Climate deadlock

 It is not "the Left" or "The Right" that have the actual votes. The Climate does. It does not check your vote before burning down your hillside, flooding your city, dropping a tornado or derecho just anywhere, or evaporating your reservoirs.  

It's only coordinated international work that can drive us off of carbon burning as an energy source. Nuclear has a whole other set of problems - guarding its waste for longer than recorded human history being just one of them. 

Progress in transitioning to a sustainable energy future is not something that should be hoarded by those making progress. Solutions for carbon free energy, and getting the unbalanced amount of carbon out of the atmosphere that's there is technology that must be rapidly shared without regard for profit or traditional rivalries. We have a common crisis. 

We consider acts of war justifiable - even though every act of war is a crime. As Pres. Carter remarked: we need the moral equivalent of war to attack this problem. That means we must disregard a status of protecting business and property that stand in the way of this victory, just as it is morally and civilly  justified in a war. 

Guns Are Magic

 Guns are magic!

They turn men from cowards into mighty lone warriors defending their life, their family, their culture, their home and property.

They are ONLY wielded by good guys.

The targets are well established non-persons, or the gun turns them into non-persons very quickly and conveniently. That's part of the magic. Non-persons don't have families, culture, or their own property.

It's much easier to kill the second non-person after killing the first. That wasn't so hard, was it? Automatic weapons mean you don't even have to aim so well. 

Let's get back to the coward. Where does that fear come from? How is that fear concentrated and directed? Why is there a feeling of injustice when others share the same rights you do? And why is a violent solution the preferred, even cultivated, "solution" to these fears? 

Why is a solution for security involving community support and connection, and reality checking, not the first place to go, rather than, say, a militarized police force, or self appointed individual.

That's where the real transformational magic is.

Blame Assignment

As I often I point out, it's the major parties that are "stealing the votes" from the Greens. No one voting for third parties is doing so in spite of the fact that they really want to vote for someone else, unlike major party voters. The Green agenda is the only one that truly aims to mitigate the Climate Crisis at its core, which will also have many other positive side effects in order to actually be put into place. The time to have started that work and to treat it seriously was way more than 30 years ago.

A party or faction doesn't have to win to be influential in politics - see the Republicans for an example - but having the ideas vigorously brought up in every debate is important. 

The Climate crisis is basically "whataboutism" turned inside out: literally everything else is "whataboutism". 
I like to point out Brecht's take on the Buddha's Parable of the Burning House. 
https://www.mysteriology.com/blog/the-buddhas-parable-of-the-burning-house-by-bertolt-brecht/

It will change civilized human life patterns, and not for some far off generation either. It will also take down functioning ecosystems, and to some extent, even change geography through shifting shorelines, receding glaciers and melting permafrost. The buck has already been passed to us, and we're left holding the bag (block that metaphor). There is no natural process - which is the only thing that can treat the crisis at scale - in place or planned to be in place that can deal with the enormity of our environmental sin. 

Good luck being, say, pro or anti choice as your house is swept away in a flood or derecho, your hospitals burn to the ground in wildfires, and you and your family and friends become sudden climate refugees in places where municipalities and their governments cannot handle the massive influx. 

Time zones

Time zones are determined politically. Keeping track of what time it is everywhere is subject to the whims of sovereigns and legislatures. 

Let's step back a little and ask, what do we want out of a clock? For instance, what time should solar noon be? What time should dawn be? What time should sunset be? Why should that matter?

In the tropics, this is not a big deal. However as you leave the tropics, the length of the extent of useful sunlight varies until a day (or night) lasts half a year at the poles. Approaching the poles, "the time" and "the date" are concepts that make sense somewhere else, especially after sundown.

The idea of standardized times and time zones only really dates from the age of railroads. Prior to that, you couldn't get anywhere fast enough to make a difference, and time was very local, based on the loudest clock tower. 

The continental US (sorry, Alaska and Hawaii and Guam) is about 3 hrs and 48 minutes wide. This is currently fit into 4 time zones. These zones have borders based on political boundaries, so parts of each zone may be astronomically separated by more than 1 hour. Furthermore, the length of the day in the southern parts of the country varies less than in the northern parts throughout the year. Summer daylight in Brunswick, ME is about 7 hours longer than winter daylight, whereas in Corpus Christi, TX the difference is only 4 hours. Therefore, it's less disruptive in the South to make no accommodations to the official local time than in the North.

Nevertheless, it'd be nice to get daylight aligned to a working day: so as to be able to be used during whatever passes for a commute on both ends. The easiest way to do that is to make the working day vary with the light available, or to eliminate the commute, period. Agriculture has always needed to align with natural cycles, why not everything else? 

That said, rather than linking everything to Universal Coordinated Time (UTC), which makes a lot of sense for any inter-temporal transactions, we'd like to have local times that give you an idea of how much light and heat there will be from the number alone. 

Right now, the time zones we have are not particularly accurate everywhere locally within them, but it's not that impractical. We could move to a system of finer grained zones, say, 8 of them roughly 1/2 hour wide each, and split up north to south so that southern ones don't need to compensate through the year whereas northern ones do, possibly more than twice a year. Fortunately, they'd only be a half hour early or late if they missed the time zone change. This would be much improved in terms of daylight alignment, but people would be even more angry about clock changes than they are now. 

Globally, there already are a number of  time zones aligned on the half hour relative to UTC. All of India, and Iran, for example. Nepal Time is 5 hours and 45 minutes ahead of UTC, showing it can be even more fine-grained.

China, which also spans about 4 hours in width, is all on one time zone, and the day length difference is about 14 hours longer in the summer than in winter in the far north, whereas the difference in Hong Kong is only 3 hours. Clearly, China is not fiddling with the number on the clock to make it correspond to any nation-wide concept of how a named hour is experienced!

To summarize, the current twice-a-year changes, spread among the states and possessions, is a little frustrating twice a year, but again, it's less frustrating than either making it more precise or making it less precise.