• About

Collapse of Industrial Civilization

~ Finding the Truth behind the American Hologram

Collapse of Industrial Civilization

Tag Archives: Free Market Ideologues

The Trumpocene: Darkness Gathers

22 Wednesday Feb 2017

Posted by xraymike79 in Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Cyber-Warfare, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Peak Oil, Pollution

≈ 44 Comments

Tags

6th Mass Extinction, Automation, Biological Diversity, Capitalism, Carl Sagan, Climate Change Denial, Conspiracy Theorists, Coral Die-Off, Corporatocracy, Cyber-Warfare, Deforestation, Donald Trump, Endocrine Disruptors, Fairness Doctrine, Fake News, Free Market Ideologues, Gary Kasparov, Gaslighting, Martin Luther King, Michael E. Mann, Micro-Plastic Pollution, Ocean Acidification, Overthrow Project, Peak Net Energy, Rush Limbaugh, Slave Labor, Techno-Fix, The Global Elite, The Trump Wall, Trumpocene, TV Sensationalism

“The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” – Gary Kasparov

With each passing day, the mental stability of our narcissistic, megalomaniacal president is increasingly being called into question by those unnerved from his erratic behavior. The unhinged press conferences, comically embarrassing meetings with world leaders, and uncensored tweets reveal just how illiterate, delusional, and divisive America’s first reality TV president truly is, and the consequences won’t be confined to the imaginary world of a television screen. The irony is that the very news media networks whom the president disparages on a daily basis were instrumental in getting him elected, allowing Trump’s circus to hog the headlines in an ‘issues free’ campaign. Trump received $1.9 billion in free media coverage, 190 times as much as he paid for while the major networks made tons of revenue off Trump’s theatrics. Driving this symbiotic relationship is the fierce competition for ratings determining the advertising revenue and bottom line of these corporate-owned news networks. The media exploited Trump’s sensationalist behavior for profit, helping to drive his campaign to the top of this money-grubbing pyramid scheme. We are, as Neil Postman mused, amusing ourselves to death. Most of these networks are now busy trying to contain the monster they helped create. The other great irony is that America is getting a taste of its own medicine after having meddled in other country’s elections for decades; the CIA was one of the early developers of cyber warfare and is one of the world’s most ruthless practitioners of it.

Of the many Trump lies glossed over by corporate media, the most dangerous one is that anthropogenic climate change is a hoax. The Trump administration is riddled with like-minded Flat-Earthers bent on dismantling the EPA and stoking fossil fuel consumption. In Trumpland, alternative facts are as valid as any empirical evidence. Scientists are being muzzled and the masses are being gaslighted. Conspiracy theories, hearsay, and pure fantasy have replaced meaningful public discourse. We have a demagogue working to blind everyone to what scientists are telling us and our own eyes can see. A civilization which cannot discern the truth cannot make rational decisions for the future, let alone the present. Trump’s kleptocracy will flourish in such an environment while repeating the mantra, “It’s all about the American people.”

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance” ~ Carl Sagan

The loss of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 was an important milestone in America’s decline towards a “post-truth” culture, paving the way for the “outrage industry” and talk radio demagogues like Rush Limbaugh. Twitter is the new bully pulpit for a tyrant-aspiring charlatan, and his antics serve as a useful tool for distracting the public from the right-wing agenda of extreme deregulation and privatization, otherwise known as the Overthrow Project. The biggest danger of wealth inequality is capture of the political system by the elites. This has already happened in America and abroad to the extent that there is now a new globalized elite who have more fealty towards each other than their country of origin, completely lacking positive feelings and loyalty towards their own native lands. The existing oligarchy is being strengthened at the expense of an already polarized and economically disenfranchised society. The Trump regime is corporatism on steroids.

As the famous saying goes, “There’s a sucker born every minute” and Trump is just the latest huckster to exploit them. His rhetoric appeals to people’s emotions and raises their dopamine levels, but facts have a tendency to get in the way of a good story. Trump’s base of supporters, however, appear immune to facts that contradict their leaders’s disinformation. One of his big campaign pledges was to bring back the manufacturing base of the U.S. and revive the Rust Belt, but this promise rings hollow in the age of techno-capitalism. Machines have taken over manufacturing and Trump’s protectionist policies will in all likelihood accelerate this process. AI promises to bring even more radical disruption to the job market:

At a time when the Trump administration is promising to make America great again by restoring old-school manufacturing jobs, AI researchers aren’t taking him too seriously. They know that these jobs are never coming back, thanks in no small part to their own research, which will eliminate so many other kinds of jobs in the years to come, as well…

In the US, the number of manufacturing jobs peaked in 1979 and has steadily decreased ever since. At the same time, manufacturing has steadily increased, with the US now producing more goods than any other country but China. Machines aren’t just taking the place of humans on the assembly line. They’re doing a better job. And all this before the coming wave of AI upends so many other sectors of the economy.

Trump’s fake stance on protecting American workers will not unwind decades of globalization, unrelenting automation, or the machinations of corporate capitalism. His promise to reignite the coal industry is yet more empty rhetoric; independent energy experts at BNEF dismantle his claim:

Coal power is just too costly and inflexible, explains BNEF: “Super-low-cost renewable power — what we are now calling ‘base-cost renewables’ — is going to force a revolution in the way power grids are designed, and the way they are regulated.”

When you add the revolution in cheap fracked gas — which Trump has pledged to double down on — it’s no surprise the country shut down over 40 gigawatts of coal-fired power stations since 2000…

It’s also being driven by a collapse in the export market, as countries from Europe to Asia also move away from coal because of its economic and human cost…

So Trump won’t be bringing back the domestic coal industry. And even if he could, he can’t bring back the jobs because it’s the coal industry itself that wiped out most of those jobs through productivity gains from “strip mines and machinery”…

Conveniently ignoring the harmful environmental impacts and the fact that illegal immigration has been on the decline for the past decade, the proposed Trump Wall is an expensive monument to xenophobia and misguided fears. No wall will prevent those determined to circumvent it, but if you listen to the engineers and experts who actually have experience working at the border, then it’s not a solid continuous wall(projected to take 16 years to complete) but a partial fence that would be more effective and feasible, and that’s if you believe that Americans will take the place of those millions of migrant farm workers who leave their homes every year to plant, cultivate, harvest, and pack America’s fruits, vegetables and nuts, in addition to the millions of other low-skilled and low-paying jobs that immigrants perform. Capitalism thrives on the back of cheap labor, but even these jobs are not safe from machines.

What kind of world is going to support all this labor-saving, hi-tech gadgetry when its creators are too short-sighted to maintain the habitability of the planet for their own descendants? There is no deus ex machina to prevent catastrophic collapse of the oceans nor is there one to stop catastrophic climate change. Industrial civilization is a one-hit wonder for which there are no solutions that scale up to the mountain of problems it has created. Dealing with the environmental costs of fossil fuels is the classic “prisoner’s dilemma” whereby the incentive to cheat for short-term economic gain prevents the cooperation needed by everyone. The economic, legal, and moral framework to tackle climate change simply does not exist. The invisible hand of the “free market” has turned into the boot of environmental catastrophe.

Primates, mankind’s closest biological cousins in the animal kingdom, are in steep decline because they have the “misfortune of being concentrated in areas rich in certain resources precious to their sapient but ravenous cousins.” Not even our fellow human beings can escape war and death when they live atop coveted resources, so what chance does any other species have?

“People have argued that we only have to worry about human-caused extinctions if we do something that causes the loss of 80 or 90 percent of species on the planet,” said UC Berkeley environmental scientist James W. Kirchner.

“Our analysis shows that even if the human impact is much smaller than that – 20 or 30 or even 50 percent of species – it’s still going to take 10 million years for the Earth to recover. That is well past the expected life span of the human species, or even of the genus Homo.” – Link

The study quoted above was from the year 2000 and has the usual hopeful spin:

“It is not preordained that high levels of human-caused extinction have to happen,” Kirchner said. “Our future depends on what we choose to do on a national and international level, as a society. Those decisions are critical because they will have very long-lasting consequences.”

Not surprisingly, we have failed to heed that advice. Scientists say our rampant road building has dissected the Earth’s land into 600,000 fragments too small to support significant wildlife. A new study covering 130 countries finds deforestation rises with incomes in developing economies and never reverses. This is particularly troubling because Africa is a developing continent with some of the world’s largest tracts of remaining undisturbed forests and biodiversity hotspots. Biodiversity loss is an existential threat comparable to climate change. The glaring warning from all these studies is that the Western way of life exported across the entire planet has brought us to a point of cataclysmic overshoot. Business-as-usual only exacerbates the crisis:

Real-world CO2 emissions have tracked the high end of earlier [IPCC] emissions scenarios, and until the currently wealthy countries can produce a large decline in their own emissions per capita, it is dubious to project that emissions per capita in the less developed countries will not continue on a trajectory up to the levels of currently wealthy countries…[The top 10% of the economically wealthy in the world produce almost as much total GHG emissions as the bottom 90% combined]… – Link

Trump peddles the false hope of regaining material wealth for a collapsing middle class with his slogan “Make America great again”, but after being elected, is giving more power and riches to those who have created this environmental and social catastrophe. Capitalism is, as Martin Luther King observed, “socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor.” Nonetheless, in the bigger scheme of modern civilization’s looming collapse, the ‘Trumpocene’ amounts to nothing more than polishing the brass on the Titanic.

A time is coming when what we do to Earth is completely overshadowed by what Earth does to us. We have already condemned the planet to an ice-free Arctic and no amount of techno-fixes will return it to its former state. Were humans to disappear today from the Earth, the after-effects of our massive fossil fuel binge would reverberate for aeons. The last time there was an ice-free Arctic was during the Eemian period 125,000 years ago at the height of the last major interglacial period, but the CO2 levels of today are much higher now and causing the climate to change at a rate that is 170 times that of natural forces with much more warming to come. According to a new study, manmade global warming is replicating conditions that triggered an abrupt sea level rise of several meters in the ocean around Antarctica some 15,000 years ago. The damage done is irreversible not only on a human timescale or a civilizational time scale, but a species timescale. The total global carbon dioxide emissions load from the onset of the industrial revolution is enough to push the next ice age back by 100,000 years and only deep geologic time will significantly remediate the chemistry of a CO2-spiked atmosphere. The same is true for ocean acidification. The natural process of continental rock weathering to neutralize all of the CO2 from human activity that is entering the oceans would take hundreds of thousands of years. Plankton blooms, a key part of the entire marine food web and the biological carbon pump, are being disrupted by warming, acidifying oceans. The Great Barrier Reef is expected to be completely dead within the next two decades and 98% of all reefs around the world gone by mid century. The latest research indicates ocean acidification is much worse for corals that previously thought.

Manmade persistent organic pollutants(POPs) such as PCBs and flame retardants can be found in the most remote places on Earth such as the 36,000-foot-deep Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean where researchers tested crustaceans and found them to contain 50 times more POPs than crabs living in one of China’s most polluted rivers. Once these endocrine-disrupting compounds settle into the sediments, they can remain there for thousands of years before being disturbed and recirculated into the environment once again as a contaminant. Microplastics less than 5mm in size are ubiquitous in the environment, having been documented in the waters of both the Arctic and Antarctic and recently found on 73% of Britain’s beaches.

The irrational ramblings of a demagogue won’t change a shifting earth laying waste to a once rich ecosphere and grinding to dust the landmarks of modern man. Delusions and protestations have no bearing on the laws of chemistry and thermodynamics.

Share this:

  • Tweet
  • Share on Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

AGW Amplified Drought is Increasing its Destabilization of Countries Around the World

01 Friday May 2015

Posted by xraymike79 in Climate Change, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Pollution

≈ 177 Comments

Tags

AGW Amplified Drought, Anthropogenic Global Warming, Brazil Drought, California Drought, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Eco-Costs, Ecological Overshoot, Electricity Blackouts, Externalized Environmental Costs, Fossil-Fuel Based Economy, Free Market Ideologues, Groundwater Depletion, Hydropower, Iran, Lake Mead Shrinking, Megadrought, Oregon Drought, Peak Water, Syria, The Anthropocene Age, The Resource Curse, Urban Sprawl, Venezuela

one

The town of Potosi, Venezuela was flooded in 1985 to expand the Uribante-Caparo Reservoir for a hydroelectric dam. For the next twenty-six years, the only visible trace of the town was the 85 ft tall steeple of the church, which usually poked above the surface and was used as the high water mark for the reservoir. Recent droughts starting in 2010 have caused the ghostly ruins of the church and town to reemerge.

Amid a continuing drought and persistent, intense heat waves afflicting South America, Venezuela is another developing country in the cross hairs of anthropogenic global warming. Like its neighbor Brazil, the country’s electrical needs are heavily dependent on hydropower which provides roughly two-thirds of demand. In recent days temperatures have climbed to 115 degrees Fahrenheit, making 2015 the hottest year on record for Venezuela in the last 60 years and forcing its citizenry to crank up their air conditioning. In response to a stressed electric grid, the government is now rationing electricity in order to avoid further blackouts. Scientists have known for some time that AGW would cause such blackouts due to hotter temperatures, more severe storms, as well as other factors of a warming atmosphere. In fact, such disruptions to the electrical grid have doubled since 2003 and 75% of heat waves are now attributable to climate change. Nevertheless, much of the population still thinks any serious effects of AGW are in the distant future even though today we are seeing the destabilization of weaker, marginal countries like Venezuela whose resilience to collapse was already compromised by long-standing mismanagement, corruption, and dependency on high oil revenue for government funding. Venezuela is estimated to suffer a 7% economic contraction due to the drop in oil prices. In The Middle East, climate change helped topple Syria and it looks like the 4,000 year old state of Iran is now in danger:

“Approximately 50 million people, 70% of Iranians, will have no choice but to leave the country.”…

Kalantari said that Iran and Egypt are two countries that due to excessive resource usage are currently “exposed to a serious crisis.” However, he said that Egypt’s water exploitation is only at 46%, a “big difference” from Iran’s 97%.

“To understand the depth of this tragedy, look at the water exploitation of other countries: Japan 19%, America 21%, China 29%, India 33% and countries such as Spain, which has geographical similarities to Iran; it’s only 25%,” he said. He added that according to international standards, surface water exploitation should not be more than 30%, and that most advanced countries have set maximum levels of 25%. – Link

Free-market ideologues believe Venezuela’s energy crisis is solely a problem of ‘isms’, socialism vs capitalism, and the improper pricing of commodities, but in a world of ecosystem collapse and resource scarcity, no type of ism that runs a fossil fuel-based civilization is going to work. Capitalist carbon man is incapable of monetizing the true value of the earth’s ecological systems because he operates within an economic paradigm that forces him to externalize costs at every turn, leaving the eco-costs of burning ancient carbon to present and future generations. As long as a good’s price signal fails to ‘internalize’ these eco-costs, then price signals will fail to alter social behavior on a scale necessary to avoid climate catastrophe and social collapse. There is no viable free market solution for irreversible glacial melt, acidifying oceans, exponential SLR, or the accelerated 6th mass extinction. Alternative energy will not stop what has already been set into motion. Climate change is market failure writ large for a bubble civilization that is so far off into overshoot that the marketing slogan of a “green, sustainable future” has become a cruel joke.

time off

Turning towards the so-called First World, Lake Mead registered its lowest water level in 78 years and Las Vegas will soon be sucking the dwindling waters of the lake bottom from a nearly completed third water intake pipe that cost roughly a billion dollars to construct. California’s air quality is deteriorating due to wildfires from bone dry conditions while Starbucks sells $1.95 bottles of spring water drawn from the state’s precious groundwater. Do we really know the value of water when we build megacities in the desert and irrigate crops on arid land? The UN reports that by 2025, 1.8 billion people will be living in countries or regions with absolute water scarcity, and two-thirds of the world’s population could be living under water stressed conditions.

I recently asked a real estate agent in Phoenix, AZ if she was aware of the looming water problem in the Southwest and she said she had recently attended a seminar on the topic and that state authorities were working hard on the water shortage because they anticipate problems within the next couple years. I then asked if any of her clients had brought this subject up with her and she stated, “Never, you are the only one.” We then went back to the business of finding me a home on the edge of town and overlooking the open spaces of the Sonoran Desert, a region I have lived my entire life and grown to love. This complete detachment from reality bothers me, but at the same time I feel a sort of comfort in letting go of my worries and getting lost in the madding crowd. I know the dangers are growing, but I’m at peace with the knowledge that nothing I do individually will make any real difference in the trajectory of the Anthropocene.

time off

I thought of moving to a place with ample water like the Pacific Northwest, but the California drought has crept into Oregon with nearly two-thirds of the state now affected and Gov. Kate Brown declaring drought emergencies in seven counties. Lots of drying firewood up in that tinderbox corner of the country. The water crisis is expected to spread across America. I think I’ll just enjoy the view from where I am rather than uprooting to far-flung places that are just as vulnerable to a rapidly changing planet. Better the Devil you know, right? There’s no escape for anyone except in our imaginations where we toy with the delusional thought that some sort of last minute techno-fix will come along to put the CO2 genie back in the bottle or that mankind will suddenly become enlightened and cooperate globally to rein in this growing cancer of capitalist industrial civilization.

In Native American culture, a ceremony is carried out when one comes back from war in order to cleanse the individual of the impurities and evil spirits that have polluted their mind. Spending time in the Sonoran Desert away from any human crowds and techno-crap gadgetry is the ritual I practice to cleanse my mind of the horrors we have unleashed on the world. How long before these little sanctuaries in the desert fall victim to urban sprawl, pollution, and a disfigured climate? I don’t know, but I’m willing to keep them secret and protect them with what little time we all have left on this planet.

Share this:

  • Tweet
  • Share on Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

The Yellow King

23 Sunday Feb 2014

Posted by darbikrash in Capitalism, Consumerism, Corporate State, Empire

≈ 29 Comments

Tags

Ambrose Bierce, An Inhabitant of Carcosa, Ann Coulter, Capitalism, Carcosa, Cardinal John Henry Newman, Corruption in Religion, Dead can Dance, Death in June, Eco-Apocalypse, Exploitation of Labor, Fascism, Foxconn, Free Market Ideologues, Friedrich Nietzsche, Google, Greenwashing, Matthew McConaughey, Nox Arcana, Oppression through Dependency, Privatization, Public Relations Propaganda, Ron Paul, The Coercive Power of Capitalism, The Evangelical Right, The Federal Reserve, True Detective, UAW, Yellow King

TrueDetective_1 Set in the foreboding shadow of Louisiana’s oil refineries, Matthew McConaughey recounts an ominous story, while the camera lens brings into focus a modern day monster.

Made popular in the current television drama of some note, True Detective is the story of a psychotic serial killer who leaves behind cryptic talismans of occult origin, with unknown meaning. The killer invokes oblique references to the Yellow King, a mythical exiled ruler from the lost city of Carcosa, a dystopian city not unlike the capital of a doomed planet.

TrueDetective_2

 Over all the dismal landscape a canopy of low, lead-colored clouds hung like a visible  curse. In all this there were a menace and a portent — a hint of evil, an intimation of doom. Bird, beast, or insect there was none. The wind sighed in the bare branches of  the dead trees and the gray grass bent to whisper its dread secret to the earth; but no other sound nor motion broke the awful repose of that dismal place. A few blasted trees here and there appeared as leaders in this malevolent conspiracy of silent expectation.

This is also the name of a play nearly 200 years old, never completed except in short story form. It is said if the entire play is read, the reader will go insane. Indeed, the protagonists in the TV show edge closer to insanity as they circle the truth.

carcosa_by_irrealist-1 We don’t know much about the Yellow King, or Carcosa except that its sky has black stars and two suns, and its dead landscape is ravaged by centuries of evil. Existence in this city is purportedly centered in a fourth dimension, where time is represented as a flat circle, a Nietzscheian reference indicating the inhabitants are doomed to repeating the same events over and over again, unable to change and unable to stop the repetition.

carcosa_f

A sudden wind pushed some dry leaves and twigs from the uppermost face of the stone; I saw the low-relief letters of an inscription and bent to read it. God in Heaven! My name in full! — The date of my birth! — The date of my death! A level shaft of light illuminated the whole side of the tree as I sprang to my feet in terror. The sun was rising in the rosy east. I stood between the tree and his broad red disk — no shadow darkened the trunk! A chorus of howling wolves saluted the dawn. I saw them sitting on their haunches, singly and in groups, on the summits of irregular mounds and tumuli filling a half of my desert prospect and extending to the horizon. And then I knew that these were ruins of the ancient and famous city of Carcosa.

There is speculation that Carcosa was never really a place, but a destination for a future of collapse, and the Yellow King was not an exiled ruler, but a disguise- a mask of sorts that once worn, occludes the truth from those who might see.

Carcosa_Night_by_harakeke Once the mask is removed, the truth is laid bare and the viewer is transported to Carcosa. If so, the Yellow King is with us in force today manifest in many forms, most of these designed to disguise the true nature of our world. For we stand to inherit a Carcosa, a towering existential recreation of hell, with circular, unbreakable patterns of dysfunctional behavior.

And the Yellow King walks among us, unabated, spreading misinformation amplified by mass media, advising us, extolling us to ascend to the power of liberty and free markets, get what’s yours while the gettin’ is good, and valorizing those who crush the most souls on the way up.

Free market apologists reign supreme, their carnival barking and incessant media chatter filling the airwaves with blather and bloviation, coiffed and blow dried edifices of carefully constructed perfection lecturing the faithful in the ways of the good and righteous. The downtrodden and sullen worker class unabashedly enamored by the sparkling white teeth and tanning parlor afterglow of the likes of Ann Coulter, with her simmering promise of bleach blond playdates in Republican nirvana.

Give the finger to the underclass, step up to a Brooks Brothers suit with power tie, and the kingdom is yours.

Long considered just an annoyance, at worst, a screeching nails-on-the-blackboard offense endured among polite company as the uniformed contrivances of the political class, merely the monosyllabic utterances of the unenlightened. Which is to say, to be ignored, or in a flight of compassion, to debate the helpless bastards in the hopes that common sense may prevail, and they may see the light, amongst earnest and heartfelt protestation.

Why, forgive them as they know not what they do.

But perhaps they do.

For the Yellow King, with his sycophant protégés donning the mask of illusion lay forth this banter of iniquity, they hold sway as full participants in the court of world opinion. Their voices of reason, their faces of envy, and their politics of grace conspire to deliver a message finely honed through the millennia.

A message warned of for more than 2000 years by an institution not treated well in the Age of Reason. An institution of former glory consumed from the inside out by the very evil it warned of, now one of the largest Capitalist entities on the planet, its crippled and corrupt exoskeleton only occasionally eking out a coherent message, a sporadic, diminutive cry of caution.

Such a cry can be heard by 19th century Cardinal John Henry Newman, in a quote recently featured on Jesse’s blog:

Do you think he is so unskillful in his craft, as to ask you openly and plainly to join him in his warfare against the truth? No; he offers you baits to tempt you. He promises you civil liberty; he promises you equality; he promises you trade and wealth; he promises you a remission of taxes; he promises you reform.

This is the way in which he conceals from you the kind of work to which he is putting you; he tempts you to rail against your rulers and superiors; he does so himself, and induces you to imitate him; or he promises you illumination, he offers you knowledge, science, philosophy, enlargement of mind.

He scoffs at times gone by; he scoffs at every institution which reveres them. He prompts you what to say, and then listens to you, and praises you, and encourages you. He bids you mount aloft. He shows you how to become as gods.

Then he laughs and jokes with you, and gets intimate with you; he takes your hand, and gets his fingers between yours, and grasps them, and then you are his.

J.H.Newman, the Times of Antichrist (Circa 1850)

  He makes the disturbing claim that such representations are not mere affectations of the less enlightened, not musings of a political counterfactual, not the flip side of rationed debate, but the deliberate and finely considered dialogue of evil.

The ascendancy of the evangelical right has long mouthed consternation that society is decaying, and claimed vindication when they should be claiming responsibility. Their inversion of right and wrong, their overt sponsorship of capitalist society, in fact their insistence of capitalism as the only Christian means of life moves them well beyond the moniker of fascism firmly into the category of evil incarnate.

For the Yellow King the disguise of illusion is a world of opposites, a world of up really being down, not a matrix style hologram of technology, but a bending of light, an Alice in Wonderland vignette where three lefts make a right and the fun house mirrors portray you to be wealthier than you really are. A world where you argue against your best (or anyone else’s) interests, a world where you degrade, prostrate, and mutilate yourself on the advice of those gleaming faces of prosperity.

In the hope that you may be like them, someday to exchange your station in life, to become that gleaming face and to dispense the wrath of your tortured ascendancy on the filthy groveling masses sullying your shoes as they struggle to feed themselves.

Much is made by the armchair economist and pundit as to causality for our American nightmare as it careens from crisis to crisis. The Yellow King advises this is purely monetary in nature, we have simply oversubscribed our creation in money-capital and succumbed to the avarice of too much government. Why it’s just too much fiat money, and too much government, let’s get back to sound money and free markets, and let her rip.

The narrative takes on fairy tale proportions, indeed, even a child can see through such gas baggery. But a child does not have a vested interest in this belief system, and the rest simply apply religious fervor to the notion that capital just has to succeed, and will accept any preposterous explanation, however dubious, to keep the mask firmly in place.

One of the more hysterical diversions is the demonization of the Federal Reserve System. Made popular by demagogues such as Ron Paul, who stifles his repulsive free market evangelization long enough to divert attention away from this atrocity onto a tangible target that can mobilize the “base”- he and his gullible minions make fast with the scam that all things bad are due to financial manipulation of the monetary system- and nothing more.

With only the occasional, yet telltale reference to the “free market” in his rhetoric, he directs the majority of the pent up frustration of the populace towards an institution that he knows full well will never change or be made obsolete. He knows that the Federal Reserve and the existing monetary system are not only endemic to capitalism- but required for capitalism to function.

Bleu Noir

As capital’s organic growth becomes more visible, new and ever more insidious ways of extending its reach is realized. In San Francisco, privatized Google buses now make the morning rounds to pick up employees at city municipal bus stops, ostensibly to make a “green” contribution in lower emissions. But The Deceiver’s fingerprints are all over this one as well, green emissions is but a public PR job, the real concept is an extension of the social contract between employer and employee.

By providing privatized mass transportation into a living community that does not require a car for subsistence transportation, Google can add a value dimension for being an employee, and increase dependency on Google for not just wages, but transportation as well.

google-bus-human-centipede This extends also to the long provided “loaves and the fishes” style cafeteria, wherein free food (and as much as you want) is given without charge to employees through the company cafeteria, discouraging off campus lunch breaks and building dependency.

Corporate planners know full well that large scale provisioning of food and transportation eventually allows the company to reduce cash compensation, as the use value of their products is directly tied to the cost of labor reproduction.

The next natural steps forthcoming are no doubt company provided housing, “on campus” of course, again to be pitched as some environmentally favorable/humane means of freeing up communities with impacted housing (such as San Francisco) so that “others less fortunate” may procure much needed housing.

All that’s missing is the FoxConn standard issue suicide nets- because you just never know when a “team member” might just want to step out for a smoke- from the ninth floor.

Foxconn-suicidenets1

King’s X  

yellow_sign

In a most sadistic twist of labor relations, the recent voting down of UAW expansion to VW’s new car plant in Tennessee shows the Yellow King to be in his cups. The usual suspects lock horns to first admonish the workers that any yes vote for unionization will “force” VW to locate subsequent plants out of state in a parade of displeasure. Or so say the Republican lawmakers from this state.

This is an obvious case of the captured legislature doing the bidding of capital. Oddly, VW remains silent, and uncharacteristically encourages the vote.

But the UAW is voted down, the workers are no dummies and are well aware of their predicament, they can see who owns the means of production and the ominously cold winds of a gut hooked Detroit blow even in Tennessee.

The real agenda is soon brought to light, first noticed with VW’s “disappointment” with the lost election, as they had hoped to bring forth their legendary company sponsored “Work Councils”, and required a union vote to legally deploy this tactic.

In a master stroke of labor relations, modern Capital does not fight organzied labor, it simply steps in pro-actively to organize itself. Why leave to chance a critical control level when you can step in and hold the controls yourself? By self-organizing and seeding the work council with specially trained “conflict managers” they can discretize any grievances and head off at the ground floor any dangerous mobilization against management’s interest.

The work councils become modern day privatized versions of the Stasi, with employed informants providing up to the minute labor logistics to the council members. And the beauty of it all, why, it’s all in the name of employee empowerment.

The noose of universal commoditization is tightening, the ligature marks are getting harder to hide as we inch closer to the realm of a dying sun……

Share this:

  • Tweet
  • Share on Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

Extinction is Profitable, in the Short Term

25 Saturday Jan 2014

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Peak Oil, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 53 Comments

Tags

Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Arctic Ice Melt, Benjamin Franklin, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporatocracy, Derrick Jensen, Dystopic Future, Eco-Apocalypse, Empire, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, Free Market Ideologues, Greenwashing, Inverted Totalitarianism, Laissez-Faire Capitalism, Mass Die Off, Peak Oil, Peak Water, Pink Floyd - Money, Privatization, Runaway Climate Change, The Elite 1%, Venus Syndrome, Wall Street Fraud, War for Profit

50244180e54f4f0a0f498387adc62d951

“Hey, my name’s Luke. The year is 2060 and I live in what was once called America. As you can see, the ‘developed world’ never was able to kick its fossil fuel habit. They just kept turning to dirtier sources and more extreme processes to burn the stuff, like the liquefaction and gasification of coal. The entire planet became a sacrifice zone for the sake of keeping mega cities lit up and the machinery humming, but ultimately it was death by a thousand cuts. Entropy was the victor. GHG’s continued to rise, warm the planet, and wreak havoc on the biosphere. Cancer and industrial disease spread to every corner of the globe. Weather patterns were drastically altered until the world’s food production was forced to move indoors. Large-scale cloning of animals became common practice in order to feed the several hundred million surviving people. War, drought, floods, fresh water scarcity, and a rash of pandemics crashed the world’s population from a high of 8 billion. The agricultural bread baskets of the world became wastelands of dust and weeds. International cooperation failed and the world’s existing powers scrambled for the last remaining resources. There are none who buy into the propaganda of a “better world” any longer because the stark evidence of what we have done to the planet cannot possibly be hidden from view. There is no utopian sanctuary for anyone to escape to, no matter how many gold coins one has managed hoard. Despite this realization and even after all the geoengineering mishaps, people still cling to the belief of salvation through technology. Everyone lives in fortified bunkers to escape the hot, drying winds that sometimes carry poisonous and toxic clouds. When we do venture out, gas masks are always worn as well as long clothing to protect from the thinning ozone layer. Industrial smoke stacks still belch plumes into the air to keep the underground cities running.”

world_demise_by_shume_1-d4qmmaj

“When above ground, I’ll spend hours walking through the wreckage of industrial civilization, the skeletons of its skyscrapers blotting out the sun like the mythical Redwood trees once did along the west coast. The occasional sound of a steel beam crashing to the ground or a glass window shattering breaks the ghostly silence. These deserted cities are infested with rats the size of small dogs, and the ray of my flashlight is reflected in their staring eyes. The endless and self-defeating rat race of humans has now been replaced by the scurrying, scavenging, and fighting of real rats. I find it amazing that my ancestors spent their entire lives living and working inside these little office cubicles. That was a time when Earth was still green and you could hear the birds chirping and singing outside your window. I’ve got a digital recording of various holographic scenes depicting bygone days of nature that I project inside the confines of my subterranean home, but I’d give my right arm to experience the real thing. To think that people were once surrounded by nature all the time amazes me. Its true value had never really been calculated. Rather, money seems to have been what people were most preoccupied with back then. On one of my excursions I came across a dwelling whose crumbling walls were packed with stacks of moldy paper money. Whoever lived there must have worked an entire lifetime to eke out a savings of that size, stuffing it into every wall cavity like it was insulation. Many thought humans would go extinct long before money would ever cease to exist. I guess they were wrong.”

388794_1250206496_large

“They say the people of this country went mad, obsessed with money as it overtook their every thought, decision, and activity. One of America’s forefathers once said, ‘He that is of the opinion money will do everything may well be suspected of doing everything for money.‘ All things were framed within the context of money. Environmental damage was discussed in terms of financial setbacks to the economy. Political leaders made decisions based, first and foremost, on the financial interests of those powerful few who put them in office. Choices on matters involving the well-being of humanity were made solely in the interests of corporations and stockholders. Even as the overwhelming evidence mounted that mankind’s place on earth was becoming evermore tenuous, the money worshippers continued to find ways to profit from calamity and mayhem. Preserving the Earth simply was not profitable, so they let it die. The Arctic melted, so they raided its open waters. The land became parched, so they invested in water rights. CO2 levels skyrocketed, so they put their money into carbon credits. Our continued existence became a crap shoot in the marketplace. The vultures of capitalism were able to profit from the collapse; thusly, such nightmarish and dystopian scenarios as botched geoengineering schemes, a Venus syndrome on earth, and ultimately human extinction were allowed to become sober realities….”

non_omnis_by_shume_1-d6q4r7c

‘No matter what we call it, poison is still poison, death is still death, and industrial civilization is still causing the greatest mass extinction in the history of the planet.’
~ Derrick Jensen

Share this:

  • Tweet
  • Share on Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

Legion

14 Saturday Dec 2013

Posted by darbikrash in Capitalism, Consumerism, Corporate State

≈ 122 Comments

Tags

Calvinism, Capitalism, Chris Hedges, Conservatism, Consumerism, Evangelical Christianity, Evangelical Right, Evengelii Gaudium, Free Market Ideologues, Globalization, Gross Inequality, Idolatry of Money, Just Price, Karl Marx, New Testament, Newcomb’s Paradox, Political Corruption, Pope Francis, Predestination, Protestant and Calvinistic theology, Puritan Ethics, Rentier Class, Roman Catholic Pope, Rush Limbaugh, Strip Mall Religiosity, Tea Party, The Enlightenment, Thomas Aquinas, Usury

American Horror Story

You almost have to feel sorry for the conservatives, tea partiers, and the whole menagerie of free market evangelists these days. Even a casual perusal of AM talk radio, along with the buffoonery and gas baggery of the hard right news shows, one can see evidence of collapsing narratives at every turn.

Our disintegrating social conditions demand a plausible explanation from the right, and any such explanation, ideologically, must be sure to exonerate capitalism and the free market system.

This is becoming increasingly hard to do, as the shrill and contradictory defenses put forth become less satisfying every time the story is told. The story evolves, the audience reactions carefully polled, and the messaging refined to try and adapt to a low information audience growing more skeptical by the minute. There are many versions of the same story, depending on who tells it and more importantly who is paying for it, but for this discussion we are interested in the narrative brought forth by the evangelical right, and their socially conservative stable mates, or in general, the fire and brimstone crowd accounting for something near half of the American population.

The operating theory of this cohort centers for the most part on morality, or lack thereof, as principal cause for our society’s collapse.

Rush Limbaugh provides a pathetic but typical example of this type of addled logic:

The reason all of these stats on income inequality don’t work anymore is because the baseline for the statistical start is the fifties.  Now, what was happening in the fifties?  Well, in the fifties we had this thing called a nuclear family.  There was a mother, a woman.  There was a father, a man.  They had babies by engaging in coitus.  Leave It To Beaver, Ozzie and Harriet — hell, even the Beach Boys, for crying out loud!  They were seemingly clean and pure as the wind driven snow.

Anyway, then after the coitus in the bedroom, then little Beaver was born and then Wally, and there were 2.8 of the kids and little picket fence and (if the dad got a vice presidency), there were two cars in the garage, and mom — the female. I’ve gotta make that distinction. The mother was a woman, the wife of a man. She stays home, raises the kid, fixes breakfast, sends ’em off to school, talks to the PTA. There was all that.  There was one breadwinner, and there was an economic boom going on at the same time, following World War II.

Incomes in America rose dramatically.  Then something happened.  The left didn’t like that arrangement.  That was just bad. They didn’t fit in.  They didn’t like the idea of coitus in the bedroom.  They didn’t like coitus with someone the opposite sex, necessarily.  They didn’t even like coitus as a means of producing a kid.  In fact, most times they didn’t even like the kid. They wanted to have the abortion.  So what happened was that the nuclear family became under assault by “progressive” forces of modernization.

So today, you can’t compare family income today to what it was in the fifties when the boom time ’cause the family’s not the same.  You’ve got single women, single-parent families, fewer nuclear families.  Incomes have been divided.  It doesn’t work.

Who knew?

The root of American ethics and morality stems in part from its heavily Protestant and Calvinistic theological underpinnings, which we might well reduce to the “Puritan” ethic. There are several key components of this behavior, tracing back to the late 17th century:

1. Personal sacrifice fulfilled by austere living conditions.

2. Self-sufficiency and disdain of charity for one’s self.

3. Obsessive work ethic fueled by the notion that idleness is evil.

Of course there are others, but we can use these generalizations to continue. In addition we should mention that Calvinism utilizes the principle of predestination, or predetermination, a fundamental departure from modern evangelical Christianity.

The rollup of these centuries old dogmatic beliefs is a programing bias towards moral explanations for when things go wrong, and strong lifestyle choices that dictate high moral standards when times are normal, in order to stave off any potential (future) fall from grace. The modern evangelical right has conflated this DNA to represent a distorted view of Christianity leaning heavily on Capitalism-which has fascist underpinnings in its ultimate embodiment.

In the Flat Fields

A gut pull drag on me
Into the chasm gaping we
Mirrors multy reflecting this
Between spunk stained sheet
And odorous whim
Calmer eye- flick- shudder- within
Assist me to walk away in sin
Where is the string that Theseus laid
Find me out this labyrinth place

I do get bored, I get bored
In the flat field
I get bored, I do get bored
In the flat field

What is often lost in our current infatuation with Enlightenment thinking is the degree to which the Pre-Enlightenment Church managed commerce, financing, and general market forces. In fact, the Church maintained an iron hand on issues such as usury, which was condemned and not distinguished from the “normal” practice of charging interest until the late 19th century.

In the age of Church hegemony, which lasted for centuries, it was considered immoral, and grossly so, to profit in any way through trade, charging interest, or commerce which resulted in a profit without actually performing any work. specifically, any rent seeking activity was forbidden.

Things that are considered commonplace today, such as raising prices for items needed in a disaster, (supply and demand) were thoroughly rejected by the Church and considered inconceivable during that time. Thomas Aquinas brought forth these concepts in the theory of Just Price in his Summa Theologica circa 1274 AD. Although this was clearly a Pre-Capitalist economy, much learning was put towards strict management of commerce dating back to the money changers being expelled from the temple in Biblical times- a theme oft repeated through the Dark Ages and well beyond.

For centuries, civilizations knew full well the dangers of markets and unconstrained commerce, and there is more than a passing connection between this realization and theology, present in virtually all religions throughout time.

This reality has been brought to the fore with the recent, and controversial, exhortation Evengelii Gaudium from the Roman Catholic Pope. Pundits have been zeroing in on the more provocative aspects after his release of the document last month. I’ve read all 244 pages of it and I’m here to tell you that he has pretty well burned down the Christian right’s moralistic narrative along with a good bit of the more mainstream conservative cohort.

For those who have dismissed previous Papal exhortations (as well as any other messaging, written or otherwise delivered) as irrelevant and hypocritical drivel, and I count myself on this list, the recent missive is a shocker. Let’s take a look as some selected passages:

We can no longer trust in the unseen forces and the invisible hand of the market. Growth in justice requires more than economic growth, while presupposing such growth: it requires decisions, programmers, mechanisms and processes specifically geared to a better distribution of income, the creation of sources of employment and an integral promotion of the poor which goes beyond a simple welfare mentality. I am far from proposing an irresponsible populism, but the economy can no longer turn to remedies that are a new poison, such as attempting to increase profits by reducing the work force and thereby adding to the ranks of the excluded.

…

The need to resolve the structural causes of poverty cannot be delayed, not only for the pragmatic reason of its urgency for the good order of society, but because society needs to be cured of a sickness which is weakening and frustrating it, and which can only lead to new crises. Welfare projects, which meet certain urgent needs, should be considered merely temporary responses. As long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation and by attacking the structural causes of inequality,[173]no solution will be found for the world’s problems or, for that matter, to any problems. Inequality is the root of social ills.

Now this passage in particular stands out, and is a recurring theme throughout the document. Inequality is the root of all social ills. Not moral misbehavior. Rush Limbaugh is positively foaming at the mouth with this conclusion. You see, the story as told has to exonerate Capitalism, so the explanatory focus is redirected to not just suggest, but to demand that the moral lapses of the populace are the sole causality of a world gone bad.

After all, the world was given to us with abundance, work hard, maintain high moral standards, and its abundance will never run out. No limits to resources, no environmental disasters, no exploitation, nothing but paradise, unless of course you take a bite of that apple.

Spear Of Destiny - Religion - Front

Let’s go on:

Sometimes we prove hard of heart and mind; we are forgetful, distracted and carried away by the limitless possibilities for consumption and distraction offered by contemporary society. This leads to a kind of alienation at every level, for “a society becomes alienated when its forms of social organization, production and consumption make it more difficult to offer the gift of self and to establish solidarity between people.

Karl is that you?

Genuine forms of popular religiosity are incarnate, since they are born of the incarnation of Christian faith in popular culture. For this reason they entail a personal relationship, not with vague spiritual energies or powers, but with God, with Christ, with Mary, with the saints. These devotions are fleshy, they have a face. They are capable of fostering relationships and not just enabling escapism. In other parts of our society, we see the growing attraction to various forms of a “spirituality of well-being” divorced from any community life, or to a “theology of prosperity” detached from responsibility for our brothers and sisters, or to depersonalized experiences which are nothing more than a form of self-centredness.

images

This would seem to be a dig at modern “strip mall religiosity” as it is now de rigueur to have non denominational churches in strip malls, repurposed industrial buildings, etc, all which have superficial distorted messaging, often pronouncing how wealth is your divine right.

Today’s economic mechanisms promote inordinate consumption, yet it is evident that unbridled consumerism combined with inequality proves doubly damaging to the social fabric. Inequality eventually engenders a violence which recourse to arms cannot and never will be able to resolve. It serves only to offer false hopes to those clamouring for heightened security, even though nowadays we know that weapons and violence, rather than providing solutions, create new and more serious conflicts. Some simply content themselves with blaming the poor and the poorer countries themselves for their troubles; indulging in unwarranted generalizations, they claim that the solution is an “education” that would tranquilize them, making them tame and harmless. All this becomes even more exasperating for the marginalized in the light of the widespread and deeply rooted corruption found in many countries – in their governments, businesses and institutions – whatever the political ideology of their leaders.

…

Today in many places we hear a call for greater security. But until exclusion and inequality in society and between peoples are reversed, it will be impossible to eliminate violence. The poor and the poorer peoples are accused of violence, yet without equal opportunities the different forms of aggression and conflict will find a fertile terrain for growth and eventually explode. When a society – whether local, national or global – is willing to leave a part of itself on the fringes, no political programmes or resources spent on law enforcement or surveillance systems can indefinitely guarantee tranquility. This is not the case simply because inequality provokes a violent reaction from those excluded from the system, but because the socioeconomic system is unjust at its root. Just as goodness tends to spread, the toleration of evil, which is injustice, tends to expand its baneful influence and quietly to undermine any political and social system, no matter how solid it may appear. If every action has its consequences, an evil embedded in the structures of a society has a constant potential for disintegration and death. It is evil crystallized in unjust social structures, which cannot be the basis of hope for a better future. We are far from the so-called “end of history”, since the conditions for a sustainable and peaceful development have not yet been adequately articulated and realized.

So now we get to the money shot:

While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. This imbalance is the result of ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. Consequently, they reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control. A new tyranny is thus born, invisible and often virtual, which unilaterally and relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules. Debt and the accumulation of interest also make it difficult for countries to realize the potential of their own economies and keep citizens from enjoying their real purchasing power. To all this we can add widespread corruption and self-serving tax evasion, which have taken on worldwide dimensions. The thirst for power and possessions knows no limits. In this system, which tends to devour everything which stands in the way of increased profits, whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenseless before the interests of a deified market, which become the only rule.

And

One cause of this situation is found in our relationship with money, since we calmly accept its dominion over ourselves and our societies. The current financial crisis can make us overlook the fact that it originated in a profound human crisis: the denial of the primacy of the human person! We have created new idols. The worship of the ancient golden calf (cf. Ex 32:1-35) has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose. The worldwide crisis affecting finance and the economy lays bare their imbalances and, above all, their lack of real concern for human beings; man is reduced to one of his needs alone: consumption.

…

In this context, some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the socialized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting. To sustain a lifestyle which excludes others, or to sustain enthusiasm for that selfish ideal, a globalization of indifference has developed. Almost without being aware of it, we end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people’s pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone else’s responsibility and not our own. The culture of prosperity deadens us; we are thrilled if the market offers us something new to purchase. In the meantime all those lives stunted for lack of opportunity seem a mere spectacle; they fail to move us.

attack_zps72cf4894

Just as the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say “thou shalt not” to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills. How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points? This is a case of exclusion. Can we continue to stand by when food is thrown away while people are starving? This is a case of inequality. Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.

Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded. We have created a “throw away” culture which is now spreading. It is no longer simply about exploitation and oppression, but something new. Exclusion ultimately has to do with what it means to be a part of the society in which we live; those excluded are no longer society’s underside or its fringes or its disenfranchised – they are no longer even a part of it. The excluded are not the “exploited” but the outcast, the “leftovers.

So this goes on in a similar vein, and this position does not bode well for the conservative narrative. We see capitalism explicitly blamed for inequality, and in turn inequality for societies ills, a disturbing cause and effect that is disruptive to the American status quo. Coming from a supposedly impartial and world recognized voice of moralistic guidance, this is particularly damning.

We have to ask given the (millennial) history of precisely just this set of teachings, where the hell have these people been for the last 400 years? Mired in child molestation cases, and other aspects of immeasurable hypocrisy, that’s where. Typically dispensing irrelevant teachings to a disinterested world, met with a yawn and the clink of coins in the Sunday collections basket, the cafeteria Catholics and faithful parishioners buy their penance on the free market of theology, shopping for workable edicts and morals they can live with, and leaving aside things that might prove troublesome.

And the Church, let’s not (yet) get all misty eyed that the new Pope has found his voice, that the Holy See can finally see after 400 years of Post Enlightenment blindness, because if we learned anything in the Dark Ages we learned the Church was an authoritarian, totalitarian institution, honed to perfection after centuries of practice, misappropriating Christianic themes in furtherance of its own power and hegemony. Restricting knowledge, capturing books, and distorting, twisting and interpreting discovery with a certain malleability of facts, and containing science to maintain its omnipotence.

It is worth noting that at its core, the Church operates as a corporatist entity, with significant focus on profits itself, poisoned if you will, by the very same sickness it chastises. So we might well leave the discussion here, hopeful that the new Papal vision will at least upset some belief systems, and file this under the category of good ideas for the wrong reasons, and move on to other superficial topics. Except that we have 2000 years of history here, history that resonates with this same message, repeated in many ways over and over again. We have a seminal event in the Enlightenment, which purported to shut down the fiefdoms, mysticism and fanciful explanations, replacing it with science and reason to wrest the power and authority from cloistered theocrats.

And this has failed.

None of the Post Enlightenment theories of political economy have provided satisfactory, sustainable solutions despite 400 years of trying. By most measures, they are in fact worse. The current fashionable trend to double down on technology as means of providing solutions is not working, and critical thinkers can see these measures are leading to cascading failure modes, with each technological “breakthrough” creating new and unanticipated failures of their own, with insufficient study as to unanticipated outcomes.

theatreofhate_zpsb312a704

I had occasion last month to attend a talk by Chris Hedges, the first time I have heard him in person. The venue was in Santa Monica in a historic building now owned by the Women’s Club, a depression era wood structure with a whitewashed paint job, faintly reminiscent of a church. The venue was packed to the rafters, with the upstairs balcony fairly bulging under the weight of way more people wanting to see Hedges than the organizers anticipated. Everyone finally got in to the standing room only crowd. Hedges has found his voice, he is articulate in person, but powerful, vocally projecting in a way I’ve not seen him do in taped interviews where he seems more reflective and almost mournful. His message is a powerful force and it is clear his upbringing under a Presbyterian minister (his father) and his education in seminary converge to forge his style and messaging. The emotion and power left me somewhat stunned, I wasn’t prepared for the electricity in the room and palpable agitation of the attendees who know full well the truth in his message.

It might seem that these events conspire to ordain a germ of an idea, a small, kindled spark that suggests, almost horrifically, that the assemblage of the capitalist mode of production is not a just theory of economics or political economy. It is not merely an exchange of commodities or a clever and oblique system of exploitation. It is not just a mechanism for conflicting class structure or means for the landed nobility to hold down the masses.

It is a religion, a theology so all consuming that it transcends borders, boundaries, catechism and Koran. It extends to every denomination, to every corner of the earth with a deification and worship of commerce and consumption so deeply ingrained that there is no inoculation once infected. Its participants trapped in a purgatory analogous to opium dens, transient pleasure of consumption and accumulation, but in the 19th century opium dens most knew to advise a friend to retrieve them after several hours (or days) as they would be unable- and unwilling- to leave on their own.

In this version, no one is coming to get you out, there is no getting out. No one is free from the addictive vapors of consumption.

 CAPITALISM AS RELIGION

a) First of all because, as we have seen, capitalism, by defining itself as the natural and necessary form of the modern economy, does not admit any different future, any way out, any alternative. Its force is, writes Weber, ‘irresistible’, and it presents itself as an inevitable fate.

b) The system reduces the vast majority of humanity to ‘damned of the earth’ who cannot hope for divine salvation, since their economic failure is the sign that they are excluded from God’s grace. Guilty for their own fate, they have no hope of redemption. The God of the capitalist religion, money, has no pity for those who have no money . . .

c) Capitalism is ‘the ruin of being’, it replaces being with having, human qualities with commodified quantities, human relations with monetary ones, moral or cultural values with the only value that counts, money.

d) Since humanity’s ‘guilt’ – its indebtedness towards Capital – is permanent and growing, no hope of expiation is permitted. The capitalist constantly needs to grow and expand his capital if he does not wish to be crushed by his competitors, and the poor must borrow more and more money to pay their debts.

e) According to the religion of Capital, the only salvation consists in the intensification of the system, in capitalist expansion, in the accumulation of more and more commodities; but this ‘remedy’ results only in the aggravation of despair.

So in other words, the will of God is substituted by the will of the market. The Saints of Capitalism are not represented by iconography in dusty church alcoves, rendered in plaster bas relief, illuminated by flickering votive candles aligned in perfectly concentric rows, no, these saints are reproduced on our paper money, mass produced by photoengraved plates and scaled to feel, to touch, with every transaction to reacquaint and remind the heathen that this is the portal to eternal salvation.

Our cathedrals are not limestone structures of centuries production, flying buttresses soaring gracefully to the heavens, constructed of a scale to intimidate and instill perspective of scale between creator and subject, no these cathedrals are chrome and glass, with banal and endless rows of cubicles for the disciples to prosthelytize to the unwashed masses, “lift yourself, take our hand and elevate yourself to the glory of all the money is and can be”.

Consume or be consumed, the entire New Testament may be reinterpreted not as a warning of end times, not as a statement of worldly evangelism, but each parable and writing a searing indictment and prophetic warning of a planet destroying insidious religion about to rise. The Original Sin may well be reduced to being born into a world which requires you to sell your labor power for survival, the baptism a cleansing in preparation of a lifelong participation in commodity exchange- labor for goods.

There is no expiation in the religion of Capitalism, it is game theory analogous to Newcomb’s Paradox, a contrivance where an omniscient being gives you two choices, one of which is already made for you, and analyzes your strategy for utility maximization when you know that your choice is already predetermined- and you cannot change the outcome.

Here’s hoping for the ninth Crusade.

Share this:

  • Tweet
  • Share on Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

A Review of the Collapse of Western Civilization

06 Saturday Apr 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Environmental Degradation, Pollution

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Arctic Ice Melt, Bill Maher, Capitalism, Climate Change, Climate Refugees, Climate Tipping Points, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Empire, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, Free Market Ideologues, Historian Erik M. Conway, Inverted Totalitarianism, Mass Die Off, Neoliberal Capitalism, Overpopulation, Privatization, Professor Naomi Oreskes, Regulatory Capture, Resource Wars, Social Unrest, The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future, The Elite 1%, unwashed public

I’m on my downtime right now, but a paper, entitled ‘The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future‘, came to my attention and deserves a blog post. It was written by Professor Naomi Oreskes and Historian Erik M. Conway. It is the chronicling of past events after the Great Collapse by a future historian in China:

…a second Dark Age had fallen on Western civilization, in which denial and self-deception, rooted in an ideological fixation on “free” markets, disabled the world’s powerful nations in the face of tragedy. Moreover, the scientists who best understood the problem were hamstrung by their own cultural practices, which demanded an excessively stringent standard for accepting claims of any kind–even those involving imminent threats. Here, our future historian, living in the Second People’s Republic of China, recounts the events of the Period of the Penumbra (1988–2073) that led to the Great Collapse and Mass Migration (2074)…

The paper starts off with a brief history of industrial civilization’s chemical and material pollutions overloading the Earth’s environmental sinks. The sheer volume of mankind’s activities, from the Ozone Hole created by CFC’s to the resource-depleting diet of industrial cattle-farming, became a force of nature unto itself threatening the very habitability of the planet. The scientific community began to recognize that man’s industrial activities were upending the earth’s life support systems; various organizations and institutions were created to try to ‘protect the environment’, but the interests of free market capitalism with its high-consumption lifestyle created a backlash against any restriction and attempts to recognize the limits of the human economy’s unending growth. The party had to continue no matter how dire the consequences. 1988 is said to have marked the beginning of the “Penumbral Period”, perhaps meaning a time of partial illumination where the threat was seen, but no effective action was taken. Indeed, we dug our grave faster with the building of evermore coal-fired plants and the destruction of the remaining ecosystems in the face of a series of extreme and ominous weather events which had the earmarks of manmade climate change.

By the early 2000s, dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system was under way. Fires, floods, hurricanes, and heat waves began to intensify, but these effects were discounted. Those in what we might call active denial insisted that the extreme weather events reflected natural variability, despite a lack of evidence to support that claim. Those in passive denial continued life as they had been living it, unconvinced that a compelling justification existed for broad changes in industry and infrastructure. Scientists became entangled in arcane arguments about the “attribution” of singular events; however, the threat to civilization inhered not in any individual flood, heat wave, or hurricane, but in the overall shifting climate pattern, its impact on the cryosphere, and the increasing acidification of the world ocean…

…what was anomalous in 2021 soon became the new normal. Even then, political, business, and religious leaders refused to accept that the primary cause was the burning of fossil fuels. A shadow of ignorance and denial had fallen over people who considered themselves children of the Enlightenment. For this reason, we now know this era as the Period of the Penumbra.

If you don’t like reality, then withdraw into fantasy and rewrite history; “we’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality,” said Karl Rove.

In the early Penumbral Period, scientists were accused of being “alarmist” in order to increase financial support for their enterprise, gain attention, or improve their social standing. At first, the accusations took the form of public denunciations; later they included threats, thefts, and the subpoena of private correspondence. Then legislation was passed (particularly in the United States) that placed limits on what scientists could study and how they could study it, beginning with the notorious “Sea Level Rise Denial Bill,” passed in 2012 by the government of what was then the U.S. state of North Carolina (now part of the Atlantic Continental Shelf ) and the Government Spending Accountability Act of 2012, which restricted the ability of government scientists to attend conferences to share and analyze the results of their research.

Though ridiculed when first introduced, the Sea Level Rise Denial Bill would become the model for the U.S. National Stability Protection Act of 2022, which led to the conviction and imprisonment of more than three hundred scientists for “endangering the safety and well-being of the general public with unduly alarming threats.” By exaggerating the threat, it was argued, scientists were preventing the economic development essential for coping with climate change. When the scientists appealed, their convictions were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court under the Clear and Present Danger doctrine, which permitted the government to limit speech deemed to represent an imminent threat.

Human adaptive optimism is one explanation for why humans failed to act in order to save themselves. People came to believe that technology and human ingenuity would solve threats of environmental collapse. From The tragedy of cognition: psychological biases and environmental inaction:

Snap 2013-04-06 at 00.07.30

And I love this line…

…robust evidence shows that people systematically overestimate the probability of positive future contingencies, and underestimate the probability of negative ones — only those who are depressed or dysphoric come to accurate assessments…

Diogenes of Sinope must have practiced a sort of philosophical dysphoria.

Another cause for modern man’s downfall was the adoption of an excessively stringent standard for accepting causal links between climate change and human industrial activities:

…Historians have long argued about why this standard was accepted, given that it had no substantive mathematical basis. We have come to understand the 95 percent confidence limit as a social convention rooted in scientists’ desire to demonstrate their disciplinary severity. Just as religious orders of prior centuries had demonstrated moral rigor through extreme practices of asceticism in dress, lodging, behavior, and food–in essence, practices of physical self-denial–so, too, did natural scientists of the twentieth century attempt to demonstrate their intellectual rigor through intellectual self-denial. This practice led scientists to demand an excessively stringent standard for accepting claims of any kind, even those involving imminent threats…

CO2 emissions continued to rise not only in developing countries, but also developed countries as fossil fuel production accelerated with shale gas extraction and Canadian oil-sand processing. The world was firmly in the grasp of the fossil fuel energy trap.

…How did these wealthy nations–rich in the resources that would have enabled an orderly transition to a zero net-carbon infrastructure–justify the deadly expansion of fossil fuel production? Certainly, they fostered the shadow of denial that obscured the link between climate change and fossil fuel production and consumption. They also entertained a second delusion: that natural gas from shale could offer a “bridge to renewables.” Believing that conventional oil and gas resources were running out (which they were, but at a rate insufficient to avoid disruptive climate change), and stressing that natural gas, when combusted, produced only half as much CO2 as coal, political and economic leaders persuaded themselves and their constituents that promoting shale gas was an environmentally and ethically sound approach.

This line of reasoning, however, neglected three crucial factors. First, fugitive methane emissions–CH4 that escaped unburned into the atmosphere–greatly accelerated warming. (Again, scientists had foreseen this phenomenon, but their predictions were buried in specialized journals.) Second, the argument presupposed that net CO2 emissions would fall, which would have required strict restrictions on coal and petroleum use. Third, and most important, the sustained low prices of fossil fuels, supported by continued subsidies and a lack of external cost accounting, undercut efficiency efforts and weakened emerging markets for solar, wind, and biofuels (including crucial liquid biofuels for aviation). Thus, the bridge to a zero-carbon future collapsed before the world had crossed it. The bridge to the future became a bridge to nowhere.

The following scenario seems to me to be our most likely future under the current path of business-as-usual:

…The net result? Fossil fuel production escalated, greenhouse gas emissions increased, and climate disruption accelerated. In 2001, the IPCC had predicted that atmospheric CO2 would double by 2050. In fact, that benchmark had been met by 2042. Scientists had expected a mean global warming of 2 to 3 degrees Celsius; the actual figure was 3.9 degrees. Though originally merely a benchmark for discussion with no particular physical meaning, the doubling of CO2 emissions turned out to be significant: once the corresponding temperature rise reached 4 degrees, rapid changes began to ensue.

By 2040, heat waves and droughts were the norm. Control measures such as water and food rationing and Malthusian drills had been widely implemented. In wealthy countries, hurricane- and tornado-prone regions were depopulating, putting increased social pressure on areas less subject to those hazards. In poor nations, conditions were predictably worse: rural portions of Africa and Asia were already experiencing significant depopulation from out-migration, malnutrition-induced disease and infertility, and starvation. Still, sea level had risen only 9 to 15 centimeters around the globe, and coastal populations were mainly intact.

Then, in the Northern Hemisphere summer of 2041, unprecedented heat waves scorched the planet, destroying food crops around the globe. Panic ensued, with food riots in virtually every major city. Mass migration of under-nourished and dehydrated individuals, coupled with explosive increases in insect populations, led to widespread outbreaks of typhus, cholera, dengue fever, yellow fever, and, strangely, AIDS (although a medical explanation for the latter has never been forthcoming). Surging insect populations also destroyed huge swaths of forests in Canada, Indonesia, and Brazil. As social order broke down, governments were overthrown, particularly in Africa, but also in many parts of Asia and Europe, further decreasing social capacity to deal with increasingly desperate populations. The U.S. government declared martial law to prevent food riots and looting, and the United States and Canada announced that the two countries would form the United States of North America in order to begin resource-sharing and northward population relocation. The European Union announced similar plans for voluntary northward relocation of eligible citizens from its southernmost regions to Scandinavia and the United Kingdom…

World leaders convened to hastily put together a climate geoengineering scheme in an effort to halt the collapse, but unforeseen side effects occurred and the project was immediately stopped, resulting in even more dire consequences. Various feedback loops unleashed a “Venusian death” on planet Earth:

…This massive addition of carbon led to what is known as the Sagan effect (sometimes more dramatically called the Venusian death): a strong positive feedback loop between warming and CH4 release. Planetary temperature increased by an additional 6 degrees Celsius over the 5 degree rise that had already occurred…

The rapid melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and the Greenland Ice Sheet resulted in massive sea level rise and more apocalyptic human and non-human suffering:

…Analysts had predicted that a five-meter sea level rise would dislocate 10 percent of the global population. Alas, their estimates proved low: the reality was closer to 20 percent. Although records for this period are incomplete, it is likely that 1.5 billion people were displaced around the globe, either directly from the impacts of sea level rise or indirectly from other impacts of climate change, including the secondary dislocation of inland peoples whose towns and villages were overrun by eustatic refugees. Dislocation contributed to the Second Black Death, as a new strain of the bacterium Yersinia pestis emerged in Europe and spread to Asia and North America. In the Middle Ages, the Black Death killed as much as half the population of Europe; this second Black Death had similar effects. Disease also spread among stressed nonhuman populations. Although accurate statistics are scant because twentieth-century scientists did not have an inventory of total global species, it is not unrealistic to estimate that 60 to 70 percent of species were driven to extinction…

This doomsday narration then ends with a sort of “happy note” which seems to me to be wishful thinking, an improbable turn of events which saves mankind from total extinction. The last few pages discuss more the pitfalls that mankind fell into leading to such a dire fate: positivism or Baconianism and market fundamentalism.

…power did not reside in the hands of those who understood the climate system, but rather in political, economic, and social institutions that had a strong interest in maintaining the use of fossil fuels. Historians have labeled this system the carbon-combustion complex: a network of powerful industries comprised of primary fossil fuel producers; secondary industries that served fossil fuel companies (drilling and oil held service companies, large construction firms, and manufacturers of plastics and other petrochemicals); tertiary industries whose products relied on inexpensive fossil fuels (especially automobiles and aviation); and financial institutions that serviced their capital demands. Maintaining the carbon-combustion complex was clearly in the self-interest of these groups, so they cloaked this fact behind a network of “think tanks” that issued challenges to scientific knowledge they found threatening…

…When scientists discovered the limits of planetary sinks, they also discovered market failure. The toxic effects of DDT, acid rain, the depletion of the ozone layer, and climate change were serious problems for which markets did not provide a spontaneous remedy. Rather, government intervention was required: to raise the market price of harmful products, to prohibit those products, or to finance the development of their replacements. But because neoliberals were so hostile to centralized government, they had, as Americans used to say, “painted themselves into a corner.” The American people had been persuaded, in the words of President Reagan, that government was “the problem, not the solution.” Thus, citizens slid into passive denial, accepting the contrarian arguments that the science was unsettled. Lacking widespread support, government leaders were unable to shift the world economy to a net carbon-neutral energy base. As the implications for market failure became indisputable, scientists came under attack, blamed for problems they had not caused but merely documented…

Watching the following video, we can see such a future, as describe above, being played out before our very eyes:

Real Time episode with Bill Maher – aired April 5, 2013: Bill Maher led an intense panel discussion on the reliability of science on his show tonight, with Maher, Abby Huntsman, Senator Bernie Sanders, and 19-year-old science education activist Zack Kopplin arguing with Wall Street Journal columnist Steve Moore over scientific consensus on global warming. Moore continually insisted the debate is not over, but Maher repeatedly explained how sound science is not up for debate and that Moore should “have the humility” to defer to actual scientific experts on the issue…

Share this:

  • Tweet
  • Share on Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

No Bailout for Mass Extinction and the Collapse of Industrial Civilization

10 Wednesday Oct 2012

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Pollution

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

6th Mass Extinction, Bill Mckibben, Canfield Ocean, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Edward Bernays, Environmental Collapse, Free Market Ideologues, Inverted Totalitarianism, Mass Die Off, Mass Media Manipulation, Paul L. Street, Peter D. Ward, Under a Green Sky: Global Warming - the Mass Extinctions of the Past - and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future

“There’s No Economy on a Dead Planet”: Reflections on a Missing Election Issue

excerpt…

“A Powerful Symbol of the Age of Man”

Climate change is indisputably anthropogenic – human-made. The long deep-pocketed propaganda, public relations, and lobbying arms of the corporate carbon industrial complex have long insisted that global warming is a reflection of unalterable natural forces that operate independently of human control. But the preponderant majority of the climate-sentient world agrees with the overwhelming consensus finding of contemporary earth scientists that global warming is anthropogenic (“human made”) – that it reflects the visible hand of human practice, politics, and policy. It knows that the story of the world’s broken ecology is about the human release of greenhouse gases resulting from the uncontrolled extraction and use of carbon-based fossil fuels.[8]

The harsh reality has to be acknowledged in elite capitalist media. Reflecting its duty to provide its privileged readers with reasonably accurate information, even the neoliberal, arch-capitalist Anglo-American Economist magazine acknowledges the dominant role of human agency in a recent special supplemental report on “The Vanishing North.”  According to The Economist last June, “The shrinkage of the sea ice is no less a result of human hands than the ploughing of the prairies. The cause is global pollution, and the risks it carries are likewise global. The Arctic, no longer distant or inviolable, has emerged, almost overnight, as a powerful symbol of the age of man.”[9] 

“Accelerating the Catastrophe”

What do the two dominant U.S. business parties offer towards the goal of saving the planet – well, its living species – from the crisis of anthropogenic global warming? Less than nothing. An escalation of the assault, in fact, making the problem worse.

Writing about the drastic melting of “the earth’s air-conditioner,” Gillis notes a chilling lack of urgency in reacting to the problem the part of rich nation governments, whose “main response has been to plan for exploitation of newly accessible minerals in the Arctic, including more oil.”[10]

Instead of acting to limit greenhouse emissions, those governments see the retreat of the great northern ice cover as an opportunity “to accelerate the catastrophe…The reaction,” Noam Chomsky notes, “demonstrates an extraordinary willingness to sacrifice the lives of our children and grandchildren for short-term gain. Or, perhaps, an equally remarkable willingness to shut our eyes so as not to see the impending peril.”[11] …

…The Republicans and the Democrats both decline to take the great time bomb of climate change[18] with anything remotely like the seriousness it deserves since doing so would disrupt “the economy.” They both worship at the altar of growth and the notion that “a rising tide lifts all boats” – capitalism’s longstanding fake, eco-cidal answer to popular pressure for jobs, and end to poverty, and the downward redistribution of income and wealth.[19] They both refuse to let long-term considerations of livable ecology and human survival interfere with the short-term pursuit of material expansion and the bottom line, not to mention the short-term logic of the election cycle.

I often wonder why people, who know that climate change is real, refuse to discuss it. They refuse to discuss it because it will upset their regimen of making money and carrying along with business-as-usual.

Bill Mckibben was on some late night TV show and he mentioned that the executive of some oil company said that if we need to move our food production north, then we will. Here is why that won’t work. Climate change means widespread famine, wars for dwindling resources, the fall of States, and the final extinction of man. There’s no more pretending that economic growth is possible or even a sane path for us to follow. Yet the system continues on through coerced participation.

I wonder if our forebears from 100 years ago would alter their actions if they knew from scientific and observable evidence that their way of life would cause the extinction of their progeny. Do you think they were more sensible back then? At that time, Edward Bernays and the tools of mass media manipulation had not yet entered society. Are not climate change deniers and free market ideologues the flat-earthers or Salem witch hunters of the 21st century? Feel free to give me an answer if you have one.

If you destroy the oceans, the cradle of life, then they will overtake you, returning you from whence you came…

Share this:

  • Tweet
  • Share on Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

Browbeaten Scientists Not Telling the Public the Full Truth

19 Wednesday Sep 2012

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Pollution

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Capitalism, Climate Feedback Loops, Climate Scientists Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, David Roberts, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Free Market Ideologues, Laissez-Faire Capitalism, The Elite 1%

Is it still possible to limit climate change to a 2 degree increase? If we don’t take into account the loss of sulfate parasols as a result of our emissions controls and if we close our eyes to the multiple feedback loops that have already been unleashed and which, in and of themselves, could dwarf anthropogenic emissions, then it might be possible in such a theoretical and hypothetical world.

(click to enlarge)

But a theoretical and hypothetical world and a world of brutal reality are two very different things. Humans must ultimately answer to brutal reality which discards all of the fabricated economic theorems and pie-in-the-sky myths about the techno-supremacy of modern man that we delude ourselves with. So the cold and hard reality is “No, we are well and truly fucked!” Despite decades of warnings by scientists, we have kept on burning fossil fuels and continue to do so as I write this post. As a matter of fact, growth in fossil fuel consumption is baked into our economic system as far into the future as we care to fantasize. We have backed ourselves into a corner where the only salvation left is some sort of globally coordinated Manhattan project of geo-engineering. And how likely is that to occur, let alone succeed? As David Roberts reports in his latest essay ‘Freaked-out climate scientists urge other freaked-out climate scientists to speak up, fight Man‘, our current enslavement to an infinite growth economic paradigm precludes such a possibility:

…Can we make the radical changes necessary to meet that challenge? No, say climate scientists Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows in a recent commentary in Nature Climate Change, not “within orthodox political and economic constraints.”

There is no political or economic constraint more orthodox than the primacy of economic growth. No solution to climate change that threatens economic growth can get any traction at all — even the most “alarmist” climate hawks fear to tread there. Which is too bad, Anderson and Bows say, because “climate change commitments are incompatible with short- to medium-term economic growth (in other words, for 10 to 20 years).” What’s worse, “work on adapting to climate change suggests that economic growth cannot be reconciled with the breadth and rate of impacts as the temperature rises towards 4 °C and beyond.” In other words: We either give up economic growth voluntarily for a little while or suffer a climate that will reverse economic growth long-term…

…Anderson and Bows stress that, “within orthodox political and economic constraints,” hitting such a target is wildly unlikely. Absent some pretty revolutionary political and economic changes, it won’t happen. For obvious reasons, scientists shy away from saying this kind of thing in public. They don’t want to depress people or come off as “political.” However, say Anderson and Bows, “away from the microphone and despite claims of ‘green growth’, few if any scientists working on climate change would disagree with the broad thrust of this candid conclusion.”…

The article goes on to explain how our scientific community is hamstrung and browbeaten into reciting and presenting only evidence without expounding upon and revealing what the consequences of those findings will be for humanity:

…scientists remain reticent, often assuming that “the most effective way of engaging is by presenting evidence, without daring to venture, at least explicitly, broader academic judgment.” This kind of just-the-facts reticence, Anderson and Bows say, is neither warranted nor wise given the urgency of current climate circumstances:

[W]e need to be less afraid of making academic judgments. Not unsubstantiated opinions and prejudice, but applying a mix of academic rigour, courage and humility to bring new and interdisciplinary insights into the emerging era. This would be controversial enough in itself. Various social and professional incentives work against academic researchers speaking out beyond their narrow specialties. And there is an entire cottage industry devoted to scolding climate scientists for going “beyond the science” to political analysis or policy advocacy. These latter sins, they are warned, threaten their status as “trusted brokers.” (Because the trusted-broker thing is working so well so far, climate-wise.)

What else can you do, though, when danger of such unthinkable scope and permanence is looming and humanity’s actions in the coming decade will determine the fate of future generations? I mean, it sounds like a sci-fi movie, but it’s real. What can you do if you’re one of the scientists who understands how dire the situation is? These are not ordinary times.

And in conclusion, the article talks of something I have posted about here – the failure and inability of the free market to solve this civilization-ending problem of climate change:

Anyway, as controversial as it is to ask climate researchers to venture broad social and economic judgments, the specific critique that Anderson and Bows offer is even more likely to make some of their straight-laced colleagues wince. It has to do with the “catastrophic and ongoing failure of market economics and the laissez-faire rhetoric accompanying it.” Specifically, market economists (and the politicians and scientists in thrall to them) suffer the “misguided belief that commitments to avoid warming of 2°C can still be realized with incremental adjustments to economic incentives.” They urge their colleagues:

Leave the market economists to fight among themselves over the right price of carbon — let them relive their groundhog day if they wish. The world is moving on and we need to have the audacity to think differently and conceive of alternative futures.

One of the objectives of this blog was to speak truth to power and reveal where the human race is headed. Now that we know our final outcome, our predicament is analogous to being diagnosed with terminal cancer. You people reading this post are an infinitesimal percentage of the global population who are privileged, or perhaps cursed, to be in possession of such depressing knowledge. Where do we go from here? What do we do? How do we live our lives knowing what we know of the dismal future of the world’s youth? The entire edifice of human civilization will become a worldwide ghost city before this century ends. Perhaps the only thing left to do is live each day as if it were our last because there really is no future without some miraculous, radical, and global social change accompanied by unprecedented global cooperation. Those in charge of such matters have chosen temporary preservation of the current system over the long-term survival of our species. Evil and suicidal or foolish and ill-informed… Which is it that best describes the self-destructive choices that have been made?

A truly frightening time-lapse visualization by the NOAA of the Arctic Ice Melt:

Share this:

  • Tweet
  • Share on Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

Free Markets and the Extinction of Mankind

07 Friday Sep 2012

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Pollution

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Anthropogenic Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Free Market Ideologues, Record Arctic Ice Melt

In a previous post entitled ‘Free Market Blinders and the Coercion of Industrial-Corporate Capitalism‘, I posted arguments on why the free market ends up being anything but free. In the pursuit of profit, the shortest path taken includes usurping the instruments of the state. It also means all problems are forced into the ‘free market’ box and what comes out are phony solutions that only serve capitalism such as the scheme of carbon trading which has been described as “halfway between fantasy and fraud.”

Due to the lag time of its effects, climate change is a problem that the ‘free market’ cannot fix:

Whistling Past the Graveyard on Climate Change

…This is the sort of problem that democracies and free markets are mostly incapable of solving. Politicians who have to come up for reelection every two to four years aren’t good at annoying business interests in order to solve problems that won’t even show up in a significant way for the rest of their lifetimes.

And even in its most ideal form, the logic of “free market solutions” is predicated on companies getting punished by angry consumers if they don’t do the right thing. There are all sorts of things wrong with this approach, of course: if a bunch of people die due to food poisoning, it’s not as if it’s always easy to identify where in the production chain the problem occurred, or which corporations to punish by not buying their product (not to mention the obvious fact that the deaths should have been stopped by regulation and oversight in the first place.) But in its most simplistic form it might work if the impact of corporate malfeasance is immediate.

But how does a “free market solution” work when it comes to carbon emissions? Whom do consumers punish? Whom do consumers reward? On what timescale? By the time the problem is advanced enough to penetrate consumer consciousness, it will have been far, far too late for the market to change organically.

And that’s, as I’ve said before, why climate change is such a threat to the conservative enterprise. It’s not just that big energy interests would be impacted. It’s that the entire conservative model of problem solving would be rendered obsolete if the realities of climate change were accepted in our public discourse.

So absent some sort of organizational metamorphosis for human societies, business interests will continue to divide nation states against one another as politicians in the major industrialized democracies dawdle and pretend the problem will go away.

CO2 levels continue to rise despite the sham carbon trading scheme (NOAA):

As you can see from the following video, the warming effects of the CO2 we have been pumping into the atmosphere over the last 130 years are becoming much more pronounced (this video is from NASA and only goes up to 2011).

In regards to the future stability of the human race, consider the conclusions from top climate scientists in a recent article of the highly regarded journal Nature:

The mean global temperature by 2070 (or a few decades earlier) will be higher than it ever has since the human species evolved.” [Human-induced climate change creates] “the potential to transform Earth rapidly and irreversibly into a state unknown in human experience.” “The net effect is that once a critical transition occurs, it is extremely difficult or even impossible for the system to return to its previous state.”

You see, the problem is that we are bringing on these changes to the climate and environment so rapidly that we, along with many other species, will NOT be able to adapt in time. Certainly our food supply will be in grave danger as weather patterns shift and droughts become more intense. The vast and expensive infrastructure we built to take advantage of the stable climate that we enjoyed in the past will no longer apply. Imagine a game of musical chairs with the entire global population scrambling for the last remaining seat. That’s the future in which a chaotic climate makes the access to dwindling resources even more tenuous. Arguing over cause and effect as we all go over the cliff is not an option, but that is the avenue we are taking.

The only hope is a radical and abrupt shift away from the use of all CO2 emitting energy, as referred to in this excerpt from an updated statement by the American Meteorological Society on global warming:

There is unequivocal evidence that Earth’s lower atmosphere, ocean, and land surface are warming; sea level is rising; and snow cover, mountain glaciers, and Arctic sea ice are shrinking. The dominant cause of the warming since the 1950s is human activities. This scientific finding is based on a large and persuasive body of research. The observed warming will be irreversible for many years into the future, and even larger temperature increases will occur as greenhouse gases continue to accumulate in the atmosphere. Avoiding this future warming will require a large and rapid reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions.

The results of industrial civilization’s binge on fossil fuels are happening in full Technicolor right before our eyes:

Share this:

  • Tweet
  • Share on Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

Free Market Blinders and the Coercion of Industrial-Corporate Capitalism

30 Thursday Aug 2012

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Consumerism, Corporate State, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

1976 American satirical film 'Network'. Howard Beale, Capitalism, Commodification of Human Labour, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, David McNally, Environmental Collapse, Financial Elite, Free Market Ideologues, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Karl Marx, Keith Farnish, The Elite 1%

I think many of us intuitively understand that free market ideologues have a narrow path to walk in order to keep afloat their construct of a world that is best run by the omnipotent and omniscient capitalist market system. Perhaps the idea that our globalized capitalist economy knows best is as damaging to society as the teachings of a fanatical cult urging all its members to drink from the poisoned chalice. Certainly the needs of the global capitalist economic system, currently propped up by money printing, supersedes all other considerations, including compassion for our fellow man and the well-being of the environment which is the forgotten lynchpin of the economy, not to mention the crucial factor in determining whether or not humankind continues to survive on this planet.

In the realm of the worker and the capitalist elite(the ones who own the means of production), the exploitation of humans on such a large-scale amounts to a society of wage-slave toiling zombies:

The distinguishing feature of a capitalist society is the commodification of human labour—and it is this that differentiated early modern England from any other nation. England was not the first country to develop long-distance trade or to plunder other parts of the world; throughout the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, countries like Portugal, Spain and Holland exceeded England in these regards. What set English society of the time apart from its European rivals, however, was that it alone established an extensive labour market, the key to capitalist development. […]

On the labour market, every economic transaction touches directly on essential qualities of human life—material, social and moral. In exchange for wages, those who sell their labour power surrender to the capitalist ultimate control over the work to be done, its conditions, pace and organization. Rather than treating our creative energies as a unique source of personal identity, “the owners of the conditions of production treat living labour-power as a thing” (Marx, Capital, v. 1, trans. Fowkes, 1976, p. 989). The result is a profound personal alienation, a hollowing out of the meaning of life. This is why the poor, as we shall see, have historically resisted being driven into the labour markets as their only means of survival.

Reflecting on this relationship, Karl Marx described work under capitalism as alienated labour: Relinquishing control over her labour, the worker suffers an estrangement from an essential part of her humanity. As Marx (Wage Labour and Capital, Progress Publishers, 1952, p. 20) put it in one succinct passage:

“But the exercise of labour power, labour, is the worker’s own life-activity, the manifestation of his own life. And this life-activity he sells to another person in order to secure the necessary means of subsistence. Thus, his life-activity is for him only a means to enable him to exist. He works in order to live. He does not even reckon labour as part of his life, it is rather a sacrifice of his life. […]”

For the worker, in other words, work is a means to life, but not life itself. Real life begins after work, during “free time”. The familiar expression, “Thank God It’s Friday”, is a depressing acknowledgement that work for the majority is oppressive, alienating, boring and dehumanizing. Of course, things look very different from the vantage point of the capitalist.

Since the worker alienates control of her labour to the employer, the capitalist is in a position to exploit that labour—to force the labourer to perform an amount of work that exceeds the value of the wages paid. Indeed, this is the whole point of the transaction for the capitalist: to make a profit on the purchase of labour by getting workers to produce more value than what they are paid. And this difference between labour’s output and the wages paid—called surplus value—is the secret to the massive inequalities of capitalism: enormous amounts of the wealth produced by workers accumulate in the hands of the owning class.

And our economic system labels everyone the cold and dehumanizing term of “consumers”. Your behavior is methodically studied and cataloged so that the system can exploit your consumerist tendencies:

When you accept the label of ‘consumer’, you accept that you have become a financial object, willing to be manipulated by whatever marketing tricks abound. Consumer choice would be far better entitled ‘Conchoice’, a term describing the true level of choice that individuals are provided with, should they find themselves within the consumer culture.

Here is an email from Darbikrash, entitled ‘Buy or Die’, which illustrates the mind-numbing, invasive nature of corporations and the consumer culture:

…As there are too many goods chasing too few consumers (with any money left) the end game is to invent markets, to cajole and hoodwink people into believing they need something that they really don’t, and then to create products to port into this fabrication, rotating through product ideas at high speed to “see what sticks”.

What is really laughable is the degree of planning, co-ordination and control that exists in a typical retail outlet, say for example, Bed, Bath and Beyond. Every square inch of that jumbled, packed to the rafters collection of junk and useless assorted trinkets is planned. The product lineout is planned seasonally, and rotated to reflect the calendar quadrant. Each product, each one, is placed at the precise height, shelf location, and aisle location to optimize traffic and elicit the best response to a shoppers’ buy signals. The orientation of the aisles, the sequence to which high demand products are placed to maximize traffic to get to that product is profound. They know with statistical certainty which direction you will turn your shopping cart when you enter the store and when you reach the end of a given aisle.

They run full scale mock-ups or “focus groups” to optimize traffic patterns to increase the sales volume of the highest margin items. Shelf placement is determined by the highest margin. Products with lower margins are back charged to the manufacturers with “slotting fees”, bribes in effect to obtain higher shelf placement in a more lucrative aisle.

The store locations and real estate acquisition decisions are made with greater precision than a military invasion of a foreign country, and in many ways it is just that. They know to 6 significant digits the average household income within a 40 mile radius of each store location. They know how many times you leave the house to buy a product, and how far you are willing to drive to get it. They know if you’re male or female, married or single, and they know the preference curves of your demographic. They know how close to the entrance you will want to park before you drive off in disgust, and they know what type of music to play over the loudspeaker to increase your propensity to buy. They know how many visits you’ll make (on average) per calendar quarter, and the average amount of money you’ll spend at each visit, to incredible accuracy.

But just try and pass a law that restricts a multi-national from acting as a sovereign state. Just try to pass something that will put consumer protections in place. Imagine the uproar if there was an initiative to place healthy food in the front of a store and unhealthy food in the back, for example. There would be riots in the streets, with calls of Communist and Police state tactics shouted from every corner.

Who runs this country?

Share this:

  • Tweet
  • Share on Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...
← Older posts

Connect with me on Twitter:

Connect with me on Tumblr:

Who really pulls the strings?:

The megawealthy and Washington have become so symbiotic as to be a single entity. The bought-and-paid politicians sitting in Washington are simply the marionettes of the corporations and financial elite who are dictating public policy and regulations.

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

Climate Change & Global Warming Myths (Click on Icon)

Climate Change Videos

Topics

  • Basic Rules of this Website
  • Capitalism
  • Climate Change
  • Consumerism
  • Corporate State
  • Cyber-Warfare
  • Cyberwarfare
  • Ecological Overshoot
  • Empire
  • Environmental Degradation
  • Inequality
  • Intro
  • Military Industrial Complex
  • Neo-Colonialism
  • Peak Oil
  • Pollution
  • Wall Street Fraud
  • Weekend Funnies for the Depressed Collapsitarian
  • Year-End Review

Doomsday Clock Stats

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Archives

  • June 2022
  • January 2022
  • July 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • September 2020
  • January 2020
  • September 2019
  • June 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • March 2018
  • May 2017
  • February 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012

Movies and Videos

  • 1177 B.C.: When Civilization Collapsed
  • 1976 Hubbert Clip
  • A meteorite is not the greatest danger of environmental change – The Sixth Extinction
  • After Armageddon – A SHTF scenario
  • American Blackout 2013 National Geographic
  • American Coup
  • An Unreasonable Man (Ralph Nader)
  • Anima Mundi
  • Answering Climate Change Skeptics, Naomi Oreskes
  • Apocalypse, Man (Full Documentary)
  • Apologies Of An Economic Hitman (Full Documentary Movie)
  • Arctic Death Spiral and the Methane Time Bomb
  • Arctic Emergency: Scientists Speak
  • Are Humans Inherently Unsustainable? …Yes.
  • Are Humans Smarter Than Yeast?
  • Atomic Wounds
  • BBC Global Dimming Documentary About Geoengineering & Global Warming
  • Blind Spot
  • Born Into This – Charles Bukowski Documentary
  • Cabot Institute Annual Lecture 2012
  • Call of Life: Facing the Mass Extinction
  • Capitalism Hits the Fan – Richard Wolff
  • Capitalism is the Crisis (Full Movie)
  • Cinema Politica
  • Clive Hamilton 'Requiem for a Species'
  • Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
  • Conspiracy Rising
  • Consumed – Is Our Consumer Culture Leading to Disaster?
  • Conversations with Great Minds – Climate Scientist Dr. Curt Stager
  • Dark Days – Documentary by Marc Singer
  • David Fridley – Green Dreams: Future or Fantasy?
  • Developing a Sustainable Community – Simon Michaux
  • Do Fox News Viewers Understand Basic Science At All?
  • Do Fox viewers understand the propaganda they are watching?
  • Earth 2100 – Full Documentary / Movie Full HD
  • Earth Days (2009) – Full Movie
  • Earth Under Water – Worldwide Flooding | Sea Level Rise (SLR)
  • END CIV Resist Or Die (Full)
  • END:CIV 2011
  • Facing the Anthropocene: fossil capitalism and the crisis of the earth system
  • Final Warning Limits to Growth
  • Four Horsemen
  • Garbage Warrior [Full Length Documentary]
  • Gasland Part II
  • Geo Scarcity – Geo Destinies in the Coming Age
  • Geologic and human time scales: How can we salvage our global civilization?
  • Green Illusions
  • Green Illusions: "Solar Cells and Other Fairy Tales"
  • Guy McPherson – Earth Extinction 2030
  • Guy’s Climate Chaos Presentation from Pauline Schneider
  • Harvest of Empire
  • Hoodwinked: Who Stole Our World – Presented By John Perkins
  • Into Eternity ( A Nuclear Waste World )
  • Iraq For Sale: The War Profiteers • FULL DOCUMENTARY
  • Jared Diamond – Guns, Germs, & Steel
  • Jeremy Jackson: Ocean Apocalypse
  • Joseph Tainter: The Energy Crisis and the End of The Industrial Age
  • Journeyman Pictures
  • Koch Brothers Exposed
  • Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance
  • LAST CALL: the untold reasons of the global crisis
  • Last Hours for Humanity?
  • Lecture on Collapse of Complex Societies by Dr. Joseph Tainter
  • Life After People
  • Manufacturing Consent
  • Modern Black Death – The Next Pandemic – BBC Horizon
  • Nate Hagens – Limits to Growth: Where We Are and What to Do About It
  • Noam Chomsky – Propaganda & Control of the Public Mind
  • Obey
  • Ocean Acidification
  • Ocean Acidification in Earth's Past: Insights to the Future – James Zachos
  • Oil, Smoke & Mirrors
  • Peak mining & implications for natural resource management
  • Permian – Triassic Mayhem: Earth's Largest Mass Extinction
  • Peter Ward Our Future In a World Without Ice Caps
  • Peter Ward The Medea Hypothesis II
  • Peter Ward: The Medea Hypothesis I
  • Photographing the Nuclear Disaster in Fukushima
  • Pirate Television: Financializing America with Randy Mandell
  • Professor Al Bartlett – Arithmetic, Population and Energy
  • Professor Kevin Anderson: Real Clothes for the Emperor – Facing Climate Change
  • Rick Wolff // A Cure for Capitalism
  • Six degrees could change the world
  • Somewhere In New Mexico Before The End Of Time
  • Submedia TV
  • Surplus: Terrorized Into Being Consumers
  • Surviving Progress
  • Techno Fix – Why Technology Won’t Save Us Or the Environment
  • Techno-Fix – Dr. Michael Huesemann interview
  • The Age of Stupid
  • The Big Fix
  • The Century Of The Self
  • The Chomsky Videos
  • The Coming Famine
  • The Corporation : The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power
  • The Crash Course
  • The Crisis of Civilization : Full Movie
  • The Day the Earth Nearly Died
  • The Domino Effect – Overpopulation
  • The False Solutions of Green Energy – Wilbert & Foley (PIELC 2014)
  • The Flaw
  • The Fuck-it Point
  • The Long Emergency
  • The Man who Quit Money
  • The Methane Ticking Time Bomb has Struck Again…..
  • The Myth of Capitalism with Michael Parenti
  • The Myth of Sustainability – Guy McPherson
  • The Myth of the Liberal Media: The Propaganda Model of News
  • The Ordinary Madness of Charles Bukowski
  • The Overview Effect
  • The Permian–Triassic Extinction Event [FULL VIDEO]
  • The Planet by Johan Söderberg
  • The Power Principle: (Full Length Documentary)
  • The Secure & the Dispossessed: How the Military and Corporations are Shaping a Climate-Changed World
  • The Shock Doctrine 2009
  • The Sixth Extinction (Elizabeth Kolbert)
  • The Twin Sides of the Fossil Fuel Coin – Guy McPherson
  • There's No Tomorrow (peak oil, energy, growth & the future)
  • Threads (Nuclear War)
  • Tom Murphy: Growth has an Expiration Date
  • TOXIC: AMAZON – FULL LENGTH
  • Up & Coming Liquid Fuel Crisis by Tom Murphy
  • VICE Documentaries
  • What A Way To Go: Life at the end of Empire
  • Who's Afraid Of Machiavelli?

Notes and Documents

  • 'Conspiracy Theories' and Clandestine Politics
  • (2019) UN Report: Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’
  • 2019 UN Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services(One Million Species At Risk of Extinction)
  • American Empire and Killing Hope – The Essays of William Blum
  • An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security
  • An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for US National Security
  • An Anarchist FAQ Webpage
  • An Inconvenient Truth: Does Responsible Consumption Benefit Corporations More Than Society?
  • Animal Minds and the Foible of Human Exceptionalism
  • Averting Collapse: 6 Steps
  • “Are Humans Unsustainable by Nature?”
  • Book review of Turchin’s “Secular Cycles” and “War & Peace & War”
  • BRAVE NEW WORLD REVISITED
  • Burning Energy to Keep Cool: The Hidden Energy Crisis in Saudi Arabia
  • Capitalism cannot solve our ecological collapse: articles by Richard Smith
  • Capitalism's Ideological Crutches
  • Carmageddon and Karl Marx
  • Carmaggedon or Rational Discourse?
  • Charles Eisenstein Essays
  • Chatham House: Sustainable Energy Security
  • Christopher Clugston ~ Research Papers and Essays
  • Climate and collapse: Only through the insurrection of civil societies will we avoid the worst
  • Climate and Social Stress: Implications for Security Analysis (2012)
  • Climate Change is Simple – We Do Something or We're Screwed
  • Climate Change: Just the Facts.
  • Consistency in American Foreign Policy
  • Could the 'Black Death' Strike Again?
  • Dangerous Climate Warming: Myth & Reality
  • Dangerous Speech Project
  • Deforestation and world population sustainability: a quantitative analysis
  • Dennis Meadows: “There is nothing that we can do”
  • Desert
  • DieOff.org
  • Dinosaur, We
  • Dispelling myths about oil
  • Dr. Steven Best – Writings
  • Drill, Baby, Drill
  • Earth may be 140 years away from reaching carbon levels not seen in 56 million years
  • Ecoglobe: Requiem
  • Edward Morbius
  • Energy Return on Energy Invested (ERoEI) for photovoltaic solar systems in regions of moderate insolation
  • English version of German military peak oil study
  • Entropy and Economics
  • Eric R. Pianka: The Vanishing Book of Life on Earth
  • Fleeing Babylon
  • FOURTH NATIONAL CLIMATE ASSESSMENT Volume II: Impacts, Risks, and Adaptation in the United States
  • FRACKING GONE WRONG: FINDING A BETTER WAY
  • Getting to the Nearest Star? Not in Our Lifetimes…If Ever!
  • Gleanings for an Understanding of the Endgame
  • Global Drought Monitor
  • Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism
  • Global Warming & Climate Change Myths
  • Globalization and the Emergence of a Transnational Oligarchy
  • Green Capitalism: the God that Failed
  • Green Capitalism: The God That Failed (Updated)
  • GRIFFIN: The political writings of G.S. Griffin, activist and author
  • Hirsch Report
  • How a Culture Dies
  • How Many Gigatons of Carbon Dioxide?
  • How to Avoid Population Overshoot and Collapse
  • Human domination of the biosphere: Rapid discharge of the earth-space battery foretells the future of humankind
  • Humans will not 'migrate' to other planets, Nobel winner says: The 77-year-old said he felt the need to "kill all the statements that say 'OK, we will go to a liveable planet if one day life is not possible on earth'."
  • Imagining the Post-Antibiotics Future
  • Implication of our technological species being first and early
  • Intentional Ignorance
  • Interview with Jay Hanson
  • Is Global Collapse Imminent?
  • Jason W. Moore: Essays
  • Johnny Reb's Freethought Website
  • Julian Cribb
  • Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II – Part I by William Blum
  • Le Monde interview with Dr Robert Hirsch from September 2010
  • Life as a Manifestation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics
  • Living Dangerously: Stories of Climate Change
  • Living for the Moment while Devaluing the Future
  • Lloyd's adds its voice to dire 'peak oil' warnings
  • Looking Back on the 'Limits to Growth'
  • MARY BOOTH ON THE MYTH OF “GREEN” ENERGY FROM WOOD
  • Michael E. Mann
  • 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
  • Nature’s Laws No Longer Apply…
  • Net Energy and The Economy
  • New scientific study predicts that plastic pollution and toxic chemical-induced ocean acidification will cause a trophic cascade collapse of the entire marine ecosystem, destroying human society within the next 25 years.
  • NOAA & U.S. Geological Survey Interactive Sea Level Rise Map (up to 25 ft)
  • 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
  • Partnership for Civil Justice
  • Peak Energy, Climate Change, and the Collapse of Global Civilization
  • Peak Oil – A Turning Point for Mankind by Dr. Colin J. Campbell
  • Peter H. Gleick : Has the U.S. Passed the Point of Peak Water?
  • Plastic and toxic chemical-induced ocean acidification will cause a plankton crisis that will devastate humanity over the next 25 years, unless we stop the pollution.
  • Poles Threaten “Climate Chaos” from Continued Warming
  • Policy Makers Slow to Take Peak Oil Action
  • 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
  • Professor Charles Hall
  • Renewable energy – Hope or hype?
  • RENEWABLE ENERGY – THE ARGUMENT AGAINST ITS CAPACITY TO SUSTAIN AN ENERGY-INTENSIVE SOCIETY
  • Richard Reese on 'Near Term Extinction'
  • Saudi Arabia May Become Oil Importer by 2030
  • Searching for a Miracle: 'Net Energy' Limits & the Fate of Industrial Society
  • Secular Cycles, Chapter 1
  • Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter planet, by Mark Lynas
  • Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis
  • Stephanie McMillan's 'Capitalism Must Die'
  • TED talks – a recipe for civilisational disaster
  • The Anarchist Library
  • The Authoritarian Personality
  • The Bichler & Nitzan Archives
  • The climate threat: What our children can expect
  • 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, Seven Years Later
  • The Entropy Law and the Economic Process
  • The evolution and psychology of self-deception
  • The Final Empire THE COLLAPSE OF CIVILIZATION
  • The Final Empire: THE COLLAPSE OF CIVILIZATION
  • The Free Press
  • The Future of Ice Sheets and Sea Ice: Between Reversible Retreat and Unstoppable Loss
  • The Gore Vidal Pages
  • The Great Oil Swindle
  • 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 Last Great Global Warmıng
  • 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
  • The Principle of Imminent Collapse
  • The Science of Apocalypse
  • The Story of P(ee)
  • The Story of Phosphorus: 7 reasons why we need to transform phosphorus use in the global food system
  • The Temptation of The Technofix (The Quest for “New Nature”)
  • The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
  • 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
  • Twenty-First Century Collapse
  • Underminers: A Practical Guide to Radical Change
  • 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

RSS 3 Quarkes Daily

  • 3 Quarks Daily has moved! April 29, 2018
  • polixeni papapetrou (1960 - 2018) April 29, 2018

RSS A Closer Look

  • Cookies August 17, 2025
  • The structure of this blog November 4, 2024
  • Morning Has Broken, pet peeve February 1, 2023

RSS A Prosperous Way Down

  • A really inconvenient truth August 25, 2019
  • Energy ethics for survival of people in nature June 23, 2018

RSS Adam Curtis Blog

  • SAVE YOUR KISSES FOR ME November 30, 2012
  • WHILE THE BAND PLAYED ON November 14, 2012
  • HE'S BEHIND YOU October 21, 2012

RSS Adam Vs The Man

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS AdBusters

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Against the Grain

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Aljazeera

  • Blinken says US to share info on alleged spy balloon with allies February 8, 2023
  • Suspect in Texas anti-immigrant shooting changes plea to guilty February 8, 2023
  • Hope fades in Turkey, Syria with time running out on the buried February 8, 2023
  • Syrians denounce failed aid response after devastating quake February 8, 2023
  • Photos: Syrians in quake-hit Gaziantep displaced again February 8, 2023

RSS Aljazeera – Opinion

  • Google shares tank 8% as AI chatbot Bard flubs answer in ad February 8, 2023
  • Brazil launches raids to oust illegal miners from Indigenous land February 8, 2023
  • Grief-stricken Palestinians recount deadly Israeli raids February 8, 2023
  • US foreign policy reduced to an afterthought February 8, 2023
  • Earthquake survivors: ‘Worse than the bombardment in Syria’ February 8, 2023
  • Infrastructure to blame for high Syria earthquake death toll February 8, 2023
  • Devastation in Turkey’s Hatay as rescue workers slowly arrive February 8, 2023

RSS All Tied Up and Nowhere to Go

  • Another Christmas December 30, 2022
  • Objective Crisis, Subjective Crisis November 6, 2022
  • Jesse Jackson on poverty September 17, 2020
  • Quote of the day September 12, 2020
  • Voting and the ‘rule by law’ September 12, 2020
  • Wendy Brown on neoliberalism and democracy September 7, 2020

RSS Alternative Radio

  • [Jules Boykoff] Martin Luther King Jr & the FBI February 2, 2023

RSS AlterNet

  • 'This is insane': Experts hammer Kevin McCarthy for letting George Santos attend classified China briefing February 8, 2023
  • Watch: Marjorie Taylor Greene 'wrongly' declares her Twitter ban as illegal February 8, 2023
  • 'They can't do it': Dominion Voting Systems slams Fox News for failure to produce evidence of fraud February 8, 2023
  • TN GOP Governor Bill Lee suggests taxpayers have 'moral obligation' to pay for anti-abortion centers: report February 8, 2023

RSS Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Anarchist News

  • Anarchism is for the contemporary working classes February 7, 2023
  • Attack in Memory of the Base in Brooklyn February 7, 2023
  • From a cell in 41 bis, an anarchist is making a State tremble February 7, 2023
  • TOTW: Elder care February 6, 2023
  • ANews Podcast 300 – 2.3.23 February 6, 2023

RSS Antony Loewenstein

  • Why Israel sells spyware to repressive Bangladesh January 16, 2023
  • TRT World interview on new far-right Israeli government January 4, 2023
  • The merging of Israeli far-right power January 4, 2023

RSS Apocadocs

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Arctic Emergency Institute

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

RSS Arctic Methane Emergency Group (AMEG)

  • AMEG Strategic Plan December 8, 2012
  • Breaking the Chain November 27, 2012
  • AMEG Policy Brief September 23, 2012
  • The biggest story of all time September 1, 2012

RSS Arctic News

  • Dire situation gets even more dire February 4, 2023
  • The global climate change suicide pact January 29, 2023
  • A huge temperature rise threatens to unfold soon January 3, 2023

RSS Arctic Sea Ice

  • PIOMAS December 2019 December 17, 2019
  • PIOMAS November 2019 November 13, 2019
  • PIOMAS October 2019 October 14, 2019
  • PIOMAS September 2019 September 16, 2019
  • PIOMAS August 2019 August 7, 2019

RSS Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis

  • Arctic sea ice low, Antarctic lower February 6, 2023
  • December lows January 5, 2023
  • Lingering open water areas December 5, 2022

RSS Around the Coast Mountains

  • The name’s Mark… Mark BC March 18, 2014
  • Packrafting / Fatbiking Buntzen Lake March 3, 2014
  • My New Surly Pugsley Fatbike Build February 11, 2014

RSS Arthur Silber

  • Moving Interruptus, and Why Hospitals Suck July 1, 2019
  • Crisis May 16, 2019
  • How Many Damn Fucking Times Do I Have to Explain This? May 15, 2019
  • So Close, Yet So Far April 7, 2019

RSS Arundhati Roy

  • This is no ordinary spying. Our most intimate selves are now exposed | Arundhati Roy July 26, 2021
  • ‘We are witnessing a crime against humanity’: Arundhati Roy on India’s Covid catastrophe – podcast May 7, 2021

RSS Arundhati Roy Says

  • A perfect day for democracy February 9, 2013
  • Arundhati Roy speaks about the issue of rape in India December 22, 2012
  • We Call This Progress December 17, 2012

RSS ASPO – USA

  • On hiatus December 8, 2022
  • The Energy Bulletin Weekly – 23 October 2022 October 26, 2022
  • The Energy Bulletin Weekly – 17 October 2022 October 17, 2022
  • The Energy Bulletin Weekly – 10 October 2022 October 10, 2022
  • The Energy Bulletin Weekly – 3 October 2022 October 3, 2022
  • The Energy Bulletin Weekly – 26 September 2022 September 26, 2022
  • The Energy Bulletin Weekly – 19 September 2022 September 19, 2022
  • The Energy Bulletin Weekly – 12 September 2022 September 12, 2022
  • The Energy Bulletin Weekly – 5 September 2022 September 6, 2022
  • The Energy Bulletin Weekly – 29 August 2022 August 29, 2022

RSS Avedon’s Sideshow

  • You can not do that, it breaks all the rules January 28, 2023
  • Twelfthnight January 6, 2023
  • You just gotta call on me December 15, 2022

RSS Bad Astronomy

  • Republicans Are Angry at Joe Biden for Accurately Describing Plan to Sunset Social Security
  • So, Was the Chinese Balloon a Grave National Security Threat, or What?
  • God, the New Magic Mike Is Such a Tease

RSS Barbara Ehrenreich

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS BBC: Science & Environment

  • Quantum breakthrough could revolutionise computing February 8, 2023
  • HS2 Ltd miscalculating impact on nature - Wildlife Trusts February 8, 2023
  • Millions face threat of flooding from glacial lakes February 7, 2023

RSS Big Picture Agriculture

  • BIG PICTURE AGRICULTURE'S LATEST NEWS February 26, 2022
  • How to Stay Informed About Agriculture, Food, and Farming Issues October 15, 2019
  • Dr. Walter Falcon's 2019 Iowa Farm Report September 11, 2019
  • Agriculture Reading Picks October 31, 2018
  • The Merits of Amaranth October 30, 2018

RSS Bill Moyers

  • PODCAST: Dr. Bandy Lee Saw It Coming – The Violence Foretold in Donald Trump’s Election August 18, 2022
  • Trump-Russia-Ukraine Timeline April 12, 2022
  • Insurrection Timeline March 13, 2022

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

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Brane Space

  • Biden Delivers In SOTU - Making The Clear Case For Getting A Second Term February 8, 2023
  • Use Of Generalized Coordinates, Momenta and Force In Theoretical Mechanics February 7, 2023

RSS Brave New World

  • Islam: The Overlooked Aspect of Rumi’s Poetry March 9, 2021
  • Remembering Nur ad-Din Zengi: The Light of Faith March 6, 2021
  • Francophobia Among Muslims: Just Another Myth? February 25, 2021
  • A Year in Kazakhstan: Some General Observations October 25, 2020

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

  • PRESS RELEASE: UN Sec. General Guterres says Doomsday Clock is a sign for leaders to “get to work” February 6, 2023
  • UN Secretary-General: “the Doomsday Clock is a global alarm clock” February 6, 2023
  • There is no alternative: US-Russian nuclear arms control must restart. Now. February 6, 2023

RSS Business Insider

  • A secret Russian satellite has broken apart in orbit, creating a cloud of debris that could last a century February 8, 2023
  • China has a global spy balloon operation collecting intel on other countries' militaries, including 'strategic bases' in the US, officials say February 8, 2023
  • 'You' season 4 premieres February 9 — here's how to stream the hit psychological thriller starring Penn Badgley February 8, 2023
  • George Santos says it 'wasn't very Mormon' of Mitt Romney to tell him he doesn't 'belong' in Congress February 8, 2023
  • Nikki Haley and her husband, Michael, have been married for 26 years. Here's a timeline of their relationship. February 8, 2023
  • Iran unveils underground base meant to protect its aging US-made fighter jets February 8, 2023
  • A Michigan couple paid off their $200,000 mortgage in 4 years. They broke down how they did it to find financial freedom and build up their kids' college funds. February 8, 2023
  • I've driven 20 electric cars — here are the 7 most important things I've learned about charging, range, and why Tesla still dominates February 8, 2023
  • US stocks drop as Fed officials reinforce Powell's hawkish tone February 8, 2023
  • Cathie Wood's Ark Invest has loaded up on these 2 small-cap names for the last 7 trading sessions February 8, 2023

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

  • Are you really surprised by Joe Biden’s impressive State of the Union? February 8, 2023
  • Just how clean is your vehicle? February 8, 2023
  • Trump is a monumental problem for Republicans February 7, 2023
  • I’ve been blinged February 7, 2023
  • How to write a romance story February 7, 2023
  • A police interaction with a young, Black girl had a happy ending February 6, 2023

RSS Cassandra’s Legacy

  • Cassandra is Dead. Long Live Cassandra! April 15, 2021
  • Ugo Bardi's Latest Post on "The Seneca Effect": The Collapse of Saudi Arabia's Water Supply April 12, 2021
  • Ugo Bardi's Latest Post on "The Seneca Effect" April 5, 2021
  • Ugo Bardi's Latest post on "The Seneca Effect" April 1, 2021
  • Ugo Bardi's latest post on "The Seneca Effect" March 29, 2021

RSS Censored News

  • Federal Court Rules for Lithium Mining on Paiute Massacre Site at Thacker Pass February 8, 2023
  • The Napalm Burn Pit at Fallon February 7, 2023
  • University of California Berkeley leads U.S. in Native Grave Robbing February 6, 2023

RSS Center For Biological Diversity

  • Biden Administration’s Postponement of Oil, Gas Lease Sales to Be Defended by Conservation Groups February 8, 2023
  • New Joshua Tree Bill Spurs California Commission to Delay Decision on Protecting Iconic Plants February 8, 2023
  • Wildlife Agency Fails to Address Extinction in Changes to Endangered Species Regulations February 8, 2023

RSS Center for Investigative Journalism

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Center for Economic & Policy Research

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Charles Eisenstein’s Blog

  • Peace-building March 25, 2022
  • FASCHISMUS UND DAS ANTIFESTIVAL November 16, 2021

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

  • Racist Conspiracy Theories Take Over Congressional “Border Crisis” Hearings February 8, 2023

RSS Class Warfare Blog

  • I Am Amazed it Passed February 6, 2023
  • Ancient Aliens Show Jumps the Rails and the Shark Simultaneously! February 6, 2023

RSS Cliff Schecter

  • Hope fades in Turkey, Syria with time running out on the buried February 8, 2023
  • Syrians denounce failed aid response after devastating quake February 8, 2023
  • Photos: Syrians in quake-hit Gaziantep displaced again February 8, 2023
  • Is politics hampering the delivery of aid to Syria after quakes? February 8, 2023
  • US has questions to answer over Nord Stream blasts, Russia says February 8, 2023
  • Google shares tank 8% as AI chatbot Bard flubs answer in ad February 8, 2023

RSS Climate and Capitalism

  • World Bank is no friend of working people or the planet February 2, 2023
  • Even with emission cuts, 2º heating is likely by 2054 February 1, 2023
  • Top 1% grab twice as much new wealth as everyone else combined January 16, 2023
  • Ecosocialist Bookshelf, January 2023 January 15, 2023
  • 90% of world’s people to face combined extreme heat and drought January 9, 2023
  • Practical nuclear fusion is still just hype January 2, 2023

RSS Climate Central

  • The looming threat for Maine’s iconic potato industry
  • Ellis Island, lighthouses among historic NJ sites flooding as seas rise
  • Still rare in Iowa, electric car powers Des Moines family’s home during blackouts
  • Storied Maine ski resort bets future on reining in high costs of warmer winters

RSS Climate Change: The Next Generation

  • Historic Greenland ice sheet rainfall unraveled May 30, 2022
  • Flip Flop: Why Variations in Earth's Magnetic Field Aren't Causing Today's Climate Change February 22, 2022
  • Let's call climate change deniers what they really are: CLIMATE LIARS! May 9, 2021

RSS Climate Citizen

  • Guest Post: Labor’s scheme to cut industrial emissions is worryingly flexible January 10, 2023
  • Ozone action on track, helping avoid 0.5C of global warming by 2100 says UNEP January 10, 2023
  • Chubb Review into the integrity of Australian Carbon Offsets sends mixed messages January 9, 2023

RSS Climate Code Red

  • Will Steffen’s crucial climate ideas on “Hothouse Earth”, tipping cascades and non-linearity February 1, 2023
  • Over half of all fossil fuels are extracted by just seven countries, as world heads to 3°C of warming November 28, 2022
  • Brace for impact. International aviation Net Zero 2050 flightpath crashes in Melbourne. November 19, 2022

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

  • Tesla Model Y is Best Selling Car in California February 8, 2023
  • No Miracles Needed: Wind, Water, Sun Enough to Beat Climate Change February 8, 2023
  • Red America’s Green Windfall February 8, 2023

RSS Climate Progress

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

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

  • Let’s hear more from the women who leave academia (Part 2) March 23, 2021
  • Let’s hear more from the women who leave academia. March 11, 2021
  • Talking, typing, and the social model of disability July 22, 2020

RSS Club Orlov

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS ClusterFuck Nation

  • Where Do Things Stand? February 6, 2023
  • Lose-Lose February 3, 2023

RSS Cocktailhag – FDL

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

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

  • Green Groups Defend Biden Decision to Delay Oil and Gas Drilling Leases February 8, 2023
  • Sanders, Senate Dems Invite Schultz to Testify About Starbucks' Labor Law Violations February 8, 2023
  • 'Huge Win': Railway Unions Strike Deal on Sick Leave With Industry Giant CSX February 8, 2023
  • To End 'Genocide' of Indigenous People, Lula Launches Raids Against Illegal Miners in Amazon February 8, 2023
  • Critics Sound Alarm on GOP Plan to Enact Big Oil 'Wish List' February 8, 2023

RSS Consortium News

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Consumer Energy Report

  • Death of the Florescent Shop Light – Energy Efficiency September 21, 2022
  • Methanol VS Ethanol – Technical Merits and Political Favoritism September 21, 2022
  • Bill Nye the Science Guy – Social Primate and Nuclear Energy September 21, 2022
  • World’s Smallest Gasoline Engine – Technology Breakthrough September 21, 2022

RSS Corp Watch

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS CorrenteWire

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS CorrenteWire – Quick Hits

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Counter Currents

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS CounterPunch

  • Less Freedom, More Money: Tony Blair’s Vaccine Passport June 14, 2021
  • The U.S. Dares to Criticize Israel October 3, 2014
  • Gaza – Betrayed In Thought and Deed August 5, 2014
  • Boeing Workers Take a Stand & Take the Heat December 31, 2013
  • Bank Corruption Down Under December 31, 2013
  • Europe’s Deadly Transition From Social Democracy to Oligarchy December 9, 2011
  • What We Can Not See December 29, 2007
  • The Sham of Homeland Security December 29, 2007
  • Beauty from the Heart of Texas December 29, 2007
  • Encountering Benazir Bhutto December 29, 2007

RSS Crooked Timber

  • Phoenix crumbling into ashes February 7, 2023
  • Can college level the playing field? No, it really can’t. February 6, 2023
  • Monday photoblogging: cranes February 6, 2023
  • Digital hoarding January 31, 2023

RSS Crooks and Liars

  • Trump's Latest Attack On DeSantis Is Right Out Of The Q Playbook February 8, 2023
  • Biden Just Dropped The Receipts On Republicans And Social Security February 8, 2023
  • Jim Jordan Makes A Case Against Himself At Twitter Hearing February 8, 2023
  • Fox And Friends: Independents Hated GOP Heckling At SOTU February 8, 2023

RSS Cryptome

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Culture Change

  • Low Cost Polluting: The Real American Dream?
  • We Did It: Sailing Cargo in the Aegean
  • Cure for Depending on 90K Oil Spewing Cargo Ships: Sail Power Makes Inroads, Now in Mediterranean

RSS Dahr Jamail

  • For a Worse Tomorrow November 18, 2021
  • Covid-19’s Not Through With Us Yet September 21, 2021

RSS Daily Kos Comics

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Damn the Matrix

  • Delusion exposed…. February 6, 2023
  • More Simon Michaux February 1, 2023

RSS Dan Hagen

  • America's Dizzy Delirium of Desire February 4, 2023
  • Timeless Tennessee February 3, 2023

RSS Dangerous Intersection

  • About Trusting Wikipedia February 8, 2023
  • The Importance of Foundational Principles February 7, 2023
  • Action in the Absence of Evidence: The Case of Compelled Masking and COVID February 7, 2023

RSS Dark Ages America

  • The Sopranos, William Golding, and Contemporary America February 4, 2023
  • 7 million and going strong January 6, 2023
  • Karma City December 13, 2022
  • Muddy Waters November 12, 2022

RSS David Bollier

  • Binna Choi of the Casco Art Institute: Curating Art through Commoning February 1, 2023
  • John Thackara on Designing for Life January 1, 2023
  • Joe Brewer's Bold Quest to Help Restore a Bioregion December 1, 2022

RSS David Cay Johnston (Link – National Memo)

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS David Cay Johnston (Link – Tax Analysts)

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS David Harvey

  • Noam Chomsky and David Harvey discuss capitalism and war February 8, 2023
  • A Companion to Marx’s Grundrisse: A letter from the editor January 21, 2023
  • Register for Reading Marx’s Grundrisse with David Harvey December 27, 2022

RSS David Hilfiker

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS David McNally

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

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

  • Leading the way in preventing traffic accidents September 21, 2022
  • Truck safety rate system 3 years September 14, 2022
  • Traffic accident in the school zone August 31, 2022
  • cerebral hemorrhage in a traffic accident August 9, 2022
  • Uiseong-gun receives donations from children’s safety umbrella to prevent traffic accidents August 3, 2022

RSS Decline of the Empire

  • Defending Reality
  • Fascism And The Uniparty

RSS Deep Green Resistence News Service

  • Subsistence Communities: Destroyers or Protectors of Forests? February 6, 2023
  • How Many More Dead Whales? February 3, 2023
  • Preparing National Guards for Protests: Foresight or Suppression? January 30, 2023
  • Forever Chemicals in Every River in the US January 27, 2023

RSS Deepak Tripathi’s Diary

  • Afghanistan Awaits Uncertain Future After US Withdrawal July 7, 2021
  • UK’s Brexit Maze October 29, 2019

RSS Democratic Underground

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Democratic Underground – Breaking News

  • Disney to cut 7,000 jobs as it slashes costs and reorganizes February 8, 2023
  • China says it was smeared in Biden State of the Union speech February 8, 2023
  • Exclusive: Hyundai in talks with U.S. Labor Department over Alabama child labor February 8, 2023
  • Biden-Harris Administration Announces Move to Reduce Financial Burden on U.S. Territories February 8, 2023
  • Lockerbie bombing suspect pleads not guilty to charges connected to 1988 terrorist attack February 8, 2023
  • Kyrsten Sinema sits amidst Republicans as Biden shouts out some of her accomplishments February 8, 2023
  • Big Oil doubles profits in blockbuster 2022 February 8, 2023
  • Zelenskiy, in London, wins pledge to train pilots on NATO jets February 8, 2023
  • Dutch probe implicates Putin in 2014 downing of Malaysia passenger jet February 8, 2023
  • Biden Uses Republican Heckling To Publicly Strong-Arm Them Into Dropping Demands For Medicare, Soci February 8, 2023

RSS Democratic Underground – Good Reads

  • DeSantis makes a mess, and Florida lawmakers use special session to clean up after him February 8, 2023
  • Americans Usually Blame Republicans After Showdowns Over Government Spending February 8, 2023
  • One of the best State of the Union addresses of my lifetime! February 8, 2023
  • This Sarah Huckabee Sanders subtext should be very concerning -- for Republicans February 8, 2023
  • Memphis Police Chief Deliberately Covered Up Child Sex Crimes In Her Department February 8, 2023
  • Hillsborough sheriff's cadet arrested on theft charge, deputies say February 8, 2023
  • Memphis officer took and shared photos of bloodied Tyre Nichols, documents show February 8, 2023
  • Russia's budget deficit explodes as latest sanctions bite February 8, 2023
  • The Agoraphobic Fantasy of Tradlife February 8, 2023
  • GOP's Probe Into Hunter Biden Risks Political Blowback February 8, 2023

RSS Democracy Now

  • Have Movements Pushed Biden to the Left? Rep. Delia Ramirez & Economist Dean Baker Respond to SOTU February 8, 2023
  • Rep. Delia Ramirez to Biden: Further Militarizing the Border Is Not the Answer to Immigration February 8, 2023
  • Matt Duss on Biden's State of the Union & the Risks of an Anti-China Consensus in Washington February 8, 2023
  • Biden Condemns Police Murder of Tyre Nichols as Congressional Push for Police Reform Remains Stalled February 8, 2023
  • Headlines for February 8, 2023 February 8, 2023
  • COINTELPRO 2.0: How the FBI Infiltrated BLM Protests After Police Murder of George Floyd February 7, 2023
  • Over 5,000 Dead in Turkey and Syria as Earthquakes Devastate Region Filled with Refugees Fleeing War February 7, 2023
  • Headlines for February 7, 2023 February 7, 2023
  • Kimberlé Crenshaw on Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality & the Right-Wing War on Public Education February 6, 2023
  • War as Crime of Aggression: Reed Brody on Prosecuting Putin & Probing Western Leaders for Other Wars February 6, 2023

RSS Derrick Jensen

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Desdemona Despair

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Desertification

  • Reboisement sur glacis à Arbolle (Burkina Faso) : Bois de la Fraternisation (1988-1998) February 8, 2023
  • Premiers stades du Bois de l’Amitié (Niou, Burkina Faso) 1988 February 7, 2023
  • Climate change: Green Sahara partners USOSA, foundation to plant 10,000 trees in schools February 4, 2023
  • UNCCD joins forces with a top US-based academic partner to advance global drought resilience agenda  February 4, 2023
  • Saudi’s Ministry of Economy and Planning joins forces with UpLink to address food insecurity in arid climates (Part 2) January 25, 2023

RSS deSmog Blog

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Digbys Blog

  • Untitled January 12, 2020
  • They can save the world by @BloggersRUs January 12, 2020
  • Just drifting: R.I.P. Buck Henry By Dennis Hartley January 12, 2020
  • It looks like he wants to take Iraq's oil money January 12, 2020
  • Untitled January 11, 2020
  • Let's not forget who worked with Suleimani's IRGC January 11, 2020

RSS Disinfo – Ecology

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Dispatches from the Underclass

  • Exclusive Interview w/ Hezbollah’s Second-In-Command Sheikh Naim Qassem January 15, 2023
  • UN Official Calls for Lifting ‘Illegal’ Syria Sanctions After Seeing Devastation First-Hand November 21, 2022
  • Europe Self-Destructing for U.S. Proxy War In Ukraine, w/ Prabhat Patnaik November 21, 2022
  • US Brings World to Brink of Nuclear Armageddon As Europe Self Destructs, w/ Ali Abunimah November 21, 2022
  • Reality vs Propaganda: Understanding Iran’s Protests, w/ Navid Zarrinnal October 16, 2022

RSS Dissent Magazine

  • Trapped by Empire February 8, 2023
  • The Agoraphobic Fantasy of Tradlife February 6, 2023
  • How to Revive the Labor Movement February 3, 2023
  • “A Fundamental Violation of Basic Human Rights” February 1, 2023

RSS Dissident Voice

  • Intellectuals and the Imperialist Affairs February 8, 2023
  • Is It a Monkey Wrench or C4, or Some Form of War? February 8, 2023
  • Generations February 8, 2023
  • Ballooning Paranoia: The China Threat Hits the Skies February 8, 2023
  • V-Day is not Just a Valentine for your Sweetheart! February 8, 2023
  • Devil is in the Details of “Holocaust Education” February 8, 2023
  • Melbourne University Backs Racist and Anti-Semitic IHRA February 7, 2023
  • Justin Confronted in Red Light District February 7, 2023

RSS Do the Math

  • Keeping Up On Appearances January 6, 2023

RSS Dollars & Sense Blog

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Doug Stanhope

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Douglas Rushkoff

  • Escape plans of the rich and famous November 30, 2022
  • Cyber: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires November 30, 2022
  • Survival of the Richest November 30, 2022

RSS Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

  • The Real State of the Nation February 8, 2023
  • The Ever Widening War February 8, 2023

RSS Dredd Blog

  • Most Popular Dredd Blog Posts February 2, 2023
  • The Citizen Journalist In America - 5 January 31, 2023
  • The Citizen Journalist In America - 4 January 22, 2023
  • In Search Of Ocean Heat - 13 January 21, 2023

RSS Ear to the Ground – Truth Dig

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Early Warning

  • New York Not Close to Exiting Lockdown April 17, 2020
  • Is New York Containing Covid? April 8, 2020
  • New York vs Italy March 23, 2020

RSS Earth First

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

RSS Earth Observatory: Image of the Day, Natural Hazards, and News

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Earth Observatory: Image of the Day

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Earth Observatory: Natural Hazards

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Earth Policy Institute Blog

  • Data Highlight - Wind Power Beats Nuclear Again in China
  • Data Highlight - Plastic Bag Bans or Fees Cover 49 Million Americans
  • Plan B Update - Fossil Fuel Development in the Arctic is a Bad Investment

RSS Ecocide Alert

  • How to Win at Slots February 7, 2023

RSS Ecohuman World

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Eco-Shock News

  • Radio Ecoshock: True Climate Revealed: The Late Will Steffen February 8, 2023

RSS Ecological Headstand

  • Dilke, Chapman, and Dahlberg Pop-ups May 15, 2021
  • For the Abolition of the Wages System! June 18, 2015
  • The Incredible Shrinking Blog June 9, 2015
  • Keynes "hadn't got round to it" May 25, 2015

RSS Ecological Sociology

  • Commons Enabling Infrastucture August 31, 2013
  • A Short History of Progress: Book Review August 26, 2013
  • Foucault, Power, Truth and Ecology August 14, 2013

RSS Ecologise

  • Joshimath Crisis is a Warning from the Himalayas February 6, 2023
  • Paul Kingsnorth: The Great Unsettling February 3, 2023
  • Charles Eisenstein: The Coronation May 16, 2020
  • Visakhapatnam gas leak accident: A preliminary modelling study May 15, 2020
  • The electric car must fail March 30, 2020
  • Economy and ecology are now in conflict; it’s time to integrate them with wisdom March 27, 2020
  • War, mismanagement and climate change: Iraq’s environment on the brink March 20, 2020
  • Big Farms make Big Flu: The deadly connection between industrial farming and pandemics March 17, 2020
  • The Songs of Trees: Stories From Nature’s Great Connectors March 13, 2020
  • Charles Hugh Smith: Could Covid-19 overwhelm us in the months ahead? March 10, 2020

RSS Economic Hardship Reporting Project

  • How This Subway Dancer Carries On The “Litefeet” Legacy In NYC February 7, 2023
  • EHRP and CUNY Journalism Join Forces to Create Fellowship January 31, 2023
  • EHRP and Fast Company Nominated for Ambies January 30, 2023
  • The Myth of the Socially Conscious Corporation January 27, 2023
  • Salt Lake and Other Utah Cities Used Most of a $10 Million Homeless Services Fund to Hire Cops January 25, 2023
  • No Vacancy January 18, 2023

RSS Economic Undertow

  • Z Marks the Spot September 1, 2022
  • The Death of Economics June 9, 2021
  • Cars and More Cars … March 22, 2021

RSS EcoWorldView

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Empire Burlesque

  • Generation of Vipers: The Original Sin and Continuous Crimes of America’s Involvement in Afghanistan August 17, 2021
  • Reich and Reality: Culture Wars of the Conquerors August 10, 2021

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

  • Jeff Gerth’s Undisclosed Dissemination of Russian Intelligence Product
  • The Blind Spots of CJR’s “Russiagate” [sic] Narrative
  • CJR’s Error at Word 18

RSS End of More

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Energy Balance

  • “The Oil Machine” and the Changing Climate. November 22, 2022
  • Architects of Our Future: Energy and the Changing Climate. October 23, 2022
  • The Energy War, and Climate Breakdown. August 17, 2022
  • “Reading Hydro” – Microhydropower on the River Thames at Caversham Weir (Reading, UK). May 17, 2022
  • “Four Meals From Anarchy” – We Must Grow More Food Locally. April 23, 2022
  • Russia-Ukraine War and the Changing Energy Landscape. March 16, 2022

RSS Environment & Food Justice

  • National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Statement on the Climate Crisis October 31, 2019
  • 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

RSS Envisionation Blog

  • 2023 – The Dawning Era Of ‘Overshoot’ & ‘Intervention’ (Climate Engineering) December 30, 2022
  • Byronic Nomads – Francesco da Mosto discusses the fate of Venice December 28, 2022
  • But what is ‘Overshoot?’ – Rafe Pomerance December 5, 2022
  • Rabbi Yonatan Neril – Religion as a global force November 28, 2022

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

  • Untitled
  • Untitled

RSS ExtraGeographic

  • An Unsuitable Job for a Woman film review
    On its release in 1982 An Unsuitable Job for a Woman was criticised for being under-powered and perfunctory. But 40 years on, what were seen as weaknesses are now strengths.
  • Covid-19 antibody test photo
    A lateral flow antibody test which involves pricking the tip of your finger to get a blood spot for testing.
  • Smartphone cartoon
    Cartoon about mobile phones.
  • The Shard / London Bridge photo gallery
    A photo gallery of The Shard / London Bridge.
  • David Bowie
    Thank you, David.

RSS Facts for Working People

  • Michael Roberts: Keynes and the left February 6, 2023
  • Ukraine: Western Escalation Creates a Zero Sum Game. Mearsheimer February 3, 2023
  • Central banks: boom or slump? February 2, 2023

RSS Fair: Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting

  • As Unions Gain 273,000 Members, Media Opt for Gloomy Headlines January 26, 2023
  • Renomination of Gigi Sohn Gives Public Another Chance to Be Heard January 23, 2023
  • WaPo Feeds Denial With False Claims About Overcounting Covid Deaths January 20, 2023

RSS Fairewinds

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Fairfax Climate Watch

  • How Does Climate Change Affect Your Health? July 18, 2022
  • Health Screening Tests Every Woman Should Have July 12, 2022
  • The Day 2 Antigen Test When Travelling From The UK  November 19, 2021

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

  • Podcast: Wellbeing frameworks – challenges and progress January 31, 2023
  • Bridging the Gaps 2023: podcasts on ecology, health, well-being…. January 31, 2023
  • Update from the Wellbeing Economy Ireland Hub January 27, 2023

RSS FireDogLake

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Fish Out of Water

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Foreign Confidential

  • Film History: the French New Wave July 2, 2021
  • Nine Beautiful Places to Visit in Slovenia July 2, 2021
  • Top 10 European Islands to Visit July 2, 2021
  • Little Europe: the Amazing Microstates July 2, 2021

RSS FracTracker

  • 2022 Pipeline Incidents Update: Is Pipeline Safety Achievable? February 1, 2023
  • Testimony On EPA’s Proposed Methane Pollution Standards for the Oil and Gas Industry January 31, 2023
  • Assessment of Rework Permits on Oil Production from Operational Wells Within the 3,200-Foot Public Health Protection Zone January 24, 2023

RSS George Monbiot (Alternet)

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS George Monbiot (Official Home Page)

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Get Real List: Chris Nelder

  • Moving on… July 9, 2021
  • My new gig December 5, 2015
  • Announcing the Energy Transition Show October 14, 2015

RSS Gil Smart

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

RSS Glen Ford – Black Agenda Report

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Global Guerrillas

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

RSS Global Occupy News

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Global Oneness Project

  • Farewell RSS Feeds May 18, 2022

RSS Global Research

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Global Research CA

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Gonzalo Lira

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

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

  • A Million-Strong ‘Army Of Environmental Super Voters’ Seeks New Recruits In 2 Red States February 8, 2023
  • He Paid $1 Million For Destroying Wetlands. Now He’s Fighting Clean Water Rules In Congress. February 8, 2023
  • Biden's State Of The Union Speech Shows This Isn't Your Father's Democratic Party February 8, 2023
  • Inside The Race To Tap A Controversial Source Of Carbon-Free Energy: Nuclear Waste February 6, 2023
  • Northeast Temps Soar A Day After Bone-Numbing Cold February 5, 2023
  • Experts Fear Bird Flu Outbreak Could Turn Into New Pandemic February 5, 2023
  • 'Frostquakes' Reported In Maine As Arctic Blast Deep Freezes New England February 4, 2023
  • Arctic Air Brings Brutal Cold To Northeast February 4, 2023

RSS Greenpeace Blogs

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Greg Palast

  • Know Your Rights: Voting Rights, and Voting Wrongs February 6, 2023
  • The Words That Could Convict Trump January 25, 2023

RSS Gregor Macdonald

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Grinning Planet

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Grist

  • How Big Tech rewrote the nation’s first cell phone repair law February 8, 2023
  • Biden spotlights climate victories in State of the Union. But where do we go from here? February 8, 2023
  • To protect marine areas, Canada must include First Nations February 8, 2023
  • A major dairy company plans to slash methane emissions — but there’s an elephant in the room February 7, 2023

RSS Growth Busters

  • Now HERE’S What We Call an Eco-Superhero January 15, 2023
  • A Vasectomy Could Save Herschel Walker a Lot of Money December 28, 2022
  • Bleak Friday, 8 Billion Post-Mortem and Damage Done by Guilt December 1, 2022
  • 8 Billion is Too Many: Don’t be a Twit About Overpopulation November 9, 2022

RSS Guernica Mag

  • He Who Fishes February 6, 2023
  • Cheryl Wing-Zi Wong: Light and Shadows January 30, 2023
  • The Shape of Vodou in Diaspora January 23, 2023
  • I Am the Ghost Here January 16, 2023

RSS Guy McPherson’s Blog

  • Explained: Radicalism, via McPherson quoting Nearing and Mencken February 6, 2023
  • Edge of Extinction: Living Alone in a World of Wounds February 2, 2023

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

  • The Next Right Thing February 6, 2023
  • Better Than Real February 5, 2023
  • Exemplifying and Modelling ‘Teal’ February 3, 2023

RSS I am Not a Number

  • THE ART OF THE POSSIBLE? May 19, 2022
  • Alt-Right conspiracy theories are obviously true… except they are not. January 24, 2022
  • The civil war in the LP was NEVER about antisemitism. November 20, 2020

RSS I Cite

  • "Feudalism Lives on in the Delta" -- Ray Sprigle August 17, 2020
  • Critical Theory and Climate Change 2 April 2, 2020
  • Critical Theory and Climate Change 1 March 23, 2020
  • Untitled July 18, 2019
  • America's obsession with rooting out communism is making a comeback September 25, 2018

RSS Iamronen

  • Religiousness in Yoga Part 17: Nirodha October 4, 2022
  • Religiousness in Yoga Part 16: Jñāna, Bhakti, Mantra, Rāja, Kriyā, Karma, Laya, Tantra, Haṭha, Kuṇḍalinī October 1, 2022
  • Religiousness in Yoga Part 15: Antarāya, Iśvara-praṇidhāna September 24, 2022
  • Religiousness in Yoga Part 14: Bandha September 20, 2022
  • Religiousness in Yoga Part 13: Antaraṅga Sādhana, Saṃyama, Kaivalya September 16, 2022

RSS Ian Welsh

  • Lean Into The Good February 7, 2023

RSS Idea Explorer

  • Lay of The Landscape January 31, 2023
  • Upgrades October 8, 2022
  • Learning As We Go October 29, 2021
  • Values and Responsibilities March 11, 2021
  • Habitat Loss November 9, 2020

RSS Idea Explorer – Big Pic Explorer

  • Consumption Drop November 25, 2020
  • Habitat Loss November 9, 2020
  • General Update February 24, 2020

RSS Idea Explorer: Land of Conscience

  • Doubt December 4, 2022
  • Remembrance September 22, 2021
  • Seeking Miracles July 15, 2021

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

  • Renewed Sense of Urgency Driving Reproductive Rights Actions
  • Time to Close Guantanamo Prison
  • Unholy Days and Nights in Bethlehem
  • ALF Action Leads to Closure of Largest US Mink Farm

RSS Indybay Newswire

  • Stop Sanctions On Syria IMMEDIATELY
  • EMERGENCY! SYRIA NEEDS FUEL TO RUN MACHINES TO EXTRACT PEOPLE FROM EARTHQUAKE RUBBLE!
  • Uncle Sam went ballistic over a balloon?
  • RAND Corporation: No one can win this war
  • DeSantis' First Law Enforcement Appointee Perjury and Failure to Disclose homicide arrest

RSS Information Clearing House

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Inside Left – The OFFICIAL Anti-Olympics Blog™

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Institute for Public Accuracy

  • “Not in the public interest”: HHS Ends Covid Hospitalization Dashboard February 8, 2023
  • Biden Claims Not to Seek Conflict with China: So Why All the Military Bases? February 8, 2023
  • Chas Freeman: U.S.’s China Policy Harming Both U.S. and Chinese People February 7, 2023
  • “The Coming War with China” February 6, 2023
  • New York Governor Hochul Proposes Budget Without Significant Reforms for Home Care Workers February 3, 2023
  • Activists Confront DNC about Biden, Manipulation of Primaries February 2, 2023

RSS International Debt Observatory

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS io9

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS iWatch: Global Muckraking

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

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

  • Gandhi’s Assassin Helped Build the Forces Ruling India Today February 8, 2023
  • At a New Jersey Factory, Workers Are Up Against a Pension-Backed Private Equity Giant February 8, 2023
  • The Judiciary Has Never Been Impartial — Something the GOP Has Long Known February 8, 2023
  • Joe Biden Still Has No Plan to Turn His Rhetoric Into Reality February 8, 2023
  • The Grinding War in Ukraine Could Have Ended a Long Time Ago February 8, 2023
  • If You Care About Human Freedom, You Should Reject the Capitalist Work Ethic February 8, 2023

RSS Jeremy Scahill

  • But What About Hamas’s Rockets? May 14, 2021

RSS Jill Stein

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Joe Bageant

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS John Cook Video Uploads

  • The Science of Cranky Uncle Part 3: Fighting Misinformation with Critical Thinking December 29, 2021
  • The Science of Cranky Uncle Part 2: Inoculation Theory December 21, 2021
  • The Science of Cranky Uncle Part 1: Why We Can't Ignore Misinformation December 14, 2021
  • Climate misinformation: Will Happer on CO2 being plant food January 24, 2021

RSS John Hively

  • The War Over Global Warming is Class Warfare on Many Fronts July 24, 2021
  • How the Billionaires Corporate News Media Have Been Used to Brainwash Us May 1, 2021

RSS John Pilger

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS John Perkins

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS John W. Whitehead

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS John Zerzan: Anarchy Radio

  • Anarchy Radio 02 07 2023 February 8, 2023
  • Counterflow (2021) Alone Together : The City and its Inmates February 3, 2023
  • Anarchy Radio 01 31 2023 February 1, 2023

RSS Jonathan Turley

  • Biden Repeats Dubious Call and Claim on Assault Weapons in State of the Union February 8, 2023
  • Federal Judge Suggests Abortion May Be Protected Under 13th Amendment’s Ban on Involuntary Servitude February 7, 2023
  • Texas Criminally Charges Bartender With “Overserving” Customer Involved in Deadly Crash February 7, 2023
  • Victim’s Family in the University of Idaho Murders Appeals Gag Order February 7, 2023

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

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Kate Ausburn

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

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 Tracker Now Lives Here … November 1, 2015
  • A farewell post: Three reasons why good science writing is worth defending. January 6, 2015
  • Globe story on non-invasive prenatal testing offers murky argument. December 31, 2014
  • (UPDATED/2*) What Ho? A 2014 List of Lists of best, worst, or otherwisest in 2014 December 30, 2014
  • Cancer & poverty: When a reporter’s journey becomes part of the story. December 23, 2014

RSS Kulture Critic

  • In the Folds of the Flesh: Philosophic Reflections on Touch November 6, 2021

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

  • Who knew? There are limits to growth in the American West February 5, 2023

RSS Lack of Environment

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Law and Disorder

  • Law and Disorder February 6, 2023 February 6, 2023
  • Law and Disorder January 30, 2023 January 30, 2023
  • Law and Disorder January 23, 2023 January 23, 2023

RSS Le Monde diplomatique – English edition

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Le Monde diplomatique – Open Page

  • Walking tall again February 7, 2023
  • Chinese thinkers debate their country's future February 6, 2023
  • UAE's high-tech toolkit for mass surveillance and repression February 6, 2023
  • Afghanistan: enabling the Taliban February 2, 2023
  • The Cuban missile crisis cover-up January 31, 2023

RSS Leaving Babylon

  • Even Iran is laughing at us November 9, 2020

RSS Lee Camp

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Lee Fang

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Leonardo Boff

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Les Leopold

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Life Itself

  • Confessions of a Petroleum Engineer and Ecologist January 29, 2023
  • On Snowflakes, Blogs and Loneliness January 13, 2023
  • Why the Year 2022 Stood Out? January 6, 2023

RSS Limited, Inc.

  • Blues for the "we" February 8, 2023
  • Roots of the paranoid republic February 7, 2023
  • Looking back at the midlife crisis February 5, 2023

RSS Link TV – Earth Focus

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Low-Tech Magazine

  • What if We Replace Guns and Bullets with Bows and Arrows? November 23, 2022
  • When Lethal Weapons Grew on Trees November 23, 2022
  • How to Build a Practical Household Bike Generator March 7, 2022

RSS LRB Blog

  • In Gaziantep February 8, 2023
  • Free Ihsane El Kadi February 6, 2023
  • Remembering Tom Verlaine February 3, 2023
  • The Banshees and the Quiet Girl February 2, 2023
  • ‘The Truth over the Dnieper’ February 1, 2023

RSS Luis J. Rodriguez

  • Updates from Luis J. Rodriguez (Mixcoatl Itztlacuiloh) August 2, 2022
  • Help Luis J. Rodriguez become California governor January 5, 2022
  • Stand Firm on Election Day November 3, 2020

RSS Mabinogogiblog

  • If you oppose climate change, join the 50/60 campaign January 3, 2023
  • Democracy, Dictatorship and Journalism January 2, 2023
  • After Putin's war, the UN should introduce an Index of Democracy and Human Rights January 1, 2023
  • Current climate change denial memes December 29, 2022

RSS Manicore – Accueil

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Marginal Revolution

  • Russia fact of the day February 8, 2023
  • Wednesday assorted links February 8, 2023
  • *The Time Travelling Economist* February 8, 2023

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

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Mark Lynas

  • COP27 outcome begins to address ‘loss and damage’, but the 1.5 Paris goal is looking highly unlikely November 20, 2022
  • Misinformation in the media: global coverage of GMOs 2019-2021 November 17, 2022
  • Why I’m no longer lonely as a pro-science environmentalist October 3, 2022
  • 5 ways to face down Putin’s food blackmail tactics July 13, 2022
  • UKRAINE ENERGY SOLIDARITY PLAN: How we can stop funding Putin’s war machine May 13, 2022

RSS Martin Wolf

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Matt Bruenig

  • Solar Panels Reduced My Electric Bill by $2,677 in 2022 January 1, 2023
  • The Contradictions of Deliberative Democracy December 30, 2022
  • Babies on Planes December 29, 2022

RSS Matt Taibbi

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Matt Wuerker

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Max Keiser

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Media Lens

  • Tree-Climbing GOATS – Who Is The Greatest Writer Of All Time? February 1, 2023
  • ‘End Stage Capitalism’: Collapsing Britain And The Climate Crisis January 26, 2023
  • Harry The ‘Traitor’ And Lynch ‘The Grinch’ – The Corporate Media’s Automatic Smear Machine January 19, 2023

RSS Media Matters – Environment

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Media Matters – Everything

  • Fox guest on possible troop withdrawal from Afghanistan: "The solution is more blood, sweat, and tears" 
  • Fox host defends Trump: "Just because you use harsh language doesn't mean your intent is to denigrate another race"
  • Fox News is talking more about abortion than the Democratic debates did

RSS Media Roots

  • Media Roots Radio: New Wave of Anti-LGBTQ Legislation, Manhattan Institute, CIA & Spooky Rufo’s Disney Leaks 2 of 2 August 6, 2022
  • Media Roots Radio: Coming Down from the Shock of Overturning Roe & J Peterson Unravels August 5, 2022
  • Empire Files: Abby Martin at RIMPAC War Games: The Inside Story [PREVIEW] July 22, 2022

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

  • The Hypocrisy Just Makes Me Cry February 7, 2023
  • Inflation’s Drivers on The Geopolitical Hour January 29, 2023
  • Introducing the Geopolitical Economy Hour January 18, 2023

RSS Michael Miller – Viewpoint

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Michael Parenti

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Mike Philbin – Free Planet

  • STAR CITIZEN - HALF A BILLION DOLLARS - TEN YEARS AND COUNTING September 1, 2021
  • ELECTRO-BULLET: reinterpreting a classic... August 28, 2021
  • LAST OF THE CATHEDRA available in trade paperback from Amazon. October 24, 2020

RSS Mondoweiss

  • Together imagining, greater than the sum of our parts February 8, 2023
  • NJ Palestine solidarity organizations oppose resolution to adopt IHRA antisemitism definition February 8, 2023

RSS Mons Angelorum: Deadly Serious 3

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Mons Angelorum: Waiting for Good Weather

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Mother Jones

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

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

  • Iraq’s Position On Corruption Index Unchanged February 8, 2023
  • This Day In Iraqi History - Feb 8 Baathist-military coup overthrew Gen Qasim February 8, 2023
  • Violence Drops In Iraq In January 2023 February 7, 2023

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

  • Seymour Hersh: Navy Divers + Spooks + Norway Took Out Nordstream 2 on Biden’s Orders, Using Timer February 8, 2023
  • 2:00PM Water Cooler 2/8/2023 February 8, 2023
  • Links 2/8/2023 February 8, 2023
  • Carbon Capture Project Is ‘Band-Aid’ to Greenwash $10 Billion LNG Plant, Locals Say February 8, 2023
  • Evidence-Based Medicine for the Modern Age of Artificial Intelligence February 8, 2023

RSS Naomi Klein

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Naomi Klein – Guardian.UK

  • Greenwashing a police state: the truth behind Egypt’s Cop27 masquerade – podcast November 4, 2022
  • Greenwashing a police state: the truth behind Egypt’s Cop27 masquerade | Naomi Klein October 18, 2022

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

  • Food for health: the right to health is to live healthy lives June 3, 2020
  • Making peace with the Earth. 600 organisations urge a sustainable new start April 24, 2020
  • The Seed War March 20, 2020

RSS New Internationalist

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS New Left Project

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS New World Notes

  • Observations on Work June 20, 2021
  • The GOP and the Dems: Hypocrisy and Betrayal June 13, 2021
  • Can Technology Save Us? June 8, 2021

RSS News Junkie Post

  • Qu’est donc la memoire? July 31, 2022
  • The Stench of Extinction July 20, 2022
  • Forget Wars on Covid and Terror: War on Climate Collapse Is the Only War of Necessity for Human Survival August 22, 2021
  • Covid Fear Management Policies: Distractions from and Tests for Looming Climate Collapse August 4, 2021
  • France Neoliberal Macron: Vanguard of a Covid Global Corporate Dictatorship? July 24, 2021
  • Magic Woman of Haiti’s Mountains July 18, 2021

RSS NOAA: Monthly State of the Climate Report

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Notes from the Aboveground

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

RSS NYT Examiner

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Occupy.com

  • 'More Training' Is Not the Answer to Police Terror February 3, 2023
  • The National Debt Doesn't Matter, and It Can Go Unpaid Forever January 27, 2023
  • The GOP Speaker Battle May Have Been a Dry Run for the Next January 6th January 16, 2023
  • Who's to Blame for the New GOP House Majority, Part III: The Supreme Court December 9, 2022
  • Who's to Blame for the New GOP House Majority, Part II: Racial Gerrymandering November 23, 2022
  • Who's to Blame for the New GOP House Majority, Part I: Andrew Cuomo November 19, 2022
  • Occupy the Cinema: The First Attack Ads: Hollywood vs. Upton Sinclair November 11, 2022
  • The Threat of Republican Fascism, Part V: Preparing for a Wave of Mass Political Violence November 4, 2022

RSS Occupy las Vegas

  • Discover Your New Favorite Crypto-Friendly Casino: Dexterbet February 4, 2023
  • Cardano Blockchain Bridges Digital Divide with World Mobile-IOG Partnership January 27, 2023
  • Bitget Launches Zero-Fee EUR & GBP Deposits, Enhancing Crypto Mass Adoption January 20, 2023

RSS Occupy Wall Street

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Oddity Central

  • Dog Abandoned in Nevada Desert as a Pup Gets Adopted by Coyote Pack February 8, 2023
  • The Cracked Glass Portraits of Natnael Mekuria February 8, 2023
  • Zoo Director Allegedly Cooks Four of Its Ten Pigmy Goats for New Year’s Feast February 8, 2023
  • Finally, the WD40-Scented Perfume You’ve Been Dreaming Of Has Arrived February 7, 2023
  • Venezuelan Man Becomes First Person To Be Tattooed by a Monkey February 6, 2023
  • Busy Woodpecker Stores 700 Lbs of Acorns in California House Walls February 6, 2023

RSS Of Two Minds

  • Prepare to Be Bled Dry by a Decade of Stagflation February 6, 2023
  • Seven Points on Investing in Treacherous Waters February 3, 2023
  • What Goes Up Also Comes Down: The Heavy Hand of Bubble Symmetry January 31, 2023

RSS One Penny Sheet

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS One Struggle – South Florida

  • Organize – Or Else! November 4, 2022
  • They Snatch Our Rights – We Bite Back! June 26, 2022
  • DeSantis and the Florida Fasc June 6, 2022
  • We Scream for Change and They Respond by Supporting the Status Quo March 29, 2022

RSS Orion Magazine

  • Jessica Lee Answers the Orion Questionnaire January 24, 2023
  • Merloyd Ludington Lawrence: A Tribute July 22, 2022
  • Five Questions for Megan Mayhew Bergman, author of How Strange a Season March 29, 2022

RSS Our Finite World

  • Ramping up wind turbines, solar panels and electric vehicles can’t solve our energy problem February 3, 2023
  • 2023: Expect a financial crash followed by major energy-related changes January 9, 2023
  • The economy is moving from a tailwind pushing it along to a headwind holding it back December 16, 2022

RSS Pando Daily

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Paul Haeder

  • Is It a Monkey Wrench or C4, or Some Form of War? February 8, 2023
  • V-Day is not Just a Valentine for your Sweetheart! February 8, 2023
  • Shifting Baseline Disorders: Only the One Percent is Bad February 4, 2023

RSS Paul Kingsnorth – Elswhere

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Paul L. Street

  • Beware False Claims of Victory Over Fascism: A Response to Indivisible’s Ezra Levin February 7, 2023
  • The Long Bourgeois Doctrinal Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. February 7, 2023
  • Latin Americans Can Call Fascist Coup Attempts Fascist but US-Americans Can’t February 7, 2023
  • Refuse Fascism Podcast January 8, 2023 February 3, 2023

RSS PBD – Progressive Blog Digest

  • 46 January 21, 2021
  • HIS LEGACY January 20, 2021
  • THE END GAME January 19, 2021

RSS PeakOil.com News

  • Saudi Arabia Just Killed The Petrodollar Right In Front Of Our Eyes January 29, 2023
  • Are You Really Against Fossil Fuels? Read This Before You Answer January 29, 2023
  • Visualizing U.S. Consumption of Fuel and Materials per Capita January 28, 2023

RSS Peak Prosperity Blog

  • Exposing The UK Medical Death Cult February 8, 2023
  • The Surprising Truth About Vitamin D and Why the NIH is Ignoring It February 7, 2023
  • The War For Your Mind: How to Stay Informed Without Going Insane February 7, 2023

RSS Peak Prosperity: Daily Digest

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Peak Prosperity: Featured Voices

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS People Before Profit Blog

  • "Blacklisted Again" Michael Berkowitz on "Trumbo" by Norman Markowitz December 10, 2015
  • A Corrected and Updated Version of The "Madness" of Donald Trump by Norman Markowitz December 9, 2015
  • The "Madness" of Donald Trump by Norman Markowitz December 8, 2015

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

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Physicist-Retired Newsvine

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Pink Tank

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS PlanetSave – Climate

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Political Violence @ a Glance

  • That’s Not Really A Thing Anymore: Why Calls for Secession Come and Go February 7, 2023
  • Can Democracy Assistance Be Effective in the Age of Authoritarianism? February 6, 2023
  • Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration in Ethiopia: What to Expect January 31, 2023

RSS Popular Resistance

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS PRN with Danny Schechter

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Progressive Radio Network

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS ProPublica

  • Here’s What States Are Doing to Abortion Rights in 2023 February 8, 2023
  • Federal Agency Rejects Developer’s Report That Massive Grain Elevator Won’t Harm Black Heritage Sites February 8, 2023
  • From Penis Cookies to Spying: A Growing List of Allegations at Anchorage City Hall February 7, 2023
  • It Was Good to Be Friends With the Mayor. Then the Investigations Began. February 7, 2023
  • New Legislation Takes Aim at Hidden Foster Care February 7, 2023

RSS Project Censored

  • STFU about ChatGPT: February 4, 2023
  • Germany’s Dirty Push for More Coal Mining and the Recent Murder of Forest Defender Manuel “Tortuguita” Teran February 1, 2023
  • Silicon Valley’s Censorship by Proxy, State Propaganda, and the Military-Entertainment Complex January 31, 2023

RSS Public Intelligence

  • NCTC Guide: The Structure of Violent Extremist Ideologies
  • (U//FOUO) NCTC Guide: Process of Violent Extremist Disengagement
  • China EMP Threat: The People’s Republic of China Military Doctrine, Plans, and Capabilities for Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack
  • DHS-FBI-NCTC Bulletin: Wide-Ranging Domestic Violent Extremist Threat to Persist
  • (U//FOUO) DHS Bulletin: Online Foreign Influence Snapshot August 2022
  • National Intelligence Council Map: Russian Filtration Operations
  • (U//FOUO) DHS Bulletin: Russia Cyber Threat Overview Substantive Revision
  • (U//FOUO) DHS-FBI-NCTC Bulletin: Dissemination of Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures Used by Buffalo Attacker Likely To Enhance Capabilities of Future Lone Offenders
  • DHS-FBI-NCTC U.S. Violent Extremist Mobilization Indicators 2021 Edition
  • (U//FOUO) DHS Reference Aid: Post-Title 42 Encounter Projections at the US Southwest Border

RSS Pulse

  • A Protest for Ukraine free of Dogma and Cynicism March 2, 2022
  • Dismantling Hindutva with Islamophobia? February 19, 2022
  • Of UnStating the Stated, and the Silences in its Wake February 10, 2022
  • Tunisia and the Spectre of Authoritarianism July 15, 2021

RSS Quartz

  • What to expect from PayPal's earnings report February 8, 2023
  • Biden's plan is not going to lower the price of insulin February 8, 2023
  • 3 deceptive DEI metrics companies use to tout success February 8, 2023
  • Shipping giants Maersk and MSC are making different bets on the future of trade February 8, 2023
  • South African and Nigerian artists won big at the Grammys February 8, 2023
  • India ignored the concerns of its own finance ministry to favor Adani February 8, 2023
  • This meeting style can help you make better one-on-one connections February 7, 2023
  • Super Bowl LVII ad watch: less crypto, more beer February 7, 2023
  • What to look for in Disney's first earnings report since Iger's return February 7, 2023
  • Elon Musk still needs 10 million more Twitter Blue subscribers to pay the interest on his loans February 7, 2023

RSS Question Everything

  • Happy Summer Solstice, Goodbye and Thanks for All the Fish June 20, 2021
  • Hope for a Pleasant Vernal Equinox March 20, 2021
  • Starting a New Blog: Rethinking Everything December 31, 2020

RSS R-Squared Energy

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Rabett Run

  • The My Pillowfication of Twitter January 14, 2023
  • Posturing January 9, 2023
  • More Hydrogen Less Methane about the Same HO July 24, 2022

RSS Rabble.Ca

  • Alta. gov’t plan for post-secondaries is about dominating free speech February 8, 2023
  • Could new federal health money usher in needed reforms? February 8, 2023
  • What kind of recession are we heading into in 2023? February 8, 2023
  • Why do corpora