No one is fooled but many are in denial

“Don’t confuse me with the facts.  My mind already is made up.”  Chairman George D. Aiken, of the Senate Agriculture Committee, 1954

In Federalist paper #65, Alexander Hamilton extolled the virtues of the U.S. Senate as the premier entity to address impeachment hearings over other institutions, including the Supreme Court.

“Where else, than in the Senate … would [that body] be likely to feel confidence enough in its own situation, to preserve unawed and uninfluenced the necessary impartiality between an individual accused, and the representatives of the people, his accusers?”, Hamilton asserted back in 1788.

That appreciable estimation of the U.S. Senate by Hamilton has pretty much stood the test of time over most of the last two centuries.  But over the last two decades Republicans, more so than their Democratic counterparts, have allowed the so-called greatest deliberative body in the world to devolve into a chamber of ideologues bent solely on retaining political power. 

“The Republican Party laid the groundwork for dysfunction long before Donald Trump was elected president”, noted political historians E. J. Dionne, Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann in their September, 2017 Atlantic Magazine article: How the GOP Prompted the Decay of Political Norms.  

“We don’t fully appreciate the power of norms until they are violated on a regular
 basis. And the breaching of norms often produces a cascading effect: As one person breaks with tradition and expectation, behavior previously considered inappropriate is normalized and taken up by others. Donald Trump is the Normless President, and his ascendancy threatens to inspire a new wave of norm-breaking.”  according to Dionne, Ornstein and Mann

The evidence of this dysfunction is on display in the Senate trial of Donald John Trump.  The compelling fact-based evidence that the Democratic managers have laid out for the world to see compels honest and objective brokers to seriously consider removing a president who repeatedly displays childish rants at anyone who exposes his incompetence to be the leader of the free world.

Because they have been unable to argue the case laid out by the Democrats, Trump’s White House lawyers have engaged in Trump’s traditional style of attacking your accusers to distract those who would judge the president’s abuse of power.  And though  these Senators are no fools, will they act as if they are when they deny the obvious motives of a President who waged a months long campaign to pressure the Ukrainians to investigate a bogus conspiracy about the Bidens and the Ukrainian efforts, not Russian, to influence our 2016 elections?

“The principal restraint on the Congress is not personal corruption or vulnerability to executive intimidation but political timidity.” - Richard N. Goodwin

Will they ignore the fact that any effort to investigate real corruption by any American citizens in foreign affairs should have gone through our Justice Department using the state of the art tools and highly skilled professionals of the FBI, not some shady back channel source headed by Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani?

Will they ignore the fact that Trump, after whining about the lack of due process during the House impeachment hearings, refuses now to provide his own witnesses and documents in the Senate trial that he claims would exonerate him of any wrong doing?

Will they ignore the very high probability that the military & security funds being withheld to get Ukrainian President Zelensky to announce (not actually initiate) and investigation into the Bidens and Crowdstrike were only released after the White House became aware of a whistle blower’s complaint that the Trump administration had violated the Impoundment Control Act as stated in a recent GAO report? 

If these Republican Senators, including Texas’ own Cruz and Cornyn, deny the compelling evidence of Trump’s wrong doing in Ukraine, history will mark them as being complicit in this action that will seriously damage our fragile democracy.  Furthermore, it may well validate Trump's infamous 2016 campaign boast that he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and wouldn't lose any voters.

Standing on the brink

“We have met the enemy and he is us” - Walt Kelly’s Pogo

A recent article found on the MIT Technology Review Web page informs us that the catastrophic Australian fires have pumped out more emissions than 100 nations combined, estimated to be around 400 million metric tons of carbon dioxide

These massive fires are the result of extreme drought conditions that have been attributed to man-made climate change.  Climate change is driving climate change.  It’s a condition known as climate forcing.

“A climate forcing is any influence on climate that originates from outside the climate system itself. One example of external forcings is any human induced changes in greenhouse gases.”   Not only has the loss of trees and other plant life created greater CO2 emissions outside the natural climate cycle but it has removed their use as carbon sinks to absorb CO2 and convert it into oxygen.

Climate change deniers will be quick to point out the benefits of CO2 in the life process.  But this is a 3rd grade understanding that intentionally omits that excesses of CO2 are detrimental to ecosystems as they increase the amount of green house gases in the atmosphere, beyond what nature allows to sustain life on earth as we’ve known it for several millennia.

The Australian fires are just one of multiple examples of increasing extreme weather conditions that can no longer be attributed to a natural course of climate events.  Though droughts, floods, hurricanes and other climate conditions have been with us since our earliest human forms, science has sufficiently demonstrated they have not occurred with the intensity and frequency that we are now experiencing them.

As one astute observer notes, “The models and the observations match.
There is simply no other mechanism that can explain the significantly altered climate path and the changes in the radiative forcing [like the Australian fires] other than human causes.”

We have been recent witnesses here in Denton to such extreme and rapid changes.  On Friday, January 10th we experienced an abnormal high temperature of 71 degrees.  By the next morning, temperatures dropped to 30 degrees with wind chills at 19 degrees and a 2-3 hour snow storm that left at least two and half inches of snow.  The snow had significantly vanished by the end of that day and and by this Tuesday, temperatures are expected to rise once again to the low 70’s.

I’ve lived in North Texas all of my life and climate changes of this nature were rare at best.  Winters have become warmer and shorter while warming seasons are seeing record high temperatures that are lasting longer. 

The existential threat that man-made global warming poses mainly for those under fifty years of age and live at or below the poverty line supersedes all other socio-economic factors that touch our lives.  Without a sustainable ecosystem to raise our families and create jobs in, we are at risk of enduring health and safety risks that will over shadow the plagues and diseases in past eras that wiped out millions around the globe.

“a decade of GOP climate denial, fossil fuel industry obstruction, mounting climate disasters, and the cataclysmic election of Donald Trump pushed the climate fight into a much more radical and confrontational mode”   -SOURCE

We currently have elected officials in the Republican party that refuse to acknowledge the science and physical evidence we are all experiencing. If we are to have a chance for future generations to safely survive we need to put people in positions of leadership who will bi-pass partisan politics and corporate special interests to work towards those efforts that will reduce our carbon foot print.

Time is of the essence.  We have already exceeded thresholds that will effects us for decades.  Unless we make drastic changes with cleaner energy sources and away from human activities that destroy vital plant life, life as we’ve known it will be unrecognizable before the end of this century.