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Collapse of Industrial Civilization

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Collapse of Industrial Civilization

Tag Archives: Gross Inequality

The Slow-Motion Train Wreck of Industrial Civilization

29 Monday Sep 2014

Posted by xraymike79 in Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Peak Oil, Pollution

≈ 106 Comments

Tags

6th Mass Extinction, Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Capitalism, China's State Capitalism, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Dennis Meadows, Dr. Ovamir Anjum, Environmental Generational Amnesia, Gross Inequality, Linear Thinking, Maldistribution of Wealth, Nihilism, Overconsumption, Overpopulation, Peak Debt, Shifting Baselines, The Limits to Growth

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The linear thinking that has dominated Western civilization since the Enlightenment has become a death trap for mankind in the 21st century. The dynamic system of the Earth’s biosphere with its many interconnected parts interacting in complex and unpredictable ways is clashing with modern man’s linear, sequential, and reductionist frame of thought for solving problems. Technical fixes only act as bandaids to the inherent flaws of global techno-capitalism. Time lags and feedbacks set in motion by industrial civilization’s rampant consumption of natural resources will extend over centuries and into deep geologic time. Ignoring the various environmental and social warnings at our own peril, we neither fully understand nor comprehend the consequences of our unsustainable way of life. The laws of physics and chemistry are indifferent to such human tragedy.

Institutional changes required to deal with complicated problems such as climate change move at a sloth’s pace, and the transition to new energy sources has proven historically to be a long, drawn-out process spanning decades. Never mind the fact that so-called ‘green energy’ cannot support the current mode of living nor the overpopulated state of the planet. In other words, our current socio-economic system is unsalvageable.

After one accepts, at least on a subconscious level, these realities, is it then any wonder that nihilism is on the rise? What is more nihilistic than the view that our fate is the end result of the “evolutionary success of an exceptionally rapacious primate”, that “human intelligence is a lethal mutation”(Ernst Mayr), and that industrial civilization is a cancerous growth? I would qualify such thinking by stating that intelligence without wisdom brings destruction. Wisdom is not a genetic trait and has little to do with intelligence. Wisdom is attained through life experience and conscious choice.

There is nothing wise about the culture of capitalist industrial civilization. Global capitalism co-opts and corrupts everything within its sphere; what it cannot control, it kills. Flip the channel to CNN’s Anothony Bourdain and you’ll see a celebration of unrestrained capitalism and “free markets” in China, a country suffocating under the weight of its own pollution:

…Shanghai can come as a rude surprise. In spite of its nominally communist system, it is the most go-go, unfettered, money and status mad, materialistic place on earth. Its skyline alone is confirmation that money talks loudest. In no other city could you build the world’s largest, tallest and ominously curved phallus—stick it right up into the clouds like a giant “FUCK YOU!” to the world and not have trouble with the NIMBYs…

Billions clamoring for an American level of consumption appears to be the real weapon of mass destruction on the planet. Capitalism shows no sign of stopping its downward spiral into barbarism:

The dilemma of progress, as captured neatly by the authors of The Axemaker’s Gift(1995), is that the human species’ very success in exploiting its natural environment and dominating others of their kind (the two go hand in hand), and generally fulfilling its aspirations (and its aspirations, unlike those of all other animals, seem to have no limits) has directly led to its self-destruction. The linear march of progress, on this view, has been from human life in caves only minimally taxing its environment, to life as tribes and agriculturalists exploiting it just a bit more, to modern life. And what is modernity but the triangle of secular science, corporate-capitalism, and nation-states – all made possible by the human ability to create large, secular, result-oriented organizations? In this inexorable story of progress, nature (as well as human lifestyles friendlier to it) have been the losers.
~ Dr. Ovamir Anjum

Dennis Meadows, one of the authors of the prophetic book The Limits to Growth, says that because capitalist industries and the political-legal framework supporting them are so powerful and entrenched, humanity will not evolve through proactive change, but will stumble into multiple unfolding crises as it clings to failing policies and ideologies of promoting material growth at the expense of all else. If we look at current news, this is clearly what is happening:

Global debt is still soaring:

Snap 2014-09-29 at 12.38.19

…Overall, the world’s total debt load has risen from 160 per cent of national income in 2001 to almost 200 per cent after the crisis struck in 2009.

But contrary to all the talk of “deleveraging” that ratio has actually increased since the financial crisis, and was up to 215 per cent globally last year. Put another way, the world owed a collective $70 trillion US before the last recession. But today that figure is up to $100 trillion.

“Contrary to widely held beliefs, the world has not yet begun to delever and the global debt to GDP ratio is still growing, breaking new highs,” the report reads…

The cognitive dissonance between our fossil fuel use and the collapsing environment continues:

Snap 2014-09-29 at 12.44.34

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Global overpopulation shows no signs of stopping:

Snap 2014-09-29 at 12.58.20

The Wealth Gap continues to grow:

Snap 2014-09-29 at 13.06.07

The most striking finding in the new Survey of Consumer Finances may be the degree to which wealth is being concentrated in the hands of a small portion of the population.

That trend isn’t new. “Many other studies have also shown the lasting effects of the recession and documented rising income disparity in the United States,” writes Reuters.

But the SCF shows that the wealth gap continues to grow. The share of wealth belonging to the richest 3 percent of Americans was:

44.8 percent in 1989.
51.8 percent in 2007.
54.4 percent in 2013.

And the 6th extinction is far worse than we realize:

Snap 2014-09-29 at 13.19.41

These are just a few of the realities once we scrape away the greenwashing, political spin, and optimism bias humans are prone to, but let’s not get “lost in a roman wilderness of pain.” Check back with me next year and the story will be much the same as humans accept higher poverty rates, a steeper Keeling Curve, and lower biodiversity levels as the new normal. There’s a name for this gradual adaptation of humans to a worsening environment —environmental generational amnesia. We really won’t know what we’ve been missing until everything is far too gone to support another generation of humans.

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Striking a Nerve: Everyone I Know is Brokenhearted

04 Monday Aug 2014

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Military Industrial Complex, Neo-Colonialism

≈ 81 Comments

Tags

Anthropogenic Climate Disruption (ACD), Capitalism, Corporate State, Gross Inequality, Jason Box, Josh Ellis, Military Industrial Complex, Security and Surveillance State, The Precautionary Principle, Zenarchery.com

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At some point in your life you realize that you’re running out of time, that your health and energy level are slipping, and that your time here on Earth is extremely fragile and transient. You begin to question and re-evaluate what’s important to you. Most still go to their grave with the belief that life will go on for their descendants in a world of never-ending technological “advancements” and improvements in society. A few reading this blog understand the myth of human progress and that mankind is sleepwalking towards a very dark fate. How could there be any other outcome when we have never really heeded the precautionary principle of environmentalism and, in fact, flagrantly disregarded it? Occasionally a scientist will candidly speak the truth. Recently, Jason Box did just that when he tweeted “we’re f’d” if just a small fraction of floor carbon is released from the Arctic. Some of us realize what dire straits we are in and all we can really do is watch with a sort of morbid fascination as this dystopian future unfolds before our eyes. A “grim meathook future” is the inevitable result of a society that worships money, materialism, militarism, and technology.

For an articulate and heartfelt expression of the angst of the modern age, I highly recommend reading the blog post Everyone I know is brokenhearted. The author, Josh Ellis, doesn’t mention climate change at all, but he does hit on every other aspect of capitalist industrial civilization and its soul-crushing, alienating culture. Judging from the number of Facebook “likes”, now at 21K and counting, he has really struck a nerve with people. Perhaps it’s fitting and somewhat ironic that Josh has spent much time in the desert megacity of Las Vegas, the ultimate man-made mirage of capitalist decadence. 

All the genuinely smart, talented, funny people I know seem to be miserable these days. You feel it on Twitter more than Facebook, because Facebook is where you go to do your performance art where you pretend to be a hip, urbane person with the most awesomest friends and the best relationships and the very best lunches ever. Facebook is surface; Twitter is subtext, and judging by what I’ve seen, the subtext is aching sadness.

I’m not immune to this. I don’t remember ever feeling this miserable and depressed in my life, this sense of futility that makes you wish you’d simply go numb and not care anymore. I think a lot about killing myself these days. Don’t worry, I’m not going to do it and this isn’t a cry for help. But I wake up and think: fuck, more of this? Really? How much more? And is it really worth it?

In my case, much of it stems from my divorce and the collapse of the next relationship I had. But that’s not really the cause. I think that those relationships were bulwarks, charms against the dark I’ve felt growing in this world for a long time now. When I was in love, the world outside didn’t matter so much. But without it, there is nothing keeping the wolf from the door…

Read the rest: http://zenarchery.com/2014/08/everyone-i-know-is-brokenhearted/

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Capitalist Industrial Civilization = M.A.D.

25 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Military Industrial Complex, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 82 Comments

Tags

Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Anthropogenic Climate Disruption (ACD), Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, David Suzuki, Depleted Uranium, Dr. Helen Caldicott, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Empire, Gross Inequality, Military Industrial Complex, Mountaintop Removal, NSA chief Keith Alexander, Nuclear Waste, Ocean Acidification, Plasticizing the Planet, Poverty, Privatization, Regulatory Capture, Strip, The Revolving Door Between Government and Corporations, War for Profit

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“This, then, is the legacy we leave to future generations so that we can turn on our lights and computers or make nuclear weapons… Have we, the human species, the ability to mature psychologically in time to avert these catastrophes, or, is it in fact, too late?” ~ Dr. Helen Caldicott

Radical, wide-scale planning should have been executed decades ago in response to the Limits to Growth study. Instead, we carried on with business-as-usual as the natural world underwent cataclysmic, mass extinction level changes. Every day, the insanity of capitalist industrial civilization(CIC) is on full display as we entertain ourselves with the illusion of token political gestures towards “sustainability”. None of it changes our death march over the cliff of extinction. Nature died long ago with man’s discovery of fossil fuels which fed his terminal overshoot. Any isolated pockets of remaining wilderness are trampled underfoot, amounting to no more than a mere novelty destination commercialized by the tourist industry.

Enslaved to his own self-destructive technology, CIC continues to toxify and irradiate the planet, plasticize the oceans, and disrupt the chemical conditions that allow for life. A society that dehumanizes everything with the fetishization of technology and money will always see disaster as a money-making opportunity. Anthropogenic climate disruption is no exception. Competition amongst nations and corporations for economic/military supremacy, wealth, and power demands that the energy resources to be exploited first are those with the highest available ERoEI, i.e. fossil fuels. The charts bear out this cutthroat strategy and so do the actions of nation states who have made it a legal duty to maximize greenhouse gases. Giving up the competitive advantage of coal, oil, and gas ensures you will be eaten alive in the global economy. Thus nation states are locked into a capitalist race to the grave. The nasty greenhouse gas-emitting side effects of these fuels are simply another negative externality quietly pushed onto future generations. However, physical reality will eventually overtake a fake mass-media culture consumed by the idolatry of materialism and greed. The Earth doesn’t bail out a species that continuously spends more than it saves. Instead, the biospheric slate is wiped clean to make way for the next bout of evolutionary events.

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Like radiation, GHG’s are seemingly invisible yet their effects are all too real. Because of the lag period involved in anthropogenic climate disruption, their devastating environmental costs will never be fully appreciated in time to avert disaster. Adding up the land, air, ice, and ocean warming data, a study from last year found that in recent decades the earth has been heating up at a rate of 250 trillion Joules per second. This is equivalent to:

    • Detonating four Hiroshima atomic bombs per second
    • Experiencing two Hurricane Sandys per second
    • Enduring four 6.0 Richter scale earthquakes per second
    • Being struck by 500,000 lightning bolts per second
    • Exploding more than eight Big Ben towers, with every inch packed full of dynamite, per second

For the Fox-news-befuddled masses, such analogies are meaningless because the threat is not in their face. In their conspiracy-addled minds, climate change is a socialist plot to ruin the American economy and undermine capitalism itself. To the genuflecting masses of capitalism, the mythical free market is seen as an all-powerful, self-regulating mechanism of the Earth, the Sun, and the Universe. Man-made constructs are inanimate and artificial, yet we cling to them as if they were immutable laws of nature.

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Keeping industrial civilization chugging along in the face of planetary ecological collapse is eerily similar to the military doctrine of nuclear deterrence called M.A.D. (Mutually Assured Destruction), as commenter James explained:

Our competitive growth is MAD and considered on a geological time scale is only slightly slower than a sudden launch of nuclear missiles which may also eventually occur. We kid ourselves when we think that we’ll be fine as long as we never have a nuclear exchange, that sustainability is a possibility if we prevent nuclear war…

…This planet has the Big C, civilization, and it will torture its denizens as they struggle to maintain normalcy while the onslaught of malnutrition, decay and chaos drive them mad.

Do you think Hillary Clinton or Mitt Romney are going to ameliorate the conditions of your decline? Ever wonder what it’s like to be a human sacrifice?

Capitalist carbon man’s unwavering faith in the powers of technology ensures that Big C’s omnicidal, energy-slurping $46 trillion-dollar infrastructure(U.S.A. only) and its array of mechanized contraptions cranks onward, squeezing out the last drop of resources from a spent Earth. Human cannon fodder will continue to be shoveled into Iraq and the Middle East to keep the fossil fuel furnaces burning. America’s corporate-industrial-military-political-financial complex will protect its financial coffers at the expense of the destitute masses and a habitable planet. When it comes to money, there is no loyalty to anyone or anything in the land of the FEE and home of the bamboozled. Just like countless Wall Street predators who have passed through the revolving corporate/government door, former NSA chief Keith Alexander is now getting in on the action to exploit his national security credentials. 

A simple lesson not learned from the two recent epic industrial disasters:

Collusion between big business, government and industry is hardly restricted to Japan. In every country, the health and safety of working people in their workplaces and their communities are routinely subordinated to the dictates of profit. Moreover, the past three decades of market restructuring have led to the systematic erosion of the limited regulations that previously existed. In many instances, regulatory bodies have been cut back or replaced by corporate “self-regulation”.

Fukushima is just one of the major disasters that have exposed the criminal character of capitalism. One year earlier, an explosion at the BP-run Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico killed 11 workers and created the worst environmental catastrophe in US history. The Bush and Obama administrations fast-tracked the project, which proceeded without an environmental impact study, despite public concern and opposition. In the wake of the oil spill, the Obama administration acted as a virtual attorney for BP, assisting the energy giant to minimise the economic and political fallout. From the outset, the White House made clear that the disaster would not impede further offshore oil projects—including by BP.

The Japanese government, first under Prime Minister Naoto Kan, and now Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, has performed a similar service for TEPCO—providing a huge bailout for the company and limiting the payouts to small businesses and individuals whose lives have been devastated…

…The real lesson that should be drawn from the report’s revelations is the incompatibility between capitalism and even the most elementary needs of humanity for a healthy and secure environment….

Structuring a society to reward the most sociopathic and ruthless amongst us, create grotesque levels of inequality and political disenfranchisement, deify material wealth as the primary metric of success, privatize and profitize war, and use the planet as a garbage dump for toxic waste is a recipe for disaster.

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Humans have thrown into the geological evolutionary processes of Earth several long-lived and very disruptive monkey wrenches. There are three which are noteworthy and will outlive us all in the deep time of planetary history:

    • Anthopogenic climate disruption will essentially last forever, according to Professor David Archer of Chicago University and his associates. He says “the climatic impacts of releasing fossil fuel carbon dioxide into the atmosphere will last longer than Stonehenge, longer than time capsules, far longer than the age of human civilization so far. Ultimate recovery takes place on timescales of hundreds of thousands of years, a geologic longevity typically associated in public perceptions with nuclear waste.”
    • Ocean Acidification, the so-called ‘evil twin’ of climate change, will mirror the longevity of anthropogenic CO2…

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    • Nuclear Waste from the production of nuclear power and nuclear bombs lasts essentially until the end of time. Coal-fired electric plants produce their own witch’s brew of radioactive waste as well. In the U.S. alone, roughly 2,000 metric tons of nuclear waste are produced every year with 70,000 tons now sitting at some 100 temporary sites across the country. A permanent disposal site has yet to be established to store the fatal stuff. The recent egregious, Homer Simpson-esque mishaps and incompetence at America’s only radioactive waste repository located in New Mexico don’t inspire any confidence that we can store this stuff safely even for a brief period, let alone for the thousands of years required. We’re too busy fracking around that fragile site to worry about any long-term consequences. Humans have sufficiently booby-trapped the planet that in the dying days of the Anthropocene, your chance of survival is the same as winning the Lotto.

A few of the deadly radioisotopes that can be found in nuclear waste are the following:

– uranium 238 (half-life 4.468 billion years)
– uranium 235 (half-life 700 million years)
– plutonium 244 (half-life 80 million years)
– iodine-129 (half-life 15.7 million years)
– neptunium-237 (half-life two million years)
– plutonium 242 (half-life 373,300 years)
– technetium-99 (half-life 220,000 years)
– plutonium-239 (half-life 24,000 years)

Depleted uranium is a byproduct of processing mined uranium for fuel in nuclear energy plants and as a component for nuclear bombs. Depleted uranium contains U-234, U-235, U-236, and U-238. Only two countries have acknowledged using depleted uranium in their weaponry, the US and UK, for its armor-piercing advantages. Only one country, Belgium, has banned its use. A couple of years ago, New Zealand put forth a bill to ban DU munitions, but it failed by one vote. The Dutch peace group PAX recently confirmed that the U.S. fired DU munitions into Iraqi civilian populations.

Once a DU shell impacts a target, it aerosolizes into a fine gas or mist which can then travel in the air for miles. These radioactive particles can get kicked up again and again by the wind or other disturbances after they have settled on the ground or in the sand. Once inhaled by humans, DNA is damaged and the ensuing cell mutations lead to cancer. For an example of the havoc depleted uranium has wreaked on the health of returning soldiers, watch this video. Investigative reporter Dr Nafeez Ahmed recently reported how the World Health Organization tried to cover up the horrific, lingering effects of depleted uranium contamination in Iraq. For those Middle East countries, the use of these radioactive DU munitions by Western forces constitutes an under-the-radar nuclear scourge with cancers, birth defects, and chronic ill-health affecting generations upon generations into the distant future.

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I suppose one could add plastics to the list of unimaginably long-lasting pollutants to the list. Microscopic particles of the stuff can be found at any beach and even in mountaintop lakes. And of course the scars from massive strip mining operations will remain as an indelible reminder of industrial civilization’s insatiable appetite for energy. Scientists didn’t declare this the Anthropocene Epoch for nothing; we have certainly left our mark like no other species before or since, literally terraforming the Earth into a planet inhospitable to ourselves. Perhaps aliens will pay a visit after the dust has all settled. They’ll surely shake their heads in disgust at the poisonous wreckage left behind by our fossil-fueled madness before zooming off into the night skies in search of a planet that has intelligent life.

 

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Global Corporatocracy: Privatized Profits and Socialized Losses

08 Sunday Jun 2014

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

≈ 58 Comments

Tags

"David Cay Johnston: The Perils Of Our Growing Inequality", Capitalism, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, David Cay Johnston, ExxonMobile, Financial Elite, Free Trade Agreements, Governmental Capture, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Maldistribution of Wealth, Reaganism, Regulatory Capture, Steve Coll's 'Private Empire', The Elite 1%, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Wall Street Fraud

David Cay Johnston is, as he states, not a socialist, but a capitalist who believes in fair and competitive markets and integrity. My blog concentrates quite a bit on environmental issues and David only passingly mentions the deregulation and rolling back of environmental laws in the interview below, but he has been writing about inequality since the 1960’s and does a great job of describing the “governmental capture” by multinational corporations. An overwhelming proportion of environmental destruction is being caused by these mammoth corporations that are literally a state within a state, so it’s important to make the connection between inequality/political disenfranchisement and the destruction of the environment driven by a “business aristocracy” which has usurped the institutions of society. There can be no social, environmental, and climate justice if there is no government to serve the people. Of particular interest is the interview with Steve Coll and the power that ExxonMobile wields. Three notable examples of government acting as an insurance agency for corporations while leaving a mess for the common people to deal with are the BP oil spill, TEPCO’s Fukushima disaster, and the mortgage crisis created by the Too-Big-To-Fail Banks.

Government rules and policies have been put in place to create the huge wealth gap in America:

– political economy, an amplifying feedback loop where wealth begets access to the rules in politics which begets changes in the rules which reinforce wealth.

– 45 years ago the media was staffed by blue-collar intellectuals. TV news media is now filled with people from wealthy households whose life experience tells them that things are just fine in the world. We’re not hearing about those exploiting the system for their benefit. Very little coverage of poverty as well. The U.S. has the highest % of children who go to bed hungry of any modern country.

– The most important period of determining your lifetime health and well-being is from conception to the first 6 months of life. Little to nonexistent programs and support for mothers and newborn babies in America. Just as the U.S. is neglecting its infrastructure by not maintaining and investing in it, we are also stealing from the future by not nurturing and providing proper care for small children. There will be a price and it will be very high.

– U.S. has been living under Reaganism since 1981 in which we worship money and our measure of the country is money. The purposes of our country were written down for us in the preamble of the Constitution: justice, the general Welfare, common defense, domestic tranquility, liberties. Nothing in the preamble talks about getting rich. That’s a byproduct of these other things, but we have gotten a distorted view of what’s happening and now have 33 years of evidence that Reaganism has made the rich richer at the expense of the 90%. We are mining the 90% to benefit the super-rich rather than creating an economy that benefits everyone.

– The number one driver of this crooked system is campaign finance. There are over 100,000 people in this country whose job it is to mine the public treasury or the rules for their benefit. This corrupt system has to be changed.

– The way we think about this country and its society needs to change. The founders actually wrote a great deal about their concerns over inequality. John Adams, the second President, wrote that his fear was that a business aristocracy would arise to destroy the country, making workers mere wage earners instead of craftsmen owning their own tools. These wage earners, not being truly independent, would be manipulated into voting for policies that would benefit the business aristocracy and we would lose both our liberties and democracy. Adam Smith, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, talks about inequality being corrosive to the very fabric of society and says that “the greatest corruption of our moral sentiments is the tendency to almost worship the rich and to hold in bad regard people who are poor.” Our politicians reflect this even though many of them will tell you at any moment how religious they are. They obviously have not studied their religious text because if they did they would know that, in the case of the Christians for example, you were required to “give all that thou hast to the poor.”

– Reaganism has led to an enormous concentration of wealth amongst a small minority who cannot possibly consume that wealth and instead are investing it in financial instruments to extract more wealth rather than investing it in the economy. We don’t have to burn more fossil fuels to grow the economy; there are other ways to do that.

– We pay big corporations to not pay their taxes. The way this happens is that corporations are limited in the amount of money they can hold in the U.S., so the corporations get around this by offshoring their money in foreign bank accounts and then turn around and buy U.S. treasuries. The interest they earn from these treasuries will eventually exceed the value of the tax on that money, when and if these corporations decide to bring the money back into the U.S.. This scheme has literally become a profit center for the corporations.

– When this country was founded, there had been only seven corporations in the old british colonial United States at the time of the Declaration of Independence. Six of them were what today we would either call a charity or a utility. The Boston Water Works is a good example; it was the very first one and was essentially a utility. One corporation created in the colony of New Haven was set up solely to make profit. It was such a scandal they had to shut it down within a year and it took ten years to clean up the mess. The founders disliked and distrusted corporations, but they believed in collective bargaining because in 1792, Congress passed the first significant labor law and subsidy law based on a study conducted by Thomas Jefferson. It was to revive and protect the cod fishing industry ravaged by the British Navy. The class of fisherman known as “sharesmen” were able to negotiate with the wealthy ship owners in order to share in the profits. Those ships who participated in sharing their profits with the fishermen were given the subsidy and those who did not were exempt from the subsidy.

– Violent, explosive rise in executive pay which diverts CEOs from the welfare of the company. All large pools of capital that are owned collectively (charitable endowments, pension funds, etc) are systematically being predated. The assets of utility companies are being worn down and stripped.

– We now have a government that does not go after people who are engaged in criminal frauds because they are considered so powerful that if they were prosecuted it would “damage the economy”. The government has become an insurance agency for the rich and powerful and the common people pay the premiums.

– We have gotten the results that Mr. Reagan said, if you listen to him carefully in 1980, that we would get which is that those people who are wealth holders would realize the income from that wealth, and they have. The actual tax rates of the people at the very top are 60% lower than what they paid in the 1980’s, but at the same time by getting rid of unions, by having these “free trade deals” which are really deals to drive down the cost of labor, we have driven down the wages and salaries of the vast majority of Americans as well as the environmental conditions (laws to protect the environment). A whole mechanism has been put in place that favors profit over labor and when you look at the data you can see it. The returns to labor in the Fed reserve data show a marked decline and returns to capital have been rising and since 2009 it has skyrocketed. Because labor returns have gone down, there is not enough aggregate demand in the economy for people to buy goods and services. The next thought would be that capitalists would change because people have to be able to buy their goods and services. No, if you are a global capitalist it does not matter. As long as there are no riots in the streets, you can sell your goods in other countries. We have lots of corporations now that are bigger than governments. Steve Coll’s book on ExxonMobile basically describes a private foreign service and a private military:

The scope of the market has become larger than the domain of the sovereignty of nation-states.

– The ultimate solution is very simple: the 90% of Americans who are worse off, who are back to the income level of 1966, can vote in a new government and start with the state legislatures because they are the ones that set the boundaries for the congressional districts but it will take many decades to get to a better path. The fundamental question about this division between the super-rich and everyone else is, “Are we going to revise the rules?” Right now you are seeing the rise of oligarchical thinking such as Tom Perkins saying the number of votes you should have should be based on the amount of money you have. The founders explicitly rejected that kind of thinking.

– This idea that if you make a lot of money, you should pay more in taxes is the most conservative idea in western civilization if your standard is something that’s been tested through time and works which is the classic meaning of conservative. Progressive taxation was invented 2,500 years ago in Athens when they invented democracy. The people of the city-state of Athens concluded that the only way one could become wealthy is by following the rules and laws set down to protect everyone. The infrastructure of Athens, its military, and government services that were provided to benefit everyone meant that those who did become wealthy were expected to bear a greater burden for those costs of society to ensure that Athens would endure. Society made their fortunes possible. This idea has been embraced by every classic worldly philosopher. 

– The game doesn’t just comfortably and stably go on if people don’t become active and we keep driving towards deeper and deeper hollowing out and inequality. Isn’t there a dark scenario here also?  Yes, we’re giving up on democracy and our descendents will read history books that begin with these words: “The United States of America was… ” It became a failed experiment where cynicism is used to mock anyone who is idealistic, a foolish romantic…

– We have governmental capture. We literally have a federal government that responds to the political donor class, which is a narrow group of very wealthy people, in how it taxes, how it doesn’t regulate, how it doesn’t enforce laws, how it makes trade agreements with other countries, and that imbalance should worry us a great deal. What did Plutarch tell us 2,000 years ago? “An imbalance between rich and poor is the most frequent and fatal ailment of all republics.”

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Endlessly Apologizing for a Self-Destructive System

24 Saturday May 2014

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 57 Comments

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Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate $tate, Corporatocracy, Financial Elite, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, James Howard Kunstler, Joel Magnuson, Mass Media Manipulation, Mindful Economics: How the U.S. Economy Works - Why it Matters - and How it Could Be Different, Monopoly Capitalism, Monopsony, Noam Chomsky, Poverty, Regulatory Capture, Richard Wolff, Systemic Disorder, Systemic Fraud in Politics, The Invisible Hand of the Free Market, The Myth of Laissez Faire Capitalism, The Profit Motive

occupytoronto-021

Although I agree with much of what J. H. Kunstler has to say, particularly on his analysis of energy and his critiques of American suburbia, when it comes to his views on the human-made system that is driving this entire train wreck, he gets it dead wrong. Here is a quote from his last blog post:

Now I am, going to reveal to you why it is so difficult to get a live human being on the telephone at these important places: because the more of a racketeering matrix medicine becomes, the more it seeks to evade responsibility for the consequences. That is, the more medicine becomes a criminal enterprise, the less it wants to hear from its client/victims. The same ethos is at work in just about every other realm of corporate enterprise in the USA. Our problem in the USA is not “capitalism,” it’s racketeering. Why we fail to comprehend it is one of the abiding mysteries of contemporary life.

…It ought to be self-evident that this could only happen in a profoundly corrupt, dishonest, and degenerate society, because it took the form of a social compact that accepted this sort of behavior as okay…

Kunstler is perpetuating a deep-seated myth about capitalism that many in American society repeat. Laying the blame on those victimized by an economic system, which by design exploits, disenfranchises, and discards its subjects, overlooks the fact that the problem is the system itself. Capitalism is not an ethical system, and its overriding force of motivation is always the bottom line. Inequality, conflict, and regulatory corruption are all part and parcel of capitalism. History has borne this out numerous times. Unless someone steps in to break them up, monopolies are the natural result of unbridled capitalism (Mindful Economics, Joel Magnuson):

Winner-take-all

Corporate money greases the wheels of the political system which then passes regulations discouraging competition and favoring large corporations. Regulatory capture is inevitably what happens when successful capitalists amass wealth and buy off the political class whose lifeblood is, after all, money. Under the present system, we will never see a candidate elected to office without a substantial war chest of funds stuffed with corporate ‘donations‘. Government does the bidding of capitalists, not vise versa. We saw this in spades with the election of Obama when all his campaign promises of “hope and change” evaporated into thin air as he filled his cabinet with Wall Street and Goldman Sachs cronies. Who wrote the legislation for Obama’s healthcare reform? — lobbyists for the healthcare industrial complex where, not surprisingly, “the big bucks are currently earned not through the delivery of care, but from overseeing the business of medicine.” The corruption that Kunstler decries is not an aberration of capitalism, but a natural feature of it:

…What chiefly drives this sort of political corruption today is capitalism’s structure. For many capitalist enterprises, competitive and other pressures exist to increase profits, growth rates, and/or market share. Their boards and top managers seek to find cheaper produced inputs and cheaper labor power, to extract more output from their workers, to sell their outputs at the highest possible prices and to find more profitable technologies. The structure provides them with every incentive of financial gain and/or career security and advancement to behave in those ways. Thus, boards and top managers seek the maximum obtainable assistance of government officials in all these areas and also try to pay the least possible portion of their net revenues as taxes. Boards of directors tap their corporations’ profits to corrupt mostly the top echelons of the government bureaucracy, those needed to make advantageous official decisions.

Individual capitalists act to corrupt government officials to serve their enterprise’s needs. Grouped into associations, they do likewise for their industries. When organized as a whole (in “chambers of commerce” or “manufacturers alliances,” etc.), they corrupt to secure their class interests. When such corruption is not secret, capitalists articulate their demands to corrupted officials as “good for the economy or society as a whole.” Such phrases constitute the “appropriate language” that enables officials publicly to disguise and hopefully to legitimate their corrupt acts.

Strict moral codes, regulations and laws have been imposed to prevent individual or grouped capitalists from corrupting government officials. Evidence suggests, however, that neither civic-minded ethics, nor regulations nor laws have come close to ending capitalists’ corruption. Countless government courts, commissions, etc., have hardly ended official complicities in that corruption. Mainstream economics mostly proceeds in its analyses and policy prescriptions as if rampant corruption did not exist. Mass media tend to treat capitalist corruption (at least in their home countries) as exceptional and government efforts to stop it as serious. These, too, are further examples of that “appropriate language” with which modern capitalist societies mask systemic corruption.
~ Richard D Wolff

Noam Chomsky uses the acronym RECD (Really Existing Capitalist Democracy, pronounced ‘wrecked‘) to describe the capitalism that exists in the real world, and he doesn’t hold out much hope for civilization surviving it. Any sort of idyllic form of capitalism only exists in people’s heads and is kept alive by the myth of laissez-faire capitalism (Mindful Economics, Joel Magnuson):

Myth of a free market

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A democracy cannot exist without an informed and intelligent electorate, and when corporations and monied interests intentionally spin the news, the populous are reduced to conspiracy mongers and what Gore Vidal scoffingly called ‘consumer-depositors’ in thrall to the financial elite. Alas, the institution intended to educate the public, aka the Fourth Estate, on matters of vital importance has been thoroughly dismantled and perverted by capitalism. The internet, the last bastion of independent and alternative news, is soon to follow suite (Mindful Economics, Joel Magnuson):

media

If the masses are unable to see through the spin and distortion propagated by a class of greedy parasites, there is one entity that will not suffer the fate of the dispossessed, dying quietly in some dark corner. The Earth is not so forgiving to such continued capitalist assaults, and it’s not fooled by propaganda such as ‘sustainable development’, ‘green growth’, or ‘corporate social responsibility’. Since pre-industrial times, the global temperature has ‘only’ risen 0.85 degrees Celsius (1.5 degrees Fahrenheit), and we can already see the havoc to civilization’s infrastructure that climate chaos is wreaking. With forecasts of average global temperature to be many fold greater by mid century, it would seem that only a miracle will save us.

Systemic Disorder published an important essay yesterday on the systematic destruction of labor rights throughout the world. How long will these myths about capitalism persist until the exploited finally wake up and realize their blood, sweat, and sacrifice are what fills the coffers of the über rich? Many at the bottom of the economic hierarchy bend over backwards to apologize for our current system, calling it everything but capitalism. No matter how often capitalism fails, no matter how many people it kills, it is religiously touted as the only and the best economic system available despite its flaws. Will humans continue to amuse themselves to death, defending a systemically self-destructive system?

…

We watched the tragedy unfold
We did as we were told
We bought and sold
It was the greatest show on earth
But then it was over
We ohhed and aahed
We drove our racing cars
We ate our last few jars of caviar
And somewhere out there in the stars
A keen-eyed look-out
Spied a flickering light
Our last hurrah

And when they found our shadows
Grouped ’round the TV sets
They ran down every lead
They repeated every test
They checked out all the data on their lists
And then the alien anthropologists
Admitted they were still perplexed
But on eliminating every other reason
For our sad demise
They logged the only explanation left
This species has amused itself to death . . .

…

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Business-As-Usual on a Dying Planet

19 Monday May 2014

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Peak Oil, Pollution

≈ 120 Comments

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BP, British Petroleum, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corexit, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), Corporate State, Dr. Wilma Subra, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Sacrifice Zones, Environmental Collapse, Gross Inequality, Gulf Oil Spill, Industrial Disease, Inverted Totalitarianism, Mass Die Off, Noam Chomsky, Peak Oil, Renfrey Clarke, Tragedy of the Commons, Vice Media: Crude Awakening

Molotov

A recent investigative piece by Vice on the aftermath of the BP oil spill, America’s most devastating environmental accident to date and the “largest accidental marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry”, shows that people are still getting sick and dying in the Gulf region.

Award winning chemist, Dr. Wilma Subra, conducted blood tests on Gulf Coast residents who were symptomatic with new illnesses and found that some of the cancer-causing agents were 65 times the expected level in the victims blood tests. Subra noted that Corexit is in the air, the water and the Gulf resident’s blood.

“There’s a whole population that’s very sick and doesn’t have access to medical care, and that’s what we’ve been trying to work on now, from the very beginning, is getting them medical care so they will get better,” says Subra. “How many people do you think we’re talking about, do we have any guess?” “Hundreds of thousands along the whole coastal area,” Subra says. “Hundreds of thousands of people?” “That are sick, yes.”

It also is likely that the BP cleanup workers are going to suffer the same fate. Listen to what Dr. Wilma Subra had to say about the health of this group.

These findings can leave little doubt that BP’s use of Corexit has seriously compromised the collective life span of Gulf Coast residents. This is a staggering implication for the collective longevity in the Gulf. – link

Nearly 2 millions gallons of Corexit were used to prevent the millions of barrels of leaked oil from hitting shorelines. Where did all that oil go? Once Corexit is dispersed over an oil slick, it causes the spilled oil to break apart and sink to the bottom of the ocean. In the case of the BP oil spill, this toxic material created massive kill zones on the Gulf floor. When oil and Corexit are mixed together, the resultant substance becomes 52 times more toxic and penetrates human skin much easier. The locals don’t eat what they catch, but remember that Obama said it was safe.

Corexit has been banned in 18 countries, including the UK, because “it is a cancerous causing neurotoxin pesticide that is acutely toxic to both human and marine life.” Every time there is a strong storm, the Corexit chemical and oil mixture gets swept up onto shore and enters the water cycle:

As of early October 2013, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) website specifically stated that the spill should have no effect on drinking water, and that any questions residents might have about their water should be directed to their drinking water provider. The website fails to mention that water from the Gulf, mixed with oil and Corexit could make its way into the ecosystem eventually, washing up onto the Gulf’s shores and seeping insidiously into the ground water. Florida’s ground water aqueduct system provides drinking water to 18 million residents. – link

The happy motoring culture of suburban sprawl, bread & circus infotainment, and celebrity/wealth worship has long since forgotten what has been called “the biggest public health crisis from a chemical poisoning in the history of this country“. Entrapped by poverty and lacking the means to escape the Gulf region,  its residence have become part of the sacrifice zone offered up in the name of profit to the carbon-hungry God of industrial civilization.

None of the locals who took part in the clean-up effort were told of the dangers to their health, nor were they allowed to wear protective gear such as respiratory masks, suits, and gloves because it would have more accurately conveyed to the world the true nature of the disaster. More recently, BP has been accused of hiring internet trolls to threaten critics of its handling of the 2010 disaster. Surely the authorities were aware of the aftermath from the Exxon Valdez accident wherein the same dispersant was used by those clean-up workers who are now nearly all dead at the average age of 51. For BP and the U.S. government, image and corporate interests override the horrific realities of ecocide and corporate manslaughter. Better to sink the oil out of sight and mind in order to maintain the illusion that all is well rather than have a company pay the full cost for its recklessness. All that oil mixed with Corexit is now a 3 to 4 inch toxic layer blanketing the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, inhibiting its biodegradation by natural oil-consuming bacteria and prolonging the disaster for decades. And BP is once again allowed to bid for U.S. government contracts after having sued the EPA in 2013 to lift the suspension. Of course lots of conspiracy theories surrounded the BP oil spill, but the only real conspiracy here was the government/corporate collusion to hide and minimize the damage, control the public’s perception of the disaster, and protect corporate profits over people and environment — nothing out of the ordinary for the corporatocracy we live under, here or abroad.

It’s not just in the oceans that we have to worry about oil spills. If we look at just one set of data from one inland state, you can get an idea of the staggering scale of the fallout from the oil drenched machine of industrial civilization:

Snap 2014-05-19 at 08.56.37

When you take into account all the global destruction that capitalist industrial civilization has wrought over the last few centuries, you realize no solution will ever be forthcoming from our corporate overlords. The idea of corporate social responsibility (CSR) is simply a PR and marketing ploy. CSR employs ineffective market-based solutions, making it appear that a corporation is addressing a social or environmental problem when in fact it only serves to protect corporate financial interests and shift the blame to the individual and elsewhere. Over decades, corporations have molded society into atomized, uninformed, and passive consumers who parrot the same talking points fed to them from the mainstream media. Those wielding the power in society and leading mankind over a cliff are the same ones that hide behind the moniker of CSR, a smokescreen for continuing the looting and polluting of the planet to the point of ecological collapse.

521622_591434340867473_1869861116_n As the catastrophes of the BP oil spill and Fukushima illustrate, a bankrupt planet is preferable to them over a bankrupt corporation. The Tragedy of the commons, as Noam Chomsky points out, has been perverted and twisted by the widespread adoption of the capitalist ethos. It actually means the opposite of what most have been taught to believe:

…there is another part of Magna Carta which has been forgotten. It had two components. The one is the Charter of Liberties which is being dismantled. The other was called the Charter of the Forests. That called for protection of the commons from the depredations of authority. This is England of course. The commons were the traditional source of sustenance, of food and fuel and welfare as well. They were nurtured and sustained for centuries by traditional societies collectively. They have been steadily dismantled under the capitalist principle that everything has to be privately owned, which brought with it the perverse doctrine of – what is called the tragedy of the commons – a doctrine which holds that collective possessions will be despoiled so therefore everything has to be privately owned. The merest glance at the world shows that the opposite is true. It’s privatization that is destroying the commons. That’s why the indigenous populations of the world are in the lead in trying to save Magna Carta from final destruction by its inheritors…

tumblr_n4jfednib51qjb4vfo1_1280 09-52-16

I’m afraid we are light years away from the Charter of the Forests and any sort of bucolic utopias. As for the future, think moonscapes, tumbleweeds, and the creaking sheet metal of rusted-out cars. The hyper-reality of megacities, with their pulsating neon lights and traffic-filled streets, will fall into silence and decay. Coastal cities will be swallowed up in watery graves. The impotence of man’s technology will become painfully evident as the global-scale geochemical disruptions caused by man quickly unfold, ripping asunder any hold we once had on Earth.

…If modern industrial capitalism were a person, he or she would be on suicide watch. The system that has brought us quantum physics and reality television, modern medicine and the columns of Andrew Bolt is set on a course which, by all the best reckoning, points directly to its doing itself in. If capitalism goes on — everything goes. Climate, coastlines, most living species, food supplies, the great bulk of humanity. And certainly, the preconditions for advanced civilisation, perhaps forever…
~ Renfrey Clarke

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Overpopulated by Homo Colossus

20 Sunday Apr 2014

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Pollution

≈ 118 Comments

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Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Derrick Jensen, Environmental Collapse, Gross Inequality, Overconsumption, Overpopulation, Poverty, Social Unrest, Wage Slave, William Catton

Snap 2014-04-01 at 21.56.52 Do citizens of industrialized, consumerist nations have the moral authority to lecture the world about overpopulation, singling it out as the root of all the world’s problems? William Catton coined the term Homo colossus to describe those living in the industrialized world whose consumption of resources is disproportionately greater than those in the so-called undeveloped world:

Snap 2014-04-20 at 11.42.06 In his book Endgame, Derrick Jensen points out that the argument of overpopulation becomes rather meaningless unless it is framed within the context of consumption levels:

Snap 2014-04-20 at 09.24.25 If we take a look at who is actually pushing the environment to collapse according to their consumption levels, it becomes clear by the numbers that the real planet destroyers are not the teeming masses of the Third World, but industrial civilization’s energy gluttons driving their SUV’s, checking their stock portfolios on the internet, and wagging their finger at the huddled masses who have been corralled into megacities because globalization wiped out their indigenous means of subsistence:

consumption-inequality-2005-pie

consumption-inequality-2005-bar

…What is immediately apparent from Chart 1[above] is that the 10 percent of the world’s population with the highest income, some 700 million people, are responsible for the overwhelmingly majority of the problem. It should be kept in mind that this is not just an issue of the rich countries. Very wealthy people live in almost all countries of the world—the wealthiest person in the world is Mexican, and there are more Asians than North Americans with net worth over $100 million. When looked at from a global perspective, the poor become essentially irrelevant to the problem of resource use and pollution. The poorest 40 percent of people on Earth are estimated to consume less than 5 percent of natural resources. The poorest 20 percent, about 1.4 billion people, use less than 2 percent of natural resources. If somehow the poorest billion people disappeared tomorrow, it would have a barely noticeable effect on global natural resource use and pollution. (It is the poor countries, with high population growth, that have low per capita greenhouse gas emissions.22) However, resource use and pollution could be cut in half if the richest 700 million lived at an average global standard of living.

Thus, we are forced to conclude that when considering global resource use and environmental degradation there really is a “population problem.” But it is not too many people—and certainly not too many poor people—but rather too many rich people living too “high on the hog” and consuming too much. Thus birth control programs in poor countries or other means to lower the population in these regions will do nothing to help deal with the great problems of global resource use and environmental destruction… – link

By far, the wealthy have the world’s largest environmental footprint :

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the carbon footprint of the top quintile is over three times that of the bottom. Even in relatively egalitarian Canada, the top income decile has a mobility footprint nine times that of the lowest, a consumer goods footprint four times greater, and an overall ecological footprint two-and-a-half times larger. Air travel is frequently pegged as one of the most rapidly growing sources of carbon emissions, but it’s not simply because budget airlines have “democratized the skies”–rather, flying has truly exploded among the hyper-mobile affluent. Thus in Western Europe, the transportation footprint of the top income earners is 250 percent of that of the poor. And global carbon emissions are particularly uneven: the top five hundred million people by income, comprising about 8 percent of global population, are responsible for 50 percent of all emissions. It’s a truly global elite, with high emitters present in all countries of the world.

In the post Earth to Humans: “Get Off Your Merry-Go-Round Ride to Extinction”, I quoted a well-reasoned article by Devon G. Peña who explained the self-serving and hypocritical stance taken by the capitalist industrialized nations regarding the issue of overpopulation. The root causes driving mankind to extinction are completely sidestepped:

…In climate change debates, overpopulation arguments serve to delay making structural changes in North and South away from the extraction and use of fossil fuels; to explain the failure of carbon markets to tackle the problem; to justify increased and multiple interventions in the countries deemed to hold the surplus people; and to excuse those interventions when they cause further environmental degradation, migration or conflict.

As such, population theory is far more than a theory or a principle. It is above all a political strategy that obscures the relationships of power between different groups in societies, whether these be local, national, global, while at the same time justifying those political relationships that allow certain groups to dominate others structurally, be they men over women, property owners over commoners, or ‘us’ over ‘them’. The “too many” are hardly ever the speakers, they are always the Other.

This partially explains why those considered to be surplus are not those who profit from continued fossil fuel extraction but those most harmed by it and by climate change…

As was shown in the post The Biophysics of Civilization, Money = Energy, and the Inevitability of Collapse, GDP and money are tied to energy consumption and CO2 emissions. Climate change is the greatest threat to humanity and our economic model and profligate way of life are on a collision course with catastrophe. Realistic solutions require dealing with the root of the problem, not the symptoms. Geoengineering, carbon trading schemes, and GMO’s are technocapitalist solutions to climate change. Focusing on overpopulaion ignores the socio-economic system behind all the exploitation and destruction.

…It is not surprising, however, that a worsening climate situation is often attributed not to continued fossil fuel extraction but to too many people. Whenever global environmental crises, Third World poverty or world hunger are at issue, whenever conflict, migration or economic growth are discussed, economists, demographers, planners, corporate financiers and political pundits (at least in the North) frequently invoke overpopulation.

Over 200 years ago, at a time of immense social, political and economic upheavals and deprivation in England triggered by the enclosure of common lands and forests on which peasant livelihoods depended, free market economist Thomas Malthus wrote a story about how nature and humans interact. The punch line was his mathematical analogy for the disparity between human and food increases. Harnessing politics to mathematics, he provided a spuriously neutral set of arguments for promoting a new political correctness – one that denied the shared rights of everyone to subsistence, sanctioning instead the rights of the “deserving” over the “undeserving”, with the market as arbiter of entitlements. The poor were poor because they lacked restraint and discipline, not because of privatisation. This is the essence of the overpopulation argument.

Today, a range of industries use the same argument to colonise the future for their particular interests and to privatise commonally-held goods. In agriculture, for instance, the talk is of extra mouths in the South causing global famine — unless biotechnology companies have the right to patent and genetically-engineer seeds. With respect to water, growing numbers of thirsty slum dwellers are held to threaten water wars — unless water resources are handed over to private sector water companies. And in climate, the talk is of teeming Chinese and Indians causing whole cities to be lost to flooding through their greenhouse gas emissions — unless polluting companies are granted property rights in the atmosphere through carbon-trading schemes and carbon offsets. These are the tools of the main official approach to the climate crisis that aims to build a global carbon market worth trillions of dollars.

Two centuries ago, Malthus was compelled to admit that his mathematical and geometric series of increases in food and humans were not observable in any society. He acknowledged that his “power of number” was just an image — an admission demographers have since confirmed. And for over 200 years, his theory and arguments — that it is the number of people that cause resource scarcity — have been refuted endlessly by demonstrations that any problem attributed to human numbers can more convincingly be explained by social inequality, or that the statistical correlation is ambiguous. Malthus’s greatest achievement was in fact to obscure the roots of poverty, inequality and environmental deterioration. The “war-room” mentality generated by predictions of scarcity-driven apocalypse has always diverted attention away from the awkward social and environmental history of discredited policies and projects – a more important focus of study.

Frequently left out of discussions about tackling malnutrition, hunger, starvation and famine, for instance, are the maldistribution of the world’s food supplies, skewed access to land, trade policies, the hazards of devoting land to agrofuel or carbon offset production, unequal access to money to buy food, and commodity speculation.

If over one billion people do not have access to safe drinking water, it is because water, like food, flows to those with the most bargaining power: industry and bigger farmers first, richer consumers second, and the poor last, whose water is polluted by industrial effluent, exported in foodstuffs or poured down the drain through others’ wasteful consumption… – link

And of course we can always wash our hands of everything by saying humans, driven by base biological urges, are inherently aggressive, selfish, and hierarchical by nature. We can blame our fossil fuel consumption on the optimal foraging theory and the lethal mutation of higher intelligence. We can excuse our self-destructive behavior on account of evolutionary blind spots such as faulty human brain circuitry with its numerous cognitive biases and inability to perceive long-term threats like climate change. We can say that “complex global human systems” are beyond anyone’s control and therefore cannot be altered or stopped. In other words, we can rationalize inaction and put forth many reasons for why we are helpless as our manmade economic system speeds toward the cliff, but as the masses see the system for what it really is, the facade becomes harder and harder to maintain. The mantra of business-as-usual is becoming a curse for most, and if continued on for much longer will most certainly be a death sentence for all.

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Who lives, Who Dies in a Never-Ending Energy Crisis

12 Saturday Apr 2014

Posted by xraymike79 in Climate Change, Corporate State, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Peak Oil

≈ 117 Comments

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Alice Friedemann, Barbara Demick: Nothing to Envy. Ordinary Lives in North Korea, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Cuba, Ecological Overshoot, Energy Descent, Financial Elite, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, North Korea, Peak Oil, The Elite 1%, unwashed public

Empires take what they want, first through diplomatic and economic pressure, then through the use of jackals and mercenaries, and finally with the shock and awe of military might dressed up with the appropriate propagandistic slogans of rescuing a resource-cursed country from its now out-of-favor dictator. ‘Regime change’ has become an acceptable TV euphemism for overthrowing governments. However, when those foreign oil taps start to run dry, important environmental regulations in the homeland get reinterpreted and scaled back in order to open up resources that once were thought of as undesirable. The elite systematically cannibalize their own societies while at the same time extracting massive profits by shredding the social safety net, criminalizing poverty and dissent, stripping away environmental protection, and gutting scientific research. In order to protect their ability to loot the commons, the elite circle believe it is more advantageous to keep the masses ignorant about the true extent of the planetary crisis their policies have created. If science gets in the way of “progress”, then it is summarily dismissed by outright denial, defunding, and deletion from public records as Apneaman points out:

…the gutting of Environment Canada by the Harper gang was an effective strategy in silencing scientists whose research was causing “sufficient embarrassment”. It was not violent, but they are just getting started. Then there are the non violent environmental protesters who are being sent to prison. Could you imagine that 20 years ago? Just getting started. As the benign dog points out, when the dollar hegemony slips even further it won’t be just the government and the rich looking to silence the critics. Does anyone one here really think people like the neo-cons are going to give up the reserve currency status without a fight?

For those countries who are located down low on the totem pole of energy wealth such as North Korea, the coffers of the State are filled by criminal activity of a more mundane variety such as drug smuggling and currency counterfeiting:

North Koreans began to produce meth in “big state-run labs.” The Los Angeles Times reports that narcotics investigators said the North Korean government controlled the production of meth and opium, as well as other drugs, in the 1990s in order to bring in “hard currency” for Kim Jong Il, the late North Korean leader. The government was engaging in the drug trade in order to save and improve its economic state as a nation. I do not by any means agree with the actions North Korean government chose to take. Instead of tending to its people’s health issues, it chose to spread life-threatening drugs throughout the world. In such a heavily government-dependent political system, the people have no hope to turn to a government official and ask for help. Individuals and families turned to the drug in times of desperation, leading to many North Koreans becoming fervent methamphetamine addicts. This situation is devastating and should not be overlooked. According to CNN, a majority — two-thirds to be exact — of the North Korean population has used methamphetamines. It is reportedly accessible in restaurants and has “become the drug of choice of high-ranking officials and the police.” http://www.centralfloridafuture.com/opinion/north-korea-s-meth-addiction-could-spell-disaster-for-us-1.2853884#.U0jHJyhRY20

It is no secret that North Korean diplomats and embassies are self-financing. In fact, they are profit earning and they must remit funds back to Pyongyang. While this means that DPRK diplomatic relations are not a drain on the treasury, as is typically the case with other countries, it does mean that the DPRK’s official representatives are more likely to make headlines for their business dealings rather than political statements. http://www.nkeconwatch.com/2009/11/22/dprk-diplos-arrested-for-smuggling-again/

Liu had been convicted of conspiracy and fraud involving millions of dollars made not by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing but by counterfeiting presses in a foreign country, presumably North Korea. The quality of these “supernote” forgeries is so high that he’d managed to pass enormous quantities through the electronic detection devices with which every Vegas slot machine is supposed to be equipped. The prosecutor was asking the judge to give him close to 25 years, and in the end Liu would receive more than 12. Liu’s crimes threatened not only the integrity of America’s currency but the very fabric of international peace. They were part of a vast criminal enterprise believed to be controlled by the North Korean state, set up and used to finance its nuclear-weapons and ballistic-missile programs. All of this, intelligence analysts say, is coordinated by a secret agency inside the North Korean government controlled directly by “the Dear Leader,” Kim Jong Il, himself. The agency is known as Office 39. (Given the opacity of anything inside North Korea, experts differ on whether “Office” should be “Bureau” or even “Room”—and they also suspect that the number itself may change.) http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/09/office-39-200909

Cuba and North Korea are two interesting examples of countries that are both energy poor but also very different on the sociopolitical spectrum. Cuba appears to be closer to an ideal model for how energy descent should be handled, and North Korea is a much more frightening view of how things are run by a tiny, coddled elite. What follows is a review by Alice Friedemann of “Nothing to Envy. Ordinary lives in North Korea” written by Barbara Demick…

Nothing-to-Envy-9781400139842

North Korea and Cuba were the first countries to lose oil, the lifeblood of civilization. Since we will all share that fate, it’s interesting to see what happened, though keep in mind that how severe the consequences are will depend on the carrying capacity of the region you’re in, how much civil order can be maintained, and the effectiveness of the leaders in power (i.e. see “Lessons Learned from How Cuba Survived Peak Oil” that compares California to Cuba).

There are enormous differences between the fates of Cuba and North Korea. Cuba had many advantages — a benign climate with year-round rainfall where three crops a year could be grown, a culture of helping one another out, and Castro prevented middlemen and speculators from charging astronomical amounts for food. For a detailed understanding of what happened in Cuba read this Oxfam analysis.

North Korea couldn’t be more opposite – a cold mountainous nation with only 15% of its land arable, and dictators so crazy and cruel they’re almost unmatched in history. North Korea might be the only nation with more prisoners per capita than America. There are many kinds of prisons, from detention centers to hard-labor camps, to gulags where your children, cousins, brothers, sisters, and parents would also be sent to for a crime you committed for generations to come. About 1% of the population– 200,000 people –permanently work in labor camps. The threat of these prisons has made it impossible for organized resistance to happen.

It’s hard to escape, and if you do, then your relatives end up in labor camps. Other nations aren’t keen on refugees – South Korea fears a collapse of North Korea and being overrun by 23 million people seeking food and shelter, and China has their own problems with 1.2 billion poor people.

The consequences of peak energy in North Korea are worse than what’s likely to happen initially in America, though some regions of the United States are likely to suffer more than others. On the other hand, when times get hard, group-oriented cultures that depend on a large network of people tend to do better than highly individualist cultures, which is as you can learn more about in Dmitry Orlov’s Post-Soviet Lessons for a Post-American Century.

The only good aspect I could find about North Korea was that the women there are less repressed than in the past. A century ago Korean women were so completely covered in clothing that the Taliban would find no faults. In one village north of Pyongyang women wore 7 foot long, 5 feet broad and 3 feet deep wicker hat constructions that kept women hidden from head to toe. Perhaps even more than Muslim women, Korean women were imprisoned in family compounds and could only leave at special times when the streets were cleared of men. One historian said that Korean women were “very rigidly secluded, perhaps more absolutely than women of any other nation”.

After the Korean War ended, North Korea lost most of its infrastructure and 70% of its housing. It was amazing that Kim Il-sung managed to create a Spartan economy where most were sheltered and clothed, had electricity, and few were illiterate. Grain and other foods were distributed as well. In autumn each family got about 150 pounds of cabbage per person to make kimchi, which was stored in tall earthen jars buried in the garden so they would stay cold but not freeze and hidden from thieves.

North Korea became utterly dependent on the kindness of other countries for oil, food, fertilizer, vehicles, and so on.

What happens when the oil stops flowing? 

In the early 1990s North Korea suffered a double blow at a time when they were $10 billion in debt. China wanted cash up front for fuel and food while at the same time the Soviet Union demanded the much higher price of what oil was selling for on world markets.

The nation spun into a crash. Without oil and raw materials the factories shut down. With no exports, there was no money to buy fuel and food with. Electric plants shut, irrigation systems stopped running, and coal couldn’t be mined.  The results were:

  • Power stations and the electric grid rusted beyond fixing
  • The lights went out.
  • Running water stopped so most went to a public pump to get water
  • Electric trams operated infrequently
  • People climbed utility poles to steal pieces of copper wire to barter for food
  • There were few motor vehicles
  • And few tractors, farming was done with oxen dragging plows

Hunger struck, which made people too exhausted to work long at the few factories and farms that were still surviving.

Oil is liquid muscle. One barrel of crude oil (42-gallons) has 1,700 kilowatts of energy. It would take a fit human adult laboring more than 10 years to equal one barrel of oil.

Perhaps this is why many nations have had no choice but to rely on muscle power after an economic crash or during a war, which means putting many people to work on farms. After the energy crisis, North Koreans over 11 were sent out to the country to plant rice, haul soil, spray pesticides, and weed. This was called “volunteer work”. Now that they couldn’t afford to buy fertilizer, every family was expected to provide a human bucketful of excrement to a warehouse miles away. The bucket was exchanged for a chit that could be traded for food.

Like Mao’s crazy schemes, North Korea’s dictators lurched from one mad idea to another — one day it was goat breeding, the next ostrich farms, or switching from rice to potatoes.

Food staples were grown on collective farms, and the state took the harvest and redistributed it. The farmers weren’t given enough to survive on, so they slacked on their collective fields to grow food to survive on, making the food crisis even worse. In the end, it was people in cities with no land to grow their own food on who ended up starving first. Every year, rationed amounts of food went down.

People were told the United States was at fault, and propaganda campaigns encouraged Koreans to think of themselves as tough, and that enduring hunger without complaint was a patriotic duty, and kept everyone’s hopes up by promising bumper crops in the coming harvest. The Koreans deceived themselves like the German Jews in the 1930s, and told themselves it couldn’t get any worse, things would get better. But they didn’t.

Worse yet, instead of spending money on agriculture, the defense budget sucked up a quarter of the GNP. One million men out of 23 million people were kept in arms – the 4th largest military in the world.

The only place to get food became the illegal black market, where prices were terribly high, sometimes 250 times higher than what the state used to sell food for.

Natural disasters made harvests even worse – in 1994 and 1995 Korea was struck with an extremely cold winter and torrential rains in the summer that destroyed the homes of 500,000 people and rice crops for 5.2 million people.

People began picking weeds and wild grasses to stretch out meals, as well as leaves, husks, stems, and the cobs of corn. Children can’t digest food this rough and could end up in a hospital, where doctors advised the rough material be ground up fine and cooked a long time. It wasn’t long before malnutrition led to increasing numbers of people with pellagra and other diseases. Hospitals soon ran out drugs and other supplies.

Who died?

The rest of the article is at:

http://energyskeptic.com/2014/book-review-of-nothing-to-envy-ordinary-lives-in-north-korea/

 

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Ground Down Under the Machine of Poverty

23 Sunday Mar 2014

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Consumerism, Corporate State, Empire, Inequality

≈ 20 Comments

Tags

Capitalism, Consumerism, Corporate State, Effects of Sexualization in Advertisements, Empire, Gross Inequality, Institutionalized Poverty, Joni Mitchell, Kurt Vonnegut, Materialism, Military Industrial Complex, Social Unrest, The Elite 1%, unwashed public

As corporations sit on trillions of dollars and the wealth gap continues to widen, the vast majority continue to sink deeper into poverty. America can sanctimoniously claim the number one spot yet again, this time with having the highest percentage of children living in poverty amongst all industrialized nations.

Poverty-uplift

This is a guest post by commenter ‘the Heretick’…

602

You’re a grand old flag,
You’re a high flying flag
And forever in peace may you wave.
You’re the emblem of
 The land I love.
The home of the free and the brave.
Ev’ry heart beats true
‘neath the Red, White and Blue,
Where there’s never a boast or brag.
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
Keep your eye on the grand old flag.

You’re a Grand Old Flag
by George M. Cohan

Life in these United States is rough, especially for the working poor. This is a subject that just doesn’t get enough attention. Yes, lot’s of ink is spilled over the truly poor, those who qualify for SNAP (food stamps), rental assistance, utility assistance, and the various other govt. programs, but not for those who slave away year after year, just making enough to keep their heads above water, but never enough to get ahead.

Just consider, as I’m sure you have, the physical and psychological stressors borne by the great unwashed (speaking metaphorically), and the range of mixed messages we must process just to keep our heads on straight.

Let’s start with something basic, sex, always a good start, something we can all relate to because as they say, if someone wasn’t monkeying around, none of us would be here. Being a straight male, I can only write from my own perspective, but the reader is free (of course) to relate my thoughts to whatever fits their own circumstances the best. Look at what is paraded in front of the average red-blooded American man: cleavage, T and A, Giselle, Heidi, The World’s Next Top Model, and let’s not forget Ms. Upton; what a masterstroke of marketing genius! Take plain old Kate. Why she’s just an ordinary girl, the girl next door. Meanwhile back on Planet Earth, how is the average male to look at the old warhorse over on the Barcalounger who has thickened up through the process of having his kids?

As Joni Mitchell so eloquently states:

“Doctors’ pills give you brand new ills
And the bills bury you like an avalanche
And lawyers haven’t been this popular
Since Robespierre slaughtered half of France!
And Indian chiefs with their old beliefs know
The balance is undone crazy ions
You can feel it out in traffic
Everyone hates everyone!
And the gas leaks
And the oil spills
And sex sells everything
And sex kills
Sex kills”

Yup, stuck between a rock and, well, never mind.

Speaking of traffic, we’ve seen them on teevee. It’s the slim young hipsters in their smart cars with their cell phones, bright young faces going places, the packaged and commodified non-conformists creating their calling plan so nobody is late for the show, where no doubt they will strum their guitars and beat their drums (Made in China), and lament the death of the Late Great Planet Earth, Hal Lindsey reference not intended.

C’mon, admit it, it’s creepy. You see them on the street, texting, talking, in their spandex on the treadmill (why don’t they hook those things up to a generator? people would pay).
The perfect people, the enlightened. I’m sure they don’t drink coffee or smoke cigarettes. These people are scary, all in their own orbit, and if they know that they are being controlled, they seem to like it.

And the cars! Why they talk to you! And Sly? He drives a Ferrari, of course. My truck doesn’t talk to me, just bings when I leave the turn signal on or don’t fasten the seat belt, because God knows I would be such a loss or, even worse, a burden, but we’ll get back to that. In any case, it probably would be best to get a great big neon sign to strap to the tailgate that flashed “LOSER” once every 3 seconds. I think the denizens of the ghetto have got it right. Know what they say? “S’up, Dog?” –a statement of fact. You’re a dog, I’m a dog, everywhere a dog, dog. You could even become a bounty hunter, get a TV show, put the other dogs in the kennel.

Yes, all these poor people, such a burden on society, eating our food, sucking up our resources, just too many of them; and if they are lucky enough to have a job? Why they should just be grateful. That’s right, Bob, grateful. It’s not like the Boss Man is making any money off them. Just a big bunch of ungrateful losers, a great big fat burden for the rest of us, we who are smarter, harder workers and who play by the rules, unlike them.

blame-the-poor

My very favorite is the Sunday shows where carefully coiffed and groomed experts give serious statements about current events through their lying horse teeth, perfect pearly white teeth and big mouths being so much more telegenic, don’t you know. Then after you are informed that your common sense opinions on matters of life and death are so very mistaken, you are treated to 5 minutes of adverts for your retirement plan, and how you had better get on the stick boy. Time flies and you better get on the horn and call up T. Rowe Price and make some sound investments with all that extra cash you have lying around. What? What’s that you say? You don’t have a retirement plan? Loser.

You’ll probably become a burden to your children because that is what’s important, the children, isn’t it? Why, you probably shouldn’t have had any, overpopulating the planet as your kind do. Don’t you care about Mother Earth? Probably not, don’t even care about your very own Mother, such a Loser.

But here’s the beauty of it. The battering, the depression, lack of response, that good old deer in the headlights look, it’s for free. Many people don’t realize, but Howie says it best:

“… It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. …

Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say, Napoleonic times.”

Howard W. Campbell Jr.
Slaughterhouse Five
Kurt Vonnegut

Why are Americans never going to revolt? Why will they never effect any meaningful political change? Because they are too busy beating themselves up, beating themselves black and blue; if they aren’t beating themselves up, they’re beating someone else up, on the street, in a foreign country, and of course, there’s no place like home.

The web makes it easy to look up the statistics, crime, poverty, drug usage. There are more people in the US on legal drugs than illegal I would hazard to conjecture, but one thing is for sure, We’re Number 1!  We’re Number 1! We’re Number 1!

Yes, the Good Old USA, the country that gave you road rage, drive by shootings, drone wars, and KFC, it’s Finger Lickin’ Good!

jesuskfc1100

I think we should change the colors on the US flag, and it’s not just because we borrowed the colours from the bloody English (oh, excuse me, the “UK”) or the French , who we all know are Communists. It’s because our flag no longer represents the true state of America, if indeed it ever represented anything at all. Maybe we should just be honest about it and adopt the Silver and Black, Thunder and Lightning, Shock and Awe. Hell, let’s just go all the way, admit we are the Black Hole of the Universe, Raider Nation, Buccaneers, Pirates.

No? Too many contractual commitments? Copyright problems?

Ok, then how about Black and Blue? Such is the state of most of America, figuratively speaking, or is that literally? So confusing. If the injuries are not readily apparent, we can fix that. Just go down to City Hall and try to claim it as yours. Black and Blue doesn’t just tell the whole story though does it? We need something to add a shade of definition; how about something the color of blood? And the contrast of white thrown in for the countless bones crushed beneath the tank tread of Empire.

So what if some of that Red splashes on the camera lens? If it bleeds it leads.

That’s the ticket! By golly, I think we’ve got it, Red, White, Black, and Blue. It’s a Grand Old Flag:

Kentucky Fried Consumers

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Nightmares of the Omnicidal Juggernaut

17 Monday Mar 2014

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

≈ 136 Comments

Tags

6th Mass Extinction, Annalee Newitz, Capitalism, Charles Bukowski, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumer Culture, Corporate State, Dr. Paul Willis, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, General Electric, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Omar N. Bradley, Overpopulation, Privatization of Science, Security and Surveillance State, Singularity Network, Social Unrest, Techno-Optimists, Technocapitalism, Technotopia, The Elite 1%, Transhumanists, unwashed public, Zdzislaw Beksiński, Zygmunt Bauman

Beksinski-x77

What had been designed to be our servants became our masters, then our owners and gods, and finally our destroyer….

Some days I wake up and despise the monotony and pettiness of this culture and its followers: its celebrity worship, its staged news reporting, its chameleon politicians, its conniving marketers of consumerism, its cookie-cutter neighborhoods, its push-button surveillance state, and its clueless masses all working together to create the illusion of normalcy. Everyone goes along with this mindless program like obedient slaves, afraid of the social stigma attached to questioning any radical deviation from what constitutes normal. God forbid anyone openly discusses the cliff we are fast approaching, its sheer drop-off and craggy rocks below coming more clearly into view. One last scramble for the last bit of habitable land at the poles will be the inevitable end game as atmospheric warming catches up to the glacial melt and sea level rise humans have set into motion. In light of all the scientific evidence accumulated over decades, mankind has known for some time that a radical reconfiguration of our socio-economic system was the only way to avoid collapse, as described beautifully back in 2008 by a longtime blogger who has been writing for nearly a decade:

Snap 2014-03-16 at 08.28.17

There can be no “soft-landing” for a species adding another million of itself every 4 and a half days to consume and convert into more and more human flesh what little remains of the planet’s tattered web of life. Worshiping paper symbols of wealth as the only measurement of social and environmental worth, our species has monetized and misunderstood nature, ignoring its true incalculable value. Surely something is amiss when the financial interests of the insecticide industry trump the health of humans and the survival of pollinators. Examining the root cause of such corrosive effects in our economic system, i.e. capitalism, is nearly as taboo as mentioning the collapse of modern civilization. The culturally Pavlovian responses to any such criticism directed at capitalism or the unsustainability of industrial civilization is to argue for the rehabilitation of capitalism into something less destructive and tout humanity’s unfailing ability to adapt to any situation. Reinforced by past successes such as the Green Revolution, robotic exploration of distant planets, and Moore’s Law of technological advancement, the marriage of capitalism and technology has created a mindset which takes for granted the belief that the marketplace will create a hi-tech fix to any and all problems. Little green aliens, paranormal experiences, and techno-utopian futures seem to be more socially acceptable subjects for discussion rather than the collapse of a way-of-life that requires several more Earths if everyone were to live like Americans. Perhaps that is why we get technotopian books like this one:

SAR1000w-300x453

The myth of progress is central to corporate ideologies of materialism, modernism, and technocapitalism. The mythical quality of technological progress was expressed most succinctly in GE’s slogan from the 1950’s: “Progress is our most important product.”

Screen shot 2014-03-17 at 8.34.03 AM

The newly revealed cover-up of GE’s PCB contamination of the Hudson River is just the latest in a not-so-stellar record of “bringing good things to life.”

There are reportedly hundreds of Transhumanist-affiliated groups(life extensionists, techno-optimists, Singularitarians, biohackers, roboticists, AI proponents, and futurists) in the world with the largest, the Singularity Network, claiming 10,000 members. Few in our society can imagine this planet exhausted of its resources, inhospitable to agriculture, and devoid of all its keystone species, but such a world is fast becoming reality as industrial civilization steamrolls the planet under the direction of technocapitalism. Millions of factories continue to spit out products by the ton to be shipped to every corner of the globe. The ravenous hordes struggling for a higher standard of living never think twice about the energy and eco-social damage tied to these consumer products that magically appear on store shelves.

72 (10)

“A transhuman future is a day-dream and we are rapidly running out of the luxury of being able to do nothing about the very real problems that face us now. A transhuman future is a nightmare of the electric sheep.”
~ Dr. Paul Willis

The boundaries of a finite planet have been temporarily extended by technology, giving mankind a false sense of power over his environment, but technological complexity is not immune to the law of diminishing returns; the problems are overwhelming the solutions:

“…Technology cannot bring back a concentrated resource deposit like soil, phosphates and fossil fuels that have been dispersed and converted so completely that no amount of energy can get them back. The links in the technological evolutionary chain have been successful so far, but all it takes is a single broken link that will drop us into the waste heap of failed evolution. The next link of the chain always exists in the imaginations of men, technological wonders to carry us forward, but malignant growth, the kind sponsored by corporate, banking and Wall St. entities, will guarantee the current technological link is our last one…”

For a culture that lives for today and ignores the consequences of tomorrow, the show must go on even as cracks and weaknesses in this false façade become more evident day by day. Omar N. Bradley may have been thinking about weapons of mass destruction when he made an observation about mankind’s tools of self-destruction, but he could not have been more prescient in the broader sense of technology’s reach into our lives when he said, “If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner.”

As in previous fallen civilizations, today’s elite are more out of touch with our precarious position than most realize, and they will try to cling to their wealth and social status despite how much blood flows in the streets as the masses bear the brunt of collapse first –poverty, disease, war, starvation, etc., but ultimately no one can run from the death of the Earth’s oceans, the spread of novel diseases, and the die-off of trees. Those now deciding how our technologic scalpels will be wielded are not institutions looking out for the greater good of humanity, but by the ultra wealthy for their own personal financial enrichment and narcissistic interests:

Snap 2014-03-16 at 23.14.16

“For better or worse,” said Steven A. Edwards, a policy analyst at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, “the practice of science in the 21st century is becoming shaped less by national priorities or by peer-review groups and more by the particular preferences of individuals with huge amounts of money…

…that personal setting of priorities is precisely what troubles some in the science establishment. Many of the patrons, they say, are ignoring basic research — the kind that investigates the riddles of nature and has produced centuries of breakthroughs, even whole industries — for a jumble of popular, feel-good fields like environmental studies and space exploration…

..the rise of science philanthropy may simply help “rich fields, universities and individuals to get richer.” The new patrons are responsible for one of the most striking trends on these campuses: the rise of privately financed institutes, the new temples of science philanthropy.

This privatization of science is just one more aspect of capitalism’s usurpation and corruption of the body politic.

ZB_20

The art in this blog post is from Polish artist Zdzislaw Beksiński whose intricately detailed paintings of apocalyptic landscapes, mutated and deformed humans, and surreal images were said to be inspired from his nightmares. He never gave titles to his paintings and signed them on the back. It is said he would often wake up in the middle of night to paint his dark visions. In 2005 he was found dead lying on the floor of his Warsaw flat in a pool of blood, stabbed 17 times.

Perhaps the greatest nightmare of modern man is the fact that he is at the mercy of an ever-expanding industrial civilization running on autopilot, as Zygmunt Bauman described, with no realistic way to stop its onslaught of toxic waste, greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, and numerous other ecocidal features. I can see this horror when I look at much of Beksiński’s work, but I also see nature reclaiming the battlefield after man has defeated himself.

To a great degree, humans are their own worst enemy, prisoners of their flawed cerebral wiring with its neuroses, blind spots, and cognitive biases, but the real enemy is the omnicidal juggernaut our numbers have created; its base urges can’t be contained.

BeFunky_null_1.jpg

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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

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  • 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
  • GM must face class actions over defective transmissions -judge March 23, 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

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RSS AdBusters

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RSS Against the Grain

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RSS Aljazeera

  • Trump holds first 2024 campaign rally in Waco, Texas March 26, 2023
  • Honduras cuts diplomatic ties with Taiwan March 26, 2023
  • Why are so many people in France angry about pension overhaul? March 25, 2023
  • Israeli defence minister calls for halt to judicial overhaul March 25, 2023
  • Russia’s nuclear arsenal: How big is it and who controls it? March 25, 2023

RSS Aljazeera – Opinion

  • Trump holds first 2024 campaign rally in Waco, Texas March 26, 2023
  • Honduras cuts diplomatic ties with Taiwan March 26, 2023
  • Why are so many people in France angry about pension overhaul? March 25, 2023
  • Israeli defence minister calls for halt to judicial overhaul March 25, 2023
  • Russia’s nuclear arsenal: How big is it and who controls it? March 25, 2023
  • Putin says Russia will deploy nuclear weapons in Belarus March 25, 2023
  • Brazil’s Lula postpones China trip after catching pneumonia March 25, 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

  • [Manning Marable] By Any Means Necessary: Malcolm X March 23, 2023

RSS AlterNet

  • 'Libraries saved my life': Internet archive to appeal 'chilling' federal ruling against digital books March 26, 2023
  • 'I couldn’t care less': Trump supporters at Waco rally undeterred by potential indictment March 26, 2023
  • 'Must be Opposite Day': Twitter promptly debunks Trump’s claim 'nobody laughed' at U.S. when he was president March 26, 2023
  • 'Whoever she is': Marjorie Taylor Greene disses Nikki Haley in Trump-loving rant March 25, 2023

RSS Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

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RSS Anarchist News

  • Your Space Colonization Sucks! - Uncivilized Podcast 23 March 25, 2023
  • Ireland: Solidarity Graffiti with Alfredo Cospito March 25, 2023
  • Anathema: Volume 9 Issue 1 March 25, 2023
  • The Valencia Anarchist Bookfair is Back March 25, 2023
  • Long Haul community center faces displacement March 25, 2023

RSS Antony Loewenstein

  • The human cost of the “green” revolution March 24, 2023
  • TRT World interview on surging violence in Palestine and Israel’s Supreme Court March 23, 2023
  • Dangers of an Israeli spy in your pocket February 25, 2023

RSS Apocadocs

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RSS Arctic Emergency Institute

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

RSS Arctic Methane Emergency Group (AMEG)

  • 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

  • Sea surface temperature at record high March 18, 2023
  • We are now in the Suicene March 12, 2023
  • Will Steffen: The dilemma of pioneer climate scientists February 12, 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 maximum at fifth lowest on satellite record March 15, 2023
  • Transition time March 2, 2023
  • Antarctic sea ice settles on record low extent, again February 27, 2023

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

  • Modi’s model is at last revealed for what it is: violent Hindu nationalism underwritten by big business | Arundhati Roy February 18, 2023
  • This is no ordinary spying. Our most intimate selves are now exposed | Arundhati Roy July 26, 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

  • Don't let it slip away March 17, 2023
  • And hope that my dreams will come true February 19, 2023
  • You can not do that, it breaks all the rules January 28, 2023

RSS Bad Astronomy

  • I Should Be in Jail For How Much I’m Enjoying the Gwyneth Paltrow Trial
  • Gwyneth Paltrow and the Ozempic Craze
  • We’re Launching a Fiction Podcast That Will Change How You Think About Tech

RSS Barbara Ehrenreich

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RSS BBC: Science & Environment

  • Have we found the 'animal origin' of Covid? March 25, 2023
  • Commercial development of gene-edited food now legal in England March 23, 2023
  • What is gene-edited food and is it safe to eat? March 23, 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

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RSS Brane Space

  • Solutions To Simpler Problems In Special Relativity (March 17 post) March 24, 2023
  • New Paper Claims Cosmic Interloper (Oumuamua) Is Just An "Ordinary Comet" - But Top Harvard Astronomer Disagrees March 24, 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

  • In Memoriam: Lowell Sachnoff March 24, 2023
  • How Russia’s retreat from the Vienna Document information exchange undermines European security March 24, 2023
  • There’s a ‘ChatGPT’ for biology. What could go wrong? March 24, 2023

RSS Business Insider

  • Trump kicks off 2024 with a lifeless stump speech, folding indictment hysteria into a growing list of grievances March 26, 2023
  • If you think you're being 'quiet fired,' just talk to your boss and find out what's up March 25, 2023
  • Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick takes credit for arranging Trump's debut 2024 campaign rally: 'I picked Waco' March 25, 2023
  • Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp says he's not running for the White House in 2024, hasn't heard from Trump, and will keep 'an open mind' on the GOP presidential field March 25, 2023
  • A home-improvement contractor from Connecticut who went to fight in Ukraine posted a video of his location online, revealing his unit's location, and then admitted he falsified his military record March 25, 2023
  • Snack wraps are coming back — just not to McDonald's March 25, 2023
  • Staring down a possible indictment, Trump holds a rally in Waco. A Texas newspaper said the choice isn't a dog whistle but an 'air horn' to far-right groups. March 25, 2023
  • 'RM Palmer is devastated': Cause of fatal explosion at Pa. chocolate factory that rocked nearby building still a mystery March 25, 2023
  • The NHL's Arizona Coyotes suspend minority owner after assault-related arrest at Aspen hotel March 25, 2023
  • Manhattan DA warns staff they might hear 'fictional explosions' as Lady Gaga films 'Joker' sequel nearby and threats loom over Trump investigation March 25, 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

  • HIGH FOOD COSTS March 17, 2023
  • DRONES AND CLONES March 17, 2023
  • DRONES AND CLONES March 17, 2023
  • DRONES AND CLONES March 17, 2023
  • FUTURE OF CRYPTO March 17, 2023
  • TRUMP CAN STILL PACK ‘EM IN March 17, 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

  • Jet Fighters Endanger Tohono O'odham This Week March 25, 2023
  • Bridge to the Ancestors: Walk Run with Carrizo/Comecrudo Youths in Texas Borderlands March 23, 2023
  • California: The State of Genocide and Forced Sterilizations of Native People March 22, 2023

RSS Center For Biological Diversity

  • Lawsuit Targets Federal Deforestation Project Near Nevada National Park March 23, 2023
  • Legal Agreement Will Bring New Protections From Logging to Oregon Coast Coho Salmon March 23, 2023
  • New Eastern Monarch Butterfly Count Indicates Pollinator Still Threatened March 22, 2023

RSS Center for Investigative Journalism

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RSS Center for Economic & Policy Research

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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

  • Federal Government Plans Breakup of Organ Transplant Monopoly March 24, 2023

RSS Class Warfare Blog

  • The Danger of Religious Knowledge March 24, 2023
  • Follow-up to “War Criminals to the Left of Me . . .” March 20, 2023

RSS Cliff Schecter

  • ‘My city is gone’: Many dead as tornado tears across Mississippi March 26, 2023
  • Trump holds first 2024 campaign rally in Waco, Texas March 26, 2023
  • Honduras cuts diplomatic ties with Taiwan March 26, 2023
  • Why are so many people in France angry about pension overhaul? March 25, 2023
  • Israeli defence minister calls for halt to judicial overhaul March 25, 2023
  • Russia’s nuclear arsenal: How big is it and who controls it? March 25, 2023

RSS Climate and Capitalism

  • Ecosocialist Bookshelf, March 2023 March 16, 2023
  • Insect Apocalypse in the Anthropocene, Part 3 March 15, 2023
  • Greta Thunberg’s Climate Book March 7, 2023
  • Insect Apocalypse in the Anthropocene, Part 2 March 5, 2023
  • Nuclear flatlines while renewables soar March 3, 2023
  • A Neglected Chapter in the History of Capitalism March 1, 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

  • Faster, higher, hotter: What we learned about the climate system in 2022 (3) February 23, 2023
  • Faster, higher, hotter: What we learned about the climate system in 2022 (2) February 21, 2023
  • Faster, higher, hotter: What we learned about the climate system in 2022 (1) February 20, 2023

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

  • This is Fine March 26, 2023
  • New Video: Europe Now a Global Warming Hot Spot March 26, 2023
  • With Hot Gulf Waters – Devastating Twisters Could Signal Rough Season March 26, 2023

RSS Climate Progress

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RSS Climate Snapshot

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

RSS ClimateSight

  • 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

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RSS ClusterFuck Nation

  • KunstlerCast 373 — Jeffrey Tucker of the Brownstone Institute on the Covid Bamboozlement of Donald Trump, and Other Developing Matters March 24, 2023
  • The Season is Here March 24, 2023

RSS Cocktailhag – FDL

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RSS Colin Tudge

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

RSS Common Dreams: News

  • Internet Archive to Appeal 'Chilling' Federal Ruling Against Digital Books March 26, 2023
  • 'Extremely Dangerous Escalation': Putin to Station Russian Nukes in Belarus March 25, 2023
  • 'When We Fight, We Win!': LA School Workers Secure Deal After 3-Day Strike March 25, 2023
  • Trump Rally in Waco Called Not a Dog Whistle, But a 'Blaring Air Horn' to Far-Right March 25, 2023
  • 'No One's... Having Fun': Surveys Show Soaring US Economic Pessimism March 25, 2023

RSS Consortium News

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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

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RSS CorrenteWire

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RSS CorrenteWire – Quick Hits

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RSS Counter Currents

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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

  • The United States Should Ban TikTok March 23, 2023
  • The hierarchy of excuses March 20, 2023
  • Parenting Boys, Parenting Girls March 16, 2023
  • How to restore work-life balance in academia March 13, 2023

RSS Crooks and Liars

  • LNMC With Taj Majal March 26, 2023
  • Killer Kyle Cries The Blues About Being Sued March 25, 2023
  • How We Can Hack The Media To Get It Back March 25, 2023
  • Italy's Giorgia Meloni's Impassioned Plea For Ukrainian Aid March 25, 2023

RSS Cryptome

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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

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RSS Damn the Matrix

  • On NOT joining the dots… March 24, 2023
  • The Hydrogen fallacy explained March 23, 2023

RSS Dan Hagen

  • 'Shazam:' Quirky Charm of the Gods March 19, 2023
  • The GOP's House of Fascism March 8, 2023

RSS Dangerous Intersection

  • More Damage Threatened by “Anti-Racism” March 26, 2023
  • NPR Ignores Gender Dimorphism When Commenting on Transgender Sports March 25, 2023
  • What It’s Like for an Accomplished Woman Swimmer to Compete Against a Biological Man March 24, 2023

RSS Dark Ages America

  • A Grotesque Bulvan. However... March 4, 2023
  • The Sopranos, William Golding, and Contemporary America February 4, 2023
  • 7 million and going strong January 6, 2023
  • Karma City December 13, 2022

RSS David Bollier

  • Expanding Regenerative Agriculture through Open Source Technologies March 1, 2023
  • Binna Choi of the Casco Art Institute: Curating Art through Commoning February 1, 2023
  • John Thackara on Designing for Life January 1, 2023

RSS David Cay Johnston (Link – National Memo)

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RSS David Cay Johnston (Link – Tax Analysts)

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RSS David Harvey

  • Reading Marx’s Grundrisse | Session 4 March 2, 2023
  • BOOK LAUNCH: A Companion to Marx’s Grundrisse with David Harvey, Kanishka Goonewardena and Nancy Fraser February 26, 2023
  • Reading Marx’s Grundrisse | Session 3 February 23, 2023

RSS David Hilfiker

  • Welcome August 4, 2011

RSS David McNally

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RSS David Roberts

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

RSS Death by Car: Capitalism’s Drive to Carmageddon

  • 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

  • [Event] Lierre Keith in London: What is to be Done and From Living Planet to Necrosphere [Event] March 24, 2023
  • On DGR, Resistance, Our Home and Nature March 20, 2023
  • Green Deceit: Forest Management, EVs, and Manufactured Consent March 17, 2023
  • Treasure Hunt for Coastal Gaslink [Communique] March 13, 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

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RSS Democratic Underground – Breaking News

  • House Republicans rebuke Bragg's 'unavailing' refusal to provide testimony on Trump probe March 26, 2023
  • McConnell released from inpatient therapy after concussion, fractured rib March 25, 2023
  • Putin says Moscow to station nuclear weapons in Belarus, first time since 1990s March 25, 2023
  • Afroman Sued By Law Enforcement Officers Over Use Of Raid Footage March 25, 2023
  • Pope expands sex abuse law, reaffirms adults can be victims March 25, 2023
  • Mississippi tornadoes kill 23, injure dozens overnight (UPDATE) March 25, 2023
  • LAUSD reaches historic deal, meets demands of union workers following 3-day strike March 25, 2023
  • 2 dead, at least 9 unaccounted for after explosion rocks Pennsylvania chocolate factory March 25, 2023
  • Gordon Moore, Silicon Valley pioneer who co-founded Intel, dies at 94 March 25, 2023
  • Russian strikes in Ukraine kill 10 civilians, wound 20 more March 25, 2023

RSS Democratic Underground – Good Reads

  • The Republican Trump MAGA Desantis Anti-Woke Agenda is a flop March 26, 2023
  • If Trump Is Prosecuted, George W. Bush, Cheney, and Kissinger Should Be Too March 25, 2023
  • Turkey and Hungary Not Invited to Biden's Big Democracy Summit Biden spurned NATO March 25, 2023
  • The Largest Source of Stolen Guns? Parked Cars. March 25, 2023
  • Stolen Valor: The U.S. Volunteers in Ukraine Who Lie, Waste and Bicker March 25, 2023
  • Trump is stoking the fires of Waco March 25, 2023
  • Is Ron DeSantis the Republican Michael Dukakis? March 25, 2023
  • MICH: Dem. Gov Whitmer Signs Historic WORKERS RIGHTS Bills Into Law, 1st to Repeal Right to Work Law March 25, 2023
  • Parents Storm D.C., Tell the GOP Whose Rights They Forgot in Their "Parent Bill of Rights" March 25, 2023
  • The Paranoid Style in American Politics - by Richard Hofstadter (Harper's Magazine, 1964) March 25, 2023

RSS Democracy Now

  • Cop City: Judge Denies Bond to People Rounded Up in Mass Arrest for Opposing Police Training Facility March 24, 2023
  • The Candidate and the Spy: James Bamford on Israel's Secret Collusion with Trump to Win 2016 Race March 24, 2023
  • Rep. Ro Khanna on Regulating Banks, TikTok, China, Ukraine & His Vote on the "Horrors of Socialism" March 24, 2023
  • "France Is Furious": Anger Grows at Macron for Raising Retirement Age as Millions Strike & Protest March 24, 2023
  • Headlines for March 24, 2023 March 24, 2023
  • "Disaster": Iraqi Journalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad on U.S. Invasion, Sanctions, Occupation & What's Next March 23, 2023
  • A Police Killing Inside a Hospital: Ben Crump on Death of Irvo Otieno During Mental Health Crisis March 23, 2023
  • Headlines for March 23, 2023 March 23, 2023
  • The U.S. Owes Iraq "Just Compensation": Muslim Peacemaker Sami Rasouli on 2003 Invasion & Aftermath March 22, 2023
  • Andrew Bacevich on China's Rise as Global Superpower & Decline of U.S. Empire After Iraq Invasion March 22, 2023

RSS Derrick Jensen

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RSS Desdemona Despair

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RSS Desertification

  • Family gardens in the Sahara desert March 25, 2023
  • How should we react if a food and fodder plant is called an invasive species? March 25, 2023
  • Africa is increasingly drier: Economic research estimates reduction in income due to desertification March 21, 2023
  • Africa is increasingly drier: Economic research estimates reduction in income due to desertification March 21, 2023
  • Poppy plantation and agents of desertification March 21, 2023

RSS deSmog Blog

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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

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RSS Dispatches from the Underclass

  • Bombshell w/ Seymour Hersh: US Blowing Up Nord Stream Was ‘Act of War’ March 2, 2023
  • 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

RSS Dissent Magazine

  • A New Path to Diversity March 23, 2023
  • Michael Walzer Responds March 22, 2023
  • Liberal Commitments March 21, 2023
  • Letters March 20, 2023

RSS Dissident Voice

  • China Denounces US TikTok Ban Threat as “xenophobic witch hunt,” Firmly Opposes Possible Forced Sale March 25, 2023
  • Historic Meeting between Xi and Putin March 25, 2023
  • The Theatrics of COVID March 25, 2023
  • Imran Khan, a Zionist Army Chief, and Pakistan-Israel Normalization March 25, 2023
  • American Labor: Prospects and Possibilities March 25, 2023
  • The Terrorist Forefathers of Israel: The Irgun and Lehi March 25, 2023
  • Banking Crisis 3.0: Time to Change the Rules of the Game March 25, 2023
  • How Chelsea Manning’s Court-Martial Laid the Groundwork for Julian Assange’s Prosecution March 24, 2023

RSS Do the Math

  • Keeping Up On Appearances January 6, 2023

RSS Dollars & Sense Blog

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RSS Doug Stanhope

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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

  • Satanic Tyranny Now Rules Canadians March 24, 2023
  • Perhaps the French People Will Employ the Guillotine .  Many think it is past time for it. March 24, 2023

RSS Dredd Blog

  • Mass Production of Pandemics - 2 March 25, 2023
  • The Skulls They Are A Changin' - 2 March 23, 2023
  • Appendix T-Z TSTAC March 23, 2023
  • Appendix O-S TSTAC March 23, 2023

RSS Ear to the Ground – Truth Dig

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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

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RSS Earth Observatory: Image of the Day

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RSS Earth Observatory: Natural Hazards

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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

  • 5 Slot Machine Tips to Help You Win More Often and Have More Fun at the Slots March 24, 2023

RSS Ecohuman World

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RSS Eco-Shock News

  • Radio Ecoshock: Why Normal Is Never Coming Back March 22, 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

  • On International Forests Day: Reality of Forests in India March 24, 2023
  • P.V. Satheesh, the Original Millets Man of India March 22, 2023
  • It did not stop the dam, but is it a failure? February 23, 2023
  • How Nepal Regenerated its Forests: Communities know their Forests Best February 21, 2023
  • 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

RSS Economic Hardship Reporting Project

  • Medical Residents Nationwide Are Unionizing. What Does That Mean for the Future of Healthcare? March 24, 2023
  • Little House of Propaganda: Homesteading Myths and the Sentimentality of Self-Reliance March 20, 2023
  • Every Child Has the Right to a Free School Meal March 20, 2023
  • From Meager Pay to Malnutrition, School Cafeterias Are in Crisis March 17, 2023
  • MSNBC Interviews EHRP’s Alissa Quart March 15, 2023
  • Nonprofit Quarterly Interviews EHRP’s Alissa Quart March 15, 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

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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

  • Kash’s Castles of Scatter and Evan Corcoran’s BCC
  • Happy Crime-Fraud Exception Day, for Those Who Celebrate
  • On Joshua Schulte’s Alleged Substantial Amount of CSAM … and Other Contraband

RSS End of More

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RSS Energy Balance

  • "Living the Change," Film Screening + post-film Q&A. 6 pm, April 17th (2023), Reading Biscuit Factory (Reading, UK). March 17, 2023
  • “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

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

  • Sources of Water In A Drier World | Aquaseek | Marco Simonetti March 16, 2023
  • Italy’s Drought – A Creeping Disaster March 8, 2023
  • Cambridge Climate Lecture Series 2023 – Lecture 1 with Prof. Kevin Anderson February 20, 2023
  • 2023 – The Dawning Era Of ‘Overshoot’ & ‘Intervention’ (Climate Engineering) December 30, 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

  • What happened to Let’s Wrestle?
    Find out what the members of Let's Wrestle are doing now. And listen to I won't lie to you. It's a marvellous tune and video.
  • 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.

RSS Facts for Working People

  • THE COVER-UP: Biden and the Destruction of the Nordstream Pipeline March 23, 2023
  • Bank busts and regulation March 21, 2023
  • The UAW Has New Leadership. What Will The Reformers Do Differently is the Question. March 21, 2023

RSS Fair: Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting

  • What Fox’s Bad Calls on Election Night 2020 Say About 2024 March 24, 2023
  • Anonymous Sources Are Newsworthy—When They Talk to NYT, Not Seymour Hersh March 10, 2023
  • Early Polling Tells You Little About Next Year’s GOP Primary February 24, 2023

RSS Fairewinds

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RSS Fairfax Climate Watch

  • How to Slow Down Global Warming March 14, 2023
  • Not All Asphalt Types Are Created Equal March 8, 2023
  • How Does Climate Change Affect Your Health? July 18, 2022

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

  • Healthy Habitats March 18, 2023
  • A Dialogue with Professor Tim Jackson: the Art of the Wellbeing Economy, March 29 at 7:30 pm Irish time March 16, 2023
  • Environmental Justice and Carbon Pricing March 10, 2023

RSS FireDogLake

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RSS Fish Out of Water

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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

  • Worth Protecting: A photo album by Better Path Coalition and FracTracker Alliance March 1, 2023
  • The Truth About Blue Hydrogen: Green Fuel or Greenwash? February 10, 2023
  • 2022 Pipeline Incidents Update: Is Pipeline Safety Achievable? February 1, 2023

RSS George Monbiot (Alternet)

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RSS George Monbiot (Official Home Page)

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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

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RSS Global Guerrillas

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

RSS Global Occupy News

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RSS Global Oneness Project

  • Farewell RSS Feeds May 18, 2022

RSS Global Research

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RSS Global Research CA

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RSS Gonzalo Lira

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RSS Green is the New Red

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

RSS Green on Huffington Post

  • 10-Year-Old Girl Armed With Sand Bucket Helps Save Stranded Giant Octopus March 25, 2023
  • Much Of West Coast Faces Salmon Fishing Ban As Population Plummets March 25, 2023
  • Fish Can Sense Each Other's Fear, Scientists Find March 23, 2023
  • Elon Musk’s Company Plans To Dump Wastewater In This Texas River — And Locals Have Concerns March 22, 2023
  • ‘Daily Show’ Guest Host Al Franken Reveals Exactly Why The News Is 'Pointless' March 22, 2023
  • 16 Places Where You Can See Cherry Blossoms In The U.S. March 21, 2023
  • Residents Sue Louisiana Parish To Halt Polluting Plants March 21, 2023
  • Biden’s Budget Cuts Funding For Nuclear Energy At A Pivotal Moment March 21, 2023

RSS Greenpeace Blogs

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RSS Greg Palast

  • The Madness of King Powell March 23, 2023
  • Reagan’s Treason: October Surprise and the $23 Million Payoff March 20, 2023

RSS Gregor Macdonald

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RSS Grinning Planet

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RSS Grist

  • Itochu quietly assembled a gigantic home battery network in Japan March 25, 2023
  • What is ESG, the investment strategy under attack by Republicans? March 24, 2023
  • The IPCC says we need to phase down fossil fuels, fast. Here’s how the US could do it. March 24, 2023
  • Indigenous leaders demand a seat at international water negotiations March 23, 2023

RSS Growth Busters

  • Fact-Checking News of China’s “Demographic Crisis” February 10, 2023
  • 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

RSS Guernica Mag

  • In-N-Out for Iftar March 20, 2023
  • Ism March 20, 2023
  • From Here March 20, 2023
  • Sound Shadow March 13, 2023

RSS Guy McPherson’s Blog

  • Edge of Extinction: We’ve Been Warned! March 23, 2023
  • Science Snippets: Is the Beginning of El Niño the End of Us? March 20, 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

  • Longing to be Free (a guest post) March 24, 2023
  • AI and the Arts March 23, 2023
  • Grooming Us to Hate and Fear March 18, 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

  • Michael Levin | Cell Intelligence in Physiological and Morphological Spaces March 19, 2023
  • 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

RSS Ian Welsh

  • Open Thread March 25, 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

  • Palestinians Demand Freedom at Israeli Consulate in SF
  • Activists Demand Right to Rescue Farm Animals
  • Chevron Doubles Profits, Sending Transportation Costs Soaring
  • UC Berkeley Continues to Retain Thousands of Native Remains

RSS Indybay Newswire

  • War poker and Imperial moralism
  • Elected officials and coalition groups urge the Legislature to enact price gouging bill
  • Financial crisis - it's crashing again and The time of change
  • Who’s in Control of How We Remember the Iraq War?
  • Passing of a park maker

RSS Information Clearing House

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RSS Inside Left – The OFFICIAL Anti-Olympics Blog™

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RSS Institute for Public Accuracy

  • Behind the French Government Machinations that Sparked the Protests March 24, 2023
  • Push to End Yemen War March 23, 2023
  • Media Outlets Miss the Point on “Pandemic Preparation” March 22, 2023
  • Insulin Advocates on the Insulin For All Act of 2023 March 22, 2023
  • Did the Reagan Campaign Defeat Carter by Colluding with Iran to Hold on to the Hostages? March 21, 2023
  • Putin and ICC “Rank Hypocrisy” 20 Years After Iraq Invasion March 20, 2023

RSS International Debt Observatory

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RSS io9

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RSS iWatch: Global Muckraking

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RSS Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer Blog

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

RSS Jacobin

  • Public Education Is Vital for Democracy. But It’s Not the Solution to Poverty or Inequality. March 25, 2023
  • You Should Know About Labor Leader John Brophy March 25, 2023
  • Academic Workers at Rutgers University in New Jersey Are Poised to Strike March 25, 2023
  • When Tito Turned to the West March 25, 2023
  • The Weakness of Labor, Not Automation, Is the Greatest Challenge Facing Workers March 25, 2023
  • With Victory in Ukraine Out of Reach, Putin Is Stepping Up His War on Domestic Enemies March 25, 2023

RSS Jeremy Scahill

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

RSS Jill Stein

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RSS Joe Bageant

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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

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RSS John Zerzan: Anarchy Radio

  • Anarchy Radio 03 21 2023 March 22, 2023
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RSS Jonathan Turley

  • “How Does This Keep Transgender Students Safe?”: Pittsburgh Under Fire for Allowing Conservatives to Speak on Campus March 25, 2023
  • Res Ipsa Hits 69,000,000 March 25, 2023
  • Manifest Destiny: Alvin Bragg Searches for His Criminal Kailasa March 24, 2023
  • Stanford’s DEI Dean Doubles Down on Duncan Controversy March 24, 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

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RSS Kate Ausburn

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RSS Keith Farnish

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

RSS Knight Science Journalism – MIT

  • The 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

  • What the dramatic drop in European demand for natural gas showed us March 19, 2023

RSS Lack of Environment

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RSS Law and Disorder

  • Law and Disorder March 20, 2023 March 20, 2023
  • Law and Disorder March 13, 2023 March 13, 2023
  • Law and Disorder March 6, 2023 March 6, 2023

RSS Le Monde diplomatique – English edition

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RSS Le Monde diplomatique – Open Page

  • Iraq invasion, twenty years on March 24, 2023
  • Jacinda Ardern calls it a day March 23, 2023
  • March: the longer view March 14, 2023
  • Ukraine: the dangerous war the left won't talk about March 13, 2023
  • Scotland's ‘every last drop' March 13, 2023

RSS Leaving Babylon

  • Even Iran is laughing at us November 9, 2020

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RSS Life Itself

  • Goodness, mostly March 25, 2023
  • Light or Darkness? March 21, 2023
  • AI and Chaos Forever March 7, 2023

RSS Limited, Inc.

  • Illegitimacy in France: Macron's bossism March 24, 2023
  • poem by K. Chamisso March 23, 2023
  • The plutocrat problem, or What Macron hopes to accomplish by lowering the quality of French life March 22, 2023

RSS Link TV – Earth Focus

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RSS Low-Tech Magazine

  • Can We Make Bicycles Sustainable Again? February 28, 2023
  • What if We Replace Guns and Bullets with Bows and Arrows? November 23, 2022
  • When Lethal Weapons Grew on Trees November 23, 2022

RSS LRB Blog

  • Fifty Degrees in the Persian Gulf March 24, 2023
  • Beyond Compare March 23, 2023
  • A Long Weekend in Paris March 22, 2023
  • Not So Clever Politics March 21, 2023
  • Feed the Birds March 17, 2023

RSS Luis J. Rodriguez

  • The death of a grandson to fentanyl January 1, 2023
  • Updates from Luis J. Rodriguez (Mixcoatl Itztlacuiloh) August 2, 2022
  • Help Luis J. Rodriguez become California governor January 5, 2022

RSS Mabinogogiblog

  • Covid Means that the NHS Needs 6000 More Beds March 17, 2023
  • The Economics of Medical Science March 3, 2023
  • It's Curtains for Wasted Room Heat March 2, 2023
  • If you oppose climate change, join the 50/60 campaign January 3, 2023

RSS Manicore – Accueil

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RSS Marginal Revolution

  • Are social media making us miserable? March 25, 2023
  • Saturday assorted links March 25, 2023
  • What should I ask Kevin Kelly? March 25, 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

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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

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RSS Matt Bruenig

  • Equality and Equity March 5, 2023
  • Who Decides for Children? February 21, 2023
  • The Total Fertility Rate Is Kind of a Nonsense Statistic February 17, 2023

RSS Matt Taibbi

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RSS Matt Wuerker

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RSS Max Keiser

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RSS Media Lens

  • Arguments Against Despair March 9, 2023
  • ‘That Paper Is Dead’ – The Power Of Propaganda February 23, 2023
  • ‘A Beautiful Outpouring Of Rage’ – The Observer, The Great Peace March And Nord Stream February 17, 2023

RSS Media Matters – Environment

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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 Collapse of Antiquity – release March 22, 2023
  • With Dennis Kucinich on the Financialized Economy, Collapse March 22, 2023
  • Bond Market Play Reveals Systemic Crisis March 16, 2023

RSS Michael Miller – Viewpoint

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RSS Michael Parenti

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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

  • Students for Justice in Palestine’s 12th annual conference; Stop Cop City in Atlanta March 25, 2023
  • Israeli authorities charged with safeguarding cultural sites are now led by far-right settlers March 25, 2023

RSS Mons Angelorum: Deadly Serious 3

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RSS Mons Angelorum: Waiting for Good Weather

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RSS Mother Jones

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RSS MR Zine

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

RSS Musings on Iraq

  • This Day In Iraqi History - Mar 25 Iraq’s Information Min Sahaf began telling media US losing during invasion of Iraq March 25, 2023
  • This Day In Iraqi History - Mar 24 Ayatollah Khamenei Pres Khatami decided to send Badr Brigade into Iraq to carry out ops vs US during invasion March 24, 2023
  • This Day In Iraqi History - Mar 23 Nuri al-Said became PM 1st of 9 times Went after opposition Closed newspapers Took control of parliament to assure passage of Anglo-Iraq Treaty March 23, 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

  • Links 3/25/2023 March 25, 2023
  • Gender Reveal… It’s Brands! March 25, 2023
  • Your ‘Recycled’ Grocery Bag Might Not Have Been Recycled March 25, 2023
  • The Collapse of Antiquity: Greece and Rome as Civilization’s Oligarchic Turning Point March 25, 2023
  • 2:00PM Water Cooler 3/24/2023 March 24, 2023

RSS Naomi Klein

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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

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RSS New Left Project

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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

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RSS Notes from the Aboveground

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

RSS NYT Examiner

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RSS Occupy.com

  • Capitalism's Conclusion, Part II: Robber Barons Musk and Bezos Bring Back the Gilded Age March 16, 2023
  • Green New Deal XXI: The Rich Are Killing Our Planet. Make Super-Wealth History March 3, 2023
  • Capitalism's Conclusion, Part I: What the Ohio Train Derailment Exposed March 2, 2023
  • '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

RSS Occupy las Vegas

  • Gain Exposure to Pre-IPO & Pre-IDO Tokens with PrePO March 19, 2023
  • Silvergate Bank Collapse: US Regulators React, Crypto Industry at Risk? March 12, 2023
  • Connect AWS, Meta, and Google Cloud with Chainlink: Unlock Real World Use Cases March 5, 2023

RSS Occupy Wall Street

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RSS Oddity Central

  • Man Exercises 8 Hours a Day for 20 Years, Now He Can’t Walk March 24, 2023
  • Man Climbs 4,100m Mountain in Three-Piece Suit and Leather Shoes March 24, 2023
  • This $43,000 Luxury Meteorite Purse Is Literally Out of This World March 24, 2023
  • Talented Soap Maker’s Creations Look Good Enough to Eat March 23, 2023
  • 29-Year-Old Woman Poses as Teenage High School Student to Relieve Glory Days March 23, 2023
  • German Brewery Claims Its Beer in Powder Form Could Change Industry Forever March 22, 2023

RSS Of Two Minds

  • Bull or Bear? The Ultimate Source of Market Instability March 23, 2023
  • Welcome to the Era of Warring Elites March 21, 2023
  • We've Forgotten That Business-Cycle Recessions Are Essential March 20, 2023

RSS One Penny Sheet

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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

  • When the Economy Gets Squeezed by Too Little Energy March 6, 2023
  • 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

RSS Pando Daily

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RSS Paul Haeder

  • More Like Cousteau’s Son, Not Bradley Cooper’s Twin! March 24, 2023
  • How Far Do We Go to Save a Species? March 24, 2023
  • Flying into a Cloud of Souls March 19, 2023

RSS Paul Kingsnorth – Elswhere

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RSS Paul L. Street

  • Gee It’s Nice Your State is Blue, the War on Abortion’s Still Coming for You March 2, 2023
  • The Fascist Cancer Has Spread Across the United States Body-Politic March 2, 2023
  • The Horrors of Capitalism: A House Resolution You Won’t Be Hearing About Anytime Soon March 2, 2023
  • Let’s Get Over “It Can’t Happen Here”: Amerikaner Fascism isn’t Missing a Beat March 2, 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

  • Last Energy Signs Deals Worth $19 Billion for Nuclear Plants March 23, 2023
  • Russia-China ties enter ‘new era’ as Xi meets Putin in Moscow March 22, 2023
  • Gasoline Is About To Get More Expensive March 18, 2023

RSS Peak Prosperity Blog

  • Deutsche Bank Sinking Beneath The Waves March 24, 2023
  • Greg Hunter Interviews Chris Martenson March 23, 2023
  • Our Unsustainable Future March 21, 2023

RSS Peak Prosperity: Daily Digest

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RSS Peak Prosperity: Featured Voices

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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

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RSS Physicist-Retired Newsvine

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RSS Pink Tank

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RSS PlanetSave – Climate

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RSS Political Violence @ a Glance

  • Political Links to the Water Mafia in Karachi March 23, 2023
  • Why Democracies Aren’t More Reliable Alliance Partners March 21, 2023
  • Viewpoint: Protecting Women Politicians from Online Abuse March 9, 2023

RSS Popular Resistance

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RSS PRN with Danny Schechter

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RSS Progressive Radio Network

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RSS ProPublica

  • How Cigna Saves Millions by Having Its Doctors Reject Claims Without Reading Them March 25, 2023
  • EPA Asks for More Public Input on Asbestos After ProPublica and Others Reveal New Information March 24, 2023
  • Federal Study Calls U.S. Stillbirth Rate “Unacceptably High” and Recommends Action March 23, 2023
  • Juveniles Locked Up for Life Will Get a Second Chance in New Mexico. But the State Must Locate Them First. March 22, 2023
  • A Chicago Suburb Stopped Ticketing Students. But It Won’t Stop Pursuing a 3-Year-Old Case Over Missing AirPods. March 22, 2023

RSS Project Censored

  • Entire Tribal Towns Forced to Relocate Due to Climate Crisis March 24, 2023
  • Study Exposes Electric Utilities’ Climate Misinformation Campaigns March 22, 2023
  • Glitchy ICE App Jeopardizes Immigrants, Raises Privacy Concerns March 22, 2023

RSS Public Intelligence

  • NCTC Guide: The Structure of Violent Extremist Ideologies
  • (U//FOUO) NCTC Guide: Process of Violent Extremist Disengagement