On rich, smug elites and on Australia right now
This article has stuck in my mind for some time. It was written on December 10th, in Australia, about the bush fires. Remember that that was three weeks ago, and that in terms of the seasons their December is our June here in the Northern Hemisphere.
Are the rich that stupid as to believe that they will escape climate change? The money passage of this well-written article by James Plested tells a lot:
The most forward thinking of the super-rich are aware that we’re heading toward a future of ecological and social break-down. And they’re keen to keep ahead of the curve by investing today in the things they’ll need to survive. Writing in the Guardian in 2018, media theorist and futurist Douglas Rushkoff related his experience of being paid half his annual salary to speak at “a super-deluxe private resort ... on the subject of ‘the future of technology’”. He was expecting a room full of investment bankers. When he arrived, however, he was introduced to “five super-wealthy guys ... from the upper echelon of the hedge fund world”. Rushkoff wrote:
“After a bit of small talk, I realized they had no interest in the information I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come with questions of their own ... Which region will be less affected by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? ... Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked: ‘How do I maintain authority over my security force after the Event?’
So this is precisely what is going through these people's minds. It's all a game, and when the whole planet is wrecked, thanks to them, they're going to find some well-stocked hole somewhere in the world, New Zealand or Alaska, and hide in it. Their main concern: "How do I maintain authority over my security force after the Event?" Gee, I don't know. Maybe they'll reflect upon what you've done to every space on the surface of the planet, all you nice smug elites, and make their collective decision based on that.
Okay so what's happening in Australia now? Here's some New York Times news:
Thousands Flee to Shore as Australia Fires Turn Skies Blood Red
It begins:
SYDNEY, Australia — As the fire stalked the east coast of Australia on Tuesday, the daytime sky turned inky black, then blood red. Emergency sirens wailed, followed by the thunder of gas explosions. Thousands of residents fled their homes and huddled near the shore. There was nowhere else to go.
Greater context is provided by climate doomsayer David Wallace-Wells:
Global Apathy Toward the Fires in Australia Is a Scary Portent for the Future
The New South Wales fires have been burning since September, destroying fifteen million acres (or more than two thousand square miles) and remain almost entirely uncontrolled by the volunteer firefighting forces deployed to stop them; on November 12, greater Sydney declared an unprecedented “catastrophic” fire warning. That was six weeks ago, and the blazes are almost certain to continue burning through the end of next month, the soonest real rain might arrive.
Wallace-Wells is a bit vague on who is being callous and inconsiderate to whom. Meanwhile the Australians' Prime Minister Scott Morrison doesn't want to talk climate policy. Plested is outraged, or at least he was outraged on December 10th, back when he wrote the first piece I mentioned for "Red Flag":
The only rational explanation is that Morrison and his like are aware of the dangers posed by climate change but are choosing to act as though they’re not.
On first appearances, this might seem like a fundamentally irrational standpoint. It would be more accurate, however, to describe it as evil.
Should we continue to support our elites, knowing they'll continue to do nothing about climate change while the world turns into a real-time replica of the one portrayed in Cormac McCarthy's "The Road"? It's got to be like the end of the world for at least some Australians. Meanwhile we who have comfortable homes celebrate the end of one catastrophic decade, full of war and economic disaster and "natural" disaster and elite-programmed social retrenchment, with no end in sight for the decade to come.
I suppose that what comes to mind when I read this piece is the scene in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake in which Jimmy/ Snowman watches the world's people die from the safety of his sealed-in living quarters. You've read this novel, right? This novel is about a world become dystopia, climate change and genetic engineering become rampant, social decay fed by rampant capitalism as the world is devoured. The central act of the novel is a pandemic intended to wipe out the human race, invented by a genetic engineer who has created a designer human race to replace the one he destroyed.
In Atwood's story, the primary character "Jimmy" watches the Internet and the mass media as the whole of human society is devoured by the pandemic while he sits behind an airlock. Here's the most interesting depiction of Jimmy's experience of watching the pandemic, from page 344:
Site after site, channel after channel went dead. A couple of the anchors, news jocks to the end, set the cameras to film their own deaths -- the screams, the dissolving skins, the ruptured eyeballs and all. How theatrical, thought Jimmy. Nothing some people wont' do to get on TV.
"You cynical shit," he told himself. Then he started to weep.
"Don't be so fucking sentimental," Crake used to tell him. But why not? Why shouldn't he be sentimental? It wasn't as if there was anyone around to question his taste.
Are the rich elites setting themselves up to be Jimmy?
UPDATE: Yep, it's getting worse. People dying, ghost towns. The accompanying video is also instructive. Here's the Beeb on this phenomenon.
Comments
I have been asking this question
Are we going to keep allowing a few thousand sociopaths to destroy our world and our way of life? The elite have shown time and time again that they cannot be trusted to be in charge. But then they should be asking how they keep their security forces from turning on them.
Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.
There is another reason
I'm betting that the PTB know that there is nothing that can be done about climate change and are going to just suck up as much money as they can and leaving us to fend for ourselves. I've seen a few articles saying that this is what will come from the green new deal.
More
Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.
OTOH,
even though there's no time to reverse what's already baked-in to the climate catastrophe, there are booming 'green' business ventures profiting from it all. 'Green billionaires for
Green Big Ticket Items'. it's all getting so bald and out in the open, such as the Green 'We Mean Business' alliance cory morningstar's written about on twitter.
to cass: in what manner do you propose we not support elites? on edit: and who do you consider 'elites'?
on later edit: We Mean Business Coalition:
"The We Mean Business coalition is catalyzing business action and driving policy ambition to accelerate the zero-carbon transition."
Harvard Scientists Funded by Bill Gates to Begin Spraying Particles Into the Sky In Experiment to Dim the Sun, freethoughtproject, aug. 3, 2019, although he's wrong about this shite having anything to do w/ 'chemtrais conspiracy'. but what coud go wrong, bill?
sorry, it's a crap source on an important issue...
What could go wrong
- quite aside from the unforeseen “technical” issues you imply - is that there is no mechanism for deciding who gets to control the type, level and duration of any mitigation. Plus these “solutions” all need to be maintained continuously or we snap back to the warming we have plus what we hid from. The technocratic arrogance is truly stomach churning.
We can’t save the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be changed.
- Greta Thunberg
why, billy gates and the MIT
'scientists' get to decide, silly! and billy gates and david attenborough are practicing and recommending (in attenborough's case) racist eugenics and malthusianism in africa! (injectable birth control microchips) too many darkies!
and new in dec.:
he'd tested nestle formula on african women to deleterious effects. dayum, i despise this asshole.
but yeah, capital is the cause in the US, so why not let capital profit from it now we are jut past the tipping point? nuclear power? sure, it's 'low carbon', lol. no more permafrost, methane bubbling up from the sea floor of the north pole; oceans are no longer carbon sinks! we make money before all you suckers die!
Hence....
I just read a great article saying that if we stopped burning fossil fuels today and stopped all destructive practices it wouldn't matter cuz the damage has already been done. The green new deal and other things that the elites say they will do is just a way for them transfer more wealth. Who are the elites? The few sociopaths who get to make the rules for the rest of us. The ones currently making bug out plans to survive the event. I also think that is why congress will be coming for SS, M&M and the social programs and are not doing a damn thing about our crumbling infrastructure. They are sociopaths and don't give a rat's ass how many of us die.
Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.
now that's seriously cynical...
and i love it. but i suppose you'd have to say who's included in 'We'. somehow USians seem to believe that's 'US' (perhaps the UK green new dealers), but there's a whole planet out there that's literally unable to stop using carbon fuels, even as they're transitioning. click into the 'we mean bidness coalition' link to get a blink-worthy eyeful, even if just the headlines.
but no green new deals i've seen (save howie hawkin's version of the green party GND) even acknowledges that the largest carbon footprint on the planet is...the US military.
as to the rest of your formula, i dunno what M&M stands for.
but while i have this comment open, the elites don't have to make human slaves:
Jobs that are also being done by robots
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylWBQyh9CC4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITLyfGqua6A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qt98NlE_SRo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwVfw-NWEUI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCBbejvb7jA
and these are just a few: home health care, nurses, wait staff, surgical assistants, and tra la la.
Great comment by Juliana on moa #72
It's true that the world the younger generations are going to inherit is a bad one. Climate refugees from inside our country...how will they be treated? The California fires have already created thousands. When the seas start to rise where will people go and will they get any help from the government?
The one by 62 is also most excellent. Lots of smart people over there.
Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.
best commentariat
in the blogosphere, imo, and so many great links they bring! ah, (kiwi ex-pat) juliania was quoting t.s. eliot there, a very good comment, and she does love that time-traveler eliot. she also loves plato, but seems sometimes to get tripped up in 'rule by the higher, educated classes (paraphrasing here) now and again. but shoot, she graduated from st. john's in santa fe, and they only take the creme de la creme, as i understand it.
and ooof, some of the profs she had there! she's spun entire diaries at the café from her notes! but she loves the russian novelists bests, so her own language is quite as... flowery (ornate?) as theirs.
They're nuts.
They're addicts. And like most addicts, they are lying to themselves.
"Keep control of their security forces"? That's what they're worried about?
Are their security forces going to grow and cook their food, and clean and maintain their houses, and provide their medical care, and take care of their children, and entertain them, and provide for all of the myriad needs of human existence, including miraculously supplying the necessary raw materials?
Do they plan on kidnapping people to be their servants, and keeping them and generations of their descendents in perpetual slavery?
And how would these devoted addicts of financialized capitalism continue to grow their wealth if there's no one left to play the game with them?
What would be more likely to happen is that the "elite" few would hunker down in their luxurious hideaways. Everyone else on Earth would be dead. Without any other outlets for their sociopathic greed, and having gone even more insane from being isolated on a dying planet, the "elite" would start going after each other. Finally, one sole "elite" person emerges as the survivor, the final winner, standing all alone on what remains of the planet. Survivor: Planet Earth.
What a sad ending to the human species that would be.
"Don't go back to sleep ... Don't go back to sleep ... Don't go back to sleep."
~Rumi
"If you want revolution, be it."
~Caitlin Johnstone
"Keep control of their security forces"? Ah, the schadenfreude.
The question they should ask is "what's the best way to kiss my weenie ass goodbye when my prowess on Wall Street doesn't mean shit, and my true worth is measured by how many pounds of meat my hungry security people can carve off my bones?".
Yeah, their money and fortification plans can stave off that moment in time for a while, but not forever.
It would seem that the elite bunker builders
have not thought things through. That is a common failing of rich people who have no life experience of not being rich.
They still do not comprehend that the bunker life is not a rich and wealthy life. Or a safe life.
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
"... who have no life experience of not being rich." Exactly.
I think we all take for granted a little bit how much we rely on other people. But I suspect that some ultra wealthy are in denial or simply ignore the roles that other humans, and also fate, plays in their wealth.
All they're thinking about,
like all other addicts, is how to get their next fix.
"Don't go back to sleep ... Don't go back to sleep ... Don't go back to sleep."
~Rumi
"If you want revolution, be it."
~Caitlin Johnstone
Survival fantasies
You asked:
Yes, and yes. Or so they hope.
"there's something so especially sadistic about waving the flag of a country that you're actively destroying" -- Aaron Mate
The really weird thing
is that they are trying to control the food supply in an area (NZ) that is highly agricultural and sparsely populated. Why wouldn’t the “servants” just walk away and leave the Peter Thiels to figure out how to “peel back edge of foil to reveal tater tots” alone in their bunkers?
We can’t save the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be changed.
- Greta Thunberg
I guess that's what the security forces are for.
They'll act as overseers for the slaves toiling in the fields, kind of like 21st century Simon Legrees.
By the way, I wonder what wine goes best with tuna casserole MREs? I guess that will be one of the tasks facing the players on Survivor: Planet Earth.
"Don't go back to sleep ... Don't go back to sleep ... Don't go back to sleep."
~Rumi
"If you want revolution, be it."
~Caitlin Johnstone
In Oryx and Crake
the two main characters "Jimmy" and "Glenn" play a game called Extinctathon, in which the species extinction crisis is made into a computer game. Jimmy's game-name is "Snowman," a reference to a world in which there is no longer any snow anywhere, and Glenn's name is "Crake," a reference to an Australian bird which is extinct in the time of the novel.
"there's something so especially sadistic about waving the flag of a country that you're actively destroying" -- Aaron Mate
Morgan David?
Cold duck? Or some other rot gut wine that is cheap to buy?
lol..good one!
Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.
For the wealthy it's a movie
It's Roland Emmerich's "2012", but starring Zuckerberg, Gates, Bezos. All heroes in their own minds.
Smart Money
is a term that is oxymoronic in the extreme. Capitalism is all about growth with no brake pedal, just like cancer. Making more and better cancer is not curative.
We only have a chance of recovery if we STOP our destructive behaviors; our overconsumption, our growing human monoculture refusing to accept the fact that our wellbeing is inextricably dependent on a diverse and well balanced ecosystem.
Building bunkers is a perfect expression of just how misguided and ignorant people can be about what is actually needed.
Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all."
- John Maynard Keynes
Funny you should mention this
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7837713/Luxurious-doomsday-proo...
LMAO
Survival of the richest! Luxurious doomsday-proof bunkers are becoming more alluring to the ultra-wealthy as they fight to get their hands on the $4.5million post-apocalyptic homes fitted with swimming pools, shooting ranges and dog parks.
One of the pictures has a giant screen TV...who do they think is going to be running the television studios when the rest of us have been wiped out? Same goes for the internet. And just what will those rich titans of industry do when their food runs out? Do they think it'd be easy to grow food? Fine if they want to be vegetarians since all the wildlife will be gone too.
But if they do indentured servitude then I give it less than 10 years before the servants rise up against them. I think they better start thinking things through better.
Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.
//15-story inverted luxury tower//
My, the euphemisms are thick with this one.
Seriously, I'm incredulous. These super elites who want to "protect their families" have absolutely no clue what it's going to be like to live underground for five years. "Windows" that "simulate normal sunrise and sunset" notwithstanding, they're all going to go stark raving mad without the option to go outdoors.
Quite honestly, they can have it. I'd much prefer to die in the Event than live like that.
I'll be laughing my ass off in my grave. A bunch of narcissistic
selfish self-entitled sociopaths and their spawn trapped together in an underground bunker with time limited resources.
The Last Decade
Yesterday I posted a fairly optimistic 2020 prediction. But I'm not feeling it. I'm afraid the 2020s are going to be The Last Decade for most of us. Yes, a privileged few will seal themselves into bunkers. The analogy is trying to keep a species alive in zoos. It works until it doesn't. They'll live longer than the rest of us, so I guess they "win". It might be another 50 years before the last of them stab each other over the last stale chocolate chip cookie.
Maybe the 2020s will be The Last Decade before we link arms and pull ourselves out of this. Maybe the 2020s will be The Last Decade where there is any hope. Or maybe that was the 80s. Or the 40s. Or the 1750s. Or 3000 BC.
The wealthy are wealthy because they are skilled at using their wealth to harness society to produce more wealth for them. Without society they're just psychopaths -- individually dangerous but not a force of transformative change.
I'm afraid the 2020s will be The Last Decade when there is a functioning society.
What was that old novel, "On The Beach"? I read it a lifetime ago. Now the Australians are huddling on their beaches. I'm a long way from the beach. I'll have nowhere to go.
Maybe I'll go reread my post from yesterday.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Albert Bartlett
"A species that is hurtling toward extinction has no business promoting slow incremental change." -- Caitlin Johnstone
stab each other over the last stale chocolate chip cookie.
you got it
good luck friend
"One day after"
Is also a good book. It's about a small town in the Carolinas that struggled to survive after an EMP went off. Poof! There went everything electronic that got fried by the pulse.
A great tv series was Jericho. Life in a small Colorado town after nukes went off in Denver and other big cities. Spoiler...if you don't want to know the ending
.
The nukes were set off by people inside the government that didn't like the direction the country was going. The people who did it hired mercenaries like blackwater and things got a little too close to the truth and the series got ended. Quickly. Great show though.
Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.
The deleterious effects of climate change
will affect the poorer half of the world population to a much greater extent. The actions required to lesson these effects will also affect these very same people to a greater extent.
By world standards, WE as a population are the "rich, smug elites". For everyone in this world to live like an average American would require the resources of 4 1/2 earths.
I don't see this changing in the near future. How many Americans are willing to live like an average Chinese let alone an average person from Africa?
If you ever get chance to watch a Greta Thunberg rally, focus on the crowds instead of Greta to see what they are wearing, what they are carrying, how they got to the rally, where they live, their general lifestyles. Do you think they would be willing to give these things up? I don't. Blind hypocrites.
We are, as a nation, always gloating and touting to the world that we have attained the highest standard of living in all of history. We have no intention of ever losing this exalted position and we are prepared to retain it at all costs.
The REAL purpose of our massive military force is to ensure the US maintains it's standard of living. Americans inbred exceptionalism will also ensure majority support for the military to use any necessary force against the rest of the world - including Obama's trillion dollar "user friendly" nukes - to do this.
Why are we in this hand-basket and where the fuck are we going?
Climate change mitigation --
is not about "giving up" anything. We will not, moreover, increase the appeal of climate change mitigation if all we have to offer is pleas to "give up" stuff. Rather, it's about the complete redesign of society. One of the virtues of Foster, Clark, and York's book The Ecological Rift is that they show that productive consumption dwarfs consumptive consumption, probably by a factor of thirty or forty. Capitalism is extraordinarily wasteful because its starting point is a small group of super-rich and super-powerful owners who see the world (including you and me) as something to be bought cheaply. Thus everything on Earth is laid to waste so that producers can make a buck.
We should like to see the climate protesters take over the means of production so they could revolutionize its methods -- biointensive farming instead of "conventional," local production instead of the global market, alternative energy instead of fossil extraction, co-housing instead of the Internet, and so on.
"there's something so especially sadistic about waving the flag of a country that you're actively destroying" -- Aaron Mate
"We" in the US have to give up stuff
Could you imagine everyone in the world having the lifestyle of the average American? Can the world support 6.7 TRILLION vehicles and the energy, resources and infrastructure to manufacture and accommodate them?
How about housing? Do you think Americans are willing to give up their 1000 sq/ft per person houses (and the stuff that fills them)?
What about food, clothing, washers/dryers, whole house heating/air conditioning, electronics and a hundred other items we take for granted as an American? Do you really think the earth can support 8 billion people living like an American w/o a majority of people having to give up "stuff"?
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cuM5CWYJuM]
"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind."
- Edward Bernays
The only solution is to remove the psychopaths who are in control. Unfortunately, the Trump fiasco tells us that we cannot vote them out because they were never voted in. They retain their insidious control because they are part of the permanent government aka the Deep State and they have tremendous power.
I figure they will take us down with them rather than give up control.
We need new a whole new political system - ours is rotten at the core. Maybe another country, with another system, can do it?
So if 95% of real consumption is productive consumption
what is gained by laying a guilt trip upon those whose 5% of the problem is consumptive consumption?
"there's something so especially sadistic about waving the flag of a country that you're actively destroying" -- Aaron Mate
The problem is not consumption per say
It is distribution of available resources.
A review of the book you spoke of:
I disagree. Having hundreds of small individual steel making plants in the past century has been highly instrumental in giving us the high carbon baseline in the first place. The production of the key components of our civilization such has steel, must be highly industrialized and localized at key locations to take advantage of scale of production. This will minimize damage to the environment (which is ALREADY extreme by the VERY nature of the product). How do we fund this w/o large scale capitalism?
It is WHAT we produce with capitalism that is the problem - the US has also been mass producing weapons of war and destruction along with production of goods that originally mostly benefited the US. It was operating on a zero sum basis with many other nations in the world that allowed the country to become the richest in the world.
I counter that capitalism properly applied can improve the condition of mankind. The Chinese BRI is an example.
Under capitalism
autonomous processes of "value," and not your choices, determine what you do. You are, in short, subordinate to the forces operating within whatever market exists for whatever services you can offer.
If, under capitalism, environmental destruction is the primary method for producing what people think they need at the largest quantities at the lowest prices, then some if not most of the population will be working in the environmental destruction business or not at all.
Also under capitalism the world exists for the capitalists as what Patel and Moore call "cheap nature." The world, both human and non-human, is to be arranged into a collection of profit-making machines, sites of accumulation and zones of extraction, as cheaply as possible -- which is to say, following the principle of "buy low, sell high." That's what capitalism is, not some fairy-tale about what it should be.
Now, if you are in government, you can regulate this movement (the movement that Patel and Moore call the "appropriation" and the "capitalization" of the world) a little bit. But if the capitalists don't make a profit they can collapse the economy, which leaves the governments with two options:
1) The easy way, involving capitulation to the business interests or (with the example of post-Soviet Russia) inventing business interests from scratch
2) The hard way, inventing a new system
My suggestion is that, given that holding onto capitalism in the climate change future will be both economically and ecologically ruinous, said governments need a big boost in their abilities to imagine social change, so that they can take a hard look at option #2.
As for your China example, how's your tolerance for Beijing smog? At any rate start here. And if you want to find out what the Chinese countryside is like, read the reports on government repression in western China, or your favorite Ma Jian novel.
"there's something so especially sadistic about waving the flag of a country that you're actively destroying" -- Aaron Mate
Good luck
with Richard Smith's AOC's global warming mitigation plan by deindustrializing the world. It doesn't have a hope in hell of being implemented.
BTW, Richard Smith's link about China is dated. I've read a number of his other reports. He appears to have an anti-China bias that dates back 3 decades.
Here's a few newer links for China I collected at random. They are actively working on these environmental problems. All of these are government backed (which Richard Smith supports for the US).
China Wants to Mainstream Environmental Protection
Fishermen relocated and reemployed to gradually ban fishing in Yangtze
China’s Non-CO2 Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Future Trajectories and Mitigation Options and Potential
[Note graph is Q3 2019 year to date versus Q3 2018 year to date. *Thermal includes coal, gas, oil, and biomass]
let me recommend your comment
in spades. how long has existed the adage: 'Live Simply...so that others might Simply Live'?
decades, at least, i reckon. as for little Greta, follow the money. billionaires who sen their soar powered yachts for her to cross the atlantic when she was stranded in south amerika when chile had to cancel COP 25 or whatever to take her to spain; the cover of Time magazine...twice?
and yes, reluctantly gave into nuclear power with sigh, and was recently on the radio with african malthusian david attenborough endorsing his schtick. but more tomorrow, perhaps.
indigenous such a evo morales, perhaps?
i'd just hunted my posts
for a tweet concerning little greta blaming evo for the destruction of the amazon rain forest, although cordeliers says lilys plastic pickup is part of greta's cohort, but all i found bingling externally was this propaganda push. but many of evo's detractors raged in fury that morales wouldn't allow USAID convoys and US military in; can't imagine why, can you? but imo, it was the start of the putsch against him.
i'll stick up a couple reposts of Other Peoples' post soon, see how they fly here. 'a marxist critique: Selling Extinction' didn't go all that well, lol.
and yeah, china is increasing its market capitalism but i remain agnostic that 'capitalism properly applied can improve the condition of mankind'. but china's sort, as russia's sort..are a hella lot better than the amerikan kind.
I have lived too long, seen too much.
I lived through the 1950s and 60s, Change the words only slightly (metaphorically speaking) and I am now once again living through the 1950s and 60s. Unless
weyou all do something different this will not end well.I am tired of doing the right thing and nobody giving a shit. I am not as tenacious as Bernie.
RIP
You, you may say I am a dreamer ...
agreed rip
nothing new except the gloss
pisses me off to no end
do we really have to relive all that
pseudo reality to learn
or is just another false flag
I don’t understand Australians
I’m looking daily at the pictures of pyroclastic tornadoes and people huddled on beaches and I don’t get it. There was one picture I saw thus morning where the scale escaped me for a moment and I thought I was looking at a firefighter digging an arc trench, but it turned out to be a helicopter dropping a column of retardant inside a burning arc 50 meters wide.
Don’t they care about their children? Their friends? Themselves?
We can’t save the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be changed.
- Greta Thunberg
reactions to climate catastrophe
seem to vary by the geographic ruling class
Aussies got theirs
Kiwi's got theirs
Japan just gives us back
radiation and hondas
They probably do.
Perhaps their main problem is that in government they have The Leadership, and The Opposition, and The Opposition's best idea for climate change mitigation is a carbon tax. (I have written on a carbon tax previously.) So The Opposition passed a carbon tax, The Leadership repealed it, and they are back where they started.
I really do think that the deficit of imagination is what keeps us from a better future.
"there's something so especially sadistic about waving the flag of a country that you're actively destroying" -- Aaron Mate
deficit of imagination
spot on
let the creative types
get control
be a better
future
Australia finally sent in the military
to fight the fires. RT has the article. But people knew what they were voting for when they voted for the PM didn't they? Same with Trump voters.
Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.
In democracies devoid of imagination
most people don't vote for what they're voting for, but rather they vote against what they don't want to see from government.
"there's something so especially sadistic about waving the flag of a country that you're actively destroying" -- Aaron Mate
They do, now.
Voters have been weaponized by negative messaging. It blocks their ability to envision a positive future for society.
____________________
The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato
Bunker Busting.
Read an article out of New Zealand a few years ago about how the Maori locals already have a plan for cracking billionaire bunkers if/when TSHTF.
Apparently, detailed schematics for all of these 'safe' houses are publicly available from local town registrars. All the existing plans have already been copied, stored and studied, and any new buildings are quickly added to the database.
Secret passages, hidey holes, hidden safes, panic rooms...all there in black and white.
Squads of trained Maoris with that data will have little trouble ousting the owners and their mercs.
Just don't tell the billionaires.
The current working assumption appears to be that our Shroedinger's Cat system is still alive. But what if we all suspect it's not, and the real problem is we just can't bring ourselves to open the box?
Hunt for the Bunker People
(Thanks for the tip - it made me go searching.)
We can’t save the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be changed.
- Greta Thunberg