#globally the vast majority of us have very little and have absolutely nothing to do with the state isreal wants to establish

[stupot]

Hey I don't want to make a big deal out of this because it is decidedly not the principle problem right now but I would be extremely wary of posts that sound the alarms over specifically Ashkenazi Jews. Please think it over: how does pinning the blame for an atrocity on a specific minority group help the Palestinian cause in any way? It doesn't. Not only is it reductive but there are millions of Ashkenazis many other countries, yours and mine, who overwhelmingly have no ties to Israel, no family there, no history there, who rightfully despise it and all it stands for, and who are regularly harassed and attacked for being Jewish BY WHITE SUPREMACISTS....I would suggest reblogging literally any other post about Palestinian causes, aid, protests, culture, updates etc. They are suffering beyond IMAGINATION and we're not going to use their pain to legitimize bog standard easily identifiable antisemitic canards. Zionists crying antisemitism over condemnation of Israel are full of shit. But this IS crystal clear antisemitism. Please be wary of that and focus on Palestinian aid.

#I'm not going to get into conditional whiteness right now because it's not worth it #just please think about what a post line that is trying to achieve #im surprised that a post attempting to lend credence 2 the idea that Ashkenazis are too powerful and bloodthirsty isnt raising any eyebrows #isreal is bloodthirsty and bankrolled by the must powerful nations #why the fuck are we talking about a huge ethnoreligious group with a long history of persecution with tons of diaspora #globally the vast majority of us have very little and have absolutely nothing to do with the state isreal wants to establish #globally so so many of us are PROTESTING this genocide #come on man.

[littledreamling]

Okay so a couple of days ago, I made a post about making an enjoyable afternoon out of scrolling through Neil Gaiman’s tumblr likes (and I stand by that; if you choose to do so, it will be an afternoon filled with wonder, education, laughter, and not a small amount of confusion as to why he’s liked certain things) and I made the joke that I wasn’t sure if he knew that his likes were public for the world to see (I partially stand by that too; I’m also pretty sure that he just recently learned about tagging, since I’ve never seen him tag anything up until that head pat ask, but I could be very wrong; he’s been on the internet longer than I’ve been alive), but I think there’s more to it than that.

I think he has his likes public for a reason, a very specific, very meaningful reason. You see, tumblr doesn’t have an algorithm. It’s one of the (many) things we tumblr users love about tumblr; it won’t collect your data, it won’t pander specifically to you (leading to an infamous reputation for downright yet hilariously horrible ads), and it sure as hell won’t spread your posts outside of your circle of followers (at least not until recently, though I have fully embraced the new tumblr tabs; they provide enrichment and new genetic material for my pool of mutuals). For the vast majority of us (roughly 98% of us), liking a post does absolutely nothing. Sure, it lets the author or artist know that you enjoyed their work, but it doesn’t spread the word, and tumblr’s entire function revolves around spreading the word. Liking is useless in that regard.

But for people like Neil Gaiman, who have a sort of power here (he’s our resident celebrity, a fact that never fails to make me smile because it means he’s the same sort of weird as us) (some of us, at least), who have a recognizable name and a massive fanbase and holds the adoration of countless, liking posts (and making those liked posts visible for anyone to see)… well, suddenly it starts to mean a little bit more. He doesn’t like a whole lot, sometimes just a few posts a week, sometimes even less, but scrolling through what he does like is a heartwarming experience (one that I fully encourage people to undertake themselves, paying particular attention to the number of notes that certain posts have) (no seriously, how does he find these posts sometimes?? they have single-digit note counts and he’s among the first to like completely untagged posts, it’s baffling) because they’re things that boil down to (what I can only assume to be) the essence of Neil Gaiman. They’re funny comics about reading. They’re gut-wrenching news articles about current global politics. They’re stories from fans about meeting him, or wanting to meet him, or not being able to meet him. They’re pictures of barbecues and famous actors and movie posters. They’re trans-positive and queer-supportive and riot-encouraging (because the first pride parade was a riot and queer means fuck you). They’re artworks done by fans featuring his characters and meta posts about his works and raving reviews about his shows. They’re wholesome and alarming and lighthearted and important. And for someone like Neil Gaiman, who uses his blog almost solely as a way to connect with his fans, as a way for his fans to be able to see him for who he is, making his liked posts public is… shockingly refreshing.

As a trans person, I have had many idols in my life, especially authors (*cough, cough, you know who I’m talking about*) who have written fantastic works but have let me down with who they are as people and their beliefs. Too many times have I dug deep into an author only to find that deep down, they’re just shitty people. Imagine my surprise when, as I dove down the rabbit hole of Neil Gaiman, unearthing everything he willingly offered to the public to find about him, all I found was support. All I found was righteous anger and encouragement and an all-encompassing compassion. All I found was Neil’s steadfast belief in me, in everything I am, in everyone like me who came before me and who will come after me, in my brothers and sisters and siblings, in my community. And above all else, I found love. For myself, for my community, and for the author who isn’t afraid to show up, to be loud, to put his money where his mouth is, to come to the defense of a community that (to my knowledge) he is not a part of, and to stand firm in his support even when he’s under fire for it.

So yes, his likes are public, because for him, it’s not about an algorithm. It’s not about spreading word or creating a ruckus or drawing attention. When Neil Gaiman likes posts, he is simply saying “I’m here. I hear you. I see you. I support you.” And he isn’t afraid to show the entire world that he does so. And I, for one, respect him as an author, as a personal inspiration, and as a human being all the more for it

#idk if this makes sense #it’s 4:30 in the morning #I’m tired and rambling and emotional about my favorite author #keep going you funky little tumblr celebrity #Neil Gaiman #he’ll never see this and that’s okay #it’s more for me anyway #I’m serious about acrolling through his liked posts though #it’s entertaining as hell lmao #I think I referred to him as hilariously odd in my last post #and I refuse to take it back #it’s such a good descriptor of him #he’s brilliant and insightful and inspiring yes #but he’s also just… a funky little internet dude #I love him #in the most respectful way possible #I wish he was my dad #I’m also SO curious about who he follows #there are a few blogs that I follow that he likes their posts fairly frequently #it just makes me wonder #I know I post too many shipping shitposts for him to ever follow me #but I can one day dream about havjng the HONOR of receiving that notification

[itsclydebitches]

Is it valid to criticize the Witcher series for being very white and having little to no non white characters. Even though it comes from a Poland, a very white country by percentage. Yet not ok to give those criticizes to Japanese media for being the same way, just with Japanese characters? ect ect to any story coming from a country that is overwhelming dominated by 1 race. Something America does not fall under.

With the obligatory disclaimer that I'm definitely not the most informed on this topic, I think the concept of a fantasy series is a more important factor than the supposed percentage of any place. (And I say "supposed" because we tend to think of certain areas as more homogenous than they actually are.) Meaning, why do these statistics even matter? The Witcher is a series where dwarves, elves, and human-looking dragons roam the world... but suddenly we care about presumed realism when we're talking about black characters, or other racial minorities? When it comes to fantasy, the problem has always been that it's fantasy; that authors imagine wonderful, impossible, highly diverse worlds... that just happen to not include anyone with darker skin. Same with Japanese media, which we generally think of in terms of manga and anime. If you take something like BNHA, this isn't a tale meant to reflect real Japanese school students, in which we might discuss the expected, racial makeup of a modern student body. This is a story about a classroom filled with kids that have tails, horns, make things float, and ignite the sweat in their hands. But again, in that wealth of insanity the idea of including non-white characters is suddenly off the table due to statistics? To say nothing of the global readership for popular stories nowadays and the major themes these fantasy series tend to engage with, one of which is the concept of the outsider. The Witcher uses both witchers themselves and non-humans to discuss minorities, whereas BNHA uses the lack of a quirk, and though we can apply that to numerous types of identity (sexuality, ableism, etc.) race is another, major consideration. So yes, I'm personally critical of any series that essentially goes, "I, like pretty much any author, wrote this with the hope that people outside my country would love it too, it's a fantasy series in which the concept of humanity is stretched to its limit, I engage critically with the themes of discrimination and physical difference... but no, none of my characters are people of color. Why would they be?"

Obviously you're quite right that the racial politics in the U.S. are not the racial politics of elsewhere in the world and that absolutely has to be taken into account when discussing each individual text. For example, the Witcher Netflix series has been criticized for being too Americanized, despite claims that they were going to be faithful to the books and their roots, and so though fans are happy that diversity has been added to the cast, we could have a conversation about what making the show more Polish would look like — including casting. But on the whole, I'm not sold by arguments that series don't need diversity because look, we (again, supposedly) have this homogenous society in real life. A story — especially a fantasy story — is not real life. It's meant to reflect aspects of real life in a manner that is accessible and worthwhile for an audience. But for a huge chunk of the world's audience, they're approaching these texts and receiving the message that they don't get to be a part of these fantasy adventures. To provide an example of the reverse, many white gamers were incredibly uncomfortable when it was revealed that their randomized avatar in Rust would be permanent. How can the developers expect me, a white person, to play someone who is black? How are we supposed to relate to that? Why are you forcing us to think about politics? It's about freedom of choice! Now, putting aside the inherent issues in those complaints — an inability to identity with others, the idea that it's only "making things political" when people of color get involved, etc. — that's precisely what every non-white player is experiencing when they pick up The Witcher 3 — a game where I can't think of a single person of color until Hearts of Stone — and, you know, the vast majority of games out there too. If all things were equal then yeah, maybe we could debate the merits of keeping the Polish fantasy series almost exclusively white. But we definitely don't live in that world.

#witcher #BNHA #My Hero Academia #racism

[newstfionline]

Monday, October 4, 2021

Governing by crisis (AP) Washington’s tempestuous week of walking, chewing gum, juggling balls and spinning plates at the same time is giving rise to apocalyptic rhetoric about the state and future of the country. Four big things are happening at once, all attended by hyperventilation. The White House talks of a “cataclysmic economic threat” if Republicans don’t start cooperating. Republicans assail Democrats for unleashing a “big-government socialist nation.” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer says: “Insanity and disaster are now the Republican Party line.” It’s a contest to see which side can bash back better. This is what governing by crisis looks like. The government has essential housekeeping to do this time of year. Yet no deal comes until it absolutely must. Why act at the 11th hour when you’ve got 59 minutes left? There are a couple of must-do’s. The government needed a law to keep itself open in the budget year that began Friday morning. That happened, with a few hours to spare. It also needs to raise or suspend its borrowing ceiling to cover current expenses and avoid a default on its debt payments over the next two weeks. Then there are the want-to-do’s. President Joe Biden, many Democrats and a sizable number of Republicans want to build or restore roads, bridges, broadband and more in an ambitious public works package. Biden and many Democrats, but no Republicans, also want to supercharge social and climate spending, potentially costing upward of three times more than the infrastructure one. All the plates are still spinning.

Military Bases Turn Into Small Cities as Afghans Wait Months for Homes in U.S. (NYT) In late August, evacuees from Afghanistan began arriving by the busload to the Fort McCoy Army base in the Midwest, carrying little more than cellphones and harrowing tales of their narrow escapes from a country they may never see again. They were greeted by soldiers, assigned rooms in white barracks and advised not to stray into the surrounding forest, lest they get lost. More than a month later, the remote base some 170 miles from Milwaukee is home to 12,600 Afghan evacuees, almost half of them children, now bigger than any city in western Wisconsin’s Monroe County. The story is much the same on seven other military installations from Texas to New Jersey. Overall, roughly 53,000 Afghans have been living at these bases since the chaotic evacuation from Kabul this summer that marked the end of 20 years of war. While many Americans have turned their attention away from the largest evacuation of war refugees since Vietnam, the operation is very much a work in progress here, overseen by a host of federal agencies and thousands of U.S. troops. While an initial group of about 2,600 people—largely former military translators and others who helped allied forces during the war—moved quickly into American communities, a vast majority remain stranded on these sprawling military way stations, uncertain of when they will be able to start the new American lives they were expecting. An additional 14,000 people are still on bases abroad, waiting for transfer to the United States.

Dwindling Alaska salmon leave Yukon River tribes in crisis (AP) In a normal year, the smokehouses and drying racks that Alaska Natives use to prepare salmon to tide them through the winter would be heavy with fish meat, the fruits of a summer spent fishing on the Yukon River like generations before them. This year, there are no fish. For the first time in memory, both king and chum salmon have dwindled to almost nothing and the state has banned salmon fishing on the Yukon, even the subsistence harvests that Alaska Natives rely on to fill their freezers and pantries for winter. The remote communities that dot the river and live off its bounty—far from road systems and easy, affordable shopping—are desperate and doubling down on moose and caribou hunts in the waning days of fall. “Nobody has fish in their freezer right now. Nobody,” said Giovanna Stevens, 38, a member of the Stevens Village tribe who grew up harvesting salmon at her family’s fish camp. “We have to fill that void quickly before winter gets here.” Opinions on what led to the catastrophe vary, but those studying it generally agree climate change is playing a role as the river and the Bering Sea warm, altering the food chain in ways that aren’t yet fully understood. Many believe commercial trawling operations that scoop up wild salmon along with their intended catch, as well as competition from hatchery-raised salmon in the ocean, have compounded global warming’s effects on one of North America’s longest rivers.

Crossing the Darien Gap (NYT) Migrants are surging at the Mexican border. Tens of thousands are passing through a deadly South American jungle to get there. The Darién Gap, a roadless, lawless land bridge connecting Colombia and Panama, was considered so dangerous that only a few thousand people a year tried to cross it. But the economic devastation wrought by the pandemic in South America has been such that 95,000 migrants, most of them Haitian, attempted the crossing in the first nine months of the year. “We very well could be on the precipice of a historic displacement of people in the Americas toward the United States,” a former national security adviser said. “When one of the most impenetrable stretches of jungle in the world is no longer stopping people, it underscores that political borders, however enforced, won’t either.”

Puerto Ricans fume as outages threaten health, work, school (AP) Not a single hurricane has hit Puerto Rico this year, but hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. territory feel like they’re living in the aftermath of a major storm: Students do homework by the light of dying cellphones, people who depend on insulin or respiratory therapies struggle to find power sources and the elderly are fleeing sweltering homes amid record high temperatures. Power outages across the island have surged in recent weeks, with some lasting several days. Officials have blamed everything from seaweed to mechanical failures as the government calls the situation a “crass failure” that urgently needs to be fixed. The daily outages are snarling traffic, frying costly appliances, forcing doctors to cancel appointments, causing restaurants, shopping malls and schools to temporarily close and even prompting one university to suspend classes and another to declare a moratorium on exams. Puerto Rico’s Electric Power Authority, which is responsible for the generation of electricity, and Luma, a private company that handles transmission and distribution of power, have blamed mechanical failures at various plants involving components such as boilers and condensers. In one recent incident, seaweed clogged filters and a narrow pipe.

Thousands in Brazil protest Bolsonaro, seek his impeachment (AP) With Brazil’s presidential election one year away, tens of thousands of demonstrators marched Saturday in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and dozens of other cities around the country to protest President Jair Bolsonaro and call for his impeachment. Saturday’s protest targeted the president for his mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Bolsonaro, who is not vaccinated and doesn’t usually wear a mask, has underestimated the severity of the virus and promoted crowds during the pandemic. Some 597,000 have died of COVID-19 in Brazil, a country of 212 million people. Demonstrators also protested surging inflation in mainstays like food and electricity. Over 130 impeachment requests have been filed since the start of Bolsonaro’s administration, but the lower house’s speaker, Arthur Lira, and his predecessor have declined to open proceedings. Division among the opposition is the key reason analysts consider it unlikely there will be enough pressure on Lira to open impeachment process.

Ecuador to pardon thousands of inmates after deadly prison riot (CNN) Ecuador plans to pardon and commute thousands of sentences in order to free up space in the country’s prisons following a deadly riot at a penitentiary in the coastal city of Guayaquil this week. The Director of Ecuador’s prison agency SNAI, Bolivar Garzon, said on Friday that up to 2,000 inmates, including elderly people, women and those with disabilities and terminal illnesses, would be prioritized on the pardon list for release and foreign nationals will be deported. Investigations are still ongoing at the Litoral penitentiary in Guayaquil, after violent clashes between rival gangs at the high-security facility left 118 inmates dead and dozens wounded on Tuesday. Those killed suffered from injuries resulting from bullets and grenades, according to regional police commander Fausto Buenaño. Ecuador’s President Guillermo Lasso said in a televised address on Wednesday that the prison was not yet entirely secured, and urged inmates’ relatives and families to stay away from the area.

After a century of waiting, Russians witness a royal wedding once more (NPR) Descendants of the czarist Romanov dynasty were married in the country’s first royal wedding in over a century—kicking off a weekend of lavish events that sparked public curiosity, awe and derision in seemingly equal measure. Under the dome of St. Isaac’s Cathedral in Russia’s former imperial capital city, Grand Duke George Mikhailovich Romanov, 40, married his Italian bride, Victoria Romanovna Bettarini, 39, in an Orthodox ceremony on Friday before priests and several hundred guests. Czarist trappings included an engagement ring “traditionally exchanged in the House of Romanov,” according to a press release. The Russian Orthodox Church’s top official in St. Petersburg, Metropolitan Varsonofy, blessed the ceremony. “It’s a kind of imperial wedding. A remembrance of eternal Russia—of sacred czars and patriarchs and (the) church,” philosopher Alexander Dugin said in an interview with NPR.

China tightens political control of internet giants (AP) The ruling Communist Party is tightening political control over China’s internet giants and tapping their wealth to pay for its ambitions to reduce reliance on U.S. and European technology. Anti-monopoly and data security crackdowns starting in late 2020 have shaken the industry, which flourished for two decades with little regulation. Investor jitters have knocked more than $1.3 trillion off the total market value of e-commerce platform Alibaba, games and social media operator Tencent and other tech giants. The party says anti-monopoly enforcement will be a priority through 2025. It says competition will help create jobs and raise living standards. President Xi Jinping’s government seems likely to stay the course even if economic growth suffers, say businesspeople, lawyers and economists. “These companies are world leaders in their sectors in innovation, and yet the leadership is willing to squash them all,” said Mark Williams, chief Asia economist for Capital Economics. Chinese leaders don’t want to reimpose direct control of the economy but want private sector companies to align with ruling party plans, said Lester Ross, head of the Beijing office of law firm WilmerHale. “What they are worried about is companies getting too big and too independent of the party,” said Ross.

China sends 77 warplanes into Taiwan defense zone over two days, Taipei says (CNN) Taiwan has reported a record number of incursions by Chinese warplanes into its air defense identification zone (ADIZ) for the second day in a row, Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense said on Saturday night. The self-governing island said a total of 39 Chinese military aircraft entered the ADIZ on Saturday, one more than the 38 planes it spotted on Friday. The 38 and 39 planes respectively are the highest number of incursions Taiwan has reported in a day since it began publicly reporting such activities last year. The incursions on Friday came as Beijing celebrated 72 years since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Taiwan and mainland China have been governed separately since the end of a civil war more than seven decades ago, in which the defeated Nationalists fled to Taipei. However, Beijing views Taiwan as an inseparable part of its territory—even though the Chinese Communist Party has never governed the democratic island of about 24 million people.

Leaked records open a ‘Pandora’ box of financial secrets (AP) Hundreds of world leaders, powerful politicians, billionaires, celebrities, religious leaders and drug dealers have been hiding their investments in mansions, exclusive beachfront property, yachts and other assets for the past quarter-century, according to a review of nearly 12 million files obtained from 14 firms located around the world. The report released Sunday by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists involved 600 journalists from 150 media outlets in 117 countries. It’s being dubbed the “Pandora Papers” because the findings shed light on the previously hidden dealings of the elite and the corrupt, and how they have used offshore accounts to shield assets collectively worth trillions of dollars. The more than 330 current and former politicians identified as beneficiaries of the secret accounts include Jordan’s King Abdullah II, former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, Czech Republic Prime Minister Andrej Babis, Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, Ecuador’s President Guillermo Lasso, and associates of both Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan and Russian President Vladimir Putin. “The new data leak must be a wake-up call,” said Sven Giegold, a Green party lawmaker in the European Parliament. “Global tax evasion fuels global inequality. We need to expand and sharpen the countermeasures now.”

Cities rethinking transit (NYT) Trams, cable cars, ferries: Cities are rethinking transit. Berlin is reviving electric tram lines that were ripped out when the Berlin Wall went up. Bogotá, Colombia, is building cable cars to serve working-class communities. Bergen, Norway, is running battery-powered ferries and buses. Where cities are succeeding in these and similar efforts, they’re also finding benefits in cleaner air.

#headlines #news

[madamlaydebug]

Urgent info before it gets removed sent via Sean Ferris today

This is very important, so please take a moment to read so you know what has been happening behind the scenes!!!!! Evidently monies to fund the child trafficking tunnels came from US Taxpayers through the Cabal-owned IRS/Federal Reserve System. An inside source said, “They spent trillions of dollars on these tunnels… that’s where the trillions of dollars that have been missing from the 9-11 building that they took down.” READ BELOW!!!!

Since April 2019 in secret military operations, thousands of tortured, mutilated babies, children and teens have been rescued or found deceased by the US Military. US Special Operations teams directed by President Trump and his Pentagon Pedophile Task Force have been clearing out the children, corpses, gold, cash and documents from a massive labyrinthine of DUMBS tunnels (Deep Underground Military Bases) that ran beneath the US, Canada and Mexico.

Evidently over centuries the tunnels had been built and used by members of the Illuminati, better known as the Cabal, or Deep State. Global, political and Hollywood elites into Satan worship were known to pay big bucks to drink the blood of a traumatized child (known as Adrenachrome) – reported to create a “high,” along with a supposed reverse of aging. Although, if their “supply” was cut off, the partaker suffered greatly and could even die.

The Pentagon was making sure that supply was never harvested as evidently it had been for centuries. Back in April 2019 the US Military, Interpol and different countries’ local military forces began a concentrated and coordinated effort to rescue children from a huge tunnel network that ran throughout the US from California to New York, to Canada, Mexico, Europe, Italy (the Vatican and Venice), the Hague, New Zealand, South America and the Middle East (Lebanon). Some of the tunnels lay beneath the Vatican, with many reported to be several stories deep – like the one beneath the Denver Airport.

By April 2020 a total of over 50,000 malnourished, caged and tortured children had been reported as rescued or found deceased in the tunnels beneath large US cities including one under New York Central Park. Another tunnel was said to run from the Clinton Foundation building to the New York Harbor.

The latest horror was uncovered around August 20, 2020 beneath Reno Nevada where thousands of mangled recently deceased corpses of children were discovered. The child captives were believed to have been kidnapped or bred for purposes of sexual abuse, human experimentation and human sacrifice in Satanic rites.

On Wed. Oct. 16 2019 an unbelievable 2,100 children being held in cages in underground tunnels at the California China Lake Military facility were rescued by Navy Seals and US Marines. The children and teens were said to have been sexually abused, tortured and killed to collect their blood. Marines carried out traumatized children, some of whom have never seen the light of day, pregnant preteens, deformed babies, piles of little corpses whose bodies were apparently used for organ harvesting, children locked in cages, electro-shocked and traumatized in order to harvest their blood – Adrenachrome for the elites to drink.

“In Nevada the child rescue operations moved in earnest… what was amazing is that everyone was thinking Las Vegas would be the horror show of horror shows… there was a horror show but it was Reno… underneath Reno they could not believe the tunnels underneath the ground... the DUMBs… the bulk of the children found in the tunnels under Reno were dead… not only dead folks, they were mangled… they’re trying to do DNA testing to get the pieces back in order… which piece belongs to which other torso… it’s horrific” commented Dr. Charles Ward, who has been in a couple of the tunnels.

A trooper involved in rescue operations said, “On 4 July 2019 at 2 am PDT we surprised personnel at the China Lake Naval Research Base in California. We took over the base and rescued approximately 3,000 children being tortured in ways beyond comprehension. . .The count now of traumatized children (found dead or alive) was more like in the hundreds of thousands – generations who had never seen sunlight.”

Another trooper in rescue efforts reported, “Underground bases trafficking children were destroyed back in 2019. That included a base that was under the Getty Museum. The more recent Utah March 18 2020 earthquake was actually destruction of child trafficking tunnels (under the old Dugway Utah Germ Warfare base also referred to as another Area 51 UFO Base). There was a major battle under the Denver airport. The Illuminati had planned to make Denver the capital of the US after they took over and killed most of us.”

There was a tunnel system that circled Australia and centered in Melbourne. The military made a massive raid in tunnels beneath the Black Forest in Germany. In Barcelona Spain they rescued over 2,000 women and children, while arresting 13 of their pedophile leaders. There were 30,000 pedophiles arrested out of Germany, and “lots” were arrested in Spain and England.

Charlie Freak - about Australia said that the troops went into Melbourne and found a second layer of tunnels beneath an enormous tunnel system in Australia. “It started in Sydney… they described it to us… think arachnid… it’s a web… and it was below… so this second tunnel system goes in a ring around Australia, with a big central line running towards Ayers Rock…One night - 9 p.m. to 6 or 7 a.m. - there were explosions every 2 or 3 seconds that entire time. That’s why there were police out there.”

US Military, Marines, Navy Seals and Special Ops trained for over a year for the special missions under direction of President Trump and the Pentagon Pedophile Task Force. These US Special Forces were working with Interpol and various countries’ militaries to clear out the underground tunnels filled with trafficked children and women. They then blew the tunnels up so they can never be used again for any purpose. The small nuclear explosives used caused small earthquakes in the region.

Evidently monies to fund the tunnels came from US Taxpayers through the Cabal-owned IRS/Federal Reserve System. An inside source said, “They spent trillions of dollars on these tunnels… that’s where the trillions of dollars that have been missing from the 9-11 building that they took down.”

The operation was ongoing as they discovered even more tunnels deeply buried beneath the earth. Dr. Charles Ward said: “The rescue operations were taking longer than The Alliance thought because the massive labyrinthine illuminati tunnel systems were more vast than anyone had any idea of.

“They collapsed tunnels in Lebanon,” Ward said. “There was a considerable amount of tunnels under a building there that exploded. I’ve learned an awful lot about these tunnels and I have actually been inside some of these tunnels in my work because they store a huge amount of gold and cash in these tunnels. The ones I’ve been in were 200 Meters below ground level. .. the width of the tunnels would be 30/40 feet, the height would be 15/20 feet, there was electric golf buggies riding around down there like it was a main road; 40 km, 30 km of roads down there, shops down there, living quarters down there, storage facilities, safes, everything down there, and this was in just the two that I’ve visited. . . I think the process has been, from what I understand, once they’ve removed the women and children that were stored down there, they were removing the tunnels so nothing can be ever done there again.”

Ward has personally has been inside two DUMBs that were crammed with cash, gold and valuables. He was part of a team that was moving gold, cash and valuables around the world for the United States Government to back a revaluation of currencies in a Global Currency reset about to take place.

Dr. Ward related that in March 2020 during the child rescue mission at the Vatican they arrested the Pope. Some of Ward’s Security Team watched the arrest. He said that 650 plane loads of gold, cash and documents were flown out of the Vatican to Fort Knox. He regularly used specially trained teams to move money and his teams had been hired to clear out the Vatican of its stolen treasure.

“I don’t think normal people have any idea or any concept as to how many children disappear every single year…And I'm going to sicken you right now. People that we trusted, organizations that we trusted during times of tragedy were involved, such as Hurricane Katrina where lots of people went missing. They were basically stolen by organizations that we trust to look after us in a time of trouble. Those kids were trafficked.

“That’s pretty damn disgusting… In times of war… the wars in Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, the amount of children that were stolen from those countries is unbelievable. So that the families think that they’ve died and they haven’t. They’ve been stolen… and this is a world that, don’t take my word for it, go and do some homework, because it’s absolutely disgusting

“And you’ll start to wake-up to what Donald Trump is actually doing when he’s draining the swamp…I don’t think… a lot of people have any idea how dirty that swamp is…how contaminated it is…and when you wake up to what he’s actually doing…It doesn’t matter if he has funny hair, it doesn’t matter if he does funny tweets. If he gets rid of one pedophile gang, saves one woman and a child from being trafficked, he’s doing a good job. He’s saved thousands and thousands of children and families, yet there’s NOTHING, NOTHING in the mainstream media. They should be ashamed of themselves, totally ashamed. It’s disgusting.”

*Copied

[ghinanotlinetti]

A Review of ‘Feminsm for the 99%: A Manifesto’ by Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya & Nancy Fraser

Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto is a book published by Verso Books, and is essentially a manifesto for feminist rooted in socialism. As I read this book in its entirety, I found myself agreeing with most if not all of the points that were made by the authors. Throughout the manifesto, the contributing authors make it clear that the rise of capitalism is greatly responsible for enabling exploitation, oppression and discrimination. There are also other factors which play into widening the gap of inequality such as race, class, and gender. I connected with this manifesto a great deal largely because I myself cannot comprehend neo-liberal values, and yet these values were seen as the norm and/or the ideal. I remember the time when Hilary Clinton’s vow to ‘break the glass ceiling’ for women pursuing a political career gained popularity; although there have been many women who’ve praised her and portray women like her as an icon, I found myself rather intimidated and disturbed by women such as Clinton and the women that would rally behind due to the fact that there would be a pattern or commonality that I, and many other women, could see in this group of women. For starters, I and other women look nothing like these women (they’re white most of the time), and secondly these women would have access to a plethora of resources from a system which favours this type of women (i.e. they had money, wealth that many women only dream of possessing). I mention Clinton and her glass ceiling because the book references this in the statement: “We have no interest in breaking the glass ceiling while leaving the vast majority to clean up the shards.” I read this statement over and over again, because these words are the exact the words I’ve been dying to say but could never piece out during the rise of white liberal feminism. White neo-liberal feminism seemed to have become the golden standard for women’s liberation, and yet I found it quite odd how easy it was for this ideology to exclude a large population of women in the global society whilst claiming to be “universal”. The moment I was confronted with just how much white women dictated the grounds for gender development, I was an exchange student in a Scottish university studying Gender and Development. From being cut off when I tried to speak up in the class group discussions to saying and idea but from an Eastern perspective and have it be questioned shortly after that idea was repeated but used in a Western perspective and then applauded by the white girls in this class gave me much to think about when class was over and I made my way in the snow from the university grounds to my flat. I do want to mention that the professor was a white woman and she was well aware of imbalances of power especially in gender and development studies, so she was a wonderful woman and I appreciate her very, very much, her classes were the best. But it was very clear to me that the white girls who came to this class were very much trained into thinking in neo-liberal and “Caucasian” trains of thought. It’s not that I’m disturbingly shocked because of how surprised I was, if anything I wasn’t even the slightest bit surprised and this gave me clarity in really and truly having every intention in fighting for my rights and every other woman’s rights to speak their narrative and voice their story with power and confidence.

This manifesto, along with my memories and teachings as a student of international studies, has given me clarity in voicing my principles and what I believe in. Just as any twenty-something-year-old I’m still learning, but I’m also at that stage where I’m able to ground myself in my core believes and search for what truly speaks to me and that won’t be what everyone believes. I also want to mention the post-face because there was a point which I felt really hit the nail and this is on women and labour. The authors speak about labour in terms of sustenance, survival and consequence. Generally speaking, it’s implied that men pursue hard labour to have a right in taking on the role of breadwinner of the family, they strive and work-hard for glory and praise, whereas women who are committed to childcare and other labour that is associated with maintaining the household are typically seen someone who’s just doing what they’re suppose to be doing, nothing praise-worthy, they simply do labour (which is most often unpaid) out of “love”. Many aunts who are caring for more than three children come to my mind when I read this explanation of labour in the post-face; women in our society are told that it is our purpose to be a mother typically by men (and I know this because it happened to me) and I strongly disagree. A woman's purpose shouldn't be reduced to giving love and receiving basically nothing in return; we are our own person, we have dreams, desires, hopes, fears, and ambitions beyond our capacity to give love.

100000000/10! This is a book I’ll be recommending to all my fellow social justice warriors, let’s fight together and be radical together for our society! Reading this during quarantine made me all in my feelings but this is exactly why social justice matters. We all matter. After this book I made a conscious effort to read a fiction book because I’m trying to avoid entering an existential crisis in these tough times 😅 my next review will be on a fiction book that I’ve recently read, it’s a best-selling novel and has been adapted into a miniseries and here’s an emoji for the hint: 🔥 (if you guessed Little Fires Everywhere then you’re absolutely right!) Happy reading my dudes!

#feminism for the 99 per cent #feminism #feminist manifesto #cinzia arruzza #thithi bhattacharya #nancy fraser #verso books #socialism #anti capitalism #politics #gender #social justice #book review

[how-screwed-are-we]

"Everything runs on electricity in this house," she says.

This is the foundation of a zero-carbon world: Electricity that comes from clean sources, mainly the sun and the wind, cheap and increasingly abundant.

Kiliccote quit her job at Stanford University and launched a startup company, eIQ Mobility, helping companies replace their fleets of vehicles, such as delivery vans, with electric-powered versions.

Last year, the world's climate scientists put out a report showing what it will take to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees C by the end of this century, averting the worst consequences of climate change. It requires bringing the globe's net greenhouse emissions down to zero by 2050.

It's a giant leap for humankind.

So Sila Kiliccote and I take that leap. Sitting in her kitchen, with solar panels overhead and an electric car parked outside, we pretend that it has happened. It's 2050 and we've stopped climate change.

2050: The first step was electric cars. That was actually pretty easy

"By 2025, battery technology got cheaper," she says. Electric cars were no longer more expensive. "At that point there was a massive shift to electric vehicles, because they were quieter, and cleaner, and [required] less maintenance. No oil change! Yippee! You know?"

Heating and cooling in homes and office buildings have gone electric, too. Gas-burning furnaces have been replaced with electric-power like heat pumps.

We needed more electricity to power all this right when we were shutting down power plants that burned coal and gas. It took a massive increase in power from solar and wind farms. They now cover millions of acres in the U.S., 10 times more land than they did in 2020. Huge electrical transmission lines share electricity between North and South America. Europe is connected to vast solar installations in the Sahara desert, which means that sub-Saharan Africa also has access to cheap power.

"It just changed Africa," Kiliccote says. "It actually fueled the economies of Africa."

We now store electricity so that it's always there when we need it. With batteries, of course, but in lots of other ways, too. For instance, cities are using electricity to heat and chill massive tanks of water, which then heat or cool buildings at any hour of the day or night.

Some big cement and steel plants still are burning coal or natural gas, but they also have to install massive plants to capture carbon dioxide from their smokestacks and put it back underground.

"We just had to kind of bite the bullet and say, 'OK, if you're making cement or steel, you are capturing and sequestering that CO2,'" Benson says. "And in some cases we actually had to say, 'We're not going to make those things here anymore'" because it wasn't economically feasible to capture the CO2 emissions from that factory.

Big, long-distance freight trucks were a problem, too. "They're really heavy, and batteries are really heavy, and if you have to put a whole bunch of batteries on a truck it's really inefficient," Benson says.

Some of my guides see "electric highways" with wires overhead, and trucks tapping into the electric power in those wires the same way trains do. Others see trucks running on hydrogen fuel; we make that hydrogen using solar or hydro power.

It appears that aircraft still are burning jet fuel. When you buy a plane ticket, you're also paying to cancel out that flight's carbon emissions, capturing an equivalent amount of CO2 from the air. This makes air travel expensive. Fortunately, we now have much faster trains. Teleconferencing helps, too.

Sally Benson is absolutely convinced about one thing. The hardest part of this journey wasn't finding technical solutions. They all existed, even back in 2019. The hardest part was navigating the social disruption.

Entire industries died — like oil exploration and gas furnace manufacturing. Others rose to take their place, as the country rebuilt its electrical systems. People didn't know what would happen and they were scared. The changes only moved ahead when people were convinced that they weren't getting ignored and left behind. It was the political struggle of a generation.

Now, in 2050, there's a tremendous sense of accomplishment.

"Are there children who look around at all the old buildings and say, 'What are those things they call chimneys? What were they for?' " I ask.

"They do," Benson says with a chuckle. "You know, it's like a historical artifact, but you know, they find it very touching. They are appreciative, because they're living in a world where they don't need to worry about climate change anymore."

It wasn't easy and it wasn't free, Benson says. But it was absolutely worth it.

The air is so much cleaner. Cities are quieter. And we're no longer heating up the planet.

2019: I'm taking a walk through downtown Toronto, in Canada, with Jennifer Keesmaat, the city's former chief planner.

Two years ago, a new set of traffic rules went into effect here. "Basically, what we've done is, we've limited through-traffic for cars," Keesmaat says. It forced cars away from King Street and launched a whole cascade of changes.

The streetcars that run down the middle of King Street weren't stuck in traffic anymore.

They became the best way to get across town at rush hour. "The volume of people being moved is astronomical!" Keesmaat says, as one rolls by. The streetcars, of course, are powered by electricity, and one passes every two or three minutes.

2050: At this point, Keesmaat and I open up our minds and take a leap into a world that could be. Greenhouse gas emissions have dropped to zero.

The vast majority of streets have been pedestrianized; that's how people get around, by walking down the street," she says.

"What has happened to the sprawling suburbs?" I ask. "Are people living there? How are they getting around?"

"Some of the large homes haven't changed at all," Keesmaat says. They've just been turned into multifamily units." Other free-standing houses that once lined suburban cul-de-sacs have disappeared; each one has been replaced with a building that contains five or six homes. With the local population booming, those neighborhoods also attracted shops and offices. Suburban sprawl morphed into urban density.

Cars have mostly disappeared. "There are cars, but people don't own cars," Keesmaat says. "Because a car is something that you use occasionally when you need it." Streetcars and buses go practically everywhere in the city now, and you rarely have to wait more than a couple of minutes to catch one. Fast buses and trains connect towns. For other destinations, there's car-sharing.

"2050? It's a wonderful life!" says Daniel Hoornweg, another one of my guides to this zero-carbon world.

"So, you want an autonomous vehicle? Bless your heart, but it costs you more to drive that autonomous vehicle on the road by yourself. If you ride-share, it's a little bit less."

The basic recipe — densely populated neighborhoods linked by mass transit —has been the same for cities all over the world, Hoornweg says.

In part, people are forced to share things; cars are scarce and homes are smaller.

But the scale of zero-carbon life also makes it easier to share. We're living closer together and run into neighbors all the time. "We have more acquaintances — somebody we met in our ride pool or car pool or whatever," Hoornweg says. "There's no better way to [meet your neighbors] than sitting in a [shared] car and you can't get away from them for 20 minutes or whatever."

Some people hated losing their yards and their solitary commutes at first. Others loved the changes. Eventually, Hoornweg says, it just became normal. People stopped talking about it.

Life now goes on as it always did. But there's one huge difference. We're no longer heating up the planet.

2019: Jacobo Arango was traveling in a forested part of his country, Colombia, when he ran into one big reason for global warming. He didn't see it, but he could hear it.

"You could hear the chainsaw cutting the forest; and the locals [were] telling us that this is nothing unusual for them, that they were hearing that every day," says Arango.

This was totally illegal. But local farmers didn't dare report it. "They said, if you do that, your life could be in danger," Arango recalls.

Usually, what follows land clearing in the tropics is cattle grazing. It's a careless, destructive form of cattle grazing, and Tim Searchinger, at the World Resources Institute, says it's incredibly common. "Grazing land is about two-thirds of all agricultural land, and about a third of that came right out of clearing forests," he says.

It's a climate disaster. First, cutting down trees and tearing up forest soil releases huge amounts of carbon dioxide. Then, cattle release methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, as microbes in their stomach digest grass and leaves.

There are greenhouse emissions from other kinds of farming, too — from plowing and from fertilizer. Add it all up, and growing food accounts for a quarter of the entire climate change problem. That could increase, too, because billions of people around the world are getting richer; they want more beef, too.

"There is no solution to climate change that doesn't dramatically reduce the land use demands and greenhouse emissions of agriculture," Searchinger says.

He and his colleagues at WRI released a report last year that laid out a road map for how to do this. It includes lots of things, from wasting less food to reducing greenhouse emissions from fertilizer.

He's brought me to a farm in the Patía valley, not far from Colombia's Pacific coast.

This pasture is a bovine buffet. The grass is up to my waist. This is not ordinary grass that grows wild in this region. These are varieties with names like Mulato, and Cayman, which researchers at CIAT bred and selected to be top-quality cattle feed.

Angulo Mosquera says that these grasses grow so fast, and they're so nutritious, he can keep four or even six cows on land that used to support just one. He does have to manage the cows more carefully; moving them every few weeks to new pastures when the grass is ready.

"More milk, more meat," he says.

Now, because the animals are growing so much faster, they aren't releasing nearly as much methane per pound of milk or meat.

We're looking at an essential part of a world without climate change.

And as we stand there, Jacobo Arango and I just start imagining it's already happened, and talking as though it's real.

2050: The same way we stopped mining coal to generate electricity, we've stopped mining the soil to grow food.

Farmers aren't letting cows wander across the landscape in search of something to eat. They're treating their pasture like a valuable crop, which it really is.

Another critical change: Americans are eating a lot less beef now — per person, half what they ate in 2020. "That's a really, really big deal," Searchinger says.

But they've been part of something amazing. It's 2050 and there are almost 10 billion people in the world. They are eating better — yet the Amazon forest is still there. It hasn't been sacrificed to grow food.

#climate change

[rumandtimes]

I Don’t Trust Atheists on TV

__________________________________________________

Winfred Thoroughfare

Assoc. Reasonable Man Contributor

There’s something unsavoury about television personalities in general, but especially those that address the topic of religion. As a reasonable man, I don’t trust religious personalities on television at all, but I couldn’t say that I distrust overt atheists any less or believe in them any more than the commercial evangelists.

The Call To Atheism

For an out-and-out atheist to take to the stage and the limelight, they must have some sort of mission. Namely, to sell their book, but on the back of that goal they have a supplementary objective: the destruction of religion. TV atheists usually don’t espouse the benefits of one religion over another and typically hate them all. Their goal is to destroy world religion. But as most of them in the English-speaking circuit come from the United States or England, they usually set their targets for Christianity, making little distinction between Catholicism and Protestantism, but viewing Protestantism as slightly more evolved because it can in certain cases be more secular, and usually making no distinction between Orthodoxy and liberalism, since such a divide is unimportant to the U.S. / U.K. audience.

While they are no worse than idiots spreading religious lies and falsehoods to a closed loop of believers on TV, televisions atheists are often consumed by their particular egos and in propagating the achievement of their respective book. Even atheists who feign humility will go on and on about how humble they are, and take the stage to speak of how they do not care for recognition. The companionship of atheism and egoism is likely, probably because the atheist feels as if there is a thousand-year-old tradition spanning human existence up into the majority of the present population, yet they alone in their limited group of intellectuals have solved the ultimate problem: that the big, existential lie of monotheism does not exist.

Everyone knows it’s not so simple. It is an easy matter to prove that any religious text is demonstrably false, and every religious tradition is inconsistent and inane more often than not. But that does not negate the purpose religious has in society, which is not a historical or scientific one, but a bluntly cultural function that often guides socioeconomic behaviours.

Christianity in the United States, for instance, is a markedly isolationist, greedy, and self-indulgent religion; it exists to justify the biases of the congregant, not to challenge a sense of conformity or growth. While American Christians might take umbrage with that observation, pointing to charitable works by their millions of churches and blanket ideals of amicability, religion in America is more often an economic identity or a regional heritage than a calling to a universal standard, and the threat of hell to the nonbeliever out-levers the embrace of opposing factions to a ubiquitous degree.

The Mormons, who may call themselves the most American sect of Christianity (as they claim Jesus was an American) prioritise charity, discipline, and humility for the congregant — all which could be viewed as selfless virtues. But, of course, the Mormons are also extremely strict about social habits such as embracing all forms of abstinence, and their charity comes as a cloak over the dagger of proselytisation and attempts at conversion. Humility on the individual level may be cooperative, but at the institutional level it plays a part in enforcing conformity and obedience from the top down. Charity comes with expectation, discipline comes with sacrifice, and humility comes with ceding control. While it may be hard for a believer of such transactional and oppressive religion to hear, there are forms of Christianity that ask the believer to give up nothing, and instead revel in what there is to gain in following ‘the one true way.’

While religions are often polluted and poisoned by administrative strangling of the freedoms of their lower communities, all religions at their centre have a commentary about the nature and purpose of life, a narrative on the conquest of death, and a guide to live a happier and better existence. Most people are not blind to the corruption of the global clergy, but are happy to ignore and accept the nonsense in return for the community and spiritual gains, or at the very least, the illusion of these comforts. The evangelist atheists underestimate this along with the capacity of their audience whom they ostensibly hope to convert, and underestimate the mortal terror most people have of death and living a useless life.

To broach this fact, many TV atheists speak to the fact that they don’t care what a person believes or how they find comfort, so long as it falls within the cliche utilitarian principle that it does not harm another person. For these atheists however, that is a hard definition to make, because they are very much building a public profile and a career on exterminating religion because they view religion as necessarily irrational and damaging.

Take the prominent TV atheists, while all of them are somewhat fading as of late: Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Stephen Fry, Daniel Dennett, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Maher, Richard Dawkins, and Bill Nye — it is difficult to trust any of them on the topic of religion. Not because they can easily and conveniently poke holes in religious structures, as we all can, a child can grasp the paradoxes and mistruths of a religious story or text, but because they do not offer an alternative set of mind.

Becrying a problem and then failing to point to a solution helps no one. How will religion die? Where is the answer to that question? They avoid this question. Yet, to the TV atheist, questions of god are easy: Is God all-good? Of course not, because the world is a place that is not all-good. Is God anthropomorphic? Of course not, expecting the creator of the universe to resemble humankind is a clear limit of human hubris and egocentrism. Is God real? Of course not, there is no evidence that a god exists, and all religious accounts we have are clearly incorrect, so there is more reason not to believe and remain atheist or at the very least agnostic than there is reason to believe, therefore any god does not exist. Everyone but the deepest and most repressed religious fanatic has asked themself these questions and come to these rather obvious conclusions, and they didn’t need to map it out in a lengthy book to do so. Yet, still, to the vast majority of people it simply does not matter.

If you meet a Christian on the street and become upset that this man could believe in such a stupid, corrupt, and repressive religion as the Christian church, what will you do? Tell him that the church is corrupt? He will respond that the message of Christianity is dependent on Jesus, who is perfect, not the church, which may well be corrupt.

What if you tell him that Jesus did not exist? Or that Jesus was just a man, and not a deity or demigod as the Christians claim? He will respond that it is irrelevant, because the Bible is a narrative handed down through the generations and not a book of current events, and he values the heritage of traditions set forth in the Christian faith, regardless of the perception nonbelievers have of the Bible, and regardless of whether the account of Jesus exactly correct or not the message of Jesus is real, and that is all that matters.

What if you tell him the message of Jesus and the Bible is inconsistent and self-contradictory? He will respond that it is the duty of a good Christian to see the true, all-good message of the Bible by picking out the good parts as scripture, and ignoring the bad parts as a list of examples of traps of sin not to fall for.

Any argument you throw at this man about the history, epistemology, or philosophy of the Christian faith are irrelevant, because all he cares about is the end result: a belief that Christian teachings will guide a good life, and holding an absolution from the fear of death. Atheists can spout off their nonsense as much as they want, but unless they have a good alternative on how to live a meaningful life and how to not fear death, nothing they say actually focuses on the points at hand. And it is these two questions atheists routinely fail to address.

The TV atheist would tell you to live a life that feels good and helps others, and to accept the inevitability and futility of death. Not only are such statements callous and almost entirely incompatible with human psychology, they are easily criticised through quite valid complaints against hedonism and fatalism. Just as easily as religion in practice falls prey to the atheist attack, atheists’ advice in practice also can quickly fall flat. If religion is a lie, it is a lie that helps the individual live their life.

Atheists are brought back to their initial debate: If god (a higher, infinite purpose) doesn’t exist and if believing something doesn’t hurt anyone else, there is no use in changing the world as it is. But religion is an exception, because while it may help the individual, it hurts society, therefore there must always be a separation between church and state. Yet atheists are forced to reconsider the fact that religion is actually bad for society, and if it indeed isn’t at least worse than the alternative, then to consider the problem that promoting atheism actually trips the lines of not hurting others.

If atheists are spreading anti-religious rhetoric because they know religion to be false and consider it useless or redundant, but in so doing break the spirits of religious people, they are causing harm to others with out of a personal grudge or for the purpose of a vanity project. And if it turns out that human beings start to feel hollow and morbid in the broad absence of religion, or a replacement of religion, and the atheists are not able to provide that replacement, then they will have dismantled a potentially essential part of society, not only in transgression of their values of utilitarian freedom of ignorance and freedom of belief, but also to the detriment of many disillusioned peoples’ lives.

TV atheists would tell you that religion actually does not offer people anything, and everyone would be better off without believing in myths and lies, but people believe in existential lies all the time. The whole of human existence is based upon illusion, not least of which the illusions of the senses and the illusions of consciousness. Religion may be false, religion may be stupid, but by the very rules atheists set for themselves about what is acceptable for other people to believe, religion does not cause enough harm to justify an atheist making a highly public profile and international campaign in favour of destroying religion.

Atheism is not the same as education, as, again, many religious people are fully aware of the gaps in their religion already, but they choose to ignore them. That is an informed decision to remain ignorant of a problem, which is very different to being ignorant of that problem in the first place. Atheists setting out to teach Christians the truth about Christianity because they want to look so informed has a reverse effect of making the atheist look foolish and narrow-minded. Once atheists are making arguments about the weakness of religious thought, it is no longer an educational session but is just that, an argument, and if TV atheists are utilitarian as they claim then they should recognise there is no utility in arguing a moot point. Even is a religious person lapses from a religion based on being persuaded by arguments, they might change their nominal identity and retract support for a religious movement, but are their core values and daily routines really all that likely to change. They are the same person, but they just no longer check the “Catholic” box on registration forms, and now they will attend annual atheist book signings instead of attending weekly mass (which one could argue is a downgrade in practical social terms).

Many of the complaints atheists have are also complaints religious people have: Corruption in churches, mosques, temples, and synagogues; Vapidity of religion in politics; Deviation of contemporary religious teachings from the revelation of ancient religious texts; The failure to modernise the message of some religious doctrines on a regular basis. These are not religious failures, but social failures, and as the religious person would be quick to point out, religion is the solution to social ills, not the cause.

An atheist arguing with a believer about society, where religion is the solution to one person and religion is the problem to the other person, won’t get anywhere. It would be much more useful to actually argue solutions. Bill Nye arguing religion in the objective that undermining Christianity would somehow bolster Darwinism was misplaced; he should have stuck to solely explaining evolution rather than argue with someone who refused to listen to what he was saying based on irrelevant defiance of facts. That is not a religious problem — as many, if not most, Christians embrace evolution (not to mention, many nonbelievers refute evolution on baseless grounds) — it is a problem of dealing with an idiot. Tracing the gospel of Jesus will never advance that conversation, because that was not the question at issue, and Nye should have seen through and restrained himself from the red herring. Just because an idiot wants to invoke a “religious exception” to facts does not mean it is worthwhile to focus on the appeal to religion, as the tantrum against facts is the real point of contention.

TV atheists going off about religion in public sounds more like TV religionists than not. They both have a message to sell for their own sake, usually a financial or even spiteful incentive to push those ideas, and are driven above all by an egoism of hearing themselves speak a correction to the flawed masses while reaffirming just how right they are and how their own rules do not apply to themselves. In short, they want attention.

An instance I completely lost all possibility of respect for Richard Dawkins is when he gave a televised speech and took questions from an audience. All the audience were likeminded to him, as you might imagine the kind of draw to a commercial book promotion for a text Dawkins had authored and was willing to sell and sign for a price. There was no ‘reaching the masses,’ only an atheist author playing an atheist crowd, or — as they say — preaching to the choir. One spectator asked Dawkins a moral question, a chance for Dawkins to build a moral philosophy to replace the absence of modern religious guides to life, and that question was, shockingly, if gay incest was morally acceptable and even healthy. Disturbingly, Dawkins agreed with his pervert fan and said that it was okay, specifically for a lesbian mother to have sex with a lesbian daughter, or for lesbian sisters to have a long-term or exclusive sexual relationship.

A perfect example of how TV atheists will say anything to sound contrarian and build up a stir while playing their fanbase, and of how completely devoid of the human condition their thinking is. Having sex with a family member, or against an imbalance of power, is not solely wrong because it could lead to genetic diseases or questions of parenthood as Dawkins assumed. Those are costs to be reckoned after the fact. But it is wrong in the conception of the act because it violates the family structure and destroys the development of a normal and healthy life if a parent views their own child as a sex toy to be groomed into adulthood, and it violates the requirements of happiness and satisfaction in consent if there is a power imbalance in a purposefully mutual relationship.

While the loser in Dawkins’s audience obviously didn’t realise it, there is a need in human relationships to have a bond on a personal level, to have an unconditional bond on a parental level, and to have a familial bond on the sibling level (including cousins). People’s relationships are not just sexual.

Promoting incest in the presence of contraception or homosexuality as Dawkins did in an offhanded comment is disgusting and disturbed, because such a broken system would be harmful to the people involved on a social, biological, and individual level, depriving them of the value of having a family. Viewing each person as a sexual object, and each household as a harem in the process of self-breeding where people have no worth outside of being violated by their close kin, not only undermines the first and most major drive that people have in forming new relationships despite the risk with new people but it also corrodes the safety and security of life at home. There is a reason that most people don’t have an urge to have sex with their family members, and where it does happen occasionally it has never in the history of any human society on Earth been viewed as most normal and best long-term option.

Just because people consent to something does not mean it is good for them, and two lesbian siblings having sex with each other could only lead to disaster (or is likely the product of some previous disaster), no matter whether Dawkins and his acolyte have given them the go-ahead. As pornographic as it might feel to have sex with a sibling to the Dawkins-brand of utilitarian, such a perversion of biology could never compare to the fulfilment of going out into the world and meeting someone who cares for you on a purely sexual level without destroying the deeper relationship you have with a sibling for the rest of your life after the hormones wear off.

Most people know that hooking up with an ex or a co-worker is a bad idea, yet Dawkins is telling people to go for their mom if she’s into it and they bring a condom. And as a biologist, hiding behind the title of biology to push evolution as a trojan horse for atheism, Dawkins should — should — have immediately noted that such a stance is evolutionarily unsustainable if adopted to any real degree, and that it comes off as somewhat homophobic and ill-informed to acquaint doing gay stuff with doing incest and then say it’s cool only because “they can never have children.” Gay people are not black holes of morality, nor are they dead ends of evolution, which Dawkins neither said nor implied, yet that was implied by what he said.

Perhaps tellingly, Dawkins and fan completely failed to understand the fact that sex is a behavioural more than a procreative act — another misconception about human nature Dawkins ironically shares with the church. As a general rule, as well as an absolute rule, say no to incest.

While that’s Dawkins, and maybe people never respected him anyway, the other TV atheists have a repetitive air to their talks of wasting their time (Bill Nye), pushing an ulterior agenda (Sam Harris), going on a pointless rant (Stephen Fry), flattering their own ego (Richard Dawkins), suffocating people with the obvious (Daniel Dennett), being generally unsufferable if not all of the above (Christopher Hitchens), failing to properly contextualise the issue (Neil deGrasse Tyson), or acting out as a contrarian (Bill Maher). If being reasonable is the only goal of the TV atheist, they ought to reason out the fact that religion does play a role in people’s lives, and solving the issues of child rape or poor education or genocidal conflicts are not as simple as saying, “abolish the church,” because the church is a manifest if flawed representation of religion, and religion itself is not responsible for those atrocities.

If anything, religion is a meaningless term — especially in hyper secular and materialist societies like the United States, Britain, European Union, China, and Russia — and especially in hyper dogmatic societies such as Pakistan, Iran, Tanzania, Israel, and Argentina. Religion means whatever the religious person wants it to, and that is not due to ignorance as the TV atheists believe, but is actually by design.

People convert religions, lapse, mutate, and protest their teachings in accordance with their own beliefs. Just because this happens behind the scenes and in silence for most people does not mean the internal doubts and realignments do not take place. And at the end of the day, religion is still there, because people need a sense of purpose and a reason to live their lives, and because most people (unlike the impenetrable exterior of the common TV atheist) don’t want to die — and the concept of death includes aging, being outperformed by rivals, feeling useless, losing a sense of purpose or time, feeling regret over memories, and facing the unknown in both the present and the future.

Religion helps people by telling them lies. Such as in America, American-Christianity telling people everything happens for a reason, telling people that god has an individual purpose for them, telling people that money does not corrupt but instead empowers, telling people that they are guaranteed to live forever in a perfect existence after the first inevitable death which they already know is coming, telling people that they can never be alone because god is always with them, telling people if they do the right thing the right thing will happen for everyone in the end. No one in their right mind could live in a world where they did not believe each of these things were true, regardless if religion is what gets it to them.

Having a handful of rich, famous, and disillusioned men complain about the idiot commoner rejects reality, or complain that the idiot commoner is being scammed by the insidious clergyman, because they just won’t accept that their lives are meaningless, and that there is no plan, and that there is no afterlife, is — frankly — mean-spirited, impractical, dishonest, harsh, and somewhat insane. Atheists may have qualms with the rabbinic tradition, but what is the harm whatsoever in a Jewish person believing that they have a calling in life and suspending disbelief is something challenges that identity? That does not mean that religion cannot or should not be reformed constantly, but the TV atheists need to start asking what is their calling, and what truly does it mean to be religious.

#Atheism #Bill Nye #Neil deGrasse Tyson #Richard Dawkins #Religion

[stephendavid]

[I posted some of this in the Comments section but YouTube censored and deleted it, clearly for political reasons] This video contains a Sky News Australia interview with Bush (W/Jr) advisor Michael Duran. What is truly amazing is that Sky News presents itself as a "Conservative" outlet, but this is from it. I have been an enthusiastic follower, esp. of Alan Jones, for sometime. But in this segment with a Neo-Con RINO, no one on the panel questions any of the lies and foolishness this ignorant clown says. His basic premise is : diverse Muslim groups hate each other more than they hate us. The 9/11 and other terrorist attacks weren't really aimed at us. They were meant to trick us into fighting and causing instability in Muslim countries so they could take advantage of it to destroy their Muslim enemies. (you know, the 'Moderate Muslims" Bush constantly reminded us about. I supported Bush after 9/11 because he did a good job of temporarily uniting us and getting us through the national trauma. He also launched the attack on Afghsnistan in order to destroy Al-Qaida and their training camps. But it quickly became problematic when he labeled it a "War on Terror". As was mentioned frequently, you can fight a physical enemy with (physical) armed forces but you cannot fight and defeat a tactic (terror) with missiles and warplanes. To make matters worse, you can't defeat an enemy if you choose to be willfully ignorant of who they are, what their ideology is, their motivation, and why they want to destroy you. 20 years and countless Islamic terror attacks later, and Bush advisor Duran is still promoting nonsense demonstrating this willful ignorance. Bush almost immediately went on a campaign of endlessly promoting the lie that "Islam is a religion of peace." After every Islamic terrorist attack around the world, we were told this. Keep in mind that, no other religion has been given that label which needs to be reaffirmed on a regular basis, year after year, when various adherents carry out murders, executions, beheadings, knife attacks and bombings around the globe. No one has to remind us that other religions are "Religions of Peace" because it's rare that any of their adherents carry out such attacks. And of course, because they were so enchanted by their own lies about the vague and undefined "enemy", Bush and his advisors, such as numbnutz Duran, refused to study the enemy's ideology - Islam. it was much easier to lie than study the actual 1400 years of doctrines and motivations that launched a 7th century bandit and warlord to take the middle east by the sword and convert, subject (dhimmihood) or execute all who fell within their power. When I was a teenager in the 1960s, I launched a study of world religions that included the important and Primary texts of those religions. That included the Bhagavid Gita, the I Ching, the Tao Te Ching, teachings of Buddha, Zen masters, Yogis, writings of Milarepa (Tibetan) etc. I also read the Qur'an completely. However, unlike other texts, I read it once and tossed it. Whatever was somewhat "good" in it was derived from Jewish and Christian Scripture. But even that was just commentary aimed at changing the meaning or narrative of the original text. And other than that the Qur'an is filled with hatred and violence - aimed specifically at Christian, Jews and pagans. As I was an extreme passivist at the time, I abhorred the foul book. Since 9/11, I have purchased a number of different translations, along with reading the Sira (Muslim biography of Muhammad), and regularly consult Muslim websites to access the large collections of hadiths/Sunnah which preserve the sayings and deeds of Muhammad. Muslim apologists cherry pick verses from Qur'an to support their false claims, but the vast body of Islamic texts make it clear that Islam is the religion of War, Hatred and Terror. It started that way with Muhammad, and it continues over 1400 years later. So the idea that we could attack Al-Qaida and the Taliban and install democracy where the people's own religion did not support democracy and human rights, was simply a fool's errand from the beginning. Following WW2, the US and Allies performed an extensive "de-Nazification" process to remove as much of Nazi ideology from society as possible to support the new Democratic nation. And prior to the Nazis, Germany had been a Christian country. A study of German church history reveals that it had become spiritually weak and the average German had little interest in it (attendance had become drastically low), which facilitated the rise of fascism. But the society historically had the foundations of Christianity to support democracy and human rights following WW2. Numerous global studies/surveys taken among Muslims since 9/11 demonstrate that, while most Muslims don't want to risk their lives in terrorist attacks, many are OK with financially supporting extremist groups (e.g. see the Holy Land Foundation Hamas terrorist financing trial conviction, 2009) and the vast majority of Muslims around the world support Shariah, including draconian laws oppressing women, homosexuality and religious minorities. The only countries where such Shariah support was low were in countries that had been heavily influenced by western democracies, such as Lebanon (originally Christian), Turkey (formed under secularist Attaturk) and Indonesia (former Dutch colony, multi-ethnic with 15% non-Muslim population). While the occupying coalition claimed to be installing democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq, they allowed inclusion of clauses in both constitutions that disallowed any law to be passed that conflicted with Shariah - the actual basic foundation behind Islamic terrorism in the first place. As a result, blasphemy and apostasy laws were put in place with capital punishment. These laws were aimed and misused against religious minorities (Hindus & Christians) and there have been occasions where individuals had to be removed from Afghanistan to save their lives. And that is what is happening on a wide scale now that Biden has suddenly removed their military protection and the Taliban has returned. As long as we pumped endless supplies of cash along with a military presence, while propping up a modern infrastructure the Afghan government failed to maintain, they would reap the benefits of the artificial democracy non-Muslims foisted on it. But as soon as the non-Muslim cash and military were removed, it took literally no time for the entire system to implode. Our original goal should not have been the fool's errand of democracy implementation, which was an impossible task, given the situation described above. The goal should have simply been to remove the fangs (Al-Qaeda) of the tiger (Taliban/Afghan govt). That meant to destroy/weaken Al-Qaeda, destroying their training camps and completely burn down and destroy the Opium Poppy fields that financed the terrorists through heroin sales to the Cartels and ended up pumped into the arms of Americans. This is one serious thing our military did little to nothing about. A big deal was made over finding Osama Bin Laden, but he was never located by our military in Afghanistan. He was eventually located via surveillance and Intelligence years later living peacefully in our duplicitous "ally" Pakistan, and taken out by Special Ops -- not by Afganistan occupation. The bottom line is that we should have bombed Afghanistan until they had no ability to continue their terror attacks and then left. At most, one could argue in favor of building and maintaining a military base on location (E.g. Gitmo) for rapid response if/when Al-Qaeda began to rebuild. But we should not have wasted 20 years of money, resources and lives propping up a fragile government that could never exist without us. We obviously should have left along time ago. But, although I have not been a Trump supporter for personality reasons, it's clear that he was the only one who could have extracted us without causing the totally chaotic mess that our current feeble and demented President created almost overnight -- all the while hiding "on vacation" in Camp David and Delaware. Trump's agreement with the Taliban was that we would systematically withdraw by May if they agreed to not attack our forces. By even Biden's admission, the Taliban lived up to their agreement. But Biden took over in January and by April had announced that he was going to reneg ion the agreement and keep our military presence in Afganistan with the goal of leaving by the anniversary of 9/11. It appears obvious that he did this as some kind of foolish symbolic gesture (we retreat by the anniversary of their attack???). But that was a serious breech of Trump's agreement, making it null and void. And every expert, as well as basic common sense, said we should have pulled all US and coalition civilians out furst,first, followed by any Afghans who provided support (translators, etc) or otherwise would be specific Al-Qaeda targets. Following successful evacuation of civilians, we absolutely should have removed all the millions of dollars worth of sophisticated US military weapons and hardware, such as drones, tracking devices, night vision goggles, etc. Our military should have been the very last to be evacuated. But that did not happen because a feeble bodied and feeble minded withering old man was put in charge as US Commander-and-Chief and Leader of the Free World. How do we put ourselves back together and return the US to the prominent center of the world stage as a "Superpower" that we held just a mere half year ago? The world and the US are radically different then they were even a few short weeks ago. Congress needs to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove Biden from office for medical (cognitive) reasons. But that would mean elevating Kamala Harris to the highest office -- something NO ONE wants, Keep in mind that Harris was polling in last place in the single digits before being the first Dem to drop out following the DNC debate. In fact, it was totally shocking when Biden's handlers chose her to take the number 2 slot, given the way she had eviscerated Biden -- outright implying he was a racist and siding with his accuser regarding sexual assault charges. But since taking over as Vice President, she has done literally nothing. She was put in charge of the Southern Border crisis, yet ignored the situation and routinely refused to personally visit the Border. When the problem became catastrophic, she was finally pressured into action, but instead of visiting the Southeastern points where the crisis was at a peak, she flew down for a photo-op in the Northeast area of the Border -- literally hundreds of miles from the crisis. And she has been silent and mimicking her boss by hiding away during the current fiasco in Afghanistan. Whenever confronted with a difficult or embarrassing question, she routinely throws her head back and laughs -- Kackling until the questioner gives up and moves to the next topic. She would not be any serious improvement on Biden, which is probably why the Dems are afraid to remove him. aAll we can hope for is the near guarantee that the Republicans take both Houses in 2022. We'll have to wait and see.

[mirceakitsune]

Trump and the events that transpired today

It's AM as I start writing this journal, likely past 5 AM once I finish it. I'm tired after today and don't know to what extent I can be fully coherent, politically and socially correct, or whatever else I'm supposed to about what happened. But after the events that took place today I need to speak up. I am sick, feeling I have had it... but for once it's on a matter I can discuss with others in this world, shared by millions of people. Even though I'm nervous to even talk about it as the divide keeps growing; I don't know on which of those websites even journals discussing politics will still be allowed by the administration, I already have a hard time keeping track of the different rules on each of the +8 websites I post anything on... as far as I'm aware we're still allowed to discuss for now.

I don't know exactly who the people that invaded the Capitol building today were. Many say it was Antifa protesters disguised as Trump supporters; I find it hard to understand why they'd interrupt the crowning ceremony of their lover Biden if they were already winning, but who knows at this rate. The people who initially walked in there were likely Trump supporters, with Antifa coming later to start violence so they could say Trump did it. A woman was shot in the neck and unfortunately died soon after, no footage showing who did it yet... scary stuff but it's to be expected given the times we're living in, RIP.

I will start by saying the following thing: I was NEVER a real Trump supporter, and I likely never will be. I'll share a little secret: In 2016 when I first heard he won, I fell in a depression for the entirety of the next day, fearing that he was going to bring about the end of the free and modern world that seemed to be going well till then. And in some ways I was right: Bullshit like SESTA / FOSTA and the repeal of Net Neutrality and other garbage happened under his leadership. But things have changed SO much since that day. The true liberals and progressives I once knew and was proud of being among no longer exists: The left's tolerance has been replaced with hate and fascism, their love for freedom with "freedom as long as we aren't offended or our narratives challenged", even the free internet they once praised is now seen as a tool of "spreading hate and misinformation" unless guided by their censorship regime. No matter how difficult this was for me, I had to accept that only Trump and some of the people around him are still fighting for REAL freedom... putting aside some religious or "think of the children" bullshit the Republicans can't let go of; Freedom to think and say what you want, to live your life as who you are, to go outside without having to wear a god damn mask and breathe like a fucking sapient being that still has any right to live! I don't care that much about either left of right doctrine... all I truly wanted was to be free, to live in a world where everyone minds their own business without using fear and prejudice to control others. I'm also not a patriot as one way or another I believe in a world where people are just citizens of the planet and countries are mainly different legal / cultural zones... I do however believe in a movement to support the people of the world, even if that's currently dressed under patriotism.

Today I watched Trump's speech before the Capitol was stormed. I literally saw and felt a different man from that fool I too once hated and demonized. And I hated him for good reason: He still hasn't denounced his wall of hate (the Mexico border wall bullshit), never had the will or bravery to openly defend the LGBTQ community and distance himself from those supporters that oppose them, attacked Section 230 which is unacceptable despite his justified war against big tech and the corrupt media... I am and will remain outraged at those things about him, he was no ideal example. But you know what? He's not the demon the media makes him out to be either. And as much as I HATE to say this... he is a hero in his own way: For having the courage to fight the biggest organized crime network in the history of humanity... one known as globalism. THAT is why some people turn to him while others want him to look like the devil: Not because they're fascists but because he stood up against a problem everyone else is one way or another a part of, a problem you can't even talk about without being called a conspiracy theorist and raving nut, a frustration many of us feel yet is only deepened by this denial instead of anyone ever addressing it.

Let me be very clear on an essential thing: I'm well aware there are real neo-Nazis, xenophobes, racists, misogynists, transphobes, puritans, psychopaths, etc. in Trump's circles. Yes they are pests, and I too will smite those fools if they try to use Trump (or any other means) to impose their own bullshit on this world! The vast majority of Trump supporters I've seen have nothing to do with this hate: I've watched livestreams from dozens of Trump rallies by now, have only seen decent and peaceful and creative people dancing and having fun... unlike some Antifa and BLM rallies which are far more aggressive by comparison. It's always the media transmitting from those protests, journalists putting up theatrical scenes about how they're surrounded by dangerous extremists on their crusade to find the Proud Boys hiding in the crowd. There were at least 1 MILLION people supporting Trump in Washington DC today, kilometers of street filled with people. Including countless black people who were allegedly discriminated by him, who will also tooootally die from COVID tomorrow because they didn't respect social distancing... did I forget to mention the pro-LGBT flags being waved at those rallies? Really: Is anyone trying to tell me those are all evil intolerant whatever-phobic lunatics? Because I'm not going lie to myself because the media decided what we have to believe: The traitorous brainwashing media can go to hell, together with big tech and especially big pharma after what they did to the world with COVID.

I also watched dozens of livestreams from courts, of proof being presented regarding the massive election fraud that put Biden in office. There is no such thing as "there was no fraud", there were hundreds of testimonies under oath some with footage and documents; Courts simply refused to see the evidence or decided to ignore it citing procedural grounds... because like everything else, the globalist octopus (mafia reference) owns the justice system and every part of society. Dominion voting machines were programmed to default to Biden votes, they were designed with the mindset "here's a big button to vote for Biden... because you don't really want to vote for Trump do you, though if you really want to I guess you can click here". And other forms of manipulation that ultimately caused Biden to get MILLIONS OF VOTES OVERNIGHT, which is so normal and definitely not suspicious at all.

Now that the brave and mighty police secured the Capitol building and drove those pesky citizens away, senators led by lowlife-by-profession Mike Pence resumed their session of shoving Biden down our throats at any cost (sadly not in a fun vore way). I watched their vomit inducing speeches as they went on about how they're sticking to their duties in such difficult times, and how those thugs who entered the building tried to stop them but failed. This will only add to the frustration, which they don't even realize or care about: They know all too well what their duty is... to sell the world to those who are desperate to have UNLIMITED POWER AT ANY COST. Their decision was fueled by sheer stupidity and ambition, and will only ensure that if Biden is allowed to become president he'll only be even more illegitimate than he already was. After such a shock there was no way any valid session could continue, no one is in the capacity to count electoral votes and certify a fucking president right now after today... they haven't even cleaned up the fucking blood from the staircase! An absolute disgrace.

But fear not: There are people who will stop this, people who won't allow this hell to come true. They aren't racists, homophobes, psychopaths... the media will no doubt paint them as such, and many will believe the lie, but with the same force others are seeing the truth now more than ever. They think China's authoritarian domination can be forced on us, just as their Covidist masks, or their censorship in the name of stopping hate, and everything else the globalists decided must be forced upon the planet. They have no idea how badly they're furthering this divide: The hate and sickness on both sides has reached a point where riots and tragedies are going to be unavoidable. Of course they tell themselves "we're gods on this Earth so we'll be able to control it", they're used to thinking they can hold unlimited power and nothing they do ever has any consequences. The truth will strike, the more you keep the pot on the kettle the harder it will explode once it blows off: All they did today was ensuring it will strike even harder. Save this journal if you wish, so you can remember those things for future reference, to know that some fool out there and in this community saw this and wasn't afraid to say it.

Whatever you think of me, believe me when I say this: I truly am sorry that it had to come to this... on multiple scales. I don't know if many friends that I do care for will ever understand me... such as a certain purple furred vixen, or a kind albeit sometimes rough unicorn who is one of my soul parents, not to mention a very close fox working on building a lab and bringing genetic transformation to life; They all more or less believe some of the official narratives, and I feel barely tolerate me for not doing the same. If there was another way to see the world and live this life, I would have taken it. If something would have been different in the past and led to a different outcome, I could be living a life of standing with the majority instead of against it... something I wish I knew what was like, I never did, I can only presume it must be peaceful and relaxing to live in such a world, but I'll likely never experience it as I don't have the naivety for such a leap. I'm sorry it's like this. And my only wish is that all of you will get to see who truly made it like this once all the lies are exposed! Whatever happens, whether it will be Biden or Trump in the end... please let what they did be exposed.

[harryweaver]

Terrorists

Written in 2013

Terrorists

Who Are They?

I took a plane flight the other day.

While waiting for take off I was looking round, noticing the ever decreasing amounts of metal employed in the interior of aircraft these days, consistent with the need for weight saving. Even the little there was appeared to be aluminium, or an aluminium alloy type, to make it lighter and I thought about the degree of fossil fuel involvement in: its removal from the ground; transport to the foundry; during the processing and moulding; and then transport to the assembly facility. Even the minimal amounts employed by the power tools necessary for assembly. Then I thought of all the other metal aspects in the wiring and the exterior fabrication, the fossil fuel requirement there and the associated transportation factor. After that, I envisaged the insulation involved, looked at the plastic, overhead locker housings, the vinyl seating and paint, the polyester involved in the carpeting, stewardess' uniform and even her nail polish. All petroleum based.

I thought about what our 'civilisation' would be like without oil and realised we'd be back in the days of the horse and cart, looking round for something to grease the axles.

The thought then occurred how foolish it would seem to have the entire basis of your economy in someone else's hands.

Iraq.

Not two wars, but two fronts in the one war with a blockade to provide the siege factor between. With the blockade in the Gulf of Arabia ensuring that such things as wheelbarrows were not permitted through as they might conceivably be employed as tools in the construction of nuclear weaponry sites. Vaccines were not permitted through, as they were deemed capable of being employed as the basis for the production of biological weaponry, although, as any secondary school biology student could tell us, the bacteria that make up the vast array of vaccines are dead. As a direct result of this latter action 200,000 Iraqi children, in their first five years of life, died during the Iraqi occupation while doctors in hospitals begged, unsuccessfully, for the release of the vaccines needed to save them. These are just two examples of assessment guidelines imposed, to facilitate the degree of compliance required, that had nothing to do with international rulings.

Not to mention such aspects as the destruction of Fallujah. One of the more direct modes of winning hearts and minds.

The carefully targeted destruction elsewhere in Iraq, destroying some of the very foundations of known civilisation. Destruction of cultural identity - the hallmark of genocide.

All this in a country where, before the latest Kuwaiti invasion (No, it hasn't always been a convenient part of Britain), 98% of households had a potable water supply and the same percentage of the population had unrestricted access to a quality tertiary education. But none of this has relevance in relation to our own requirement, obvious when it's observed that the high-minded motive for the launch of the second front was a decidedly fuzzy, high-resolution satellite picture of a garbage truck. The siege simply wasn't meeting the time frame.

Moslem acquaintances of mine had been united in the assessment that, in traditional Arabic tribal culture, even if Saddam Hussein was removed, somebody just as bad or even worse would take his place. The tribe in power always abuses the privilege (and in this, I see little to differentiate Western cultures), other tribes that were associated in their ascendancy reaping concessions, with ancient grudges ensuring placement in the substrata of the social order. This tribal mode of behaviour is practically genetic in Arabic culture and not about to transpose into a 'Rag-Head' copy of 'America the Beautiful' as the result of some eye-blink stop-over, which makes zero difference to a cultural outlook that was ancient before America was mistakenly discovered by Columbus.

'America the Beautiful' is losing some of her sheen now, with the rapidly growing efficiency of direct information exchange mediums making it obvious that, for example, a new trade good described as 'foreign aid' is to be supplied to some deserving situations that have some strategic value while others just as deserving, but with no advantage to offer, receive none. Some, like Eritrea, are not even 'recognised'. This appears to do nothing toward slowing the death rate, however. Nothing of their plight appears on the pages and screens of a corporate media that has a product to sell that, these days, appears to have nothing to do with the concepts implied by the terminology, 'journalism'.

As far as the armed forces go, sentient beings, even in those instances where their full intelligence quotient might not have been permitted full flight by peer pressure and their adversary has had their humanity stripped from them by appellations such as 'Rag-Heads', know when they are being conned. They are aware, if only on a subconscious level, that they are involved in the first of the major corporate wars.

Being asked to die for corporate requirement instead of the principles laid down by Founding Fathers that created an admirable American ideal, that exists now only in the memories of a rightfully proud and ever diminishing American few. Could this be the reason American servicemen are at their lowest ever ebb in regard to the morale factor? And American armed forces conscription is at an all time low also?

There appears to be a great level of confusion on this level, as illustrated by the case of Bradley Manning, a Private, First Class in the American Armed Forces who hears one stance espoused by the commanders of those forces, sees what are obviously radical discrepancies that contradict that stated stance, takes those discrepancies to his direct superiors and is told to 'Go away'. Then, apparently having no other direction to go in, he decides to go public with an ethical stance that does himself, the armed forces he serves and his country proud. As a product of the confused maelstrom of contradiction posed by stated policy and actual practice, he is branded a traitor, locked up on the sole evidence provide by a madman and subjected to the latest fashion in psychological torture practices for a grossly extended period, before, and this is yet to happen, he is sent to trial to determine his guilt or innocence.

And then there's Afghanistan. There are too many other examples of global tragedies, that have no fiscal/material benefit to offer that go ignored and unattended, to have any faith in the much trumpeted ethical stance any longer. Let's not forget that the Taliban were originally founded and funded by the American taxpayer, to the tune of four and a half billion dollars, in order to destabilise the Soviet presence in Afghanistan.

And now, with regard to Afghanistan's massive predisposition for poppy farming, the world's basis for pharmaceutical commodities of everything from basic Codeine all the way through to Heroin (oops, sorry, Morphine) placed in 'Protective Custody'? Suddenly there appears to be the outline of what could be interpreted as an intentional drive toward a stranglehold on oil and pharmaceuticals, the two largest global corporate economies.

With other bonuses

Which are enacted upon, as quickly as possible

Idealistic standards of the past supply no more than a format for the oratory, that enables the future plundering of assets, with techniques that bear little relation to the rhetoric.

While the location, location, location aspect screams to be recognised with the border of mainland China just a short flight up the Hindu Kush. And in the middle, between Iraq and Afghanistan (Oh! Amazing coincidence!), Iran, with a production of over 4 million barrels of oil/day.

Terrorism.

Who are the terrorists?

Actually?

If your party spills over into the neighbours’ backyard and you start stealing his beer, you'll get a negative reaction.

If you invade half the middle east, taking from them control and ownership of the only commodity they have that keeps the desert warm at night and cool during the day, you don't think you are going to get an adverse reaction? Go back and repeat the slow learner class!

As Noam Chomsky once said, `If you want to stop terrorism, stop participating in it’.

There are many conspiracy theories surrounding such phenomenon as the Twin Towers tragedy, but when a complex of this size, where 50,000 people worked on any weekday, with another 200,000/day passing through as visitors, it's a marvellous thing to me that only 2,800 were killed - including over 400 utilities workers who came along afterward. The complex was so large, it had its own zip code: 10048, so nobody had to leave the complex to go to lunch when it happened, at 8.45 a.m.

It was the Twin Towers incident that 'launched' the 'War On Terror'.

But perhaps there is something else at work here also?

Barack Obama and his would-be Mini-Me, the then Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, both arrive on the last day of the recent international climate change conference to abundantly demonstrate how concerned they weren't with the issues. Massive industrial outsourcing investments have gone into both China and India, to take full advantage of the cheap labour overhead, so they'll never be asked to cut emissions. No advantage in that. It'd just drive up the price of the product. That's the reason they were outsourced in the first place. The demand for oil will only increase within industrial and commercial environments that follow production processes that require them. An entirely new definition of pollution, powered by over half the world's population, will be carried along by water-tables, ocean and wind currents, phenomena that have absolutely no respect for national boundaries either.

As pollution increases, natural resources will suffer in quality and availability and, as a consequence, escalate in value. Future wars will be fought over water and that won't be too far into the future. The overtures have already been well and truly played.

As I have said previously: We consider our 'selves' to be a separate entity to our environment, rather than an integral, interacting aspect of it, so any harm we inflict on the environment has no real effect on our situation, we surmise. (The comparative example of this would be that of a race of people, travelling through endless space, systematically destroying the space ship they are travelling in.) There have been highly qualified dissenting voices to this supposition, even economists like E.F. Schumacher who advise that, "If we ever find ourselves in the position of winning our battle with nature, we will automatically find ourselves on the losing side".

As a species, are we really this stupid? Or do we employ our elected political heads to make these awkward decisions for us, while we fiddle as our ethical state burns and we hide our heads in the sands of short term profit? And we pretend not to know until, only occasionally, the truth of the situation finds its way through the cracks in the walls of mainstream media platitudes. Truth finally hurled in our faces to the point where we can no longer ignore it and we throw our political, human sacrifices on the fiery, self righteous altars of our conscience?

Absolution!

Let's do it again!

Is this the trade off?

```````````````````````````````````````````````

'Religion is regarded by the common people as true,

by the wise as false,

and by the rulers as useful.'

- Lucius Annaeus Seneca.

Terrorism, the new religion?

```````````````````````````````````````````````

We'll live quietly, in our allocated suburban box and pay you very well, if you'll perpetuate our preferred illusions? The veneer of civilisation, over the greatest predator in the history of the planet, isn't even rice paper, Bible-page thick.

Yes, we can go ahead and pretend that none of this is happening, but if we create a Golgotha that is free of any chance of vice, we will have removed the only stage where virtue has the opportunity to dance, so what spiritual aspect to existence will we have to console us then?

Spirituality is no longer a required attribute in a Production Unit however:

Religion, as described above, will do as a substitute;

Basic diet requirement, yes;

Health maintenance, also (any need for it to be preventative would be associated with the lowering of retraining cost);

and a little R&R as a last condescending concession to our humanity, to aid in compliance and prove corporate benevolence.

It'll suffice.

After all, why not give up our civil liberties?

We weren't using them anyway.

[entireconfection]

Can We Turn It Around?

Hard to believe it’s been four years, isn’t it?

           As I sit down to write this, 5 weeks out from the 2020 election, it’s hard to know where to start. For almost four years now, we’ve been living in an altered (and very shitty) state of reality. Donald Trump’s America. A never-ending dumpster fire. And, to be frank, one of the worst chapters in our country’s history. On top of that, we’ve just crossed the half-year mark of a global pandemic, an ongoing crisis by turns devastating and surreal, one that seems sadly befitting of our dystopian, is-this-really-happening times.

           After 4 agonizing years of hate and stupidity ruling the roost, of nonstop assaults on science and decency and civility, of the obliteration of democratic norms, destruction of the checks and balances that we naively assumed would always be there for us, we’ve almost arrived at another election. And with it, the possibility that we can start to turn this around. That we can rise up and say “NO. We DON’T want a dictatorship. We WON’T go along with this. We will FIGHT for love and decency and our democracy.”

           Personally, I am proceeding under the assumption that Trump will be reelected. I have to do so for my own wellbeing. I don’t want to get my hopes up. The bitter, blindsiding defeat of 2016 is still fresh in my mind. There are many ways that this election could turn into a shitshow. Not the least of which is we have a ruthless dictator as President who is doing everything he can to sabotage the vote. And he has a powerful ally in the Republican party, which has expertly suppressed the vote for decades and is doing so now with as much gusto as ever, determined to hold onto power at all costs. Throw in all of the logistical challenges and obstacles caused by COVID, along with all of the flaws of our antiquated, broken-by-design voting system (courtesy of the democracy-hating GOP), and no one really knows what the hell is going to happen on November 3.

           So I have to assume that Trump will win. Because, awful as that will be, life will go on if he wins. And I need to be able to carry on as well.

           Still, as accustomed as I’ve become to the insanity of the Trump era, it’s sometimes hard to grasp that it’s come to this. That we are perilously close to becoming an authoritarian country with a permanent conservative majority. That it pretty much all hangs on this election.

           It’s not just our country either. It’s our planet that’s on the line. Perhaps you’ve heard of climate change? You know, that little issue that Americans don’t give a shit about, but is an existential threat to human civilization? Well, it’s only getting worse. The Northern Hemisphere just had its hottest summer ever, 2 degrees above normal. You can expect a new record every year for your lifetime.

           Trump, as expected, has been a disaster for the climate – withdrawing from the Paris Accord, gutting environmental regulations left and right, and basically doing as much damage to the earth as possible. Given that experts say we have 10 years to make major cuts in emissions if we have any hope of avoiding irreversible and catastrophic climate disruption, it’s safe to say that a second Trump term would pretty much be game over for the climate, and for life as we know it. It’s the predictable outcome when you elect an idiot climate denier president of the most powerful country in the world.

           Then there’s the fate of democracy itself, which is in a perilous position around the world. Fascism masquerading as “right-wing parties” has been on the march across Europe for years. Trump has gleefully helped that effort, cozying up to ruthless dictators like Kim-Jong Il and giving his buddy Putin the green light to continue to ratfuck elections, sow chaos, and wage cyber warfare on any country he chooses.

Meanwhile, Trump has given the middle finger to our allies constantly since taking office. Again, completely to be expected from a jingoistic simpleton whose entire understanding of foreign policy boils down to “America First.” Remember his shit-eating smirk while refusing to shake Angela Merkel’s hand in the Oval Office? Trump exemplifies the right’s foaming-mouth hatred of Europe, foreigners, and diplomacy. Just one of their many flavors of bigotry, he and his base believe that the rest of the world basically consists of international elitists determined to destroy America. Not exactly a philosophy conducive to preventing trifling matters like, say, global pandemics or world wars.

The more I write, the more I remember when an absolute sleazebag our president is, and the more astonished I am that this man is our president. This is the guy who 60 million people voted for in 2016. This is the guy who is nothing less than a savior to millions and millions of white Americans. Donald fucking Trump? You would be hard-pressed to find a more loathsome person in all of America. And despite knowing full well how polarized and tribalized we have become, it’s still hard to fathom that so many Americans can look at this vile, morally bankrupt con man and see a great leader, a champion of their values, the greatest president of all time. It just doesn’t compute.

           And yes, many of his voters are well aware of his vices, and yes, white working-class voters have legitimate problems, and on and on. For four years, we’ve discussed and dissected these reasons for Trump’s victory. They are admitted and entered into the record. Now can we please get rid of this menace because he destroys our democracy, wiping out the great experiment that has endured for 244 years?

           Because that’s what’s really on the line on November 3. We’re all deciding if we want to go back to being a democracy – a flawed, messy, imperfect democracy to be sure, but still a democracy at heart – or a dictatorship.  That’s not hyperbole. That’s just the situation.

Trump, aided and abetted by the entire Republican apparatus and 40% of the population, has turned us into a dictatorship. He has put his cronies in positions of power. He has fired anyone who refuses to become his unquestioning flunky, smearing public servants who have spent decades working to help people – a concept completely alien to Trump. He has demonized the media (except for the propaganda outlets who run only pro-Trump news), relentlessly undermining one of the pillars of a liberal democracy, turning people against the very journalists who are trying to expose how Trump is screwing them over. He has conspired with our enemies to compromise our own elections. He came to power by colluding with Russia to his political opponent. He tear-gassed peaceful protestors in front of the White House and painted Black Lives Matter as radical terrorists and applauded right-wing vigilantes who pointed guns at BLM protestors. Hell, he gave them a plum speaking slot at the RNC. Because that’s who calls the shots in Donald Trump’s America – racists and white supremacists.

So, yeah…it’s a rubbish time. And as anyone who remembers the train wreck of Election Night 2016 can understand, I don’t want to get my hopes up. We’ve all been burned one too many times.

Still, it is nice – if only for a moment – to think about a President Biden.

A president who acts like a fucking adult, not a tantrum-throwing toddler or a schoolyard bully.

A president who condemns violence, not one who exploits and encourages it for political gain.

A president who speaks carefully and thoughtfully, knowing his words have real-life consequences. Not one who constantly spews venom and lies, not caring if people die as a result because they’re not his base so screw them.

A president who refuses to legitimize dangerous conspiracy theories. Not one who gleefully seizes on every twisted fairy-tale to emerge from alt-right trolls lurking on 4chan.

A president who accepts the simple fact that our world is interconnected and that diplomacy, respect, and civil discourse are our best tools for making life better for everyone. Not one who embraces the right’s phony-ass “patriotism” and thinks Americans – more specifically, his supporters – are the only people on Earth who matter.

A president who does his fucking job, not one who sits on his ass tweeting and watching Fox News to get his daily ass-kissing. When he’s not golfing or holding white supremacist rallies, that is.

Trump’s awfulness is simply unparalleled, probably in human history. It is an expansive mass so vast and blatant and unashamed that it’s almost a work of art, in a sick way. You could go on forever about the cringe, the iconic moments of incompetence, the garish displays of smirking idiocy and unabashed bigotry that have come to define our time. Sharpie-doctored hurricane maps, Kanye in the Oval Office, calling African countries “shitholes,” telling black and Latina Congresswomen to “go back where they came from,” toilet paper on the shoe, shoving a world leader on stage, soundproof phone booths at the EPA, white supremacists as “very fine people,” caravans, paper towels, upside-down Bibles, covfefe…it has just been a constant, dizzying tornado of hate and evil and stupid. It’s why I stopped watching the news. It’s too much. We weren’t wired to ingest this level of crazy and awful every day. Being a human being is hard enough as it is.

It’s hard to stomach the thought of one more day of this shit, let alone 4 years. Should Trump get reelected, it’s hard to see how anything good will survive. And should his victory come once again come via dirty tricks, be it foreign interference or voter suppression or both, it would appear to confirm that our system has been so hopelessly corrupted by the right that it’s impossible for a Democrat to win. It would suggest that it is now impossible to have a fair presidential election and we’re doomed to have permanent tyrannical rule by a racist, reactionary, science-hating, authoritarian minority. Where we go from there is anyone’s guess.

I hope we can turn it around. I hope there are enough decent people out there who are fed up with this asshole. I hope the myriad GOTV efforts we’ve seen in recent months will motivate people who sat out last time, and maybe some people who have never voted. I hope the collective determination of people who are against Trump is enough to overcome the GOP’s perennial cheating and voter-suppression campaigns. I hope, no matter the outcome, that the whole thing doesn’t devolve into an epic shitshow that makes Florida 2000 look like a calm and orderly affair.

So I have hope. Is it well-founded? Is it anything more than wishful thinking? Hard to say. But when all appears lost, that’s what we have. Hope.  

In closing, if you are dismayed by what America has become these past 4 years, if you want to save the democracy that so many people fought and died for throughout our history, please vote for Biden. Your kids, your grandkids, and the entire world will thank you.

#election #politics #biden #democracy

[luwucas04]

𝐇𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐧 𝐍𝐚𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞

Personally, every day I grow more and more disappointed with the masses of humanity and people with a large portion of power within society. More than ever it’s become so prominent just how people putting financial gain ahead of the well-being of others during the current global crisis we are currently living through is so utterly, disgustingly evil. I’ve noticed that how the world runs and the lack of attention to grave issues regarding the prosperity of nature and humans in general is very unfortunately dominated by billionaires and other capitalists, all with disgustingly little regard for any decency pertaining to morality or the greater good. If they can’t gain from it, they simply don’t care. They are more concerned about their economic status, gain, and the economy itself than the things that have real value when it comes to the betterment of our Earth and its people.

To be specific, right off the bat we have Jeff Bezos. He is THE richest man on the planet. The average person spending one measly dollar is equivalent to Jeff Bezos spending 1.2 million dollars. Adding to this, he roughly makes well over $2,000 every second. He is 36% richer than the entire British Monarchy (or than at least what we know the British Monarchy has). And what does he do with this tremendous amount of wealth? The absolute bare minimum. The only thing he himself has recently done was contribute a small donation of $100 million toward US food banks. Of course, any donation counts, but in this man’s case that’s just like a regular person donating less than 90 dollars: easy and not impressive considering just how wealthy he really is. What’s more, amidst the vast struggling within anyone below upper-class, him along with countless other selfish men are profiting from this. Just within the last couple MONTHS Jeff Bezos has gained 24 billion dollars. Yet, funding issues still remain, healthcare is overflowing, and the working class is suffering. And guess what! Just a few days ago he was announced to be well on his way to becoming the world’s first ever TRILLIONAIRE. I don’t know about you, but trillionaires should absolutely not exist on this planet whatsoever. There are too many injustices to be able to hoard that much money for yourself.

Rich people and even governments are fighting to reopen businesses and the conventional running of day-to-day life solely for the sake of ‘saving the economy’ and their profits. They don’t care about the well-being and safety of others. Minorities and the most vulnerable within society aren’t profitable to them, therefore they don’t exist as something that requires their attention or consideration. They have the privilege to do such incredible things with the wealth they have acquired—but they don’t. They stand by inhumane working conditions within their own companies. They silently watch people struggle and die within the situations they help to ensure. They choose to use their positions of power to prey on and assault others and get away with it. These figures of ‘authority’ do all they can to make it look like workers are being brave for stepping up during these times but do absolutely nothing to ease their material conditions. Oh, wait, the minimum wage was just upped by four whole dollars. That’s definitely going to help protect them from the novel coronavirus and put more food on the table, that’s so kind of them for their generous consideration.

Sorry for the heavy tangent on capitalism, but as of late rich people have been exceedingly getting on my nerves in ways I genuinely cannot describe.

However that aside, I’ve ALSO noticed changes in how humanity tries to bring itself together in a way! In my case, a lot of the bands I like have been providing (pre-recorded from past performances) concerts available to livestream on YouTube and various other insider-personal takes on their music. Those have been really fun; it’s usually on designated Thursdays and Fridays and I have to be awake for 10 am when a concert starts, we (me by myself) go to town for like 3 hours, then I go downstairs to have lunch. Or, a few weeks ago this other group had a 3-day-long (again, pre-recorded) livestream (that started at 11 pm this time) and I ended up staying up till around 3 am with my friend. I had a light stick from when I actually went to their concert in 2018, I was able to sync it up through their app and it probably looked like a low-key rave was going on from the cars passing by. Very good times.

From a non-personal standpoint, I recall seeing videos of people on their balconies in Italy coming out and singing and playing instruments together as a neighbourhood. That was very nice to see, but it’s also worth keeping in mind that is one of the best-case scenario situations and those people were lucky enough to indulge in something like that so nonchalantly. Not to say enjoying yourself isn’t allowed, but it should be acknowledged that just looking at lockdown like that is romanticizing the whole of what’s really going on, as it’s not that glamourous for everybody.

It’s been interesting seeing how people interact with others during their adjusted daily lives, too. I’ll go on walks sometimes and me and my friends will take turns sitting at the end of each other’s driveways and ‘hang out’ like we (well not really) would before. Adding on to human interaction, I’ve seen videos of people handing out packages of things like masks and hand sanitizer to people on the street, or leaving things out for delivery people, quite thoughtful, and maybe one could say even creative, things.

Living the life as you can see (I’m sitting on the grass)

Overall, when all is said and done, in my opinion, I think everything would be much better if the people who are in charge and dictate things A) weren’t painstakingly dense and simple minded—Angela Merkel and her policies would be a great example for countries like England and the US to take notes from; B) genuinely cared about their citizens and not just money and themselves; and C) properly absorbed science and legitimate medical advice and guidelines. Sadly, a lot of people, as you may be able to have tell, are very easily influenced and follow quite blindly *cough* ingesting cleaning products *cough*. But, fortunately that’s only a small portion of the population.

Conversely, this also goes to show other like-minded regular people, in a better light, become closer and stand in solidarity for what they know is best for them and the well-beings of others. Because the majority of us are all in the exact same situation doing the exact same thing, I feel like we can gain a better understanding and deeper familiarity with those around us. And this is really specific, but I think it’s cool how we now get to see some ‘famous people’ (right off the top of my head Doja Cat, Bernie Sanders and Taylor Swift are some examples) just livestreaming or posting themselves existing in their homes and generally having a good time. You wouldn’t get to see that part of their lives too much before. I think I’ve mentioned them over 50,000 times on this blog already, but the other day the band One Ok Rock (whose song I did on the guitar) released an upload of them recreating one of their old music videos while all the members are individually self-isolating.

(Joke explained, the original title of the song is 「完全感覚Dreamer」 (Kanzen Kankaku Dreamer), but they changed it to「完全在宅Dreamer」 (Kanzen Zaitaku Dreamer); the original kankaku means ‘feeling’ or ‘intuition’, and the new zaitaku means ‘staying at home’.)

Above all, it’s difficult to decide whether this has either brought out the best or worst of humanity. I think it’s really subjective to your status and mindset that you had in the first place and what you were dealing with before all this. Adding onto that, we know how the news likes to focus on the negative the most. There are good people in this world, and grouping them together with those who think haircuts are a human right and aggressively protesting in large crowds is a good idea isn’t really fair to them.

As for myself, I haven’t noticed anything prominent come out of myself. The best I can do and what I’ve been doing right now is just following official medical guidelines, keeping distance and not go into super crowded areas, and simply wait for what happens next while staying informed. Nothing outstanding.

Here’s someone’s hot take on the subject matter as well, as much as this is 100% valid I strongly believe it’s worth acknowledging even the smallest good things happening from this too.

[toshootforthestars]

via Hamilton Nolan, posted 5 May 2020:

In the month of April—as 30 million Americans filed for unemployment, and destitute small businesses closed forever, and rent strikes were demanded, and city and state governments forecast years of grim austerity—the U.S. stock market had its best month in more than 30 years.

Day after day, we were treated to stories of absolute ruin in the real economy, right next to another glorious rise in stocks. After a sharp selloff in March, the S&P 500 index has bounced back to where it was in the fall of 2019, as if that little devastating global pandemic were nothing more than a fleeting, momentary annoyance.

The glaring disconnect between the real economy, of working humans with jobs and bills to pay, and the investor class economy, embodied by the stock market, is one of the most brutal and devious political issues of this age of crisis in which we’re living. Though free marketeers like to boast of the fact that more than half of Americans now own stocks, the fact is that most of them own too few stocks to matter to their day-to-day economic lives.

Half of all stocks in America are owned by the wealthiest 1% of people. They are the stock market’s target audience and prime movers. The primary effect of high stock prices today is to insulate the rich from the consequences of the wrecked real economy. So long as stocks are doing okay, there is no need for the class of people who control most of America’s institutions to feel much urgency to save the lives of everyone.  A strong stock market is like a sturdy wall around the rich and powerful. You can stay outside and lose your job and starve and die, and it won’t penetrate their serene bubble very much at all.

Robert Scott, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, says the stock market at the moment is being held up by “Frankly, just financial engineering.” He estimates that by the time the government’s rescue packages are all tallied up, they could add up to $5 trillion of zero-interest loans to big business. Hardly the fabled laissez-faire version of capitalism, but of course the companies will take it. (It is, after all, what their political contributions have paid for.) Scott believes that the gravity of America’s crushed economy will eventually pull down the stock market again, but the current measures will have served their purpose: “Insiders are going to sell off their stock and make a killing,” he says, “and long term investors will take the loss.”

And this brings us to the second, and more useful, way to understand the bizarrely healthy stock market: as the result of a political choice. Brush away the financial jargon that Wall Street uses to ward off interlopers and it is easy to see what is happening here.

(emphasis below is mine)

The coronavirus forced our entire economy onto life support from the federal government. Instead of choosing to support everyone during this temporary shutdown—guaranteeing the incomes of workers, instituting widespread debt relief, and pouring stimulus money directly into the base of the wealth pyramid, which supports everything else—the government has instead done what it is built to do: protect the biggest businesses and the accumulated wealth of the richest people, herding society’s most powerful into an economic fortress, content in the knowledge that high unemployment and austerity for local governments will just create a population desperate to work for even lower wages than before.  As the Trump administration pled helplessness over the fact that we have no good system for delivering money directly to individuals, it did not need to say that that, itself, is a policy choice that is now serving its intended purpose.

This political choice is also a moral choice. It is a choice of whether or not to value fairness. Either the incentives of everyone in society are aligned, or they are not.

In America, they are not.

In fact, they are the opposite: the incentives of the rich, who live through stocks and the accumulation of corporate power, are in fact opposed to the incentives of the vast majority of people, whose existence is reduced to nothing more than labor income to be minimized as much as possible. An economy devised to prop up stock prices is an economy devised not to encourage widespread public wealth, but rather the concentration of private wealth. That is a choice. That is the incentive structure we have built in this country. The mystifying government response that allows a crisis of unemployment and sudden poverty to happen and then refuses to solve it even while doling out trillions of dollars to business is in fact just American capitalism working as we have designed it to.

#all the terrible people will get to create the terrible world they always dreamed of #the way things work #the conservative movement #lust for power and control #a nation of abusers #news #us news #coronavirus #2020 pandemic #coronavirus stimulus #45 #kleptocracy #failed state #failed society #the united states is a failed state and a failed society #us politics #2020 us presidential election #unlimited power #endgame #hamilton nolan #food for thought

[travelwiide]

The Best Nation In Africa as indicated by Top Travel Bloggers

The Best Nation In Africa as indicated by Top Travel Bloggers 

We haven't seen enough of Africa. Out of the considerable number of landmasses on the globe Africa is the one that energizes me the most yet I have just visited two nations (Karen has seen all the more however without me!!!) from this immense land. From The Pyramids in the north to Table Mountain in the south, Africa is brimming with world-class vacationer goals. Which made me think. If you have never been to Africa which would be the best nation in Africa to visit? I solicited some from the world's top travel bloggers that very inquiry and their answers are underneath. There are some astounding answers yet they all solid stunning, which implies our Africa container list has quite recently got bigger!

The Best Safaris in Africa

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Zimbabwe 

I'd kid if I said that Zimbabwe is my preferred African nation simply because it empowers me to state I've traveled the world from start to finish! The nation remains a cherished memory to me due to the individuals I've met. At the danger of proliferating a generalization, Zimbabweans will, in general, be kind society who have a profound love for their country. Zimbabwe has experienced serious monetary difficulties as of late and, since the difference in authority in November 2017, an energetic, positive vibe is apparent. Zimbabweans truly accept that their nation is currently just getting started. As an admirer of nature and untamed life, I have encountered some exceptional game drives in Zimbabwe. Hwange National Park is an incredible spot to see birdlife and elephants. It's home to all of southern Africa's Huge Five. While strolling with guides from Dark Rhino Safaris in Matobo National Park I came surprisingly close to a gathering of white rhinos. That was an exciting second. Also, Zimbabwe is the main spot on earth that I've yet eaten barbecued crocodile and warthog. The last is the tenderest meat I've at any point tasted: genuinely flavorful! (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

MOZAMBIQUE 

Individuals caused a stir when we disclosed to them we were beginning our African travels in Mozambique. We're as of now Overlanding through Africa in a Land Meanderer Safeguard with our two young men (matured 2 and 4). Many cautioned us of the degenerate police pulling over visitors in the desire for pay-offs and the horrendous pot-holed streets. Truly, the last is valid, particularly as you adventure further north, yet fortunately, the police appeared to be unengaged in us. The driving separations between goals in Mozambique are gigantic. A long time of practically nothing. Simply immense open scenes, dabbed with the odd dusty, unexceptional towns with kids that come up short on hovels to wave at the uncommon bystander. In any case, our long travel days were remunerated with immaculate unblemished seashores that we needed to ourselves, an interesting old-frontier design that looks back to the former days of the Portuguese, and a grasping feeling of experience that can be hard to track down on the present very much trodden planet. Mozambique won our love. Those immense scenes were intellectually liberating. The slamming waves rolling in from the Indian sea were animating. In any case, the individuals we will recollect so affectionately. Particularly the gathering of 15 neighborhood kids who raced to our guide when we stalled out in profound sand. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

Uganda 

Uganda is without question my preferred spot in Africa for such a significant number of reasons at the end of the day for the untamed life encounters you can have there. Uganda is generally well known for its gorilla trekking encounters which will perpetually be one of my preferred travel recollections. Words can not depict the sentiment of encountering these great creatures and I can say I have never felt an association with a creature as I did when I met the silverback mountain gorillas just because. In any case, Uganda has considerably something other than gorillas. You can go chimp trekking in various areas which is a perfect inverse encounter to the serenity and tranquil experience of meeting gorillas. You can likewise winged creature watching swamp strolls, cruising safaris which offer an extraordinary safari point of view and see the one of a kind tree-climbing lions of Ishasha I additionally love Uganda since you can have these encounters while withdrawing at night to some exceptional extravagance lodges. If you are searching for untamed life and extravagance, at that point, Uganda is unquestionably where you should be going. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

South Africa

South Africa best my rundown for most loved African nations to visit because there is something for everybody. From open-air climbs, superb nourishment and wine, astonishing landscape, and simplicity of untamed life seeing, it is essentially difficult to come up short on activities in South Africa. We started our week-long encounter with a couple of evenings in Cape Town, one of the most wonderful urban areas I have ever visited, effectively matching San Francisco. By day, we climbed Table Mountain, investigated the Winelands, visited the penguins at Rocks Seashore. We additionally meandered down to the Cape of Good Expectation where we appreciated brilliant vistas and clearing sea sees. Our week finished up with a three-night remain at Umlani Bushcamp simply outside Kruger National Park, where we saw copious untamed life, including obviously, the Enormous Five. The accommodation was first rate and the nourishment and wine are the absolute best on the planet as far as quality and creativity yet besides reasonableness. The main awful thing about our outing was that it was excessively short – we can hardly wait to return for another round.

Sudan

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); There are relatively few individuals on the planet who might think about traveling to Sudan – and a great many people called me insane when I chose to visit this nation. Be that as it may, I got compensated with a mind-boggling time, and Sudan immediately got one of my preferred nations on the planet. While the facts demonstrate that the south and the west of Sudan is perilous and ought to be stayed away from, the northern and eastern part is totally protected, and the truth is told, I really felt a lot more secure than in most different nations I've traveled to. Since there's actually no travel industry in the nation, all the individuals I met were so cordial. supportive and inviting. Nobody could ever trick you or do any damage to you, however, there was certifiably not a solitary day when I didn't get welcomed for tea or nourishment by inviting Sudanese in the city. It's really the individuals who make visiting Sudan such a delightful and special experience. With regards to sights, Sudan has numerous pyramids (in reality more than Egypt!) which you can – since there aren't some other sightseers, I had the vast majority of these spots very to myself! Visiting Sudan is likewise amazingly modest! I hope to pay around 2$ for a private room in a guesthouse, and under 1$ for a dinner in a café. I traveled from Egypt through Sudan and further into Ethiopia and it was incredible to perceive how the Center East gradually moves into East Africa, with Sudan going about as an interface. The nation is one of a kind and will presumably never be a major traveler goal. Yet, the individuals who are sufficiently brave to visit will have an excellent encounter!

Namibia

I began to look all starry eyed at Namibia even before we arrived at our first goal. It was a long excursion – directly to the air terminal from a day at work for a trio of global departures from London to Windhoek, where we moved into a small four-seater Cessna for the last jump to the Namib Desert. Worn out as I seemed to be, the weariness softened away as I looked down at the sun-warmed scene, the ground getting always bright as we approached our excursion's end, the shadow of our little plane going before us down beneath. As we arrived at the desert and diminished our height, I saw huge red sandhills canvassed in influencing blonde grass, oddly freckled with circles of exposed red sand edged with taller grass. On handling, our hosts from Wolwedans met us and we immediately drove from the airstrip to rising Cabin, a close camp made of canvas chalets on raised wooden stages. No opportunity to rest, we took straight off on a sun-killjoy drive! (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); During our remain, our aides uncovered numerous enjoyments of the 'Living Desert', including the riddle of those confounding "pixie circles". Dissimilar to exemplary safari goals where untamed life seeing incorporates the large five and a lot increasingly notorious creatures, here we delighted in the species that figured out how to flourish in this desert condition. From chameleons, creepy crawlies and snakes, to social weaver flying creatures, bat-eared foxes, jackals, wildcats, and mandrills… and the gigantic and striking gemsbok oryx. Around evening time, with no light contamination for a significant distance around, the sky lit up with a bigger number of stars and systems than I at any point envisioned noticeable from Earth, and promptly the following morning, we viewed from our beds as the sun dashed into the sky, tinting the sand in a quick-changing palette of brilliant yellows, oranges, and reds.

The Best Sailing Destinations of the World

Kenya

There's something somewhat uncommon about Kenya. It isn't only that the scenes are immense and fluctuated, that the natural life assorted variety is among the best on the planet, or that the sun consistently is by all accounts sparkling. For us, what tops off an already good thing sweet cake was the inviting and well-disposed nature of the considerable number of individuals we met during our travels out there. We were caused to feel like tragically deceased companions as opposed to inquisitive pariahs, and that is so significant when you're a long way from home in a nation that is so extraordinary to your own. Obviously, we were there to see the creatures and had picked Kenya given its notoriety for world-class extravagance safaris. We weren't frustrated. In the Masai Mara, we remained at Saruni Mara and delighted in the best-untamed life seeing we've at any point experienced, because of our master nearby warrior manage who went well beyond attempting to discover us surprising experiences. We saw a lion pursuing a cheetah, eat breakfast ignoring hippos in the waterway, and even joined a pride of lions out chasing around evening time. Further north we investigated the parched grounds around Saruni Samburu, again with a neighborhood warrior, who was overly benevolent and demonstrated to us the peculiar endemic untamed life for which the territory is well known, including the gerenuk, an impala which remains on its rear legs to eat tree leaves! Kenya is about decent variety and magnificence, and we left realizing we'd be back again soon. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

Botswana

Botswana left us totally remembered with its huge scenes, shifted untamed life, and incredibly neighborly individuals. We wandered in overland from Namibia with little desires for Botswana and left vowing to return one day. Beginning with the safari involvement with the novel Okavango Delta where we had the option to see all the astonishing natural life in Africa from the center of the delta. Elephants, hippos, crocodiles, lions, or more all the one of a kind fowl animal types make a safari here exceptional. It isn't only about the delta however, one of my preferred stops in Africa is the god-like Chobe National Park. Here you can see impala, fish falcons, warthogs, wild ox, and a lot of elephants. Genuinely you will see such a significant number of elephants here as there are more than 120,000 wandering the recreation center! I likewise adored that the remoteness that you can feel in Botswana. There are just around 2 million individuals here, however, the nation is enormous. The administration has dispensed 40% of the land to parks and natural life so harmony and calm make certain to be had here.

Swaziland

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); While investigating Southern Africa, I made a stop in a little, landlocked nation called Swaziland. Swaziland felt like South Africa other than being smaller than expected in size. Local people communicate in English. There is an acceptable street framework. The Swazi individuals are warm. Furthermore, the landscape is amazing. In case you're in the capital, Mbabane, make a point to visit eDladleni Café. They are the main eatery serving Swazi cooking and it's delectable! So great that I returned a subsequent time. They open during the night. A plate is on normal 95 Rands (USD 8). One component I discovered entrancing about the Swazi culture is their conjugal traditions. A man can wed the same number of spouses as he needs except if he needs a Christian wedding. You need to pay for the spouse as a share. 17 cows if the lady is a virgin. For a non-virgin, the cost can be arranged. 1 dairy animals are 7000 rands ($550).

Cape Verde

Cape Verde is an island country off the shore of West Africa. Because of its political soundness and regular magnificence, Cape Verde has advanced into a well-known contract traveler goal for eager for sun Europeans in the course of the most recent couple of years. In February this year, I visited the Cape Verde islands just because. Because of their notoriety for being bundle occasion islands, my desires towards fervor and experience were very low. Yet, the island of Sal which I visited was totally stunning. The most stunning thing about it was local people. In typical places of interest, local people are frequently very tired of global guests. In any case, in Sal, everyone halted and approached me on the off chance that I was searching for help at whatever point I began looking somewhat lost. What's more, the rich history of Sal as a salt creating province for Portugal and its landscape persuaded me considerably more to return one day. The island offers a lot of exercises like kite surfing, plunging, and swimming and takes into account each spending limit. During my time on the island, I visited the green eye of Buracona, the salt fields of Pedra de Lume, and the extraordinary Kite Seashore – a seashore with several kite surfers. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

Mauritius

Lying 2000km off Africa, Mauritius is a piece of the African mainland yet its rich history makes it a genuinely various country. In the past a Dutch, French and UK province, Mauritius is a mixture of societies including Indian, Sri Lankan, African and European and is summarized by the aphorism 'One Island, numerous people groups, all Mauritian'. This way to deal with life is a piece of the intrigue of Mauritius, the glow, and the prepared welcome. Individuals come here for the awesome seashores yet if you can drag yourself away from the coast, Mauritius has rainforest at Dark Waterway Canyon, professional flowerbeds, customary estate houses, a UNESCO world legacy site in its capital Port Louis, and a Hindu sanctuary flaunting a 180-foot tall sculpture. Seven Shaded Earths is a one of a kind land highlight with ridges of multi-hued sand inland. In case you're an untamed life watcher you won't have to move excessively far from your lawn chair, numerous mornings we watched dolphins playing seaward as we ate. The Seychelles tortoises are a typical sight in Mauritius and you can make a beeline for Casela Nature Park for a day at the zoo with breathtaking perspectives. In case you're making a beeline for Mauritius, appreciate the breathtaking dusks of the seashore resorts yet ensure you investigate past. Your endeavors will be remunerated with the experience of Africa meets India meets Europe on this interesting island. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

Malawi

There's something exceptional about Malawi, yet in one way or another, it's regularly neglected as a travel goal, with numerous individuals preferring its celebrated neighbors. Indeed, Malawi is somewhat harsh around the edges, however for me, that is the thing that makes me love it that tad more. Malawi can be a provoking spot to travel, yet also one of the most fulfilling, and in case you're searching for a genuine African experience, this is the place you'll see it. It's the kind of spot where anything can occur and you never entirely know where the day will take you. I originally became hopelessly enamored with Malawi in 2009 while Overlanding through the nation and have been back various occasions since. It has all that I search for in a vacation goal – delightful mountains, extraordinary dusks, cool exercises, incredible safaris, and obviously, shocking Lake Malawi, the backbone of the nation and one of the most unwinding and relaxed places on the planet. Furthermore, it's extraordinary for those traveling on a tight spending plan! (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Be that as it may, the individuals truly give Malawi the edge. Malawians are the most inviting and warm individuals you would ever meet and before you know it, you'll be a piece of the family!

Tunisia

From the capital city of Tunis to the Algerian fringe at Le Kef, Tunisia is loaded up with astounding urban communities and sights. The individuals, the commercial centers, the nourishment help your creative mind go crazy, conjuring up accounts of days gone by, much the same as the narrative of the Middle Eastern Evenings. A portion of the spots we suggest are the blue and white city of Sidi Bou Stated, the world legacy locales, for example, Carthage, El Jem, or Dougga, or the bright harbor city of Bizerta in the north of the nation. Shockingly, Tunisia is truly simple to get around. We leased a vehicle and experienced no difficulty finding our direction or perusing the signs. We adored the nourishment! I was unable to accept how much fish they ate, however, it bodes well with a long Mediterranean coastline. Some nourishment on the "must-attempt" list are leblebi, a chickpea soup, ojja with mergez (sheep hotdog) or eggs, a tomato-based stew, just as bunches of olives and harissa, a pepper sauce. You can't turn out badly. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Regardless of whether you need to visit the Star Wars shooting site of Tatooine, other-worldly no doubt, or visit some Roman period-authentic destinations, for example, Bulla Regia, you will cherish Tunisia as much as I did.

Zambia

Having traveled pretty broadly through Southern and Focal Africa, it's difficult to limit our preferred African nation to only one – yet Zambia is certainly up there with our unequaled faves! For a beginning, Zambia is home to one of the Seven Normal Miracles of the World: Mosi-oa-Tunya. Also called Victoria Falls, 'the smoke which roars' is the world's biggest cascade by volume and is probably the best power of nature you would ever plan to see. The falls are likewise an extraordinary spot for thrill-seekers as you would bungee be able to bounce 111m over the falls, swim to the very edge at the Heavenly attendant's Pool (and alarm every one of your companions at home with your photographs!), go wilderness boating on the rapids, and take a microlight flight as well. As though having an epic cascade wasn't sufficient, Zambia is additionally home to some chief safari openings, and without the enormous groups, you'd find in the Serengeti or Masai Mara as well. In the east, South Luangwa National Park is one of Africa's best-kept safari 'mysteries'; it's home to the large five and furthermore known for its enormous panther numbers. In one safari we spotted more than 6! Kafue National Park is another phenomenal national park for untamed life devotees as well. The individuals in Zambia are probably the most amicable we've experienced, it's additionally been positioned as perhaps the most secure nation, and there's constantly a great celebration or occasion going on – what more might you be able to need?!

But Why Zambian Safaris and Tourism

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Morocco

Morocco arrives on the most loved nation list for most travelers who have visited North Africa. It packs in everything from clamorous city quarters, picturesque oceanside towns, and fascinating Berber desert towns. The individuals are warm and inviting, the best suppers are home-cooked. The nation is rich with history, design, and craftsmanship. The mosques, Kasbahs, and medersas are entrancing instances of Islamic and Moorish style. The structures are similarly as excellent as the Map book Mountain areas. Mount Toubkal is the area's most noteworthy pinnacle, second to Kilimanjaro on the landmass. It's a nation for all travelers, you could go through weeks or months here submerging yourself in Moroccan culture and if like me you'll be persistently captivated.

Morocco: A Land of Enticement

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Egypt

Even though I haven't (yet) traveled Africa as broadly as I'd like, the preferred nation I've visited so far would be Egypt. Egypt had a lot more to offer than I at any point knew before I initially went. Truly, there are the pyramids and they are astonishing. Remaining before them caused me to acknowledge how karma I am to travel since I found out about the pyramids in school and never figuring I would really observe them face to face. In any case, the pyramids are only a little piece of Egypt's astonishing history to find out about. I was additionally intrigued by the flawless mosques I visited, spent a few loosening up nights on a nightfall journey of the Nile in my very own felucca (pontoon). I likewise did the absolute best scuba plunging of my life in the Red Ocean and went through a day riding ATVs in the desert. Egypt is additionally home to probably the least expensive tourist balloon rides on the planet. Additionally, when I visited, I never felt dangerous. Truly, there are some fairly forceful sales reps yet I never felt in harm's way. What's more, due to the occasions that happened a long time previously, the travel industry has not yet recouped. This implies organizations are in overwhelming rivalry for your business which means some mind-blowing costs and offers being tossed your direction! In case you're thinking about a visit to Africa give Egypt a look I was intrigued by how much there was to see and do!

A Stream Nile Journey in Egypt

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Tanzania

Besides having maybe the best monetary orders on the planet (when cash has a rhino, lion, or elephant on ​it, we're in flash fans), Tanzania is a delight just because guests to Africa searching for the ideal prologue to the miracles of the landmass. The nation of 58 million lay cases to apparently three of Africa's travel royal gems: Mount Kilimanjaro, the Serengeti (home of the surprising wildebeest relocation), and the dream place where there is Ngorongoro Pit. As it were, Africa's most noteworthy mountain, the set (basically) of the Lion Lord, and an enormous hole where you can spot rhino, lions, elephants, and most different creatures on your safari list. In any case, if you feel that Tanzania is simply one more spot for safaris and climbing, at that point you'd not be right. Off its eastern coast, a short ship ride from Dar Es Salaam, you can locate African island heaven in Zanzibar. Socially particular from the terrain (its 90%+ Islamic), Zanzibar is home to the kind of flawless white seashores, new fish, flavors and coconuts, and welcoming Indian Sea where you can have the sort of comprehensive or outside of what might be expected island experience of which you've constantly envisioned. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); We trusted you appreciated the excursion around Africa. If there is a nation that you love that is excluded from the rundown, drop us a line, and clarify why it ought to be.

source https://www.travelwiide.com/2020/05/the-best-nation-in-africa-as-indicated.html

[rcardamone]

Final Part 5: The Real Limit

The final chapter in “The Human Planet” begins with a quote by Lewis Mumford: “Every culture lives within its dream.”1 Dreams are the ultimate limit. While we likely encounter other constraints in the ongoing formation and changes of our cultures and selves, our aims are dictated by what we can conceive. This is as true for an individual as it is for a culture. To broaden the scope of a culture’s dreams starts with broadening those of individuals. And before broadening the dreams of other individuals, one must do so with their own. 

Lewis and Maslin assert that there are only three possible outcomes for humanity. First, they entertain the possibility that business as usual, as in “the continued development of the consumer capitalist mode of living towards greater complexity” could survive the challenges brought on by human impact on the environment. 2 I do not want to linger here as I agree with Lewis and Maslin that this is highly unlikely. However, I think its important emphasize that even if the system was certain to sustain itself indefinitely, that, fundamentally, would not be a desirable outcome. The system simply does not maximize the possibilities of human life for the vast majority of the people within it. Lewis and Maslin provide an exceptionally concise summary of the core of the system: “In today’s world [people] are required to sell their labour in order to obtain what they need to live. People must work and continually increase their productivity--if they don’t somebody more productive will replace them. For this people earn, on average, more money over time, with which they buy more goods and services to live better. The owners of the resources live on the profits they extract from the labour-sellers, and reinvest some of those profits in order to further increase productivity to produce more goods and services.” 3 It is clear that this reduces human flourishing, even for those who succeed within the system, to a very narrow thing: the consumption of more goods and services to make life better. This is not to minimize the value of having enough material resources to live well. That is important. However, it is not what makes a human life worth living. At least not for me. 

I think the essence of the fallacy consumer capitalism is built on, that we must constantly pursue more to improve our lives, is beautifully captured in the tale of the Mexican Fisherman told by Mark Albion (from the assigned materials for March 2nd). In the story, a young traveler, a businessman with an MBA, asks a fisherman why he has not caught more fish. He replies, “I catch enough to support my family and I live a full and busy life.” He explains his daily routine, which includes time to work, but also time for family, and music, and wine, and teaching. The MBA replies by explaining steps the man could take to build a fishing empire over time. At each step, the fisherman asks the question, “then what?” After becoming a millionaire a million times over, the MBA explains, realizing his foolishness, the fisherman would be able to retire to a small village, fish a little, spend time with his family, teach the children to fish, and play guitar with his wife. 4 The moral is simple and profound: The man already had enough, and he knew it. Growth could do nothing for him. The strange part of this is, we can all recognize that the fisherman’s life is good. We understand why it is good, since it is what we would hope to retire to. But somehow, our culture has convinced us that first we must participate in the charade of growing for growth’s sake. Simply put, consumer capitalism has no governing concept of enough. The question of, “how much is enough?” is rarely asked and answered with solidity. Instead, we reach for ever more, with many of us knowing on some level that what we are doing is ridiculous and empty. That is the dream our culture has created, and it is a dream that many of us, whether we like it or not, live inside both in ways that we recognize and ways we do not. And we, within that system, are the “winners,” who have attained the best or close to the best it has to offer. If that dream was not morally unconscionable for its impact on the future, it would still be an unacceptable burden on the human soul. 

Figure 1, The MBA and the Mexican Fisherman 5

I subscribe to Lewis and Maslin’s argument that the two positive feedback loops capitalism relies on, “the solving of problems via the scientific method, which improves technology, thereby allowing greater numbers of problems to be solved; and the investment of profits into the production of ever more profits, which requires ever-more energy inputs,” cannot continue indefinitely given the finitude of the system (the planet) on which we live and that their cessation (or dramatic change) may be closer than we think. 6 However, what does worry me is our apparent desire to hold on to our current way of living for as long as possible, even if it means denying reality. This fact was made painstakingly clear to me by the presented information about the projections used to draw up the terms of the Paris Climate Accord, that this is exactly what we are doing as a world. As Lewis and Maslin succinctly put it, “modelling scenarios...are narratives in mathematical form.” The modelling narrative told to make the Paris Climate Accord look like it can lead to net zero carbon emissions by 2050 is at best laughably optimistic and at worst a conscious lie. The models rely heavily on the deployment of Bioenergy Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS). There are two methods of this, one of which involves, “collecting the waste carbon dioxide from fossil fuel-burning power plants and burying it underground to keep it safely out of the atmosphere.” The second is to “grow crops and trees for fuel, burn them in a power station to produce electricity, and capture the waste carbon dioxide, again by burying it.” 7 In essence, the models “use historical precedent to set the expected maximum pace of emission reduction, which leaves lots of remaining fossil fuel emissions. The models then use BECCS to square that with the much smaller actual carbon budget to keep emissions below 2 degrees Celsius” 8 In order to make the models work, BECCS would have to store “1300 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide which is larger than the total amount of carbon dioxide we are allowed to emit if we are going to limit global warming to 2 degrees celsius.” To do that would require, “15,000 of these plants...running. Moreover it has become clear that carbon capture and storage is more complex than expected.” 9 One might argue that the models are simply realistic in that they set a maximum pace of emissions reductions and try to work with that. However, we are, as a species, hedging a tremendous bet on an unproven technology being deployed at a colossal scale. That does not seem so realistic. Why are we doing this? To quote Lewis and Maslin, “because it puts off taking action now.” I have to admit that this was wildly disappointing to read, and this is exactly the type of thing that makes me assume we are headed for the second option Lewis and Maslin posit: Collapse. 

Figure 2, Graph showing significant role of BECCS in Reaching Paris Climate Targets 10

When Lewis and Maslin imagine futures where not enough is done to keep global warming to a manageable level, they do not definitively answer the question of whether this would trigger total collapse of interconnected civilization. They do however make the point that a world where emissions are not quickly cut to zero would be one of “dizzying social, environmental, social and political change to deal with the failures to curb earlier problems.” Furthermore, on whether this could be sustainable, they state that, “[i]t is worth recalling what we have learnt from the collapse of various aricultural societies in the past: societies often get more complex as they solve problems, but when the marginal returns on these investments in complexity is lost, some of this complexity is lost. This loss is another way of saying that they collapse.” 11 What can be lost in discussions of diminishing complexity is that collapse entails human suffering on a colossal scale. The collapse of ecosystems will bring on the collapse of food supply chains and economies. The collapse of geopolitical stability resulting from this will bring on war. “Some complexity” being lost may sound like an acceptable option due to Lewis and Maslin’s gentle word choice, but it entails an unimaginable human cost that cannot be even entertained. Still, I have to admit that in my rational mind, I see this as the most likely option. Nothing in Lewis and Maslin’s chapter inspired realistic hope in me that this can be avoided. I continue to think, and many of the trends they describe in the chapter bear this out, that consumer capitalism is deeply entrenched and will likely require a massive shock, perhaps something on the order of this collapse, to be fundamentally restructured. The will to do enough to prevent catastrophic warming, which would almost by its nature mean making dramatic changes to capitalism, quite simply does not seem to be there right now. Perhaps there will come a day in the future when it is, but drastic action has to start happening now or extremely soon if we hope to prevent catastrophic warming. I cannot rationally envision this happening. 

It is here that I encounter not only my culture’s limits for dreams of the future, but my own. I do not want to be somebody who accepts the inevitability of collapse. I want to be somebody who believes in and works for the creation of the third way Lewis and Maslin imagine as possible: a radical change in our mode of living. And yet, I have quite a hard time dreaming of this future as they do without thinking myself naive. The best argument I can offer myself is that if I accept the impossibility of such a future, then I help to absolutely guarantee that impossibility. However, if I dedicate myself to the third way, even if I cannot rationally justify why I think it is possible, there remains some possibility, even if it is small, that I will be a part of bringing it about. Thankfully, there is so much that I do not know, least of all the future. And there will always be solace in what is yet to be. 

Words: 1827 

1 Lewis, Simon, and Mark Maslin. The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene: a Pelican Book. London: Pelican, 2018.

2 Lewis and Maslin 369 

3 Lewis and Maslin 400 

4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7JlI959slY

5 Lewis and Maslin 371 

6 Lewis and Maslin 395 

7 Lewis and Maslin 395 

8 Lewis and Maslin 396 

9 Lewis and Maslin 397 

10 https://www.google.com/search?q=graph+beccs&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi2sq30zp_pAhVKmK0KHQ5_DEgQ_AUoAXoECAwQAw#imgrc=_VR5xjjfgj4_cM

11 Lewis and Maslin 387