy, good paying jobs—not more corporate polluter giveaways.”
The End Polluter Welfare Act would end these absurd corporate giveaways by abolishing dozens of tax loopholes, subsidies, and other special interest giveaways littered throughout the federal tax code, ending energy resource giveaways to polluters on lands and waters owned by the American people, and prohibiting taxpayer-funded fossil fuel research and development - saving taxpayers up to $150 billion over the next ten years. The bill would also stop the Trump administration from taking coronavirus relief funding away from struggling businesses to bail out fossil fuel corporations.
In addition to ending domestic polluter welfare, this bill would end federal support for international oil, gas, and coal projects as a step toward fulfilling our responsibility to help the international community move away from dirty fossil fuels to clean sources of power. It would also guarantee the continued solvency of the Black Lung Disability Fund to ensure continued medical care for tens of thousands of working-class Americans who worked hard for decades to provide energy for the nation. Fossil fuel drilling and transportation also disproportionately impact indigenous communities and communities of color, who have long opposed extraction on their land.
"It is ridiculous that the federal government continues to hand out massive giveaways to antiquated fossil fuel industries that are not only financially risky, but are also destroying our planet," said Senator Merkley. "And it's even worse when working families and small businesses are barely hanging on. Enough. It’s time to put the health of the American people and our economy above the wish lists of powerful special interests, close these loopholes, and put an end to taxpayer subsidies for fossil fuels.”
“We should be providing support for workers and those affected by Trump’s criminally-negligent response to the pandemic—not bailing out the fossil fuel industry and propping up its profit margins,” said Senator Markey. “Trump is only trying to add to these decades-long payouts for polluters, when we should be directing our resources to keeping people safe.”
“In the midst of a global pandemic, a climate crisis and a nationwide call for racial justice, The Trump Administration is prioritizing corporate polluters over people,” said Rep. Barragán.“Policies like the End Polluter Welfare Act, and the ReWIND Act within it, are important steps to refocus the work of our government back to the people in their time of need.”
Original cosponsors in the House include Reps. Ayanna Pressley, Mark Takano, Jesús “Chuy” Garcia, Grace Napolitano, Joseph Kennedy, Early Blumenauer, Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Jimmy Gomez.
The End Polluter Welfare Act is also endorsed by Alaska Wilderness League Action, Alaska's Big Village Network, Build A Movement 2020, Center for Biological Diversity, Climate Hawks Vote, Data for Progress, Democratic National Committee Environment and Climate Crisis Council, Earth Action, Inc., Earthworks, ecoAmerica, Food & Water Action, Friends of the Earth, Global Witness, Greenpeace USA, International Marine Mammal Project of Earth Island Institute, National Children's Campaign, Ocean Conservation Research, Oil Change U.S., Oxfam America, Progressive Democrats of America, Sierra Club, Stand.earth, Sunrise Movement, SustainUS, Texas Campaign for the Environment, and Turtle Island Restoration Network.
“Big Oil is already looking to exploit the coronavirus for even deeper giveaways from taxpayers. Today more than ever we need to protect people and the planet, not polluters and their profits. We thank Representative Omar and Senator Sanders for leading this important effort,” said Lukas Ross, Program Manager at Friends of the Earth.
“Alaska has suffered from an economy primarily based on non-renewable mineral resource extraction, and the cancellation of contractually obligated royalties. It's a disaster,” said Nikos Pasos, Alaska's Big Village Network.
“Build A Movement 2020 is a cross-partisan alliance of Americans who call for the passage of the End Polluter Welfare Act as soon as possible. We must would abolish fossil fuel subsidies by ending tax breaks and special financing so that fossil fuel corporations pay their fair share and stop ripping off the American public,” said Dr. Paul Zeitz, Executive Director, Build A Movement 2020.
