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Collapse of Industrial Civilization

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Collapse of Industrial Civilization

Author Archives: td0s

Checkmate

02 Monday May 2016

Posted by td0s in Peak Oil

≈ 71 Comments

By TDoS
Crossposted from Prayforcalamity

—

Streams of sunlight find every break in the tree canopy and beam downward, electrifying the dry leaf litter that covers the ground. Our steps are slow. My daughter is twenty five pounds and the hiking pack I carry her in is probably another five which makes the up and down slopes a significant physical endeavor. Staring always at the ground near my feet, the grays and browns flecked with green and lavender make a Renoir of the forest floor, and somewhere in that morass of color there are morel mushrooms. There must be.

We take a break on a shady hillside and my daughter walks about learning the world with her mother close behind. Bear cone sprouts in abundance from nearby oak roots tricking my eye for a quick moment, making me think I have stumbled onto a mushroom bonanza. Early settlers called it Squaw Root due to the fact that the native women used it medicinally for various menopausal or hemmoragic reasons. I prefer its other name. Bear cone doesn’t care what we call it. Every four years it rises to seed itself before continuing its parasitic relationship with whichever oak tree’s root system it has settled on. Maybe we should call it “Election Root,” or “Democracy Root.” There are no more bears here to eat it, after all.

Warm days came too fast. The ticks have been worse than I have ever known them. I already have melons and summer squash planted in the garden. The climate will continue to erase established patterns, and we will continue to take mental notes on the small details of our surroundings hoping to figure out just where it is taking us. Not until a few days ago did enough rain come to cool our temperatures back to something close to normal, and the land seems grateful, lush, green.

—

There is a question I have wrestled with for years, and which I have at times presented in my writings here. That question is essentially this: How do we destroy a thing on which we are reliant? Industrial civilization will destroy the ability of the planet to harbor life. Whether we look at climate change, topsoil loss, biodiversity loss, mass extinction, oceanic acidification and oxygen depletion, toxification of landbases, etc. we see an accelerating trend by which human industrial civilization is rendering the planet inhospitable to life, all in an attempt to boost the carrying capacity of the planet in regards only to homo sapien life. Some of these crises are so firmly established that there is seemingly no way to now cease them or to reverse the damage done. Others seem to still present a window of opportunity to intervene for the protection of viable habitat. Such interventions seem as though they must come in a form that accomplishes the near immediate halting of many if not all industrial processes, but also a dramatic alteration in the standing mythology people have concerning themselves, their societies, and where they as a species are to exist within the greater context of the living world. That is a tall order indeed.

Meanwhile, billions of human beings now rely on industrial systems to provide them with every single thing they require for survival, from basic water and sanitation to food, shelter, and medical care. How does one begin to convince these billions of people to destroy the systems they rely on? How does one begin to convince these billions of people that it is in fact, in their best interests to see that the permanence of the long term damage being wrought by these systems is not nearly worth the short term gains achieved by employing them? If the billions of people were even thusly convinced, could they even do anything about it? At what level are these billions thoroughly captive to the handfuls of humans who hold political and economic power? After all, knowing is nothing if cannot be followed by some level of doing. Is it fair to say that we are living in checkmate? Have the powers that be already won the game? Is there any move left that the populace or even some subset could make that doesn’t already have a preset counter-move lying in wait that the powerful can successfully respond with?

At times it feels as if this is the case.

I have heard people question whether or not the rich and the powerful understand that the fate of the Earth includes them and their children as well. How is it that in boardrooms and government buildings the people who have various levels of control over the systems of capital and state do not find satisfaction with their wealth and power, and then having driven us so close to the brink take contentedness with their status and finally declare, “Enough!” Why do they not look at the faces of their grandchildren and finally push the big red button that grinds the assembly line to a halt and opens up that bit of space we need to remake the world in a way that doesn’t base itself on ecocide?

And then I think, perhaps we are not living in checkmate, but a stalemate. We are in a condition in which there is no plausible move for either side. This happens in chess when a player cannot make any move because each available option opens them up to certain loss. Looking on the human subplots that round the globe it often looks like this is our condition. The populace can make no move against the state or capital without opening themselves up to certain destruction by those forces. State and capital cannot unmake their machinations without opening themselves up to certain destruction by either the masses, or more likely, by those other members of the ruling cabals. Too many contingencies have been built into the system. Too many continuity of government plans.

Imagine an M.C. Escher sketch of a Mexican stand off with apocalyptic implications.

It is in this spirit that I suggest we are post ideological fidelity. Or more simply put, we must embrace the contradiction. In the broadest of terms, we must bite the hand that feeds, taking swings and jabs at the mechanics and infrastructure of industrial civilization even as we need it and liberally make use of it. We must ignore all wails and shrieks of “hypocrisy!” as purity has become impossible, and the commandments of logic and reason that were carved into stone during an age of expanding excess are turned on their head. The actions and behaviors that such times demand are not ever going to palatable to a crowd whose notions of sensibility or righteousness were forged during an expanse of time when an increase in access to material goods was axiomatic.

To be blunt, what we need is for someone to shut this motherfucker down and to let the chips fall where they may no matter what that might mean, as long as it opens up some small possibility of a future in which the Earth can heal and the survivors, human and non, can establish themselves anew. This is the dark, adult truth as best as I can surmise it, and it is no less terrifying for me than for anyone else. My world orbits around a two year old girl. But all of my desire to see her grow into a happy and healthy women cannot convince me to look away from the abyss. I clutch her smallness and hold her deeply, knowing that the love that overflows from me for this small person is no different, no greater, no more important than the love that every parent has ever felt for their children. We walk hand in hand through the forest, and I wonder which is worse, industrial civilization collapsing tomorrow, or industrial civilization continuing unabated, thrashing and writhing as it burns up the last of the coal and the oil bringing us an ice free Arctic, drought, dust bowls, burned forests, dead oceans. What is my responsibility to her?

—

Catalhoyuk is often referred to as the “egalitarian civilization.” A neolithic settlement in what is now Turkey, it was active between 7500 and 5600 BC. The population probably rested around seven thousand people and peaked at perhaps ten thousand. What fascinates most people about Catalhoyuk is that there is no real evidence of a tiered society of classes. The interconnected network of mud brick rooms in which people resided offer no clues to a hierarchy or priestly class. More interestingly, the human remains found buried at Catalhoyuk reveal that women were as well fed as men. Buried remains do see to suggest that perhaps there was some sort of division of labor cut along gender lines, as the men are buried with stone axes and the women buried with spinning whorls.

This small civilization that existed on the boundary of the paleolithic era is the foil of anti-civ suggestion. When anti-civ proponents suggest that city based societies ultimately outstrip their land base with agriculture and inevitably create hierarchies which lead to social stratification, expansion, war, and ecological decimation, there are critics who counter, “But not at Catalhoyuk!”

Catalhoyuk is anthropologically interesting, however it is also not completely understood. Personally, I find this ancient city fascinating because it straddled the line between the inception and outright implementation of the civilized project. Murals uncovered on the walls of Catalhoyuk depict now extinct aurochs. Cattle skulls were mounted on the walls. The population of Catalhoyuk was not completely dependent upon agriculture. They grew wheat and barely and domesticated sheep, but they gathered fruits and nuts from the hills and their meat was primarily attained through hunting.

In a sense, Catalhoyuk is the half step between tribal and civilized living. Thought of in this way, it makes me wonder what such a half step would look like only moving in the opposite direction. If we were somehow able to uncivilize ourselves in a proactive fashion, what would the halfway point between here and there look like? Is such a proposition even remotely feasible? At Catalhoyuk, a thriving and unpoisoned wild still existed on the periphery. Food was still making itself in abundance beyond the city walls. Water wasn’t laden with the heavy metals and carcinogens of industry. The path towards civilization has so many emergency exits, and indeed, peoples around the world chose to walk through them when the efforts required to maintain a massive and dense city life was fully recognized. The Maya, the Hohokam, and the people of Gobekli Tepe are examples of such.

Abandoning civilization offers no easy exits. Indigenous tribes that still exist around the globe are constantly fighting to resist enclosure. Individuals who reside within the wealthy nations are falling ever so gradually under the iron grip of high technology while slowly their bodily integrity is assaulted by increasingly artificial food, man made carcinogens, radiation, and stress. The global poor are not quite so lucky, and suffer a brutal and merciless poverty of overcrowding, lack of sanitation, hunger, and hopelessness.

Optimists continually posit that there is a move we can yet make, something political or revolutionary whereby the ruling class can be ousted, and sane, empathetic and ecologically conscious people can be put in their place. In this, optimists are suggesting that if we can just coordinate and organize all of the human community, perhaps through social media and awareness campaigns, that there is some move left on the field to be played. At best they believe we can break the stalemate. At worst, they fail to realize, we already lost. Either the game is over and our opponents gloat, or we are deadlocked, staring down bewildered by the configuration of pieces while our opponents recognize the peril of our position and make their own plans for when the game board inevitably gets tossed from the table.

And that, my friend, is I believe our conundrum. There is no easy exit, no half way point on the road home to a sustainable and ecologically integrated way of living. There is a grinding and terminal lock which will only be upset by calamity. If this is truly our context, then I forgive now anyone who works to foment that upset. We are left without ethical or even seemingly rationally consistent options. Doing nothing is safe in the individual’s near term, and a death sentence generationally. Doing something means using the master’s tools to destroy the master’s house, and doing so unflinchingly, even if they are slave-made, purchased from Wal-Mart and wrapped in so much plastic. I forgive the gasoline used to sabotage the pipeline. I forgive the miles driven to dismantle the power plant. I forgive the hours spent wearing a suit and tie working for quarterly gains when the income is spent on bolt cutters, angle grinders, sledgehammers, or acetylene torches.

Nothing makes sense. We don’t have the luxury of purity.

—

Three feet into the wet clay Earth, my shovel is pulled by a suction of water and weight, and I fight it upwards before dumping the saturated brown mud along the fence line. When the shape of the hole matches the shape of the black pond liner, I wipe my brow. It is May first, and the sun is oppressive in the clearing where we have our garden. Soon our baby ducks will live outside and use this pond for water in between running about and clearing my plants of snails and slugs. Usually I would only just be planting tomatoes, if not holding off yet another week, but alas, they have been in the ground for two weeks now.

Apparently methane is bulging up from beneath the sea floor off of the coast of Siberia. The Greenland ice sheet’s summer melt began early and violently this year. Upwards of ninety-three percent of the Great Barrier reef has suffered a bleaching event. A massive drought is devastating India where water is under guard. Venezuela is experiencing a full blown economic and political collapse as power is rationed in part due to the failure of rains leading to a failure of hydroelectric dams. It is hard to not feel that the headlines of global strife are more frequent, more dire.

Night falls and my daughter and I sit in the darkness of our home, staring out at the blackness, smiling as flashes of lightning give us glimpses of the forest. Thunder rolls and she smiles at me. I smile back, and we wait.

A Demon Haunted World

31 Thursday Mar 2016

Posted by td0s in Peak Oil

≈ 21 Comments

Cross posted from PrayforCalamity
by TDoS
—

She picks up a stick. Her two year old hands are pristine, without callouses. Standing straight up she begins to walk forward on the path that leads along a ridge line deep into the forest. On uneven ground her steps still betray a clumsiness, but she overwhelms her lack of experience with exuberance and then turns to see me walking a few steps behind her.

“Dada get a big stick?”

She wants me to use a hiking stick as well. Last year I would carry her in a hiking pack, and I would use a large stick for support as I navigated slopes and downed tree trunks. Now she imitates the habit using the small bit of hickory in her hand, poking the ground with it as she walks, and she expects me to do so as well.

“You want me to find a hiking stick?”
“Uh huh.”
“How about this one?”

Leaning over I pick up a bowed piece of a fallen branch and proceed to snap off the twigs that jut from it in crooked tangles. It is a brittle piece of wood and suffices as more of an accessory than anything, but my daughter is happy that we are now both equipped for our walk. She turns once more down the path. A two year old girl takes confident steps with her hiking stick in one hand, and a plastic pink magic wand in the other. We are going out in search of fairies, and she flat refuses to embark on such an adventure without her wand.

—

Economic collapse finds itself a popular plot device across a broad spectrum of the internet. Those who anticipate such a collapse monitor the details of international trade, noting the ups and downs of stock and bond markets, currency values, volatility and shipping indices. Economic collapse is one of those concepts that is out the door and around the world generating hype, fear, and sales of pocket knives before anyone who would take the time to explore its value can even settle into an armchair. As with so many other premises and cliches we are bombarded with, most people take for granted that the economy is even a thing.

In 1776 Adam Smith published his magnum opus, “An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,” in which Smith establishes the now firmly entrenched and wholly mythical notion that barter societies preceded the invention of money, which was an inevitable progression due to its efficiency at facilitating trade. In “Nations,” Smith also establishes the idea that the economy is even a thing that exists and that can be studied. Of course, it will be men like himself that are capable of doing the studying and imparting their wisdom onto the world. It is quite a ruse, if you think about it, inventing a specter and then inventing the business of studying it.

When we speak of “the economy,” what are we even talking about? The Dow Jones Industrial? The S&P 500? Or are we merely speaking of some amalgamation of the habits and behaviors of humans which combine to provide for our daily acquisition of needs? It may seem silly to question because it is such a prevalent notion in this culture, but for the majority of human existence, there was no economy. It was an idea that had to be invented, and now, there are whole academic wings dedicated to the maintenance of the idea, as well as sections in newspapers and channels on television focused solely on its changing winds. Those who lord over such institutions have their charts and maps and a host of methods for describing the economy to everyone else. At times, they speak of their trade as a science, which would lead one to believe that the thing which they observe is predictable, that they could establish some level of capable control over it. At other times, the economy is a wild thing, and it moves and thrashes of its own chaotic will like a storm squall.

So people watch the signs. They generate charts. They consult the experts. Some believe that the economy, despite its tantrums, is an all loving God that will always rise again, and so they tithe. Others believe the economy is a false idol set to feast on the souls of the avaricious or the merely ignorant, and so they prepare.

—

As someone who long ago came to the conclusion that the civilized method of human organization is one that is always bound to fail, I have many times put forth the suggestion that we need to transition into living arrangements that do not rely on the creation of cities. This is all to say, I have an anti-civilzation philosophy, which to the uninitiated perhaps seems extreme or absurd. Consider quickly, this definition of civilization offered by wikipedia:

“A civilization is any complex society characterized by urban development, social stratification, symbolic communication forms (typically, writing systems), and a perceived separation from and domination over the natural environment by a cultural elite. Civilizations are intimately associated with and often further defined by other socio-politico-economic characteristics, including centralization, the domestication of both humans and other organisms, specialization of labor, culturally ingrained ideologies of progress and supremacism, monumental architecture, taxation, societal dependence upon farming as an agricultural practice, and expansionism.”

To be against civilization is not to be in favor of some inhumanity towards others, but simply to believe that urban development, infinite growth, ecological destruction, social stratification, agriculture, etc. are ultimately unsustainable pursuits that are dooming our possibility of existing very far into the future. Further, the anthropocentrism inherent in such societies results in the widespread extirpation of the other beings with who we share this planet.

Suggesting that we abandon, once and for all, the project of civilization is often met with a buffet of criticisms. That civilization gave us the sciences, and the sciences – usually now expressed simply as Science! – gave us a candle in an otherwise dark, demon haunted world, is usually proffered as reason enough for humanity to continue on a civilized trajectory. Critics of anti-civ ideas would have us believe that as primitive people we lived in constant fear of disembodied spirits that stalked and haunted us, manifesting as sickness and death that we could not otherwise explain. Science! they claim, was a great demon slayer that has brought illumination in the form of germ theory and biology, and thanks to optics of all kinds, both micro and telescope, we can see that the universe both minute and macro is not subject to god or djinn, not spirit or elemental but merely to the wind of a grand mechanical clock of subatomic particles and fundamental forces.

What light! It bathes us in such cleansing luminance! Fear not as you walk through the world sons of Ptolemy and daughters of Hypatia!

Now check your stocks. There are movement in the markets. How is your 401K?

—

More is happening in the space around you than you can possibly imagine. Your body is equipped with various sensory abilities that allow you to gather information about the world around you, and this information is used to generate a picture of existence that you as a biological entity can use to go forth and attain your survival. This picture exists in your mind only, and it is further shaped and formed by your particular biological makeup, as well as the cultural programming that you have been inculcated with since birth.

The world you see is not the world I see, let alone, is not the world an owl, or a butterfly, or a snap pea sees. Human societies have a habit of claiming that through their sciences that have been able to package and interpret reality as it is. The fun sets in when we notice that each of these societies that has claimed such a handle on reality have all, in fact, had different descriptions of reality.

Again, more is happening around us than we could know. We are filtering. We are constructing from the pieces we capture. We are naming and simplifying and manufacturing volumes of symbols. In a sense, we must do so so as not to be crippled by the overwhelming weight of all that we experience. But ultimately, more is not included in our picture of the world than is included. The cutting room floor actually contains more reality than the final film playing out in our heads.

It is this understanding that stays my hand when others might wave theirs in dismissal of the disembodied phenomena that live outside of the lens we in the modern industrial world currently use to view our surroundings. Those who fear the crumbling of the city walls for what hordes of demons might come rushing in like a torrent to corrupt our understandings so finely crafted over centuries of weighing and measuring might do well to look around and see which demons already stalk the streets and halls. We have traded one set of lesser gods for another. You many not make offerings to the spirits of rain after holding the dry dirt in your fingers, but your faith in tomorrow’s full stomach might have you watching for a little green triangle to come drifting across a stock ticker. Where a few centuries ago a geomancer may have cast a chart that relied on the anima mundi – or soul of the Earth – for its answers, today’s economists are numerologists drawing meaning from the staggered lines that connect disparate values of commodities and currencies, hoping to tease from it all some prediction about future well being.

Am I attempting to claim that germs do not exist? Of course not. Am I attempting to claim that science has produced nothing of value? Of course not. I am simply suggesting that civilized life has not rid the world of demons, but merely shifted the demons we concern ourselves with. Priests have not gone out of fashion, to be sure, they just wear a different costume and spin incantations of a new variety. This class of priests extends far beyond the realm of economics, and the demons they promise to exorcise can be found anywhere uncertainty and fear have taken root. The simple fact is that life is a dangerous pursuit, and we all enter into it with a debt. We owe our lives and will all be held to account sooner or later. If we do not create cultures capable of accepting this most basic truth, we will invariably create cultures that attempt to mitigate our fear of death with palliatives. The palliative du jour in our particular civilization is technological domination of the ecological systems of the Earth, and it is this behavior that is responsible for the variety of cataclysms now unfolding globally. Sea ice melt, top soil loss, forest die offs, oceanic dead zones, mass extinction of species, climatic disruption; all have now long passed the formative stage and are well underway.

But so afraid of the dark beyond the city gates, the civilized world clings to their neon gods. They pray to markets and justice, progress and innovation. The Maya may have found it prudent to sacrifice some humans, perhaps by throwing them into a cenote or by letting the blood of a Pok-ta-tok victor to replenish the vigor of the tree of life. We modern civilized are far more sophisticated, and instead sacrifice the salamander, the Ash tree, the island chain, the clean flowing river, the indigenous tribe, or the global poor.

If we refuse to defecate in the river because we consider the water sacred and believe it contains within it a spirit of its own, does it matter? The water runs clean. If we continue to clear cut jungles so as to mine for rare Earth metals using diesel fuel and laborers fed mono-crops all because we believe that technology will somehow repair the wounds we have inflicted on the living planet, can we really claim that our demon free world is now safer?

—

She kicks up leaves as she walks.

“Shh!” I crouch low, squatting on my hams and I tap my ear with a forefinger. “Listen.” My daughter emulates my posture and I cannot help but smile. She looks out into the mass of trees before us. I whisper when I ask her if she sees any fairies, and she whispers her replies.

“Yes.”
“How many?”
“Two fairies.”
“What color are they?”
“Blue.”

The afternoon sunlight is gold as it falls all around us. We stay there a while and I tell her that we must not disturb the fairies. We tell them that we are not there to do them any harm. We are nice people, we assure them. We hope that they are safe in the forest and we wish them well in their endeavors. After all, the forest can also be home to goblins, which is why I am glad my daughter has her wand.

Tribute to the City

24 Thursday Mar 2016

Posted by td0s in Peak Oil

≈ 11 Comments

Cross Posted from Prayforcalamity
by TDoS
—

The vernal equinox has come and passed and with it the official start of spring is here in the northern hemisphere. Across the countryside Jane Magnolia trees have awoken. Their hundreds of fingers each cupping rose colored blooms like candles, as if they were so many tiny lavender hands offering up communion to the sun. Daffodils peer out of the hillside clearings like periscopes or perhaps yellow gramophones all playing a song of rebirth to call back the songbirds and honeybees. The energy sequestered in the root-balls and mycelium mats as the land went to sleep the last few months has begun surging upward, and it is hard to not feel it flowing through me as I walk my land taking stock of which fruit trees and berry bushes are producing buds. A good friend of mine, and mentor, once told me that I am doing well if I can establish two fruit trees per year. Looking at my spread of apple trees, it looks like I am on track to have done well in that regard. My partner does all of the work to care for our bee hive, and after donning her protective veil for a spring inspection, she reported to me that the hive is in great condition. I have heard it said that bees surviving the winter is what converts one from a bee-haver into a bee-keeper.

Our garden calls for much attention, and each week I spread a truck load of wood chips on the walking paths, which were first covered with flattened cardboard. Hopefully this effort will buy me a few years of relatively weed free walkways. Mint is returning with a vigor, and the strawberry leaves are vibrantly green. Kale, spinach, beets, and parsnips have been seeded, and I am keeping a keen eye for the first asparagus shoots. This year I have to grow significantly more food than I have in the past, as my partner is returning to work full time and I will be staying home during the week days with our daughter. In the short term we will have less money, but I will have more time to attend to tasks around the homestead. Walking through the garden brings me such a deep sense of calm as I talk to the plants and lose myself in my many tasks. Starting seeds is a great way to practice slowing oneself down, especially small seeds that tend to stick together like those of tomatoes and carrots.

I find myself happy as the sun tans my shoulders and a red tailed hawk cries from its nest somewhere high up in the trees behind me.

—

February was the warmest month in recorded history. The record it broke for such crowning glory had been set in December. February temperatures saw the Earth cross the two degrees centigrade above pre-industrial average barrier that has been established as a hard danger zone by climate scientists. It was an anomaly, for now, but one that is likely to rear itself again and again. The most dramatic warming has been in the Arctic, which bodes ill for jet stream patterns as well as summer sea ice coverage. Time will tell if we see our first ice free Arctic this summer. Somehow the magnitude of the crisis of climate change still seems to evade most general discourse despite the pomp and show of the electoral season now in bloom in the US. There are lots of grand promises being hurled at the public about bringing manufacturing jobs back stateside. If that is not the dictionary definition of cognitive dissonance then I do not know what is. Industrialism long ago set us on a crash course with calamity, and now that the calamity has begun to rain down upon the world in the form of mega droughts, fires, famines, and super-storms, those angling for positions of power are promising more industrialism.

Of course, it is not even a job in a factory per se that most Americans dwelling in the rust belt actually want, it is a secure living situation. They want their basic needs met in a way that does not leave them uncertain and wrecked by stress month after month. It is a culture of production organized and operated through the machinations of capitalism that requires that people work a job in order to have these needs met in such a satisfactory way. When politicians say “Jobs!” it has become a Pavlovian response for the middle, and formerly middle, classes to come salivating like starving dogs to desperately pull a lever in their favor. They forget that first the food, and the land, and the ability to provide for oneself had to be taken away before they could be forced to work jobs for these things. A great deprivation preceded the creation of job economies whereby everyone was made to punch a clock and become the automaton of some civilized production scheme in order to have enough to eat and a place to sleep at night. This deprivation now long forgotten, people have no memory of themselves as anything but workers, and so they beg for work.

Neo-liberal capitalism may be the dominant platform by which this scheme is globally enacted, but it is merely the software that operates on the hardware of the civilized model of human organization. It is key to recall that ecological decimation was the order of the day long before the advent of capitalism. Forests had been clear cut from the Levant, through Greece and across Europe and the UK as civilization marched across the ancient world, slashing and burning its path to conquest and dominion over greater and greater expanses of the Earth. This pattern was repeated globally where ever civilizations formed. The Maya deforested the jungles of the Yucatan Peninsula long before Europeans brought their particular version of civilization to the continent and eventually ran head first into the consequences of such short sighted actions. The Aztecs, who may have created one of the more arguably “sustainable” cities in Tenochtitlan, did so on the backbone of war, expansion, tribute, slavery, and human sacrifice. Sure, they recycled their human excrement for crop fertilizer in their Chinampas, but they also relied on the growth of the territory that they dominated through blood shed. Food, firewood, and other material goods flowed into the city from outlying tribute towns where common people had to work to not only provide for themselves, but to pay a quarterly tribute to the city center of the empire.

Such is the way with cities. Goods and raw materials flow in and waste flows out. Cities harvest the natural wealth of outlying areas, and this model is now global, with powerful nations harvesting the material wealth of poor nations. No matter how desperately people may want to believe in the idea of the “sustainable city,” it is a contradiction of terms. Austin, Texas proclaims itself “America’s most sustainable city,” yet every day truckloads of food make deliveries while truck loads of garbage and waste are removed. The city depends on dammed lakes off the lower Colorado river for water which will one day fail to support the city’s growing population, and which in the present deprive down stream communities. According to 2010 data, households in Austin spent the most money on gasoline relative to other American cities. And Austin continues to grow, to cover more of the land in concrete preventing the recharging of the Edward’s Aquifer and demanding more energy for cooling as the city can have over one-hundred days in a year that breach one-hundred degrees fahrenheit.

A recent study calculated how much food the city of Seattle could produce based on how much solar radiation falls on its potentially farmable locations, including parks, rooftops, and yards. Even selecting crops that grow well in Seattle’s climate conditions the study’s authors determined that the city could provide only one percent of its food needs. If the streets and sidewalks were ripped up, the number could rise to two or three percent, but the city would lose functionality. After all, even if day to day travel was carried out on foot or on bicycle, deliveries with diesel powered semi-trucks would still be necessary for everything the city’s inhabitants required, from clothes, to air conditioners, to building materials, and of course, the other ninety-eight percent of the food they could not produce for themselves.

Sustainable living and cities are not compatible. This is not a matter of ideology. This is a matter of hard material reality, and suggestions that somehow 3D printing or vertical farms or a population fed a steady diet of algae shakes will be just the miracle we need to upend hard material constraints are at best, petulant whimpers of those who have become accustomed the vast wealth of selection that living in a first-world city provides, or at worst, Kubler-Ross stage three bargaining, hoping that somehow, by some stretch of compromise we can sustain the unsustainable.

But we can’t. Not without expansion. Not without tribute. Not without an exploitative power dynamic and flows of violence that may or may not be visible from the comfortable confines.

—

Hot coffee is a miracle, or damn near one. Every morning millions of Americans have a cup or two of hot coffee, the beans of which were grown in Columbia, or Ethiopia, or Hawaii. Maybe those Americans have tea grown in India or a banana grown in Peru. They pull on shoes made in Vietnam and perhaps ride their bicycle made with bauxite mined in Australia on a road paved with bitumen from Alberta. Perhaps these Americans stop off at a local food co-op or farmer’s market where they purchase some locally grown kale. They take pictures of the fresh eggs at the market with their iPhone which has a slew of globally sourced components buried within it, and they post this photo online with the help of a network of satellites and tag it with some cute caption about sustainability.

When the average American city dweller thinks about urban living, they likely think of the comedy clubs, the used book stores, the fusion restaurants, or the bars. They fail to think about the global hegemony of the United States military and how a worldwide network of bases has laid the foundation for dollar dominance. Most of the American or European or Australian or Canadian city dwellers who stammer on about generating green, sustainable cities are not picturing the mega-cities of the world like Dakha or Rio de Janeiro. Millions of children living in the squalor of slums and favelas, tin roofed shacks and human waste littering the streets and waterways are not what the white first worlders are picturing in their minds when they declare the supremacy of urban existence. Even the relatively lucky people in Hong Kong or Manila live in crammed, small apartments set inside concrete towers that resemble prisons more than anything else.

The wealth extracted from around the planet by western powers over the course of centuries, a process which went into overdrive in the twentieth century, has absolutely skewed the perceptions of those average citizens who reside within these conquistador nations. Like Tenochtitlan, the US and its neo-liberal capitalist crony nations exact tribute from the global poor. We may not adorn ourselves in exotic feathers and obsidian jewelry, but our sneakers and our jeans and our lattes and our cellphones will never be sustainably sourced and manufactured within the footprint of our home city limits. It is just not possible. We can have civilization, or we can have a livable planet, but we cannot have both.

—

Phosphorous leaches from agricultural and manufacturing sources into water ways. Eventually it alters the chemistry of these waterways creating the conditions that support toxic algae blooms. Power plants are often built along waterways. Coal fired plants have been using rivers such as the Ohio as a waste dump for decades. Radioactive tritium has been leaching into the groundwater from the Indian Point nuclear plant in New York, and the leak is getting worse. The Turkey Point nuclear power facility is leaking waste into Biscayne Bay just outside of Miami.

Often when I discuss the destruction wrought by civilized existence, the first critique hurled in my direction is that, “We cannot go back.” On this point, I agree. We cannot go back because civilization has greatly destroyed the ability of so many natural systems to harbor life. Industrial civilization will decay and fracture in the coming decades and centuries. I do not know how this process will play out or how long it will take to complete, but I feel that I could safely suggest that several generations from now the people who are making new ways of living will curse the stupidity and greed of those who poisoned the water. They will wonder what demons possessed our hearts with such a dark poison that we could so callously wipe out the other living beings who we rely on for survival.

In the dry wastes a young girl will dig for tubers amongst a backdrop of drought ravaged trees and the charcoal remains of those that burned in the previous season. Seeking a nourishing root she finds the bric a brac of our brain dead culture; a plastic fork, a beer can, rubber testicles that once swung from a pick-up truck’s trailer hitch. Yee haw.

Her family boils caught rainwater unaware that it contains heavy metals which will be responsible for some of their eventual deaths. They will laugh, as people do, and they will tell cautionary tales about a long ago world in which people set the sky on fire.

Whatever gods there may be forgive us. We were drunk on oil and pictures of ourselves. We really wanted good jobs.

The Art of Yielding

10 Thursday Mar 2016

Posted by td0s in Peak Oil

≈ 13 Comments

Cross posted from: Prayforcalamity.com
by TDoS

—

The ache in my left arm seems to travel up a nerve towards my shoulder. I wince as I stretch the arm up and then rotate it in an arc. Every Friday night I attend a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu class, and last week during open rolling – which, to the uninitiated, is essentially grappling with a partner – I was thrown to the mat by a zealous fellow student, and crashing onto my left arm I immediately felt the shock of pain that now lingers there in my bicep. At the time I was bit angry, as the amount of strength my opponent applied was a bit excessive for such a drill, but thinking about it now perhaps that is foolish of me. It is a fight exercise after all. Myself, I am always slow to apply great strength in any drill, as I am fairly frightened of hurting someone. I often find that during a roll where I am dominant and pressing down with intense force that I periodically ask my opponent if they are OK. If they weren’t, they of course, could easily tap out, but still, it concerns me that I might needlessly hurt someone.

Jiu Jitsu, if we return to the Japanese root words (Ju Jutsu) is the art of yielding. As combatants roll they are applying strength and force, but they are also reading the direction of the force being applied against themselves and then attempting to use their opponents energy against them. My trainer once relayed a statement that he heard from a master practitioner, which was essentially that all of Jiu Jitsu is knowing which square inch of the opponent on which to apply all of one’s body weight, and knowing when to do it. This trainer is by day, a police officer. Funny, myself an anarchist, a vehement supporter of efforts to abolish prisons and police, respectfully and humbly listening to this man and trying to always devour with my eyes all of his movements and motions so that I can absorb them in the fibers of my own legs and hips. I laugh at his jokes, as he is genuinely funny, and in the next moment, I imagine him using the very techniques he is demonstrating to subdue me in the streets. I wonder how these skills he imparts on me have been applied against people who now sit in a prison. When we roll, he out classes and out strengths me, but each time I am able to resist his efforts to sweep me, I smile. That smile is then quickly followed by him quickly overtaking me.

Life is complicated and so entirely writ with nuance and irony. There is a beauty to such contradictions, and I am grateful to be reminded of the great complexity of our context, and I am grateful too for the reminder that a world so replete with complexity and contradiction is a world in which easy answers need not apply. Often we simplify what we experience to make our day to day existence easier or more efficient. In doing so, we almost certainly shuck away the truth of things until we create an existence with a lot more mutual exclusivity than is actually present. We make binaries out of gradients. This is often necessary. It is also often the first step towards justifying violence as it is the root of manifesting the “other.”

—

Thirteen people were arrested in Anaheim this past week as a Ku Klux Klan rally was quickly cut short by anti fascist activists who confronted and then fought with the Klan members. The Klan members pulled knives, and even used the point on the tip of a flag pole to fight back, and they ultimately stabbed three people. Back in 2012 several young people crashed a meeting of white supremacists in Tinley Park, Illinois attacking the attendees. Five of them were eventually arrested and served prison sentences. Anti-racist actions such as these often have mild mannered Americans suggesting that we must refrain from violence and respect free speech. They follow with the claim that the only weapon to be used against Klan members and neo-nazis is either counter speech, or out right ignoring them.

The logic of such suggestions goes like this:

Free speech will conquer bad ideas and hate. Those with hateful ideologies will be shown as the fools they are by the reasoned counter arguments of those who oppose them, and these counter arguments will affect society at large in a positive way, resulting in a society in which those who proliferate hate speech are mocked and shunned. Thus, no violence is necessary to counter them. Further, the application of violence to counter speech opens us to the “slippery slope” whereby violence is brought against more and more people for even slight deviations in thought or opinion. Also, violence begets violence, so we should always and forever avoid it.

The entirety of this issue needs unpacking because it is quite convoluted. “Free Speech,” as it is referred to in the United States is a reference to a constitutional protection offered by the first amendment which prohibits the government from interfering with the speech of individuals and groups. It is not an obligation of an individual to hear out any other. Of course, it should be said that like most constitutional protections, “free speech” goes right out the window once it is not convenient for the state or their capitalist counterparts. Endless videos of protesters being gleefully beaten by the police can attest to this fact.

Obviously, unthinking and mindless violence is not the tool we should immediately reach for every time someone says something we disagree with. Someone at a bar stating that, “climate change is a hoax,” is not justification for me to haul off and break his nose. As a long time bartender, I have found that usually mockery and humor are the best weapons against the drunken loud mouth who wants to use my bar top as his soap box. This is a skill I have finely tuned over many years of dealing with drunks, almost always men, who after a few beers want to loudly espouse their right wing talking points. I may well be a black belt in rhetorical judo.

However, what if this person says, “I am going to fucking kill you!” Am I justified then in kicking him in the jaw and crushing his face into the floor? Surely I would need to read the tone and intention in his voice, but the point remains that a direct threat of aggression permits a response that can meet and dislocate the threat. And that is where the waters begin to muddy. The Klan has an extremely violent history. Their rhetoric is rhetoric of violence towards entire swathes of the population. How tolerant should the general public be of a group that has incited horrendous and gruesome violence spanning generations?

More imporantly, how patient should the would be victims of racist violence be with liberal society’s calm and reasoned counter arguments? If a cross is burned in your front yard, or a black man dragged behind a pickup truck in your town, should you sit back and wait for well articulated, non-violent responses to convince white supremacists of the inappropriateness of their behavior? The sheer fact is, that sometimes, counter violence is the exact response necessary. Indigenous peoples were completely justified in fighting back against the encroaching settler presence as it occurred in the Americas. It is still the appropriate response in those last places where indigenous peoples live in their traditional homelands which are threatened by attempts at civilized exploitation, be it for the construction of an oil pipeline, a hydroelectric dam, a nuclear waste dump, or the construction of a university telescope.

Those who are the victims of the violence meted out by the dominant culture need not wait for those behind the levers of power to spawn a conscience. They need not wait for a critical mass of pacifists to turn the gears of democracy and generate a legal response for their protection.

I am reminded of Albert Camus’ Letters to a German Friend, in which he laments the absence of an immediate and forceful response on the part of the French to Nazi aggression. Camus suggests that the French consciousness is one which responds to the absurdity of the human condition by seeking beauty and love, whereas the Nazi response was one of nihilism and the pursuit of conquest. Such dispositions gave the Nazi an advantage over the French who first pontificated on the righteousness of counter violence. The Nazi did not care for such ethical questions, and according to Camus, in the end it took the French coming to terms with the righteousness of their position, indeed, it took the confidence of spirit and the sword together to be victorious over the Nazi:

“…[W]e shall be victorious thanks to that very defeat, to that long, slow progress during which we found our justification, to that suffering which, in all its injustice, taught us a lesson. It taught us that, contrary to what we sometimes used to think, the spirit is of no avail against the sword, but that the spirit together with the sword will always win out over the sword alone.”

—

Any suggestion that the tool of violence is appropriate does require that those who would take it up think long and hard about the implications of their actions. Our world of seven billion people and growing is a world of seven billion minds all generating individual interpretations of reality. To be sure, the majority of those minds are convinced of the righteousness of their actions and ideologies. The abortion clinic bomber is convinced that his is a justifiable counter-violence. The ISIS executioner is convinced that his is a justifiable counter-violence. The anarchist arsonist and US military drone pilot are likely also convinced that theirs is a justifiable counter violence. How in such a cacophony of noise, confusion, and rash behavior can one escape what is a seemingly impossible knot of human delusion, anger, and misunderstanding? How in good conscience can a person with deep concerns for autonomy, cooperation, and compassion suggest adding to the violence and misery of the world?

When would it have been OK to start attacking Nazis during the rise of the third reich? When Hitler was giving speeches in small halls to small audiences, would it have been reasonable counter violence for anti-fascists to have attacked him and his cadres? There would have been a point in time where this small man loudly screaming his nonsense to a room of twenty people was absolutely laughable. Rational minds would say, “Just ignore him! He is a fool, and he and his ideology will amount to nothing.” Years later there would have been a time when organizing to violently confront Nazis would have meant a death sentence, when the party already controlled the state apparatus and resistance would have been near impossible. At what point in between was the exact right moment to strike, according to a pacifist or liberal dogma?

This is the trouble with nuance. Easy answers are usually wrong answers. To strike opens us up to greater realms of ethical complexity and realms of possible negative fallout. To wait cedes crucial time and ground to those who have absolutely no concerns for such ethics. At what time, and what place, do we place one hundred percent of our strength? When do we yield and allow the momentum of our opponents to be their own undoing?

Sometimes yielding is fighting. And sometimes you give up your back and get caught in a vicious rear naked choke. Master tacticians can be brutal in their yielding. But even master tacticians can be knifed in the dark. As Mike Tyson said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”

At the end of it all, we must choose which is the preferable mistake, and in making such mistakes we put our souls on the line, killing an integral part of ourselves because we hope that in doing so a greater beauty is allowed to survive. Then we pray that our children can forgive us.

I, for one, will not err in favor of compassion for a Nazi.

—

Choirs of frogs still sing along the rim of the pond as dawn breaks. While still technically winter, the robin hopping along the ground near budding daffodils tells me that spring is here. Another cold front is always possible, but this winter that never really materialized is bowing out. The garden calls for so much attention. Greens need to be planted, pathways need covering with wood chips, and I need to get annual seeds started and placed in a cold frame. Energy surges upward from the subterranean metropolis of tree roots and mycelium, and as it flows through the flesh of hickory and maple, oak and dogwood, so to it flows through my limbs. I am anxious to get back to the long, slow process of developing our homestead. My endless list of projects is less daunting these days as I approach it one job at a time.

Out in the world of human hollering and bickering, an impending election is drawing a lot of attention. I try to ignore it. I try to focus on our small hollow here in the backwoods. Our community of young families trying to get by on the day to day with what little we have while surmounting the challenges that the raw entropy of civilized life throws at us can absorb pretty much all of the mental capacity I have to offer. But then there are whispers and hints that the authoritarianism and racism being whipped up by certain campaigners finds it way to my ears, and I ask myself, if it comes here openly and brazenly, what am I to do? What cannot be tolerated? What requires a response, and am I prepared to offer one?

Perhaps we should all start asking ourselves such questions. By the time the shadow has covered us all, it is too late to take shelter from the storm.

Filling the Void

18 Thursday Feb 2016

Posted by td0s in Peak Oil

≈ 21 Comments

Cross posted from PrayforCalamity
by TDOS
___

The flue damper drops with an iron clang that reverberates through the kitchen. At three hundred square feet, the straw bale cabin we are currently living in heats easily with the old wood stove. I pile the belly of the steel box high with oak so my lady and our daughter can return to a warm home. Plodding through the snow in my knee high boots, I head out to start my Cherokee. It fights me when temperatures are below freezing, and convincing the engine to turn over requires patience and a handful of tricks, including occasionally popping the hood and manually pumping some gas at the fuel rail. This is not a process I enjoy, and I have been researching a solution for a couple of weeks now. It would seem that a new fuel pump and assembly are in order. Last week found me replacing degraded “O” rings in the oil filter adapter to seal a leak there. Removing the filter adapter was an exercise in zen. The process required that I lay on the cement floor of my friend’s unheated garage, the ground drawing my heat from me, as I removed a very inconveniently placed motor mount bolt while flecks of aged engine grime fell into my eyes and mouth. Turning a wrench an eighth of an inch at a time can really ground you. On my next day off I can try to tackle this rough start problem. Always making plans, making to do lists, spending my days before I meet them.

The driveway is a little over a half mile long, and I move slowly over it, absorbing the details of the forest on every side of me. Gray sky, born of a mist that intermingles with the countless slender fingers of trees reaching upwards, arterial in their deliberate formlessness. A monochrome wash of tones accentuates the golden leaves of the beech trees. These small tear drops of paper flicker like watercolor candlelight. Through the forest I curve on roads still layered in an inch or two of snow. Even the thinnest branches of the trees all have a brushstroke of white highlighting their organic motion, which speaks of rivers and lightning, of nerves and fissures, of the geometry of the world entire. It is clear to me in this moment that I am witnessing poetry, that the Earth sings, that there is the most amazing, most gut-wrenchingly divine performance before us, all containing pieces of wisdom great and small, waiting for us to grasp them. And we don’t care. We aren’t interested.

A car pulls up close behind me. I am driving too slowly. I let them pass.

—

Collapse is a very odd fascination. I cannot help but think that such an interest is a by-product of the civilized mind. I also cannot help but think that the collapse so many people fear is related to their perception of time, which is in its modern form, shaped by the superstructure of our society. Capitalism has commodified our time. People in our culture sign thirty year mortgages, they make promises to pay for cars and phones and anything that can be bought with a credit card. The entirety of neoliberal capitalism is predicated on the notion that there will be more energy and stuff tomorrow than there was today. Imaginary wealth in the form of digital notations, be they named “stocks” or “bonds” or any other “investment vehicle” exists purely in an abstract future space. Civilization already has us living within the confines of abstractions built from so much collective imagining, and these abstractions form the foundation of an even more illusory notion of time in which we have convinced ourselves that we exist. When predominantly western, white, middle class people fear collapse, what exactly are they even talking about? I posit that they are actually anxious about the destruction of the future, by which I mean a constructed notion that does not actually exist.

Certainly, I am out on a limb, but that is exactly where I mean to be. Time, as it is, is not “Time” as we experience it. This is not surprising, as nothing is as we experience it. We interpret the world around us via our senses and generate a picture of it in our heads, which itself is informed by our individual biology and experience. When we speak of time, we are speaking of the abstract way in which we interpret it. Past, present, and future are clunky attempts to place ourselves within this abstract notion we ourselves have imagined into being. This understanding is culturally informed and not a hard and fast representation of reality. Not surprisingly, modern industrial civilization has imagined time into the most expedient and efficient of forms for the benefit of production; the straight line.

Over the years I have found myself constantly hurrying, loading myself with tasks in order to manifest the future. When I was saving money to buy land, I was constantly at work, picking up extra shifts, staying late. When my partner and I finally bought our land, I had to build a house, and do it quickly. If I was idle, if I spent a day at rest, I felt guilty. This guilt still builds in me whenever I find myself not busying about. Always I am in a hurry to manifest the future, and most importantly, to have it match the abstract picture I have generated in my head. It is almost as if the very existence of tomorrow depends upon me laboring to generate time itself, that without me holding it on my shoulders like Atlas, the future will fall out of being. And then where will I be? In the uselessness of the present, which is itself, destined to be an obsolete and immutable past mere microseconds from now.

The civilized mind is bent on domination. The land must be bent to serve human desires. The flesh of other beings must be whipped and tormented into serving human desires. The bodies of women must be confined, contorted, and too often forced to serve the desires of men. The story of civilization is the story of domination, the exertion of force and the repudiation of symbiosis. Interestingly, the abstract notion of time generated by the civilized mind is just another tool designed to dominate, however it contains within it a contradiction; time as modeled by civilization is infinite, particularly as it projects into the future. This creates a conundrum, as the generation of an infinite future space creates an infinite workload on the civilized mind, having to now manifest, maintain, and control an infinite terrain.

So we see the denizens of working class westerners labor endlessly in an attempt to place their circumstances in crystal, to eliminate any variance or uncertainty from days to come. Can this reasonably be described as anything other than absurd? Perhaps insane?

—

Sweet potatoes stick out the top of water-filled mason jars along my window. In time they will drop roots and then slips with small purple leaves will spout from them. I will pull the slips and place them in water where they will establish further roots, and when the last danger of spring frost has passed, I will plant the slips in my garden. All of this exists in a future I have concocted in my mind. Agriculture cannot exist without a plan, without a perception of a day many days beyond this one. Civilization requires that we collectively imagine tomorrow into being, in full technicolor and high definition detail. It is hard for me to not assume that this requirement is the birth of anxiety and stress.

Abstract notions of time are, like all of our abstractions, a tool. We create tools to serve a need. Tools require not only the knowledge of how to generate or operate them, but the wisdom to do so skillfully, safely, and most importantly, of when to not use them. As is the case with the vast majority of the cognitive tools civilized humans have invented, we have found ourselves in the service of the tool of time. We are not present. We are not here. We are not listening to the poetry of the world before us because we are altogether somewhere else.

Of course, there will be those who insist that without a view of the future, we will destroy the world of the present. After all, if someone takes all of the fish from a river or dumps radioactive waste in the ocean for a benefit here and now, the future will be one in which no one will be able to eat from the rivers or oceans. Why is it then, that we see these very same behaviors running rampant at the hands of a culture so lost in its projections of time? The very economic structure of capitalism demands that tomorrow contain more production than today, yet it simultaneously destroys that very possibility. So lost in a vision of the future, capitalism blinds modern civilization to the actual makeup of the present. The map is given precendent over the terrain.

There exist cliches about various indigenous cultures maintaining a concern for their progeny seven generations out. Such ideas would suggest that concern for the future, or the invention of the future as an abstraction, is not a product of the civilized mind at all, but the human mind. Still, it strikes me as highly unlikely that any band of hunter gatherers would find themselves so concerned with a decline and fall of their world in some distant time to come. Obviously, any attempt to think the thoughts of an imagined person is some long ago circumstance is open to folly, but none the less, when I do attempt to place my own mind in such circumstances, what jumps out at me is this: Pre-civilized hunter gatherers would exist in a world where everything around them that they interacted with was placed there by nature. Pre-civilized humans must have remained ever cognizant of their surroundings, paying attention to the plethora of details in their experience in order to find food, avoid danger, note their location, etc. Seemingly, such people would find their minds more present in their circumstances. Perhaps at night they would lose themselves in thought as they stared deeply into the night sky or the cook fire, but I digress. It is hard to imagine pre-civilized people creating and agonizing over the future the way civilized humans do.

For a bit more insight on this issue, I asked a Metis man about the civilized notion of time versus the indigenous notion, and he had this to say:

“Talking about core pillars of a completely foreign worldview very quickly turns into an esoteric mess. Any explanation of concepts of time, like saying time is cyclical will have a westerner looking for spots to add his seconds, minutes, and hours. The concept of future apart from past and present suggests a linear view of time. If you stand at the center of a circle with the past present and future all flowing within the circle, where are you? And why would you not be able to see a future? Euro worldview sees the future as a black void that needs to be filled with all the new stuff one can imagine into being. Their present is of no consequence, as it quickly becomes a frozen point in the past that can not interact with the present and certainly not the future void. Indigenous worldview sees a future that looks much like the present and past if all beings act in a responsible way. European worldview is collapse, it is an irresponsible actor.

Indigenous peoples are often accused of claiming European Worldview is evil. This is not the case. It is seen as a mental illness. That mental illness has now infected most of the human population.”

—

People who talk to trees are very unlikely to clear cut a forest. Mainstream society would consider such people crazy. People who reject a linear notion of time, who speak to their ancestors and believe that the past is just as important as the present and the future, do not create economic systems that are predicated upon the infinite growth of material production. Mainstream society would consider such people crazy. As I sit here I cannot say that I know for certain the shape or make up of time. I can say that the tools we create are of limited use, and that when they bend us to their service and to our own detriment, we are fools to not remake them, if not abandon them altogether.

Tomorrow will come, to be sure. It will bring with it happenings and consequences. In no way am I suggesting we abandon concern for such things, but perhaps, that we remember that there are a lot of pictures we have drawn up in our minds, often collectively, and that anxiety is the byproduct of our efforts to match reality with these projections. We must remain flexible. We should make efforts to remain present, and thus committed to the terrain.

Of course, with this, I struggle too. At the end of the day, I am merely a man trying to make sense of his heartache. By the hundreds of millions humans race about, neglecting their spirits and their physical well being to make certain that lines on charts always trend upwards, to fill the black void. In doing so, they close their ears to the song that the Earth sings with every sunrise, to the poetry she writes with each curve and undulation of the topography, and to the ancient wisdom she has joyously written into every leaf, and stone, and star. We are all so much less for it. And we all but guarantee our doom.

The Complexity of Simple

20 Wednesday Jan 2016

Posted by td0s in Peak Oil

≈ 24 Comments

Cross Posted from PrayforCalamity
by
TDoS

—

The complexity of simple

Winter came as ice. The slightest threadbare twigs on every bush and tree wrapped in crystal and then dusted with snow like confectioner’s sugar. The entirety of the forest frosted, white outlines tracing contours until the fingers of every brach blended into every other masking the separation of individual trees, and the whole landscape was without depth or form, an unbroken line tracing itself eternally. Time itself slowed, my breath stands still before me while the land begs, “Slow down. Be.”

The road out was blocked by a downed pine tree. I idled the Jeep and went to the trunk to retrieve my chainsaw, a tool that stays packed in the car for just such occasions. Even the main highways were laden with the branches and trunks of conifers whose root balls could not sustain the added weight of their ice laden bodies.

What is often overlooked when people talk about the “simple life,” is just how complex it can be, and just how many tools it can require. Four wheel drive vehicles, chainsaws, power tools, axes, come-alongs, tow straps, water pumps, and all of the hand tools, files, honers, clamps, cleaners and cleansers needed to keep all of it functional. Across the spectrum of internet commentary and niche hipster-farmer magazines that paint rural homestead living as the solution to ecological crisis and collapse, too rarely is it mentioned just how expensive being intentionally poor can be.

—

Last week I stood outside in the cold, bundled in layers of long underwear and insulated Carhartt overalls, and with the assistance of a more mechanically inclined friend, I replaced the high pressure hose on the power steering pump of one of our Jeeps. The repair was far from complicated, but ten degree weather is not conducive to manipulating steel wrenches or the impossible to reach bolts that are put in place by machines so that humans will struggle to remove them. Repairing one’s own vehicle comes with a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction, almost akin to flipping the bird to the capitalist system that engineers itself around the need for high priced professionals and the near term obsolescence of overpriced parts and components. Such satisfaction quickly fades however, when the next mechanical defect arises.

The engine of my newly repaired Jeep refused to turnover, and I suspected that the eight degree temperature Monday morning brought with it was the likely culprit. The starter seemed to fire, but then the long list of troubleshooting began. My hands stinging with cold even through gloves, I tinker with battery cables and fuel lines. Is there spark? Is there gas? Frozen condensation could be in a line, or on a circuit board, or even preventing the distributor arm from spinning. Motors are a complexity of moving parts, and such complexity is supposed to make our lives easier. But then we become the tools of our tools, and find ourselves serving machines.

I want to scream. I just want life to stop handing me roadblocks. It seems like I struggle just to struggle. The hood slams shut and the metal clang echoes off of the steel roof of the open air carport. I crunch through the ice to the wood pile, and bend my knee to the Earth to load up my arms with split oak.

—

The wealth gap in the United States is at historic proportions. Apparently, sixty-three percent of Americans cannot afford a five-hundred dollar car repair. This is not a scenario which will be allowed to proceed. The problem with having a handful of people be vastly rich while the majority are poor is multi-fold, but what is often not discussed is the general dysfunction that is generated by so greatly valuing people’s labor and time on such drastically different scales. Even without talking about the do-nothing billionaire class, the gap in pay between the massive portion of the population that works service sector jobs and those who engage in more “skilled labor,” generates an inability of the lower classes to access the services of the middle. Despite having moved to a rural location to build my own off-grid home on land where I can attempt grow a significant quantity of my family’s food, I still work a full forty hours a week between two part time service sector jobs. One of those jobs pays ten dollars an hour. A mechanic commands anywhere from seventy to one-hundred dollars per hour in this region. Such a disparity makes acquiring the services of a mechanic on the edge of impossible and reserved for only the most complicated and necessary repairs.

Legal services are even more expensive. When the county demanded I install a septic system for my cabin, I could have refused, and in court I could have cited the State’s legislation protecting those who build their own homes from the intrusions of county bureaucrats. Had I chosen to engage in such a legal entanglement, I could not possibly have afforded the assistance of a lawyer at the going rate of two-hundred dollars per hour. The cost of compliance with the county, despite knowing full well that I am within my legal rights to refuse, is far lower than would have been the cost of justice. How can I give half a week’s wages to someone for one hour of their time? It would take me a month to afford one of their days.

Medical attention is a publicly acknowledged farce in the United States. Racketeers and mafioso middlemen have fully inserted themselves into parasitic positions across the healthcare industry with the full protection of the state. The Affordable Care Act was a papal blessing by the federal government confirming the right of money changers and paper pushers to hold people hostage to illness and injury, essentially demanding near lifelong servitude to repayment plans. Insurance, of course, is not treatment. No one ever screamed, “Is there an insurance agent in the house?” at the sight of an dying man. So we ignore small problems. We hope that fermented foods will keep us well and go to work sick when they don’t. We super glue wounds that should probably be stitched and as a last resort, we go to the emergency room and ignore the bill.

Those of us at the lower end of the pay scale have been priced out of modernity in many regards, and I imagine this is a trend that is only blossoming, and when fully unfolded, will drag a massive swath of the millennial generation into a similar state of affairs. I would imagine this economic disparity will play a large roll in bringing more people into urban centers, and preventing even those with dreams of permaculture gardens and straw bale houses from escaping them. The young are told that if they want to climb the economic ladder they should borrow enough money to buy a small house and instead to give it to a college. If it’s not one scam, it’s another.

—

During the summer our gardens are teeming with zucchini, tomatoes, okra, and other vegetables. Sweet potato vines crawl far beyond their primary roots and lavender flowers appear along their lengths. Welsummer chickens hunt grasshoppers in a field and we collect easily a dozen eggs a day from their nesting boxes. The food that we do not preserve or immediately eat we will sometimes sell. I can fetch twenty dollars for a load of produce, eggs, and wild harvested mushrooms. A truckload of gravel laid on our driveway allowing our property to even be accessible by car costs three-hundred dollars. Our own driveway requires about two of these truckloads every spring, and that does not include the road up to our land, which we must also contribute to maintaining. The simple life is expensive, and the honey, eggs, strawberries and other fresh foods we can produce are essentially valueless to the outside world thanks to petroleum. But we have to keep pace. Little house on the prairie only works when everyone is playing. If no one uses a car, it is not expected that you will, and the overall pace of your society slows down. Money is energy and velocity. Your rate of production must be commensurate with that of those around you with whom you hope to trade, or you will be for all intents and purposes, too poor to participate.

An individual cannot work as fast or far or as long as a John Deere. A twenty-four hour globalized world that operates at the speed of electricity generates output at a rate that is beyond the capacity of human hands spreading mulch and pulling weeds. When we look at the threat of climate change and ecological collapse, many of us recognize the need for humanity to slow down, to consume less, to shut down the tar sands mines and the frack pads in favor of draft power and raw muscle. Yearly upgrades of the cell phones and gadgets that isolate us seem absurd especially when we look at the total cost of their production, so instead we envision communities of people coming together to work towards common subsistence. The machine of industrial civilization spins too fast, and burns too much fuel, so we try to walk away, only to come to the harsh realization that as long as the machine is still out there, it sets the pace, and walking away is nearly impossible. The simple life is a luxury. Conscious poverty is the playground of the rich. Want a homestead in the country where you can raise goats and pigs? You better have at least one-hundred-thousand dollars to buy in.

In this world there is only keeping up or being crushed, and keeping up usually means crushing someone else; keeping your head above water is only possible by pressing your boot into the neck of another. Capitalists and fossil fuel apologists relentlessly harp on environmentalists by declaring that no one wants to make sacrifices, that they too drive cars and eat industrial food. Of course, what is intentionally neglected is that plenty of people are more than eager to leave behind the modern western lifestyle, and that it is not a fear of hard work or sacrifice holding them back, but the financial barriers to entry. And for those who can leap the first hurdle of land ownership, there is then the cost of everything one cannot provide for themselves, because let’s face it, no one can be self sufficient. Eventually you will need something from the outside world, whether a box of nails or a broken bone set, and then you will be at the mercy of costs set by a world powered by oil. Even the barest, most primitive lifestyle is only possible with access to a vast territory, a few friends, and a state apparatus that doesn’t limit your existence or steal your children when it finds them wearing furs and eating dandelions.

—

My friend placed the tip of his screwdriver into the release valve on the fuel bar. Gasoline trickled out. At midday the sun had gently raised the temperature. With the turn of the key, the starter whirred and the engine turned over. I had to laugh. Of course it would start with no problem when a friend had trekked out to help me diagnose the malfunction. He laughed too. Inside the cabin with a steady warmth emanating from the wood stove I prepared a breakfast. My friend declined the homemade sauerkraut, but gladly accepted sausage, eggs, and hot coffee. I had a few steaks in the freezer and I gave them to him.

“Make dinner,” I said as I gave him what I could for his time.
“Thanks, I will.”

We will only get poorer. The low paying jobs will be fewer and fewer as the years pass, and the pittance they pay will buy less and less. Our survival in the rural places will be predicated on either preying on our neighbors by keeping apace with the terms dictated by capitalists, charging each other fees that drain an entire two week paycheck for necessary services, or by working together, giving our time and our skill with no expectation of payment, only the hope that down the line, our own needs will be met with the kindness of others.

I for one will be opening up my land to others. Rent is a backbreaker, and if I can support like minded friends by giving them a place to exist without expectation of payment, I will happily do so. Civilization is a complexity of moving parts, and theoretically, this machine is supposed to serve us. But we become the tools of our tools, and now that this too is breaking down the complexity is a burden, and more and more of us are finding that we exist in a realm of negative returns, so we dream of making something new. While we dream, we struggle.

The Humiliated Masses

07 Thursday Jan 2016

Posted by td0s in Peak Oil

≈ 52 Comments

Cross posted from PrayforCalamity
by
TDoS

—

The blue sky almost gleamed in the morning light. An electric sapphire firmament hanging low over the green grass. Cold water moving fast through the creeks whose banks were widened by the unseasonable flow. A spring day by the look and feel of it. In reality, it was Christmas Eve in the year of a super El Nino. We were winding along country roads on our way north to visit my mother who lives on the outskirts of Chicago. Every time I return to that cast iron city so bathed in smoke and fog I can only feel satisfied with my choice to never again reside there.

In honor of a friend who died this past summer, I met up with a man I have known since high school and we, along with his girlfriend, went to see the new Star Wars film. Our deceased mutual friend was a great fan of the original trilogy, and it seemed a fitting way to center getting together while we were both back home. Of course, the flip side of such an outing is having to enmesh oneself with the throngs of other movie goers, and to submit oneself to the barrage of cultural pap, heavy with subtext and clues to the greater cultural malaise that is a Hollywood movie viewing experience.

Before the film, there are of course several coming attractions for other movies which by and large all seemed to express the same handful of palpitating urges that must be metastisizing just beneath the skin of the general public’s artfully crafted facade of contentedness. With the exception of a children’s cartoon, every film we were shown a trailer for was about the grand destruction of society in one form or another. Most of these couched their plot lines in the superhero milieu. Batman and Superman will be fighting Doomsday while the X-Men will be fighting the Apocalypse. Captain America was in there somewhere too, punching, kicking, and I can’t remember what. Some other films, the names of which escape me, also focused on massive catastrophe of some kind, but the protagonists were unexpected heroes who were trained to be better, faster, stronger by military mentors. It was hard to not come away with the feeling that a large contingent of this society is seething beneath their complacent smiles, waiting for the day when the skylines of the cities are aglow with flame, when the rules are no longer enforceable, when the millions of other human beings who are constantly interfering with their lives are wiped out in a clean flash of light, and the scattered remnants – themselves included – get to run around with guns shooting anyone else who happens to be in the way.

A better psychoanalyst than myself could likely un-stitch the many tangled threads of collective conscious that seem to be on display in such a venue, but the negative space was clear. Not present were any films about people cooperating to solve problems. Not present were even simple stories about people living normal lives, albeit beset by uncommon struggles, but at least content with modern western existence. A movie without a firefight or some kind of glorious combat was glaringly absent. Interestingly, the superhero plot points often seemed to revolve around internal conflict within the ranks. Is this a representation of the collective unconscious? Are we all gearing up for a fight against all enemies, foreign and domestic?

—

Apparently it rained at the North Pole in recent days. Tornadoes ripped through Texas during the holiday break while floods ravaged England. The El Nino event that has been supercharged by climate change is indeed wreaking its share of havoc. Larger, continuing ecological calamities like tree die offs around the globe and oceanic extinctions which are glaring and happening almost in slow motion prompt some people to ask, “Why are humans so inept when it comes to responding to environmental crises?” It is a reasonable enough question on it’s surface, but I am skeptical whenever all humans are lumped into a group and then laid on the couch to be analyzed. Are humans inept? Or are other forces preventing otherwise well intentioned and intelligent humans from addressing such crises? It isn’t as if no humans care about the living planet. Many are willing to lay down their lives to protect a stretch of forest, a river, or a species. Around the world, being an environmental activist is quite dangerous, and not because of some ineptitude, but because other humans who stand to gain from the conversion of the living world into dead materials for capitalism’s factories hire out the execution of humans who would get in their way.

Capitalism, and indeed, industrial civilization must be insulated from those have no been so disconnected, so alienated from nature or so humiliated and shamed by their powerlessness that they might strike back at their abusers rather than identifying with them.

No, it is not that humans are inept at solving ecological crisis. It is that we are prevented from doing so by people with power. Unpacking this further, we must acknowledge what classes we as individuals reside within, and what power we do and do not possess. I cannot with the stroke of a pen prevent a dam from being constructed, or order the deconstruction of one that already exists. I cannot stand before a board of directors and tell them to cease particular business practices, let alone to close up shop permanently. Not without being summarily accosted and dragged out of the room, anyway.

There are people with such power though. Certainly, there are. It is just a rare thing indeed for them to exercise it as such, but they absolutely exist. They are keenly aware of the system that they serve and how much wealth their service to this system has personally provided them with. Any inklings as to the dangers generated by their use of power that may have penetrated their thinking are likely exterminated by denial. Denial is really, really easy when everyone around you is washed in it as well. In towers of glass they laugh at our concerns, they berate us, and they devour the latest scraps of million dollar lies about how everything is just fine, how the Earth is here to be plundered, about the supremacy of man, about our right, our divine destiny really, to dominate the living world. Their great wealth proves it.

And forests fall. The oceans are trawled. A pipeline is laid.

—

Often we are fed a narrative that we as the general public can “vote with our dollars,” and send economic signals to the benevolent corporations of the world by purchasing only the most ethical of goods. This notion is folly for many reasons which have been largely addressed by myself and others. But I would like to take some space to dismantle the idea even further.

First, if we accept that this premise is true, we must also accept inversions of the premise. For instance, if buying ethical product A makes one innocent of ethical harms, then we are implicitly accepting that purchasing unethical product B renders one guilty of an ethical violation themselves. Why?

This thinking generates a line of reasoning in which the consumer of a product generated by unethical means is the reason the unethical means were used. Their purchase demanded such a production process. Can you see what is glaringly absent here? For one, there is no timeline. The product existed before it was purchased. The specific harm has already been executed. But even more startlingly absent from such an analysis is any agency on the part of the producer whatsoever. We are told, by those with power and money, that if people buy a thing, that the producers can only respond in one way, and that is, to continue to produce their product in like fashion. Hence, riding in a car is the reason for Arctic drilling.

But where is the agency of the board of directors of the oil company? Could they not receive the money from their previous gasoline production, and decide that their production process is dangerous to the health of the global ecology, and not continue to seek new petroleum sources? Are they robots? Do they have no minds, no consciences? Why is the underclass the sole bearer of responsibility in this equation? Very obviously, if an oil company decided to sell their assets, pay their employees dividends and to close down operations, there would be less oil and gas available for consumption. As the producer, they have far greater agency than mere purchasers.

Basically, the whole notion of supply and demand as described by capitalism’s apologists is one sided. The general public bears the responsibility to act ethically, to make sacrifices, to go through their day and to abstain from sending any price signals to the powerful, whether wittingly or not, that might stimulate another round of ecologically destructive behavior on the part of a multinational corporation. Price signals of course, cannot be resisted by businessmen. They are victims, really, of our rapacious purchasing of their wares. We are forcing their hands.

—

A lack of agency over our lives culminates in humiliation. We by and large feel like beings of free will, and then we make a commute we hate to a job we despise to take commands from a boss we loathe. A face on television tells us we are one of the lucky ones to get to do so. This is humiliation. It s submission to a system that degrades our dignity by converting us into automatons of misery. Our potential as autonomous actors is diminished at nearly every conceivable opportunity to reduce risk and to generate consistency. Subject to mass society and capitalism we are only slightly above necessary as the fleshy avatar of a more important notation in a ledger. We exist as nodes in a network of capital flow, and if somehow we could be eliminated, we would be. Indeed, many are.

We are dancing bears, faces painted and dolled up in lace. The master holds a whip and a gun, so we dare not strike for fear of being killed. Eventually, the master doesn’t even carry the pistol any more because we have it internalized. He knows we would not dare attack him, and the insult is doubled. We look to the other caged animals around us and think, “If only we rose up as one, surely the master could not kill us all. If only we could combine our strength and in numbers find courage. Even if we were to die in such a struggle, we at last would be free. In our final glorious moments we would be complete, we would not exist in submission, humiliation, domestication.”

But the other animals are scared. They have been whipped. Some have come to defend the master. We don’t even know who we can trust. And it has been such a long time since we have lived beyond the cage. The wild intimidates us now. Can we even survive out there anymore? Can we even exist without the scraps the master feeds us? Then one day we see a tiger attack a crowd of onlookers. She has snapped. She rages beautifully for one perfectly flawed moment before a bullet quiets her. If only she had said something. If only we had acted together. If only we had turned our claws and fangs in the right direction. If only it was the master now lying in a pool of blood.

We have a lot of masters. We are made pitiful by clerks as well as clocks. We are degraded not just politicians and police but by abstractions and imaginary lines. We so badly need to forge time and space to be quiet, to meditate, to speak softly about just who we think we are. Technology interrupts. The buzzing of other people’s demands seeps in through the cracks to find us, to distract us, to constantly hurry us up, to tire us out, to intoxicate us, to leave us slumped over and worn.

So we go to the movies and watch civilization collapse. We envy those who get to rebuild, if only on the screen. If we keep buying such stories, they will keep selling them. And we will surely never live them.

Incantations of Gratitude

17 Thursday Dec 2015

Posted by td0s in Peak Oil

≈ 14 Comments

From Prayforcalamity.com
By TDoS

—

“He said that men believe the blood of the slain to be of no consequence but that the wolf knows better. He said that the wolf is a being of great order and that it knows what men do not: that there is no order in this world save that which death has put there.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

—

She gave me leather gloves and said, “They’ll scratch the shit out of you.” A size too small, I pulled her tight gloves onto my hands. By the tuft of the rabbit’s neck, I pulled him through the opening of the wire hutch. As I walked toward the post, I tried holding him by his back legs, upside down, so that the blood would rush to his head an he would drowse. The rabbit screamed.

“They don’t like to be upside down,” she said.

I righted him. “It works with chickens,” I offered. Then I raised the rabbit, almost like an offering to the gray morning sky, so I could gently lower him into the steel breaking bar. He kicked a bit, then calmed. “It’s your death. Meet it how you choose. I’d probably kick and scream too.” Through the trees the pond was visible down the slope before us. My wife stood with my daughter on the dock, looking at the turtles and the fish as they moved in the cold black water.

“It’s OK. It’s OK.” I was gently stroking the rabbit’s plush fur. “Look at the trees. See the sky. It’s a beautiful day.” My voice was hush. My intention was to keep the rabbit calm. But still I wondered if my human touch was repugnant to the rabbit. Is the sound of my voice wretched to his mind? Is there such a thing as a tender executioner? When I said, “travel well,” might it have been better to say nothing it all?

With a firm hold of the rabbit’s rear legs and then a thrust, I pulled down and back towards my knees. The process repeated, five in all, each neck broken as decisively as I could offer, each rabbit given a moment of calm, each life acknowledged before each death delivered.

“Thank you for being nice to them,” she said.
“Of course.” My God, of course.

Five rabbits for twenty dollars and a handful of butternut squash. Her freezer full of meat, she didn’t want to kill anything else this year. Killing isn’t easy. It leaves a stain, and I hope it always does. My family is still without a deer. Five rabbits do not add up to a lot of meat, but they will carry for now. With two hands I carefully lifted each dead rabbit and placed them in a cardboard box. My wife and daughter climbed the hill. We made pleasantries. The box was warm when I loaded it into the trunk.

—

December is not usually this warm. This fall has been the warmest in the lower fourty-eight United States since record keeping began. Deluges of rainfall have flooded Chennai in India, as well as Ireland and the UK. Seven-hundred-thousand people are evacuating in advance of a typhoon in the Philippines. Meanwhile, winter rains are failing to materialize in Africa, portending drought conditions next year. Representatives of the global elite have once again walked away from an international climate summit with nothing to show but a palisade of words constructed to deflect real conversation about turning off the killing machine of industrial capitalism. They boarded jet planes to return home, and I stood outside in a sleeveless shirt two weeks before the winter solstice as my daughter and I pulled green onions from our garden that we could lay over the rabbit as we cooked it over a pit fire.

In the circles of power, I am sure there are back pats and hand shakes to accompany the praise of a job well done in Paris. To be sure, I imagine there are plenty of western liberals who believe some form of progress was made at the COP 21. Conversely, those of us on the fringes probably expected just such a result. No hard lines, no painful cuts, no discussion of deindustrialization or plans to decrease the consumption rates of the first world or the financial largesse of the wealthy. The fact that an international conference on climate change has official corporate sponsors from automobile companies to airlines and banks should be a blood red flag to anyone with even the most beta of bullshit detectors. Growth was still the order of the day. This is a system that cannot see itself, let alone confront itself. This is a system that completely lacks the ability to stop itself from destroying the habitat of the Earth. Is there any word more applicable to such a system than psychopathic? Maybe omnicidal? Watching at the neoliberal attempt to address climate change is like watching a serial killer at the end of their career; they are getting sloppy because they want to be caught, they want to be stopped, they know they have zero control of their death urge. They won’t turn themselves in, but they will leave abundant clues as to their identity.

Advertisements for AirFrance plastered on a Parisian bus stop are the killer’s semen stain left on the victim’s bedsheets. Please catch me. I cannot help myself. Stop me before I kill again.

—

An inability to confront ourselves seems to be a defining characteristic of our age. Examples abound on the macro and micro level. The social media obsession highlights the trend nicely, as millions upon millions of people spend hours a day meticulously crafting an image of themselves that they want to convince the world is genuine. From Facebook to Instagram, the obsession du jour is taking photos of oneself and then sitting back and waiting for other humans, also likely obsessed with taking photos of themselves, to tell you how fantastic you look or how interesting to appear to be. After harvesting “likes,” the high of such fickle and ephemeral attention fades, and it’s back to the bathroom mirror.

On a grander stage, we in the United States are now forced to endure the asinine behavior of a man-child braggart whose particular appeal as a potential presidential candidate appears to be the fact that he is perfectly comfortable being cruel to others, and that he has made a personal commitment to being as inconsiderate in his speech and action as possible. Of course, his defenders describe this behavior as a positive salvo against those who force us to all be “politically correct.” It requires very little effort to dismantle such an argument. What is really happening is that in recent years, challenges to society’s entrenched and predominantly unspoken white and male supremacy have been vocalized more frequently and with more support. These challenges make the beneficiaries of systemic racism and misogyny uncomfortable primarily because they were never cognizant of the leg up they have always received by being the “default” person, and they thusly feel that they are personally under attack for crimes they never committed.

Then along comes a powerful white man who tells his supporters he won’t cow to social justice warriors. Naturally, a lot of white men line up to carry his banner. The grand irony, is that this man is very wealthy. The declining standard of living amongst the middle class is a direct result of neoliberal economic policies enacted by the rich. Rich white men want poor white men to think it is foreigners who have undermined their economic viability, when in all reality, it was Wal-Mart. It was NAFTA. It was cheap labor abroad and cheap oil to ship goods around the globe. How the rich are able to convince the middle class that the poor are their greatest threat is a feat so counter intuitive that you almost want to applaud their ability to craft an illusion. How a billionaire has been able to convince millions of Americans that he can protect them from the machinations of politicians who have been bought by wealthy donors is downright stupifying.

Bravo, America. You have the political savvy of a goldfish.

But this is what happens. Vonnegut might just say, “and so it goes.” Nothing should surprise us now. We are in an age of consequences. An inability to look at ourselves and take stock of who we truly are and what our context actually is will lead to a world of a myriad of conflicting narratives. We cannot build a cogent society if even agreeing upon the nature of the basic building blocks of that society has become impossible. We stand along the road to greater social fracture. Indeed, we have been walking this path for a long time. Without the ability to synthesize healthy communities autonomously, we have been cordoned in by artificial borders. The rich have become startlingly rich, and as they have done so they have created various high pressure systems that are directly adjacent to low pressure systems, and the joinery of this impending disaster has consistently been state force, police violence, and a non-stop torrent of propaganda and myth to convince the masses that it is all for their benefit, for their protection, and further, that this state of affairs is exceptional, so exceptional in fact that the heathen hordes about the globe are frothing mad in their desire to take it from them.

—

It is said that “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” I would suggest that such fury is outmatched by the violent potential of a man entirely convinced of his righteousness. Keeping apace with the decline of civilization often has us looking at economic indicators, energy returns, political turmoil, and the quickening rate at which the climate is destabilized and species are driven into extinction. All fair sign posts, to be sure. But on the day to day, one of my greater concerns is the absence of humility, grace, and self reflection which as a trend seems to inversely correlate with a spike in the abundance of self righteous vitriol. The outsizing and emphasizing of ego is a decline in spiritual quality, for lack of a better term, and it is the hand maiden of our global crises; affected by and then re-effecting.

John Michael Greer on his blog, The Well of Galabes, defined magic as “the traditional craft of causing changes in consciousness in accordance with will.” Whether or not you believe in magic of any kind, it is clear that the human consciousness and will are the fore-horses of human action, and when hundreds of millions, if not billions, of humans are at a time collectively convinced to perpetuate the premises and trends of civilization, be it the infallible nature of capitalism, the primacy of the western “way of life,” white supremacy or that Allah would want you to throw a person off of a building because that person is homosexual, the power we possess is manipulated into feeding the furnaces of a death cult.

Of course, it is easy to highlight this trend when it manifests amongst the most visibly powerful or violent groups. Truly, it is prevalent too amongst people who claim to fight for the oppressed, the poor, and the vulnerable. Even those who claim no desire to conquer or to control become so convinced of their position, so damn sure that they are right, that furious anger and venom is let fly horizontally even at the bottom of the barrel. Warriors for the working class so entrenched in their analysis about race, or sexuality, or gender, that it seems impossible to think they have ever spent time with the people they wish to help liberate. Fall in line with my thinking, or line up against a wall.

It is a long wall indeed, with room for all of us, and so many willing executioners.

Our power as humans is vast, possibly boundless. On the whole, our wisdom is not commensurate with this power. Knowing when not to apply power is central to using it intelligently. Can you hold a gun and not point it someone? Can you be given a chainsaw and not clear cut a forest for profit? Can you unlock the petroleum from its deeps but choose to leave it there? Can you have a voice, but not speak until you are sure that doing so is appropriate; is necessary? Every day we apply our intention to the world, and the vast majority of this application is as thoughtless as flicking a cigarette butt out the car window. Then we wonder why the world burns.

The unforgiving pace of capitalism exponentially exacerbates this problem. Nothing can be slow. Not movement, not communication. How can an instantaneous world be a thoughtful world? How can a twenty four hour civilization with light speed demands for your attention and response court the deliberate hand, the calm voice, or the well crafted response? Eight billion humans all living in a lightning round, shouting, responding, and firing their intentions into a storm of chaos and collision. Then consequence, response, repeat, and the storm grows.

Here we are on the precipice of global ecological calamity, frail worlds dancing on a razor blown back and forth by the whims of mad men, and I fear that the wisdom the situation requires is not only not present, it is not welcome.

—

Salt falls to the Earth as I drag the dull knife across the hide. Bits of remaining meat and fat collect on the edge of the blade, and I pick off the pink wads that gather there and flick them to the ground. Fleshing a hide is time consuming and skill intensive. My back aches a bit as I lean over the plywood the hides are nailed down to. The world is made of blood and bone and I am so grateful to be a part of it.

Cold wind blows. I massage egg yolk into the skin. If these rabbit hides tan well, my wife wants to use them to create a cloak for our daughter. I just want to get better at the process.

Viscera has been given to the chickens. In the compost pile I buried the rabbit’s heads. Before pulling the decaying plant matter over them, I placed lettuce leaves and turnip greens in the hole. An offering. Gratitude. There are surely people who think it is superstitious or perhaps merely self serving to do so. I don’t give a good God damn. It feels right. I

In Centuries and Seconds

03 Thursday Dec 2015

Posted by td0s in Capitalism, Climate Change, Ecological Overshoot, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Peak Oil

≈ 20 Comments

Tags

Anarchism, Anti-civ, Collapse, Global Warming, Inca, Industrial Civilization, Paris Terrorist Attacks, Revolution, Time

From PrayforCalamity
By TDoS

—

She was a yearling. Not very large, maybe one hundred pounds I would guess, as I was able to easily hoist her body into the back of my Jeep. Gauging by the blood leaking from her ears and mouth and lack of any other visible wounds, I assumed the car that killed her struck her in the head, possibly breaking her neck. What I could not gauge was how long she had been lying dead on the side of the highway. Her eyes were open and not yet eaten by birds, and her anus was also free of any infestation. I chuckle to myself when I imagine the reaction more domesticated individuals might have if they knew that there are people like myself who assess the edibility of roadkill by the presence of uncorrupted eyes and assholes. To be fair, I also took stock of the stiffness of her body and the lack of any immediately offensive odors emanating from it. She was worth taking home for a greater look, anyway.

From a cross beam of the carport I anchored a carabiner, and I fastened another to the yearling’s hind legs so I could create a “z-rig” pulley system, effectively halving her weight so that I could hoist her body into the air and tie of the cordage without help from a second person. My partner was going to come outside and watch the dressing so she could have a greater understanding of the process, and she bundled up our daughter too, who showed no fear or anxiety concerning the large animal hanging dead before her. Gently, I explained that the deer had died, and I was going to harvest its meat for us to eat. Not yet two, she stood looking at the yearling and said, “Deer, off.”

“Yes honey, the deer is off.”
“Deer, on?”
“She can’t be turned back on. Once something dies, it cannot come back to life. But her spirit and her flesh return to the Earth.”
“Deer, off.”
“Yes baby.”

—

The year is closing as we approach the winter solstice. From the corners we inhabit, we watch the fallout from terrorist attacks in Paris and the downing of a Russian war plan by the Turkish military. Those who tally the climate statistics are telling us that 2015 is set to be the warmest year on record, globally. South Africa grapples with drought, the rainforests of the Amazon are burning, and world leaders sent to negotiate climate deals are converging on a Paris conveniently locked down by security forces preventing mass demonstrations under emergency restrictions imposed due to the aforementioned terrorist attacks. Not that it matters. Floats and puppets are fun to look at, but only a complete restructuring of society could address the challenge of climate change, and that restructuring begins with erasing existing borders and property lines, canceling existing debts, dismantling industrial infrastructure, and of course, toppling the standing systems of power. The puppets and street theater capable of such feats, I would love to see. As I have previously stated (and my blog name continually hints at) I do not believe humans capable of achieving such goals, at least, not without a little help from our friends calamity and chaos. The gatekeepers are just too well equipped to stave off conscious revolution. If you want to get into the citadel, you will just have to wait until a tornado throws a bulldozer through the wall, or a plague kills most of the guards.

Until then we watch, we wait, and we endure. We keep repeating the conventional wisdom of collapse; that which cannot be sustained, will not sustain. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and it didn’t collapse in a day, either. The collapse of a civilization is not one event, but the consummation of many events that eventually birth a catastrophe that overwhelms the ability of that civilization’s people to rebuild what has been destroyed, whether material or social.

Fast collapse and slow collapse are really the same thing, looked at from different vantage points. What is built over centuries can end in seconds.

—

November 16, 1532. Francisco Pizarro has one hundred and sixty eight men laying an ambush in the Inca city of Cajamarca. Atahualpa, the emperor of the Inca empire, arrives for a meeting with the Spanish backed by an unarmed cadre of six thousand. A friar and barely competent translator tell Atahualpa they are there, in essence, to bring the Inca into the fold of the Catholic church and the Spanish empire, and they offer him a bible as a seal of their truth. As was to be expected, and likely, the intention of the Spanish, Atahualpa rejects what he is being offered. This rejection of the bible and the truth of the Catholic church gave the Spaniards what they considered to be legal grounds to attack the Inca who had amassed there. A century of empire with its conquest, expansion, and grandeur, could be said, to have ended in the following seconds.

Those seconds, however, were the ripe culmination of years of internal strife concerning who the rightful heir to the imperial throne was, a waning ability of the empire to effectively control far flung principalities, and a plague of smallpox brought to Mesoamerica by Europeans that advanced faster than conquistadors on horseback. Political turmoil and disease were eating away at the Inca empire, and the Spanish arrived just in time to add the critical pressure necessary to break it. And they had guns.

History, of course, is complex, and the fall of the Inca empire extended beyond the massacre at Cajamarca, as Pizarro played disaffected Inca regions against the center, installed puppet emperors, and fought rebellions. As the colonization of the Inca proceeded, European diseases continued to decimate the indigenous population as well. The Inca actually learned how to effectively defeat the advantage of firearms, but the viruses ravaging their insides were too much.

Depending on where we stand, we can focus on the centuries or the seconds.

If tomorrow the Dow Jones Industrial plummeted by seventy percentage points or NATO declared war on Russia, we would likely see those seconds as the critical break between the past and the future, the old world and the new. But of course, years of maneuvering by humans and the consequences of those movements all came together to generate just the specific combination of factors required to outflank the established firewalls civilization has established to protect itself, and to outpace the efforts at rebuilding that are guaranteed in the aftermath of catastrophe. Resource scarcity primarily in the sphere of fossil fuel energy, the manipulation of capital to the point of diminishing returns by the global ultra-wealthy, the decimation of ecosystems around the world; all have played their part in dressing the set for those critical seconds that seem to hang over us like a sword.

—

How does an organism die? If you magnify the death of any given being, presumably you can find one second, one still frame in time that separates living from dying. When we die of old age in the most quintessential of circumstances – our heads atop a fluffed down pillow as we lie repose in a king-sized bed replete with Egyptian cotton sheets and a mahogany headboard, family and adorers walling in our bedside and wishing us fair travels as we draw a final breath, smile, and say something childishly simple yet agonizingly profound – a critical second passes when our heart ceases to beat, electrical impulses in our brain fade, and we’re gone. The room exhales.

But we were dying for so long. How many years had it been since our body’s ability to repair cellular breakdown was outpaced by the aging process? We had peaked decades before. From that point forward, despite every adventure, every new idea, every material acquisition, we were hurtling ever forward toward our imminent demise. Our vision blurred, so a doctor prescribed us glasses. Our heart stuttered, so we began taking pills. Our mobility waned so we got a Hov-R-Round from the Scooter Store thanks to the endless advertisements targeted towards we septuagenarians aired on day time TV. We pressed on.

Our bodies contain countless living beings and units; cells, tissues, and bacteria that all comprise the whole of what we perceive as our self. A veritable civilization that is born and advances through stages of growth and maturation until the energy necessary to maintain integrity is outpaced by diminishing returns. We insert techno-fixes of every imaginable stripe to stem the twin tides of time and entropy, buying what time we can until the inevitable enters stage left to take us by the hand and demurley return us to the soil.

Civilizations are no different. Shaped in centuries, defined in seconds, feeding the fertile soils of time. Billions of human hands and minds carving, digging, screaming, warring, building, repairing, maintaining until it just isn’t enough and the center can no longer hold. Hydraulic fracturing, negative interest rates, solar arrays and soyburgers all applied to patch the holes and to bail the bilge water. Industrial civilization passed its peak decades ago, sometime around the time when women in skirts freely attended University in Kabul and the United States didn’t need to stand guard over Wahhabist Monarchs in the House of Saud in order to keep the game of growth afloat. Selfie sticks and social media stock options are your glasses and nitroglycerin. The internet is your Hov-R-Round. Do not kid yourself into thinking this is a civilization still in the wild throws of maturation and bloom. The billions of organisms that make this civilization possible are under threat, from phytoplankton to pollinating insects and carbon sequestering trees, all of whom feed the the billions of humans who swing hammers and pour concrete and fit pipes and string lines and who somehow, by some curse of the lottery of birth, drag themselves to the factories and cubicle farms day in and day out, all to keep this storm born Galleon afloat. Shaped in so many of our precious seconds, defined in the roil of faceless centuries, feeding the fertile soils of time.

—

The car struck her head, I had guessed. Her life probably ended quickly in a split second of sound and light. Without any abrasions on the body, I assumed the meat would be well preserved by the cold evening air. With only a beam of light to guide my hands under the dark of night, I gently separated her hide from her flesh, using light strokes of my knife to cut away at the membrane that held her skin to her flesh. Something was wrong. Her skin had a green tone in places around her ribs. I cut away more, examining the muscle as I worked. The green hue, almost an electric blue really, blotted here and there on her leg muscles, like watercolor oceans on an aging map. Hoping the backstrap was untainted I continued to skin the deer, but it was hopeless. On her left hind leg a subcutaneous tear in the protective membrane had likely allowed the passage of bacteria. She must have been spun or thrown by the vehicle in some fashion that impacted her rear leg with a substantial force.

The meat was inedible. I sighed in the night. Fog from my mouth drifted upwards as I set my knife down, and lowered her body. Walking beneath the stars I carried the yearling downhill, briars grabbing at my boots, twigs snapping underfoot. I thanked her and apologized while burying her under a light blanket of leaves. Coyotes, buzzards, someone would eat her. Someone with an enviable array of gut flora. I plodded and crunched my way home to wash the blood from my hands and wrists. The smell would last for days.

Your Worst Enemy

23 Monday Nov 2015

Posted by td0s in Climate Change, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Peak Oil

≈ 19 Comments

Tags

addiction, Collapse, communication, community, Dark Mountain Project, Industrial Civilization, MZBs, preppers, self defense, Self improvement, tribe

By TDoS
Cross Posted from: Prayforcalamity.com
—

Cold northern air pushed south for a few days granting us the slight chill we have come to expect on a November morning. Heavy winds rattled the bare fingers of oak and hickory like blades of prairie grass. Woodsmoke seasoned the air and warmed my soul as I walked the compost toilet bucket out to the pile to be dumped and covered. Two days later temperatures were right back up again as firearm deer hunting season opened. I wanted to spend my Sunday morning waiting quietly in a tree, scanning the ridge line for a sizable white tail, but decided against it when I saw that the high for the day would be seventy degrees. The forecast calls for the cool air to return, so for now, I postpone the hunt, and cross my fingers in the hope that driving home from work late at night I will see a freshly hit roadkill deer that I can harvest instead. Their habitat long converted to highway, I honestly prefer making use of a collision killed deer than pulling the trigger anyway.

The collapse blogs and forums are often rife with talk of such things. There are those who suggest that in a world where grocery stores are shuttered or where there is no money to purchase what they might still contain, people will need to return to hunting and foraging where possible. At such suggestions, there are those who counter that the skill to harvest and process and meat is lost of the vast majority of the population. There are others who then counter that actually, in such a scenario the fields and streams would quickly be stripped bare of any game or fish as hordes of people begin shooting at anything that moves, whether they know how to properly process and preserve the meat or not. After years of collapse minded discussion on the internet, I think it is fair to say that there are many pockets of cliches and conventional wisdoms that have taken root and found their loyalties. Fast collapse, slow collapse, hyper inflation, deflationary depression, bug out, bug in, long slow die off, near term human extinction, etc. ad nauseam. Flow charts of collapse hypothesis each complete with their experts and their laundry list of survival purchases.

Over the years I have found myself settling in the realm of thought promoted by the Dark Mountain Project. I do my best not to make a lot of predictions that don’t go beyond vague guesses at trends, and I primarily try to push the notions of personal and communal endurance, adaptability, and dignity. History’s arc is very long, and it is easy to find ourselves as individuals belonging to a time that we believe from where we stand to be of particular importance or meaning. Such assumptions are vanity. The decline of industrial civilization, yes, will result in the creation of miserable conditions for most of humanity, and as we live through and beyond such times, we shall be tested. We are not going to solve the major crises. We are going to be called upon to endure them. Such endurance is likely beyond many in the western world who have never imagined, let alone suffered true hardship. The age of fossil fuels has not only softened rich bodies, but it has softened rich hearts and minds. It has convinced many that death and pain are an unfairness, one that we could, and should, banish from existence. More vanity. More hubris. To be sure, more blindness, as such soft minds are closed off to the suffering and death that formed the foundation of their very comfort to begin with.

Banish your vanity now. Welcome the dirt under your fingernails. Accept that you are not, nor your culture, the protagonist in a meaningful drama. Visions and stories you have created in your mind in which you are a central performer are phantoms of your own amusement. Dispel them. Be here. Take a good stock of who you actually are.

—

Mutant zombie bikers (MZB’s for short) are the foil of those who monitor collapse. MZB’s are the unwashed masses. Unprepared for collapse, they don their truck tire armor and necklaces strung with the teeth of their victims and then move over the suburbs and hinterlands seeking families and farmers to massacre in their grand quest for canned peaches, gasoline, and murderous skin harvesting glory. They are the primary enemy portrayed in the dystopian future sketched out in most collapse related conversation.

I would like to offer a counter notion; your worst enemy will be yourself. This suggestion, I hope, can steer us from the primacy of the notion that navigating social collapse is going to be best achieved by those who most willingly point guns at everyone else.

If in fact, a grand collapse of sorts occurs and the social and economic systems that the vast majority of people rely upon fail, it will not likely be a man built like a WWE wrestler riding a tricked out Harley and brandishing a flaming nail bat who kills you. It will be your own inability to work with a group. It will be your own lifetime of poor health choices. It will be all of the ebooks about wild edible plants that you downloaded and never read. It will be your hubris, your panic, your depression, your anger, and primarily your inability to adapt to unpredictable and ever changing conditions.

For what it is worth, this is the concept I would like to toss into the gyre of collapse discussion. How self improvement now not only increases one’s chances of survival in the event of any emergency, short or long, but further, how such improvement greatly benefits one’s life even in the absence of societal breakdown. Successfully navigating dire circumstances that present physical, mental, and emotional challenges requires fortitude on all fronts – body, mind, and soul. Doing the work to improve oneself on these fronts is not likely to be a waste should calamity never strike, in the same way that “prepper” purchases of five years worth of EZ Mac and banana chips might be. Mice will never eat your improved physical stamina. A flood will not wash away your uncluttered mind.

—

Let’s face it, life in the modern era in western nations has shaped most of our interactions to flow along the patterns and dictates of the economic system; capitalism. Short, shrift transactions where one exchanges paper notes for food do not establish a bond between buyer and seller. More often than not, the owner of such food is not even present, and we interact with low wage workers who operate cash registers, and the bulk of our acquisitions of necessities is at the behest of a system which at times even generates resentment of all the other humans around us. We are infuriated by traffic, long lines, and crowded spaces. Community bonds are threadbare. True reliance on one and other that flows equally back and forth is rare. So what happens when this social and economic paradigm crumbles? Do you have the ability to work well in a group? Can you keep from yelling or being over bearing? Do you dominate conversations and interrupt others? Do you dismiss women or people who aren’t white? Do you even notice if or when you do these things? When the humans around you become a de facto band that must cooperate to survive, can you set your ego and your ideology aside? Can you be the first to give before having received? Can you politely disagree? It may seem silly to present such concerns, but truly, communication has been so degraded by generations of commercial transaction replacing communal reciprocity, not to mention newly invented forms of abbreviated, faceless, eye-contactless device to device texting, that I think a focus on just being able to talk to one another in order to effectively organize crisis response should be a priority. Do you really want to find yourself outcast because everyone around you thinks that your a blowhard asshole?

Of course, habits that trend in the opposite direction could be just as deadly. Are you a doormat? Do you speak up for yourself? Are you easily manipulated? Do you fear speaking your mind when your opinion is unpopular? Can you say “no” and mean it? An ability to judge when to defer to group dynamics and when to pull back from activities you believe to be foolish, dangerous, or a waste of energy is crucial. Of course, navigating the emotions and egos of others is a delicate matter, and doing so forms the basis of politics. When your life is on the line, you will need to swallow your pride one day, draw a line in the sand the next, and hopefully make the right choice as to the when and why for both.

Meanwhile, our habits and addictions will haunt us when all of the usual patterns change, and then change again. If right now you are a smoker, a drinker, if you are addicted to sugar, to caffeine (my personal drug of choice) or just happen to need a particular anti-depressant or antipsychotic to get out of bed, how will you fare when the chemicals your brain requires to function are not available? What is your current physical status? Here in the US, the lion’s share of the population travels by some form of petroleum powered vehicle on a regular basis. Has this made you a bit soft around the middle? Or has a steady diet of sugar softened you sort of all over? The ability to walk long distances over varied terrain while carrying a load, perhaps water, perhaps wood, perhaps a child, would probably serve well. The ability to defend yourself without a weapon, would probably serve well. The ability to live two weeks on nothing but mashed turnips without flipping out on everyone around you at the slightest annoyance because your body is craving a Diet Coke and a Parliament Light might just serve you well.

And I am not pitching machismo. I know too well that a smile, a nod, a low calm voice, can in the right circumstances carry more power than a grounded right cross. Well rounded and adaptable, clear headed and resourceful, that is what I am pitching.

This is why I decry the prepper mentality of stockpiling large caches of goods. That is just consumerism. That is just altering a bad habit to feel like a good habit. Sure, having food in the house, useful tools, toilet paper and jumper cables does make sense. Twenty-Five buckets of mylar sealed white sugar is an absurdity. No matter what emergency you encounter, be it a car accident on a stormy evening, a house fire, or full on “the-grid-went-down-thanks-to-Chinese-hackers-cracked-out-on-energy-drinks-and-promises-of-state-provided-communist-love-girls,” the one thing you will always have on you, is you. Your mind, your body, and your spirit are primary. If these are out of balance or in a dysfunctional state, why would you assume that a Rubbermaid Tub full of Pepto-Bismol would be of any use?

You need to fill your mind, hone your body, and steel your spirit. This is a constant as we live. The work never stops. But as we travel, and work at our wisdom, our knowledge, and our fitness, we must also learn how to successfully integrate this blossoming self with others. Communities don’t just happen, because trust doesn’t just happen; communication doesn’t just happen.

—

Tribe is hard. Manufactured tribe, anyway. I have never experienced a true tribe; a family linked through time and space, culture and common cause. What I have experienced are groups of people who came together with grand purpose. The torment of hours long meetings with Occupy, the drama of interpersonal conflicts with pipeline blockades, the sheer inability to commit to the work required at failed communes and intentional communities; I have seen it all. In each case, there was success and their was failure. In each case, good intentions ran head first into fatigue, a lack of resources, and at times, post traumatic stress. And in each of those cases, the greater support system of society still existed as a fall back. Dirty, cold and hungry, I watched people do unexpectedly amazing things, no doubt. But stores still had food, even if the only food we could afford was in the dumpster. We could check out, step back, any time we wanted. When the stress of it all was too much to bear, one could return to the “real world” and level out. A collapse scenario will offer no such quarter.

It is said that tough times don’t last, but tough people do. I am not trying to sell some notion of myself as complete or without flaw. I am just as guilty of seeing myself not as I am, but as I have imagined myself to be. I possess plenty of traits and habits which I need to work to better, starting with my ability to calmly and accurately communicate. If I were slower to frustrate and to anger, that would likely be a boon. Despite the constant work that living in a post collapse world would require, I could personally benefit from a greater ability to slow down, to sit still, and to meditate. To just breathe and exist. I think it would strengthen my spirit, even if only by allowing me to take in more beauty and joy that I currently let pass me by in favor of tending to endless tasks. We talk tirelessly about survival, but forget sometimes that without attention to the things that make life worth living, we can never truly thrive.

The time to work on ourselves, is now. Your communication, your patience, and your tolerance, all are best improved now while daily caloric intake doesn’t necessarily rest upon them. The time to break habits of sloth, or poor diet, or of resistance to any work that makes muscles sore and brow sweat, is now. The time to take self dense classes and to increase your self confidence and endurance, is now. The time to abandon phantom notions of your protagonist self in favor of honest assessment of your strengths and weaknesses while simultaneously relieving yourself of your doughy first world comfort requirements, is now. Take cold showers. Eat more vegetables. Forgive small debts. Compliment and be patient with others. Walk.

Of course, the hard part is that the pizza is still hot, the beer still cold, and the new season of Game of Thrones is on, and all of it is available twenty-four seven and you wouldn’t even have to speak to another human being, let alone be kind to them, to get any of it. And there is work. And there are bills to pay. Maybe next month when I get a little further ahead. I’ll quit smoking. I’ll quit drinking. I’ll spend less time on the internet and more time with other people. Next month.

You are your worst enemy, but you don’t have to be.

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OWS knows who really pulls the strings

"...the megawealthy and Washington have become so symbiotic as to be a single entity. Indeed, Occupy's best move, as conservative blogger/financier Gregory Djerejian noted at TheAtlantic.com, was "directing their ire squarely toward the real elites of the country, rather than their bought-and-paid marionettes sitting in Washington."

Preserving the Status Quo

There is no right wing or left wing, only the aristocracy and the serfs (a vertical paradigm). To know this is to be like a fish who has broken the surface of the water, realizing he was in water the whole time.

A Kabuki Play

"What we have, in what passes for US democracy in 2012, is a kabuki play that Cicero put to papyrus 1948 years earlier. All historical empires and war aggressors have used propaganda to claim their looting and police states were necessary and helpful to the 99%. Instead, a sorrowful history tells us they were almost always for the sole benefit of the 1%." - Albert Bates

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  • Mysterious Siberian Crater Found at "End of the World" May Portend Methane Climate Catastrophe
  • NATURAL CAPITAL AT RISK: THE TOP 100 EXTERNALITIES OF BUSINESS
  • Natural Law
  • Natural Way of Farming Masanobu – Fukuoka Green Philosophy
  • Net Energy and The Economy
  • NOAA & U.S. Geological Survey Interactive Sea Level Rise Map (up to 25 ft)
  • NOAA Interactive Sea Level Rise Map
  • Noam Chomsky on human extinction: The corporate elite are actively courting disaster
  • Oil and gas industry using military psyops techniques to reduce opposition to fracking
  • OilCrash.com
  • On Human Nature
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  • Partnership for Civil Justice
  • Peak Coal
  • Peak Energy, Climate Change, and the Collapse of Global Civilization
  • Peak Oil – A Turning Point for Mankind by Dr. Colin J. Campbell
  • Peak Oil Australia
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  • Peter H. Gleick: Water Scarcity Issues
  • Planetary Hospice: Rebirthing Planet Earth
  • Policy Makers Slow to Take Peak Oil Action
  • Portland Peak Oil Task Force
  • Power Point Presentation on “Corporate Globalization, Corporate Power, Free Trade, Mega Trade Agreements and the Negative Impacts of TPP” by Janet M Eaton, PhD
  • Power Shift Away From Green Illusions
  • Primitivism
  • Problem Solving: Complexity, History, Sustainability
  • Professor Charles Hall
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  • Richard Reese on 'Near Term Extinction'
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  • Searching for a Miracle: 'Net Energy' Limits & the Fate of Industrial Society
  • Secular Cycles, Chapter 1
  • Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis
  • Stephanie McMillan's 'Capitalism Must Die'
  • Study by Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Fleming at the U.S. Army War College
  • TED talks – a recipe for civilisational disaster
  • The Anarchist Library
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  • The Bichler & Nitzan Archives
  • The climate threat: What our children can expect
  • The Collapse of Complex Societies
  • The Coming Reality of Sea Level Rise: Too Fast Too Soon
  • The Consumer Trap
  • The Current Mass Extinction
  • The Damage of Current Human Activities Without Precedent in Past 'Mass Extinction' Fossil Records.
  • The Discovery of Global Warming
  • The End of Growth
  • The Entropy Law and the Economic Process
  • The evolution and psychology of self-deception
  • The Free Press
  • The Future of Ice Sheets and Sea Ice: Between Reversible Retreat and Unstoppable Loss
  • The Gore Vidal Pages
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  • The human brain is in Denial.
  • The Human Nature of Unsustainability
  • The Idiot's Guide To Buying A Congressman
  • The Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations & U.S. Policy
  • The Limits to Growth (PDF scanned version)
  • The Loss of Biodiversity: a Dangerous Game
  • The Meritocracy Myth
  • The moral environment on Wall Street is pathological — money rules all
  • The Myth of the 1970′s Global Cooling Consensus
  • The myth of US self-sufficiency in crude oil
  • THE NEED FOR A NEW ECONOMIC SYSTEM: "…he feared that human society is headed for a crash."
  • The Network of Global Corporate Control
  • The New Middle Ages
  • The physics of long-run global economic growth
  • THE POPULATION PROBLEM AND SOCIALISM
  • The Power Elite
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  • The Story of P(ee)
  • The Temptation of The Technofix (The Quest for “New Nature”)
  • There Is No "Green" Energy
  • Thomas Homer-Dixon
  • Tilting at Windmills, Spain’s disastrous attempt to replace fossil fuels with Solar Photovoltaics
  • Tipping Towards the Unknown
  • Too many bodies? The return and disavowal of the population question
  • Trade-Off: Financial system supply-chain cross contagion – a study in global systemic collapse
  • Twenty Premises on Industrial Civilization from Derrick Jensen
  • Underminers: A Practical Guide to Radical Change
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  • Wake Up Amerika!
  • We Are All Madoffs
  • Wealth and Inequality – Pareto, Gini and Contingency
  • What Evolution Is?
  • Who Rules America: An Investment Manager's View on the Top 1%
  • Who Rules America: Wealth, Income, and Power
  • Why shale gas won’t end our energy woes
  • Why Space Opera Won't Fly
  • Why won't planting trees stop global warming?
  • Zygmunt Bauman

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RSS Adam Curtis Blog

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RSS Aljazeera – Opinion

  • UK veteran, 96: Defend the peaceful Europe my generation died for February 18, 2019
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  • Italy's pro-refugee mayor of Riace faces charges February 18, 2019
  • UAE signs $1.3bn in deals as arms fair opens amid criticism February 18, 2019
  • Ahead of Hanoi summit, N Korea faces 'turning point': State media February 18, 2019
  • What should be done with foreign ISIL fighters captured in Syria? February 18, 2019

RSS All Tied Up and Nowhere to Go

  • Trump. He’s famous, you know February 28, 2017
  • Just saying February 6, 2017
  • Hate, and its antidote February 6, 2017
  • Melissa McCarthy slaps Spicer and Trump February 5, 2017
  • Deutschland zweiter, den Vereinigten Staatem zuerst February 5, 2017
  • The chaos February 3, 2017

RSS Alternative Radio

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RSS Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

  • Firms need more protection against banks, argues MP February 2, 2019

RSS Anarchist News

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  • Anews Podcast 103, 2.15.2019 February 17, 2019
  • Vermont interview with American YPG volunteer concerning the revolution in Rojava February 16, 2019
  • Identity, Art, Immolation: Trust with the Gun in Your Hand February 16, 2019
  • Anarchist Zines & Pamphlets Published in January February 16, 2019

RSS Antony Loewenstein

  • How Washington has created chaos in Honduras February 15, 2019
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RSS Arctic Emergency Institute

  • Declining Summer Sea Ice Threatens More than Arctic Wildlife August 25, 2012

RSS Arctic Methane Emergency Group (AMEG)

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RSS Arctic News

  • Global New Deal February 18, 2019
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RSS Arctic Sea Ice

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RSS Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis

  • Polar vortex breakdown February 5, 2019
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  • A record-low start to the new year in Antarctica January 3, 2019

RSS Around the Coast Mountains

  • The name’s Mark… Mark BC March 18, 2014
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RSS Arthur Silber

  • Concerning Moral Judgment, and Moral Monsters February 4, 2019
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RSS Arundhati Roy

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RSS Arundhati Roy Says

  • A perfect day for democracy February 9, 2013
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  • We Call This Progress December 17, 2012

RSS ASPO – USA

  • The future of the Green New Deal February 11, 2019
  • Peak Oil Review – 2 Feb 2019 February 11, 2019
  • Global Commission on the Geopolitics of Energy Transformation on the future prospect of renewable energy January 28, 2019
  • Peak Oil Review – 28 Jan 2019 January 28, 2019
  • DeSmog Blog on the viability of the US shale oil industry January 21, 2019
  • Peak Oil Review – 21 Jan 2019 January 21, 2019
  • Reuters on the global automakers’ plans for the future of EVs January 14, 2019
  • Peak Oil Review – 14 Jan 2019 January 14, 2019
  • The Wall Street Journal on US shale industry’s financial woes January 7, 2019
  • Peak Oil Review – 7 Jan 2019 January 7, 2019

RSS Avedon’s Sideshow

  • I've been looking high and low February 4, 2019
  • As I rise, the stakes get higher January 16, 2019
  • Winter greetings December 28, 2018

RSS Bad Astronomy

  • Watch a Drunk, Naked-From-the-Waist-Down Geoffrey the Giraffe Smash Up Jimmy Kimmel’s Set With a Baseball Bat
  • Here’s Where You Can Read All of This Year’s Oscar-Nominated Screenplays
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RSS Barbara Ehrenreich

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RSS BBC: Science & Environment

  • Stores accused of 'watering down' bottle deposit scheme February 18, 2019
  • AAAS: Machine learning 'causing science crisis' February 16, 2019
  • Gene-edited animal plan to relieve poverty in Africa February 15, 2019

RSS Big Picture Agriculture

  • How to Stay Informed About Agriculture, Food, and Farming Issues November 14, 2018
  • Agriculture Reading Picks October 31, 2018
  • The Merits of Amaranth October 30, 2018
  • Global Food and Agriculture Photos October 28, 2018 October 28, 2018
  • Unloading Livestock in Ohio 1938 October 25, 2018

RSS Bill Moyers

  • 2/18 – Toni Morrison’s Birthday February 18, 2019
  • 2/15 — Bill T. Jones’ Birthday February 15, 2019
  • 2/15 — Presidents’ Day, 2016 February 15, 2019

RSS Bit Tooth Energy

  • Waterjetting 37e - Using Cavitation to disintegrate rock November 18, 2015
  • Waterjetting 37d - Underground Drilling with Waterjets November 16, 2015
  • Waterjetting 37c - A Drilling Diversion October 14, 2015

RSS Bizarro Blog

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RSS Brane Space

  • The Hard, Unadulterated Truth: Science Does Not Need Religion To Advance Or Improve February 15, 2019
  • Solutions to Revisiting Rings, Fields, Ideals February 15, 2019

RSS Brave New World

  • Remembering Berke Khan, 1209-66 August 16, 2018
  • Tbilisi, Georgia — The City Where (Almost) Everyone Owns a Hotel April 14, 2018
  • South Sudan: “Fragile” State Ravaged by Famine and War March 19, 2018
  • Turkey Coup Attempt: Propaganda Beats Journalism July 18, 2016

RSS Breaking the Set

  • Abby Martin Breaks the Set One Last Time February 28, 2015
  • Never Stop Breaking the Set! February 28, 2015
  • Cuba Part III: The Evolution of Revolution February 27, 2015
  • Cuba Part II: Ebola Solidarity & Castro’s Daughter on Gay Rights February 26, 2015
  • Why Are Americans Getting Their Medical Degrees in Cuba? February 26, 2015

RSS Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

  • The everyday cost of climate change, shown by a hot dog restaurant February 16, 2019
  • As the Colorado River runs dry: A five-part climate change story February 16, 2019
  • What we can learn about climate change from the Titanic February 15, 2019

RSS Business Insider

  • Thousands from migrant caravan are giving up on trying to enter the US after facing Trump's tough asylum policies February 17, 2019
  • These are the top five trends shaping the future of digital health February 17, 2019
  • Four people died in a 12-hour hostage standoff in Mississippi February 17, 2019
  • The three types of Amazon buyers — and how other e-tailers can lure them away (AMZN) February 17, 2019
  • 'Alita: Battle Angel' wins the Presidents' Day weekend box office, but it's is a long way from profitability February 17, 2019
  • New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio slammed Amazon for canceling its HQ2 project, calling it 'an abuse of corporate power' February 17, 2019
  • LeBron James had a great answer for why he doesn't talk about his NBA career with his kids February 17, 2019
  • AI 101: How learning computers are becoming smarter February 17, 2019
  • R. Kelly facing potential criminal charges over sex tape after a secret grand jury convened in Chicago February 17, 2019
  • Trust is the main barrier to smart speaker adoption – here's what companies can do about that February 17, 2019

RSS C-Realm

  • Automation and SJWs: A Conversation with James Howard Kunstler February 12, 2016
  • It's official. The Age of Limits gathering is on hiatus January 22, 2015
  • Three Conferences in Three Weeks June 13, 2014

RSS Cagle: Premium Cartoon News

  • Trump in the China Shop February 16, 2019
  • Yes and No February 16, 2019
  • Gun Craziness February 16, 2019
  • Sidestepping The Constitution February 17, 2019
  • Political emergency February 16, 2019
  • Wall Emergency! February 16, 2019

RSS Cassandra’s Legacy

  • And now we are Officially Starting to Slide Down the Seneca Cliff: The A380 Goes the way the Concorde Went February 14, 2019
  • What's Emperor Trump Doing? He is Busy at Splitting the Empire in Two February 11, 2019
  • The Sower's Strategy: Norway Leads the Way Toward the Energy Transition February 8, 2019
  • The Biodiesel Disaster: Why bad Ideas are Always so Successful? February 4, 2019
  • Tolstoy on War: The Systemic Vision of a Tragedy February 1, 2019

RSS Censored News

  • Ward Valley Spiritual Gathering Photos by Ofelia Rivas 2019 February 17, 2019
  • Longest Walk 2019 Photos by Bad Bear February 17, 2019
  • Victory -- Black Snake DAPL Lawsuit Thrown Out -- Supporting Water Protectors is Not a Federal Crime February 15, 2019

RSS Center For Biological Diversity

  • Lawsuit Challenges Trump's Emergency Declaration for Border Wall February 16, 2019
  • Trump EPA OKs 'Emergency' to Dump Bee-killing Pesticide on 16 Million Acres February 15, 2019
  • Judge Denies TransCanada's Request for Most Pre-construction Work on Keystone XL Pipeline February 15, 2019

RSS Center for Investigative Journalism

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RSS Center for Economic & Policy Research

  • Haiti and the Collapse of a Political and Economic System February 12, 2019
  • When Politicians Say “Free Trade,” They Mean Upward Redistribution February 11, 2019
  • ‘Middle Class Joe’ Biden Courts Wall Street Oligarch, BlackRock’s Larry Fink February 9, 2019
  • Progressive Taxes Only Go So Far. Pre-Tax Income Is the Problem February 4, 2019

RSS Charles Eisenstein’s Blog

  • Initiation à une planète vivante January 21, 2019
  • Entwicklung im Zeitalter der Ökologie October 30, 2018

RSS Chomsky

  • The Kind of Anarchism I Believe in, and What's Wrong with Libertarians June 9, 2013
  • Upcoming speaking event in Boston with Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman, and Jeremy Scahill April 19, 2013

RSS Chris Hedges

  • Worshipping the Electronic Image February 18, 2019

RSS Class Warfare Blog

  • Finding Meaning in Life February 7, 2019
  • The Mistake of Monotheism February 6, 2019

RSS Cliff Schecter

  • UK veteran, 96: Defend the peaceful Europe my generation died for February 18, 2019
  • Polish officials may cancel trip to Israel over diplomatic spat February 18, 2019
  • Pakistan recalls India envoy amid tensions over Kashmir attack February 18, 2019
  • Italy's pro-refugee mayor of Riace faces charges February 18, 2019
  • UAE signs $1.3bn in deals as arms fair opens amid criticism February 18, 2019
  • Ahead of Hanoi summit, N Korea faces 'turning point': State media February 18, 2019

RSS Climate and Capitalism

  • Ecosocialist Bookshelf, February 2019 February 17, 2019
  • Support the Trans Mountain protestors defense fund! February 14, 2019
  • An outline of ‘Democratic Eco-Socialism as a Real Utopia’ February 13, 2019
  • John Bellamy Foster on the ‘Green New Deal’ February 12, 2019
  • An open letter to Steven Pinker (and Bill Gates, for that matter) about global poverty February 4, 2019
  • Why the Anthropocene is not ‘climate change’ — and why that matters January 31, 2019

RSS Climate Central

  • New Tool Forecasts Local Power Generation
  • Want to Build a Delaware Beach House? Expect Regular Floodwaters in 30 Years
  • Ocean at the Door: New Homes and the Rising Sea
  • Rising Tides: How Near-Daily Flooding of America’s Shorelines Could Become the Norm

RSS Climate Change: The Next Generation

  • Chris Mooney, WaPo: Earth Is 'Missing' at Least 20 Ft of Sea Level Rise. Antarctica Could Be The Time Bomb February 16, 2019
  • FloodList: New Scale to Characterize Strength and Impacts of Atmospheric River Storms February 15, 2019
  • L. A. Times: As lawsuits over climate change heat up, oil industry steps up spurious attacks on its critics February 15, 2019

RSS Climate Citizen

  • Politician responses to the record extreme heat for Australia January 2019 February 3, 2019
  • Australia's Hottest January on Record as we head into a climate election February 3, 2019
  • Heatwave round 3: climate diary of an Australian heat event January 22, 2019

RSS Climate Code Red

  • Best climate video ever? A Swedish Teenager's Compelling Plea on Climate February 17, 2019
  • COP24: Capricious foes, Big Sister and high-carbon plutocrats January 13, 2019
  • Big oil and gas nations sideline the science at Katowice, even as emissions rise and warming accelerates December 9, 2018

RSS Climate Connections

  • Climate Connections Update February 5, 2015
  • CIC’s environmental and social justice photography contest open for entries January 9, 2015
  • FBI Harassing Activists in Pacific Northwest January 7, 2015

RSS Climate Denial Crock of the Week

  • OffRoading E-Truck has Crazy Specs February 17, 2019
  • Mike Mann: The Most Villainous Act in History February 17, 2019
  • Alex Steffen: The Carbon Lobby’s Quiet Strategy February 17, 2019

RSS Climate Progress

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RSS Climate Snapshot

  • "Carbon tsunami" lead by Enbridge Northern Gateway takes aim at BC June 18, 2014
  • BC's tar sands? Thirteen proposed LNG projects equivalent to 13 times current BC emissions June 9, 2014
  • Car Carbon series: cool new animation, plus the jaw-dropping impact it left out May 13, 2014
  • Climate change fuels both California's record drought and "polar vortex" storms May 6, 2014

RSS ClimateSight

  • Climate change and compassion fatigue October 12, 2018
  • The silver lining of fake news August 22, 2018
  • Future projections of Antarctic ice shelf melting June 26, 2018

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  • Worms Turning February 15, 2019
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RSS Colin Tudge

  • Let's not bet the farm | Colin Tudge April 3, 2013
  • Why the world needs a renaissance of small farming | Colin Tudge September 18, 2012

RSS Common Dreams: News

  • Slamming President for Jeopardizing Disaster Funds, States Prepare Legal Challenge to Trump's Emergency Declaration February 17, 2019
  • With Americans Outraged Over Trump's 'Power Grab Based on Lies,' Nearly 250 President's Day Protests Planned Across the Country February 17, 2019
  • DNC Rejects Ban on Corporate PAC Money, Delaying Decision Until 2020 February 16, 2019
  • WATCH: Pence Met with Icy Silence in Munich, Praising Trump and Attempting to Bully Leaders on Foreign Policy February 16, 2019
  • "It's What Happens in a Totalitarian Regime": Capitol Police Slammed for "Disturbing" Physical Attacks on Reporters February 16, 2019

RSS Consortium News

  • The FBI Came Close to Staging a Coup February 17, 2019
  • How Much of Venezuela’s Crisis is Really Maduro’s Fault? February 15, 2019
  • The End of the Observer Mission in Hebron February 15, 2019

RSS Consumer Energy Report

  • Notice: New R-Squared Is rrapier.com June 3, 2017
  • Contact Information And Blog Migration Update May 19, 2017
  • Guest Post: Offshore Wind Power Cost Update April 20, 2017
  • The Peak Oil Estimate You Won’t Believe: A Tale Of Two Sigmoids March 28, 2017

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RSS CounterPunch

  • 31 Actual National Emergencies February 18, 2019
  • What Happened to the Remains of Khashoggi’s Predecessor? February 18, 2019
  • When Grizzly Bears Go Bad: Constructions of Victimhood and Blame February 18, 2019
  • USMCA’s Outsourcing of Free Speech to Big Tech February 18, 2019
  • How the BLM Serves the West’s Welfare Ranchers February 18, 2019
  • The First Rule of AIPAC Is: You Do Not Talk about AIPAC February 18, 2019
  • The Crimes of Elliot Abrams February 18, 2019
  • A Tale of Two Citations: Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” and Michael Harrington’s “The Other America” February 18, 2019
  • Haiti and the Collapse of a Political and Economic System February 18, 2019
  • It’s Not Just Trump and the Republicans February 18, 2019

RSS Crooked Timber

  • Wit’s End February 18, 2019
  • Adorno in America February 15, 2019
  • Democracy and inequality as a global foreign policy agenda February 11, 2019
  • Jacques Callot, “The Temptation of St. Anthony” February 11, 2019

RSS Crooks and Liars

  • This Week's 'Best Viral Videos' Is Worth The Click February 18, 2019
  • C&L's Late Nite Music Club With Elastica February 18, 2019
  • George Conway Tells Trump: Take One Day Off To Stop 'Debasing Your Office' February 17, 2019
  • Heather Nauert Withdraws Nomination For UN Ambassador February 17, 2019

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RSS Dahr Jamail

  • End of Ice interview with Last Born in the Wilderness’ Patrick Farnsworth, and Rob Seimetz, host of Moving Forward on The Progressive Radio Network (PRN) February 14, 2019
  • Popular Resistance Radio Interview February 13, 2019

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RSS Daily Kos Comics

  • Cartoon: Mitch's Green raw deal February 15, 2019
  • Cartoon: The Revolver February 15, 2019
  • Cartoon: The Latin American Lucky Ducky: Pato Afortunado comes to America February 14, 2019
  • Cartoon: The wasteland new deal act February 13, 2019
  • Cartoon: Sign February 13, 2019
  • Cartoon: Many white Americans fail to assimilate February 12, 2019

RSS Damn the Matrix

  • Adding balance to the meat debate February 17, 2019
  • Time to rethink monetary policy February 15, 2019

RSS Dan Hagen

  • When Freedom Isn't February 15, 2019
  • Down the Evil Road to Socialism February 15, 2019

RSS Dangerous Intersection

  • Measuring the Deep Corruption of the U.S. Political System January 24, 2019
  • More on Political Opinions and Tribal Pressures January 23, 2019
  • Scientific Reasoning, Tribal Reasoning January 22, 2019

RSS Dark Ages America

  • 356 February 16, 2019
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RSS David Bollier

  • A Looming Deadline for the Right to Ramble January 22, 2019
  • HowlRound -- Enacting Theater as a Commons January 14, 2019
  • The Insurgent Power of the Commons in the War Against the Imagination October 8, 2018

RSS David Cay Johnston (Link – National Memo)

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RSS David Hilfiker

  • Welcome August 4, 2011

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RSS David Roberts

  • Seattle’s unbelievable transportation megaproject fustercluck June 5, 2015
  • Please support Grist April 10, 2015
  • There’s an emerging right-wing divide on climate denial. Here’s what it means (and doesn’t) April 8, 2015

RSS Death by Car: Capitalism’s Drive to Carmageddon

  • Electric Pickups February 15, 2019
  • Notes for Ocasio February 8, 2019
  • Lots of Children Left Behind January 29, 2019
  • Propaganda and Delusion January 11, 2019
  • EVs Doing Their Real Work January 7, 2019

RSS Decline of the Empire

  • Tulsi Gabbard — Because Losing All Hope Is Freedom
  • Is There An Upper Limit On Human Self-Deceptive Bullshit?

RSS Deep Green Resistence News Service

  • Greenwash, spin and bad science reporting February 16, 2019
  • Trust Nothing February 15, 2019
  • The Problem February 14, 2019
  • 156 FOURTH WORLD NATIONS HAVE SUFFERED GENOCIDE SINCE 1945 February 13, 2019

RSS Deepak Tripathi’s Diary

  • Book Review: How Democracy Ends June 5, 2018
  • A Bloody Hot Summer in Gaza: Parallels With Sharpeville, Soweto and Jallianwala Bagh May 23, 2018

RSS Democratic Underground

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RSS Democratic Underground – Breaking News

  • U.S. agency submits auto tariff probe report to White House February 18, 2019
  • Facebook needs independent ethical oversight: UK lawmakers February 18, 2019
  • McCabe: Trump talked to me about his election victory during 'bizarre' job interview February 18, 2019
  • 11-year-old Florida boy arrested for refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance February 17, 2019
  • Lindsey Graham goes all-in on Trump talking points: 'It's better' for kids to have a border wall th February 17, 2019
  • Brexit: May risks fresh confrontation with ERG over backstop February 17, 2019
  • 'Evidence in plain sight' of Trump collusion with Russia, Schiff says February 17, 2019
  • Trump's NYC eateries written up for 'live mice,' other 'critical' health code violations in recent February 17, 2019
  • Mueller questions Cambridge Analytica director Brittany Kaiser February 17, 2019
  • U.S. Appeal for NATO Personnel in Syria Brushed Off by Spain February 17, 2019

RSS Democratic Underground – Good Reads

  • A dead planet costs more February 18, 2019
  • UBI: Stockton, California Starts Universal Basic Income Experiment February 18, 2019
  • *Economic Fairness*: To Get Any We Need To Be Demanding It, By Name February 18, 2019
  • Text of Friday's Rose Garden Word Salad Debacle February 17, 2019
  • Statement by Trump, IMMIGRATION, February 15, 2019 February 17, 2019
  • In Trump's World, He Never Loses February 17, 2019
  • A Mother Learns the Identity of Her Child's Grandmother. A Sperm Bank Threatens to Sue. February 17, 2019
  • Tradition of nonpartisan selection of judges may end in Iowa February 17, 2019
  • GUARDIAN: Democratic party elites silence Ilhan Omar at their peril February 17, 2019
  • China, Russia Join for Push to Split U.S. From Allies February 17, 2019

RSS Democracy Now

  • Ibram X. Kendi on Surviving Cancer & His Anti-Racist Reading List for Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam February 15, 2019
  • "Agitate, Agitate, Agitate!": Great-Great-Great-Grandson Echoes Frederick Douglass on 201st Birthday February 15, 2019
  • Asylum Seekers Are Being Imprisoned in an Abandoned Factory in Mexico Under Trump Admin Policy February 15, 2019
  • Immigrant Activists: Democrats Are Capitulating to Trump by Approving Border, DHS Funding February 15, 2019
  • New Interior Sec. David Bernhardt May Violate Trump's Ethics Rule on Lobbyists in His Administration February 15, 2019
  • Public Citizen: Trump’s National Emergency Declaration Paves Way for Sweeping Authoritarianism February 15, 2019
  • Headlines for February 15, 2019 February 15, 2019
  • One Year After Parkland, 1,200 More Kids Are Dead by Gunfire—But Students Still Fight for Gun Safety February 14, 2019
  • Roberto Lovato: Elliott Abrams Is Bringing Violence of 1980s U.S. Latin America Policy to Venezuela February 14, 2019
  • Ilhan Omar Grills Trump's Venezuela Envoy Elliott Abrams on His Role in US-Backed Genocide in 1980s February 14, 2019

RSS Derrick Jensen

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RSS Desdemona Despair

  • Highly unusual upward trends in rapidly intensifying Atlantic hurricanes are caused by global warming February 15, 2019
  • Global insect population faces “catastrophic” collapse – “If we destroy the basis of the ecosystem, which are the insects, then we destroy all the other animals that rely on them for a food source” February 15, 2019
  • GoFundMe: Protect the National Butterfly Center from Trump border wall – $82K of $100K goal raised – UPDATE: Goal reached! February 13, 2019
  • U.S. wealth concentration returns to levels not seen since the Roaring Twenties – The 400 richest Americans own more than bottom 150 million – “For the rich, wealth begets power” February 12, 2019
  • Lawmakers tell Pentagon: Revise and resubmit your climate-change report February 12, 2019
  • New study establishes link between climate change, conflict, and migration – “In a context of poor governance and a medium level of democracy, severe climate conditions can create conflict over scarce resources” February 12, 2019

RSS Desertification

  • Untitled December 10, 2017
  • Temporary closure of this blog July 27, 2017
  • Taking resilient food security to scale means supporting innovation among millions of farmers over millions of hectares July 16, 2017
  • Key insights from the 17th Meeting of the GCF Board in Songdo, Korea July 16, 2017
  • Number of people needing humanitarian assistance on the rise July 16, 2017

RSS deSmog Blog

  • UK Climate Diplomacy Staff Cut Again as Post-Brexit Links to Trump and US Deniers Strengthen November 24, 2016
  • 'It's About Economics': Two Coal Plants to Close Despite Trump's Tweet February 16, 2019
  • The Latest Propaganda Push From Pro-Pipeline Front Group GAIN February 15, 2019

RSS Digbys Blog

  • Yer President's id is running wild February 18, 2019
  • So now the "Deep State" conspiracy includes Chief Justice John Roberts February 17, 2019
  • Is Graham angling to oust the majority leader? February 17, 2019
  • Dancing as fast as he can for decades February 17, 2019
  • The caravan, the caravan! Runferyerlives! February 17, 2019
  • He begged for the Nobel Nomination February 17, 2019

RSS Disinfo – Ecology

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RSS Dispatches from the Underclass

  • PALESTINE: ISRAEL’S WEAPONS LAB January 1, 2019
  • Meet the violent cult that Trump’s regime change crew is trying to put in charge of Iran December 25, 2018
  • Alabama’s Sewage Crisis And Hookworm Scandal December 25, 2018
  • Syria chemical attacks: Smoke and mirrors, truth and lies June 24, 2018
  • Slavery in Libya: Thanks NATO! May 31, 2018

RSS Dissent Magazine

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RSS Dissident Voice

  • Laughter for All (Financial) Times February 17, 2019
  • Enough Western Meddling and Interventions: Let the Venezuelan People Decide February 17, 2019
  • Sickness and Paranoia: The Morrison Government’s Refugee Problem February 17, 2019
  • Charter Schools: School Choice in New Orleans Means No Choices for Parents February 16, 2019
  • Confronting the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination February 16, 2019
  • Canadian Media boosts Trudeau’s Popularity Over Venezuela February 16, 2019
  • Cuba: “The Equilibrium of the World” and Economy of Resistance February 16, 2019
  • Capitalism’s Ownership of Global Warming February 16, 2019

RSS Do the Math

  • Eclipsed, Lately September 11, 2017

RSS Dollars & Sense Blog

  • Our Latest Issue! February 16, 2019
  • Garlic, Cancer, and the Public Funding of Scientific Research December 9, 2018
  • Our November/December Issue Is Out! November 16, 2018
  • Eight Lessons from History to Help Make Sense of Today’s Madness November 3, 2018
  • Brazil Is Falling Under an Evil Political Spell October 15, 2018
  • The September/October Issue Is Out! September 20, 2018

RSS Doug Stanhope

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RSS Douglas Rushkoff

  • Talks at Google: Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus February 6, 2019
  • TED: How to be “Team Human” in the digital future February 6, 2019
  • Medium – The Internet is Acid, and America is Having a Bad Trip February 6, 2019

RSS Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

  • The Neocon Zionists Have Reduced the US to a Country Despised for its Criminality February 17, 2019
  • Tucker Carleson Said It: The Neocons Have No Clothes, and No Sense or Shame Either February 17, 2019

RSS Dredd Blog

  • Countries With Sea Level Change - 2 February 17, 2019
  • Countries A-C February 17, 2019
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RSS Ear to the Ground – Truth Dig

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RSS Early Warning

  • Global Carbon Sink Holding Up So Far August 25, 2018
  • The Wake-Up Call from David Buckel April 16, 2018
  • US Carbon Emissions December 11, 2017

RSS Earth First

  • “UNC Dildo-Boy” accosts homophobic preacher, releases anti-technology declaration March 2, 2014
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  • Less Than 60 Hours Left to Support Indigenous Land Defenders! February 18, 2014

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RSS Earth Policy Institute Blog

  • Data Highlight - Wind Power Beats Nuclear Again in China
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RSS Ecocide Alert

  • Our Top Most Popular Workout Programs January 24, 2019

RSS Ecohuman World

  • Our mission November 23, 2016
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RSS Ecological Headstand

  • For the Abolition of the Wages System! June 18, 2015
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  • Keynes "hadn't got round to it" May 25, 2015
  • Napoleon Solow and the Phantom Mechanism May 20, 2015

RSS Ecological Sociology

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  • A Short History of Progress: Book Review August 26, 2013
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RSS Economic Hardship Reporting Project

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RSS Economic Undertow

  • Collapse Something or Other … December 25, 2018
  • Delusions of Grandeur November 28, 2018
  • Finance Crisis => Political Crisis October 6, 2018

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RSS Empire Burlesque

  • Pence and the Benjamins: An Eternity of Anti-Semitism February 15, 2019
  • Fake News and Phony Watchdogs: Journalists Loving the Liars They Cover January 29, 2019

RSS Empirical Magazine

  • From the Empirical Archives: Genius or Folly? August 30, 2013
  • From the Empirical Archives: Nights Such as These August 29, 2013
  • From the Empirical Archives: Second Time Foster Child August 28, 2013

RSS EmptyWheel

  • MalwareTech’s Judge Seems More Sympathetic to Hutchins about the Intent of Prosecution than the Law
  • Urgent, Urgent: Head to the Phones
  • Dan Coats Still Refusing to Provide the Evidence that Russia Didn’t Affect the Election

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RSS Energy Balance

  • The Fracking Illusion February 16, 2019
  • Rising Sea Levels – by How Much, and Why? A Current Commentary. November 16, 2018
  • Permaculture - Designing a Regenerative Future. August 1, 2018
  • Roman concrete, for durable, eco-friendly construction – applications for tidal power generation, and protection against sea level rise. April 21, 2018
  • Providing Good Nutrition on Home Soil - Back to the Future? April 1, 2018
  • Burn Out: The Endgame for Fossil Fuels. Dieter Helm. February 11, 2018

RSS Environment & Food Justice

  • La Lucha por La Sierra | Scion of Texas Oil Barons Seeks to Overturn Historic Use Rights to the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant August 30, 2018
  • Biopiracy in Mexico | Foundation stealing wild beehives in Yucatán June 14, 2018
  • Deep Seeds at the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues | April 2018 May 30, 2018

RSS Envisionation Blog

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RSS Extraenvironmentalist Blog and Podcasts

  • [ Episode #95 // Economy of Things ] January 28, 2017
  • [ Episode #94 // Rocking the Google Bus ] October 25, 2016
  • [ Episode #93 // Climate Agreements ] September 5, 2016

RSS ExtraEnvironmentalist’s Videos

  • [ Rick Wolff // A Cure for Capitalism ]
    Professor Rick Wolff explains why growth has become a focus of our modern political system. He describes how inequality is created by the way our enterprises are organized. Because a significant portion of our lives are at work, how would our society look if democratic businesses became the new normal? What would be the environmental and social implications […]
  • [ Firefly Gathering ]
    The Firefly Gathering offers a wide range of classes for adults and children on primitive skills, permaculture, nature connection, and eco-homesteading that are designed to be able to be applied to enhance everyday life. The gathering gathers a bevy of inspiring, amazing people. Besides classes it offers evening entertainment, basic infrastructure, and on-si […]

RSS Facts for Working People

  • On Ilhan Omar's Questioning of Eliot Abrams February 18, 2019
  • Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Must Not Play Amazon's Game. February 17, 2019
  • Oakland School Board Budget: Hide Money, Pump it to Contractors February 16, 2019

RSS Fair: Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting

  • Transgender Lives Are Not Up for Debate November 15, 2018
  • Media Parroting ‘$1000 Bonus!’ Stories Helped Give Trump’s Tax Cuts Majority Support March 1, 2018
  • Mass Arrests of Protesters: Outrageous in Russia, Barely Worth Mentioning in US July 13, 2017

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RSS Farooque Chowdhury’s Diary

  • Road rage faces student spirit August 4, 2018
  • Fires within the Arctic Circle July 28, 2018
  • A Facebook post on quota mobilisation July 14, 2018

RSS Feasta

  • Redesigning Freedom – report from the Metaphorum annual conference: Dusseldorf Nov. 2-4 2018 February 12, 2019
  • Feasta Annual Report 2018 February 9, 2019
  • Presenting Cap and Share to a citizens’ assembly in the Scottish Parliament February 3, 2019

RSS FireDogLake

  • How CNN Led Facebook To Censor Pages Of Russia-Backed Video Company And Manufactured News Story February 17, 2019
  • Interview With Writer Barry Eisler On Political Thriller, ‘Killer Collective,’ And More February 14, 2019
  • Corcoran Prisoners Describe Life Under Lockdown February 13, 2019
  • Elliott Abrams Melts Down As Muslim Congresswoman Questions Role In Crimes Against Humanity February 13, 2019

RSS Fish Out of Water

  • FAA Ops Manager: Flight Delays "A New Normal" Until Shut Down Ends. It just Did. January 25, 2019
  • Thirty Mile High Wave Encircling Earth to Break over North Pole on Christmas Day December 20, 2018
  • Top Firefighters Rip Trump for his Reckless, Insulting & Demeaning Response to Fires November 11, 2018
  • Sick F*k Trump Threatens & Blames Grieving Californians For Deadly Fires November 10, 2018
  • Adam Schiff "Abundantly Clear Sessions was forced out for not ending Russia Probe " November 8, 2018
  • Category 5, Supertyphoon Yutu Devastating Saipan, 180 mph, winds gusting over 200mph October 24, 2018

RSS Foreign Confidential

  • Exploring Greenland January 10, 2019
  • Dominican Republic Facts That Make You Want to Travel January 10, 2019
  • Celebrating the Legacy of George F. Kennan, Containment's Father February 20, 2018
  • Was the Cold War Inevitable? February 20, 2018

RSS FracTracker

  • Unnatural Disasters February 8, 2019
  • Getting Rid of All of that Waste – Increasing Use of Oil and Gas Injection Wells in Pennsylvania January 31, 2019
  • Seeking new Manager of Communications and Development based in Pittsburgh, PA January 14, 2019

RSS George Monbiot (Alternet)

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RSS Get Real List: Chris Nelder

  • My new gig December 5, 2015
  • Announcing the Energy Transition Show October 14, 2015
  • Guest appearance on The Energy Gang podcast May 14, 2015

RSS Gil Smart

  • Gil Smart right on development February 8, 2015
  • With Gil Smart on guns, the NRA January 19, 2015
  • Gil Smart makes sense May 19, 2014
  • Right on, Gil Smart February 17, 2014

RSS Glen Ford – Black Agenda Report

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RSS Global Guerrillas

  • The Long Night is Coming January 4, 2019
  • Disruption, Drones, and Big Airports December 20, 2018

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RSS Global Oneness Project

  • Earthrise December 21, 2018

RSS Global Research

  • Idlib Province Syria: Infested with US-Supported Terrorists February 18, 2019
  • Is Venezuela Canada’s Modern Day El Dorado? February 18, 2019
  • Venezuela, Iran and the Chaotic Imperialists! February 18, 2019

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RSS Global Research TV

  • Khashoggi and the Take Down of MbS - Global Research interviews Whitney Webb November 25, 2018
  • WTC Towers Brought Down by Controlled Demolition: Richard Gage September 11, 2018
  • The Globalization of War. Michel Chossudovsky August 23, 2018

RSS Gonzalo Lira

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RSS Green is the New Red

  • Trump Supporter Promises Legislation to Label Protest as “Economic Terrorism” November 22, 2016
  • Violence against environmentalists is now at an all-time high July 8, 2016
  • “To Build a Fire”: New Split EP With “Old Lines” and Will Potter June 13, 2016
  • “It changes who you are—forever. What you do with that change is what defines who you are.” April 28, 2016
  • Exclusive: New Virtual Reality Investigation Goes Inside Factory Farms April 13, 2016
  • New Sticker — Animal Rights Activists Must “Join or Die” February 22, 2016
  • “Truth and Power” TV series features Will Potter on “eco-terrorism,” ag-gag laws, and investigative journalism February 15, 2016
  • This woman rowed straight into a hurricane. And you should too. February 11, 2016
  • 6 Lessons From How the FBI and Media Treat Militia Groups January 12, 2016
  • Here’s How One Activist Convinced the FBI to Leave Him Alone December 7, 2015

RSS Green on Huffington Post

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RSS Greg Palast

  • In Venezuela, White Supremacy is a Key to Trump’s Coup February 8, 2019
  • Avoiding Regime Change in VenezuelaPalast on The Scott Horton Show February 5, 2019

RSS Gregor Macdonald

  • Oil Fall December 31, 2018

RSS Grinning Planet

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RSS Grist

  • Scientist who resisted censorship of climate report lost her job February 17, 2019
  • Momentum grows for New York’s landmark climate-equity bill February 16, 2019
  • Likely 2020 voters support parts of Green New Deal, despite reservations over the cost February 16, 2019
  • Youth-led climate protests sweep across Europe February 15, 2019

RSS Growth Busters

  • How to Have a Green Wedding (Podcast Episode #25) February 14, 2019
  • Wild Hope – Nature Rocks! (Podcast Episode #24) February 8, 2019
  • What Do You Do When The End is Near? (Podcast Episode #23) January 19, 2019
  • Cleaning up Our Dirty Laundry (Podcast episode 22) January 3, 2019

RSS Guernica Mag

  • Presented by SIMA: The Super Salmon February 15, 2019
  • White Witchery February 14, 2019
  • Valeria Luiselli: “There are always fingerprints of the archive in my books.” February 12, 2019
  • The Suit February 11, 2019

RSS Guy McPherson’s Blog

  • Your Last Time February 16, 2019
  • Tim Bob: Keeping Up with the McPherson Paradox February 15, 2019

RSS Health After Oil

  • Public Health’s Response to Decline: Loyalty to the 1% December 15, 2014

RSS Hot Topic: Global Warming and the Future of New Zealand

  • Postcards from La La Land #132: time warps and twaddle June 7, 2018
  • The final cut: crank paper on NZ temperature record gets its rebuttal – warming continues unabated May 2, 2018
  • Anthropogenic climate change is real: pithy post-punk anthem for the Trump generation December 9, 2017

RSS How to Save the World

  • Links of the Month: January 2019 — Collapse Watch Edition January 25, 2019
  • How Can We Prepare For an Unknowable Future? January 24, 2019
  • Curious About Radical Non-Duality But Hate Videos? January 23, 2019

RSS I am Not a Number

  • Anti-Anti-Jewish conspiracies October 27, 2018
  • What we say and the way we say it? Anti-Semitism in the Labour Party August 7, 2018
  • Coercive Control In The Workplace January 17, 2018

RSS I Cite

  • America's obsession with rooting out communism is making a comeback September 25, 2018
  • Communist party members may still be barred from US citizenship September 25, 2018
  • APSA2018 Unite Here -- Solidarity picket at Sheraton Hotel 1:00 August 30, 2018
  • Legitimating Torture: The American Political Science Association Gives Award to Condolezza Rice -- Political Scientists Push Back Letter August 28, 2018
  • Kurt Andersen Can't Read September 7, 2017

RSS Iamronen

  • Lonely is Better February 7, 2019
  • The Isolation of Science February 5, 2019
  • Overtone January 31, 2019
  • Yoga Practice – Winter 2018/19 January 25, 2019
  • Indra Adnan On New Politics, Soft Power and the Feminine January 21, 2019

RSS Ian Welsh

  • Republic’s End: Trump’s National Emergency February 15, 2019

RSS Idea Explorer

  • A Simulated World January 10, 2019
  • Future Cases December 12, 2018
  • Values Realized July 10, 2018
  • Fix June 19, 2018
  • Waste Age May 25, 2018

RSS Idea Explorer – Big Pic Explorer

  • Survival of the Realists May 9, 2015
  • Last Years May 3, 2015
  • Accelerating extinction risk from climate change May 1, 2015

RSS Idea Explorer: Land of Conscience

  • Accidents of Birth November 6, 2018
  • Save Jon Frump! September 4, 2018
  • The Extinction Test June 29, 2018

RSS If You Love This Planet – Helen Caldicott

  • Steven Starr, Bruce Gagnon and William Hartung at the Dynamics of Possible Nuclear Extinction symposium April 18, 2017
  • Dr. Helen Caldicott, Ted Postol, Max Tegmark and Alan Robock at The Dynamics of Possible Nuclear Extinction symposium June 23, 2016
  • Dr. Caldicott’s October 2014 speech: The Ukraine Crisis, Is Nuclear Conflict Likely? February 17, 2015
  • Dr. Helen Caldicott interviewed by Bob Herbert about her latest book, “Loving This Planet” December 28, 2012

RSS Indybay Features

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  • Protesters Demand Justice for Chinedu Okobi
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  • Reclaiming King's Radical Legacy

RSS Indybay Newswire

  • S.F. Labor Council Says Hands Off Venezuela
  • Israeli occupation and Palestinian rights/Letter to Dutch parliament
  • U.S. Military Invasion of Venezuela is Escalating
  • The USA, Greece, and Italy: An Anti-Fascist History
  • Influencing The Outcome

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RSS Inside Left – The OFFICIAL Anti-Olympics Blog™

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RSS Institute for Public Accuracy

  • Haiti on Edge February 15, 2019
  • Emergency Powers “Impeachable”: “All You Need is One Brave Member” February 14, 2019
  • Sanders-Khanna Bill on Saudi Assault on Yemen and War Powers Clears House February 14, 2019
  • U.S. Government Propaganda on Venezuela February 13, 2019
  • Rep. Omar and the Truth About AIPAC February 12, 2019
  • AIPAC: Power and Origins February 11, 2019

RSS International Debt Observatory

  • ¿Qué recortes tiene que hacer España para cumplir las exigencias de la UE? October 17, 2016
  • ¿Qué ocurre con la deuda pública en España? October 17, 2016

RSS io9

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RSS iWatch: Global Muckraking

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RSS Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer Blog

  • Five Things We Need to Know About the “Fiscal Cliff” December 10, 2012
  • Wasteful Pentagon Spending and Costly Wars Hurting Minnesota Communities November 6, 2012

RSS Jacobin

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RSS Jeremy Scahill

  • Pox Americana: Vijay Prashad on Venezuela, India, Mexico, Congo, and U.S. Hegemony February 10, 2019

RSS Jill Stein

  • Occupy Inauguration November 21, 2016
  • Farmer's Market on Sundays June 25, 2013

RSS Joe Bageant

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RSS John Cook Video Uploads

  • Marco Rubio: logically false argument about past climate change August 13, 2018
  • Consensus on consensus: summary of studies into scientific consensus on climate change May 5, 2017
  • Science communication & responding to misinformation in the post truth era March 1, 2017
  • John Cook vs Stephan Lewandowsky December 19, 2016

RSS John Hively

  • Wall Street and the Corporate News Media’s War Against Elizabeth Warren February 10, 2019
  • World’s 26 Richest People Own More Wealth Than the Bottom 50 Percent of the World’s Population February 3, 2019

RSS John Pilger

  • THE NEW COLD WAR HAS TURNED JOURNALISM INTO SATIRE

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RSS John W. Whitehead

  • The Emergence of Orwellian Newspeak and the Death of Free Speech June 30, 2015

RSS John Zerzan: Anarchy Radio

  • Anarchy Radio 02 12 2019 February 13, 2019
  • Anarchy Radio 02 05 2019 February 6, 2019
  • Anarchy Radio 01 29 2019 January 30, 2019

RSS Jonathan Turley

  • Two Nigerian Brothers Reportedly Implicated “Empire” Actor Smollett In Hoax Hate Crime February 18, 2019
  • Kurds: Islamic State Defeat To Be Announced “In A Few Days” But Is ISIS Truly Vanquished? February 17, 2019
  • Egypt’s Parliamentary Bill Legislates Ability For al-Sisi To Hold Power Until 2034 February 16, 2019
  • Fight or Flight: Why An Obstruction Case Against Trump Is Likely To Fail February 15, 2019

RSS Karl Grossman

  • I've switched from this site to my website -- www.karlgrossman.com -- for my blog. November 29, 2015
  • The End of Police Raids -- at Long Last -- on Gays of Fire Island July 1, 2015
  • "Fire Island Was Paradise,Truly Paradise" June 21, 2015
  • My First Big Story June 1, 2015
  • Disaster Waiting to Happen at Indian Point May 12, 2015

RSS Karl North Eco-Intelligence

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RSS Kate Ausburn

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RSS Keith Farnish

  • Uprooting Civilization (Part 2) May 7, 2014
  • Uprooting Civilization (Part 1) February 21, 2014
  • The Problem With…Conspiracy Theories January 7, 2014

RSS Knight Science Journalism – MIT

  • The Scientist as Diplomat: Five Questions for Alex Dehgan February 15, 2019
  • The Rising Tide of Climate Injustice February 14, 2019
  • Psychologists Seek a Broader, Healthier Definition of ‘Masculinity’ February 13, 2019
  • The Future of Psychiatry Is Digital. That’s a Good Thing. February 12, 2019
  • In Trump’s Census Plans, Hints of a Citizenship Registry February 11, 2019

RSS Kulture Critic

  • Patience, A Personal Reflection on Life and Its Impermanence July 31, 2018

RSS Kunstler Cast

  • John B. McLemore Email to JHK: Huffing gas fumes in shittown alabama June 1, 2017
  • Release: S-Town Podcast Prequel: KunstlerCast Ready for Binge Listening May 31, 2017
  • KunstlerCast: S-Town May 31, 2017
  • James Howard Kunstler on John B. McLemore of S-Town May 31, 2017
  • Transcript: KunstlerCast: S-Town May 31, 2017

RSS Kurt Kobb

  • "Which species are we sure we can survive without?" Revisited February 17, 2019

RSS Lack of Environment

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RSS Law and Disorder

  • Law and Disorder February 18, 2019 February 18, 2019
  • Law and Disorder February 11, 2019 February 11, 2019
  • Law and Disorder February 4, 2019 February 4, 2019

RSS Le Monde diplomatique – English edition

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RSS Le Monde diplomatique – Open Page

  • Iran nuclear deal: what does US withdrawal mean for the Middle East?
  • Doomsday redux
  • Forty years on, is it make or break for the Islamic Republic?
  • Young, liberal and critical of Israel
  • Maghreb rulers cling on

RSS Leaving Babylon

  • Going gentle into that good night December 23, 2018

RSS Lee Camp

  • Common Censored #45 – Imperial Destruction Under Polite Terms, Infiltration, Activists Beat Amazon February 18, 2019
  • Congresswoman Viciously Attacked For Speaking TRUTH [VIDEO] February 16, 2019
  • Over 1 Million Views For Jimmy Dore & I Tearing Apart NY Times Propagandist February 14, 2019
  • Redacted #231 – Trump Admin. Admits They Want Venezuela’s Oil, Plus Troops In Iraq February 12, 2019
  • Common Censored #44 – Weapons of Mass Distraction, A Student Loan Solution & Ironic AntiSemitism February 11, 2019
  • Extinction Rebellion Shut Down Rockefeller Plaza [VIDEO] February 7, 2019

RSS Lee Fang

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RSS Life Itself

  • The New Improved 1984 February 17, 2019
  • Crazy January 25, 2019
  • A Requiem for the Beautiful Earth December 10, 2018

RSS Limited, Inc.

  • on the character's resistance to her author February 9, 2019
  • Many ways to skin a plutocrat January 31, 2019
  • the guiding myth of social mobility at the top: dont believe it! January 30, 2019

RSS Link TV – Earth Focus

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RSS Low-Tech Magazine

  • Keeping Some of the Lights On: Redefining Energy Security December 9, 2018
  • How Circular is the Circular Economy? November 3, 2018
  • How to Build a Low-tech Website? September 25, 2018

RSS LRB Blog

  • Not enough insects? February 15, 2019
  • At the Théâtre de la Ville February 14, 2019
  • The Thin Blue Line February 12, 2019
  • The Little Island that Could February 7, 2019
  • Fracking Failures February 6, 2019

RSS Luis J. Rodriguez

  • New Year's Message 2017: Regeneration in a time of crisis January 1, 2017
  • Los Angeles Poets and the Temper of Our Times December 14, 2016
  • From an Indigenous Mind: Four Connections December 14, 2016

RSS Mabinogogiblog

  • Fracking in Bleadon is not acceptable February 14, 2019
  • Interruption Rate study request February 6, 2019
  • Today's Letter to MP about Brexit January 14, 2019
  • SWEETENING THE PILL OF SUSTAINABILITY January 12, 2019

RSS Manicore – Accueil

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RSS Marginal Revolution

  • *VC: An American History*, by Tom Nicholas February 18, 2019
  • What will Singapore do with its NIRC? February 18, 2019
  • Mormon missionaries can now call and text home on a regular basis February 17, 2019

RSS Mark Biskeborn – Underground Essays

  • Kafkaesque November 11, 2014
  • Larry Summers Still Living Large April 9, 2013
  • War and Corruption Deficits: Insects and Leviathans January 21, 2013
  • Breaking News: Lt. Col. Shaffer Accuses Former CIA Dir. Tenet December 29, 2012

RSS Mark Fiore

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RSS Mark Lynas

  • 5 April 2018 – Seeds of Science published in the UK! April 5, 2018
  • Mark Lynas – Speech to the Oxford Farming Conference 2018 January 5, 2018
  • Oxitec expands production of GMO mosquito October 26, 2017
  • Is feedlot beef better for the environment? September 18, 2017
  • Experts find climate-skeptic and anti-GMO studies are scientifically flawed September 18, 2017

RSS Martin Wolf

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RSS Matt Bruenig

  • Trump NLRB Smashed Google Guy February 17, 2018
  • Neoliberals Used to Refer to Themselves as New Democrats December 22, 2017
  • Alabama Part II December 16, 2017

RSS Matt Taibbi

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RSS Matt Wuerker

  • Cartoon: Freedom of speech is absolute, but... April 30, 2015
  • Cartoon: Clinton Inc April 23, 2015
  • Cartoon: Reince's Women Issues April 16, 2015
  • Cartoon: The way to win April 9, 2015
  • No Cake for you! April 2, 2015

RSS Max Keiser

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RSS Media Lens

  • Dump The Guardian February 12, 2019
  • Venezuela Blitz - Part 2: Press Freedom, Sanctions And Oil February 7, 2019
  • Venezuela Blitz – Part 1: Tyrants Don’t Have Free Elections February 5, 2019

RSS Media Matters – Environment

  • Here are two big things that were wrong with climate change coverage in 2018  
  • Fox guest says the Green New Deal is a plot to transform America into "some kind of totalitarian government-run, government-monitored state"
  • Fox News dominated prime-time cable coverage of the Green New Deal

RSS Media Matters – Everything

  • On MSNBC's All In, Angelo Carusone explains conservative media influence on Trump's national emergency declaration 
  • Conversion therapy survivor to Minnesota news station: I risked "getting physically assaulted" for not showing "masculine mannerisms"
  • Fox figures continue to smear Kamala Harris for The Breakfast Club interview after hosts debunk claim

RSS Media Roots

  • Media Roots Radio: Glass Film Review, the Unbreakable Trilogy & the Disneyfication of Culture w/ Leslie Lee III February 2, 2019
  • Media Roots Radio: Rand Trump Bromance, Neocon Update, The Wall Already Exists January 31, 2019
  • Media Roots Radio: NewsGuard & the Fake News Watchdog Racket w/ Whitney Webb of Mint Press News January 29, 2019

RSS Methane Hydrates

  • Joint New Zealand - German 3D survey reveals massive seabed gas hydrate and methane system May 12, 2014
  • Noctilucent clouds: further confirmation of large methane releases December 10, 2013
  • Earthquake M6.7 hits Sea of Okhotsk October 2, 2013

RSS Michael Hudson

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RSS Michael Miller – Viewpoint

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RSS Michael Parenti

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RSS Mike Philbin – Free Planet

  • Settled Science Cosmology: where do these people go to school? February 17, 2019
  • Star Citizen: still can't work out what it's supposed to be... February 15, 2019
  • Star Citizen: twenty short stories February 8, 2019

RSS Mondoweiss

  • Palestinian teen dies 4 days after being struck by tear gas canister during Gaza protests February 16, 2019
  • We must thank Ilhan Omar for opening a debate about AIPAC at last February 16, 2019

RSS Mons Angelorum: Deadly Serious 3

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RSS Mons Angelorum: Waiting for Good Weather

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RSS Mother Jones

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RSS MR Zine

  • Yoshie Furuhashi, "After MRZine" January 1, 2017
  • Louis Allday, "Controlling the Narrative on Syria" December 14, 2016
  • Marta Harnecker, "Fidel, Today and Forever" December 11, 2016
  • Prabhat Patnaik, "Developing 'Infrastructure'" December 9, 2016
  • Susie Day, "Forward Ever, Normal Never: Taking Down Donald Trump" December 6, 2016
  • Samir Amin, "The Election of Donald Trump" December 1, 2016

RSS Musings on Iraq

  • This Day In Iraqi History - Feb 17 February 17, 2019
  • This Day In Iraqi History - Feb 16 February 16, 2019
  • Review The Great Betrayal, How America Abandoned The Kurds And Lost The Middle East February 15, 2019

RSS Nafeez Ahmed

  • IDF's Gaza assault is to control Palestinian gas, avert Israeli energy crisis | Nafeez Ahmed July 9, 2014
  • World Bank and UN carbon offset scheme 'complicit' in genocidal land grabs - NGOs | Nafeez Ahmed July 3, 2014
  • The open source revolution is coming and it will conquer the 1% - ex CIA spy | Nafeez Ahmed June 19, 2014
  • Iraq blowback: Isis rise manufactured by insatiable oil addiction June 16, 2014

RSS Naked Capitalism

  • Has America Always Embraced Capitalism? February 18, 2019
  • Even More on “Is CalPERS Private Equity Architect John Cole So Clueless He Doesn’t Know He’s Lying?” February 17, 2019
  • Links 2/17/19 February 17, 2019
  • The Green New Deal’s Huge Flaw February 17, 2019
  • Links 2/16/19 February 16, 2019

RSS Naomi Klein

  • The Game-Changing Promise of a Green New Deal November 28, 2018
  • Donald Trump, Brett Kavanaugh, and the Rule of Pampered Princelings October 11, 2018

RSS Naomi Klein – Guardian.UK

  • A new shock doctrine: in a world of crisis, morality can still win | Naomi Klein September 28, 2017
  • Naomi Klein: how power profits from disaster – podcast July 21, 2017

RSS Nature Protects, As She is Protected

  • No Name Calling Please, Give Us Evidence Which Proves GM Crops Are Safe March 30, 2017
  • Let’s Be Honest About Genetically Modified Crops March 9, 2017

RSS Navdanya’s Diary

  • New Report sustains current non-sustainable food system January 21, 2019
  • Monsanto Does Not have a Patent on Bt Cotton Seeds January 10, 2019
  • Nature, Food & Climate: Towards a Deeper Ecological Understanding to Avoid Climate Catastrophe December 19, 2018

RSS New Internationalist

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RSS New Left Project

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RSS New World Notes

  • America: The Farewell Tour February 15, 2019
  • The Illusionists January 27, 2019
  • The People vs. "The Masters of Mankind" January 22, 2019

RSS News Junkie Post

  • Can Maduro Emulate Castro and Assad to Keep NATO’s Imperialist Hands Off Venezuela? February 16, 2019
  • Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia Merger: Global Empire of Dystopia? February 8, 2019
  • Neofascist Push for Europe’s Implosion Is Not in EU Members National Interest January 14, 2019
  • Gilets Jaunes: Catalyst for a Global Movement? January 9, 2019
  • Toussaint L’Ouverture, the Genius Who Embodied the Enlightenment December 31, 2018
  • Reinventing Marxism for Our Times December 26, 2018

RSS NOAA: Monthly State of the Climate Report

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RSS Notes from the Aboveground

  • On Inequality July 27, 2015
  • Shameless is as shameless does July 21, 2015

RSS NYT Examiner

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RSS Occupy.com

  • Regime Change In Venezuela, But Human Suffering Continues February 15, 2019
  • Rebel Cities 20: With Hip-Hop As Sound Track, Young Senegalese Say Enough Is Enough February 14, 2019
  • Act Out! [196] - NYC Harbor’s New Pipeline + Climate Change as a War Crime February 13, 2019
  • The Killing of Large Species Is Pushing Them Towards Extinction February 13, 2019
  • Richest 0.00025% Owns More Wealth Than Bottom 150 Million Americans February 13, 2019
  • Why Black Teenage Gun Reform Activists Are Barely Recognized February 12, 2019
  • Denver Teachers Go On Strike After Failing to Reach Pay Deal February 12, 2019
  • As Brexit Stumbles Towards No Deal, Calls Escalate for a Second Referendum February 11, 2019

RSS Occupy las Vegas

  • Square verzeichnete einen winzigen Gewinn auf Bitcoin Profit, aber es hat das Potenzial, sich massiv zu verbessern January 13, 2019
  • AU Govt’s Razzia auf Offshore-Glücksspiele weckt Interesse an Cryptosoft November 14, 2018
  • Bitcoin Revolution ist eine bessere Investition als Bitcoin October 23, 2018

RSS Occupy Wall Street

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RSS Oddity Central

  • Japanese Man Turns Himself into a Caucasian Living Doll February 15, 2019
  • Woman Goes Viral for Reviewing Brands of Soap on How Good They Taste February 15, 2019
  • Heavy Pollution Turns Snow Black in Russia February 15, 2019
  • Dozens of Polar Bears Invade Remote Russian Town, Entering Homes and Chasing Locals February 14, 2019
  • Excited Dog Jumps from Second Floor to Greet Owner, Lands on Him and Breaks His Neck February 14, 2019
  • Canadian Town Plagued by Unbearable Smell of 17-Year-Old Seafood Sauce February 14, 2019

RSS Of Two Minds

  • Credit Exhaustion Is Global February 18, 2019
  • Sometimes the Best Solution Is To Leave Things As They Are February 16, 2019
  • What Happens When More QE Fails to Reverse the Recession? February 15, 2019

RSS One Penny Sheet

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RSS One Struggle – South Florida

  • Shutdown – Posturing & Screwing the People January 6, 2019
  • Organize For What? Sunday 12/2/2018 at Space Mountain November 28, 2018
  • What Is Capitalism and Why Is It in Crisis? November 16, 2018
  • Midterm Elections: Can’t Vote Out Fascism October 30, 2018

RSS Orion Magazine

  • Nine Questions for the Author: Krista Schlyer, “Sacrificial Land” January 22, 2019
  • Five Questions with the Author: Elizabeth Rush, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore December 20, 2018
  • Twelve Years is Nothing. And Everything. November 18, 2018

RSS Our Finite World

  • How the Peak Oil story could be “close,” but not quite right January 30, 2019
  • 2019: World Economy Is Reaching Growth Limits; Expect Low Oil Prices, Financial Turbulence January 9, 2019
  • Electricity won’t save us from our oil problems December 20, 2018

RSS Pando Daily

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RSS Paul Haeder

  • The Circle Over the Triangle: A Collectivism and Cyclic Belief Change Comes Around February 6, 2019
  • Insanity of Social Work as Human Control February 1, 2019
  • Tidepools, Dungeness Crabs, Serenity-Fed Beaches and Recreation a Thing of the Past? January 24, 2019

RSS Paul Kingsnorth – Elswhere

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RSS Paul L. Street

  • Thirty-One Actual National Emergencies February 18, 2019
  • Chicago Racist Police-State Blues: Sixteen Shots for Laquan, Three Years for Van Dyke January 30, 2019
  • Has the Ruling Class Finally Had Enough of Trump? January 30, 2019
  • Bordering on Fascism: Scholars Reflect on Dangerous Times January 29, 2019

RSS PBD – Progressive Blog Digest

  • FRANCO-AMERICAN February 17, 2019
  • DRAMA QUEEN February 16, 2019
  • BUILD THE . . . WHATEVER February 15, 2019

RSS PeakOil.com News

  • Iranian Says Israel ‘Looking for War’ February 17, 2019
  • Which species are we sure we can survive without? February 17, 2019
  • Oil Will Continue to Play Significant Role February 16, 2019

RSS Peak Prosperity Blog

  • Dude, Where's My Cash? February 15, 2019
  • Watch Episode #1 Of Our Real Estate Investing Series February 10, 2019
  • Next Stop: Recession! February 8, 2019

RSS Peak Prosperity: Daily Digest

  • Daily Digest 2/17 - Amazon Pays $0 In Income Taxes For 2018, How Long Will This Oil Rally Last? February 17, 2019
  • Daily Digest 2/15 - Good News Friday: Citizen Helps Homeless During Cold Snap, Why Curiosity Should Be Boundless February 15, 2019
  • Daily Digest 2/14 - Avoid The Financial Circus, Why Saudi Aramco May Come To An Oil Field Near You February 14, 2019
  • Daily Digest 2/13 - Oakland Teacher Strike Looms, Employer Health Plans Cover Less Than You Think February 13, 2019

RSS Peak Prosperity: Featured Voices

  • Tan Liu: Why Many Of Today's Most-Owned Stocks Are Ponzi Schemes February 14, 2019
  • Lance Roberts: The Case For A 50% Market Correction January 22, 2019
  • Art Berman: Exposing The False Promise Of Shale Oil January 16, 2019

RSS People Before Profit Blog

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RSS Phlegm

  • "we fight each other while it devours us" Belgium June 2017 December 1, 2017
  • West Didsbury Manchester. May 2017 December 1, 2017
  • Dulwich picture gallery. April 25th 2017 December 1, 2017

RSS Phyllis Bennis

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RSS Physicist-Retired Newsvine

  • Dramatic changes in Arctic sea ice
  • Comet ISON May Provide A Spectacular Show Later This Year
  • Slightly Increased 2012 Antarctic Sea Ice Levels No Match for Arctic Declines | The Yale Forum on Climate Change Reports

RSS Pink Tank

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RSS PlanetSave – Climate

  • Smart Wood: Bio-Engineering Trees For Specific Purposes April 23, 2018
  • Topsoil Fertility Decline & Soil Erosion — A Few Musings April 22, 2018
  • New York City Banning Cars From Central Park For First Time In A Century This Summer April 21, 2018
  • PSA Group Gets Into Electrification Game April 21, 2018
  • Lyft Launching Program To Offset Carbon Emissions Of On-Demand Taxi Service Rides Via “Green” Investments April 20, 2018

RSS Political Violence @ a Glance

  • Weekly Links February 17, 2019
  • Survey Format and the Trade-Off Between Internal and External Validity February 14, 2019
  • Framework Deal: A Long-Term Path to Peace in Afghanistan February 13, 2019

RSS Popular Resistance

  • Study Strongly Supports Public Banking To Finance Infrastructure February 17, 2019
  • Lessons From FBI’s Secret War On Activism February 17, 2019
  • Union Thugs Assault Striking Matamoros Workers February 17, 2019
  • Social Movements Show Support To The Bolivarian Revolution February 17, 2019

RSS PRN with Danny Schechter

  • The Gary Null Show – 08.15.16 August 15, 2016
  • Leid Stories – Election 2016: Primaries Deliver A Big Payday for Clinton, An Inevitable Payout for Sanders – 06.08.16 June 8, 2016
  • The Gary Null Show – 05.10.16 May 10, 2016
  • Meditations and Molotovs – 05.02.16 May 2, 2016
  • Focus on the Facts – 02.29.16 February 29, 2016
  • Warrior Connection – 02.28.16 February 29, 2016
  • Resistance Radio – Darcia Narvaez – 02.28.16 February 29, 2016
  • Meria Heller Show – 02.28.16 February 28, 2016
  • Expat Files – 02.28.16 February 28, 2016

RSS Progressive Radio Network

  • Hell & High Water, with Meria & Chuck Ochelli February 17, 2019
  • Economic Update – Economics of Conflicted Mothers February 16, 2019
  • Love Code – The Healing Power of Mindfulness with Jon Kabat-Zinn PhD, February 16, 2019
  • Ask The Blood Detective – Your deepest fears about hidden health problems February 16, 2019
  • Alternative Visions – Predictions & Forecasts: US and Global Economies February 15, 2019
  • Leid Stories–You’re Cordially Invited to Free Your Mind!–02.15.19 February 15, 2019

RSS ProPublica

  • Investigation of Disasters Sparks Debate Over Navy’s Readiness and Responsibilities February 15, 2019
  • The VA Is Paying for a Top Official’s Cross-Country Commute February 15, 2019
  • Former Trump Officials Are Supposed to Avoid Lobbying. Except 33 Haven’t. February 14, 2019
  • Large Natural Gas Producer to Pay West Virginia Plaintiffs $53.5 Million to Settle Royalty Dispute February 14, 2019
  • ProPublica Named a Finalist for Shadid Award for Journalism Ethics February 13, 2019

RSS Project Censored

  • Activists at the Local and Global Levels February 13, 2019
  • How Mainstream Media Evolved into Corporate Media: A Project Censored History February 7, 2019
  • Abby Martin and Mnar Muhawish February 4, 2019

RSS Public Intelligence

  • (U//FOUO) FBI Active Shooter Incidents and Mass Killings In Schools 2000-2017
  • Czech Republic National Cyber and Information Security Agency Warning on Huawei and ZTE
  • (U//FOUO) DIA Study: Invisibility Cloaking Theory and Experiments
  • FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit’s Key Findings in October 2017 Las Vegas Mass Shooting
  • (U//FOUO) DHS Guide: Cross-Border Gangs and their Mexican Drug Cartel Affiliations
  • The U.S. Army in Multi-Domain Operations 2028
  • (U//FOUO) NCTC Counterterrorism Weekly Open Source Digest December 2018
  • Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Shooting Public Safety Commission Draft Report
  • (U//LES) DEA Bulletin: Fake Xanax Tablets Containing Cyclopropylfentanyl, Methamphetamine, and FUB-AKB48
  • Domestic Operational Law Handbook for Judge Advocates 2018

RSS Pulse

  • Let’s Talk About Genocide: Words Matter February 12, 2019
  • Intimations of Ghalib January 21, 2019
  • Open Letter to Code Pink December 8, 2018
  • Julian Assange Reveals: Holocaust Denier Is a Trusted ‘Friend’ September 22, 2018

RSS Quartz

  • Photos: When Microsoft ruled the world February 18, 2019
  • A complete guide to Microsoft’s comeback February 18, 2019
  • “Never seen anything like this before,” says Facebook India’s fake-news buster after Pulwama attack February 18, 2019
  • The most successful EV model to date is not from the US or China February 18, 2019
  • How the Narendra Modi government let Kashmir slide into chaos again February 18, 2019
  • Who are the indigenous Ainu people of Japan? February 18, 2019
  • After Pulwama attack, Indians vent their anger at Pakistan, ethnic Kashmiris, and media February 18, 2019
  • Violence rocks Kashmir’s Pulwama district again days after a deadly attack on security forces February 18, 2019
  • Meet the dogs of the 2020 presidential race February 17, 2019
  • The “snow moon” is just another full moon—with a little extra sparkle February 17, 2019

RSS Question Everything

  • Happy (sic) New Year January 1, 2019
  • Winter Solstice 2018 December 21, 2018
  • Finally people are waking up to how bad it is! October 10, 2018

RSS R-Squared Energy

  • Notice: New R-Squared Is rrapier.com June 3, 2017
  • Contact Information And Blog Migration Update May 19, 2017
  • Guest Post: Offshore Wind Power Cost Update April 20, 2017
  • The Peak Oil Estimate You Won’t Believe: A Tale Of Two Sigmoids March 28, 2017

RSS Rabett Run

  • Eli Rabett's: Dividend and Fee Carbon Taxes February 14, 2019
  • Making Tracks in the US February 8, 2019
  • It's perfectly fine to talk on a cell phone in an elevator February 8, 2019

RSS Rabble.Ca

  • Youth climate conference builds momentum around Canadian Green New Deal February 16, 2019
  • Fortuna Silver mine opposed by community of Santa Carina Minas in Oaxaca, Mexico February 15, 2019
  • Long-delayed introduction of pharmacare should be top priority in this election February 15, 2019
  • Women's Memorial March continues to demonstrate resilience and a call for justice February 15, 2019

RSS Radical Philosophy

  • Starting again from Marx December 17, 2018
  • The deportation power December 17, 2018
  • Deportation, nation state, capital December 17, 2018
  • Expulsion, power, Mobilisation December 17, 2018

RSS Ran Prieur

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RSS Random Communications from an Evolutionary Edge

  • Exciting Year for CII and Democracy – and More to Come December 29, 2018
  • In a wise democracy, who are “stakeholders” and what is their role? December 11, 2018

RSS RANTINGS ON MARKETS, ECONOMICS AND BUSINESS STRATEGY

  • The United States Continues Down The Rabbit Hole Under The Guidance Of State Liberalism And The Death Of Individual Liberty June 25, 2018
  • Facebook’s Dystopian “Community” April 13, 2018
  • Illegal Search & Seizure And The Trump Presidency April 13, 2018

RSS Read the Science

  • IPCC Discovers Infographics – Communicates Climate Change April 11, 2014
  • Show me the Money: Adaptation Finance February 18, 2014
  • The Coffee Grower’s Paradox January 24, 2014
  • Stinking Hot Down Under January 17, 2014
  • Send in the Clouds January 10, 2014

RSS Reader Supported News

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RSS Reader Supported News – Posts

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RSS Real Economics

  • Week-end Wrap - February 16, 2019 February 17, 2019
  • Week-end Wrap - February 9, 2019 February 10, 2019
  • The economic nutcase behind the coup attempt in Venezuala February 10, 2019

RSS Real-World Economics Review Blog

  • Modern Money Theory and inflation control: look at constant tax inflation February 17, 2019
  • The enduring popularity of ‘The Great Transformation’ by Polanyi February 16, 2019
  • The times are changing – tax style February 15, 2019

RSS Red Pepper

  • The global networks of neofascism February 15, 2019
  • ‘We are confronted by the threat of civil war’ February 14, 2019
  • Gilets Jaunes and the security state February 13, 2019
  • Criminalising political opposition in Catalonia February 12, 2019
  • The age of environmental breakdown February 12, 2019

RSS Reddit: Environment

  • Time to have the Talk again
  • Trump's repeal of light bulb standards will increase pollution, cost billions
  • Australia to plant 1 billion trees to help meet climate targets
  • Does anybody ever get sad when driving by new construction?
  • The real political danger to the Green New Deal is that Democrats will do what they did with healthcare—run from the issue and allow the Republicans to set the terms of the debate.
  • Ask yourself how you can reduce your use of plastic...and then tell a friend!

RSS Reddit: Overpopulation – Unending Growth

  • We Must Preserve The Earth's Dwindling Resources For My Five Children
  • Hypothetical - Stability through year of no births
  • Humanity discretely growing desperate enough to begin Oil & Gas drilling in Somalia
  • Four Billion More: What to Do About Massive Population Growth - SPIEGEL ONLINE - International
  • Could two-child policy save India from overpopulation?

RSS Republic of Lakotah – Mitakuye Oyasin

  • DENVER CELEBRATES THE LIFE AND LEGACY OF RUSSELL MEANS October 19, 2013
  • PEARL MEANS September 8, 2013
  • CONVERSATION WITH LOURDES July 24, 2013

RSS Resilience.org

  • “Which species are we sure we can survive without?” Revisited February 17, 2019
  • The world-changing potential of hot composting February 16, 2019
  • Adding Balance to the Meat Debate February 15, 2019

RSS Richard Heinberg

  • Museletter #320: Sooner or Later, We Have to Stop Economic Growth — and We’ll Be Better for it January 22, 2019
  • Museletter #319: The Big Picture December 17, 2018

RSS Robert Koehler

  • The Music That’s in All of Us February 13, 2019

RSS Robert Kuttner

  • Why Trump Will Lose The Government Shutdown Fight January 20, 2019
  • Trump’s Crumbling Wall — Of GOP Political Support January 14, 2019
  • Trump Declaring A National Emergency Would Be John Roberts' Next Big Test January 7, 2019
  • Elizabeth Warren Is Running And There's No Democrat More Qualified December 31, 2018
  • Donald Trump, Walled Off From Reality December 24, 2018

RSS Robert Lindsay

  • Trump’s Border Wall and Israel’s Apartheid Wall: How America Is Israel and Vice Versa January 6, 2019
  • Alt Left: Why Trump’s Border Wall Is Stupid January 5, 2019
  • Alt Left: Trump Shutting Down the Government January 5, 2019
  • Radical Islam as a Solution for Men in the Face of Extreme Western Feminism January 5, 2019

RSS Robert Scheer

  • Worshipping the Electronic Image February 18, 2019

RSS Robert Scribbler

  • A Green New Deal For Global Security January 2, 2019
  • 2018 Likely to be 4th Hottest; But 2019 Might Break All Records December 26, 2018
  • Hellacious Forecasts for Florence September 6, 2018

RSS Rogue Columnist

  • ASU Empire February 14, 2019
  • Block 23, a history February 1, 2019
  • Mean streets January 25, 2019
  • Sick leave January 15, 2019
  • The water fix January 3, 2019

RSS RollingStone: Politics

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RSS RT: Documentary

  • Free to be yourself. Surf master & disabled pupil inspire each other (Trailer) Premiere 02/23 February 20, 2018
  • Beauty and the Bleach. Skin-whitening trend ravages Senegalese women February 18, 2018
  • A gastronomic odyssey through St. Pete’s literary haunts – Taste of Russia Ep. 17 February 18, 2018
  • Beauty and the Bleach.Skin-whitening trend ravages Senegalese women (Trailer) Premiere 02/19 February 15, 2018
  • Of Ice and Fame. Medvedeva v Zagitova: friends off the ice, rivals on it February 14, 2018
  • Is this a yolk? Ostrich omelettes & peculiar pastries - Taste of Russia Ep. 16 February 12, 2018
  • Champions of the spirit. Unknown stories of 1st Soviet Olympic medalists February 8, 2018
  • Of Ice and Fame. Medvedeva v Zagitova: friends off the ice, rivals on it (Trailer) Premiere 02/10 February 7, 2018
  • Champions of the spirit. Unknown stories of 1st Soviet Olympic medalists (Trailer) Premiere 02/09 February 5, 2018
  • Art at the Stake. Afghan artists risk lives to return style, music, and culture to their country February 5, 2018

RSS RT Today

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RSS RT: USA News

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RSS Sail Transport Network

  • We Did It: Sailing Cargo in the Aegean July 18, 2017
  • Cure for Depending on 90K Oil Spewing Cargo Ships: Sail Power Makes Inroads, Now in Mediterranean June 15, 2017
  • Dirty Fossil Fuel ‘Business-As-Usual’ Tactics Spew Out of the IMO at COP22 November 10, 2016

RSS Science-Based Life

  • Sciencey Stuff You May Have Missed: Week 22 June 1, 2015
  • Sciencey Stuff You May Have Missed: Week 21 May 25, 2015
  • Sciencey Stuff You May Have Missed: Week 20 May 18, 2015

RSS ScienceDaily: Top Environment News

  • Indigenous hunters have positive impacts on food webs in desert Australia February 17, 2019
  • There's a place for us: New research reveals humanity's roles in ecosystems February 17, 2019
  • A hidden source of air pollution? Your daily household tasks February 17, 2019
  • Tiny fibers create unseen plastic pollution February 17, 2019
  • Virus-infected bacteria could provide help in the fight against climate change February 17, 2019
  • Understanding carbon cycle feedbacks to predict climate change at large scale February 17, 2019

RSS ScienceDaily: Top Science News

  • Graphene-based wearables for health monitoring, food inspection and night vision February 16, 2019
  • Tidal tails: The beginning of the end of an open star cluster February 15, 2019
  • A nearby river of stars February 15, 2019
  • Massive Bolivian earthquake reveals mountains 660 kilometers below our feet February 14, 2019
  • Ultra-lightweight ceramic material withstands extreme temperatures February 14, 2019
  • Gravitational waves will settle cosmic conundrum February 14, 2019

RSS Scrap Weapons

  • The SCRAP Treaty February 7, 2019
  • Regional Initiatives, the DPRK and Iran, and the Platinum Standard. February 6, 2019
  • SCRAP at the 139th IPU Assembly: Continuing Dialogue of Disarmament November 7, 2018

RSS Seemorerocks

  • More on the parlous state of the Hutt River February 18, 2019
  • Headlines - 02/18/2019 February 18, 2019
  • Tasman's drought February 17, 2019

RSS Shadow Government Statistics

  • No. 982: Stock Market, December 2018 Employment and Unemployment, Monetary Conditions January 8, 2019
  • No. 981: Retail Sales, Production, New Orders, Residential Construction, GDP and Stocks January 3, 2019
  • 980a: Some Thoughts on the Stock Market December 26, 2018

RSS Shame Project

  • Wall Street Journal Issues Epic Correction On Radley Balko’s Error-Riddled Reporting August 14, 2014
  • Malcolm Gladwell’s “David & Goliath” Asks Us To Pity the Rich October 27, 2013
  • Radley Balko: Anatomy of a “Stand Your Ground” Shill July 29, 2013

RSS Simple Climate

  • Becoming more than an old gasbag: Climate chemistry on YouTube, cryogenic energy storage, and community renewable energy November 22, 2018
  • How does carbon dioxide cause global warming? May 3, 2017
  • Australian rodent first mammalian victim of climate change July 3, 2016

RSS Skeptical Science

  • Climate Damages: Uncertain but Ominous, or $51 per Ton? February 13, 2019
  • On Buying Insurance, and Ignoring Cost-Benefit Analysis February 10, 2019
  • 2019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #7 February 16, 2019

RSS Smithsonian – Smart News

  • Joshua Tree National Park Closes During Shutdown Due to Damage to Namesake Trees January 2, 2019
  • Did Great White Sharks Drive Megalodon to Extinction? February 15, 2019
  • Racial Gap in Cancer Mortality Rates Narrows February 15, 2019
  • This Outdoor Exhibition Brings Art to a California Desert February 15, 2019
  • Around 2,000 Artifacts Have Been Saved From the Ruins of Brazil’s National Museum Fire February 15, 2019

RSS Social Text Journal

  • Against Racial Capitalism, from Occupy to the Present Dan Nemser
  • from a feeling called heaven Joey Yearous-Algozin
  • from Socialist Realism Trisha Low
  • Welcome to Hell Josef Kaplan

RSS Speaking Truth to Power

  • Thanatos And Eros In The 21st Century, By Umair Haque February 16, 2019
  • The Real American Emergency Is Fascism, By Umair Haque February 15, 2019
  • The World To Come, By Chris Hedges January 29, 2019

RSS squashpractice

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RSS State of Nature

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RSS State of the Union

  • Untitled February 17, 2019