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> every normal weather event

San Francisco and the PNW being covered by smoke every summer is not a normal weather event, and now it is starting on the East coast. The east and southeast is also being hit harder by hurricanes, and they are not stopping at the Gulf of Mexico any more. These are just the events people have been able to see in the US in past years and they're not normal and with ever-increasing carbon output it is undoubtedly going to get worse.

I'll take the entire northeast being covered in smoke as an "over the top" claim that just came true.


I feel like for US folks to take climate change seriously requires that climate change directly impact NYC and Washington DC so that the media and policy makers can have some lived experience.

Smoke in SF or Seattle doesn't seem to move the needle for whatever reason


I live in DC, the haze from the smoke was crazy a few days ago.


What exactly is America going to do about Canada refusing to mitigate their forests correctly?


The Australian wildfire smoke also had climatic effects on ozone when combined with Cl radicals.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00700-2


Actually it is and because you decided to cover forested areas in homes that usually get burned out regularly and stop the natural fires occurring you made it WORSE.

California has ALWAYS been a dry fire ridden state. This idea that it shouldn't be getting wildfires is ridiculous.


It's bizarre how the US attempted to block Cuba from getting the Internet, and still blocks Cuban Internet through many means ( https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/other-site-policies/g... ), but the presentation is that the suppression of content is of Cuban origin.

It reminds me of when the US said Cubans were not allowed to leave Cuba, and the mental hospitals and prisons were filled with political prisoners. Castro announced anyone who wanted to leave Cuba, even those prisoners or mental patients, could go to Mariel harbor and leave if they wished. Suddenly the US did a turnabout and began demanding Castro stop letting Cubans leave Cuba, and too many were prisoners and mental patients, when the US suddenly discovered those were the inhabitants of Cuba's prisons and mental hospitals.


That is not true. The US does not block Cuba from getting to the internet in general (https://ofac.treasury.gov/media/912206/download?inline), although it blocks most commerce in general under its embargo. Your linked webpage is a Github policy restricting the availability of Github Enterprise Server and Github Copilot in Cuba, not the internet.

Your characterization of the Mariel boatlift is misleading and wrong. Cubans were mostly not allowed by their government to leave Cuba. During the 1980 Mariel boatlift, Castro suddenly temporarily abolished this policy due to preceding events where thousands had rushed into the Peru embassy in Havana hoping to leave. He announced that foreign relatives of any Cubans who wished to leave could come pick them up in boats in the Mariel harbor. Those wishing to leave where subject to abusive acts of denunciation and beatings by mobs organized by the government. In a cruel twist, Castro then demanded that in addition to their relatives, the boats had to be filled with common prisoners from jails and mental patients, who were given the choice of staying in prison or trying their luck emigrating on those boats. Castro wanted to provoke a crime wave in the US to tarnish the reputations of those Cubans living there. (source: I was one of those Cuban Marielitos that arrived in 1980 in one of those boats).


> Castro then demanded that in addition to their relatives, the boats had to be filled with common prisoners from jails and mental patients, who were given the choice of staying in prison or trying their luck emigrating on those boats. Castro wanted to provoke a crime wave in the US to tarnish the reputations of those Cubans living there.

I can't help but to see a parallel with the out of control flood of migrants (some of them potential legitimate refugees) Turkey let into Europe in order to put pressure on the European Union back in 2015.


This is a positive, unbalanced spin on the Cuba issue if I’ve ever seen one.

Read about what this person is talking about for yourself here, especially the section titled “Emigration process and violence”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariel_boatlift


It wasn’t until 2013 that Cubans could more freely leave: https://havana-guide.com/can-cubans-leave-cubaall-you-need-t...

Your post implies that Cubans suddenly weren’t allowed to leave Cuba after the US asked. That’s not the case.


I've worked at a company that shipped goods to Cuba from USA between 2009 and 2011.

The biggest restrictions where on the Cuban side. And nobody told me, I implemented the software that did the controls.

We also had to close as the Cuban Government couldn't handle the amount of goods that we send them monthly.


The only limiting Cubans access to internet is its own government that restricts internet access, blocks many websites, monitor every citizen's social media, don't respect privacy rights, and even have laws that fines and can put in jail Cubans for posting on social media complaints against the government and its politics. The Cuban dictatorship sees internet as its enemy because they cannot control the information there. I have lived through that hell for 30 years.


From outside (I am not American) the anti-Cuba position seems to have an almost religious fervor!

Almost like They're socialist, we're capitalist; it's natural, true, and necessary that we must oppose everything about them. Similar to the catholic v protestant division that was very strong in the anglo world last century.

Surely, if one really wanted to dismantle an evil empire, one would open the borders as much as possible and release the forces of greed and assimilation.


In politics it's helpful to have an antagonist to point at and blame for everything bad. There's a villain in every story, and I best point him out to you in case you think it's me.

Cuba is somewhat unique in that there are lot of ex-Cubans clustered in Florida, a swing state, who are there by virtue of being anti-Cuban-government. They are in favor of any policy that hurts the govt, even if it hurts the people left in Cuba more.

Ultimately all this animosity boils down to the nationalisation of private (US) property in the 60s. An unforgivable crime As Amerixan William Wallace might have said "you can take our freedom, but you can't take our money."

Politically though being anti-Cuban has little downside, and wins important votes.


The nationalization of private property wouldn’t have been a problem if it was just US property. Many countries make it difficult/impossible for foreigners to own land.

The problem was that they did it to their own citizens, resulting in many of them becoming the Cubans in Florida.

BTW, labeling them “ex-Cubans” is a good way to piss them off (maybe that is your intention). Many see themselves as Cubans in asylum just waiting for the regime to fall and for their family homes/businesses to be returned.


>> BTW, labeling them “ex-Cubans” is a good way to piss them off (maybe that is your intention).

It was not. I was not aware that term is offensive. My apologies. Cuban Exiles is perhaps a better description.


Now that we are here, calling exiles anti-Cuban is also a good way to piss them off. That's the government stance: if you are against us, you are anti-Cuban.

This is not only a stance towards exilees, btw. If you oppose them, you get labelled the same no matter where you are.

Stop buying into the official position. It is demeaning


Yeah, as sibling comment says: the "US" as a a whole has no real interest in Cuba either way, other than a general Monroe Doctrine one. But there are enough Floridians who want to re-litigate the revolution, that feel really strongly about it, and they get to control US discourse on the subject. Because nobody else cares.


I think the corn sweetener people might also care?


Regarding MKUltra - the only reason we know what we know about it, after the CIA director directed in 1973 that all documents on it be destroyed, is that some of the MKUltra documents were mislabeled and not destroyed. They were discovered in a 1977 FOIA request.


Remember when the CIA spent six years putting together six thousand page report on the torture it conducted and then "lost" it right before it was to be delivered and then "found" it again once it was clear that they weren't going to get away with that lame excuse?

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-cia-torture/cia-says-...


I liked it better when the "Deep State" was just a conspiracy theory.


The term deep state was first used popularly far after these things were made public.


Use of the term dates back decades, and it's popularity accelerated through Bush the Younger's reign (for obvious reasons I think, Bush was widely perceived as an idiotic puppet, a theatrical figurehead for the real government (e.g. Cheney and co.))

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=deep+state&yea...


> face a Jury of your peers

Like the Arab nationalists being waterboarded in Guantanamo Bay?

Although some of them the US realized it picked up the wrong guy and released them.

Incidentally, Guaantanamo Bay is occupied by the US military against the wishes of Cuba.


> Or go to Middle East and call out their leadership and see what happen

The US and Europe have spent over a century backing despots in the Middle East and putting down or helping put down popular movements by force. The US doesn't even seem to mind if they dismember Washington Post reporters in their embassies. The US sends billions to Netanyahu every year to put down the Palestinian mass movement.

Funny how the US props up these despots, then points to them as a point of supposedly flattering comparison.


Yep. I’ll bet you did something bad once too. Now all the points you make are invalid forever.


The scale is totally the same. I used to lie to my parents about eating candy that my grandmother gave me when I was 5. The Bush administration and media apparatus told lies to the American public as pretext for an invasion that displaced ~4.5 million people and killed another ~1 million. These things are equally bad and should be treated the same way.


Hey man, if gas is expensive you vote for the other guy. Democracy can be evil like that.


Once the majority of Americans have electric cars, will US policy towards the Middle East change dramatically or stay largely the same?


Cheap fossil fuels means cheap everything else. Flights, plastic products, clothes, shipping, etc. Even cheap electricity for the electric cars.


> the price paid by their own children

If French workers allow Macron to jack the retirement age up, the price surely will be felt by their own children.


Income does not corollate exactly to relations of production, but it is a decent enough independent variable.

CNN 2020 exit poll - income over or under $100,000. The majority above voted Trump, majority below voted Biden.

https://www.cnn.com/election/2020/exit-polls/president/natio...

With regards to liberals abandoning the working class - this did not happen because liberals were never for the working class. Nor were conservatives.


> CNN 2020 exit poll - income over or under $100,000. The majority above voted Trump, majority below voted Biden.

I wonder if there is a sampling issue with the data. At $200k, the Biden/trump votes are equal.


> I was amazed when living in SF how many of the homeless are not locals. Not even Californians!

I visited the Bay Area a number of times and only met one person who was born locally. "Not even Americans!" in many cases.


The US backed radical Islamic jihadists to overthrow the secular government running Afghanistan. The US president invited them to the White House, then armed and funded them https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/Reagan_s... .

Trying to split hairs saying there was infighting and not all of them joined the Taliban does not change that.

Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda also came out of all that.

Now I'll go back to reading the mainstream media's encomiums to the Azov batallion in the Ukraine.


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