Not So Different After All
Frans de Waal On Animal Intelligence And EmotionsBY MARK LEVITON
With the coronavirus we have another interesting issue: how we eat wildlife. Ecologists and conservationists have been saying for fifty years that we shouldn’t be eating everything on the planet.
Mama with her daughter Moniek, at the Royal Burgers’ Zoo, Arnhem, the Netherlands.
‘The New York Times fabricates Russian murder plot’, 3 July 2020, Patrick Martin, wsws.org (w/permission to repost all content)
“Not since William Randolph Hearst cabled his correspondent in Havana in 1898 with the message, “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war,” has a newspaper been so thoroughly identified with an effort to provoke an American war as the New York Times this week.
The difference—and there is a colossal one—is that Hearst was fanning the flames for the Spanish-American War, a comparatively minor conflict, the first venture by American imperialism to seize territory overseas, in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. The Times today is seeking to whip up a war fever directed against Russia, one that threatens to ignite a third world war fought with nuclear weapons.” [snip]
In an essay published in French in 1990 the philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis (1922-1997) writes (in one of his most profound moments):
Nor the Seattle General Strike, as far as that goes.
following weeks of violence and chaos, CHOP was finally dismantled by Seattle police, but only after occupiers marched on Mayor Durkan’s 5,000 sqft., $7.6 million house.
Let's look at three American corporations with significant influence in our society which expanded various parts of their business into China. Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) was the first fast food franchise to enter China. Google has made two attempts to enter the high tech market in China and exited. Nike first saw China as a source of cheap labor and later a major market for sales.
In 1991, after a high speed pursuit, police beat and clubbed motorist Rodney King. Little did they know that someone with a camcorder was recording the event. When the officers involved were acquitted of using excessive force it sparked the Los Angeles riots, which caused $1 Billion in damages.
‘Aurora, Colorado, police attack protesters after investigation reopened into 2019 death of Elijah McClain’, Matthew MacEgan, 30 June 2020,wsws.
In the wake of the global protests against police violence sparked by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on Memorial Day, Colorado Governor Jared Polis (Democrat) announced last week that his administration will reexamine the case of Elijah McClain, a 23-year-old black man who died in police custody in Aurora, Colorado, in [August] 2019.
So COVID-19 reveals are on the rise, the world is frying, while society drowns in unemployment, racism, police violence and predatory neoliberal economics and the best we can do is
White children cheer outside an African-American residence that they have set on fire. © Getty Images
As I’d been reading and collecting links and quotes toward a post on ‘the Revolutionary possibilities of Civil Rights 2020’, two authors had mentioned ‘Red Summer’, as well as the bombing and burning of Black Wall Street in Greenwood, OK as historically analagous to 2020, or at least: past as prelude. And the following day, Up Jumped the Devil.
As Dickens seems to have borrowed heavily from ‘Red Summer’ at National Geographic, I’ll paste in a bit past Fair Use rules. To me it seems the depraved barbarity at play that summer needs a stand-alone diary. Fair warning: the final photo below the dotted lines may give you nightmares.
I rarely do breaking news type essays, but this was a real shock when it came across my twitter feed.
— Consortium News (@Consortiumnews) July 2, 2020
Back to the future on steroids.
The fabric of our culture is being ripped asunder. Onion-skinned trump is destroying the social contract by keeping the social chaotic, by sowing divisiveness, by pitting mini-cultures against each other and inoculating everything with chaos. Chaos begets fear, becomes the norm. It is easier to control people that way. And control is the name of the game. Maximum gain with minimal pain.
The warp and weft of the social contract were already fraying in the 60s. It had been fragmenting for many from the beginning. MLK pointed that out and lost. It happened so fast and no one was prepared for Death. But now we are.
George Floyd changed that. Time and space compressed at that moment. Truth and lies merged and in a flash we all saw the excruciating horror of who we are. We can no longer be complicit.
.
"My Dream has turned into a nightmare. … Now we are confronting issues that cannot be solved without costing the nation billions of dollars. I think this is where we are getting our greatest resistance. They can put it on many other things but they can’t get rid of slums and poverty without it costing the nations something."
Of the Democratic Party's many betrayals of it's grassroots base, uniting with the neocons, the same group that have never been right about anything, may have been the worst stab-in-the-back.
