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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 6 months

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by David Hume Kennerly

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PLEASE DON’T THANK ME FOR MY SERVICE THIS VETERAN’S DAY

NOV 11, 2023

Please don't thank me for my "service." I was in the military, not the "Service." Service is doing something good. Service is what the person does who fixes your car. When the word "service" is applied to the military, it helps to justify violence as a method for conflict resolution. Like "defending our freedom," or "bringing democracy," the word "service" is used to lower the barriers of aggression. The military solution to conflict is death and destruction. That's not "service." Call it what it is - the military. If you have to hurt someone to solve a problem, you are the Problem. -- Arnold Stieber, US Army Veteran, 1970

I have absolutely no problem understanding exactly what Mr. Stieber wrote above, “back in the day,” with the white-hot heat of youth and the thorough pissed-offness of someone who had seen the side of life nobody ever wants to see. It’s the attitude I came home with from that same war, five years before he did.

I’ve never really gotten used to the new tradition of the past 30 years, for civilians - on discovering they are in the presence of someone who served in the military, - to say “Thank you for your service.” I have very mixed emotions about that. On the one hand, it’s nice that maybe a fourth of them have a clue why they’re saying what they are, that it isn’t merely the mouthing of polite words. On the other hand, I’m not sure why anyone would want to thank someone who served in the war I served in, or the ones that followed.

The war in Vietnam made everything in America worse. For just one thing, it harmed the economy when the government adopted a policy of both “guns” and “butter,” which led to the severe inflation of the 1970s, which gave companies looking for any way to reduce costs to start taking a hard line on employee compensation, which leaves us in the condition where the average American working stiff now makes less in terms of buying power than they did 50 years ago, I don’t know about you, but I’m not up to thanking anyone for that.

Of course, thinking further on this leads one to the obvious conclusion that it wasn’t the kids who got drafted who did any of that. They weren’t sitting in the halls of government thinking about how to distract the citizenry from the fact that this particular imperial war was going bad in all ways, and coming up with the idea of keeping taxes down in a period of increased government spending for things that go “BOOM!” while making sure they could get that new car every three years like they always did. Those decisions are the ones that led to the situation I mentioned above. Made by guys who mostly never got shot at, even in the war they did serve in.

In my experience during my time in the Navy and the years after knowing other vets and working with them, there were very few of us who “wanted” to go to war. Most of my fellow sailors were in the Navy because they figured joining the Navy and getting trained for a good job and “seeing the world” beat the daylights out of being in the Army, so much so it was worth a couple extra years over the two years a draftee served. Ditto the Air Force. Even the Marines were forced to start taking draftees after 1966, when they ran low on guys who believed what John Wayne told them in “Sands of Iwo Jima.”

As close as anyone got to “wanting” to go was when those of us who had joined before the war received the first orders sending us to the war. As my friend Phil Caputo wrote in “A Rumor of War” (a “Vietnam book” you should read), when he learned he and his fellow Marines were headed to DaNang in South Vietnam in 1965, “I thought to myself that when it was over and I went home, I’d be able to look my Tarawa-veteran father in the eye.” I know many others - including me, son of the guy who survived the Kamikazes - the sons of the “greatest generation” who had grown up with all the stories about our father’s “good war,” who “played war” with the cast-off gear from that war, who had similar thoughts.

Vietnam was the last war fought with draftees, and you can bet your bottom dollar today’s leaders will never go back to that system. The draft made everyone think about the war, whether they had to worry about getting drafted out of whatever working class job they had (or didn’t have); even the kids with student deferments had to think about the war when they didn’t work hard enough to keep their grades up and maintain their 2-S status. Mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles and brothers and sisters and friends all had to worry about someone they knew and loved going off to that war. Whether they “supported the president” or came to understand that the war wasn’t worth the loss of that life they knew and loved, they came in the middle of the night to hate the war. And eventually that made itself known in politics. The makers of war became constrained in the war they could make by the lack of support from those who gave them their jobs with their votes.

I’ll tell you something. After I came back, I did all I could to end that draft. But I would be very happy to see it brought back today.

No deferments. The sons and daughters of the rich serve right alongside the sons and daughters of the poor - like they did in World War II. It’ll make the entitled little shits into something better. And it really does unify - it’s hard to hate people you know by name.

But mostly I’m in favor of that because it makes it almost impossible for “They” to decide to fight a 20 year war in Afghanistan, or Iraq. They can’t do it because too many people will be paying attention. And getting pissed off at them. And voting.

But no, for exactly the reasons I am for the draft, the “all-volunteer” army is here to stay. You can’t fight 20-year wars in hellholes nobody knows without it. That way, only about 1-2 percent of the population ever has to think about the war - the kids who join up because they don’t have a future that looks better than what the military offers, their families, their friends - not a big enough group that if they got upset they could muster any political changes, unlike all those folks 50 years ago.

Most of all, if you’re going to thank me or any of us for our service, don’t try to honor us as “heroes.” For one thing, most of us aren’t, and for another, if you haven’t been in the military you really have no idea what being a hero in that context actually is.

It’s not what you think it is.

An old Navy Chief once explained “being a hero” to me: “When you’re so terrified that your brain is so frozen you can’t think, and you’ve pissed your pants and shit your drawers, and you just know you’re going to die, and you still do your job - THAT is being a hero.”

Not the definition too many in our society nowadays want to hear.

“But, Tom,” you say, “don’t you write all these best-selling books about wars and heroes? You must really love war to think about it so much.”

If you have gotten anything even remotely like that from reading any of my books, you really need to reconsider that decision not to take that remedial course in reading comprehension.

Yes, I do honor those out there in the mud and the blood and the ooze. And I appreciate knowing the ones who were out there in the mud and the blood and the ooze and survived to come back to the world of the living. That’s because their willingness to do that has a lot to do with why there is that world of the living to come back to.

Or at least that’s true in the World War II books. That’s the last war that could be divided into the Good Guys and the Bad Guys.

Except it kind of can’t. I’ve known too many guys who served on “the other side” who are just as nice - if not nicer - than anyone I have met from “the good side.”

In fact some of them must be better than anyone who served on this side. That’s a small list. But every guy who served in Vietnam and then had the opportunity to later meet the people they were trying to kill at the time, has met people who have been willing to forgive them for My Lai and Agent Orange and Rolling Thunder and all the rest of it, and offer friendship. And the ones on that side who I have been privileged to meet are definitely honorable men.

A late friend of mine who was a leading ace in “the good war” once told me when we were at a convention of those guys and the honored guests at the event were the guys who they’d been out to kill: “The secret nobody knows is, we always thought the guys we were fighting were the only ones who knew what we were going through. We actually thought we were closer to them than to the other people who were on our side.” I’ve heard similar sentiments from former infantrymen as well as former fliers, so it’s not some “guild of the elite” or “honorable brotherhood.”

Although it probably is an “honorable brotherhood.” The brotherhood of people who were willing to do what it took to defend what they loved - and believe it or not that even applies to the Germans; most of them knew as much about the “larger issues” going on, the terrible things, as any young guy in the US military did in the war I fought. And when they did find out, they were shocked too. The people who did the terrible things tried to keep them secret from everyone else, because they knew they were doing terrible things.

My friend Jim Wright, who’s become well-known in social media in recent years for some straight-shooting talk from a retired Chief Warrant Officer, wrote:

“Mostly we veterans are just people who came when called and did our best under terrible circumstances.”

I’ll end with a quote from a guy who did know what it took to do all that stuff:

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.”

― Dwight D. Eisenhower, Soldier, General, President

[TCinLa :: Thats Another Fine Mess]

#war #the draft #history #Vietnam #soldiers #veterans #thank you for your service #the military #the military industrial complex #Dwight D. Eisenhower #TCinLA #Thats Another Fine Mess

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 10 months

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Republicans clueless as to why they don't have the youth vote . . .

climate protection reproductive health student debt gun safety affordable healthcare LGBTQ+ rights interracial marriage contraception voting rights marijuana money in politics police standards workers’ rights teaching accurate history, science and biology strong public schools support of teachers immigration issues

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The Summer of Climate Collapse

[That's Another Fine Mess :: TCinLA]

Fifty years ago, I decided that a Master of Public Administration degree would be useful in my expected career in government. In 1975, I obtained on of the first MPA degrees in the field of “Environmental Management.”

One of the books we read was “The Limits to Growth,” published by the Club of Rome, which detailed current enviornmental problems and forecast where they would be in 30 years of no action was taken, some action was taken, or effective action was taken. I rediscovered that book in a box in my garage 25 years ago and re-read it with the benefit of hindsight, since their 30 year period had just ended. In every case, no action had been taken, and in every case the current situation had been accurately forecast by the contributors to the book.

In 1967, historian Lynn White Jr.'s prescient "The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis" was published in "Science" magazine. His thesis was:

"In Antiquity every tree, every spring, every stream, every hill had its own genius loci, its guardian spirit. These spirits were accessible to men, but were very unlike men; centaurs, fauns, and mermaids show their ambivalence. Before one cut a tree, mined a mountain, or dammed a brook, it was important to placate the spirit in charge of that particular situation, and to keep it placated. By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects."

Perhaps it’s fitting that during this summer of climate collapse - and if you think it’s something other than that, consider that June was Earth’s hottest month on record since the Permian Collapse - the event that brought on the Age of Dinosaurs after killing off 70% ofr species in the ocean and 80% of those on land - until the end of this month when the record will be broken by July, a record that will likely last another 31 days to the end of August. The atmosphere is warmer now than it’s been in 125,000 years, when our species was a few thousand individuals living a precarious existence on the edge of extinction in what is now South Africa .

That we are all transfixed not by this news but rather by the prospect of the United States falling to the machinations of a tenth-rate failed circus clown demonstrates the problem.

The initial success of Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” suggests Hollywood is finally ready to portray the American development and use of atomic weapons during World War II as something other than an absolute necessity. Unlike past movies, Nolan’s film points out that J. Robert Oppenheimer and many of his contemporaries knew they were ushering in an era where eradicating civilization had never been so easy

The parallels to climate change may not be obvious to people who don’t sit around pondering the end of the world, but I see them. Both climate change and ever-looming nuclear catastrophe are willful human creations driven by “progress” - one by scientific theory and research turbocharged by limitless wartime government resources, the other by oil-fueled industrialization. Both rationalized as necessary evils; climate change as a consequence of endless convenience for the human species, and nukes as guarantor of fragile world peace via “mutual assured destruction.”

It only took nearly 80 years to get to the point that National Mythology can be questioned in a commercially-successful film In all the time scientists have tried to focus our attention on climate change, they’ve had nothing as visually arresting as a single bomb instantly wiping out a city.

That has changed this summer.

We now have a global heat wave few could have envisioned even ten years ago, while the fossil fuel companies driving this destruction are coming off a year of record profits.

I wonder how this will be portrayed on screen 80 years from now.

The World Meteorological Organization expects temperatures in North America, Asia, North Africa and the Mediterranean to be above 40 Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) "for a prolonged number of days this summer." It also expects more frequent heatwaves, spread across the seasons.

The ocean around Florida hit a record temperature of 101 degrees this week. Warm water like that will produce a hurricane that could wipe Miami off the map, the equivalent of a nuclear bomb.

While the Southwest swelters under a heat dome, Vermont saw its second 100-year rainstorm in roughly a decade. Early July brought the hottest day globally since records began, a milestone surpassed the following day. Yesterday there was flooding across the northeast from Wisconsin to Maine.

As these temperature and weather records fall, Earth may be nearing so-called tipping points. A “tipping point” is where incremental steps along the same trajectory could push Earth’s systems into abrupt or irreversible change, leading to transformations that cannot be stopped even if emissions were suddenly halted.

If these tipping points are passed, some effects such as permafrost thawing or the world’s coral reefs dying - both are already happening in Siberia and the Central Pacific - will happen more quickly than expected. We don’t really know when or how fast things will fall apart.

Some natural systems, if upended, could herald a restructuring of the world. Take the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica: It’s about the size of Florida, with a protruding ice shelf impeding the glacier’s flow into the ocean. Although the overall melt is slower than originally predicted, warm water is eating away at it from below, causing deep cracks. At a certain point, that melt may progress to become self-sustaining, which would guarantee the glacier’s eventual collapse. That will affect how much sea levels will rise; 80% of humans live near the ocean.

When melt from Greenland’s glaciers enters the ocean, it alters an important system of currents called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. The AMOC is a conveyor belt, drawing warm water from the tropics north. The water’s salinity increases as it evaporates, which, among other factors, makes it sink and return south along the ocean floor. As more glacial fresh water enters the system, that conveyor belt will weaken. Right now it’s the weakest it’s been in more than 1,000 years.

The Atlantic Ocean’s sensitive circulation system has become slower and less resilient, according to a new analysis of 150 years of temperature data — raising the possibility that this crucial element of the climate system could collapse within the next few decades.

Consider that: Paris and London are at the same latitude as Hudson’s Bay, yet Europe has the climate it does because of the AMOC - we commonly call it the Gulf Stream - which brings warm water in contact with cold air, resulting in the clouds and rain that provide for all living things there. If that collapses, life in Europe could soon resemble that of northern Canada. Right now, Europe can grow enough food to feed its 740+ million people; if the AMOC was to die, the continent could be plunged into famine in a matter of years.

The study published this last Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications suggests that continued warming will push the AMOC over its “tipping point” around 2050-2080. The shift would be as abrupt and irreversible as turning off a light switch, and it could lead to dramatic changes in weather on both sides of the Atlantic, leading to a drop in temperatures in northern Europe and elevated warming in the tropics, as well as stronger storms on the east coast of North America.

If the temperature of the sea surface changes, precipitation over the Amazon might too, contributing to deforestation, which in turn is linked to snowfall on the Tibetan plateau.

A new study published in Nature Communications last week titled “Warning of a Forthcoming Collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation” reports global warming forced by all the CO2 and methane in our atmosphere - if we action is not taken immediately - could shut down the AMOC as early as 2025 and almost certainly before 2095.

We may not even realize when we start passing points of no return—or if we already have.

James Hansen, one of the early voices on climate and the founder of 350.org, says measures to mitigate the crisis may ironically now contribute to it. A working paper he published this spring suggests that reduction in sulfate aerosol particles—the air pollution associated with burning coal and the global shipping industry—has contributed to warmer temperatures because these particles cause water droplets to multiply, brightening clouds and reflecting solar heat away from the planet’s surface. Hansen predicts that environmentally minded policies to reduce these pollutants will likely cause temperatures to rise 2 degrees Celsius by 2050.

This adds to a growing body of alarming climate science, like the one published last year in the Journal of Climate titled “Sixfold Increase in Historical Northern Hemisphere Concurrent Large Heatwaves Driven by Warming and Changing Atmospheric Circulations,” which indicates we’re much farther down the path of dangerous climate change than even most scientists realized.

That study essentially predicted this year’s shocking Northern Hemisphere heat waves. The lead researcher’s first name is Cassandra.

Perhaps most alarming was a paper published eleven months ago in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) titled “Evidence for Massive Methane Hydrate Destabilization During the Penultimate Interglacial Warming.”

It brings up the topic of the “Clathrate Gun Hypothesis,”which is the absolute worst case scenario for humanity’s future.

Across the planet there are an estimated 1.4 trillion tons of methane gas frozen into a snowcone-like slurry called clathrates or methane hydrates laying on the sea floor off the various continents. When they suddenly melt, that’s the “firing of the gun.” An explosion - in the context of geologic time - of atmospheric gas that’s over 70 times as potent a greenhouse gas as CO2. The Clathrate Gun.

The PNAS paper mentioned above concludes that 126,000 years ago there was an event that caused a small amount of these clathrates to warm enough to turn to gas and bubble up out of the seas. The resulting spike in methane gas led to a major warming event worldwide:

“Our results identify an exceptionally large warming of the equatorial Atlantic intermediate waters and strong evidence of methane release and oxidation almost certainly due to massive methane hydrate destabilization during the early part of the penultimate warm episode (126,000 to 125,000 y ago). This major warming was caused by … a brief episode of meltwater-induced weakening of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) and amplified by a warm mean climate.”

The researchers warn we may be looking at a similar event in our time:

“This week, sea surface temperatures along the coasts of Southern Spain and North Africa were 2-4C (3.6-7.2F) higher than they would normally be at this time of year, with some spots 5C (9F) above the long-term average.”

This has never happened before while humans have existed.

The least likely but most dangerous outcome scenario is that the warming ocean might begin a massive melting of those methane hydrate slurries into gas, producing a “burp” of that greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, further adding to global warming, which would then melt even more of the clathrates.

At the end of the Permian, 250 million years ago, this runaway process led to such a violent warming of the planet that it killed over 90 percent of all life in the oceans and 70 percent of all life on land, paving the way for the rise of the dinosaurs, as cold-blooded lizards were among the few survivors. That period is referred to as the Permian Mass Extinction, or, simply, “The Great Dying.” It was the most destructive mass extinction event in Earth’s history.

As the scientists writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences noted:

“The key findings of our study add to a growing body of observational findings strongly supporting the ‘clathrate gun hypothesis.’ … Importantly, the interval we have studied is marked by a mean climate state comparable to future projections of transient global climate warming of 1.3 °C to 3.0 °C.”

We just this year passed 1.3 degrees Celsius of planetary warming: we are now in the territory of the Clathrate Gun Hypothesis if these researchers are right

The last time our planet saw CO2 levels at their current 422 parts-per-million, sea levels were 60 feet higher and forests grew in Antarctica.

Meanwhile, we’re pouring more CO2 into the atmosphere right now than at any time in human history.

#climate #climate emergency #climate collapse #CO2 levels #TCinLA #Thats Another Fine Mess

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