One quarter of Jakarta may be under water by 2025, study warns (December 2018)

Jakarta Is Crowded And Sinking, So Indonesia Is Moving Its Capital To Borneo (August 2019)

How long before the US administration lights out for Tulsa, I wonder.

Meanwhile, you can have some fun while Rome burns, searching on how many presidential claims that administration has to “walk back”. A recent gem–His Eminence claims, while at the G-7, that his wife is tight with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, in spite of the fact that the two have never met. The White House “clarified” that it must have seemed to our Dear Leader that it was true, because of pillow talk or something.

Or out beyond walkback: Trump floats the idea that he’d like to buy Greenland, a nice chunk of land in the warming north that happens to belong to Denmark. (Maybe it would be a better capital than Tulsa.) The Danish prime minister’s response, quite rationally, is that the idea is Absurd. Trump tweets out that the comment was “nasty”, telling reporters “You don’t talk to the US that way” (among other butthurt-sounding noises) and cancels an upcoming meeting with the Danes. One British tabloid tagged the story “Toys Out the Pram”, and that seems about right.

And the thing is, this man’s childish insanity is mirrored over and over across the world by others in the new breed of leaders. Bolsinario of Brazil, burning down the Amazon as we speak, takes a little heat for it from the French, so he takes to social media to brag that his wife is 30 years younger than the French President’s. Duterte of the Phillipines is a proud murderer of innocents who went on TV to call Obama a “son of a whore”. Britain is being run by a buffoon intent on “crashing out” of the European Union on Halloween Day.

I was a natural anarchist growing up, but I could conditionally admire FDR and JFK and even LBJ.

But the people in charge of our trail of tears march toward extinction now can, incredibly, make me long for the sober calculating evil of Nixon, the inept folksy immorality of Reagan, even the illiterate born-again musings of Bush the younger. There was at least a charade of virtue, a nominal seriousness, a half-hearted effort in the direction of dignity.

Now we have liars, killers, and narcissist clowns, completely unapologetic for what they are, with no pretense to compassion or even the self-evident truth, and the great herds of humanity are following them off the cliff like lemmings, noses buried in some app that is lying to them also, while staring back at them through the screen with cold dead eyes, trying its very best to figure out how to butcher their self-possession in a maximally profitable way.

I love you dearly Greta Thunberg, Scott Warren, Scott Carrier, Amy Goodman, Tim DeChristopher. Thank you for fighting back on behalf of what is human and gaian in us, even as the whole human experiment slides faster and faster down the black hole of inevitable oblivion.