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Collapse of Industrial Civilization

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Collapse of Industrial Civilization

Tag Archives: Social Unrest

The Global Reality Freak Show

01 Monday Sep 2014

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

≈ 120 Comments

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"While The World Burns" by Svavar Knútur, 6th Mass Extinction, Anarchism, Climate Change Denial, Ernest Becker, Ferguson Missouri, Institutionalized Discrimination, Institutionalized Poverty, Methane Time Bomb, Michael Brown, Militarization of Society, Offshoring of Production, Police Shootings, Privatization of Education, Privatization of Science, Racism, Social Injustice, Social Unrest, Techno-Utopians, The Credit Crash, The Denial of Death, The Housing Bubble

Post-apocalypse

“Mother nature is a brutal bitch, red in tooth and claw, who destroys what she creates.”
~ Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

The root of the problem

Despite modern man’s unparalleled ability to gather and synthesize mountains of data on climate change and other growing dangers, he is helpless to stop the inevitable and well-worn trajectory that all previous complex societies have followed. This time, however, is different in that the scale of environmental overshoot is planet-wide – the world’s oceans are becoming too acidic to sustain life, the soil too eroded and degraded to grow food, and the atmosphere too polluted with heat-trapping gasses. As the green mantle of the Earth is swallowed up in the geologic blink of an eye, eon-long processes of plant and animal evolution are stopped dead in their tracks. Of all the horrors modern civilization has brought forth, the most damaging and longest-lasting legacy is the wholesale loss of genetic and species diversity. Global ecocide is certain suicide. 

Faith in technology and “free market” capitalism to solve the planet’s ills has already proven to be a very dangerous and faulty belief. Politicians are always looking for easy solutions to complex problems, and they see technology as the mechanism by which to reconcile endless growth on a finite planet. Public Relations and greenwashing are all-pervasive. Science has been privatized to the highest bidder. Essentially, those who are anti-environmental and those who claim to be environmentalists are both proponents of the same omnicidal death machine. One recognizes that fossil fuels are indispensable to industrial civilization while discounting or refuting anthropogenic climate disruption(ACD). The other acknowledges the reality of ACD but falsely believes that “renewable energy technologies” can harmlessly supplant carbon-based energy sources. In both cases, neither can accept that the root of the problem is capitalist industrial civilization. Neither the anti-greens nor the faux environmentalists are willing to give up their globetrotting airline flights, sprawling suburbia and car culture, oversized McMansions, overprocessed fast food, virtual world of cyberspace and all the rest of their energy-intensive, unsustainable way of living:

…This “standard of living” is a product of an alienated society in which consumption for the sake of consumption is the new god. In a grow-or-die economy, production and consumption must keep increasing to prevent economic collapse. This need for growth leads to massive advertising campaigns to indoctrinate people with the capitalist theology that more and more must be consumed to find “happiness” (salvation), producing consumerist attitudes that feed into an already-present tendency to consume in order to compensate for doing boring, pointless work in a hierarchical workplace. Unless a transformation of values occurs that recognises the importance of living as opposed to consuming, the ecological crisis will get worse. It’s impossible to imagine such a radical transformation occurring under capitalism, whose lifeblood is consumption for the sake of consumption…

…As Murray Bookchin argues, “If we live in a ‘grow-or-die’ capitalistic society in which accumulation is literally a law of economic survival and competition is the motor of ‘progress,’ anything we have to say about population causing the ecological crisis is basically meaningless. Under such a society the biosphere will eventually be destroyed whether five billion or fifty million people live on the planet” [“The Population Myth” in Which Way for the Ecology Movement?, p. 34]… – link

Civilization is not in of itself evil; the problem lies in how it is organized and functions. Capitalism encourages the unregulated growth of gigantic corporations that exploit the environment and people, create economic disparity, promote hyper-consumerism, and usurp and corrupt governments. In addition to using military might for exploiting foreign resources and pools of labor, capitalism encourage war for the sole purpose of profit, i.e the military industrial complex. It also encourages overpopulation by the gross maldistribution of wealth:

…There is an inverse relationship between per capita income and the fertility rate — as poverty decreases, so do the population rates. When people are ground into the dirt by poverty, education falls, women’s rights decrease, and contraception is less available. Having children then becomes virtually the only creative outlet, with people resting their hopes for a better future in their offspring. Therefore social conditions have a major impact on population growth. In countries with higher economic and cultural levels, population growth soon starts to fall off. Today, for example, much of Europe has seen birth rates fall beyond the national replacement rate. This is the case even in Catholic countries, which one would imagine would have religious factors encouraging large families.

To be clear, we are not saying that overpopulation is not a very serious problem. Obviously, population growth cannot be ignored or solutions put off until capitalism is eliminated. We need to immediately provide better education and access to contraceptives across the planet as well as raising cultural levels and increasing women’s rights in order to combat overpopulation, which only benefits the elite by keeping the cost of labour low in addition to fighting for land reform, union organising and so on. However, the “population explosion” is not a neutral theory, and its invention and continual use is due to its utility to vested interests. We should not be fooled by them into thinking that overpopulation is the main cause of the ecological crisis, as this is a strategy for distracting people from the root-cause of both ecological destruction and population growth: namely, the capitalist economy and hierarchical social relationships it requires. – link

We also discussed this consumption and overpopulation issue in a previous post entitled Overpopulated by Homo Colossus.

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Ferguson is only a small spark before the conflagration

Those communities that are the most discriminated against and disenfranchised will be the first to erupt in violence as the social fabric is stretched to the breaking point. The city of Ferguson, Missouri experienced ‘white flight’ since 1990 which changed its demographics, creating a majority of African-American residents but with whites still dominating the institutions governing the city. The racially charged social unrest in Ferguson has its roots in the rapacious system of capitalism. Several policies and effects of neoliberal capitalism worked to drain wealth and opportunity away from Ferguson: “outsourcing of American industry, the housing bubble and credit crunch, and education reform and privatization”. In addition, the militarization of local law enforcement and targeting of African-Americans with fines to fund the police department is another tactic of rogue capitalism preying upon the poor:

    • Emerson Electric, the dominant employer in the area, offshored its production little by little over time to foreign factories with cheap labor.
    • Many African-Americans bought homes in Ferguson during the housing bubble, only to become underwater in their mortgages in the credit crash and Great Recession that followed. As of 2013, 49% of homes in the Ferguson zip code were underwater.

Mortgage lenders targeted predominantly black and Hispanic areas for the highest-risk, highest-cost types of mortgage loans, such as adjustable-rate mortgages and loans with high prepayment penalties. This led to higher-than-average default rates, according to the Housing Commission established by the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

The mayor of Ferguson and its all-white city council then collaborated to keep property values low around the historic district for reinvestment and redevelopment.

    • On the basis of its state test scores, the impoverished Normandy School District where Michael Brown attended was declared a failure and its accreditation was pulled by the state. Because of this, Normandy School District was obligated to pay for the transfer of its students to other wealthier schools. (This is one of the schemes of the privatization of education and “school shopping” that the state is using rather than funding and providing resources to these schools.) The costs of student transfer bankrupted Normandy School District, so the state then dissolved the district and created a new one which it exempted from accreditation so that students would no longer be allowed to transfer out to other better-funded schools. The pipeline from such poverty-stricken, failed educational systems to prisons–many of which are for profit–is direct.
    • The militarization of the domestic police force in the U.S. has been occurring for several decades and is in line with the ever-increasing militarism of America’s foreign policy. With the entire globe now treated as a battlefield in the ‘War on Terror’, summary executions can be carried out by remote-controlled drone aircraft. Americans have now joined the ranks of those in South America, the Middle East and the rest of the Third World who have been exploited by the neo-coloniali exploitation of U.S. corporations over the last century. As the economy fails to ‘improve’ and global unrest becomes more frequent, the brutality of a fascist corporate state will reveal itself right here at home in more overt ways. The growing police state in America is the response by those planning to protect their elite positions at the top of the capitalist hierarchy in this corrupt state of ever-widening wealth disparity, resource depletion, and environmental collapse:

…Combat in large cities is central to the military doctrine that is being developed by the US armed forces. This is spelled out in a document entitled “Megacities and the United States Army: Preparing for a complex and uncertain future,” which was released in June by the Army’s Strategic Studies Group and endorsed by its chief of staff, Gen. Raymond Odierno.

Predicting that it is “highly likely that megacities [described as metropolitan areas with populations of more than 10 million] will be the strategic key terrain in any future crisis that requires U.S. military intervention,” the report reveals that the Pentagon has conducted “case studies” and “field work” in preparation for such interventions in: Dhaka, Bangladesh; Lagos, Nigeria; Bangkok, Thailand; Mexico City, Mexico, Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, Brazil … and New York City.

Describing the conditions that it anticipates will require US military intervention, the report warns, “As inequality between rich and poor increases … Stagnation will coexist with unprecedented development, as slums and shanty towns rapidly expand alongside modern high-rises. This is the urban future.”

“Radical income disparity,” is further described as the foremost “driver of instability” in these far-flung urban areas.

In other words, the Pentagon brass is seeking to prepare the US military for directly counterrevolutionary interventions aimed at quelling popular revolts that it sees as the inevitable consequence of the unprecedented social inequality created by world capitalism in crisis… – link

As reported by Cyrano’s Journal Today, the Obama administration’s call to review U.S. government funding of military equipment for local/state police departments is simply a PR ploy to calm the nerves of uneasy Americans. In reality, the U.S. government will work to normalize and standardize the militarization of domestic law enforcement:

…The aim of the Obama administration’s review—beyond being a public relations exercise—will be to cut down on such unprofessional displays and make the use of domestic military police more systematic, widespread and regular. In this it will be similar to the administration’s reviews of its domestic spying programs, each of which has only resulted in the extension of illegal spying by the US intelligence agencies.

Far from acting as a restraining influence on local police departments, the federal government has been the most active facilitator of police militarization. In June, the American Civil Liberties Union released a report entitled “War comes home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing,” which concluded that “the federal government has justified and encouraged the militarization of local law enforcement.”…

    • To add insult to injury, the Ferguson police made it a practice to feed off the poor by filling its coffers with millions of dollars in fines and court fees that it collected by specifically targeting and harassing African-Americans. I seldom quote ZeroHedge here because it is pro-capitalist and attributes all social and economic problems to Federal Reserve monetary policies rather that correctly placing the blame on the inherent workings of capitalism, but I did read an informative article from them on the scale of poverty that is affecting not only Ferguson, but all major metropolitan areas in the U.S.:

The biggest concern, however, is that Ferguson is merely the canary in the coalmine. According to Brookings, within the nation’s 100 largest metro areas, the number of suburban neighborhoods where more than 20 percent of residents live below the federal poverty line more than doubled between 2000 and 2008-2012. Almost every major metro area saw suburban poverty not only grow during the 2000s but also become more concentrated in high-poverty neighborhoods. By 2008-2012, 38 percent of poor residents in the suburbs lived in neighborhoods with poverty rates of 20 percent or higher. For poor black residents in those communities, the figure was 53 percent.

A long history of colonialism, slavery, and racism underlies the economic, political, and social disenfranchisement of African-Americans today in communities like Ferguson. Their exploitation has been institutionalized, and thus deemed acceptable.

fergusonprotest2

We’re just an extra in this global reality freak show

The world certainly appears to becoming much more unstable with Russia and the Ukraine flirting with nuclear war, barbaric decapitations at an all time high in the perpetually destabilized Middle East, the failure of Japan’s ice wall to stop its radioactive clusterfuck fallout, redneck commando wannabes of America’s local police departments running roughshod over those they are sworn to “protect”, the Wall Street Casino Royale reaching all-time highs as average Americans get new lone shark PayDay loans to pay their previous lone shark PayDay loans, and our corporate overlords celebrating even higher profits while paying even less taxes. And while this circus of humanity plays out, both poles continue their meltdown with new outgassings of methane promising to wipe us out with one monstrous belch.

The techno-utopians will continue their crusade to save mankind from himself. The free market fundamentalists will seek comfort in the fantasy that Adam’s Smith’s invisible hand will fix everything. The climate change deniers will continue to rationalize the increasingly destabilized biosphere as a new normal that has happened before. The things we know that should be done to save ourselves are only philosophical narratives running in our head, never to see the light of day. All you can do is watch it all unfold because this reality freak show is global and you’re just an extra in it, whether you want to be or not. After all, I don’t think any of us are completely free from some sort of delusion. If we were, we wouldn’t be human.

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Where’s the Evolution?

07 Monday Jul 2014

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

≈ 69 Comments

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Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Albert Einstein, Anthropogenic Climate Disruption (ACD), Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, E.M. Forster: “THE MACHINE STOPS”, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Ferengi of Star Trek, Inverted Totalitarianism, Joseph Tainter, Kevin Lister's The Vortex of Violence and why we are losing the battle against climate change, Military Industrial Complex, Nuclear Proliferation, Peak Oil, Resource Wars, Rudolph Herzog, Social Unrest, Thermonuclear War, War for Profit, War Profiteers

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“Cannot you see, cannot all you lecturers see, that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives is the Machine? We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralyzed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it. The Machine develops – but not on our lives. The Machine proceeds – but not to our goal. We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries, and if it could work without us, it would let us die.”
~ E.M. Forster, “THE MACHINE STOPS”

Insects, birds, mammals, and fish have all been migrating to cooler zones for the past four decades in response to the cataclysmic climate disruption ignited by industrial civilization, but humans are the only organisms inhabiting this blue orb we call Earth who are not altering their behavior. They live within an energy cocoon that keeps them cool in the summer, warm in the winter, stuffed with massed produced food from mechanized factory farms, and entertained by a virtual world of digital imagery. As cracks and holes in the Earth’s biosphere grow ever larger, the natural response of capitalist carbon man ensconced within his protective energy shell is to try to put a price tag on what is being burned, i.e. fossil fuels, rather than deal with the deeper root cause of an unsustainable economic system and way of life which demands such exorbitant consumption of resources.

Our energy slaves feed us and control the climate for us while at the same time destroying the natural world that had enabled humans to create such an artificial environment. Detached from nature and enslaved by our own technological creations, we sleepwalk over the cliff of extinction. Our so-called progress will, in the end, disappear like a mirage in the scorching desert sun as nature is sacrificed to the machine of industrial civilization.

Throwing money into the maw of the ‘free market’ is the predictable modus operandi of technocapitalism’s indoctrinated disciples who believe such offerings will create a technofix, miraculously healing the planet. In the Star Trek TV series, the Ferengi were an extraterrestrial race whose culture was characterized by “a mercantile obsession with profit and trade, and their constant efforts to swindle unwary customers into unfair deals.” Just like the Ferengi species where profit is the first, last and only important factor, the high temples of private enterprise are commodifying and monetizing the atmosphere just as they have everything else in nature. The colonization of the public mind by capitalism is complete and overriding. We ignore unfolding geologic forces and instead put our faith in manmade market forces to our detriment.

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In the final days of capitalist industrial civilization, the relentless and compulsive pursuit of profit and growth has subsumed any intelligent and realistic plans for survival. In fact, with the race amongst nations for nuclear technology and sophisticated weaponry, the requisite competitive economy to support such hi-tech militaries nullifies any attempts at reducing greenhouse emissions and pushes the world towards nuclear annihilation. As Kevin Lister, author of the forthcoming book The Vortex of Violence and why we are losing the battle against climate change, points out:

…The fundamental dilemma all nuclear weapons states face is that to maintain a credible nuclear force, be it a force of one or one thousand nuclear warheads on deployment, a massive military industrial complex must be maintained. As well as building the actual nuclear weapon systems, it must also provide the conventional defence screen consisting of fighter jets, patrols planes, anti-submarine warfare technology etc. In an ultimate irony, the purpose of these becomes to defend the nuclear forces to ensure a second strike can be launched rather than to defend people, because there is no defence against a determined nuclear attack. The military industrial complex that delivers this equipment must be continually fed with new streams of contracts at increasing values otherwise the industrial complex collapses. Thus a key objective in the initial gate document which justified to parliament the early procurement of material for Trident was that, “We must retain the capability to design, build and support nuclear submarines and meet the commitment for a successor to the Vanguard Class submarines.” In other words, we build Tridents to continue building Tridents.

The enormous cost of this needs to be covered by taxes, and for this some £500 billion of additional excess economic activity is needed which requires energy from fossil fuels and is the antithesis of making the urgent cut backs we need to tackle the soaring greenhouse gas overburden. Thus once the decision is made to proceed with Trident, it becomes impossible to make the climate change agreements to save the planet. In this context Trident is more dangerous than we ever first thought and it is the ultimate Faustian bargain.

Your commissioners have also failed to acknowledge in their report that the public spending that will be needed on Trident must be made at the same times as scarce public funds must be diverted to building a low carbon economy and mitigating the effects of climate change such as flooding and storm damage. This conflict will arise as tax receipts simultaneously drop through energy price rises.

The impossibility of meeting these conflicting challenges is the reason that much of the negotiations at climate change conferences takes place around the positions of the nuclear weapons states and their need to maintain large military industrial complexes and competitive and expanding economies to fund these…

…to build at huge expense a nuclear force whilst the nation is effectively bankrupt that will never provide secure protection from nuclear attack and merely encourage our competitors to reciprocate. It drives a race to the bottom where rational decisions on climate change can never be taken.

This nexus between global capitalism, the lucrative military-industrial complex, and the strategy of nuclear deterrence has locked the nations of the world into a trajectory of escalating anthropogenic climate disruption, environmental degradation and an ongoing arms race since World War II. Illustrative of this are the energy consumption levels of the U.S. DoD and war profiteering motives of defense contractors:

…The US military is the largest single consumer of energy in the world. If it were a country, the Department of Defense (DoD) would rank 34th in the world in average daily oil use, coming in just behind Iraq and just ahead of Sweden…

…Electricity usage by the military, which accounts for even more greenhouse gas emissions, is also gargantuan. In FY 2006, the DoD used almost 30,000 gigawatt hours of electricity at a cost of almost $2.2 billion. The DoD’s electricity use would supply enough electricity to power more than 2.6 million average American homes.

In fiscal year 2012, the DoD consumed about a billion gigawatt hours of site delivered energy at a cost of 20.4 billion dollars. While consuming that amount of energy, DoD emitted 70 million metric tons of CO2. And yet, total DoD energy use and costs are even higher simply because the energy use and costs arising from the contractors to support military operations both domestically and abroad are not included in DoD’s data…

…The increased propensity for war and conflict brought about by global warming is being exploited by the military-industrial complex which is planning on how to profit from it. Defense contractors are looking at climate change as a growth and profit opportunity due to the potential conflicts produced by food and water shortages. They are salivating over the potential profits to be made leading to increased stock market performance and, therefore, higher CEO compensation.

Defense contractors are setting their sights on a narrow-minded militarist approach. Indeed, the very companies most responsible for climate change are set to make a killing from its intensification. – link

Only one civilization in history has voluntarily uncomplicated/decomplexitized its society in the face of resource scarcity. According to Joseph Tainter, that civilization was the Byzantine Empire:

“After the Byzantine empire lost most of its territory to the Arabs, they simplified their entire society. Cities mostly disappeared, literacy and numeracy declined, their economy became less monetised, and they switched from professional army to peasant militia.”

 As commenter James wryly puts it:

…Because the human ape is such a competitive and vicious sort, there must be a constant “progress” in technology and development to prevent being eaten by or dominated by another nation. Evolution writ large. Without a doubt it will end soon and nothing shall remain but the Ozymandian technological skeletons of times gone by…

photo-11 Yes, where is the evolution? Teeming within the capitalist industrial civilization that is M.A.D. are 7+ billion naked apes, the most dangerous creature to ever walk the face of the Earth capable of wiping itself out within mere minutes from thermonuclear war, if anthropogenic climate disruption, ocean acidification, and global nuclear reactor meltdowns don’t do the trick.

As a warming planet cooks our brains and scrambles our environment, the trigger finger of some mentally ill and agitated soul may just belong to someone sitting at the launch button of a nuke. As Albert Einstein said, ‘I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.’

Full video here: http://www.c-span.org/video/?312985-1/book-discussion-short-history-nuclear-folly

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Overpopulated by Homo Colossus

20 Sunday Apr 2014

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

≈ 118 Comments

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

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

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

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

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consumption-inequality-2005-bar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Ground Down Under the Machine of Poverty

23 Sunday Mar 2014

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

≈ 20 Comments

Tags

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

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

Poverty-uplift

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

602

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

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

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

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

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

As Joni Mitchell so eloquently states:

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

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

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

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

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

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

blame-the-poor

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

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

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

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

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

Howard W. Campbell Jr.
Slaughterhouse Five
Kurt Vonnegut

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

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

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

jesuskfc1100

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

No? Too many contractual commitments? Copyright problems?

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

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

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

Kentucky Fried Consumers

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Nightmares of the Omnicidal Juggernaut

17 Monday Mar 2014

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

≈ 136 Comments

Tags

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

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

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

Snap 2014-03-16 at 08.28.17

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

SAR1000w-300x453

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

Screen shot 2014-03-17 at 8.34.03 AM

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

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

72 (10)

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

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

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

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

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

Snap 2014-03-16 at 23.14.16

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

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

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

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

ZB_20

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

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

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

BeFunky_null_1.jpg

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Us and Them

13 Thursday Mar 2014

Posted by Brutus in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Environmental Degradation

≈ 87 Comments

Tags

6th Mass Extinction, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Eco-Apocalypse, Extinction of Man, Mass Die Off, Social Unrest

what-corporate-america-wants

Cold War antipathies between the “free world” and the Communist Block used to be conceptualized (in short) as “us and them” (sometimes “us vs. them”), which meant the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., the last two great superpowers. Additional facets to geopolitics were added by China, North Korea, the Middle East, India and Pakistan, and Brazil (mostly members of the nuclear club), but they didn’t figure as prominently in the rhetoric as what was clearly (even then) a false dualism. Binary thinking of this sort continues today in bogus phrases such as “either you’re with us or against us” or “if you’re not part of the solution then you’re part of the problem.” In American politics, the two-party system (Republicans and Democrats) appears to be intransigent and permanent despite political parties having risen and fallen over time both here and abroad. This herd team mentality keeps most political thinkers and observers from examining third-party alternatives with much seriousness the same way it forestalls bipartisanship. A little known fact is that the government-sounding agency called the Commission on Presidential debates is, in reality, a private corporation financed by Anheuser-Busch and other major companies and created by the Republican and Democratic parties to seize control of the presidential debates from The League of Women Voters in 1987.

Close identification with in-groups is learned early in life as cliques form in middle school (or before?) and is reinforced as each of us progresses through life’s phases. For instance, married/committed couples have a divergent set of understandings of personal relationships from unmarried individuals seeking/searching for a significant other. Childless couples have fundamentally differing social perspectives from those raising children (parents’ outlooks tracking with their children’s development). Working class folks have fewer opportunities and prerogatives than white-collar and professional workers. The rich enjoy considerable obeisance from everyone and benefit from undeserved favors and preferential treatment that the lower and middle classes can only look upon with envy and/or resentment. Examples go on and on.

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We cling to these identities with surprising faithfulness, considering how they lump everyone rather imprecisely into categories, not altogether arbitrarily constructed but crude nonetheless. Blends of attitudes and truly creative, outlying thinking don’t figure in discussions dominated by rigid fidelity to narrow rhetoric, sound bites, and talking points. Interestingly, this same us-and-them effect is at work in discussions of collapse and NTE, the players divided unevenly between those who just don’t get it (for a variety of reasons) and those who believe all indications are beyond controversy, meaning, completely obvious: we’re on a hopelessly downward trajectory. Of course, this division omits the bulk of the population for whom the issue isn’t even broached, and even for those who acknowledge the issue, there are a surprising number of positions on the continuum, such as those who get it but haven’t extrapolated far enough, those who get it but lie or deny out of one motivation or another (e.g., self-enrichment or political gain, albeit short-term), and those who don’t get it yet are exceeding well-versed in the evidence (so that it can be argued and spun).

All these dividing lines, rather than being a celebration of diversity, make us a fractured society along multiple faults. Perhaps it’s just my perception, but there seems to be a widening gap between those who openly admit our future must lead ineluctably to doom and techno-utopians for whom future horizons loom bright. I’ve suggested elsewhere that newcomers to the issue of collapse have a lot of catching up to do, but that naïvely assumed a common, shared understanding of our reality upon which to base incontrovertible conclusions. Let me suggest something a bit more radical: the utter failure of the masses to grasp the immensity of the collapse story already unfolding around us while a few intrepid folks call bullshit on the substitute story offered by clever politicians, pundits, and marketeers — rhetoricians all — is equivalent to the divide between a poor, illiterate, itinerant farmer (or hunter or trapper) ca. 1780 and the Founders, a tiny group of landed gentry who were exceptionally well-educated men — Renaissance men, if you will, all having deep understanding of political and Enlightenment philosophy of the day. It must have been nearly impossible for the Founders to communicate effectively with the governed.

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Today, the situation is reversed: mouth-breathing populists are now governing and have seized upon the means to manipulate the masses through disinformation and misdirection. Further, popular leaders and opinion-makers refuse to hear and simply cannot understand what a wizened few are telling them, namely, that unsustainable practices of industrial civilization have reached fever pitch and will soon become a hellscape of our own creation. Like a Revolutionary Era agriculturist or outdoorsman, today’s populists (and the large portion of the population they reflect — who elect them, in fact) may possess narrow expertise at their individual endeavors. Yet ironically, they remain over specialized and cut off from broad intellectual traditions and are thus functionally illiterate. Similarly, the masses to whom they proselytize have at best limited command of reading and almost no critical thinking skills whatsoever. (We never even approached universal literacy, which is a gateway to erudition.) A liberal arts education is to them hollow and meaningless, they are fundamentally immune to what science instructs, and their heads are full of entertainments (e.g., superhero geekery and professional sports) and other distractions that block real knowledge and understanding gained through careful, sustained consideration of an array of sources and perspectives. Contrast them with folks who read voluminously, study trends and scientific reports, and draw conclusions from a wealth of evidence: the two groups might as well be speaking Mandarin and English for all the communication passing between them.

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My sense of the term populist should not be mistaken for leaders who embody the will of the people. That’s obviously not happening. The most basic function of government is to formulate policy and allocate funds to execute those policies. The graphic below shows top policy priorities over the past five years:

Well down the list is dealing with global warming (and I’m guessing the related complex of problems). Protecting the environment fares about 10–20 points better, as though it were a separate issue. What is most important to the public, however, are those things at which our leaders are failing the worst: the economy and jobs; terrorism; and education. Every administration and Congress initially pays ample lip service to priorities with wide public support but then diverts to a different agenda. This paragraph by Joel Hirschhorn captures the sort of populism now practiced.

With the Bush-corrosion of our Constitution and collapse of the economic system after it had been exploited by the rich and corrupt, what better time for revolution? Instead, we got a president with a glib tongue, a terrific smile and a deep commitment to the two-party plutocracy and corporate state. Obama is no populist, not even close. Nor is he a genuine reformer. At best, he is a master exploiter of populism.

It’s noteworthy that Hirschhorn saw through the B.S. five years ago.

A similar disconnect between public mandate and leadership is described in this Truthout article from 2011:

According to the latest poll conducted by CBS “60 Minutes” and the magazine Vanity Fair, 61 percent of Americans want to raise taxes on the wealthy as the primary way to cut the budget. The same poll finds that the second most popular first choice for cutting the nation’s budget deficit, at 20 percent, is cutting the military budget. That is, 81 percent of us — four out of five — would cut the deficit by taxing the rich and/or slashing military spending. Only four percent of those polled favored cutting Medicare … and only three percent favored cutting Social Security … A second poll, this time by CNN, reports that 63 percent of Americans oppose the US War in Afghanistan and want it ended. Only 35 percent say they support the war (now in its ninth year).

With such a disconnect stalling meaningful discussion before it begins, no wonder that controlling rhetoric is defined instead by funding (profit), celebrity (guru glorification, including green-washing types), and false solutionism. They are precisely the wrong kinds of issues, of course. The right kinds might involve the realization that…

  1. in an interconnected world, we all succeed and fail together in this life (there is no us and them anymore),
  2. the time has long passed for solutions and (an attempt at) mitigation is the next step, and
  3. moral choices about how we act in the time remaining us are of paramount importance once deteriorating conditions lead to widespread chaos.

Instead we get slick salesmanship to keep the economy humming (funneling capital to the top) and the masses calmed or blissed-out on gadgetry. We get not-so-behind-the-scenes preparations to cull and quarantine the population when the going gets rough. And we succumb to infighting among those who can’t achieve consensus about what’s to be done. Us and them to the bitter end.

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We’ll Have Nothing Left to Lose!!!

05 Sunday Jan 2014

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

≈ 61 Comments

Tags

Banksy, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate Espionage, Corporate Lobbyists, Corporate Shills, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Disneyfication of Society, Eco-Apocalypse, Economic Collapse, Empire, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, Financialization of the Economy, Globalization, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, McDonaldization of Society, Military Industrial Complex, Near-Term Extinction, Nine Inch Nails, Peak Oil, Philip K. Dick, Police State, Ponzi Schemes, Poverty, Propaganda, Pseudo-Realities, Public Relations, Ralph Nader, Resource Wars, Revolution, Security and Surveillance State, Social Unrest, Stephen Fjellman, The Elite 1%, unwashed public, Vinyl Leaves:Walt Disney World and America, Wall Street Fraud, War for Profit, Worship of Mammon

BeFunky_Banksy McDo & Mickey Mouse-3.jpg

Rejoice: McDonald’s to open up first restaurant in Vietnam in 2014. Disneyland can’t be too far behind.

The . . . metamessage of our time is that the commodity form is natural and inescapable. Our lives can only be well lived (or lived at all) through the purchase of particular commodities. Thus our major existential interest consists of maneuvering for eligibility to buy such commodities in the market. Further, we have been taught that it is right and just—ordained by history, human nature, and God—that the means of life in all its forms be available only as commodities. . . . Americans live in an overcommodified world, with needs that are generated in the interests of the market and that can be met only through the market.
~ Stephen Fjellman, Vinyl Leaves:Walt Disney World and America

From the Amazonian tribe driven off its land by fossil fuel companies to the wage-enslaved city dweller dependent on mass-produced food and other commodities, no place on Earth has escaped the planet-wide reach of capitalist industrial civilization’s profit-extracting mechanisms. The oligarch’s of industry and banking shape public thought through an all-pervasive mass media monopoly, control legislation and regulation by pulling political purse-strings and commanding an army of lobbyists, sew death and mayhem with the global arms trade, sacrifice the next generation in resource wars, decimate ecosystems for short-term gain, manipulate and devalue currencies, create economic bubbles, and sell this entire vile process back to the masses as “progress” and “development” with measurements of inflated stock prices and skewed GDP figures. The untold human and environmental costs are now bursting at the seams with societal disintegration, epidemic mental illness, wide-scale resource depletion, industrial pollution and contamination, and the on-going collapse of the Earth’s biosphere.

If you’re wondering why there can never seem to be any significant action taken on climate change, don’t look for honest answers from those whose livelihood is tied to capitalism. If the true costs of the global industrial economy were calculated in terms of environmental damage, the ill-health effects on workers and the public, as well as the fraying of the Earth’s web of life, industries would find the costs too great to bear. The honest truth is that this ecocidal economic system would have to be dismantled for there to be any hope of humanity preserving a living planet and averting extinction.

“…big-time corporate capitalism is an omnicidal momentum. I mean, it just has one thing in mind, and it will destroy or weaken or co-opt anything in its way that is civic, that is democratic….corporations have been very clever A) in distracting people, especially young generation, with entertainment, with professional sports, turning them into spectators. Now you’ve got, you know, 24/7 entertainment. There’s no end to it. And they’ve also been very good in making people internalize a sense of powerlessness.” ~ Ralph Nader

Perhaps the three biggest crises facing civilization are unrestrained financialization of commerce and society, climate change, and peak oil (or peak net energy). Let’s take a quick look at how America is handling each of these crises:

Employing paid shills for the financial industry is now simply standard operating procedure in the U.$.A.:

Snap 2014-01-05 at 21.19.12

…Consumer advocates and independent analysts do their best to weigh in as well, but they are outgunned. Meanwhile, consulting firms dedicated to playing matchmaker between corporations and hired experts have flourished in the new regulatory environment. Director Charles Ferguson, whose film Inside Job highlighted the role of sponsored professors in supporting the deregulatory policies that led to the financial meltdown in 2008, says the business of economic consulting firms that work to “source” academics for expert testimony and regulatory filings “has been going on for quite a while, and it’s now quite a large industry.”…

Of course anthropogenic climate change, the existential threat of modern times, would seem to be a catastrophe deserving of mankind’s attention, would it not? Well, as you can see, the capitalist only views it as a public relations war:

An extensive study into the financial networks that support groups denying the science behind climate change and opposing political action has found a vast, secretive web of think tanks and industry associations, bankrolled by conservative billionaires.

“I call it the climate-change counter movement,” study author Robert Brulle, who published his results in the journal Climatic Change, told the Guardian. “It is not just a couple of rogue individuals doing this. This is a large-scale political effort.”

His work, which is focused on the United States, shows how a network of 91 think tanks and industry groups are primarily responsible for conservative opposition to climate policy. Almost 80 percent of these groups are registered as charitable organisations for tax purposes, and collectively received more than seven billion dollars between 2003 and 2010.

How about peak oil? Again, the energy industry has its PR machine in full swing touting America’s imminent energy independence along with many other myths, but commenter James of this blog cuts to the chase:

Now, which ponzi is most despicable, a religious or financial one? Both are based upon deceit and both serve primarily the enrichment of the scheme officialdom. One promises a payoff in eternal life while the other promises financial success. One examines your credit score while the other applies tick marks in you behavioral ledger of good and evil. Both systems of fleecing are based upon human fear and herd mentality. Society shuns the heretic of either ponzi and damnation awaits those that do not participate fully. Ponzis collapse when increasing numbers of fools, resources and energy can no longer be sucked into their cancerous growth schemes. The religious structures will be more enduring as they can always find plenty of poor dolts to give their last penny to gain a chance at the big after-life payoff. The financial schemers, faced now with meeting the absolutely unbelievable limits of growth will have to leave all those little nest eggs of promises, unhatched. The key is to convince the ponzi participants that the U.S. is the new Saudi Arabia, that fracking oil and natural gas is the future and we can get enough oil from shale to last a million years. “Just relax folks, you’re all gonna get your money back”. Not. What a miraculous world we live in.

As you can see, America is handling all three crises like a sleazy car salesman unloading a lot full of lemons.

And if anyone was spooked by the Snowden revelations of government spying, the implications of corporate espionage on social-change organizations that threaten to impede unfettered access to profits is truly terrifying.

colin-sugget-the-mickey

Although I’m not a particularly religious person, all evidence does point to a civilization which has completely succumbed to the worship of Mammon:

…The fruits of such idolatry are clear: the injustice and unemployment and waste of human talents; the corruption of our political leadership and their collusion with immoral financial practices; the depredation and degradation of our natural environments and the exhaustion of our natural resources; the inevitable wars and other crises that arise from the systematic fostering of base human appetites and the refusal to compromise our ways of life, and pursue a more equitable sharing of the gifts bequeathed to us…

I would not blame anyone for wanting to seek comfort in a bottle or some other form of self-medication, but perhaps doing something more dramatic to escape this nightmarish reality of a thoroughly corrupted, money-worshipping society is in the cards. When your back is against the wall and you’ve lost faith in everything, then revolution is the antidote for the “pseudo-realities” that plague us.

“Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups… So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.” ~ Philip K. Dick

Anonymouse-David-Aja

The specter of death, near-term extinction, haunts us as we silently endure the evil and decay all around us, going along just to get along in the belly of the American empire. One day pent-up anger and hunger will burst forth, pushing us into the streets. Blood and emotions will flow freely. Inept and crooked governments will fall. We’ll have nothing left to lose.

micky909

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Gulf of Despond

24 Tuesday Dec 2013

Posted by Brutus in Climate Change

≈ 72 Comments

Tags

Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Eco-Apocalypse, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Gross Inequality, Runaway Climate Change, Social Unrest

society_by_gloom82-d36que5

Newcomers to the subject of industrial collapse have a lot of catch-up to do behind those in the vanguard. If the abundant evidence, collected over several decades by this late date but foreseen long ago, is evaluated honestly and soberly, the realization might reasonably stun the collapse ingénue into silence. But in the era of instantaneous communications, emotional promiscuity, oversharing, and careerist news reports logged in real time (before events are fully known), who has the good sense to refrain from adding one’s idiotic voice to the din — especially to ask questions and subsequently provide answers that have already been gone over thoroughly and discarded by others? None too many, I venture to say.

Having struggled to understand industrial collapse now for six years or so myself, it has been curious and demoralizing to witness how even the most hopeful optimists and problem-solvers have yielded to the conclusion that what solutions may have existed some decades ago are now long behind us. Given the nature of our institutions and individual characters, we’re actually accelerating toward doom rather than braking. Thus, old-timers often descend into what might be called a Slough of Despond, but collapse newbies still desperate to cheat reality would rather name it a Gulf of Despond. To the old guard, the Slough looks like an abyss, a black hole, a bottomless pit that gobbles insatiably all energies dumped into it. To late-comers, the Gulf, by virtue of its spin-doctored name, must be somehow manageable, bridgeable, traversible, often with a glorious opportunity to establish a new, utopian social order (within a generation, of course, because that’s how history works) using all the wisdom we’ve accrued about imbalances and abuses of power. I have some empathy for those just now getting on board, but for those with a pulpit from which to preach, I suspect misdirecting our energies may be worse than just letting things unfold. Hard to know.

So what exactly produces the Slough/Gulf? The short course is that we’re already in the midst of an epoch-changing shift — a process advancing with alarming celerity compared to precedence found in the geological record — due to rising levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases (released from burnt fossil fuels) that have initiated climate change and the sixth great extinction event, to which we humans are most certain to fall prey. Without bothering to assess blame, the numbers indicate that it is not something about to happen; it’s already in the process of happening and will only get successively worse as delayed effects and feedback loops come fully into play. Let me repeat: this is already happening and there can be no pullback, pullout, stall, or reverse. The worst case scenario is, well, the worst, and we appear to be on track to spring that trap on ourselves. Three foreseeable planet-wide effects are (1) runaway global warming and climate chaos, (2) collapse of the biosphere (basically, anything that lives except for a few extremophiles), and (3) total irradiation from hundreds of nuclear sites that will melt down after being left unattended.

But because the future has not yet happened, though it is laid out before us with inevitability if one is honest, all the preferred hedges and escape hatches in language are utilized (might, could, perhaps, potential, possible, probable, likely, etc.) about what’s occurring all around us. No doubt this quells panic that would ensue if a credible voice began telling the truth, but it also prevents adoption of moral choices still available to us for taking our leave gracefully while demonstrating some concern for the rest of creation. That would be for me the most global moral choice, but there are others far more specific. For instance, we could stop the mad, greedy hustle for more — power, riches, resources, extravagance — and instead live modestly so that those who follow in our wake before the end of it all have something other than abject misery and desperation. We could stop inflicting utterly tortuous lives in cages, feedlots, and industrial barns on animals that eventually become our McNuggets, Whoppers, and bacon. We could share what we have with those truly in need rather than hoarding, doing so without self-serving expectations. We could ease suffering and mistreatment inflicted on others by the pursuit of ever-greater efficiency and profit. We could stop doubling down on all the schemes and antisocial values that have landed us, knowingly or not, in a death spiral. Lots of options out there.

However, again, given our nature, we seem intent on ending none of the stupidity, profligacy, and cruelty done by us, on our behalf, or with our complicity at least partly because Judeo-Christian values that inform industrial capitalism are still revered as sacred. (This is why the radical right has been attacking the center right — including St. Ronnie — for not being righteous doctrinaire enough. It knows its vision of salvation is broken but doubles down in desperation to validate itself.) The most important individual choice, considering our powerlessness to put a stop to the industrial juggernaut and those very real hatchetmen who perpetuate it, may be simply to do our best to understand the world that history has delivered us, represent the truth as well as possible, and go forward while we can with clear eyes and conscience. That means treating others, both villains and victims in this living nightmare, with compassion rather than universal condemnation.

This may be just about the darkest view out there, and it gives me pain to express it, just as all doomers out there struggle with what to do with their awful foreknowledge, but it’s not nihilistic. It’s not Charleton Heston at the end of one of the Planet of the Apes movies saying, essentially, “fuck it” and triggering the ΑΩ Bomb. Rather, honorable moral choices in the face of self-annihilation offers an opportunity to achieve one last, satisfying bit of grace that helps ease the pain of knowing what humans have done to the planet.

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My Home is a Dystopia

07 Saturday Dec 2013

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

≈ 33 Comments

Tags

Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Complexity Trap, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Cyberwarfare, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP), Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, Fukushima Nuclear Disaster, Global Nuclear Meltdown, Inverted Totalitarianism, Kurt Vonnegut, Mass Die Off, Nuclear Proliferation, Overpopulation, Peak Oil, Peak Water, Police State, Security and Surveillance State, Social Unrest, Steve Matthews, the Achilles Heel of the Electric Grid, The Elite 1%, Wall Street Fraud

BeFunky_null_9

Snap 2013-12-05 at 00.31.23

As media spin and political rhetoric of the corporatocracy diverge further and further from reality, modern society appears more and more to have been lifted from the pages of dystopian fiction. While the majority of the population succumbs to a serial-bubble economy, a disintegrating social safety net, and extreme weather, The elite are wasting scarce resources in an effort to hold together the cracking and buckling foundation of our sprawling industrial civilization. It’s in the short-term interest of the elite to construct a police state that will protect the gamed system they have created for themselves even though we know such short-sightedness sets us all up for a more spectacular fall. Capitalism has enslaved the world to the lifelong pursuit of little bits of paper and metal in order to buy the mass-produced products and food that have become essential to the survival of billions of people. Money and the illusion of material wealth are now perceived as more important than preserving the habitability of the planet. We live in a pathological dystopia of money worship.

Oil

Punch-drunk on fossil fuels, humans have been more destructive than a bull in a china shop; the true cost of fossil fuels continues to be externalized and downplayed as ever more ecological debt racks up, revealing itself in an increasingly destabilized biosphere and collapsing web of life. Sadly, the ‘climate emergency‘ has become yet another excuse for the elite to accelerate their looting by treating CO2 emissions as one more capitalist market tool — tax/trading policies as well as the costly and impractical capture and storage of carbon. In the end, any such market schemes will fail due primarily to the harsh consequences of human ecological overshoot and the complexity trap modern civilization has created for itself.

“…Societies struggling with the dilemmas of complexity are vulnerable from two directions. First, systems that are too tightly coupled or too efficient are fragile; they lack resilience. Thus they risk being toppled by a cascade of failure. That is how region-wide electrical outages propagate. The failure of one sector brings down another and another until the grid itself fails, and once down it takes a heroic effort to get it up and running again.

Second, they are exposed to simultaneous failure. When formerly separate problems coalesce into a problematique, a nexus of interlocking problems, the society does not face one or two discrete challenges, as in simpler times, but instead a swarm of simultaneous challenges that can overwhelm its capacity to respond, thereby provoking a general collapse.

Take climate change as a current example. To address this overall problem will require us to surmount a host of challenges in many different sectors (e.g., agriculture, forestry, public health, energy production, infrastructure and so on) not only in one country or economy but in every country—to varying degrees…”

BeFunky_Tintype_3

In the geological blink of an eye — 20, 40, 60, or 80 years from now, ghostly ruins will be all that remains of the most technologically advanced civilization that once spanned the globe. I don’t believe there will appear any sort of Hail Mary invention to solve the gauntlet of problems facing mankind — peak fossil fuels, climate change, ocean acidification, keystone species extinction, water scarcity, peak antibiotics, chemical pollution, nuclear proliferation, overpopulation, capitalism, and the complexity trap. Just a few weeks ago, a drill was conducted between Canada, the U.S., and Mexico in order to simulate a large-scale electric grid failure:

“…The vulnerability of our power grid due to solar flares or electromagnetic pulse (EMP) is getting new attention. Our system of interconnected power generation, transmission facilities, and distribution facilities are more vulnerable to cyber attacks than ever before. It would cost $3.6 trillion to fix everything, and would not be completed until 2020.

Smart grid systems make the power grid more accessible to cyber hackers so the upgrade can increase the risk. Electric car charging stations are essentially an accessible computer that cyber hackers can access the power grid. Right now, America has relatively few electric car charging stations, but we will be seeing a significant increase in government and privately funded vehicle charging station projects…

…It is estimated that a long-term failure of the power grid would likely be so catastrophic to society that casualties would be in excess of 60% of the population, according to the Chairman of the EMP Commission. With the grid vulnerable to solar flares, cyber attacks, EMP’s and weather related events it is important that we have supplies in stock to reduce the waiting time for overseas shipments and manufacturing delays. Currently we lack the inventory.

When, not if, the power grid fails, not only will the citizens of the U.S.A. be at risk of interrupted supplies of water, fresh food, fuel and the shut down of communications, but our very own military will suffer the same affects. Civil unrest would inevitably overwhelm the police department’s ability to respond…”

Back in August of this year, Outgoing DHS Director, Janet Napolitano said the following:

“A massive and “serious” cyber attack on the U.S. homeland is coming, and a natural disaster, the likes of which the nation has never seen is also likely and on its way.”

BeFunky_img148710h

Of course the extreme weather events of climate change are also a factor in the fragility of the power grid. And ironically, converting to ‘green energy’ to supply power to the grid could compound the problem:

…”Energy officials worry a lot these days about the stability of the massive patchwork of wires, substations and algorithms that keeps electricity flowing. They rattle off several scenarios that could lead to a collapse of the power grid — a well-executed cyberattack, a freak storm, sabotage.

But as states, led by California, race to bring more wind, solar and geothermal power online, those and other forms of alternative energy have become a new source of anxiety. The problem is that renewable energy adds unprecedented levels of stress to a grid designed for the previous century.

Green energy is the least predictable kind. Nobody can say for certain when the wind will blow or the sun will shine. A field of solar panels might be cranking out huge amounts of energy one minute and a tiny amount the next if a thick cloud arrives. In many cases, renewable resources exist where transmission lines don’t.

“The grid was not built for renewables,” said Trieu Mai, senior analyst at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

The frailty imperils lofty goals for greenhouse gas reductions. Concerned state and federal officials are spending billions of dollars in ratepayer and taxpayer money in an effort to hasten the technological breakthroughs needed for the grid to keep up with the demands of clean energy”…

The electric grid truly is the Achilles heel of industrial civilization:

…”Outside of the electricity industry, few fully understand the centrality of the grid to life in America today. The most graphic realizations occur when the grid goes down. It’s not just a matter of light and comfort in our homes. Without electricity, citizens may have no access to potable water, sewage treatment, safe food, fuel supplies, traffic control, or health care…

…Not only is the electrical grid central to modern life, but the grid also has multiple vulnerabilities that make keeping it safe a very difficult task. Weather outages are common, although some, such as an ice storm, can do enormous damage. A January 1998 ice storm destroyed much of Hydro-Québec’s massive 765-kV transmission system, blacking out more than 3 million Canadians, causing 30 fatalities, and leaving many customers in the dark for weeks. Tropical storms, such as 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, can also cause long-term and widespread destruction.

Human error can also take down the grid in a hurry, as was the case with the massive August 2003 blackout that turned off power for 55 million people in the Northeast, Midwest, and Canada…

…The 2003 blackout also highlighted another chilling aspect of grid failure: the propensity of the system to suffer from a cascading failure. Because of the grid’s interconnectedness, grid failures can spread quickly, concatenating across the system. This same effect occurred during the 1965 blackout that slammed most of the eastern U.S., an event that began with a simple hardware failure in Canada.”…

And lastly, without electricity for an extended period, we would have hundreds of Fukushima nuclear disasters unfolding all over the planet:

…”Unfortunately, the world’s nuclear power plants, as they are currently designed, are critically dependent upon maintaining connection to a functioning electrical grid, for all but relatively short periods of electrical blackouts, in order to keep their reactor cores continuously cooled so as to avoid catastrophic reactor core meltdowns and fires in storage ponds for spent fuel rods….

What do extended grid blackouts have to do with potential nuclear catastrophes? Nuclear power plants are designed to disconnect automatically from the grid in the event of a local power failure or major grid anomaly; once disconnected, they begin the process of shutting down the reactor’s core. In the event of the loss of coolant flow to an active nuclear reactor’s core, the reactor will start to melt down and fail catastrophically within a matter of a few hours, at most. In an extreme GMD [geomagnetic disturbance], nearly every reactor in the world could be affected…

If an extreme GMD were to cause widespread grid collapse (which it most certainly will), in as little as one or two hours after each nuclear reactor facility’s backup generators either fail to start, or run out of fuel, the reactor cores will start to melt down. After a few days without electricity to run the cooling system pumps, the water bath covering the spent fuel rods stored in “spent-fuel ponds” will boil away, allowing the stored fuel rods to melt down and burn [2]. Since the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) currently mandates that only one week’s supply of backup generator fuel needs to be stored at each reactor site, it is likely that, after we witness the spectacular nighttime celestial light show from the next extreme GMD, we will have about one week in which to prepare ourselves for Armageddon.”…

The Energy Skeptic reports that Russia is on a crusade to spread these ticking time bombs all around the world.

3959191779_a0764c7d92_o

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Citizen 3-141-592-653-5

03 Sunday Nov 2013

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

≈ 58 Comments

Tags

Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Empire, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, Gross Inequality, Homeland Security, Inverted Totalitarianism, Kathy D. Schick and Nicholas Toth, Mass Die Off, Military Industrial Complex, NSA Spying, Overpopulation, Patrice Ayme, Peak Oil, Peak Water, Police State, Resource Wars, Security and Surveillance State, Social Unrest, Tadeusz (Tad) Patzek, The Elite 1%, unwashed public, War for Profit, War on Terror

dystopian_future_01_by_demonicclone-d4mcu2e

They were called ‘consumers’. Their every behavior became just another stream of data to be tracked, recorded, quantified, and analyzed by corporations for their vast, profit-seeking conveyor belt of production, distribution and marketing to a sea of mouths. The machine was global and its hungry tentacles wrapped the Earth. Wherever it turned its covetous eyes, the Earth shook and its creatures large and small fled for cover. Government and corporate rule were fully enmeshed and the birth of a worldwide surveillance state was born. All mass communication systems were controlled and grassroot uprisings within the Empire’s homeland could be cut off at the knees before they ever gained traction. Protection of the homeland from terrorism was the initial excuse by which the fascist state expanded its power. Knowledge is power; foreign countries and governments could be manipulated from a distance. Privacy was a quaint relic of a bygone era. With the awareness that Big Brother was watching, few voiced their true opinions. The charade of democracy played on as the consumers retreated into their fabricated world of digital screens and commercialization.

“[Citizens became] one-dimensional idiots; consuming pointlessly, obsessing about lifestyle, gawping at celebrities, gazing blankly at moronic TV game shows, forever grasping towards the next, vacuous, artificial ‘want’ created by Global Gobble Corporation.” ~ Philip Mirowski

Lipton_LG_Surveillance

The captains of industry were happy with their scheme of manipulating markets, printing fiat money, continuously uprooting industry to cheaper labor pools abroad, keeping well oiled the wheels of the military industrial complex by waging war-for-profit wherever possible, and ravaging the Earth for every last bit of ancient carbon and minerals. Vast sums of money were spent on public relations and greenwashing in order to ensure the unwashed masses would stay ignorant and subservient to the looting and destruction of society and the environment. The elite were quickly turning the Earth into a death trap for all living things, and few noticed or cared. As long as cheap, mass produced, nutrient-poor food was on tap to fill the stomachs of the teeming masses, revolt and bloodshed were averted. The elite, however, could see the writing on the wall. Plans were drawn up to use force when the inevitable time arose that fuel, food, and water became scarce. The heavy stick of Empire so often used to smash swarthy radicals abroad would, in due time, be turned inward on the homeland.

laurie_lipton1

“The Will To Extermination is the very core of the Dark Side. It has been ignored at humanity’s own peril.” ~ Patrice Ayme

“Our technological abilities have made us tremendously successful animals, but also tremendously dangerous ones, glorified apes with nuclear capabilities. We tend to overexploit or destroy our resources, drastically modify or pollute our environments, overpopulate the planet, and wage war on our fellow inhabitants, all of which threaten our long-term viability as a species. Is self-induced extinction the ultimate fate of intelligent, tool-using organisms like ourselves? Are we smart, but not smart enough?”
~ Kathy D. Schick and Nicholas Toth

“This is what I recently learned from my friend, Professor Bill Rees:
During individual development, repeated sensory experiences and cultural norms literally shape the human brain’s synaptic circuitry in patterns that reflect and embed those experiences. Patterned thinking acquires a physical presence in the brain.
Subsequently, people seek out compatible experiences and, “when faced with information that does not agree with their [preformed] internal structures, they deny, discredit, reinterpret or forget that information.”
(Brain and Culture, Bruce E. Wexler, The MIT Press, 2006).
Most people are genuinely unable to face the truth. Based on this premise, most if not all human civilizations have been built.
“The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error…”
(Gustave le Bon, 1896).
~ Tadeusz (Tad) Patzek

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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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  • Ocean Acidification in Earth's Past: Insights to the Future – James Zachos
  • Oil, Smoke & Mirrors
  • Peak mining & implications for natural resource management
  • Permian – Triassic Mayhem: Earth's Largest Mass Extinction
  • Peter Ward Our Future In a World Without Ice Caps
  • Peter Ward The Medea Hypothesis II
  • Peter Ward: The Medea Hypothesis I
  • Photographing the Nuclear Disaster in Fukushima
  • Pirate Television: Financializing America with Randy Mandell
  • Professor Al Bartlett – Arithmetic, Population and Energy
  • Professor Kevin Anderson: Real Clothes for the Emperor – Facing Climate Change
  • Rick Wolff // A Cure for Capitalism
  • Six degrees could change the world
  • Somewhere In New Mexico Before The End Of Time
  • Submedia TV
  • Surplus: Terrorized Into Being Consumers
  • Surviving Progress
  • Techno Fix – Why Technology Won’t Save Us Or the Environment
  • Techno-Fix – Dr. Michael Huesemann interview
  • The Age of Stupid
  • The Big Fix
  • The Century Of The Self
  • The Chomsky Videos
  • The Coming Famine
  • The Corporation : The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power
  • The Crash Course
  • The Crisis of Civilization : Full Movie
  • The Day the Earth Nearly Died
  • The Domino Effect – Overpopulation
  • The False Solutions of Green Energy – Wilbert & Foley (PIELC 2014)
  • The Flaw
  • The Fuck-it Point
  • The Long Emergency
  • The Man who Quit Money
  • The Methane Ticking Time Bomb has Struck Again…..
  • The Myth of Capitalism with Michael Parenti
  • The Myth of Sustainability – Guy McPherson
  • The Myth of the Liberal Media: The Propaganda Model of News
  • The Ordinary Madness of Charles Bukowski
  • The Overview Effect
  • The Permian–Triassic Extinction Event [FULL VIDEO]
  • The Planet by Johan Söderberg
  • The Power Principle: (Full Length Documentary)
  • The Secure & the Dispossessed: How the Military and Corporations are Shaping a Climate-Changed World
  • The Shock Doctrine 2009
  • The Sixth Extinction (Elizabeth Kolbert)
  • The Twin Sides of the Fossil Fuel Coin – Guy McPherson
  • There's No Tomorrow (peak oil, energy, growth & the future)
  • Threads (Nuclear War)
  • Tom Murphy: Growth has an Expiration Date
  • TOXIC: AMAZON – FULL LENGTH
  • Up & Coming Liquid Fuel Crisis by Tom Murphy
  • VICE Documentaries
  • What A Way To Go: Life at the end of Empire
  • Who's Afraid Of Machiavelli?

Notes and Documents

  • 'Conspiracy Theories' and Clandestine Politics
  • (2019) UN Report: Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’
  • 2019 UN Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services(One Million Species At Risk of Extinction)
  • American Empire and Killing Hope – The Essays of William Blum
  • An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security
  • An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for US National Security
  • An Anarchist FAQ Webpage
  • An Inconvenient Truth: Does Responsible Consumption Benefit Corporations More Than Society?
  • Animal Minds and the Foible of Human Exceptionalism
  • Averting Collapse: 6 Steps
  • “Are Humans Unsustainable by Nature?”
  • Book review of Turchin’s “Secular Cycles” and “War & Peace & War”
  • BRAVE NEW WORLD REVISITED
  • Burning Energy to Keep Cool: The Hidden Energy Crisis in Saudi Arabia
  • Capitalism cannot solve our ecological collapse: articles by Richard Smith
  • Capitalism's Ideological Crutches
  • Carmageddon and Karl Marx
  • Carmaggedon or Rational Discourse?
  • Charles Eisenstein Essays
  • Chatham House: Sustainable Energy Security
  • Christopher Clugston ~ Research Papers and Essays
  • Climate and collapse: Only through the insurrection of civil societies will we avoid the worst
  • Climate and Social Stress: Implications for Security Analysis (2012)
  • Climate Change is Simple – We Do Something or We're Screwed
  • Climate Change: Just the Facts.
  • Consistency in American Foreign Policy
  • Could the 'Black Death' Strike Again?
  • Dangerous Climate Warming: Myth & Reality
  • Dangerous Speech Project
  • Deforestation and world population sustainability: a quantitative analysis
  • Dennis Meadows: “There is nothing that we can do”
  • Desert
  • DieOff.org
  • Dinosaur, We
  • Dispelling myths about oil
  • Dr. Steven Best – Writings
  • Drill, Baby, Drill
  • Earth may be 140 years away from reaching carbon levels not seen in 56 million years
  • Ecoglobe: Requiem
  • Edward Morbius
  • Energy Return on Energy Invested (ERoEI) for photovoltaic solar systems in regions of moderate insolation
  • English version of German military peak oil study
  • Entropy and Economics
  • Eric R. Pianka: The Vanishing Book of Life on Earth
  • Fleeing Babylon
  • FOURTH NATIONAL CLIMATE ASSESSMENT Volume II: Impacts, Risks, and Adaptation in the United States
  • FRACKING GONE WRONG: FINDING A BETTER WAY
  • Getting to the Nearest Star? Not in Our Lifetimes…If Ever!
  • Gleanings for an Understanding of the Endgame
  • Global Drought Monitor
  • Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism
  • Global Warming & Climate Change Myths
  • Globalization and the Emergence of a Transnational Oligarchy
  • Green Capitalism: the God that Failed
  • Green Capitalism: The God That Failed (Updated)
  • GRIFFIN: The political writings of G.S. Griffin, activist and author
  • Hirsch Report
  • How a Culture Dies
  • How Many Gigatons of Carbon Dioxide?
  • How to Avoid Population Overshoot and Collapse
  • Human domination of the biosphere: Rapid discharge of the earth-space battery foretells the future of humankind
  • Humans will not 'migrate' to other planets, Nobel winner says: The 77-year-old said he felt the need to "kill all the statements that say 'OK, we will go to a liveable planet if one day life is not possible on earth'."
  • Imagining the Post-Antibiotics Future
  • Implication of our technological species being first and early
  • Intentional Ignorance
  • Interview with Jay Hanson
  • Is Global Collapse Imminent?
  • Jason W. Moore: Essays
  • Johnny Reb's Freethought Website
  • Julian Cribb
  • Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II – Part I by William Blum
  • Le Monde interview with Dr Robert Hirsch from September 2010
  • Life as a Manifestation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics
  • Living Dangerously: Stories of Climate Change
  • Living for the Moment while Devaluing the Future
  • Lloyd's adds its voice to dire 'peak oil' warnings
  • Looking Back on the 'Limits to Growth'
  • MARY BOOTH ON THE MYTH OF “GREEN” ENERGY FROM WOOD
  • Michael E. Mann
  • Mysterious Siberian Crater Found at "End of the World" May Portend Methane Climate Catastrophe
  • NATURAL CAPITAL AT RISK: THE TOP 100 EXTERNALITIES OF BUSINESS
  • Natural Law
  • Natural Way of Farming Masanobu – Fukuoka Green Philosophy
  • Nature’s Laws No Longer Apply…
  • Net Energy and The Economy
  • New scientific study predicts that plastic pollution and toxic chemical-induced ocean acidification will cause a trophic cascade collapse of the entire marine ecosystem, destroying human society within the next 25 years.
  • NOAA & U.S. Geological Survey Interactive Sea Level Rise Map (up to 25 ft)
  • Noam Chomsky on human extinction: The corporate elite are actively courting disaster
  • Oil and gas industry using military psyops techniques to reduce opposition to fracking
  • OilCrash.com
  • On Human Nature
  • Partnership for Civil Justice
  • Peak Energy, Climate Change, and the Collapse of Global Civilization
  • Peak Oil – A Turning Point for Mankind by Dr. Colin J. Campbell
  • Peter H. Gleick : Has the U.S. Passed the Point of Peak Water?
  • Plastic and toxic chemical-induced ocean acidification will cause a plankton crisis that will devastate humanity over the next 25 years, unless we stop the pollution.
  • Poles Threaten “Climate Chaos” from Continued Warming
  • Policy Makers Slow to Take Peak Oil Action
  • Power Point Presentation on “Corporate Globalization, Corporate Power, Free Trade, Mega Trade Agreements and the Negative Impacts of TPP” by Janet M Eaton, PhD
  • Power Shift Away From Green Illusions
  • Primitivism
  • Professor Charles Hall
  • Renewable energy – Hope or hype?
  • RENEWABLE ENERGY – THE ARGUMENT AGAINST ITS CAPACITY TO SUSTAIN AN ENERGY-INTENSIVE SOCIETY
  • Richard Reese on 'Near Term Extinction'
  • Saudi Arabia May Become Oil Importer by 2030
  • Searching for a Miracle: 'Net Energy' Limits & the Fate of Industrial Society
  • Secular Cycles, Chapter 1
  • Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter planet, by Mark Lynas
  • Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis
  • Stephanie McMillan's 'Capitalism Must Die'
  • TED talks – a recipe for civilisational disaster
  • The Anarchist Library
  • The Authoritarian Personality
  • The Bichler & Nitzan Archives
  • The climate threat: What our children can expect
  • The Coming Reality of Sea Level Rise: Too Fast Too Soon
  • The Consumer Trap
  • The Current Mass Extinction
  • The Damage of Current Human Activities Without Precedent in Past 'Mass Extinction' Fossil Records.
  • The Discovery of Global Warming
  • The End of Growth, Seven Years Later
  • The Entropy Law and the Economic Process
  • The evolution and psychology of self-deception
  • The Final Empire THE COLLAPSE OF CIVILIZATION
  • The Final Empire: THE COLLAPSE OF CIVILIZATION
  • The Free Press
  • The Future of Ice Sheets and Sea Ice: Between Reversible Retreat and Unstoppable Loss
  • The Gore Vidal Pages
  • The Great Oil Swindle
  • The human brain is in Denial.
  • The Human Nature of Unsustainability
  • The Idiot's Guide To Buying A Congressman
  • The Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations & U.S. Policy
  • The Last Great Global Warmıng
  • The Limits to Growth (PDF scanned version)
  • The Loss of Biodiversity: a Dangerous Game
  • The Meritocracy Myth
  • The moral environment on Wall Street is pathological — money rules all
  • The Myth of the 1970′s Global Cooling Consensus
  • The myth of US self-sufficiency in crude oil
  • THE NEED FOR A NEW ECONOMIC SYSTEM: "…he feared that human society is headed for a crash."
  • The Network of Global Corporate Control
  • The New Middle Ages
  • The physics of long-run global economic growth
  • THE POPULATION PROBLEM AND SOCIALISM
  • The Power Elite
  • The Principle of Imminent Collapse
  • The Science of Apocalypse
  • The Story of P(ee)
  • The Story of Phosphorus: 7 reasons why we need to transform phosphorus use in the global food system
  • The Temptation of The Technofix (The Quest for “New Nature”)
  • The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
  • There Is No "Green" Energy
  • Thomas Homer-Dixon
  • Tilting at Windmills, Spain’s disastrous attempt to replace fossil fuels with Solar Photovoltaics
  • Tipping Towards the Unknown
  • Too many bodies? The return and disavowal of the population question
  • Trade-Off: Financial system supply-chain cross contagion – a study in global systemic collapse
  • Twenty Premises on Industrial Civilization from Derrick Jensen
  • Twenty-First Century Collapse
  • Underminers: A Practical Guide to Radical Change
  • We Are All Madoffs
  • Wealth and Inequality – Pareto, Gini and Contingency
  • What Evolution Is?
  • Who Rules America: An Investment Manager's View on the Top 1%
  • Who Rules America: Wealth, Income, and Power
  • Why shale gas won’t end our energy woes
  • Why Space Opera Won't Fly
  • Why won't planting trees stop global warming?
  • Zygmunt Bauman

RSS 3 Quarkes Daily

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

RSS A Closer Look

  • Cookies August 17, 2025
  • The structure of this blog November 4, 2024
  • An increase in crime is caused in part by economic stress January 27, 2023

RSS A Prosperous Way Down

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

RSS Adam Curtis Blog

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

RSS Adam Vs The Man

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RSS Aljazeera

  • Memphis disbands police unit linked to Tyre Nichols’s beating January 29, 2023
  • Iran thwarts drone attacks on Isfahan military site January 29, 2023
  • Netanyahu announces plans to arm Israelis after Jerusalem attack January 29, 2023
  • Czech Republic secures pro-West direction as ex-NATO general wins January 29, 2023
  • Russia claims 14 killed in attack on hospital in eastern Ukraine January 28, 2023

RSS Aljazeera – Opinion

  • Iran thwarts drone attacks on Isfahan military site January 29, 2023
  • Netanyahu announces plans to arm Israelis after Jerusalem attack January 29, 2023
  • Czech Republic secures pro-West direction as ex-NATO general wins January 29, 2023
  • Russia claims 14 killed in attack on hospital in eastern Ukraine January 28, 2023
  • World reacts to rising violence in Israel-Palestine conflict January 28, 2023
  • What’s next for Pakistan as its economic crisis worsens? January 28, 2023
  • Israel’s Netanyahu vows ‘swift response’ to Jerusalem attack January 28, 2023

RSS All Tied Up and Nowhere to Go

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

RSS Alternative Radio

  • [John Mearsheimer] Great Power Politics in the 21st Century January 26, 2023

RSS AlterNet

  • Profanity-filled tirades and threats about grassroots dominated RNC meeting January 28, 2023
  • Trump calls for wild education overhaul by 'certifying' patriotic teachers and allowing parents to elect school principals January 28, 2023
  • How concentrated wealth and corporate power nurture the greed of thieves January 28, 2023
  • 'It's a mistake' to believe murder case against cops who beat Tyre Nichols to death 'will be easy': legal expert January 28, 2023

RSS Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

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RSS Anarchist News

  • New Series: Audio Versions of CrimethInc. Articles January 28, 2023
  • Update about the health condition of Alfredo Cospito January 28, 2023
  • S1E57 - Nadia on Harm Reduction January 27, 2023
  • Ego Death Podcast - Episode Two January 26, 2023
  • Portland: Attack on UPS Shipping Center January 26, 2023

RSS Antony Loewenstein

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

RSS Apocadocs

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RSS Arctic Emergency Institute

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

RSS Arctic Methane Emergency Group (AMEG)

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

RSS Arctic News

  • A huge temperature rise threatens to unfold soon January 3, 2023
  • Wild Winter Weather December 23, 2022
  • The short lifespan of technological civilizations and the future of Homo sapiens December 17, 2022

RSS Arctic Sea Ice

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

RSS Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis

  • December lows January 5, 2023
  • Lingering open water areas December 5, 2022
  • Iced November 3, 2022

RSS Around the Coast Mountains

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

RSS Arthur Silber

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

RSS Arundhati Roy

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

RSS Arundhati Roy Says

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

RSS ASPO – USA

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

RSS Avedon’s Sideshow

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

RSS Bad Astronomy

  • Echidnas Blow Snot Bubbles to Cool Down. Could We?
  • What It Was Like to Be a Target of Political Violence in New Mexico
  • Advertisers Wanted to Spend Money at Twitter, but “Our Emails Have Been Falling Into the Abyss”

RSS Barbara Ehrenreich

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RSS BBC: Science & Environment

  • Government green heating scheme off to slow start January 26, 2023
  • True wild camping on Dartmoor not threatened say landowners January 26, 2023
  • Asteroid 2023 BU: Space rock passes closer than some satellites January 27, 2023

RSS Big Picture Agriculture

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

RSS Bill Moyers

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RSS Bit Tooth Energy

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

RSS Bizarro Blog

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RSS Brane Space

  • Can We Prevent Another Holocaust From Happening? January 27, 2023
  • "Near Miss" 2023 BU Asteroid To Graze Planet Earth This Evening January 26, 2023

RSS Brave New World

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

RSS Breaking the Set

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

RSS Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

  • Mink on a Spanish farm caught bird flu. Is the virus adapting to mammals? January 26, 2023
  • Reuters: Kremlin expresses alarm over ‘Doomsday Clock’ January 26, 2023
  • Mail & Guardian: Only bold, collective action can turn back the hands of the Doomsday Clock January 25, 2023

RSS Business Insider

  • Tyre Nichols live updates: Memphis Police Department says it will 'permanently deactivate' the SCORPION unit whose officers beat Tyre Nichols January 29, 2023
  • German chancellor's indecision on sending tanks to Ukraine has created a new word in Western war room politics: Scholzing January 29, 2023
  • AOC could potentially become the second-highest ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee: report January 28, 2023
  • 3 men arrested after attempting to kidnap an Iranian-American journalist and activist who is critical of the country's human rights abuses, feds say January 28, 2023
  • A teacher who quit and took a job at Costco says life is much better now — she has a life, can pay her bills and finally sleeps at night January 28, 2023
  • Former VP Mike Pence says he takes 'full responsibility' for classified documents found at his Indiana residence: 'Mistakes were made' January 28, 2023
  • 'It's a failure for us': Migrants at the Southern US border are reportedly frustrated with the mobile app that's supposed to speed up asylum appointments January 28, 2023
  • Department of Justice calls to bar Sam Bankman-Fried from contacting FTX employees after allegations of witness tampering January 28, 2023
  • SBF's lawyer asked the judge to let the disgraced FTX founder access the company's assets and crypto January 28, 2023
  • 10 things about ancient Egypt that movies and TV got wrong, according to an expert January 28, 2023

RSS C-Realm

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

RSS Cagle: Premium Cartoon News

  • To win the battle of ideas, you have to show up January 28, 2023
  • If you thought Donald Trump was the worst, check out Mike Pompeo January 27, 2023
  • Biden’s lost docs and losing war January 27, 2023
  • KEVIN MCCARTHY’S GAVEL January 27, 2023
  • BIDEN SICKNESS January 27, 2023
  • CONSTITUTIONAL GRIEVING January 26, 2023

RSS Cassandra’s Legacy

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

RSS Censored News

  • Chili Yazzie -- Navajo's 'transitional energy' company is damaging the earth, encroaching on Hualapai land January 28, 2023
  • Chili Yazzie 'Relationship to Land Concepts: Who owns the land?' January 28, 2023
  • American Indian Airwaves: Listen to Nuclear Colonialism Series January 28, 2023

RSS Center For Biological Diversity

  • 50 Groups Urge N.M. Governor to End Oil, Gas Extraction by 2034 January 27, 2023
  • Federal Judge Finds BLM Imperiled Sage Grouse, Broke Environmental Laws in Approving Idaho Phosphate Mine January 26, 2023
  • Lawsuit Aims to Protect Imperiled Southern Hognose Snakes January 26, 2023

RSS Center for Investigative Journalism

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RSS Center for Economic & Policy Research

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RSS Charles Eisenstein’s Blog

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

RSS Chomsky

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

RSS Chris Hedges

  • Biden Administration Unveils Proposed Renter Protection January 27, 2023

RSS Class Warfare Blog

  • Egregious Quote Mining Mistakes January 28, 2023
  • It’s a Miracle! January 26, 2023

RSS Cliff Schecter

  • Iran thwarts drone attacks on Isfahan military site January 29, 2023
  • Netanyahu announces plans to arm Israelis after Jerusalem attack January 29, 2023
  • Czech Republic secures pro-West direction as ex-NATO general wins January 29, 2023
  • Russia claims 14 killed in attack on hospital in eastern Ukraine January 28, 2023
  • World reacts to rising violence in Israel-Palestine conflict January 28, 2023
  • What’s next for Pakistan as its economic crisis worsens? January 28, 2023

RSS Climate and Capitalism

  • Top 1% grab twice as much new wealth as everyone else combined January 16, 2023
  • Ecosocialist Bookshelf, January 2023 January 15, 2023
  • 90% of world’s people to face combined extreme heat and drought January 9, 2023
  • Practical nuclear fusion is still just hype January 2, 2023
  • Ecosocialist Bookshelf: The Best of 2022 December 31, 2022
  • Degrowth and the end of capitalism December 17, 2022

RSS Climate Central

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

RSS Climate Change: The Next Generation

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

RSS Climate Citizen

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

RSS Climate Code Red

  • Over half of all fossil fuels are extracted by just seven countries, as world heads to 3°C of warming November 28, 2022
  • Brace for impact. International aviation Net Zero 2050 flightpath crashes in Melbourne. November 19, 2022
  • Not on the same page: When science and politics collide in climate communication September 28, 2022

RSS Climate Connections

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

RSS Climate Denial Crock of the Week

  • In Texas, Could Geothermal be an “Off Ramp” for Drillers? January 28, 2023
  • Could Geothermal Plan Edge Out Utah’s Mini Reactors? January 28, 2023
  • PBS: What are the Most Dangerous Areas for Climate Impacts? Where are the Climate Havens? January 28, 2023

RSS Climate Progress

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RSS Climate Snapshot

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

RSS ClimateSight

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

RSS Club Orlov

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RSS ClusterFuck Nation

  • Pretend-O-Rama January 27, 2023
  • The End of Reality Consensus Disorder January 23, 2023

RSS Cocktailhag – FDL

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RSS Colin Tudge

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

RSS Common Dreams: News

  • GOP Utah Gov. Signs Ban on 'Lifesaving Medical Care' for Trans Youth January 28, 2023
  • Protests Erupt Across US After Memphis Releases Video of Ex-Cops Beating Tyre Nichols January 28, 2023
  • 'Sheer Brutality': Released Footage Shows Fired Memphis Cops Beating Tyre Nichols January 28, 2023
  • GOP House Puts Big Oil's Revolving Door Into High Gear January 28, 2023
  • At Least 7 Killed in Jerusalem Synagogue Attack After Israeli Troops Kill 10 Palestinians January 27, 2023

RSS Consortium News

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RSS Consumer Energy Report

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

RSS Corp Watch

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RSS CorrenteWire – Quick Hits

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RSS CounterPunch

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

RSS Crooked Timber

  • Mitigated disaster January 24, 2023
  • Twigs and Branches January 22, 2023
  • Sunday photoblogging: Redcliffe flats January 22, 2023
  • On Constitutional Monetary Moments January 18, 2023

RSS Crooks and Liars

  • LNMC With Joe Pisapia January 29, 2023
  • Students Will Sue DeSantis Over AP African American Studies January 29, 2023
  • Former LAPD Cop Doesn't Pull Punches On Tyre Nichols Video January 29, 2023
  • Eagles Christmas Album Has Raised $1.25M So Far January 28, 2023

RSS Cryptome

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RSS Culture Change

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

RSS Dahr Jamail

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

RSS Daily Kos Comics

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RSS Damn the Matrix

  • To peak or not to peak… January 18, 2023
  • We’re all being poisoned… January 10, 2023

RSS Dan Hagen

  • Duck and Cover, 2023 January 27, 2023
  • Tippy-toeing around Stupid People January 18, 2023

RSS Dangerous Intersection

  • About Hamilton 68 January 28, 2023
  • Project Veritas Undercover Pfizer Video Fails to Ignite News Media Interest January 27, 2023
  • We Have Ended the War on Obesity. We Are Declaring Ourselves Healthy Fat and Moving On January 27, 2023

RSS Dark Ages America

  • 7 million and going strong January 6, 2023
  • Karma City December 13, 2022
  • Muddy Waters November 12, 2022
  • The Midterms October 19, 2022

RSS David Bollier

  • John Thackara on Designing for Life January 1, 2023
  • Joe Brewer's Bold Quest to Help Restore a Bioregion December 1, 2022
  • David Sloan Wilson on Evolutionary Science and Prosocial Behavior November 1, 2022

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

  • A Companion to Marx’s Grundrisse: A letter from the editor January 21, 2023
  • Register for Reading Marx’s Grundrisse with David Harvey December 27, 2022
  • Interview: Creating a compassionate geography November 11, 2022

RSS David Hilfiker

  • Welcome August 4, 2011

RSS David McNally

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RSS David Roberts

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

RSS Death by Car: Capitalism’s Drive to Carmageddon

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

RSS Decline of the Empire

  • Defending Reality
  • Fascism And The Uniparty

RSS Deep Green Resistence News Service

  • Forever Chemicals in Every River in the US January 27, 2023
  • Dumping Nuclear Waste in the Pacific January 23, 2023
  • Wisconsin Town Gets Sued for Regulating Factory Farms January 20, 2023
  • An Environmental Defender Is Killed Every Two Days January 17, 2023

RSS Deepak Tripathi’s Diary

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

RSS Democratic Underground

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RSS Democratic Underground – Breaking News

  • Iran reports drone attack on defense facility in Isfahan January 29, 2023
  • Trump Delivers Bitter Speech Filled With Falsehoods in New Hampshire January 28, 2023
  • Memphis police disband unit that beat Tyre Nichols January 28, 2023
  • Zelensky blasts Olympic committee move: 'Any neutral flag of Russian athletes is stained with blood' January 28, 2023
  • Gov. Cox [Utah] signs high-profile bill on transgender surgeries January 28, 2023
  • Beverly Crest fatal shooting: 3 dead 4 critical, police say no suspect information January 28, 2023
  • Pence: 'Mistakes were made' in classified records handling January 28, 2023
  • Tyre Nichols' brutal beating by police shown on video January 28, 2023
  • Trump's handpicked 'MAGA all the way' candidate for RNC co-chair drops out after finishing third January 28, 2023
  • DC AG declines to charge mother of Ashli Babbitt, Jan. 6 protester killed by police January 28, 2023

RSS Democratic Underground – Good Reads

  • Mass Shootings in the U.S. by Shooter's Race/Ethnicity as of January 2023, & by Gender January 29, 2023
  • Cops Can't Be Allowed to Just Make Up Reasons for Pulling People Over January 28, 2023
  • AP African American Studies: 'Academic legitimacy' or 'indoctrination'? January 28, 2023
  • Why (some) Republicans want a national sales tax January 28, 2023
  • Massachusetts Bill allowing Prisoners to trade Organs for Reduced Sentences January 28, 2023
  • Officer Accused in Fatal Tyre Nichols Beating was Previously Accused of Assault January 28, 2023
  • U.S. general warns troops that war with China is possible in two years January 28, 2023
  • New study finds 6 ways to slow memory decline and lower dementia risk January 28, 2023
  • Time for a Showdown With Big Pharma: Chairman Sanders vs. Sky-High Drug Prices (Opinion by Nader) January 28, 2023
  • Twitter's Trust and Safety Head Ditches Protocol for Musk Whims January 28, 2023

RSS Democracy Now

  • Tyre Nichols' Parents Remember Son as "Beautiful Soul" & Describe Video of Beating by Memphis Police January 27, 2023
  • Memphis BLM Activist: Tyre Nichols' Killing Is Part of Police Brutality Crisis Facing Black Residents January 27, 2023
  • Headlines for January 27, 2023 January 27, 2023
  • Biden Proposes Renters Bill of Rights as Landlords Make Record Profits; Housing Advocates Want More January 26, 2023
  • "20 Days in Mariupol": Meet the Ukrainian Filmmaker Who Risked His Life Documenting Russian Siege January 26, 2023
  • Headlines for January 26, 2023 January 26, 2023
  • "Lacks Educational Value"? Critics Slam Florida's Rejection of AP African American Studies Course January 25, 2023
  • Doomsday Clock Moves Closer to Midnight: Peace Activist Frida Berrigan Demands Nuclear Disarmament January 25, 2023
  • As Germany & U.S. Agree on Tanks for Ukraine, German MP Accuses U.S. of Pushing Berlin into Proxy War January 25, 2023
  • Headlines for January 25, 2023 January 25, 2023

RSS Derrick Jensen

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RSS Desdemona Despair

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RSS Desertification

  • Saudi’s Ministry of Economy and Planning joins forces with UpLink to address food insecurity in arid climates (Part 2) January 25, 2023
  • Saudi’s Ministry of Economy and Planning joins forces with UpLink to address food insecurity in arid climates (Part 1) January 25, 2023
  • National plan aims to push back desertification January 25, 2023
  • Reclaiming degraded land key for urban revival January 18, 2023
  • MEET THE TREE MAN OF INDIA’S THAR DESERT January 18, 2023

RSS deSmog Blog

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RSS Digbys Blog

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

RSS Disinfo – Ecology

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RSS Dispatches from the Underclass

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

RSS Dissent Magazine

  • Paul Goodman Replies January 27, 2023
  • Universities and Intellectuals January 27, 2023
  • My Kaduchas And Yours January 27, 2023
  • Herman Kahn: Ideologist of Military Strategy January 27, 2023

RSS Dissident Voice

  • Google Hides the Main Reason for America’s Arming of Ukraine January 28, 2023
  • Don’t Mention the War: Interview with Joan Roelofs January 28, 2023
  • “Trans” vs. Children January 28, 2023
  • The Righteous Outrage of Norman Finkelstein January 28, 2023
  • A Prescription January 28, 2023
  • If We Ever Needed George Carlin January 28, 2023
  • Drug Price Showdown Time for Chairman Bernie Sanders January 28, 2023
  • The Power of the Written Word January 28, 2023

RSS Do the Math

  • Keeping Up On Appearances January 6, 2023

RSS Dollars & Sense Blog

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RSS Doug Stanhope

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RSS Douglas Rushkoff

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

RSS Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

  • PCR interviewed by Greg Hunter USAWatchdog.com January 28, 2023
  • US Army Faces Worst Recruiting Numbers Since End of Draft Era, Offers Medals & Promotions for Referrals, mRNA mandate and woke agenda prompts immense crisis. January 28, 2023

RSS Dredd Blog

  • The Citizen Journalist In America - 4 January 22, 2023
  • In Search Of Ocean Heat - 13 January 21, 2023
  • Western Pacific January 20, 2023
  • Weddell Sea January 20, 2023

RSS Ear to the Ground – Truth Dig

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RSS Early Warning

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

RSS Earth First

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

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

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RSS Earth Observatory: Image of the Day

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RSS Earth Observatory: Natural Hazards

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RSS Earth Policy Institute Blog

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

RSS Ecocide Alert

  • SBOBET Review January 21, 2023

RSS Ecohuman World

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RSS Eco-Shock News

  • Radio Ecoshock: Polycrisis Angst: Denial or Gaia? January 25, 2023

RSS Ecological Headstand

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

RSS Ecological Sociology

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

RSS Ecologise

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RSS Economic Hardship Reporting Project

  • The Myth of the Socially Conscious Corporation January 27, 2023
  • Salt Lake and Other Utah Cities Used Most of a $10 Million Homeless Services Fund to Hire Cops January 25, 2023
  • No Vacancy January 18, 2023
  • Why Did a Man Starve to Death in an Arkansas Jail? January 17, 2023
  • The Silent Epidemic Affecting Generation Z January 12, 2023
  • A Museum for the Working Class January 9, 2023

RSS Economic Undertow

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

RSS EcoWorldView

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RSS Empire Burlesque

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

RSS Empirical Magazine

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

RSS EmptyWheel

  • Billy B and Johnny D Drank Whiskey before the Special Counsel Appointment
  • The Trump-Biden-Pence Documents Story Is Not (Yet) about Overclassification
  • More on Brandon Straka’s So-Called Cooperation

RSS End of More

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RSS Energy Balance

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

RSS Environment & Food Justice

  • National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Statement on the Climate Crisis October 31, 2019
  • La Lucha por La Sierra | Scion of Texas Oil Barons Seeks to Overturn Historic Use Rights to the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant August 30, 2018
  • Biopiracy in Mexico | Foundation stealing wild beehives in Yucatán June 14, 2018

RSS Envisionation Blog

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

RSS Extraenvironmentalist Blog and Podcasts

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

RSS ExtraEnvironmentalist’s Videos

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RSS ExtraGeographic

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

RSS Facts for Working People

  • Sudden Opening to Win Mumia Abu-Jamal's Freedom. Please Act NOW! January 27, 2023
  • Microagrressions You Say January 25, 2023
  • Why Are We Bombarded With Advertisements? January 24, 2023

RSS Fair: Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting

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

RSS Fairewinds

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RSS Fairfax Climate Watch

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

RSS Farooque Chowdhury’s Diary

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

RSS Feasta

  • Update from the Wellbeing Economy Ireland Hub January 27, 2023
  • Another Teachable Moment from the Return of the Trillion Dollar Coin January 26, 2023
  • Mining, minerals and limits: grounding the green transition January 24, 2023

RSS FireDogLake

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RSS Fish Out of Water

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RSS Foreign Confidential

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

RSS FracTracker

  • Assessment of Rework Permits on Oil Production from Operational Wells Within the 3,200-Foot Public Health Protection Zone January 24, 2023
  • Environmental Health Fellowship Opening – Summer 2023 January 20, 2023
  • CalGEM Permit Review Q4 2022: Oil Permit Approvals Show Steep Rise Within Protective Buffer Zones January 18, 2023

RSS George Monbiot (Alternet)

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RSS George Monbiot (Official Home Page)

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RSS Get Real List: Chris Nelder

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

RSS Gil Smart

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

RSS Glen Ford – Black Agenda Report

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RSS Global Guerrillas

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

RSS Global Occupy News

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RSS Global Oneness Project

  • Farewell RSS Feeds May 18, 2022

RSS Global Research

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RSS Global Research CA

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RSS Gonzalo Lira

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RSS Green is the New Red

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

RSS Green on Huffington Post

  • Elusive Wildcat Found To Be Living On Mount Everest January 28, 2023
  • Taiwan Is Retreating From Nuclear Energy. At What Cost? January 27, 2023
  • Officials In Colorado Treated To 400 Bear 'Selfies' On Wildlife Camera January 27, 2023
  • Biden Administration Cements Mining Ban Near Minnesota's Boundary Waters January 26, 2023
  • Biden Reinstates Logging Ban In America’s Largest National Forest January 25, 2023
  • Tucker Carlson Says 'What Is That?' To Lenticular 'Vagina Cloud.' Twitter Erupts. January 24, 2023
  • New Pill Treats Diabetic Cats Without Daily Insulin Shots January 23, 2023
  • Dolphins Make A Splash In The Bronx River For First Time In 5 Years January 23, 2023

RSS Greenpeace Blogs

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RSS Greg Palast

  • The Words That Could Convict Trump January 25, 2023
  • Is Santos the “Manchurian Candidate” for Brazil’s Bolsonaro? January 10, 2023

RSS Gregor Macdonald

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RSS Grinning Planet

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RSS Grist

  • Documents show how 19 ‘Cop City’ activists got charged with terrorism January 27, 2023
  • How Pittsburgh found a secret climate weapon in ‘the thrilling world of municipal budgeting’ January 27, 2023
  • Oil refineries are polluting US waterways. Too often, it’s legal. January 26, 2023
  • The best way to save forests? Legally recognize Indigenous lands. January 26, 2023

RSS Growth Busters

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

RSS Guernica Mag

  • The Shape of Vodou in Diaspora January 23, 2023
  • I Am the Ghost Here January 16, 2023
  • Extraction January 9, 2023
  • Wajo December 15, 2022

RSS Guy McPherson’s Blog

  • Livestream: Ask an Ecologist Anything January 23, 2023
  • Science Snippets: On the Rate of Environmental Change January 23, 2023

RSS Health After Oil

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

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

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

RSS How to Save the World

  • Walking in the Dark January 26, 2023
  • Hope, on the Balance of Probabilities January 23, 2023
  • Making Sense of Scents January 21, 2023

RSS I am Not a Number

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

RSS I Cite

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

RSS Iamronen

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

RSS Ian Welsh

  • Open Thread January 28, 2023

RSS Idea Explorer

  • Upgrades October 8, 2022
  • Learning As We Go October 29, 2021
  • Values and Responsibilities March 11, 2021
  • Habitat Loss November 9, 2020
  • Marginal Hope August 24, 2020

RSS Idea Explorer – Big Pic Explorer

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

RSS Idea Explorer: Land of Conscience

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

RSS If You Love This Planet – Helen Caldicott

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

RSS Indybay Features

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

RSS Indybay Newswire

  • There is nothing to fear from China
  • Oil Industry Seeks Supreme Court Review of California Offshore Fracking Ban
  • Turn of the times and Negotiations instead of truce
  • Biden 2024 Decision Pits the Party’s Elites Against Most Democrats
  • Russia's war against Ukraine and What are the war aims?

RSS Information Clearing House

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RSS Inside Left – The OFFICIAL Anti-Olympics Blog™

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RSS Institute for Public Accuracy

  • War is a Racket: Fox Guarding Hen House; Stock Buybacks Rip Off Taxpayers January 26, 2023
  • Regulators Could Break Up Wells Fargo — If They Stay Strong January 25, 2023
  • Confronting the Corporate Exploitation of Tweens January 24, 2023
  • Peru: Protests, Oligarchy and Racism January 23, 2023
  • New Dem Leader Jeffries “Has Record of Defending Human Rights Violations” January 19, 2023
  • Patient-Nurse Ratios: Chronic Problem Made Worse by Pandemic January 18, 2023

RSS International Debt Observatory

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RSS io9

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RSS iWatch: Global Muckraking

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RSS Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer Blog

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

RSS Jacobin

  • University of Chicago Graduate Workers Are Trying to Unionize January 28, 2023
  • As Democracy Fades in Port-au-Prince, Ottawa Is Backing Haiti’s Repressive Police January 28, 2023
  • Artist Romare Bearden’s Reckoning With the South January 28, 2023
  • For Workers, Hospitals Have Become the New Steel Mills — Minus the Strong Unions January 28, 2023
  • Ron DeSantis Prefers to Call His War on Workers a War on “Wokeness” January 28, 2023
  • The Hopeful Romanticism of John Keats January 27, 2023

RSS Jeremy Scahill

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

RSS Jill Stein

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RSS Joe Bageant

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RSS John Cook Video Uploads

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

RSS John Hively

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

RSS John Pilger

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RSS John Perkins

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RSS John W. Whitehead

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RSS John Zerzan: Anarchy Radio

  • Anarchy Radio 01 24 2023 January 25, 2023
  • Anarchy Radio 01 17 2023 January 18, 2023
  • Anarchy Radio 01 10 2023 January 11, 2023

RSS Jonathan Turley

  • “I Water You, You Water Me”: High School Assistant Principal Under Fire for Raising Money to Pay Off Coyote January 28, 2023
  • The Pelosi Tapes: The Video of the October Attack Show New Details and Refute Sensational Theories January 28, 2023
  • Masterpiece Cakeshop Loses Appeal Over Gender Transition Cake January 27, 2023
  • And Then They Came For “The”: Associated Press Warns Use of the Article Can Be “Dehumanizing” January 27, 2023

RSS Karl Grossman

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

RSS Karl North Eco-Intelligence

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RSS Kate Ausburn

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RSS Keith Farnish

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

RSS Knight Science Journalism – MIT

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

RSS Kulture Critic

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

RSS Kunstler Cast

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

RSS Kurt Kobb

  • Taking a short break - no post this week January 22, 2023

RSS Lack of Environment

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RSS Law and Disorder

  • Law and Disorder January 16, 2023 January 16, 2023
  • Law and Disorder January 9, 2023 January 9, 2023
  • Law and Disorder January 2, 2023 January 2, 2023

RSS Le Monde diplomatique – English edition

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RSS Le Monde diplomatique – Open Page

  • Is Venezuela back on its feet? January 20, 2023
  • Why Chinese thought matters January 18, 2023
  • Nepal-China relationship hinges on Tibetans January 18, 2023
  • January: the longer view January 11, 2023
  • Peru's permanent coup January 11, 2023

RSS Leaving Babylon

  • Even Iran is laughing at us November 9, 2020

RSS Lee Camp

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RSS Lee Fang

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RSS Leonardo Boff

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RSS Les Leopold

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RSS Life Itself

  • On Snowflakes, Blogs and Loneliness January 13, 2023
  • Why the Year 2022 Stood Out? January 6, 2023
  • Bad Karma April 9, 2022

RSS Limited, Inc.

  • In what language do we read faces? January 28, 2023
  • what is wrong with Von Mises (Ludwig, not Richard) January 27, 2023
  • ChatGPT, Perceptual absorbance and machine dreams January 24, 2023

RSS Link TV – Earth Focus

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RSS Low-Tech Magazine

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

RSS LRB Blog

  • The New Weather January 27, 2023
  • Diplomatic Immunity January 27, 2023
  • Low Resolution History January 24, 2023
  • Crying Shells January 24, 2023
  • Escape from Love Island January 20, 2023

RSS Luis J. Rodriguez

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

RSS Mabinogogiblog

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

RSS Manicore – Accueil

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RSS Marginal Revolution

  • *Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes* January 28, 2023
  • Saturday assorted links January 28, 2023
  • Text-to-4D dynamic scene generation January 28, 2023

RSS Mark Biskeborn – Underground Essays

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

RSS Mark Fiore

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RSS Mark Lynas

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

RSS Martin Wolf

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RSS Matt Bruenig

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

RSS Matt Taibbi

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RSS Matt Wuerker

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RSS Max Keiser

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RSS Media Lens

  • ‘End Stage Capitalism’: Collapsing Britain And The Climate Crisis January 26, 2023
  • Harry The ‘Traitor’ And Lynch ‘The Grinch’ – The Corporate Media’s Automatic Smear Machine January 19, 2023
  • ‘Nearly Every War Has Been The Result Of Media Lies’: Julian Assange, State-Corporate Media And Ukraine December 14, 2022

RSS Media Matters – Environment

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RSS Media Matters – Everything

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

RSS Media Roots

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RSS Methane Hydrates

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

RSS Michael Hudson

  • Introducing the Geopolitical Economy Hour January 18, 2023
  • Systemic Sponsors of Self-Interest January 17, 2023
  • China the Change Agent – Patreon Q&A #3 December 12, 2022

RSS Michael Miller – Viewpoint

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RSS Michael Parenti

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RSS Mike Philbin – Free Planet

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

RSS Mondoweiss

  • Brad Sherman models the perfect pro-Israel Democrat January 28, 2023
  • A day of protest and resistance across Palestine following ‘massacre’ in Jenin January 27, 2023

RSS Mons Angelorum: Deadly Serious 3

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RSS Mons Angelorum: Waiting for Good Weather

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RSS Mother Jones

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RSS MR Zine

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

RSS Musings on Iraq

  • This Day In Iraqi History - Jan 28 UK claimed Mosul province which it took after WWI ended January 28, 2023
  • This Day In Iraqi History - Jan 27 300-400 killed by police protesting against Anglo-Iraq Treaty January 27, 2023
  • This Day In Iraqi History - Jan 26 Saddam ordered most of Iraqi Air Force to fly to Iran to save it from Gulf War Never got planes back January 26, 2023

RSS Nafeez Ahmed

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

RSS Naked Capitalism

  • Links 1/28/2023 January 28, 2023
  • California’s Plan to Disappear the Homeless January 28, 2023
  • Rural Americans Aren’t Included in Inflation Figures – and for Them, the Cost of Living May Be Rising Faster January 28, 2023
  • Contesting The Ultimate Lockdown: Non-Vax Covid Prophylactic Home Remedies (Plus Bharat’s Nasal Vaccine) January 27, 2023
  • 2:00PM Water Cooler 1/27/2023 January 27, 2023

RSS Naomi Klein

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RSS Naomi Klein – Guardian.UK

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

RSS Nature Protects, As She is Protected

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

RSS Navdanya’s Diary

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

RSS New Internationalist

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RSS New Left Project

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RSS New World Notes

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

RSS News Junkie Post

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

RSS NOAA: Monthly State of the Climate Report

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RSS Notes from the Aboveground

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

RSS NYT Examiner

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RSS Occupy.com

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

RSS Occupy las Vegas

  • Cardano Blockchain Bridges Digital Divide with World Mobile-IOG Partnership January 27, 2023
  • Bitget Launches Zero-Fee EUR & GBP Deposits, Enhancing Crypto Mass Adoption January 20, 2023
  • Play-to-Earn in Meta Masters Guild! Get Your $MEMAG Tokens Now! January 13, 2023

RSS Occupy Wall Street

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RSS Oddity Central

  • Tech Entrepreneur Spends $2 Million a Year to Regain His Youth January 27, 2023
  • Russian IT Specialist Has Been Hiding in Freezing Forest to Avoid Army Conscription January 27, 2023
  • Man Gets Wrongfully Arrested 3 Times for Having the Same Name as Notorious Criminal January 26, 2023
  • Man Fakes His Own Death to See Who Would Attend His Funeral January 26, 2023
  • Argentinian Farmers Plant Lionel Messi’s Face in Their Corn Fields January 25, 2023
  • High-School Lights Have Been On 24/7 for Almost Two Years And No One Can Turn Them Off January 25, 2023

RSS Of Two Minds

  • Heretical Thoughts on Orthodoxies January 27, 2023
  • The Race to the Bottom Accelerates January 26, 2023
  • You Want Truly "Sound Money"? A Thought Experiment January 24, 2023

RSS One Penny Sheet

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RSS One Struggle – South Florida

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

RSS Orion Magazine

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

RSS Our Finite World

  • 2023: Expect a financial crash followed by major energy-related changes January 9, 2023
  • The economy is moving from a tailwind pushing it along to a headwind holding it back December 16, 2022
  • Today’s Energy Crisis Is Very Different from the Energy Crisis of 2005 November 17, 2022

RSS Pando Daily

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RSS Paul Haeder

  • If We Ever Needed George Carlin January 28, 2023
  • The Power of the Written Word January 28, 2023
  • Mental Health Outcomes Tied to “Other Outcomes” January 24, 2023

RSS Paul Kingsnorth – Elswhere

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RSS Paul L. Street

  • Capitalism, Race, and the Tragic Decline of US-Black Baseball: It’s the Capitalism-Imperialism, Stupid December 16, 2022
  • Dear Liberals: Stop Your Smug Celebration of the Midterms December 16, 2022
  • Eight More Takes on the Mid-Terms Further Reflections on a Hot Mess December 16, 2022
  • Purple Haze: Seventeen Takes on the Mid-Terms December 16, 2022

RSS PBD – Progressive Blog Digest

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

RSS PeakOil.com News

  • Visualizing U.S. Consumption of Fuel and Materials per Capita January 28, 2023
  • No, the World Is Not Heading Toward ‘Mass Extinction’ January 28, 2023
  • Gasoline Price More Expensive Than Year Ago January 28, 2023

RSS Peak Prosperity Blog

  • More Vaccine Shots Equals More Covid-19 January 26, 2023
  • The News Continues to Disappear January 24, 2023
  • It’s Either Capitalism or Failure  January 24, 2023

RSS Peak Prosperity: Daily Digest

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RSS Peak Prosperity: Featured Voices

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RSS People Before Profit Blog

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

RSS Phlegm

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

RSS Phyllis Bennis

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RSS Physicist-Retired Newsvine

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RSS Pink Tank

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RSS PlanetSave – Climate

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RSS Political Violence @ a Glance

  • The Colombian Government and the ELN Rebels Are Negotiating Again. Women Need A Seat at the Table January 26, 2023
  • Popular Mobilization Makes Democracy More Likely After a Coup January 17, 2023
  • Best Books of 2022: Fiction and Graphic Novel Edition January 11, 2023

RSS Popular Resistance

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RSS PRN with Danny Schechter

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RSS Progressive Radio Network

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RSS ProPublica

  • Judge Orders Washington State Private Special Education School to Turn Over Records January 27, 2023
  • Nearly Half of All Sheriffs in Louisiana Are Violating Public Records Laws January 27, 2023
  • The Museum Built on Native American Burial Mounds January 27, 2023
  • What to Know About TurboTax Before You File Your Taxes This Year January 26, 2023
  • Nevada’s New Governor Vilified Lobbyist’s Influence in COVID Lab Scandal, Then Asked Him to Help With Budget January 25, 2023

RSS Project Censored

  • The Professional Managerial Class Strikes Back! January 28, 2023
  • “Forever Chemicals” in Rainwater a Global Threat to Human Health January 24, 2023
  • Deadly Decade for Environmental Activists January 24, 2023

RSS Public Intelligence

  • DHS-FBI-NCTC Bulletin: Wide-Ranging Domestic Violent Extremist Threat to Persist
  • (U//FOUO) DHS Bulletin: Online Foreign Influence Snapshot August 2022
  • National Intelligence Council Map: Russian Filtration Operations
  • (U//FOUO) DHS Bulletin: Russia Cyber Threat Overview Substantive Revision
  • (U//FOUO) DHS-FBI-NCTC Bulletin: Dissemination of Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures Used by Buffalo Attacker Likely To Enhance Capabilities of Future Lone Offenders
  • DHS-FBI-NCTC U.S. Violent Extremist Mobilization Indicators 2021 Edition
  • (U//FOUO) DHS Reference Aid: Post-Title 42 Encounter Projections at the US Southwest Border
  • (U//FOUO) DHS Bulletin: Domestic Violent Extremist Activity Likely in Response to US Supreme Court Decision on Abortion
  • 2022 Bilderberg Meeting Participant List
  • (U//FOUO) DHS Reference Aid: 3-D Printed Plastic Weapons, Equipment, and Materials

RSS Pulse

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

RSS Quartz

  • Who is behind Hindenburg, the research firm targeting the Adani group? January 27, 2023
  • Consumer spending dropped during the holiday season—just as the Fed hoped January 27, 2023
  • You’ve got to be drunk to understand what’s in Fireball January 27, 2023
  • How an executive accepted her differences and increased her belonging January 27, 2023
  • The Hindenburg report has short-circuited Adani stocks January 27, 2023
  • Hong Kong is lifting more covid restrictions January 27, 2023
  • LVMH and H&M earnings show luxury goods can weather more storms than fast fashion January 27, 2023
  • A group of anti-abortion protesters broke into Walgreens’ shareholder meeting January 27, 2023
  • Africa will outperform the world in economic growth, AfDB projects January 27, 2023
  • India needs to rethink the way it monitors air quality January 27, 2023

RSS Question Everything

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