"Pollution ravages our planet, oozing inhabitability via air, soil, water and weather," lawyer David Buckel wrote in the email sent to The New York Times just before he performed an act of self-immolation at a park in Brooklyn recently. "Most humans on the planet now breathe air made unhealthy by fossil fuels, and many die early deaths as a result -- my early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves."

Nationally known for his brilliant work championing gay rights, Buckel had been distressed by what was happening to the planet for years and was also heavily involved in environmental causes. In his suicide note to the Times, Buckel discussed how challenging it was to change things for the better in the world, even with so many people working so strenuously to do so and mentioned how donating to organizations was not enough.

Deciding to bring his life to an end by using fossil fuels for self-immolation to make his point, Buckel's last note read, "Honorable purpose in life invites honorable purpose in death."

To the average person who understands anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD), Buckel's act might seem extreme. It is extreme ... but within the context of how truly far along the planet already is (for example, for years now Earth has been seeing 150-200 species go extinct every single day, and half of all of the planet's marine life has been lost since just 1970), it becomes less so.

The rate of underwater melting around the Antarctic is doubling every 20 years, and is on a pace that will see it soon eclipse melting in Greenland to become the single largest source of sea-level rise on Earth, according to a recently published study in Nature Geoscience. This amount of sub-sea melting of the ice continent is far greater than what was previously known, and the ice there is retreating at a rate five times the historical average. This is raising fears of the specter of a worst-case sea level rise of around 10 feet by 2100.

This is one reason why, after another deadly cyclone struck the island group this month, Fijian Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama said that ACD is now brining "almost constant" extreme weather and is literally a threat to the survival of the island nation. Bainimarama told the BBC that his country had entered a "frightening new era" of extreme weather that needed to be confronted.

Things are progressing so fast now with ACD impacts that more than one scientist I've been talking with over the years has shifted from being vehemently anti-geoengineering to either giving it renewed attention, or even outright supporting it. This is, to me, deeply troubling.

Scientists in several developing countries are now actively studying ways to dim sunshine and slow planetary warming via man-made chemical sunshade, as they see this as less risky than unchecked increases in global temperatures in the absence of global climate action.

Reuters reported that 12 scholars from countries including China, Thailand, Brazil, Bangladesh, India and Ethiopia published an article in the journal Nature recently, stating that since the poor are the most vulnerable to ACD, "Developing countries must lead on solar geo-engineering research."

"The technique is controversial, and rightly so," the scholars wrote of the technique, which involves spraying clouds with reflective sulphur particles high in the atmosphere. "It is too early to know what its effects would be: it could be very helpful or very harmful," they wrote. The same article cited a panel of UN climate experts who called solar geo-engineering "economically, socially and institutionally infeasible."

At the current trajectory of emissions and global growth, Earth is on course to see a minimum warming of 3 degrees Celsius (3 degrees C), or far more, above pre-industrial temperatures by 2100, and the goal of keeping temperature increases "well below" the 2 degrees C as per the 2015 Paris Agreement among nearly 200 countries currently looks unfeasible.

While self-immolation and geo-engineering are extreme, this month's survey of the planet provides the context within which these radical phenomena are taking place.

Earth

Due to lack of moisture, a recently published study shows that half of Alberta, Canada's boreal forests could disappear due to ACD and fires by 2100. The study warned that it's possible that even 75 percent of the forest could disappear if conditions become even more extreme. What is particularly worrisome about this is the fact that the boreal forests store massive amounts of carbon, so as they disappear, that carbon is also released into the atmosphere.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the Sahara Desert is expanding, thanks in part to ACD, according to another report. The boundaries of this massive desert have grown by 10 percent in the last century, affecting farming terrain near its southern boundary in Sudan and Chad, places already struggling with famine and food scarcity.

Looking a little further south, rainforests, savannahs and woodlands of sub-Saharan Africa have released approximately 2.6 billion tons of CO2 over the last seven years, according to a recent study. The leading causes of this are ACD, deforestation, wildfires and droughts. This is disconcerting because Africa contains one-third of the planet's tropical rainforests.

Other direct impacts on human health from ACD this month are clear. A recent report showed how, as the planet continues to warm, ticks are thriving in more places than ever, which makes Lyme disease the first epidemic of ACD.

Meanwhile, ACD's impacts on animals continue to be prevalent.

A recently published study showed that seabirds are not adapting adequately enough to climate shifts brought about by ACD. As rising temperatures are causing the birds' food sources like insects, vegetation and plankton to appear earlier each year, the bird populations are not able to sync up their breeding and nesting patters in order to adapt to these changes.

Meanwhile, extreme weather's economic toll is making itself known in the US, which experienced three different weather disasters in just the first three months of this year, each with more than a billion-dollar price tag, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) data.

Water

The pace of melting ice at or near the poles continues to amaze scientists. A recently published study showed that the Greenland Ice Sheet is seeing its melting nearly double over just the last century. This also means it is melting at its fastest rate in at least the last 4,000 years.

In the US, Western Alaska's sea ice is at the lowest extent it has been since record keeping began. Rick Thoman, a weather service climate scientist, told the Anchorage Daily News that when looking at the long-term records of coastal sea ice from satellite data, whaler's logs and Danish and Norwegian ship records, "Nothing even comes close" to how little sea ice this February and March have just witnessed in that region.

On the sea level increase front, a recently published NOAA report showed that high-tide flooding could literally be happening "every other day" by the end of this century, and showed that already, the frequency that high-tide flooding is occurring has already doubled along the East Coast of the US in just the last 15 years. Another recent report showed how the state of California is facing a massive threat from sea level rise, and indicates that previous flood hazard maps had underestimated the area of land at risk to rising seas by up to 90 percent. The San Francisco Bay Area is going to be particularly hard hit.

Meanwhile, drought across the US continues to persist, and in some places, worsen, as ACD advances.

By early April, a stretch of the Rio Grande River in New Mexico had already dried up, well in advance of summer. Due primarily to record low snowpack, that the river has started to dry up this early in the year is nearly unprecedented.

In Minnesota, another report has warned that ACD will turn Boundary Waters Wilderness Region into "a barren grassland" if human carbon emissions stay the same. As temperatures in that area continue to increase, lush forests are turning into grasslands there, and the waters will disappear with the trees.

A new early-warning satellite system has provided a warning for several countries that are at risk of having their reservoirs shrink from drought to the point that their taps could run completely dry. While Cape Town, South Africa, has featured prominently in the news with its "Day Zero" warning of when the city will run out of water, now countries including India, Iraq, Morocco and Spain could also be seeing "day zero" type water crises as their water reservoirs dry up. For example, Morocco's second-largest reservoir has already shrunk 60 percent in three years due to recurring drought, and its water level is the lowest it has been in a decade. Iraq's Mosul Dam reservoir has seen a long decline and is now down 60 percent from its peak, due to ACD-fueled drought, coupled with demand from Turkish hydropower projects upstream and increasing water demand downstream.

Meanwhile, as the oceans continue to warm and coral bleaching events become more common, another report shows that fish populations along Australia's Great Barrier Reef are collapsing in the wake of ongoing coral bleaching events. Not surprisingly, many of the fish species that live among the coral are dropping off as the corals are wiped out by the bleaching events.

To make matters worse, another recently published study shows that marine heatwaves are increasing in both frequency and duration at an accelerated rate in many parts of the planet, particularly so in Australian waters. The study showed that the number of oceanic heatwave days per year has increased a staggering 54 percent globally, as oceans have absorbed 93 percent of atmospheric heat from ACD.

Fire

A recently released book by Heather Hansen shows how the US -- and much of the rest of the planet -- is entering an era of mega-fire, given ACD-fueled droughts and wildfires, along with human encroachment and deforestation.

It has been long known that ACD is amping up the frequency and intensity of wildfires, along with lengthening wildfire seasons, and scientists continue to address these facts.

As though to underscore these points, at the time of writing, forecasters in the US began sounding warnings of dangerous, life-threatening wildfire conditions across parts of the southwest and southern plains whilst firefighters in Oklahoma fought blazes that had already killed two people.

The Associated Press reported that weather conditions in drought-stricken areas of Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas are creating "dangerous fire conditions," the likes of which have not been seen in at least a decade.

Air

Amidst a large number of scientific studies recently published, limiting global warming to 2 degreesC will not prevent destructive and deadly ACD impacts as so many people believed it would. Two degrees Celsius warming above pre-industrial baseline temperatures, which was long held as the temperature limit for maintaining a safe and healthy planet, is no longer the case. Just that much of a temperature increase is now understood to bring mass displacement of humans from rising seas, wide-scale shortages of food and water across the globe, and accelerated losses of animal and plant species -- both of which are already plummeting since we are well into the planet's Sixth Mass Extinction.

Meanwhile, during the month of March, high temperature records across Asia fell like dominoes. Pakistan saw 114 degreesF, a high temperature never seen so early in the season. Other records included 110 degrees in Iraq, 104 degrees in Qatar, 104 degrees in Turkmenistan, 99 degrees in Uzbekistan and 96 degrees in Tajikistan.

Denial and Reality

The active ACD denialists of the Trump administration have been busy these last few weeks. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), led by fossil-fuel industry hack Scott Pruitt, prepares to roll back laws that required automobiles to be cleaner and more fuel efficient.

Meanwhile, Pruitt's EPA directed staffers to use talking points designed to downplay the role humans play in ACD. The points literally mimic Pruitt's own public statements, as he has consistently denied the human role in the crisis from day one.

Secretary of Interior Ryan Zinke, another ACD denialist and pro-fossil fuel hack, recently had all National Park Service officials delete every single mention of humans' role in ACD from a report on sea level rise and storm surge.

All of this is almost laughably contradicted by reality.

Four oil giants (Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, Shell) recently acknowledged the global consensus about the reality of ACD (and humans' role in it) to a federal judge.

The country of New Zealand recently announced the cessation of all future offshore oil and gas exploration permits, a move that took oil companies by surprise but underscored how serious the country is about shifting away from fossil fuels.

Climate Disruption Dispatches

This is a good thing, given that a recent report showed the world to be on track to reach 1.5 degreesC warming within a decade from now. Hitting that temperature increase marker means that the planet will have already exceeded one of the key goals in the 2015 Paris climate agreements.

Finally for this month, a recently released study showed that the Gulf Stream current is now the weakest it has been for 1,600 years. The current, known scientifically as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), carries warm water towards the North Pole, where it then cools and sinks, then flows back southwards. ACD is slowing down the cooling of the water as warmer temperatures melt the Greenland ice sheet, which floods the area with less dense freshwater, which further weakens the AMOC.

The report warns that the current could be less stable than previously understood. This is particularly worrisome, given that the AMOC has historically caused dramatic changes in the global climate system.

It was previously believed that a slowing down of the AMOC would take centuries to occur. A collapse of the AMOC could cause Western Europe to experience far more extreme winters, sea level rise along the US eastern seaboard to increase rapidly, and disrupted rainfall across the tropics.

"I think we're close to a tipping point," climatologist Michael Mann told ThinkProgress. Mann called the slowing down of the AMOC as being "without precedent" in more than a millennium, and added, "It's happening about a century ahead of schedule relative to what the models predict."

Reacting to this study, senior scientists warned the Guardian that a disruption to the AMOC must be avoided "at all costs."

Meanwhile, business as usual in harvesting and burning fossil fuels around the planet continues apace throughout the vast majority of countries, particularly within the US.
(c) 2018 Dahr Jamail, a Truthout staff reporter, is the author of The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan (Haymarket Books, 2009), and Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket Books, 2007). Jamail reported from Iraq for more than a year, as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey over the last 10 years, and has won the Martha Gellhorn Award for Investigative Journalism, among other awards.

TWO DAYS ago, the State of Israel celebrated its 70th birthday. For days we heard about nothing else. Innumerable speeches full of platitudes. A huge festival of kitsch.

Everyone agreed: It was a historic moment, when David Ben-Gurion got up in a small hall in Tel Aviv and declared the foundation of the state.

Everybody still alive from then was asked this week: Where were you at that moment? What did you feel, when history knocked on the door?

WELL, I was alive. And I did not feel anything.

I was a soldier in the new army, which was not yet called "Israeli Defense Army " (its official name in Hebrew). My company had a small encampment of pup tents in Hulda, a kibbutz south of Tel Aviv.

We were to attack an Arab village called al-Kubab, near the town of Ramleh, that night. Stiff resistance was expected, and we were making all kinds of preparations, as soldiers do before a battle, when somebody ran up and shouted: "Quick, Ben-Gurion is declaring the state in the dining hall!" In the dining hall of the kibbutz was the only radio in the vicinity. Everyone ran there, including me.

Frankly, I did not give a damn about the declaration. We were in the middle of a desperate war - desperate for both sides - and we knew that the fighting would decide whether our state would come about or not. If we won the war, there would be a state. If we lost he war, there would be no state and no we.

A speech by a politician somewhere in Tel Aviv would make no difference whatsoever.

But I was curious about one detail: what would the new state be called? There had been several suggestions, and I wanted to know which one was accepted.

When I heard the word "Israel", I left the dining room and returned to cleaning my rifle.

The fierce battle, by the way, did not materialize. When we attacked the village from two sides, the inhabitants fled. We entered empty houses, with the food still warm on the tables. The inhabitants were never allowed to return.

The next morning my company was transferred to the south. The Egyptian army was entering Palestine, and we were to stop them before they reached Tel Aviv. But that is another story.

DAVID BEN-GURION, whose voice I had heard that afternoon on the radio, has by now become the national hero of all times, the man who created the State of Israel. This week a documentary about him was broadcast on television.

The director, Raviv Drucker, an excellent journalist, has produced a very good film. It shows Ben-Gurion as he really was, with all his good and bad points.

Compared to him, his successors in the Prime Minister's office were second rate. Not to mention the present occupant, who is a dwarf.

It was Ben-Gurion who took the decision to declare the foundation of the state at that particular moment, when the last British occupier had left and four neighboring Arab armies were about to enter the country. His colleagues were afraid of the decision and had to be pushed by him.

Frankly, I don't think that this decision was so momentous. If the declaration had been deferred for some months, it would have made no real difference. After we had won the war, though with very heavy casualties, we could have declared the state at any time.

While the documentary is mostly accurate, there are some mistakes. For example, it shows the masses of Tel Avivis cheering in the streets upon the declaration. That is a falsification, though it has been repeated so often that Drucker can be excused for believing it. In fact, the masses cheered in November 1947, when the United Nations decided upon the partition of Palestine into an Arab state and a Jewish state (and a separate unit in Jerusalem).

When the Jewish state was officially founded on May 14, and Ben-Gurion made that speech, the streets were empty. The young were in the army, their elders were too anxious to cheer.

In that war, some 6300 of us were killed - out of a total Jewish population of 630,000. The equivalent of three million US citizens today. Many more were wounded (including poor me). Losses on the Arab side were even higher in absolute terms.

BEN-GURION'S AFFECTATIONS were many and colorful. He liked to present himself as a great philosopher, and the documentary shows him receiving many hundreds of books, paid for by a rich British Jew - which would be a criminal offense under current Israeli law.

Be-Ge (as we called him) interfered in the conduct of the war, some of his erroneous decisions cost many lives. He also changed the character of the army in ways that we soldiers resented very much.

But all his good and bad decisions were negligible compared to his real historic role: his decision to turn Israel into a bulwark against the rising Arab world.

Of course, the Zionist movement was from the beginning a conscious part of European colonialism. In his book, "Der Judenstaat", the founder, Theodor Herzl, already promised that the state would be "a part of the wall of European civilization against Asiatic barbarism."

But it was Ben-Gurion who turned this vague promise into fact from the first day of Israel. According to his first biographer, he detested the Arabs and Arab culture from his first day in Palestine, suppressed the Arab minority in Israel and refused to draw Israel's borders.

The underlying reason was and is of course, that Zionism from the beginning wanted to dispossess the Arabs from their land in order to create there a new Jewish nation. This was never admitted, but was clear from the beginning.

All Ben-Gurion's successors, up to the present occupant of the office, followed this line. Even on its 70th birthday, Israel recognizes no official borders. Though we have official peace agreements with two Arab states (Egypt and Jordan) and unofficial cooperation with several more, we are hated by hundreds of millions of Arabs and a billion Muslims. And, even more important: we are at war with the entire Palestinian people. That is the real legacy of Ben-Gurion.

I AM not quite objective on this subject. I, too, was at war with Ben-Gurion.

The longer his reign lasted, the more autocratic he became. Altogether, from his assumption of power in the pre-state Zionist movement, he was the supreme leader for 30 consecutive years. No human being can be in power for so long without becoming a bit deranged.

I became the owner and editor-in-chief of a news magazine soon after the war, and began to criticize him sharply: his increasingly dictatorial manner, his colonialist treatment of the Palestinians, his anti-peace policy, his reactionary socio-economic policy and the corruption of many of his followers.

The chief of the security service publicly called me "Government Enemy No.1". On one occasion the security chief (nicknamed "Little Issar") suggested to Ben-Gurion to put me under "administrative detention" - arrest without a court order. Ben-Gurion agreed, but under one condition: that the leader of the opposition, Menachem Begin, would silently agree. Begin refused adamantly and threatened to kick up a stink. He also warned me in secret.

My office was bombed several times, I myself was attacked and my hands broken. (As I have said before, that attack was a blessing in disguise. A young woman named Rachel volunteered to move in with me to help me along for a few weeks, and stayed for 53 years, until her death.)

At the height of our fight, Ben-Gurion ordered the National Theater (Habima) to produce a piece openly directed against me. It showed the vicious editor of a weekly paper, who enjoyed making people miserable. Though he never usually went to the theater, he attended this premiere. The documentary shows him, his wife and colleagues applauding wildly. The piece did not survive three performances.

IT MUST be admitted that he was a very courageous leader. Though a staunch anti-Communist, he let Stalin support Israel with arms during the 1948 War of Independence. He made peace with Germany just eight years after the Holocaust, because the young state desperately needed money. He entered into the famous collusion with France and Britain to attack Egypt (with disastrous results.)

Towards the end, he surrounded himself with young disciples - Moshe Dayan, Teddy Kollek, Shimon Peres and others, and his elderly colleagues became afraid of him. They ganged up on him and threw him out. His efforts to form a new party and stage a comeback ran into the sand. In the end we made a kind of peace.

When we look back today upon his entire career, it must be admitted that his influence on today's Israel is immense. For better and for worse, he laid the tracks on which Israel is still rolling.

For the Democrats, Donald Trump's surprise Electoral College victory meant that the 2016 election campaign will not end until the next go-round, in 2020, punctuated by a battle for control of Congress, next year. White Democrats cannot accept that the majority of their race (63 percent of white men, 53 percent of white women) voted for Trump -- a truth that does not comport with white Democrats' self-image as leaders of a cosmopolitan, "progressive" America. Greg Palast and others have shown conclusively that the GOP stole the 2016 election the old-fashioned way, through Black voter suppression, just as in 2000 and 2004, but the Democrats are much more comfortable blaming the outcome on a fantastical "collusion" among the Russians, Trump and Wikileaks. This conspiracy theory is abetted by the imperial Deep State, encompassing most of the public and undercover actors of the U.S. foreign policy establishment who fear Trump cannot be relied on to militarily prevent Russia and China from "colluding" to end Washington's imperial hegemony over planet Earth.

In delegitimizing the election (for all the wrong reasons) the Democrats and their corporate media allies have created a crisis of legitimacy for the whole U.S. political order -- which, from a radical perspective, is quite a good thing. Unfortunately, the systems of ruling class social and economic control are not nearly as fragile as the Russia-baiters would have the masses believe and, in any case, have little do with the tweedle-dee, tweedle-dum choices made at the polls by a bare majority of the people every couple of years. The two-corporate-party electoral arrangement negates the possibility of real democratic choice, providing only a menu acceptable to corporate campaign contributors and corporate media gatekeepers. However, it is the illusion of U.S. democracy that is crucial to popular support of the system -- a mirage that dissipates by the day under the relentless onslaught of the "news," as interpreted by the likes of Rachel Maddow.The Russia-baiters are defecating in their own nest -- and claiming the stink comes from the Kremlin and its "useful idiots" here at home: meaning, folks like us at Black Agenda Report, the Black Alliance for Peace, and a short list of other lelft-wing websites.

As a result, over the past year and a half we have witnessed an hysteria of McCarthyism in a nation where there exists only a tiny organized Left, yet where the masses of people have little to no confidence in the institutions and parties of governance -- a political environment that is super-heated by constant threats of all-enveloping war. This suits the militarists and CIA spooks just fine, of course, but also serves the purposes of a Democratic Party that has nothing to offer its base of economically besieged and intensely disaffected voters, most of whom are significantly to the left of the Party on both core economic issues and on questions of war and peace.

Nowhere is the cleavage on critical issues between the Party and its base more evident than in Black America, the most loyal (captive, actually) Democratic constituency, composing a quarter of its reliable voters. For Blacks, there is no two-party system, since the Republicans have chosen to fill the role of White Man's Party. Yet African Americans are far to the left of the Democrats on social and economic justice issues. Most resemble "Swedish social democrats" or are "even more radical than that," according to Dr. Michael Dawson, the esteemed Black social demographer at the University of Chicago. Only 7 percent of Blacks favored an invasion of Iraq if would result in the "death of thousands of Iraqi civilians," compared to majorities of white males, a third of white females and 16 percent of Hispanics, according to the Zogby poll taken in February of 2003.

Although Black people's anti-war sentiments were muffled during Barack Obama's presidency, there is no reason to believe there has been a sea change in Blacks' historic opposition to U.S. military adventures abroad. But the post-2016 Democratic Party now assumes an even more hawkish posture than the GOP, including most of the Congressional Black Caucus, a majority of which votes whatever way House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi instructs. The Democrats backed Trump's obscene war budget, swallowing a death pill for all the big social programs proposed by the party's "left" wing, none of which can survive such military outlays -- and they know it.

The Democrats are -- there's no other way to say it -- full of shit. Their "big" social programs are meant to be poisoned on the vine by trillion-dollar deficits mandated by the Russian "threat" to "our democracy" that is shrieked every day and night by...the Democrats, themselves. Every time they scream "Russians," they are providing the "national security" excuse for why they can't pass the social legislation they claim to champion. Simultaneously, they demonize as "colluders" the radical domestic opposition to these same corporate forces. The Democrats are counting on Russiagate to both bring them back to power and to inoculate them from the wrath of their base when they fail to provide relief from austerity. They will never give up such an elixir.

So, when The Week shouts that Bernie Sanders has "conquered" the Democrats, because a number of his potential competitors, including abject corporate servants like Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, have endorsed the idea of Medicare-for-all and the party is now thinking "big" -- think again. Wall Street will force a split in the Democratic Party rather than allow its supplicants to press for a true single payer health care bill or a federal job guarantee. And a split is exactly what is needed.

The Sandernistas will face the same Democratic Party corporate organism in 2020, should their champion's health hold up, as they did 2016. I hope they do well, just as I did in the last go-round, but only in order that they become so ferociously frustrated at the dirty tricks and dirty money of the party's corporate controllers that they make the final break and create a new, social democratic party, potentially the biggest in the country and, hopefully, a true party of its members, rather than a front for corporate backers.

The U.S. is a nation of 300-plus million people without even one sizeable political party that serves a definable social constituency, other than the very rich: a true desert in which only the bourgeoisie have a voice, controlling both big party megaphones and virtually all the means of communication. Russiagate, a political contrivance manufactured at a time of the empire's perceived crisis -- the unexpected election of the undependable Trumpster – serves only the forces of war and domestic repression. The Democratic Party – "objectively"", the truer and more fully explicit ruling class party in the country," as Paul Street puts it, ever since go-for-self Trump took over the GOP -- is seeking to ride Russiagate into the far sunsets with its suit against Trump, the Russians and Wikileaks. As Glenn Greenwald points out, the suit, seeking damages for the "theft" of its emails, could cripple journalists' ability to expose corporate and government wrongdoing. If the Democratic National Committee is successful, "any media outlet that publishes misappropriated documents or emails (exactly what media outlets quite often do) could be sued by the entity or person about which they are reporting, or even theoretically prosecuted for it, or that any media outlet releasing an internal campaign memo is guilty of 'economic espionage.'" The DNC doesn't give a damn about gutting U.S. journalism. It is an agent of its corporate masters, for whom the rights of property (or, the propertied classes) are sacrosanct -- and that includes the pro-war Sanders camp "progressive," Rep. Keith Ellis, the DNC deputy chair. "As Americans, it is our duty to respond when our democracy is attacked," Ellis tweeted. "The DNC is filing this lawsuit because Russia, and anyone who supported their interference in the 2016 election, must be held accountable."

As matters currently stand, the odds of Donald Trump being impeached by this Congress are so profoundly minute, they defy even the existence of mathematics. There are no numbers -- here, there or anywhere -- that say such a thing is remotely possible. The federal government is rendered powerless by its own inadequacies; after giving a trillion dollars to rich people, there isn't much else the Republicans in the majority can do, so they are content to hunker in the bunker and see what November brings. Open support for impeachment, even among Democrats, is so gossamer right now that it doesn't cast a shadow in the high noon sun.

Rather than wallow in the riptides of the stormy present, cast your mind forward to the possibilities of the New Year. Imagine Trump -- mired in scandal and in a permanent state of full-throttle temper tantrum -- spending the summer and fall taking a lead pipe to any hopes the GOP had of retaining a majority in either chamber. The House and Senate are lost in a November bloodbath, the House by historic margins and the Senate by a nose. Finally, like the tolling of a funeral bell, the Mueller Report is made public after the special counsel finishes his investigation.

Maybe it's obstruction of justice. Maybe it's collusion with a foreign power to interfere with an election. Maybe it's money laundering. Maybe it's all of these and worse. Come January, a new Democratic Congress with the Mueller Report in hand will almost certainly have the necessary voltage to zap Donald Trump out of his current government sinecure and send him home to Trump Tower to watch his empire fall. As Paul Waldman recently explained in The Washington Post, "He may well be the single most corrupt major business figure in the United States of America." That corruption did not evaporate once he took the oath of office, but stuck fast to him like a kale fart in a hot car.

They will have the goods on Trump, I am mortally sure. Will they act?

For good reason, the very existence of Vice President Mike Pence is enough to derail any serious discussion of the impeachment of Donald Trump. As it stands, the man certainly serves as a potent insurance policy against Article II, Section 4.

When conversations turn to Trump's impeachment, LGBTQ activists and others have rightly raised an alarm about the acute dangers they would face from a President Pence. He could, with the right allies in Congress, push for a "religious objections" bill that legalizes discrimination against LGBTQ citizens, as he did while governor of Indiana. He might push for a bill requiring people who have abortions to hold funerals for the fetus, as he did in 2016. He might sign a bill requiring people seeking abortions to undergo two invasive trans-vaginal ultrasound procedures, as he did in 2013.

Hell yes, there is good reason for concern, and even fear. Pence is the kind of Christian evangelical zealot who would have been right at home putting "pagan" villages to the sword and torch a thousand years ago. His misogyny and homophobia are the stuff of nightmares. He is, very quietly, a darling of the right-wing moneyed elite and speaks their language fluently. Worse, as a former governor and member of the House, Pence actually knows how government works. He does not regularly dismember fellow Republicans in public, and he could easily build coalitions with the worst elements in Congress. With his knowledge and their help, they could pass legislation hateful enough to frighten the Freedom statue off the Capitol Dome.

That is now, today, tomorrow, next week and every week until November. My kid will still be eating her Halloween candy when the midterm deal goes down, and if the numbers hold or get worse for Republicans, it's going to be a whole different conversation at this year's Thanksgiving table. Sure, Pence is terrifying on a number of levels, but if the cookie crumbles just so in November, the beast will be without teeth.

There is ample precedent to support this presumption, in the guise of former President Gerald R. Ford. No historical comparison is seamless, of course, but the example of Ford is highly instructive.

After Richard Nixon resigned the presidency and fled back to California, Ford pardoned him. A few days later, he unveiled a program of conditional amnesty for Vietnam draft evaders. A year later, he presided over the US military's final, staggering exit from that war; Operation Frequent Wind was a frantic evacuation that saw helicopter gunships shoved over the sides of aircraft carriers and into the sea to make room for more refugees. Amazingly enough, Ford got Justice John Paul Stevens onto the Supreme Court. He was shot at more often than any president since George Washington.

That's pretty much it. Gerald Ford's presidential library is one room with a magazine rack and some mints in a dish. Ford didn't do nothing, but he didn't do much. Why?

There are several reasons. The long agony of Watergate, culminating in the concussion of Nixon's resignation, left the nation and the government so exhausted as to be effectively rendered powerless. With only a few scant accomplishments and no signature legislation to his name, Ford spent much of his time in office as an animated placeholder while the country tried to come to grips with what had just happened to it. Moreover, the Democrats in Congress -- cat-wary after Watergate -- watched him like a hawk. Everyone just waited for 1976, when a peanut farmer came along and sent this accidental president back home to Michigan.

As stated, no historical analogy is seamless. Ford was appointed, not elected, and the Congress of that day had yet to be infected by the rancid teachings of Supply Side Jesus. That being said, the similarities and probabilities are too obvious to ignore. If the impeachment of Donald Trump were successfully undertaken in 2019 or even 2020, the aftermath would find Mike Pence frozen like an ant in amber.

The ultimate removal of Trump would be preceded by a massive political upheaval that would leave the Republican Party on fire from stem to stern. The executive branch would be shattered and splattered, cornered into virtual immobility under the Say-No-to-Everything sway of a Democratic majority ... if that Democratic majority decides to show up. Everything on the table this time, Nancy. Keep your powder dry long enough and it turns to dust.

If the proper circumstances combine to allow the removal of Donald Trump from office, President Pence will become a cipher until an election comes along to remove him. He is neither smart enough nor strong enough to overcome the forces of history that will be sluicing through the cracks in his walls. He will be a man-suit stuffed with straw. He will be nothing, and then he, too, will be gone.

This story in the New Yorker about the former national security adviser H.R. McMaster illustrates why this president is something unique in our politics. He is a symptom of the Republican descent into madness but he is something different from them as well. He brings something to their toxic stew that actually transforms it in substantial ways. It's not that they are better, per se, but the challenges they present fit into a paradigm we understand and can mitigate through our common understanding of politics. This is not that:

When Trump assumed office, N.S.C. staffers initially generated memos for him that resembled those produced for his predecessors: multi-page explications of policy and strategy. But "an edict came down," a former staffer told me: " 'Thin it out.' " The staff dutifully trimmed the memos to a single page. "But then word comes back: 'This is still too much.' " A senior Trump aide explained to the staffers that the President is "a visual person," and asked them to express points "pictorially."

"By the time I left, we had these cards," the former staffer said. They are long and narrow, made of heavy stock, and emblazoned with the words "the white house" at the top. Trump receives a thick briefing book every night, but nobody harbors the illusion that he reads it. Current and former officials told me that filling out a card is the best way to raise an issue with him in writing. Everything that needs to be conveyed to the President must be boiled down, the former staffer said, to "two or three points, with the syntactical complexity of 'See Jane run.' "

Given Trump's avowed admiration for despots, and the curious deference that he has shown Putin, his staff was worried about the March 20th phone call. Putin had recently been elected to another six-year term, but American officials did not regard the election as legitimate. Staffers were concerned that Trump might nevertheless salute Putin on his sham victory. When briefers prepared a card for the call, one of the bullet points said, in capital letters: "do not congratulate."

Trump also received a five-minute oral briefing from his national-security adviser, Lieutenant General Herbert Raymond McMaster, who goes by H.R. Before McMaster delivered the briefing, one of his aides said to him, "The President is going to congratulate him no matter what you say."

"I know," McMaster replied.

Trump takes pride in being impervious to the advice of experts, and he had no personal affection for his national-security adviser. McMaster, who had learned to pick his battles, chose not to raise the matter of Putin's election. The President took the call alone in the White House residence, but McMaster was listening in on a so-called drop line. Sure enough, Trump did not read or did not heed the briefing card, and congratulated Putin.

On March 31, an underwater pipeline carrying oil to a refinery in Balikpapan, Indonesia, broke, spreading crude over 20,000 hectares of Balikpapan Bay. Some of it ignited, killing five fishermen. Area residents experienced health problems including nausea, vomiting and respiratory difficulties, and marine life and mangroves were also devastated.

In mid-January, an Iranian tanker carrying more than 111,300 tonnes of natural gas condensate hit a cargo ship, caught fire and sank in the East China Sea in one of China's richest fishing grounds. The accident killed all 32 of the tanker's crew and left an oil slick bigger than Paris - more than 100 square kilometres. Researchers say the spill and fire killed phytoplankton, marine mammals, fish and birds and will have long-lasting consequences.

Meanwhile, in North America and elsewhere, pipeline accidents continue to spew gas and oil into the environment, polluting air, water and land, and affecting wildlife and habitat, as well as human communities. Tanker, pipeline and drilling rig accidents have devastated ecosystems and endangered human health and lives worldwide, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Alaska coast to the Niger Delta.

As disastrous as those accidents are, the consequences of the products reaching their destinations are also horrendous, as burning fossil fuels spills massive volumes of climate-disrupting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. With the rapacious rush to exploit every bit of gas, oil and coal before the reality and consequences of climate change become too devastating to ignore, we're likely to see ever-increasing accidental and deliberate fossil fuel contamination.

In the midst of it all, we have Canadian provincial and federal governments bizarrely claiming that expanding oilsands production and pipelines is not only in keeping with our national and international climate commitments, but is actually necessary to them! The government of my home province, B.C., while standing firm in protecting the province's interests against Kinder Morgan's obsolete Trans Mountain pipeline project, thinks increasing fracking for the energy-intensive, methane-spewing liquefied natural gas industry is the way to go.

If short-term economic gain, a relatively small number of jobs and the priorities of shareholders in mostly foreign-owned companies are more important to the national interest than ensuring that people and ecosystems here and around the world remain healthy and alive, something is wrong.

If people, especially those in positions of power, truly understood the severity and urgency of the climate crisis, they would be doing everything possible to confront and resolve it. But it appears many don't even want to understand. It's easier to go along with business as usual, while implementing some half-hearted plans and talking more than acting, than to make the difficult choices to ensure our species survives and thrives.

Most discussions among governments, industry and media about Texas-based Kinder Morgan's pipeline project don't even mention climate change. It's mostly just shouting about the need to get Canadian resources to foreign markets and threatening economic and trade sanctions for not bowing to the wishes of industry and its supporters - even though using the resources at such a rapid pace is making the world increasingly less hospitable to humans.

One can sympathize with the federal government, which is already facing some provincial opposition to its climate policies and is likely to face more after a number of upcoming provincial elections. The Alberta government is also in a difficult position, struggling to hold power in a province where many people are blind to the realities of global warming and have an overblown sense of the oil industry's relative, and declining, importance.

For the federal government to argue that the pipeline is necessary to keep Alberta on-board with its climate plan is short-sighted when the party leading in Alberta polls opposes key elements of the plan.

The push for expanded fossil fuel development and infrastructure that will lock us in to unsustainable fuels and industry for years to come shows an appalling lack of imagination and courage on the part of those we elect to represent our interests.

Now that we've all survived another Earth Day, it's time for Inside Climate News to start delivering the bad news by the truckload again.

The Arctic's frozen permafrost holds some 15 million gallons of mercury. The region has nearly twice as much mercury as all other soils, the ocean and the atmosphere combined, according to a new study published Monday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. That's significantly more than previously known, and it carries risks for humans and wildlife. "It really blew us away," said Paul Schuster, a hydrologist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Boulder, Colorado, and lead author of the study.

Mercury (which is both a naturally occurring element and is produced by the burning of fossil fuels) is trapped in the permafrost, a frozen layer of earth that contains thousands of years worth of organic carbon, like plants and animal carcasses. As temperatures climb and that ground thaws, what has been frozen within it begins to decompose, releasing gases like methane and carbon dioxide, as well as other long dormant things like anthrax, ancient bacteria and viruses-and mercury.

"The mercury that ends up being released as a result of the thaw will make its way up into the atmosphere or through the fluvial systems via rivers and streams and wetlands and lakes and even groundwater," said Schuster. "Sooner or later, all the water on land ends up in the ocean."

Back a few years, when I spent a week in Arctic Alaska, the thaw in the permafrost was already a serious problem for the people living there. Because it was a major barrier to the vicious winter storms, having it soften up meant great chunks of land mass were being washed away. Not only that but, for the subsistence hunters in the area, the permafrost traditionally functioned as a wintertime refrigeration unit. The meat gathered from seals on the pack ice-which is another problem, but for another day-would be buried in what the people there called "the Eskimo freezer."

Beyond that, scientists have been warning for decades that there were all manner of things that would've been better left frozen in the earth. (In 1998, scientists found partial specimens of the virus that caused the 1918 flu pandemic in bodies that had been buried in the permafrost in Norway.) Now we find that, in addition to massive amounts of carbon that our atmosphere does not need to have released into it, there also is this huge amount of mercury, more than the scientists anticipated finding.

The mercury risk won't be isolated in the Arctic either. Once in the ocean, Schuster said, it's possible that fisheries around the world could eventually see spikes in mercury content. He plans to seek to a better understand of this and other impacts from the mercury in subsequent studies. The permafrost in parts of the Arctic is already starting to thaw. The Arctic Council reported last year that the permafrost temperature had risen by .5 degrees Celsius in just the last decade. If emissions continue at their current rate, two-thirds of the Northern Hemisphere's near-surface permafrost could thaw by 2080.

Wait, what?

From Bloomberg:

Now, more than a half century later, Trump administration officials are considering using the same statute to keep struggling coal and nuclear power plants online, according to four people familiar with the discussions who asked for anonymity to discuss private deliberations. Under the approach, the administration would invoke sweeping authority in the 68-year-old Defense Production Act, which allows the president to effectively nationalize private industry to ensure the U.S. has resources that could be needed amid a war or after a disaster. Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia, urged President Donald Trump to employ the statute in a letter Wednesday. "If you don't have the grid filled with the power that's needed 24/7, you're in trouble," he said in an interview. It's "an emergency national concern and for the national defense of our country."

Harvard University. "This statute did not contemplate the sort of use that apparently now the administration is considering."

Ever since before TV was even invented, there's been a really huge reality show being broadcast here in America. It's called "The Deep State Show". And yet despite its consistent rating as the longest-running reality show ever and even despite its presence in every single aspect of our lives, the average American has hardly even heard of it and never even gets to watch it either. Nobody here ever asks their friends the next day, "Hey, did you see the latest episode of 'The Deep State Show' last night?" In fact, nobody in America has hardly even heard of the Deep State Show before -- until now.

Why now?

Because, although the Deep State has been successfully eating its young in other parts of the world for the past century or so, it appears there are almost no more young in the rest of the world left to eat and so now it has started to eat ours too.

"You need to define your terms, Jane," you might say. Why? Defining one's terms is boring. But okay. I'll give it a shot. It's the freaking military-industrial complex. It's Wall Street and War Street. It's those dudes in three-piece suits who plot ways to steal the resources out of all the other countries on earth -- and now that the rest of the world has been pretty much sucked dry, they have come after America's resources too.

It's the guys who live in penthouses and drive Ferraris yet get their knickers all in a twist when the rest of us Americans even dare to drive a used Hyundai or buy a fixer-upper out in the sticks. It's those greedy welfare capitalists who won't let the rest of us have a safety net too. That's who it is. Capisce?

Let's move on.

In our desperation these days, we more savvy Americans are actually starting to question the Deep State. And so the Deep State Show throws us a scapegoat, a bone. All fingers now point to Donald Trump instead of to the actual men behind the curtain. Duh.

All this talk about building a border Wall and about uppity Black people is just to get us to hate each other instead of hating the worst reality show ev-ah. And yet what is at stake here is our own reality as well as the Deep State's. It is our young that are now getting eaten.

Well, now that I've got all that off my chest, what happens next? I wanna go down to Guadalajara. "How's that going to help?" you might ask next. Because thousands of people from Central America and Mexico, the ones who have already had their young eaten by The Deep State Show decades ago, are now trying to come to America and show us, "This is what it looks like to have your hopes and treasures destroyed. This is what you too will look like in another couple of years, after the Deep State has had its way with you too."

So. Hundreds of people have been marching through Mexico in the last month. They have gotten as far as Guadalajara and are now on their way to Tijuana, carrying banners that read stuff like, "We want our lives back!" And I want to join them. Why? Because I don't want my young to be eaten by no greedy old dudes on a reality show either. And neither should you.

On April 20, 2018, Senator Tim Kaine told an audience at the U of Virginia that missiles into Syria were illegal because not authorized by Congress, leaving everyone to imagine Congress could have made such a thing legal. Kaine gave a long speech on the legality of war without ever mentioning that it is illegal. So I asked him, and he admitted as much. He offered no way in which Congress could have made the missiles legal. He claimed wars are legal if a puppet "invites" you, a claim not supported by written law and not relevant to attacking Syria.

The fact is that the same line of text that gives Congress the war powers in the U.S. Constitution also gives it the power to hire pirates - except that everybody admits you're not supposed to do that. War also was banned, first and in its entirety by the Kellogg-Briand Pact, second and with limited exceptions not met by any recent wars by the UN Charter, as I pointed out to Senator Kaine.

Kaine is to be applauded for opposing Pompeo and for opposing war on Yemen. I hope he will actively pursue THOSE causes.

But promoting the idea that Congress has the power to legalize a crime, the greatest crime in the judgment of Nuremberg, is shameful.

In his remarks at the Miller-Center-sponsored event in the Rotunda on Friday, Kaine antidemocratically opposed war votes prior to elections, because popular opinion might have some influence.

He described non-state targets of U.S. wars as not following the Geneva Conventions, as if that were a variation from what some other party does.

He said he wanted cyber attacks, including the attack on U.S. elections of which he accuses Russia, treated as war.

He said that the United States today is closer than it's been in 30 years or more to a war against a nation - as if Syria were not - as he admitted within 5 minutes - a nation, and as if Afghanistan and Iraq and Libya and Yemen did not at least used to be nations.

He said that he and John McCain had lifted their bill to unconstitutionally strip away the powers of the War Powers Act word-for-word from the work of the Miller Center. His new AUMF with Senator Corker is also by two people with ties to the Miller Center.

He said all of this matters because of the "troops," with never a mention of the vast majority of the victims of U.S. wars, who are the people who live where they are fought.

He claimed that Rep. Barbara Lee agrees with him, which was at least a stretch.

Dear Gouverneur Snyder,

Congratulations, you have just been awarded the "Vidkun Quisling Award!" Your name will now live throughout history with such past award winners as Marcus Junius Brutus, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, George Stephanopoulos, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Prescott Bush, Sam Bush, Fredo Bush, Kate Bush, Kyle Busch, Anheuser Busch, Vidkun Quisling, and last year's winner Volksjudge John (the enforcer) Roberts.

Without your lock step calling for the repeal of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, your many attempts to kill off the black folks in Flint, Yemen, Syria, Iran and those many other profitable oil wars to come would have been impossible! With the help of our mutual friends, the other "Rethuglican Whores" you have made it possible for all of us to goose-step off to a brave new bank account!

Along with this award you will be given the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds presented by our glorious Fuhrer, Herr Trump at a gala celebration at "der Fuhrer Bunker," formally the "White House," on 06-02-2018. We salute you Herr Snyder, Sieg Heil!

Signed by,
Vice Fuhrer Pence