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Collapse of Industrial Civilization

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Collapse of Industrial Civilization

Tag Archives: Noam Chomsky

Evolutionary Dead-Ends

19 Monday Mar 2018

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

≈ 95 Comments

Tags

6th Mass Extinction, Arctic Blue Ocean Event, Capitalism, Carl Sagan, Climate Change, Collapse of Civilizations, Donald Trump, Dr Charlie Veron, Ecological Overshoot, Elizabeth Kolbert, Herman Daly, Jared Diamond, Micro-Plastic Pollution, Noam Chomsky, Overpopulation, Peak Oil, Stephen Boyden, Svante Arrhenius, Techno-Fix, U.S. National Climate Assessment, Wealth Inequality, William Rees

“It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.” ~ Elizabeth Kolbert

Have things improved since I wrote my last essay a year ago for this blog? Have we miraculously transformed our entire energy system into one that does not poison and degrade the natural world? Have we slowed the onslaught of plastic pollution choking the planet’s rivers, lakes, and oceans? Have we done anything meaningful to halt the deterioration of the planet’s biodiversity toward mass extinction? Has this global, hi-tech civilization done anything significant to avert its own demise? Despite a constant flow of warnings from the scientific community and even a letter signed by more than 20,000 scientists, the simple answer is no. We have failed to address the complexity of our rising population and a degrading environment. Yes, we are self-conscious and thus able to recognize the fact that we are destroying the only home we have, but will the end result differ much from a population overshoot of bacteria in a Petri dish? Dependent on a continuous stream of finite resources imported from across the globe, modern megacities contain the seeds of their own destruction and that of all other life forms upon which humanity depends for its survival. The exponential growth of modern civilization ensures that one of the next doubling times will produce an absolute increase in overshoot that tips the world into unavoidable collapse. Enough damage may well have already been done; we’re just waiting for inertia to catch up to the impacts.

2017 set a global record for the most skyscrapers built in a single year and 2018 is predicted to eclipse it. The fossil fuel energy spent to construct those concrete and steel buildings translates into a melting cryosphere. Not to mention the fact that the carbon footprint of some of the world’s biggest cities is 60% bigger than previously estimated. “Renewable energy” still only comprises a tiny fraction of global energy consumption and plans for a total transition will take decades, if it’s even possible. Any growth in ‘renewable energy’ has been offset by increased consumption of fossil fuels in the developing world. 2017 marked a new record high in CO2 emissions with 2018 set to break that record. Global CO2 emissions have yet to peak, and the UN has warned that we are on course for a 3C world. It doesn’t help that the current U.S. administration plans to cut funding for alternative energy R&D, with the Energy Department expecting no drop in the U.S. carbon footprint through 2050. Having embedded itself in the U.S. government over a century ago, the fossil fuel industry has consistently worked to block climate change action and undermine environmental laws. A UK shipping executive recently admitted his industry is guilty of doing the same to protect their bottom line. The utilities companies knew the dangers as well. Like most corporations, the viability of their business model depends on perpetuating an unsustainable way of life. With warnings ignored since the late 1800s starting with the work of Svante Arrhenius, it should be obvious by now that intelligence without sapience has produced deadly results. A new study finds “the most accurate climate change models predict the most alarming consequences.” The recently released U.S. National Climate Assessment has similar findings:

While climate models incorporate important climate processes that can be well quantified, they do not include all of the processes that can contribute to feedbacks (Ch. 2), compound extreme events, and abrupt and/or irreversible changes. For this reason, future changes outside the range projected by climate models cannot be ruled out (very high confidence). Moreover, the systematic tendency of climate models to underestimate temperature change during warm paleoclimates suggests that climate models are more likely to underestimate than to overestimate the amount of long-term future change (medium confidence). (Ch. 15)

In a new ominous research finding, the evil twin of climate change(ocean acidification) is threatening the base of the marine food chain by disrupting the production of phytoplankton. This is yet another positive feedback loop increasing the rate of global warming. Climate feedback loops and ice sheet modeling are two weak areas of climate science, which means many unpleasant surprises. This is why researchers are constantly astonished. Adaptation is not a luxury most organisms have at the present rates of change. Techno-fixes are but a pipe dream.

A diet reliant on animal agriculture is one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gases, biodiversity loss, and oceanic dead zones, yet global per capita meat consumption is increasing rapidly in both developing and industrialized countries. Investments have been made to increase global plastic production by 40% over the next decade, even as all the world’s natural bodies of water become inundated with microplastics. Coca Cola alone produces 110 billion throwaway plastic bottles every year – an astounding 3,400 a second. Plastic waste from the military is another massive contributor that cannot be overstated. Half of all plastics have been made in just the last thirteen years. Over 90% of the so-called purified bottled water sold to the public has been shown to be contaminated with hundreds and even thousands of microplastic pieces. A byproduct of petroleum and the epitome of our throw-away society, plastics have truly become ubiquitous in the environment, entering the food chain at every level.

A study published last year pulls no punches by describing the mass extermination of billions of animals in recent decades as a “biological annihilation.” Extinction risks for many species are vastly underestimated. Insects, the base of the terrestrial food chain, are faring no better. With the steep loss of invertebrates, multiple studies indicate the world is “on course for an ecological Armageddon”. Trees are dying at an unprecedented rate from extreme weather events, portending profound effects to Earth’s carbon cycle. Coral bleaching events are now happening four times more frequently than a few decades ago. Dr Charlie Veron, a renowned scientist specializing in corals and reefs, said this last year:

“Half of all coral colonies on the Great Barrier Reef died over the past two years due to coral bleaching,’’ Dr Veron said.

“It’s going to be a horrible world. Young people now are going to curse the present generation for what we’ve done. We’ll have left them a planet in dire straits.’’

“Between a quarter and a third of all marine species have part of their life cycle in a coral reef. Taking away the reefs precipitates ecological collapse of the oceans. It’s happened twice in the past due to volcanoes releasing carbon dioxide and lava flows, but that was nothing like the amount of carbon dioxide being released now.’’

No one thought that ecosystems such as The Great Barrier Reef would be circling the drain this soon. How these changes are affecting flora and fauna as well as human societies is critical, but it’s like trying to predict the outcome of a high speed car crash as it’s happening. Hindsight is 20/20, but it only serves a purpose if you are still around to learn from it. Abrupt climate change is happening now and we’re not prepared for it. Fighting to protect the very life support system we all share, environmentalists are under attack worldwide and being murdered in record numbers. The problem of poaching is so bad that scientists are advising people to scrub all GPS data from their nature photos before publication to help protect endangered species from being ransacked. The voracious consumption and defilement of the planet continues unabated, despite clear signs the once-stable biosphere that enabled the establishment of human civilizations is quickly unraveling(Puerto Rico, Houston, never-ending wildfire seasons, melting Arctic and Antarctic sea ice, widespread glacial retreat, shrinking lakes, and many other signs of a destabilized climate). The following picture taken in Oregon last summer illustrates my point; seemingly oblivious to the massive wildfires raging in the background, a group of golfers continues playing a round…“We’re trading a habitable climate for a few generations of easy living.”

Climate change is just one of many factors in mankind’s planetary overshoot. We even have a day designated in recognition of our oversized ecological footprint which comes earlier every year, with nary a mention of it in official economic reports. As Herman Daly has explained, the global economic system treats the earth as a business in liquidation. The destruction of the natural world is enshrined in our positive economic indicators, i.e. rising GDP. And if need be, those numbers will be massaged to meet expectations. On a subconscious level, the growth imperative applies to all species including humans:

Humans share two behavioral traits with all other species that are critically important to (un)sustainability. Numerous experiments show that unless or until constrained by negative feedback (e.g., disease, starvation, self-pollution) the populations of all species:

• Expand to occupy all accessible habitats.

• Use all available resources.

Like mindless bacteria bent on their own success, humans are victims of their own DNA and ingenuity. Any civilization that develops energy harvesting technologies allowing for rapid population growth will generate entropy which will in turn almost certainly have strong feedback effects on the planet’s habitability. Our exponentially growing economy is on a collision course with an immovable ecosphere.

The end of the world is coming for the naked ape, not by a cabal of bankers or any sort of cockamamie conspiracy tale like chemtrails, but by us –the entire human race– and the economic system we have developed. We’ve become hostages to the complex structures and ever more intricate specialization of an economic system designed to exploit diminishing resources. Pollution and waste are of little concern for capitalism until they become a significant drain on overall profitability and new frontiers to exploit are exhausted. When profitability on a global scale is finally threatened by climate change, it will be far too late. The response will be militarized and authoritarian.

On a more insidious note, capitalism is driven by a deep instinctive drive to accumulate which was a very survival-positive compulsion during our several million years of evolving into Homo sapiens to overcome dry periods and other threats. Capitalism hits on this genetic proclivity, and when we get a clear opportunity to grab a big time accumulation, get rich and all, social good be damned. Our big and powerful cerebral cortex is hard-pressed to find a cure.

“I am rather pessimistic. The maladaptive assumptions of prevailing cultures are deeply ingrained. The notion that economic growth must take precedence over all other considerations and general ignorance of biological and ecological realities do not augur well for the future.” ~ Professor Stephen Boyden, human ecologist

In Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond found that a common factor was the myopic and self-serving decision-making of elites who believed they could insulate themselves from the consequences of societal disasters. As the elites reaped the rewards, the resulting damage to everyone else built up over time until calamity struck. The grim reality is that history has proven such cycles of extreme wealth inequality have only been broken by catastrophes –plagues, revolutions, massive wars, and collapsed states. The U.S. has now reached a degree of wealth disparity unequaled in history:

Overall, the highest-ever historical Gini the researchers found was that of the ancient Old World (think Patrician Rome), which got a score of .59. While the degrees of inequality experienced by historical societies are quite high, the researchers note, they’re nowhere near as high as the Gini scores we’re seeing now…”it is safe to say that the degree of wealth inequality experienced by many households today is considerably higher than has been the norm over the last ten millennia,” the researchers write in their paper.

The crisis of civilization is planet-wide this time. We’ve turned a utopian world of plenty into a dystopian world of fascist-leaning governments, industrial disasters, collapsing ecosystems, and technological addiction. We have a Commander in Chief who tweets bizarre debunked conspiracies at 3 am, gets his intel briefings from right-wing TV shows, dismantles any remaining hindrances to unbridled capitalism, and doesn’t know the difference between weather and climate. Public discourse has been dumbed down to the level of Fox news talking points and tribal groupthink. Those who can discern actual ‘fake news’ from scientific fact are left to watch in horror as mainstream scientific projections continue to prove overly optimistic. Not only are regulations being cut left and right, they are not being enforced. Government science advisors are being purged and replaced with mouthpieces for industrial polluters. In fact, this administration is actively working to delegitimize and destroy government institutions. A sizable population of low information voters supports such actions, but it’s only to their own detriment. Although both major parties are under the sway of corporate power, Trump and company represent an exceptionally predatory class of people. The Union of Concerned Scientists is monitoring the current administration’s war on science and public health; their latest report is here:

The administration’s one-year record shows an unprecedented level of stalled and disbanded scientific advisory committees, cancelled meetings, and dismissed experts. The consequences for the health and safety of millions of Americans could be profound.

We live in an age of unparalleled technological advancement, while at the same time we turn a blind eye to the disintegrating natural world that gave birth to us, having forgotten that our destiny lies in our relationship with the earth. Like Icarus who, in his exuberance, ignored his father’s warnings and flew too close to the sun, modern man with his technology has ascended to great heights without heeding sound advice.

“We’ve arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster.” ~ Carl Sagan

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The Stark Realities of Baked-In Catastrophes

02 Saturday Apr 2016

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

≈ 45 Comments

Tags

6th Mass Extinction, Antarctic Ice Melt, Anthropogenic Climate Change, Arctic Sea Ice Melt, Capitalism, Climate Change Denial, CO2 Emissions, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Economic Hitman, Environmental Collapse, Intensified Hydrologic Cycle, Mangled Jet Stream, Noam Chomsky, Sea Level Rise, Sustainability, Techno-Fix, The Unsustainability of Mega-Cities, Warren Buffett

Joe-Webb-Greetings-From-California

In a civilization gone mad with delusions of grandeur, we’re left with tatters of human sociability held together by rancid mythologies.

Despite human fossil fuel burning recently reported to be “flat”, CO2 levels have been on a tear for the last six months, reaching new worrying levels which have some wondering whether permafrost melt may be contributing to the unusually high spike if no decline happens soon. The giant holes in Siberia serve as an ominous sign. Considering that the current El Niño is contributing only 10% to what we are now seeing, runaway global warming may be accelerating worldwide. But don’t worry, Warren Buffett says climate change is no more of a problem than the Y2K bug and will be profitable through increased premiums and inflation.

Ever dire studies continue to reaffirm worst case scenarios, making clear to anyone paying attention that Earth in the next century will be unrecognizable from its current state. Basic planetary geography and atmospheric conditions will be altered through warming oceans and rising sea levels which are now increasing faster than at any time in the past 2800 years. On average, sea levels were between 50 and 82 feet higher the last time CO2 levels were at 400ppm. Glaciologist Jason Box expects ice melt from the West Antarctic to become the biggest contributor to sea level rise in the coming decades due to a feedback loop not in the climate models. CO2 levels have been increasing around 3ppm per year, a twentyfold increase since pre-industrial times when the highest recorded increase was 0.15 ppm per year. We’ve long since passed the tipping point of melting Arctic summer sea ice; 300-350 ppm of CO2 was the threshold for many parts of the climate. These changes are irreversible on a timescale of human civilizations. Even if all human industrial activity magically ceased today, the footprint man has already left will be felt for eons.

In our warming world, the hydrologic cycle is changing and creating extreme weather; crop-destroying droughts and floods are becoming more frequent. The Jet Stream is transforming into something different, becoming wavier with higher ridges and troughs prone to stagnating in the same region. As global temperatures rise over time, hotter air will be trapped under these layers of high pressure from a mangled Jet Stream, cooking everything to death. Rising winter temperatures are beginning to destroy the “winter chill” needed for many fruit and nut trees to properly blossom and produce maximally. Climate change is also disrupting flower pollination and pushing fish toward the North/South poles, robbing poorer countries at the equator of crucial food resources. In a new study, marine scientists are surprised to find a disturbing trend in the increasing numbers of a specific type of phytoplankton, coccolithophores, which have been “typically more abundant during Earth’s warm interglacial and high CO2 periods.”

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Homo sapiens have only been on the planet for the equivalent of a few seconds in geologic time but have managed to overwhelm and foul up all of earth’s natural processes and interdependencies, leaving a distinct layer in the sedimentary record. There is nothing modern humans do that is truly sustainable. Here are a few glaring examples:

  • Techno-fixes are built into the IPCC’s projections for maintaining a habitable planet for humans.
  • Money megacities spend for adapting to climate change is linked more to protecting valuable capital than vulnerable people (Capitalism is doing an outstanding job of converting the planet into dead dollars.)
  • Nuclear Power: “Even if there were no issues like meltdown or waste proliferation, the cost and time for planning, permitting, and constructing nuclear plants is prohibitive. The Arctic ice will already be gone.
  • Japan prime minister: We came within a “paper-thin margin” of nuclear disaster and the evacuation of 50 million people in 2011
  • Germany’s carbon dioxide emissions increased by an estimated 10 million tonnes from 2014 to 2015, in a blow to the country’s claims to climate leadership.
  • New study published in the journal Environmental Pollution shows that urban soil can emit up to 72% as much CO2 as fossil fuels burned within a city and at a rate of up to twice that of rural soils.
  • 90% of Indigenous in Brazil’s Amazon Suffer Mercury Poisoning: A new study shows that water and food sources for 19 Indigenous communities have been massively affected by illegal mining.
  • Satellite images suggest tropical forests from the Amazon to the Philippines are disappearing at a far more rapid pace than previously thought, a University of Maryland team of forest researchers say.
  • African elephants ‘killed faster than they are being born’
  • Desertification in China is a major problem for Beijing, as the country’s deserts are growing, threatening environmental, economic, and political stability.
  • The environment is now being destroyed by corporations in the name of green growth. Sham greenwashing projects are created, funded, and enforced by the IMF and World Bank.
  • Unknown continental-scale process is dumping phosphorus into streams and lakes across the U.S.
  • According to a new study, efforts to curtail world temps will almost surely fail: “A person living today uses about four times as much energy as a person did in the early 1900s.”
  • Greenpeace says China increasing coal-fired capacity: “There is a very rapid and accelerating net increase in coal-fired generating capacity”
  • UN envoy warns of environmental activist murder ‘epidemic’
  • Remember this headline from 2013?: Arctic methane release could cost economy $60 trillion -study. Our response was to go on a fracking binge which increased our methane emissions by some 30%.
  • While the resource intensity of GDP may be falling (less resources needed to produce 1$ worth of goods/services), the absolute decoupling of resource use, emissions, pollution, etc from GDP growth is the only thing that matters and that is not happening. If the world’s population continues to grow as projected and current lifestyles do not change, global resource consumption will increase anywhere from 2 to 5 times by 2050. It defies logic that a continually growing economy would be able to reduce its resource intensity down to near-zero to achieve a sustainable ecological footprint.
  • According to recent research, even if we converted 100% of farmland to reforestation projects it would only lower temperatures 0.45C by the end of the century. Converting half of global farmland to reforestation would result in just a 0.25C drop. Other recent studies have come to the same conclusion:

No amount of reafforestation or growing of new trees will ultimately off-set continuing CO2 emissions due to environmental constraints on plant growth and the large amounts of remaining fossil fuel reserves,” Mackey says. “Unfortunately there is no option but to cut fossil fuel emissions deeply as about a third of the CO2 stays in the atmosphere for 2 to 20 millennia.

ambiente-01

Relying on machines for answers to the existential problems of a species run amok with planet-destroying tools and weaponry is rather ironic and tragic. We’re locked-up inside a complexity trap of our own making. The human propensity for tool-building coupled with our discovery of fossil fuels has created a set of living arrangements in which we are now enslaved to those machines and tools. The globalized capitalist economy externalizes its destruction and atrocities, keeping the masses in a state of ignorance and denial. Our corporate overlords are not conscientious citizens, but mindless organizations whose sole purpose is to grow profits no matter the external damage done to society and the environment. Between the economic oil hitmen who ensure that profits flow smoothly and GOP politicians who openly espouse their science illiteracy, a hospitable climate for future humans seems remote. Hopeful delusions have given way to the stark reality of our predicament as scholars like Noam Chomsky who originally started his career fighting for a modicum of social justice have now set the bar at just the chance of human survival. Despite the best efforts of scientists, environmentalists, and activists, the wealthy countries most able to do something won’t “get it” until famine, disease, and war come to their country. All is being left for the almighty ‘free market’ to sort out at the same time that climate change, a conflict multiplier, ramps up.

imageedit_3_7415100861

The sixth mass extinction gathers steam and climate inertia works to catch up to the catastrophic ecological collapse already baked-in. All the while, modern man engages in the spectacle of tribal politics(building walls, exuding military strength, recapturing past glories of their nation) and presidential candidates discuss the size of their penis.

For those who come to understand modern man’s predicament, it can either be the ultimate mind fuck or an epiphany that helps a person appreciate the fragility of life, the urgency of living in the here and now, and the grand cosmic joke of a global, hi-tech civilization that arose from the burning of ancient fossil remains only to have those fumes become a deadly curse, extinguishing any trace of our lofty accomplishments…

The fossil record, Plotnick points out, is much more durable than any human record.

“As humanity has evolved, our methods of recording information have become ever more ephemeral,” he said. “Clay tablets last longer than books. And who today can read an 8-inch floppy?” he shrugged. “If we put everything on electronic media, will those records exist in a million years? The fossils will.”
– Link

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A Slow and Systematic Genocide

12 Tuesday Aug 2014

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Corporate State, Empire, Inequality, Military Industrial Complex, Neo-Colonialism

≈ 110 Comments

Tags

"Mow the Lawn", Amira Hass, Disproportionate Force, Fascism, Gaza, Genocide, Ghettoization, Heathcote Williams, IDF (Israel Defense Forces), Intifada, Irgun Zvai Leumi, Israel, Israeli Blockade, Israeli/Palestinian Conflict, Likud Party, Menachem Begin, Militarism, Military Industrial Complex, Nafeez Ahmed, Noam Chomsky, Open-Air Prison, Operation Protective Edge, Palestine, Qassam Rockets, Right-Wing Herut (or "Freedom") Party, Robert Fisk, Sahar Vardi, Smuggling Tunnels, The Dahiya Doctrine, The West Bank, Uri Avnery, Warfare State

Israel Bleeding“People who call themselves supporters of Israel are actually supporters of its moral degeneration and ultimate destruction.” ~ Noam Chomsky

There are a number of Israelis, such as Sahar Vardi and Uri Avnery, who strongly reject the occupation of Palestinian lands and the militarization of Israeli society. Although they recently lost their exemption status from military service, an ultra-orthodox sect of Judaism known as the Haredi whose numbers comprise 10% of the Jewish state are also opposed to war and the violent land grabs of Israeli settlers. There are others as well, but their voices are suffocated by powerful forces which have no interest in ever finding a peaceful solution to the Israeli/Palestinian crisis.

“…not only does Israel now occupy 80% of the area of historic Palestine, but it – via the water company Mekarot – also takes 80% of the water resources from the 20% of the land that is left to the Palestinians…” – link

Looking back into history, one finds that the current right-wing ruling Likud party of Israel has roots in the Irgun Zvai Leumi (Hebrew for “National Military Organization”), a terrorist Jewish organization which played an integral part in the establishment of Israel: 

“…The Irgun has been viewed as a terrorist organization or organization which carried out terrorist acts. In particular the Irgun was branded a terrorist organisation by Britain, the 1946 Zionist Congress and the Jewish Agency. The Irgun believed that any means necessary to establish the Jewish State of Israel, including terrorism, was justifiable.

The Irgun was a political predecessor to Israel’s right-wing Herut (or “Freedom”) party, which led to today’s Likud party. Likud has led or been part of most Israeli governments since 1977.” – link

In fact, Menachem Begin, the sixth Prime Minister of the State of Israel, was a terrorist leader of Irgun Zvai Leumi and founder of the Likud party. As they say, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.

The disproportionate force and indiscriminate killing of this year’s Operation Protective Edge are a crafted policy of the IDF:

“This Dahiya doctrine, developed at Tel Aviv University, calls for disproportionate force against civilians and civilian infrastructure to extract the maximum pain from those civilians, to make them stop the resistance–an absolute collective punishment crime against humanity.”
– link

The thousands of primitive Qassam rockets fired by Hamas have killed 28 people and injured 1,900 since 2001, whereas Israeli hi-tech missiles have killed thousands and injured tens of thousands of Palestinians in the same time period as the following chart illustrates:

(Click to Enlarge)IP_conflict_deaths_total

The chart above does not have the complete death toll as of today, so a few thousand more Palestinians and a few dozen Israelis must be added to the body count. As the popular saying goes, war carried out by the state is simply terrorism with a bigger budget.

Just as America pursued a westward expansion of its territory with the ideology of manifest destiny and implemented the Indian Removal Act of 1830 which removed native people by force, if necessary, from desirable territories within state borders and herded them into less valuable land, so too is Israel pursuing a similar strategy. Palestinians have been isolated into two areas, the Gaza Strip (including East Jerusalem) and the West Bank. The Gaza Strip is sealed off on its land borders with Israel by concrete and steel walls, a double wire fence, watchtowers and checkpoints, and sensors and buffer zones. This Israel–Gaza barrier is equipped with state-of-the-art surveillance technology and manned by armed Israeli police. To complete the land enclosure of Gaza at its southern border, a steel wall that will extend 60 feet deep into the ground is being erected by Egypt with the help of American and French money and expertise. Last year, the Egyptian military resorted to flooding Gazan smuggling tunnels with sewage. The Israeli navy controls all ingress and egress from Gaza ports, while Israeli drones and fighter jets rule the Gazan skies. The West Bank is similarly ghettoized and in the process of being walled off. Ironically, Israel has exiled the Palestinians to the very same sort of ghettos that confined and segregated the Jews for centuries in Europe and later in the Nazi-occupied countries.

…ghettoization is itself the aim, having been implemented for the past 65 years. In other words, the aim – unfolded with the advent of time -has been to concentrate the Palestinians in reserves, after most of their land had been robbed of them. And if they desert and move abroad, it’s of their own free will. A direct planning and ideological line stretches between the enclaves in which the Palestinian citizens of Israel live and those of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

This is the real Israeli historical compromise. It is not with the Palestinians, but with the dictates of reality and among the various Zionist ideological currents. The crowded, offensive reservations – the creation of which is violence, pure and simple – are a compromise between the craving to eject the Palestinians from their land and the recognition that regional and international conditions do not permit it.
~ 
Amira Hass, Palestinian ghettos were always the plan

gaza

While the U.S. exterminated the buffalo which was the North American Plains Indian’s primary source of food and material for clothing, shelter, tools and religious icons, Israel has a policy of precisely calculating the number of calories to be allowed into the open-air prison of Gaza in order to control dietary intake and keep the people on the brink of malnutrition. To circumvent this blockade, Hamas built tunnels and estimates are that 75% of the goods that stock Gazan shelves are smuggled through these subterranean corridors. Contrary to current mainstream media propaganda, these tunnels were built out of a necessity for survival rather than for terrorist purposes. Israeli gunboats also prevent Gaza fishermen from fishing more than two or three miles off their coast despite the fact that the Oslo Accords agreement granted access to 20 nautical miles off the Gaza coast.

The Israeli navy uses different tactics of torture to punish the fishermen for persistently fishing, including shooting with live ammunition (on numerous occasions injuring fishermen), shelling, shooting with high-powered water cannons [all of which is simultaneously designed to damage the boats and equipment], at gunpoint forcing fishermen to strip naked and (after a long wait in the cold air) to jump into freezing waters and swim over 50m to the waiting naval ship before hauling the fishermen up, blindfolding and handcuffing them, and abducting them to Israel for interrogation unrelated to issues of fishing. – link

Due primarily to the blockade and previous Israeli airstrikes on power plant infrastructure, electricity generation has in recent years been severely curtailed to less than half of normal demand in Gaza. Loss of energy to waste treatment plants has caused “up to 90 million liters of partially treated sewage to discharge into the Mediterranean Sea every day.” The current Israeli bombardments on July 29, 2014 have now left Gaza in an even more dire condition:

“If there were one attack that could be predicted to endanger the health and well-being of the greatest number of people in Gaza, hitting the territory’s sole electricity plant would be it,” said Eric Goldstein, deputy Middle East and North Africa director. “Deliberately attacking the power plant would be a war crime.” – link

Snap 2014-08-11 at 21.15.38

Most wars are started under false pretenses and Israel’s current “mowing of the lawn” is no different, as Fair.org reported, but Israel has the backing of a super power to legitimize its sadistic war crimes. Western media outlets parrot the crudest of Israeli propaganda. As America’s number one recipient of military and economic aid, Israel has proven itself an integral linchpin of the American empire:

“Israel’s demonstration of its military prowess in 1967 confirmed its status as a ‘strategic asset,’ as did its moves to prevent Syrian intervention in Jordan in 1970 in support of the PLO. Under the Nixon doctrine, Israel and Iran were to be ‘the guardians of the Gulf,’ and after the fall of the Shah, Israel’s perceived role was enhanced. Meanwhile, Israel has provided subsidiary services elsewhere, including Latin America, where direct US support for the most murderous regimes has been impeded by Congress. While there has been internal debate and some fluctuation in US policy, much exaggerated in discussion here, it has been generally true that US support for Israel’s militarization and expansion reflected the estimate of its power in the region.

The effect has been to turn Israel into a militarized state completely dependent on US aid, willing to undertake tasks that few can endure, such as participation in Guatemalan genocide. For Israel, this is a moral disaster and will eventually become a physical disaster as well. For the Palestinians and many others, it has been a catastrophe, as it may sooner or later be for the entire world, with the growing danger of superpower confrontation.” ~ Noam Chomsky

With a larger percentage of its economy devoted to the military and security industry than any other country (even the U.S.), Israel is a militarized warfare state.

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Last month, Robert Fisk wrote that the current Israeli/Palestinian conflict is about land and Nafeez Ahmed wrote that it is about Gaza’s gas reserves. I say it’s about land and resources, but it’s also about war profiteers feeding the military industrial complex with endless conflict. From the gas chambers of the Holocaust to today’s slow and systematic genocide of the Palestinian people, it’s about man’s inhumanity to man and the vicious cycle of history repeating itself.

Excerpt from the poem

The Children of Gaza
& the Profits from their Genocide

by Heathcote Williams

…

For over a third of Israel’s income
Comes from its exporting its weapons,
And since it’s cultivating its deadly fruit
In its Gazan hot house at a profit,
Then why would it see the need for peace?

‘Operation Cast Lead’ in 2009
Boosted Israeli Arms sales
To a record 6 billion dollars.
It killed 1,471 Palestinians.

‘Operation Pillar of Defense’
The second large scale operation in Gaza
Was launched in November 2012
And Israel’s weapons sales that year
Set a new all time record
Of 7,000, 000,000 dollars,
While 169 Palestinians lay dead.

In ‘Operation Protective Edge’
Over a thousand would die in July 2014,
And whatever its final body count
The price will have been considered worth it
By the thriving Israeli arms business.

As Israel ruthlessly destroys the besieged Gaza Strip,
Elbit Systems, its largest developer of military technology
And its drone-maker, benefits from the bloodshed.

Since 8 July, 2014, when Israel began its latest offensive,
US-traded shares of Elbit Systems,
Climbed 6.1 percent
According to Bloomberg Business Week.

Israel’s three-week long massacre
Of 1,200 Palestinians in Gaza,
Including nearly 300 children,
“Has pushed Elbit’s stock close to the highest level since 2010
While its valuation on a price-to-earnings basis
Is near the most expensive in five years.”

Israel, in other words,
Makes bloodshed its business.

…

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The Loneliness of Anti-Imperialist Fighters, by Andre Vltchek

03 Thursday Jul 2014

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Corporate State, Empire, Inequality, Military Industrial Complex, Neo-Colonialism

≈ 22 Comments

Tags

Andre Vltchek, Capitalism, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Empire, Financial Elite, Inverted Totalitarianism, Investigative Journalism, Military Industrial Complex, Noam Chomsky, War for Profit, War on Terror

For a glimpse into the life of someone who is actually doing the dangerous and solitary work of true investigative reporting, exposing the dark underbelly of Western imperialism and global capitalism, please read the recent blog post of Andre Vltchek and support his work.

Richard Falk has said of Vltchek:

Chomsky and Vltchek help us to realize that an array of powerful forces are using their wealth and influence to prevent us from seeing. We are allowed to see only as much as the gatekeepers of the public mind want us to see, and yet we are not relieved from using our capacities for sight. Reading Chomsky and Vltchek removes the scales from our eyes, at least temporarily, as they have managed to elude these gatekeepers, but at considerable risk, with a display of moral courage, civic responsibility, and extraordinary intellectual energy. I learn a lesson in civics from their vigilance: as citizens of constitutional democracies we retain the freedom, and hence possess a heavy responsibility to see for ourselves what is being done in our name…

Algérie Résistance

Andre Vltchek. D.R.

It is late at night and you cannot sleep. Ebrie Lagoon is right behind the window of your hotel, but it is hardly visible at this hour. You are in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, West Africa.

You are here because you were informed that the President of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, also known at ‘Chocolate King’, has been getting his cocoa from the fields of this country. You are also convinced by several of your sources, based all over the world, that his confectionary empire,Roshen, is receiving its basic product from some of the most terrible plantations in Côte d’Ivoire that are still using child labor. You decided to come here, to investigate…

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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

Tags

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

BeFunky_null_12.jpg

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

Tags

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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Occam’s Razor Dispels Many Outlandish Conspiracy Theories

10 Saturday May 2014

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Empire, Military Industrial Complex, Peak Oil

≈ 106 Comments

Tags

9/11 Truthers, Blowback, Capitalism, Chemtrails, Climate Change Denial, Conspiracy Theorists, Consumerism, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Empire, Inverted Totalitarianism, Noam Chomsky, Occam's Razor, Resource Wars, The Principle of Parsimony, The Principle of Plurality, War for Profit

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Occam’s razor, or Ockham’s razor, is a line of reasoning which uses succinctness and simplicity, employing the least assumptions to arrive at the most probable hypothesis that fits the available evidence. In other words, given two equally plausible explanations for a given phenomenon, the one making the fewest assumptions is more likely correct. Its foundation rests on two guiding principle to cut through falsehoods and pseudoscience reasoning:

  1. The Principle of Plurality – Plurality should not be posited without necessity
  2. The Principle of Parsimony – It is pointless to do with more what is done with less

In the search for truth, this tool of reasoning has been used throughout history by scientists and philosophers in the creation of models and theories, by detectives in solving crimes, and by objective researchers in debunking convoluted conspiracy theories. Occam’s razor is embodied by the probability theory which says that “all assumptions introduce possibilities for error and if an assumption does not improve the accuracy of a theory, its only effect is to increase the probability that the overall theory is wrong.” It is a heuristic method to guide scientists in the development of theoretical models. In the case of anthropogenic climate change, it can be applied to show how those who are skeptical about AGW are forced to weave a much more tangled web in order to explain things:

The serious, mainstream science view goes like this:

  1. The greenhouse effect is real. Without it, average surface temperatures would be -15C, not +15C
  2. CO2 is a greenhouse gas
  3. CO2 levels have increased by 41% since pre-industrial times
  4. A 100% increase will cause a 1.2C rise in earth surface temperatures
  5. This rise will in turn cause a 3C (+/- 1.5C) rise in surface temperature.
    Explanatory video on this point here
  6. Any rise above 2C must be avoided

Reasonably simple, given the vast complexity of our planet’s climatic system, and in fact the handful of serious climate scientists on the “sceptic” side agree with points 1-4.

Now here is the climate “sceptic’s” case:

  1. The earth is not warming
  2. If it is warming, it is due to the sun
  3. The warming is due to some kind of natural variation
  4. It’s going to get cooler soon
  5. CO2 is too tiny to make a difference
  6. CO2 will make a difference but there’s nothing we can do about it
  7. We can afford to wait another 10-50 years to see if it is going to get hot then do something about it then
  8. It is going to warm but only a bit
  9. CO2 is good for us
  10. Cloud cover will extend in a warmer planet and cool us down (No it will not)
  11. All models are always wrong
  12. Some models show that the climate will not warm much
  13. It is all a conspiracy by climatologists, Greens, the nuclear industry and the UN
  14. It cannot be happening because it would mean that fossil energy would become unprofitable
  15. It is cold outside today
  16. Heat cannot get into the ocean
  17. And so on
  18. And so forth

What the above shows is that there is an endless complexity to the arguments brought by the “sceptics”, many of them self-contradictory.

They are not trying to present a coherent picture of reality, which is the aim of science. They are merely producing a stream of counter statements. I have been impressed recently that when I try to discuss the one point where agreement exists with a delayer, they rapidly change the subject to find disagreement.

In fact, their case often boils down to a mirror image of the case for man-made global warming. If we say white, they just say black.

I predict therefore that soon “sceptic” blogs will be quoting William of Occam as evidence for the truth of their case.

Another cock-eyed conspiracy theory is chemtrails which astronomer Bob Berman deconstructs using the logic of Occam’s razor:

Some folks regard contrails suspiciously. Apparently, many don’t know what they are. Several websites call the lines chemtrails, and think that the US military is deliberately spraying a substance upon the population.

This is silly for a number of reasons. First, if you’ve ever watched crop dusting you know that chemicals must be released very close to the ground. Released on high, they’d dissipate with the wind and take forever to get down; the concentration on the folks below would be zero. Second, my commercial pilot friends (along with the controllers at the FAA) would all have to go along with the plot, since they’d see the process happening. I’m a pilot and airplane owner myself: It’s NOT happening. Third, what would be the purpose? Some say mind control. But are people acting differently lately? Others say it’s to sow disease. But why would anyone want to do this? Who would go along with it? Finally, some say “chemtrails” are a government project to combat global warming. Nice, but then why should such a laudable effort be kept secret? Other web-based “explanations” involve even wackier stuff like electromagnetic rays.

Logic never placates the truly paranoid, and discussions are rarely satisfying. Those who “believe” WANT to believe, and claim soil tests show that dangerous substances have been found beneath the planes. But again, nothing released from 40,000 feet would ever reach the ground except diluted to zero. And, more to the point, the videos of these supposed “chemtrails” shown on the scare web sites are actually a common type of contrail. The believers claim they’ve only started around 1998 – but I’ve observed those “spreading out” contrails for over 40 years. They’re not new. They’re contrails. No mystery, and nothing sinister here at all.

And yet another imaginative conspiracy, thoroughly debunked by the scientific community, surrounds the terrorist attack of 9/11 in which its die-hard followers believe that elements within the U.S. government planned and executed a controlled demolition of the TWC towers and WTC 7 in order to justify the invasion of Middle East countries and restrict domestic civil liberties. The first obvious question is why would a nefarious group within the government go through the logistical nightmare of crashing airliners into buildings in addition to rigging those buildings beforehand when a massive truck bomb, Timothy McVeigh-style, would have sufficed? Was that elaborate scheme really necessary in order to galvanize the political will to invade a foreign country for oil? And as Noam Chomsky points out in the video below, why implicate nationals from our major ally Saudi Arabia instead of people from the very country the neocons so desperately wanted to invade, Iraq? Perhaps the Bush administration just enjoyed the extra hurdle of fabricating WMD’s because planning and executing such a byzantine maze of deception involving so many people was the best way to keep it all secret and ensure the highest probability of success.

Another article of faith among conspiracy theorists is that the conspiracy would not have to have been very large. In Crossing the Rubicon, Michael Ruppert writes that there didn’t have to be any more than two dozen people with complete foreknowledge of the attacks to orchestrate 9/11, and that they would all be “bound to silence by Draconian secrecy oaths.” But those numbers begin to balloon out of control if all of the people and institutions accused of playing a part in the cover-up are counted. They would have to have included the CIA; the Justice Department; the FAA; NORAD; American and United Airlines; FEMA; Popular Mechanics and other media outlets; state and local law enforcement agencies in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and New York; the National Institute of Standards and Technology; and, finally and perhaps most prominently, the 9/11 Commission. – link

[youtube:www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRV_MsbAZv4]

As more and more people fall off the economic ladder and lose faith in government, their plight will become fertile ground for conspiracy theorists looking to manipulate the anger and desperation of the dispossessed. JFK conspiracists have been around for nearly half a century and I think it’s fair to say that 9/11 conspiracists will have an even longer lifespan, perhaps outliving industrial civilization itself. The maxim of never letting a good crisis go to waste certainly held true for abusive power structures all across the globe after 9/11, but such an atrocity was inevitable due to nearly a century of nurturing and exploiting radical Islamists to serve the interests of the British and American Empires:

…When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in the 1980’s, the West, led by the United States, countered by implementing the “Islam” strategy. The recruiting of Islamic militants from around the world to fight in the “jihad” included the recruitment of Osama bin Laden by Saudi and Pakistani intelligence services. [26]

Ultimately, British strategy manifested or transmogrified into American support for the ‘holy warriors’ against the Soviet invasion. The United States invested massive amounts of armoury, military training and billions of dollars in this enterprise.

Chalmers Johnson defined, ‘blowback’ “as a way of thinking of an individual, a class, a nation or an empire…” when employed in the arena of “international conflicts” this way of thinking, “has a tendency to blow back onto the party releasing it.” [27] The criminal events in New York and Washington almost ten years ago, were partly and clearly a blowback from the “Islam” strategy.

Whereas Britain concocted and propelled the “Islam” option into strategic consideration amongst policy makers during the Cold War period, it was then the United States which was largely seen to “release”, implement and support this policy in Afghanistan in the 1980’s.

In conclusion, it needs to be emphasised that as the provenance of this “Islam” strategy pre-dates the Cold War and even the emergence of the United States as a superpower, there is every reason to believe that it will also outlive a perceived declining United States. We can now see this in Libya where NATO has worked in conjunction with Libyan Islamists to overthrow the Gadhaffi regime. [28]

The inside job of 9/11 was not some fiendishly clever plot by Cheney and a crack team of explosive experts and false flag operatives. It was the net result of decades and decades of colonial rule and the thirst for resources by Western citizens weened on suburban living, gas-guzzling automobiles, fast food, and industrial age values. Much energy and time is wasted on chasing phantom villains, while the real problems pile up around our make-believe world. Looking into history as well as into the mirror might be more productive than a crusade to bring imaginative boogeymen to justice.

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The Conspiracy is Systemic and Legalized.

08 Tuesday Oct 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Corporate State, Empire, Military Industrial Complex, Neo-Colonialism

≈ 69 Comments

Tags

Apophenia, Capitalism, Class War, Colin Todhunter, Confirmation Bias, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Dr Patrick Leman, Empire, Financial Elite, Glenn Beck, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Michael Parenti, Military Industrial Complex, Noam Chomsky, Patternicity, Plutocracy, Police State, Poverty, Regulatory Capture, Security and Surveillance State, Social Unrest, Subjective Validation, The Elite 1%, True-Believer Syndrome, unwashed public, Wall Street Fraud

conspiricy-blog-2-colossal-concerns-2

If you are a person who gets their news solely from mainstream media and forms a worldview from that information, then this website would perhaps strike you as radical, off-base, and conspiratorial. But what if nearly everything you listen to and read has been filtered through the monied interests of the most powerful entities on the planet? And what if those entities quite literally control the government by way of a revolving door, campaign contributions, and lobbyists who unduly influence the crafting of legislation in favor of big business while ignoring the needs of the common citizenry? What if you are merely a pawn in the machinations of such a system — a consumer for the all-important world market and a disposable human resource in its labor pool? What if the wealth created by such an economy is amassing at the very tip of this pyramid scheme while leaving those below to fend for themselves in a world depleted of its resources and poisoned by industrial waste. Would such a grim reality be considered a conspiracy theory? In other words, would the previously described outcome of such a socio-economic system necessarily have to be the plan of a secret cabal of powerful people? If corporations must compete to survive and are legally bound to look after the financial interests of their shareholders, then protecting and growing profits must in the end override all other concerns — environmental and social. The gross wealth disparity, environmental destruction, and political disenfranchisement created by capitalism is not the byproduct of a conspiracy; it’s simply the end-result of a system operating as intended. Concentration of wealth, a characteristic result of capitalism, inevitably leads to a near total corruption of journalism and democracy. Of course the corporate elite may collude to price-fix, bribe regulators or heads of state, and cover up environmental damage and dangers to public health, amongst many other devious activities, but it is invariably done in the interest of gaining dominance in the market place and protecting profits. Capitalism and democracy are not compatible. In fact, life on Earth is ultimately not compatible with capitalism.

One author who has written extensively on conspiracy theories is Colin Todhunter. In his essay New World Order “Conspiracy Theories”: Diversions and Deceptions, he pinpoints the time at which conspiracy theories became widespread:

“…Although conspiracy theories have been around for centuries, some gained in popularity during the 1960s and 70s as ‘post-modern disillusionment’ set in and people began to question the very notion of ‘progress’. Modernity had not lived up to expectations. Living under the constant threat of nuclear annihilation, environmental degradation, poverty and the inability of science or politics to address such concerns, people began moving towards ‘new age’ beliefs and concepts or embracing unconventional theories that seemed to explain humanity’s plight.

This all occurred against a backdrop of (failed) proposals to collectively address worldwide problems that went beyond the capacity of individual nation states acting alone. The UN had been set up along with various other international institutions in order to address global issues but also to cement US global hegemony…”

In his insightful essay The Role of Anti-Establishment “Conspiracy Theories”, Todhunter informs us about the exploitive and unstable nature of a system that has given rise to so much conspiracy theory:

“…The advocates of populist conspiracy theories seek to explain everything in terms of secret societies and codes, Zionism, ‘communism’ or the hand of ‘Rothschild’. Of course, families like the Rothschilds and Rockefellers and groups like Bilderberg exist and do hold great power. That much is not in dispute. However, the nature of the dynamics of power is. Groups or think tanks like Bilderberg, Brookings Institute, Trilateral Commission, Chatham House, Council on Foreign Relations, RAND Corporation and so on are where capitalism’s state-corporate hegemons, including the rich families mentioned above, meet to discuss, devise policies and manage capitalism.

Radical critiques of society have often focused on the underlying logic and processes of capital accumulation and capitalist economic crises as well as capitalism’s inherent contradictions. An analysis of the historical antecedents of modernity according to scholarly analysis has also been prevalent. Today, it is popular to assert that the members of some shadowy group have been in charge all this time – the Illuminati, often used as a metaphor for ‘the Jews’.

The rise of such explanations are understandable in a complex world, where the ordinary person feels utterly powerless, confused and craves easy answers. Little surprise then that events and crises are said to be the work of some sinister ‘Illuminati’, an explanation which tends to steer clear of any genuine analysis of capitalism.

In the West, jobs are being outsourced, wages are falling and unemployment rising. As the market becomes saturated with goods and demand is unable to mop up supply, firms go bust. There is a shift towards powerful monopoly capitalism, while citizens and workers experience increasing powerlessness and immiseration. And to seek out new profits, imperialist ventures abroad become the norm. State-corporate monopoly capitalism and imperialist intent are not part of a ‘New World Order’ but are part of a world in which the few benefit at the expense of the many and that has been in the making ever since Britain became the first industrial nation and capitalism emerged.

But what we now have isn’t free market capitalism, some might say. The notion of the free market has always been a myth. It’s always been controlled and manipulated. It’s never been ‘free’.  And we are now witnessing advanced capitalism in all its gore.

Capitalism has inherent contradictions. All was never intended to be fine. Remember the slogan to end poverty by 2020 (or whatever the date was)? Capitalism thrives on poverty. It’s integral to the system. That’s why it is rampant in the West and much more so in the cheap labour economies of the ‘developing world’. The increasing concentration of power, ownership and wealth and the rising impoverishment of the masses is one of capitalism’s greatest contradictions. It’s not some kind of conspiracy to keep the masses in poverty or in fear of falling into it.  It’s built in to capitalism.

But many do not refer Marx, Engels, Lenin or Trotsky to gain an understanding of the processes of dialectic materialism and capitalism.  They and their theories are regarded as being part of the Zionist conspiracy. If socialism and communism are the creation of Zionism, which supposedly exerts so much control over the US and Britain, strange then that the secret services of both the US and Britain spent so much time and energy on infiltrating, deradicalising and subverting the left (3).

While the late Antony C Sutton (sometimes regarded as the father of modern conspiracy theories) provides food for thought in his writings and research (4), conspiracy theories tend to provide limited insight into the dynamics of power and oppression in the 21st century.

However imperfect the work of people like Robert Brenner (5) and Barrington Moore (6) may have been, their research was based on broad comparative sociological analysis of the cultural, historical, agrarian and economic factors that led to the rise of capitalism, fascism and communism in various societies. In the absence of this, however, prominent proponents of conspiracy theories in the US and Britain make crude assumptions about such phenomena comprising part of an Illuminati plot, which play on the prejudices and fears of ordinary people, who in turn latch on to the explanation offered as a proxy for the underlying causes of their powerlessness and frustrations.

Why bother having an informed understanding of the dynamics of the modern world based on rigorous research? Much easier to watch a few YouTube clips about some secret, manipulative elite or even amphibians from outer space with an agenda to control the world.

Many conspiracy theorists have indeed actually been quite informative on how the banking system works and how bankers conspire to control policies by keeping governments in permanent debt. They have also highlighted glaring flaws in official accounts of 9/11. They have rightly pinpointed what the mainstream misses out of its narratives and have raised issues that many on the left had tended to ignore or gave scant attention to. But such useful insights then become wrapped up in theories that too often appear to be based on flights of fancy.

There is no doubting that people can and do conspire to shape events. Not everything can be explained by structures where individual motive is eradicated. For example, corporations conspire to produce price cartels, media barons conspire to dominate and state-corporate interests embark on military jaunts to control markets and resources. And yes, bankers conspire to restrict credit for various reasons. But this has to be placed within the wider context of Empire and capitalism.

In capitalism, the compulsion to compete, dominate and pursue profit casts long shadows over virtually every social and cultural institution, from government and politics to education, law, agriculture and entertainment.

Conspiracy theorists and their followers may well appreciate aspects of this, but merely speculate about the intentions of and actions of groups of people without addressing how capitalism shapes any of it…”

How many commercials and advertisements are bombarded at the average person every waking day of their life. It’s in the thousands – everything from TV commercials to billboards to junk mail to radio adverts. Don’t you think this would have some sort of effect on a person’s psychological well-being? Is it any wonder that the one country in which conspiracy theories thrive most also happens to be the epicenter of unbridled capitalism? British author Roger Cohen said, “Captive minds… resort to conspiracy theory because it is the ultimate refuge of the disempowered.” In an environment where everyone is expected to sell themselves everyday in order to eat and ‘the truth’ is manufactured so as to protect the vested interests of those who bring you the ‘news’, desperate souls grasp at any explanation for why the system is so dysfunctional, corrupt, and unfair. According to Dr Patrick Leman, a psychologist at the Royal Holloway University of London, the weak and marginalized of society gravitate towards conspiracy theories because they have no voice in society:

…People are also more likely to believe in conspiracy theories if they feel powerless in the face of large social authorities or institutions, and not part of the mainstream of society.

This is supported by the observation in the USA that beliefs in conspiracy theories tend to be stronger amongst members of ethnic minority groups.

Sociologists suggest that these minority groups feel politically disenfranchised or discriminated against and this gives rise to higher levels of belief in conspiracy theories…

Cognitive bias also encourages the acceptance of conspiracy theories. One such behavior is the human tendency to seek patterns from random information. Conspiracy theorists are said to be notorious for this proclivity and it goes by several different names such as apophenia or patternicity. Other cognitive biases include confirmation bias, subjective validation, and true-believer syndrome.

Development of hi-tech communication technology coupled with the rapid expansion of the World Wide Web and social networking has fueled the growth of conspiracy theories around the world. With little money, the rantings of anyone can be voiced to the world. Below is a picture of a twenty-dollar bill folded in such a way as to resemble the twin towers on 9-11. It quickly spread across the internet and was picked up by Glenn Beck, a monger of conspiracy theories, and featured on his blog:

“What are the odds that a simple geometric folding of the $20 bill would accidentally contain a representation of both terror attacks?”

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“The radical analysis sees such things as ecological crises, military interventions, the national security state, homelessness, poverty, an inequitable tax system, and undemocratic social institutions such as the corporate owned media, etc… It sees these things not as the aberrant outcome of a basically rational system, but as rational outcomes of a system whose central goal is the accumulation of wealth and power for a privileged class…” ~ Michael Parenti

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Chomsky Poses a Question

07 Thursday Mar 2013

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

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Addiction to Fossil Fuels, ALEC – American Legislative Exchange Council, Capitalism, Climate Change, Climate Tipping Points, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumer Culture, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Eco-Apocalypse, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, Gross Inequality, Henry Bemis, Inverted Totalitarianism, Mass Die Off, Noam Chomsky, The Elite 1%, The Twilight Zone, unwashed public, Wall Street Fraud

In his latest essay, Chomsky asks the simple question, “Can Civilization Survive Capitalism?” And when he says “capitalism”, he means the true capitalism we have today here in America in which capital has corrupted and usurped government regulation and legislation to the (N)th degree. Crony capitalism is the same as unfettered capitalism which is the end result of all types of capitalism if they are left to play out to their inevitable conclusion, something Chomsky calls “really existing capitalist democracy” or RECD for short.

First, Chomsky proclaims the obvious fact that RECD is incompatible with true democracy and that civilization cannot survive under RECD with its corporate-run government passing as faux democracy. He then asks whether a functioning democracy under a capitalist system would make a difference.

For the litmus test, Chomsky confronts the most apparent and grave danger facing mankind – environmental catastrophe, an unfolding crisis we here at this site are very familiar with. As is often the case in an RECD, what the public wants and what the corporate forces ruling the country demand are two very different things. To illustrate this divergent reality, Chomsky quotes from recent studies by Kelly Sims Gallagher in the current issue of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In contrast to well over a hundred countries which have enacted renewable energy policies and targets, the U.S. “has not adopted any consistent and stable set of policies at the national level to foster the use of renewable energy.”

And it’s not by lack of public desire that such renewable energies have not been enacted. On the contrary, the vast majority of Americans have favored such action in order to avert the very environmental catastrophe currently threatening life as we know it. But as Chomsky wryly comments:

The fact that the public is influenced by science is deeply troubling to those who dominate the economy and state policy.

Now to combat this influence of science on the minds of the common people, our corporate overlords have used one of their lapdog lobbyist groups, ALEC, to enact legislation with the Orwellian title “Environmental Literacy Improvement Act” which would actually cast a cloud of doubt over the science of climate change by forcing schools to allow alternative interpretations, i.e. climate change denial:

The ALEC Act mandates “balanced teaching” of climate science in K-12 classrooms. “Balanced teaching” is a code phrase that refers to teaching climate-change denial, to “balance” mainstream climate science. It is analogous to the “balanced teaching” advocated by creationists to enable the teaching of “creation science” in public schools. Legislation based on ALEC models has already been introduced in several states.

Of course this “balanced teaching” won’t include the views of those much more astute scientists who have accurately said that the IPCC’s climate models and forecasts have been and continue to be much too conservative and optimistic. The corporate intrusion into America’s classrooms will undoubtedly include viewpoints from people who say that CO2 is good for the planet and that God would not allow man to destroy himself.

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Again, Chomsky explains that such dumbing down of the populace is done intentionally to serve the short-term profit motives of our corporatocracy. Keeping the masses ill-informed and living within a cloud of propaganda and infotainment is the primary objective of the ALEC legislation. Creating a country full of Al Bundys and Homer Simpsons has been an ongoing process since the inception of a post-World War II Consumer Culture. When the primary tool for constructing a nation’s identity – “The Media” – is motivated by money, society is destined for a meltdown. We are following the doctrine of ‘preordained destiny’ right into the annals of extinction alongside the dinosaurs and the Dodo bird.

Snap 2013-03-07 at 01.17.18

…Within the RECD system it is of extreme importance that we become the stupid nation, not misled by science and rationality, in the interests of the short-term gains of the masters of the economy and political system, and damn the consequences.

These commitments are deeply rooted in the fundamentalist market doctrines that are preached within RECD, though observed in a highly selective manner, so as to sustain a powerful state that serves wealth and power.

Chomsky compares the corporatocracy’s willful ignorance on human-induced climate change to that of the ongoing banking crisis and the financial sector’s criminal behavior in disregarding “systemic risk”, i.e. the risk of collapsing an entire financial system or entire market. The systemic risk of continuing to exploit fossil fuels is more blatantly obvious every week, month, and year that passes. Enjoying 20/20 hindsight and taxpayer-funded bailouts won’t be an option for a crash of the global biosphere.

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Environmental catastrophe is far more serious: The externality that is being ignored is the fate of the species. And there is nowhere to run, cap in hand, for a bailout.

In future, historians (if there are any) will look back on this curious spectacle taking shape in the early 21st century. For the first time in human history, humans are facing the significant prospect of severe calamity as a result of their actions – actions that are battering our prospects of decent survival.

Those historians will observe that the richest and most powerful country in history, which enjoys incomparable advantages, is leading the effort to intensify the likely disaster. Leading the effort to preserve conditions in which our immediate descendants might have a decent life are the so-called “primitive” societies: First Nations, tribal, indigenous, aboriginal.

The countries with large and influential indigenous populations are well in the lead in seeking to preserve the planet. The countries that have driven indigenous populations to extinction or extreme marginalization are racing toward destruction.

Over four centuries of commodifying the planet and two centuries of wallowing in a fossil fuel high have turned the industrialized world into crazed drug addicts marching towards their own destruction. It is only the planet’s unindustrialized “primitive people’ who remain clear-minded enough to act rationally and wisely. By all estimations, having even a semi-functioning democracy under a capitalist system would exponentially improve our odds of survival; but under the current regime, no living thing will get out alive when glorified apes dressed in suits are flinging shit and wielding weapons of mass destruction.

This observation generalizes: Throughout the world, indigenous societies are struggling to protect what they sometimes call “the rights of nature,” while the civilized and sophisticated scoff at this silliness.

This is all exactly the opposite of what rationality would predict – unless it is the skewed form of reason that passes through the filter of RECD.

nuke2

Our present predicament is best described by a commenter in regards to the short film ‘Time Enough at Last‘:

Snap 2013-03-07 at 10.37.51 Time Enough At Last

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The Next Four Years: the Wear and Tear of Reality

07 Wednesday Nov 2012

Posted by xraymike79 in Climate Change, Corporate State, Empire

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

American Biologist Ernst Mayr, Barack Obama, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Economic Collapse, Empire, Financial Elite, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Mitt Romney, Neoliberal Capitalism, Noam Chomsky, Obomney 2012, Police State, Poverty, Regulatory Capture, The Elite 1%, unwashed public

Bloomberg Businessweek’s rendition of the toll taken on the President dealing with the stress of the next four years. King Romney was the alternative cover:

…the road ahead for President Obama as he faces the fiscal cliff and crucial decisions for the future of the economy, business, and defense,” writes Businessweek. “The opposition remains considerable, and no matter how successful he is, the hardest job in the world will take its toll.

…and the fate of the human species (you wouldn’t expect Bloomberg Businessweek to mention this, would you?):


Train wrecks, even one that appears to be happening in slow motion, usually are ‘shocking’. Great speech by Chomsky, especially the climate change segment:

…maybe humans are somehow trying to fulfill a prediction of great American biologist who died recently, Ernst Mayr. He argued years ago that intelligence seems to be a lethal mutation. He—and he had some pretty good evidence. There’s a notion of biological success, which is how many of you are there around. You know, that’s biological success. And he pointed out that if you look at the tens of billions of species in human—in world history, the ones that are very successful are the ones that mutate very quickly, like bacteria, or the ones that have a fixed ecological niche, like beetles. They seem to make out fine. But as you move up the scale of what we call intelligence, success declines steadily. When you get up to mammals, it’s very low. There are very few of them around. I mean, there’s a lot of cows; it’s only because we domesticate them. When you get to humans, it’s the same. ‘Til very recently, much too recent a time to show up in any evolutionary accounting, humans were very scattered. There were plenty of other hominids, but they disappeared, probably because humans exterminated them, but nobody knows for sure. Anyhow, maybe we’re trying to show that humans just fit into the general pattern. We can exterminate ourselves, too, the rest of the world with us, and we’re hell bent on it right now…

I’ll have to read up on Ernst Mayr.

…more of Chomsky on Mayr and the extinction of man:

…organisms that do quite well are those that mutate very quickly, like bacteria, or those that are stuck in a fixed ecological niche, like beetles. They do fine. And they may survive the environmental crisis. But as you go up the scale of what we call intelligence, they are less and less successful. By the time you get to mammals, there are very few of them as compared with, say, insects. By the time you get to humans, the origin of humans may be 100,000 years ago, there is a very small group. We are kind of misled now because there are a lot of humans around, but that’s a matter of a few thousand years, which is meaningless from an evolutionary point of view. His argument was, you’re just not going to find intelligent life elsewhere, and you probably won’t find it here for very long either because it’s just a lethal mutation. He also added, a little bit ominously, that the average life span of a species, of the billions that have existed, is about 100,000 years, which is roughly the length of time that modern humans have existed.

With the environmental crisis, we’re now in a situation where we can decide whether Mayr was right or not. If nothing significant is done about it, and pretty quickly, then he will have been correct: human intelligence is indeed a lethal mutation. Maybe some humans will survive, but it will be scattered and nothing like a decent existence, and we’ll take a lot of the rest of the living world along with us.

So is anything going to be done about it? The prospects are not very auspicious. As you know, there was an international conference on this last December. A total disaster. Nothing came out of it. The emerging economies, China, India, and others, argued that it’s unfair for them to bear the burden of a couple hundred years of environmental destruction by the currently rich and developed societies. That’s a credible argument. But it’s one of these cases where you can win the battle and lose the war. The argument isn’t going to be very helpful to them if, in fact, the environmental crisis advances and a viable society goes with it…

By all accounts, we appear to be racing toward our own expiration date.

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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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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!
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  • Sunday Poem
  • Why Only Art Can Save Us: An Interview with Santiago Zabala
  • Cell by Cell, Scientists Map the Genetic Steps as Eggs Become Animals
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  • Where the wild tales are: how stories teach kids to nurture nature

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RSS A Prosperous Way Down

  • A really inconvenient truth
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  • Systems thinking and the narrative of climate change
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  • The Asian Miracles: Free renewables made it all possible
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  • Treatment wetlands equal cleaner water and more birds
  • Reflections on scientific illiteracy

RSS Adam Curtis Blog

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  • WHO WOULD GOD VOTE FOR?

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  • Philippines raises alert level at rumbling Mayon volcano
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RSS Aljazeera – Opinion

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  • Pope well and cracking jokes after latest surgery: Doctor
  • From Prison to Prime Minister: Malaysia’s Anwar Ibrahim
  • Australia to ban Nazi symbols in bid to curb far right
  • Bangladesh suffers long power cuts amid worst heatwave in decades
  • Why blowing up Ukraine’s Nova Kakhovka dam is a war crime
  • ‘Poor people don’t have friends’: A Pakistani widow’s life

RSS All Tied Up and Nowhere to Go

  • Another Christmas
  • Objective Crisis, Subjective Crisis
  • Jesse Jackson on poverty
  • Quote of the day
  • Voting and the ‘rule by law’
  • Wendy Brown on neoliberalism and democracy
  • Thomas Ferguson discusses our situation
  • This way doth dictatorship lie
  • Quote of the day
  • President Kamala Harris

RSS Alternative Radio

  • [Arundhati Roy] India: On the Road to Theocracy

RSS AlterNet

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RSS Anarchist News

  • Numerous incendiary outbreaks in active memory of ‘Punky Mauri’
  • Words for Compañero Punki Mauri
  • ANews Podcast 316 – 6.2.23
  • TOTW: Joy
  • VIDEOS FROM THE TRASH DIMENSION EPISODE 6
  • Next Phase
  • Resistance to Franco: The Anarchist Air Force...
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  • Deeds and Propaganda
  • Unknown and Essential. Forgers and the Libertarian Underground

RSS Antony Loewenstein

  • Electronic Intifada on the how and why of testing weapons in Palestine
  • The Australian Greens strengthens its policy on Israel/Palestine
  • TRT World interview on Saudi and Israeli romancing
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  • Better Reading interview on Zionism, Judaism and Palestine
  • Background Briefing interview on Palestine, Wikileaks and war crimes
  • Chatham House reviews The Palestine Laboratory
  • “The Harvard of anti-terrorism”
  • The Canadian role in Israel’s endless occupation
  • How Israeli phone hacking tool conquered the world

RSS Apocadocs

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RSS Arctic Emergency Institute

  • Declining Summer Sea Ice Threatens More than Arctic Wildlife

RSS Arctic Methane Emergency Group (AMEG)

  • AMEG Strategic Plan
  • Breaking the Chain
  • AMEG Policy Brief
  • The biggest story of all time
  • Getting the picture
  • Storm exacerbates Arctic predicament
  • Food security threatened by sea ice loss
  • Supplementary evidence to the EAC from John Nissen on behalf of AMEG
  • Message from the Arctic Methane Emergency Group

RSS Arctic News

  • Smoke over North America
  • A Climate of Betrayal
  • Arctic sea ice under threat
  • Nuremberg trials for imperiling all and bringing on mass extinction of species
  • Will there be Arctic sea ice left in September 2023?
  • Humans may be extinct in 2026
  • High sea surface temperature in North Atlantic
  • Temperatures rising fast March 2023
  • IPCC keeps downplaying the danger even as reality strikes
  • Sea surface temperature at record high

RSS Arctic Sea Ice

  • PIOMAS December 2019
  • PIOMAS November 2019
  • PIOMAS October 2019
  • PIOMAS September 2019
  • PIOMAS August 2019
  • Comparing
  • PIOMAS July 2019

RSS Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis

  • Springing into summer
  • A slow start to the Arctic spring
  • From polar dawn to dusk
  • Arctic sea ice maximum at fifth lowest on satellite record
  • Transition time
  • Antarctic sea ice settles on record low extent, again
  • Antarctic sea ice extent sets a new record low
  • Arctic sea ice low, Antarctic lower
  • December lows
  • Lingering open water areas

RSS Around the Coast Mountains

  • The name’s Mark… Mark BC
  • Packrafting / Fatbiking Buntzen Lake
  • My New Surly Pugsley Fatbike Build
  • Salsipuedes Canyon by Fatbike
  • Bridge River Recon Part 3 — Chilcotin Mountains Park
  • Bridge River Recon Part 2
  • Bridge River Recon, Part 1
  • Chilcotin Bikerafting Route
  • May 25 to 28 — Long Beach, California to Alfonsinas, Mexico
  • Ring Pass, Attempt #2

RSS Arthur Silber

  • Moving Interruptus, and Why Hospitals Suck
  • Crisis
  • How Many Damn Fucking Times Do I Have to Explain This?
  • So Close, Yet So Far
  • Very Sick, Very Scared
  • Help! Please
  • Mama's Last Hug
  • Twilight Zone America
  • Concerning Moral Judgment, and Moral Monsters
  • SERIOUS TROUBLE: Pain. Hospital. ???

RSS Arundhati Roy

  • Modi’s model is at last revealed for what it is: violent Hindu nationalism underwritten by big business | Arundhati Roy
  • This is no ordinary spying. Our most intimate selves are now exposed | Arundhati Roy
  • ‘We are witnessing a crime against humanity’: Arundhati Roy on India’s Covid catastrophe – podcast
  • Arundhati Roy on India’s Covid catastrophe: ‘We are witnessing a crime against humanity’
  • Modi's brutal treatment of Kashmir exposes his tactics – and their flaws | Arundhati Roy
  • Arundhati Roy extract: 'The backlash came in police cases, court appearances and even jail'
  • Literature provides shelter. That's why we need it | Arundhati Roy
  • Amid arrests and killings, Bangladesh and India must fight censorship | Arundhati Roy
  • An exclusive extract from Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness
  • Edward Snowden meets Arundhati Roy and John Cusack: ‘He was small and lithe, like a house cat’

RSS Arundhati Roy Says

  • A perfect day for democracy
  • Arundhati Roy speaks about the issue of rape in India
  • We Call This Progress
  • ‘Those Who’ve Tried To Change The System Via Elections Have Ended Up Being Changed By It'
  • Roy Against the Machine
  • If we do not love people, what are we fighting for?
  • All roads lead to Sharjah book fair
  • ‘Fairy princess’ to ‘instinctive critic’
  • Arundhati Roy shuns 'activist' tag
  • State attacking tribals in name of Green Hunt: Roy

RSS ASPO – USA

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

RSS Avedon’s Sideshow

  • But only now my love has grown
  • You can't jump a jet plane like you can a freight train
  • Did you have to traumatize my kids?
  • And in your death's mask face there are no signs which can be seen
  • Don't let it slip away
  • And hope that my dreams will come true
  • You can not do that, it breaks all the rules
  • Twelfthnight
  • You just gotta call on me
  • There's too much confusion

RSS Bad Astronomy

  • Help! My Mother Is Lying to Everyone About Her “Service” Animal.
  • My Daughter-in-Law Is Very Secretive About Where She’s Going When I Babysit
  • Temple Grandin: A.I. Won’t Destroy Us—if We Make a Crucial Change Now
  • Living Happily Without Romance
  • After They Testified: The Drag King Who Loves Performing for Kids
  • Photos of Freaky Orange Sky Enveloping Entire Northeast Suggests End of World Will at Least Look Kind of Cool
  • The Slatest Jun 7: Wow, Jack Smith Has Been Busy Lately!
  • Chris Licht Failed at CNN. And So Did His One Big Idea.
  • Need Advice? Ask our columnists.
  • The Freedom Caucus Is Having Another Temper Tantrum

RSS Barbara Ehrenreich

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RSS BBC: Science & Environment

  • Is climate change fuelling Canada's wildfires?
  • Crocodile found to have made herself pregnant
  • Climate change: How is my country doing on tackling it?
  • Could ultra-processed foods be harmful for us?
  • 'Extinct' butterfly species reappears in UK
  • Solar panels - an eco-disaster waiting to happen?
  • Are tornadoes in the US getting worse?
  • Conservationists tackle decline of Scottish coastal species
  • Can ‘enhanced rock weathering’ help combat climate change?
  • Global warming set to break key 1.5C limit for first time

RSS Big Picture Agriculture

  • BIG PICTURE AGRICULTURE'S LATEST NEWS
  • How to Stay Informed About Agriculture, Food, and Farming Issues
  • Dr. Walter Falcon's 2019 Iowa Farm Report
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  • The Merits of Amaranth
  • Global Food and Agriculture Photos October 28, 2018
  • Unloading Livestock in Ohio 1938
  • Agriculture Reading Picks
  • Managed Rotational Grazing with Profitable Dairy in Minnesota
  • Global Food and Agriculture Photos October 21, 2018

RSS Bill Moyers

  • PODCAST: Dr. Bandy Lee Saw It Coming – The Violence Foretold in Donald Trump’s Election
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  • March 30, 2021
  • Letters From an American: Heather Cox Richardson
  • The Pandemic Timeline
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  • Bill Moyers On Democracy Podcast
  • Stop Attacks on Asian-Americans NOW!

RSS Bit Tooth Energy

  • Waterjetting 37e - Using Cavitation to disintegrate rock
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  • Waterjetting 36d - Going through more complex walls.
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  • Waterjetting 36b - Katrina anniversary and the power of water
  • Waterjetting 36a - Jet stripping of tires
  • Waterjetting 35e - A low cost version of the soil sucker

RSS Bizarro Blog

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RSS Brane Space

  • Can It Be True? There Is No "Inner Mental World" (Or Specific Knowledge) It's Merely Another Human Illusion
  • Solving Simple Problems In Linear Algebra (4)
  • Don't Blame Biden For Ongoing Inflation -- And Why Only An Idiot Would Make A Big Deal Over Biden's AFA Fall
  • Solution To Simple Linear Algebra Problem (3)
  • Newcomer Independent Yemi Mobolade Trounces Career Conservo To Become Colorado Springs First Black Mayor
  • Solving Simple Problems In Linear Algebra (3)
  • Cocky House Dems' Bravado During 2022 Lame Duck Is Partly Responsible for the Debt 'Pickle' We're In
  • Solutions To Simple Linear Algebra Problems (2)
  • Ignorant Attack On Amanda Gorman's Book (& Stature) Was Overt Racism, Pure And Simple
  • The Hard Truth: Without Math Even 'Basic Concepts' In "Popular" Physics Books Are Meaningless

RSS Brave New World

  • Islam: The Overlooked Aspect of Rumi’s Poetry
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  • Almaty, Kazakhstan: City of Tourists and Mountains
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  • Remembering Berke Khan, 1209-66
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RSS Breaking the Set

  • Abby Martin Breaks the Set One Last Time
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  • Why the CIA Won’t Give Up on Venezuela | Interview with Eva Golinger
  • [531] Bayer Infects Thousands with HIV, Clinton's Shocking Bedfellows & Netanyahu’s Cartoon Lies
  • CIA Torture Whistleblower John Kiriakou: Wake Up, You’re Next
  • Abby Responds to John McCain Promoting Breaking the Set

RSS Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

  • Once ‘defanged,’ H5N1 bird flu is gaining teeth again
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  • One way attack: How loitering munitions are shaping conflicts
  • New START: To succeed, plan for failure
  • Scientists identify over 5,000 new species at future deep-sea mining site
  • Another warning from industry leaders on dangers posed by AI
  • Juan Manuel Santos: ‘[W]e will one day see the hands of the Doomsday Clock move backward’
  • Big hairy armadillos and COVID: A warning from the animal kingdom about our pandemic future

RSS Business Insider

  • Russian forces are shooting at Ukrainian rescuers trying to reach people trapped in the floods, Zelenskyy says
  • The 10 least affordable places to live if you're an expat in 2023
  • These states have the most people who could lose SNAP benefits because of the debt ceiling deal's new work requirements
  • Elon Musk joked that he took 'too much' anti-aging formula in response to a viral AI-generated image of him as a baby on Twitter
  • Crypto is 'radioactive waste' for institutional investors until things get resolved, Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary says
  • Here's what the SEC's 'all-out assault' on crypto means for the market's 2 biggest players
  • Half the world's biggest companies are downsizing office space amid hybrid working
  • Instagram and Facebook are reeling in TikTok
  • 21 questions to ask before choosing a job you'll stay happy in long-term
  • Surging tech stocks are entering bubble territory and could see a pullback soon, JPMorgan's top strategist says

RSS C-Realm

  • Automation and SJWs: A Conversation with James Howard Kunstler
  • It's official. The Age of Limits gathering is on hiatus
  • Three Conferences in Three Weeks
  • Mantra and Collapse
  • Dirty Pool: A Response to Guy McPherson
  • Interview with Dmytri Kleiner, Venture Communist and Miscommunications Technologist
  • Epochs and Applecarts
  • The Smell of Betterness
  • Descent in Anarchy?
  • Has Charles Mann Turned to the Dark Side?

RSS Cagle: Premium Cartoon News

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  • SMOKE FROM FIRES IN CANADA –AND CLIMATE CHANGE REPOST
  • TENNESSEE GUNS, DRAG SHOWS AND PROTECTING KIDS
  • GEORGIA NUCLEAR RATEPAYER MELTDOWN

RSS Cassandra’s Legacy

  • Cassandra is Dead. Long Live Cassandra!
  • Ugo Bardi's Latest Post on "The Seneca Effect": The Collapse of Saudi Arabia's Water Supply
  • Ugo Bardi's Latest Post on "The Seneca Effect"
  • Ugo Bardi's Latest post on "The Seneca Effect"
  • Ugo Bardi's latest post on "The Seneca Effect"
  • Ugo Bardi's Latest Post on "The Seneca Effect". The Hydrogen Myth
  • Ugo Bardi's Latest Post on "The Seneca Effect." The Tunnel Vision Problem
  • Cassandra has Moved
  • Censorship: How the West is becoming more and more like the old Soviet Union
  • Donald Trump: The Sacrifice of the Sacred King

RSS Censored News

  • Ox Sam Camp Being Raided, Arrests Underway at Paiute Massacre Site
  • Choking with grief, Myron Dewey's family described their loss, as court hands down minimal sentence
  • Driver of Truck Killing Myron Dewey to be Sentenced Today
  • The Death of Paiute Journalist Myron Dewey: The Poisonous Destruction by the U.S. Government
  • Descendants of Ghost Dancers Protect Paiute Massacre Site from Canada's Lithium Americas
  • Mohawk Nation News 'Rocking Mohawk Mothers'
  • MNN -- INNU & GUARDIANS OF NITASSINAN EVICT LOGGERS
  • Foreign Mining Giants Enter Legal Fight to Destroy Oak Flat
  • Paiute Shoshone at Massacre Site Must Defend Themselves in Court from Lithium Americas
  • Mohawk Nation News 'Come to Akwesasne Kanonsesne Press Conference Wednesday'

RSS Center For Biological Diversity

  • Rare New Mexico Plant Proposed for Endangered Species Protections
  • Legal Intervention Defends Protections for Lesser Prairie Chickens
  • Legal Victory Gives Southern Hognose Snake Another Chance at Endangered Species Protections
  • Federal Judge Nixes Approval of Idaho Phosphate Mine
  • Supreme Court Denies Oil Industry Challenge to California Offshore Fracking Moratorium
  • Global Plastics Treaty Negotiations End in Paris With “Zero Draft” Still to Come
  • Embattled Puerto Rico Dredging Project Faces Court Hearing
  • Secretary Haaland Protects Chaco Canyon From Oil, Gas Drilling
  • Debt Ceiling Deal Stains Biden’s Legacy on Climate, Environmental Justice
  • Idaho, Wyoming Urged to Require Bear Identification Course for Black Bear Hunters

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
  • FASCHISMUS UND DAS ANTIFESTIVAL
  • Das Fest ist tot, es lebe das Fest
  • Die Erde als Tempel
  • Time to Push
  • The Rehearsal is Over
  • Some Stuff I’m Reading
  • Beyond Industrial Medicine
  • A Temple of this Earth
  • The Sacrificial King

RSS Chomsky

  • The Kind of Anarchism I Believe in, and What's Wrong with Libertarians
  • Upcoming speaking event in Boston with Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman, and Jeremy Scahill
  • Violence and Dignity: Reflections on the Middle East (2013 Edward Said Lecture)
  • How Noam Chomsky is discussed, by Glenn Greenwald
  • Profile of Noam Chomsky in the Financial Times
  • Brief profile of Noam Chomsky in The Guardian (UK), by journalist Charles Glass
  • Rare video of Noam Chomsky interviewed with Gore Vidal in 1991
  • Complete videorecording of 1971 debate between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault
  • Noam Chomsky profile in the Financial Times
  • Additional video excerpt of Noam Chomsky speech at East Stroudsburg University, Pennsylvania

RSS Chris Hedges

  • Festival of Riches: Cannes Premieres by Godard, Wenders, Scorsese and More
  • Backroom Deals Increase Public Cost of Cop City
  • Could Religious Charter Schools Upend American Education?
  • The Quickening Demise of CNN
  • In Wake of Animal Testing Scandal, Neuralink Nabs FDA Approval
  • Supreme Court Slashes Legal Protections for Striking
  • How AI Could Take Over Elections—And Undermine Democracy
  • Ken Loach Forever
  • What Lower Fertility Rates Mean for Climate Change
  • Ralph Nader: Congress Must Learn to Say “No” to the Defense Industry

RSS Class Warfare Blog

  • Was the Founding American Dream an Illusion?
  • It’s a Miracle I Tells Yuh!
  • The AIs are Coming for Us!
  • Free Will, Again . . . Again?
  • Signs and Portents
  • We’ve Had No True Christians™ for Millennia
  • Eighteen . . . Really?
  • We Need to Get Rid of the Elites
  • Christian Nationalists are Trying to Enslave Women!
  • Florida Has Not Yet Gone “All In”

RSS Cliff Schecter

  • Philippines raises alert level at rumbling Mayon volcano
  • South Africa is failing, and it’s failing Zimbabwe, too
  • Sudanese orphans caught in the conflict’s crosshairs evacuated
  • Hungary’s hostage diplomacy: PM Orban frees human traffickers
  • Battles intensify between Sudan’s warring factions
  • Bodies found floating after Kakhovka dam collapse: Zelenskyy
  • Victims fight for their lives after French Alps knife attack
  • Wildfires in Canada, US: How to stay safe if you are affected
  • Southern Khartoum residents fear ongoing fighting after fuel fire
  • Pope well and cracking jokes after latest surgery: Doctor

RSS Climate and Capitalism

  • Industrial farming has killed billions of birds
  • Coverup: Industry hid dangers of ‘forever chemicals’
  • The ‘net zero’ hoax: Chevron’s fraudulent climate plan exposed
  • Ecological ruin or ecological revolution?
  • Global heat will hit new records in next five years
  • Has the ocean heat bomb been ignited?
  • Capital’s long war to dispossess the poor
  • Indigenous fighters resist forest destruction in Peru
  • Ecosocialist Bookshelf, May 2023
  • Land, sea and air: Climate change driving planetary crises

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
  • Hardly any past Winter Olympic host cities will have the snow to host in 60 years
  • Data may be Colorado’s best bet to mitigate increasing wildfire risk on the Front Range
  • How sea level rise is affecting your commute to and around Atlantic City
  • ‘A moral imperative’: Monastic sisters in rural Midwest make faith-based case for climate action
  • As flooding amplifies along the East Coast, Buddhist and Jewish faith leaders join the climate fight
  • ‘Preach now or mourn in the future’: How Key West faith leaders are confronting climate change

RSS Climate Change: The Next Generation

  • Historic Greenland ice sheet rainfall unraveled
  • Flip Flop: Why Variations in Earth's Magnetic Field Aren't Causing Today's Climate Change
  • Let's call climate change deniers what they really are: CLIMATE LIARS!
  • Amy Westerfelt: The Reason COVID-19 and Climate Seem So Similar: Disinformation
  • Bill McKibben's response to Michael Moore's Planet of the Humans
  • WaPo: The Congo rain forest is losing ability to absorb carbon dioxide. That’s bad for climate change
  • Mark Carney of the Bank of England unveils climate stress test
  • Tropical forests may be heating Earth by 2035
  • Roger Harrabin, BBC: Bank of England chief Mark Carney issues climate change warning
  • Evidence that an ice-free Arctic Ocean allowed ancient CO2 and methane emissions

RSS Climate Citizen

  • Australia at Global Plastics Treaty negotiations in Paris #INC2
  • Importance of funding active transport infrastructure in Merri-bek budget to 2027
  • Logging Native Forests in Victoria to end by 1 January 2024, saving 14 million tonnes of carbon by 2030
  • Submission on Synthetic Turf to Moonee Valley Council for JH Allan Reserve
  • Guest Post: Despairing about climate change? These 4 charts on the unstoppable growth of solar may change your mind
  • Australia ramps up funding for energy efficiency in Budget 2023. Baba Brinkman: Insulate it
  • Melbourne Protest at Korean Government agencies funding the Santos' Barossa Gas project
  • Australia talking renewables at Petersberg Climate Dialogue 2023 while new gas projects launch
  • Email to the Treasurer for Budget 2023: stop subsidising fossil fuels
  • Guest Post: Labor’s scheme to cut industrial emissions is worryingly flexible

RSS Climate Code Red

  • James Hansen’s new climate bomb: Are today’s greenhouse gas levels enough to raise sea levels by 60+ metres?
  • Why markets fail on fossil fuel pollution, heralding an era of climate disruption
  • Are climate–security risks too hot to handle for the Albanese government?

RSS Climate Connections

  • Climate Connections Update
  • CIC’s environmental and social justice photography contest open for entries
  • FBI Harassing Activists in Pacific Northwest
  • Global Justice Ecology Project Executive Director Anne Peterman on the GE American Chestnut
  • Zapatistas Host Festival of Resistance and Rebellion
  • GMO Chestnuts Draw Scrutiny this Holiday
  • Photo Essay: The Pillaging of Paraguay
  • Greenpeace Chooses Marketing Over Ethics in Peru Action

RSS Climate Denial Crock of the Week

  • Music Break: RIP George Winston – December
  • Media Catching Up with Climate/Wildfire Pollution Connection
  • Meanwhile, In Florida, 40 Percent Jump in Home Insurance Premiums
  • Ukraine Dam Destruction has Implications for Nuclear Plant
  • Weather Casters Finally beginning to Make Smoke/Climate Connection
  • Haze and Health Warnings Across East as Air Quality Crisis Continues
  • In a Global Emergency, Do We Really Need More Fashion?
  • 2003: Filming the First Fire Tornado
  • “Apocalyptic” Skies as Wildfires Smoke Spreads
  • Raise Your Hand if You Knew the Gray Skies, Red Sun, and Asthma Attacks were All Part of Climate Change

RSS Climate Progress

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RSS Climate Snapshot

  • "Carbon tsunami" lead by Enbridge Northern Gateway takes aim at BC
  • BC's tar sands? Thirteen proposed LNG projects equivalent to 13 times current BC emissions
  • Car Carbon series: cool new animation, plus the jaw-dropping impact it left out
  • Climate change fuels both California's record drought and "polar vortex" storms
  • Obama's Keystone XL delay forces Harper into the "choose first" hot seat
  • Four charts reveal gigantic climate impact from proposed Kinder Morgan mega-pipeline
  • Climate fail. Surging fossil fuels are leaving renewable energy far, far behind.
  • Twenty one ways America would destroy a safe climate -- and one way they won't: US govt. report
  • Fracking in America kills off clean energy, leading to higher emissions: EIA report
  • BP calls for global carbon price to avoid the "worst impacts of climate change"

RSS ClimateSight

  • Let’s hear more from the women who leave academia (Part 2)
  • Let’s hear more from the women who leave academia.
  • Talking, typing, and the social model of disability
  • We need your help! Share your views on climate change with us.
  • Ice sheet melting: it’s not just about sea level rise
  • How I became a scientist
  • How does the Weddell Polynya affect Antarctic ice shelves?
  • Climate change and compassion fatigue
  • The silver lining of fake news
  • Future projections of Antarctic ice shelf melting

RSS Club Orlov

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RSS ClusterFuck Nation

  • What’s Next
  • June 2023
  • Who Can You Trust?
  • Memorial Service
  • Trial By Ordeal
  • Fade to Black in Ukraine
  • Dum-Da-Dum-Dum…Dah
  • Dirty Secrets
  • KunstlerCast 377 — John Michael Greer on Magic and the Reenchantment of Daily Life
  • The Smell of Goose Cooking

RSS Cocktailhag – FDL

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RSS Colin Tudge

  • Let's not bet the farm | Colin Tudge
  • Why the world needs a renaissance of small farming | Colin Tudge
  • Are modern British children suffering from 'nature deficit disorder'? | Colin Tudge and Aleks Krotoski
  • Let the country, not the City, drive the UK economy | Colin Tudge
  • Farming needs Adam Smith's invisible hand, not finance capitalism | Colin Tudge
  • Survivors by Richard Fortey - review
  • Why woodlands are wonderful
  • Fossil Ida's great big family | Colin Tudge

RSS Common Dreams: News

  • CFPB Warns End of Student Loan Payment Freeze Could Spell Disaster for Millions
  • House Dems Revive Bill to Make Poverty-Eradicating Child Tax Credit Permanent
  • Progressives Fume After Colorado's Democratic Governor Vetoes Historic Affordable Housing Bill
  • Climate Orgs Launch Week of Action to End the Era of Fossil Fuels
  • Amid Scandal, Clarence Thomas Gets Extension on Financial Disclosures
  • Sanders to Biden: Don't Let Big Pharma Bankrupt Medicare With 'Unconscionable' Price of Alzheimer's Drug
  • Ukraine Dam Disaster Is the 'Horrific Price of War on People,' Says UN Chief
  • 'Declare a Climate Emergency': Biden Urged to Act as Wildfire Smoke Chokes Eastern US
  • 'Explosive': UAE Oil Firm Has Been Reviewing Internal COP28 Communications
  • Homophobic Mob Attacks Defenders of LGBTQ+ Equality Outside School Board Meeting in California

RSS Consortium News

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RSS Consumer Energy Report

  • Death of the Florescent Shop Light – Energy Efficiency
  • Methanol VS Ethanol – Technical Merits and Political Favoritism
  • Bill Nye the Science Guy – Social Primate and Nuclear Energy
  • World’s Smallest Gasoline Engine – Technology Breakthrough
  • How Much Oil Does the World Produce? – Production Facts and Figures
  • World Sets New Oil Production and Consumption Records
  • What Makes Up the Cost of a Gallon of Gasoline? – Gas Price
  • Road Trip – Thoughts on the Satsop Nuclear Power Station
  • What Happened at Choren? – History & Events
  • Gasoline Prices Doubled Under Obama: True or False?

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
  • The U.S. Dares to Criticize Israel
  • Gaza – Betrayed In Thought and Deed
  • Boeing Workers Take a Stand & Take the Heat
  • Bank Corruption Down Under
  • Europe’s Deadly Transition From Social Democracy to Oligarchy
  • What We Can Not See
  • The Sham of Homeland Security
  • Beauty from the Heart of Texas
  • Encountering Benazir Bhutto

RSS Crooked Timber

  • Pew quits the generation game
  • Sunday photoblogging: Malbork Castle, Poland
  • In the Zone: Quinn Slobodian’s Crack-Up Capitalism
  • Sunday photoblogging: Girona
  • Misogyny and Violence in Michigan Politics
  • Ban LLMs Using First-Person Pronouns
  • Sunday photoblogging: cloister
  • Utilitarianism comes to benefit-cost analysis
  • Huntington, the woke, and Radicalization
  • Reviving “Post-post-Fordism”

RSS Crooks and Liars

  • Rocky J. Squirrel, Drama Queen
  • Did Mark Meadows Flip On Trump?
  • Russia Claims They Blew Up Leopards, Was John Deere Instead
  • 'Fake Investigations RIGHT SMACK IN THE MIDDLE OF MY CAMPAIGN'
  • Pence 2024: Proud To Stand By Trump, Who Wanted Him Hanged
  • Why Did It Take Four Days To Arrest This Murderer? Florida
  • Least Self-Aware Person In The World Fat-Shames Chris Christie
  • Violence At School Board Meetings? Thank The Proud Boys
  • Supporting RFK Jr.'s Candidacy Is Promoting Disease And Death
  • House Republicans In Disarray, Petty Edition

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
  • The Trump Presidency: Celebration of the Little Boy, and Mass Awakening
  • Stepping Back from Trump's Election: Critique of underlying US Culture in a List - 25 Limitations
  • Dirty Fossil Fuel ‘Business-As-Usual’ Tactics Spew Out of the IMO at COP22
  • The Unconnected and Unrewarded in the New Divisive Dichotomy: Being Either Online Or Not
  • The Ameliorators: a possible coalition of progressives on (e.g.) NAFTA
  • It's the 21st, and this is what a growing movement is doing
  • Pro-Climate Actions - a community flier and poster

RSS Dahr Jamail

  • For a Worse Tomorrow
  • Covid-19’s Not Through With Us Yet
  • Living in a World in Which Nature Has Already Lost
  • Life in the US Has the Hallmarks of a “Low-Grade War Zone”
  • Fracking Company Has Made It Rain Toxic Water Upon New Mexico Without Penalty
  • Interview: TODAY IS BETTER THAN TOMORROW: A TIME OF ENDINGS; SHADES OF DENIAL W/ DAHR JAMAIL
  • Grieving My Way Into Loving the Planet
  • New York Times reviews The End of Ice
  • A Future Filled With Pathogens
  • Tested

RSS Daily Kos Comics

  • Cartoon: A Calvinesque and Hobbesian look at Meatball Ron
  • Cartoon: Mike Luckovich wonders WWJD about LGBTQ+
  • Cartoon: West
  • Cartoon: Junk jargon
  • Cartoon: Targets
  • Cartoon: Guardians of the Fallacy
  • Cartoon: Mike Luckovich on Ron DeSantis and 'woke'
  • Cartoon: The lib owners
  • Cartoon: Hate month gear
  • Cartoon: Mike Luckovich on Trump as rejected cartoon character

RSS Damn the Matrix

  • ERoEI, it depends…
  • Insanity rules….
  • Nuclear Fantasies
  • More Metabolic Syndrome news…
  • Empty Planet
  • On NOT joining the dots…
  • The Hydrogen fallacy explained
  • Yours Truly on the local FM radio station
  • Limits everywhere
  • Limbic Capitalism

RSS Dan Hagen

  • A Lesson in Humanity from Star Wars
  • A Wit Called Wanda
  • Ethics Begins in Empathy
  • The Devil is in the Dumbasses
  • 'Succession' Dramatizes a Death Knell
  • CNN Parades Primal Resentment
  • We Like What He Knew
  • CNN Bellyflops into a Moral Sewer
  • 'Guardians 3:' Ya Gotta Have Heart
  • Song of Spring

RSS Dangerous Intersection

  • Meaningful Conversation is Like Sex
  • San Francisco Crumbles
  • About “Transphobia”
  • Nord Stream Story Further Exposes the Washington Post as U.S. Propaganda Partner
  • New Study Regarding Tribalism in Politics

RSS Dark Ages America

  • Healing
  • Beating a Dead Horse Dept.
  • A Grotesque Bulvan. However...
  • The Sopranos, William Golding, and Contemporary America
  • 7 million and going strong
  • Karma City
  • Muddy Waters
  • The Midterms
  • Meatball
  • Permanent War for Permanent Peace

RSS David Bollier

  • Can We Move Beyond Philanthrocapitalism?
  • The Revelations of 'Black Earth Wisdom'
  • Foster & Iaione Probe Commoning in the City
  • Expanding Regenerative Agriculture through Open Source Technologies
  • Binna Choi of the Casco Art Institute: Curating Art through Commoning
  • John Thackara on Designing for Life
  • Joe Brewer's Bold Quest to Help Restore a Bioregion
  • David Sloan Wilson on Evolutionary Science and Prosocial Behavior
  • Cecosesola of Venezuela Wins Right Livelihood Award!
  • Greg Watson's Bold Campaign for a World Grid

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

  • Video: David Harvey on capital, theory, and becoming a Marxist
  • Reading Marx’s Grundrisse | Session 12
  • Reading Marx’s Grundrisse | Session 11
  • Reading Marx’s Grundrisse | Session 10
  • Reading Marx’s Grundrisse | Session 9
  • Video: David Harvey in Dialogue with Jean-Luc Mélenchon
  • Video: The Geography of Capital
  • Reading Marx’s Grundrisse | Session 8
  • Book Talk: Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World
  • Reading Marx’s Grundrisse | Session 7

RSS David Hilfiker

  • Welcome
  • Announcement
  • Racism in Our Small Faith Community?
  • Spirituality of Weakness
  • My Alzheimer's Disease
  • A Theology Out of my Life with Alzheimer Disease
  • More Than Surviving the Crisis
  • Facing Our Mistakes
  • Hope in an Environmental Wasteland
  • Geoengineering ... because we must

RSS David McNally

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RSS David Roberts

  • Seattle’s unbelievable transportation megaproject fustercluck
  • Please support Grist
  • There’s an emerging right-wing divide on climate denial. Here’s what it means (and doesn’t)
  • Everybody needs a Climate Thing
  • Jonathan Franzen is confused about climate change, but then, lots of people are
  • Turns out the world’s first “clean coal” plant is a backdoor subsidy to oil producers
  • A way to get power to the world’s poor without making climate change worse
  • “Climate change” vs. “global warming”? It really doesn’t matter
  • How American journalists deal with climate deniers
  • Nothing is nonpartisan any more

RSS Death by Car: Capitalism’s Drive to Carmageddon

  • Leading the way in preventing traffic accidents
  • Truck safety rate system 3 years
  • Traffic accident in the school zone
  • cerebral hemorrhage in a traffic accident
  • Uiseong-gun receives donations from children’s safety umbrella to prevent traffic accidents
  • 100% fruit delivery driver
  • a traffic accident
  • Prevention of traffic accidents on school buses for children
  • More than 80% of truck traffic accidents are “car-to-car” accidents
  • “Infusion truck”. Anger explodes. If you forget, you’ll get attacked again

RSS Decline of the Empire

  • Defending Reality
  • Fascism And The Uniparty
  • Apocalypse Now and Apocalypse Not
  • Fascism Marches On — Episode 1
  • There Is No Middle
  • The Elites And The Sheeple
  • For Your Own Good
  • America Is Finished, There Is No Way Out
  • The Whole World Is Watching
  • Glenn Greenwald Censored At The Intercept, Resigns

RSS Deep Green Resistence News Service

  • DGR France Visits Proposed Lithium Mine Site
  • Over 150 Groups Urge to Immediately Shut Down Line 5
  • Kangaroo Walks and Talks [Event Alert]
  • For the Sake of Nature
  • Ecosabotage: A Heroic Action Against Ecocide
  • Indigenous Women’s Camp Set to Block Water Supply to Peehee Mu’huh [Thacker Pass]
  • Call for Comments on Women’s Sex-Based Rights in Sports [Press Release]
  • Despite Warnings, Norway Proposes Deep Sea Mining
  • Tomorrow Is Ours
  • American Greed: A Corrupt Corporation is Destroying This Native American Sacred Site

RSS Deepak Tripathi’s Diary

  • Afghanistan Awaits Uncertain Future After US Withdrawal
  • UK’s Brexit Maze
  • Book Review: Me the People: How Populism Transforms Democracy
  • Book Review: How Democracy Ends
  • A Bloody Hot Summer in Gaza: Parallels With Sharpeville, Soweto and Jallianwala Bagh

RSS Democratic Underground

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RSS Democratic Underground – Breaking News

  • US vice president announces more than $100M to help Caribbean during official visit to Bahamas
  • Biden invites thousands of LGBTQ+ individuals, singer Betty Who, to Pride Month celebration
  • House GOP drops plan to hold FBI director in contempt
  • 'Better Call Saul,' 'Bob's Burgers' actor charged in Capitol riot
  • Greek island temple complex reveals 'countless' offerings left by ancient worshippers
  • Prosecutors ready to ask for Trump indictment on obstruction and Espionage Act charges
  • Canadian fires polluting New York City air continue blazing out of control
  • Child labor investigation spreads to meatpacking, produce companies in 11 states
  • Trump's lawyers told he is target of classified documents investigation
  • George Winston, million-selling pianist known for his melodic style, dead at age 73

RSS Democratic Underground – Good Reads

  • CONGRESS TEES UP NEW BILL STRIPPING PGA TOUR'S TAX-EXEMPT STATUS
  • Congresswoman Puts Anti-Trans Activist on the Spot: 'Do You Really Believe That Garbage?'
  • LBJ's daughter Luci watched him sign voting rights bill, then cried when Supreme Court weakened it
  • Ron DeSantis' Approval Rating Has Collapsed
  • Sanders to Biden: Don't Let Big Pharma Bankrupt Medicare With 'Unconscionable' Price of Alzheimer's
  • A non-pundit's observations of how the 2024 election is shaping up.
  • Mike Pence's misguided fantasy of baseball history
  • How one of America's most famous illustrators brought homoerotic ads to the masses
  • As US aims to bring back manufacturing, supporting women is key
  • 'Girls and Their Monsters': The Morlok Quadruplets and Mental Health With Audrey Clare Farley

RSS Democracy Now

  • Cornel West on Running for President, Ending Ukraine War & Taking on "Corporate Duopoly" of Dems & GOP
  • A National State of Emergency: Human Rights Campaign Sounds the Alarm over Anti-LGBTQ+ Laws in U.S.
  • Headlines for June 7, 2023
  • Catastrophic Flooding Feared as Critical Ukrainian Dam Is Destroyed; Zaporizhzhia Nuke Plant at Risk
  • "Enough Is Enough": Australian PM Throws Support Behind Movement to Free Julian Assange
  • Cop City: Atlanta City Council OKs $67M for Facility Despite Mass Protests & Armed Raid on Bail Fund
  • Headlines for June 6, 2023
  • Ed Bisch Fights to Hold Sacklers Accountable for Opioid Epidemic 22 Years After Son Died of Overdose
  • David Sirota: Florida Lawmakers Help Ron DeSantis Shovel More Cash to Wall Street
  • David Sirota: Working Class Will Be "Deeply Harmed" by Biden's "Big Win" on Debt Ceiling

RSS Derrick Jensen

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RSS Desdemona Despair

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RSS Desertification

  • Climate change in Nigeria: Can youth activists turn the tide of inaction?
  • Tobacco-free farms: a healthier future for people and land
  • World Environment Day: Data shows China an important contributor to global environment protection
  • NAMIBIA DRIVES TO HALT, REVERSE THE TRENDS IN LAND DEGRADATION AND DESERTIFICATION
  • Middle East faces grave environmental challenges as world marks Environment Day
  • Forum to focus on combating desertification
  • Desertification is destroying fertile land. Here’s how we’re fighting it.
  • Understanding of diurnal gas exchange in order to exploit the dynamic coordination between the rate of carbon assimilation (A) and stomatal conductance (gs)
  • Untitled
  • Geo explainer: How are deserts formed?

RSS deSmog Blog

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RSS Digbys Blog

  • Untitled
  • They can save the world by @BloggersRUs
  • Just drifting: R.I.P. Buck Henry By Dennis Hartley
  • It looks like he wants to take Iraq's oil money
  • Untitled
  • Let's not forget who worked with Suleimani's IRGC
  • You can't win if you don't show up to play by @BloggersRUs
  • Friday Night Soother
  • I'm just going to leave this here.
  • Who wants to be the next Andy McCabe?

RSS Disinfo – Ecology

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RSS Dispatches from the Underclass

  • China’s Saudi-Iran Peace Deal Is a Major Setback for US Empire, w/ Prof. Mohammad Marandi
  • EXCLUSIVE | Interview with Mexico’s Leading Presidential Contender Claudia Sheinbaum
  • Bombshell w/ Seymour Hersh: US Blowing Up Nord Stream Was ‘Act of War’
  • Exclusive Interview w/ Hezbollah’s Second-In-Command Sheikh Naim Qassem
  • UN Official Calls for Lifting ‘Illegal’ Syria Sanctions After Seeing Devastation First-Hand
  • Europe Self-Destructing for U.S. Proxy War In Ukraine, w/ Prabhat Patnaik
  • US Brings World to Brink of Nuclear Armageddon As Europe Self Destructs, w/ Ali Abunimah
  • Reality vs Propaganda: Understanding Iran’s Protests, w/ Navid Zarrinnal
  • How the US Used Saudi Arabia to Fuel Fanaticism & Fight Progressive Movements, w/ As’ad Abukhalil
  • Round 2: Lula vs Bolsonaro, What’s At Stake In Brazil?

RSS Dissent Magazine

  • Know Your Enemy: What’s Wrong With Men?
  • Money Power
  • Belabored: How Workers Escape, with Saket Soni
  • Cruelty and Luxury:
  • Barcelona’s Experiment in Radical Government
  • Ultra Violence
  • The Lithium Problem: An Interview with Thea Riofrancos
  • Belabored: Reviving the Strike in Britain, with Morag Livingstone and Joe Rollin
  • The IRA Is an Invitation to Organizers
  • The Fight Against Cop City

RSS Dissident Voice

  • How Empire Fabricates Atrocities
  • Rehearsed Lives and Planned History
  • Deserving Each Other: The PGA Tour-LIV Golf Merger
  • The Emergency State’s Plot to Override the Constitution
  • D-Day = Disinformation Day
  • Coincidence Theory
  • Sharpen Your Machetes
  • Diluted Sovereignty: A Very Australian Example
  • Career Corruption Prosecutor in Moldova and in EU Quits Moldovan Gov’t., Saying It’s Too Corrupt
  • The Next Pandemic

RSS Do the Math

  • Keeping Up On Appearances
  • Holiday Haikus
  • The Simple Story of Civilization
  • Finite Feeding Frenzy
  • A Random Fix to Polarization
  • The Cult of Civilization
  • A Climate Love Story
  • Death by Hockey Sticks
  • Limits to Economic Growth
  • The Ride of Our Lives

RSS Dollars & Sense Blog

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RSS Doug Stanhope

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RSS Douglas Rushkoff

  • The Guardian: Douglas Rushkoff on why tech billionaires are in escape mode
  • Wired: Doug Rushkoff is Ready to Renounce the Digital Revolution
  • Team Human ep. 236: Fenton Bailey
  • Escape plans of the rich and famous
  • Cyber: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires
  • Survival of the Richest
  • Duncan Trussell Family Hour Ep. 522: Douglas Rushkoff
  • In ‘Survival of the Richest,’ author Douglas Rushkoff examines the escape plans of the tech elite
  • Team Human ep. 213: Philip Rosedale
  • Team Human ep. 212: Lisa Lovebucket

RSS Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

  • The Evidence of Big Pharma’s Criminality is Overwhelming, but Nothing Is Being Done About It
  • Roman Balmakov on Epoch TV Explains how the FDA and Presstitutes Worked to Prevent Covid Treatment with Ivermectin
  • Be Forewarned:  Is This What Bill Gates & Company Are Going to Release Next?
  • Does a Presidential Candidate this Good Have a Chance?
  • PCR Interviewed by Sputnik International on US Economic Outlook
  • The Escalating Persecution of Truth Tellers
  • FBI Fails to Hand Over Document Alleging Biden Bribery Scheme; Republicans to Initiate Contempt Proceedings
  • Ex-US Intel Official Says Craft Of ‘Non-Human Origin’ Recovered, Reports Withheld From Congress
  • Of all races ONLY White People ARE NOT Permitted Pride or to Have their Votes Counted
  • Our Merit-Based Society Has Been Displaced by a Diversity-Based Society

RSS Dredd Blog

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RSS Ear to the Ground – Truth Dig

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RSS Early Warning

  • New York Not Close to Exiting Lockdown
  • Is New York Containing Covid?
  • New York vs Italy
  • NYC Update - 46.5% increase Sunday over Saturday.
  • We Are About to Lose New York City to Covid
  • Containing Covid-19 (Or Not)
  • Covid-19 update
  • Covid-19 Infection Rates
  • Global Carbon Sink Holding Up So Far
  • The Wake-Up Call from David Buckel

RSS Earth First

  • “UNC Dildo-Boy” accosts homophobic preacher, releases anti-technology declaration
  • Subpoena caps bad week for fossil fuel
  • Less Than 60 Hours Left to Support Indigenous Land Defenders!
  • Shh! That Zookeeper Is a Total *&^%#!
  • Marcellus Shale Earth First! Aerial Blockade Celebrates 2 Weeks
  • Sabotaging the Badger Cull
  • Occupied Abenaki Lands Desecrated by 9/11 Memorial Protesters Intervene to Address U.S. Imperialism & Genocide
  • The Earth First! Newswire Has Moved
  • Massive Mine Proposed at Oak Flat, Sacred Tribal Land
  • Wharton Coal Prep Plant Spill Turns Boone County, WV River White

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
  • Data Highlight - Geothermal Power Approaches 12,000 Megawatts Worldwide
  • Data Highlight - China’s Solar Panel Production to Double by 2017
  • Plan B Update - The Swinging Pendulum of Population Policy in Iran
  • Eco Economy Indicator - China Leads World to Solar Power Record in 2013
  • Data Highlight - Denmark, Portugal, and Spain Leading the World in Wind Power
  • Plan B Update - The Downfall of the Plastic Bag: A Global Picture
  • Plan B Update - Plastic Bag Bans Spreading in the United States

RSS Ecocide Alert

  • What is a Lottery?
  • What is a Slot?
  • What to Know When Playing at a Casino Online
  • How to Bet at a Sportsbook
  • How to Win at Poker
  • What Is a Lottery?
  • Togel Sidney Pasaran Togel Online Terkenal
  • What You Should Know About Online Casinos
  • What Does a Sportsbook Do?
  • Developing a Poker Strategy

RSS Ecohuman World

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RSS Eco-Shock News

  • Radio Ecoshock: Why Make a World Nobody Wants?
  • Radio Ecoshock: The Big Greenhouse Gas You Don’t Know
  • Radio Ecoshock: On Fire Again
  • Radio Ecoshock: Extreme Heat #2: How It Kills (replay)
  • Radio Ecoshock: Jean-Marc Jancovici: Whistling Past the Graveyard (replay)
  • Radio Ecoshock: Making $$ from Endless Record Heat
  • Radio Ecoshock: Nomad Century & Bad Banks
  • Radio Ecoshock: The Dirt Behind Betrayal
  • Radio Ecoshock: Climate: A Big Change Emerges Down Under
  • Radio Ecoshock: What I Really Think Will Happen Is Happening Already

RSS Ecological Headstand

  • Dilke, Chapman, and Dahlberg Pop-ups
  • For the Abolition of the Wages System!
  • The Incredible Shrinking Blog
  • Keynes "hadn't got round to it"
  • Napoleon Solow and the Phantom Mechanism
  • Mathiness, Growth and Increasing Returns
  • Viral Gyro Spiral
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  • Never Mind the Bollocks. Here's the Gyro.

RSS Ecological Sociology

  • Commons Enabling Infrastucture
  • A Short History of Progress: Book Review
  • Foucault, Power, Truth and Ecology
  • Democratizing Capital at Scale: Cooperative Enterprise and Beyond
  • Stanford: Climate Change Ten Times Faster than Previous 65 Million Years
  • Beyond Market and State: The Renaissance of the Commons
  • What Then Must We Do? The Next American Revolution
  • John Thackery: Limits to Resilience
  • Timothy Mitchell: Carbon Democracy
  • The Informal Economy Blog

RSS Ecologise

  • Why this Maharashtra village is fighting for the long forgotten Gramdan Act?
  • Ignored health risks, bungled pilot projects, bonanza for Dutch firm: Modi Govt. forces fortified rice on poor
  • Protests against Ratnagiri Refinery: Skeletons in the Development Closet
  • What will be the history of India without the history of its plant life?
  • We are ‘greening’ ourselves to extinction
  • [WATCH] We are living in a deluded world: Interview with Iain McGilchrist
  • The Avocados of Wrath
  • How Mr Miyawaki Broke My Heart
  • On International Forests Day: Reality of Forests in India
  • P.V. Satheesh, the Original Millets Man of India

RSS Economic Hardship Reporting Project

  • Parajo’s Quest to Rebuild
  • Erosion and sea-level rise are coming for their Louisiana home. They’re staying anyway.
  • Ithaca Bets on Heat Pumps in Mobile Homes
  • Republican Debt Ceiling Proposals Could See Neediest Americans Lose Benefits
  • Wrecking Women’s Healthcare
  • What It’s Like to Have an Abortion Denied by Dobbs
  • Belabored: Reviving the Strike in Britain, with Morag Livingstone and Joe Rollin
  • School Support Staffers Stuck Earning Poverty Level Wages
  • EHRP-Grist comic on Kentucky disaster relief distributed as educational tool
  • LGBTQ Students Face Barriers to Getting Student Loans Without Parents’ Participation

RSS Economic Undertow

  • Z Marks the Spot
  • The Death of Economics
  • Cars and More Cars …
  • Repost From 2015: Pied Piper of Dumb Money
  • The Arc of the Moral Universe
  • Meet the New Year, Same as the Old Year
  • David Graeber Dead …
  • Frieden In Unserer Zeit, Peace In Our Time
  • Doing God’s Dirty Work
  • The Numbers Game

RSS EcoWorldView

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RSS Empire Burlesque

  • Generation of Vipers: The Original Sin and Continuous Crimes of America’s Involvement in Afghanistan
  • Reich and Reality: Culture Wars of the Conquerors
  • On the 18th Anniversary of the Invasion of Iraq
  • On the Acquittal of the Murderous Thug Donald Trump
  • Impeachment Cave-in: Dems Plumb New Depths of Perfidy
  • In Memoriam Richard Kastelein (1967-2021)
  • The Surrenderists: Dem Leaders Stand Down; No Consequences for Coup
  • Unwrung Withers: No Downsides for Trumpists From Their Coup Push
  • House of Death: Trump’s Endgame Plan to Kill Democracy
  • Brief note on a bleary post-election morning

RSS Empirical Magazine

  • From the Empirical Archives: Genius or Folly?
  • From the Empirical Archives: Nights Such as These
  • From the Empirical Archives: Second Time Foster Child
  • From the Empirical Archives: A Moment with Mary Nash-Pyott
  • From the Empirical Archives: In the Shade of a Cave
  • From the Empirical Archives: In Search of a Good Teacher
  • From the Empirical Archives: The Circle and the Pyramid
  • From the Empirical Archives: Why Human Rights Matter
  • From the Empirical Archives: Arizona
  • From the Empirical Archives: The Offer by Jennifer Hanno

RSS EmptyWheel

  • Prosecutors Interviewing Witnesses Who Knew Trump Was Hoarding Documents
  • This Indictment Will Likely Come Too Early for Trump to Consolidate the Party
  • The Thirteenth Amendment
  • Dry Run: The Filing Room Came to Trump
  • NYT’s Pre-DOJ Meeting Attempted Rebuttal
  • Now Fully Normalized: Sportswashing the Bonesaw with Golf
  • The Dog Drained My Pool to Try to Destroy Surveillance Video
  • The Dishonest and Incompetent FBI Work John Durham Learned to Love
  • FBI Cyber Division’s Enduring Blue Pill Mystery
  • ONLY TIME WILL TELL: Seditionist Oath Keepers sentenced amid tears and promises of redemption

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).
  • "Living the Change," Film Screening + post-film Q&A. 6 pm, April 17th (2023), Reading Biscuit Factory (Reading, UK).
  • “The Oil Machine” and the Changing Climate.
  • Architects of Our Future: Energy and the Changing Climate.
  • The Energy War, and Climate Breakdown.
  • “Reading Hydro” – Microhydropower on the River Thames at Caversham Weir (Reading, UK).
  • “Four Meals From Anarchy” – We Must Grow More Food Locally.
  • Russia-Ukraine War and the Changing Energy Landscape.
  • Confronting the Changing Climate: COP26 - Scientists’ Warnings into Action, from Local to Global.
  • The Energy Crisis and the Climate Crisis.

RSS Environment & Food Justice

  • National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Statement on the Climate Crisis
  • La Lucha por La Sierra | Scion of Texas Oil Barons Seeks to Overturn Historic Use Rights to the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant
  • Biopiracy in Mexico | Foundation stealing wild beehives in Yucatán
  • Deep Seeds at the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues | April 2018
  • Exclusive Update - Monsanto in Mexico | Corporate impunity and the beekeeper struggle against transgenic soybeans
  • Student Blogs | Race, Gender, and Settler Colonial Violence
  • Notas de Campaña | Por una Tortilla 100 ciento Nixtamalizada
  • Campaign Notes | For 100 Percent Nixtamalized nonGMO Tortillas | Part One
  • Maize: Our Identity, Our Food | Photo Exhibit of Indigenous Corn Farmers Featured at UN Headquarters
  • Protecting the Sacred in Corn | Seed Sovereignty Documents | Berenice Sánchez Intervention on the Protection of Indigenous Agroecosystems presented to the UNPFII-2018 | 1 of 2

RSS Envisionation Blog

  • Dr Chad Briggs – Integrating disaster risk and national security with climate policy
  • “..colossal risks with the future of civilization” First study quantifying Earth System Boundaries
  • Archive: Michael E Mann, Michael Ghil, James E Hansen – Discussing Earth System Sensitivity
  • Dr Jennifer Francis – 2023’s symptoms of climate chaos, El Niño, Ocean Heatwaves, and Arctic Sea Ice lows
  • Archive: Dr Natalia Shakhova (& Igor Semiletov) Vienna Interview 2012 UNCUT 42mins
  • “Leave Africa Alone” – Solidarity With The Voices Of The Voiceless: Ina-Maria Shikongo
  • David Spratt: [Articulating &] Reclaiming the Climate Emergency
  • Archive: Professor James Hansen – EGU, Vienna, 2012 Unedited Interview
  • European Parliament Proposes Including “ECOCIDE” In EU Law
  • Capture6 CEO, Ethan Cohen-Cole, talks: SVB bank, climate tech & being bullish on gigaton’s of CO2 removal

RSS Extraenvironmentalist Blog and Podcasts

  • [ Episode #95 // Economy of Things ]
  • [ Episode #94 // Rocking the Google Bus ]
  • [ Episode #93 // Climate Agreements ]
  • [ Episode #92 // Decrypting Cryptocurrency ]
  • [ Episode #91 // Age of Stagnation? ]
  • [ Episode #90 // Missing Out ]
  • [ Autumn 2015 Interlude // Archaeoacoustics ]
  • The Energy Transition Show – [Episode #0] – subscribe @ energytransitionshow.com
  • [ Episode #89 // How on Earth ]
  • [ Episode #88 // Resilience Imperative ]

RSS ExtraEnvironmentalist’s Videos

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RSS ExtraGeographic

  • Teary in Decathlon
  • What happened to Let’s Wrestle?
  • An Unsuitable Job for a Woman film
  • Covid-19 antibody test photo
  • Smartphone cartoon
  • The Shard / London Bridge photo gallery
  • David Bowie
  • DayZ: 36 hours in a foreign, familiar land
  • Photos: First 3D Printing Show
  • One Day in the Life of Television: 25 years on

RSS Facts for Working People

  • ChatGPT, value and knowledge.
  • After Congress Stops The Rail Strike. The SCOTUS Doubles Down.
  • Afscme Local 444 History From a Participant #2
  • Interesting Comments from Black American Radicals. Class Good Indentity Bad
  • US China Conflict. History Repeats Itself
  • Acemoglu, AI and automation
  • Water is a Human Necessity. We Should Own it. But What sort of public ownership?
  • Yes It's True. I Wish Bernie Sanders Would Just Bugger Off.
  • THE FIRE ANTS OF GUANTÁNAMO BAY