Carbon Monoxide from California Wildfires Drifts East

Click here to access report from NASA. 

My curiosity was piqued yesterday by weather reports on area (Minneapolis) weather reports that it was unhealthy to exercise outside because of the smoke from Canadian wildfires. (I wanted to ride my bicycle on a route through my town as a routine exercise.) Scanning several weather broadcasts from other channels, I found the same reports, that is, that wildfires in Canada were the cause of the darkened sky. Because I was skeptical that the smoky skies were all caused by Canadian wildfires, this morning I decided to scan reports from the web. Guess what?

There are fires reported across the globe from Siberia to Greece to Portugal as well as the west coasts of USA and Canada (see also this, this, this, and this). The Guardian even announced that it was time to do something about climate change! But "not to worry" because the Secretary of the Interior says that it's all the fault of environmentalists! (sarcasm)

Other recommended articles for Thursday, August 16. 2018

• Taibbi: Censorship Does Not End Well from Rolling Stone.

• Why Are ATMs Disappearing at an Alarming Rate after a Wave of Branch Closures? by Don Quijones (a Brit who lives mostly in Spain) from Wolf Street.

Climate change in the Anthropocene: An unstoppable drive to Hothouse Earth?

Click here to access this review by Ian Angus of a report entitled Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene by Will Steffen and other scientists posted on Climate & Capitalism. 

Corporate media has given such unusual coverage to a report published in a subscription-only scientific journal that the editors have since removed it from a paywall. Could it be that this was caused by concern about feedback loops reported by the scientists in addition to the extreme weather that nearly everyone is experiencing?

As the Earth warms, positive (amplifying) feedbacks are becoming stronger: the authors identify ten that have global impacts and that could be radically accelerated by relatively small temperature increases, including thawing permafrost, release of ocean floor methane hydrates, weakened land and oceanic CO2 absorption, increasing bacterial respiration in the oceans, dieback of Amazon and/or boreal forests, reduced northern snow cover, loss of Arctic and/or Antarctic sea ice, and melting of polar ice sheets.

Any one of these could substantially accelerate global warming, and if one passes a tipping point, it may trigger a “tipping cascade,” permanently accelerating others.

Angus quotes their conclusions:

“Incremental linear changes to the present socioeconomic system are not enough to stabilize the Earth System. Widespread, rapid, and fundamental transformations will likely be required to reduce the risk of crossing the threshold and locking in the Hothouse Earth pathway....

“The contemporary way of guiding development founded on theories, tools, and beliefs of gradual or incremental change, with a focus on economy efficiency, will likely not be adequate to cope with this trajectory. …

“To avoid crossing a planetary threshold … a deep transformation based on a fundamental reorientation of human values, equity, behavior, institutions, economies, and technologies is required.”

 And then states the following: 

Although stated in very general terms, these points have deeply radical implications.

Do you think that our masters who are addicted to profit and power supplied by their system of capitalism can even consider such changes? If not, then who? (The revolutionary question of our time.)

The Minority

Click here if you wish to access this post from the website of Ghada Chehade, a very talented Palestinian Canadian, who sent me this post from her website:

         The Minority

This white man is not my enemy
No, this white man hasn’t done shit to me

Let’s talk about the E-C-O-N-O-M-Y
That’s the real issue here

Don’t. You. See.

It’s not just about race,
but economic d-i-s-p-a-r-i-t-y

Most white men today are suffering just like me

You see, the problem aint with the majority
But a tiny little minority:

The Uber Wealthy Authority
That enslave us through financial s-u-p-e-r-i-o-r-i-t-y

Black and brown do have it worse

But economic suffering is a global curse
Orchestrated by and for the globalists’ purse

And when we turn on each other
We. Make. The. Situation. Worse

For divide and conquer is an age old trick

It makes the majority weaker
And the rich more slick

Able to stop us from seeing our common plight
And prevent us from waging a common fight

Against the ones with all the Authority…
That. Uber. Wealthy. Minority. 

Climate Change Bites Big Business

Click here to access article by Manuel García, Jr. from CounterPunch. 

... climate change denialism was heavily promoted by corporate and partisan (right wing) media, and by legions of corporate agents, flacks and factotums masquerading as elected representatives in federal and state governments. That has now changed.

Climate change is now all over the front pages of the newspapers and is the headline story of the mainstream mass media ....

What is the likely response by our masters' bought-and-paid-for government? 

Big Capital is now openly scared about climate change, and that is what we are now seeing as headline news.

We will also be seeing urgent promotions – presented as mass media news and commentary – for varieties of government subsidized protection for those sectors of Big Business that feel most financially threatened by the biting furies of climate change.

The Target Is Assange and Wikileaks, and the Role of Australia

Click here to access a 38:50m interview with John Pilger conducted by Dennis Bernstein of KPFA FM radio (a listener sponsored radio station) in Berkeley, CA posted on Pilger's website.

You will learn about Assange's health, the legal aspects of his case, the significance of his ongoing persecution by agents of the US Empire, among other topics related to Julian Assange, the renowned activist who has led the effort in countering the Empire's dirty secrets. 

Articles I found on 8/12/2018 that may be of special interest to readers of my website

• Jordan – Staunch Western Ally – Angry and Confused by Andre Vltchek from New Eastern Outlook. He visits Jordan and reports on what he finds in this colony of the US Empire which it faithfully serves.

• Brecht: On the matter of political illiteracy from The Greanville Post.

• Bunker Mentality: Start Preparing for Ecological & Economic Disaster Free of Corporate Overlords by Robert Bridge from Strategic Culture Foundation.

It’s time to stop acting like children and face an ugly truth: our current materialistic lifestyles are not sustainable in the long-term, and probably not in the short term either. Our incredible level of wastefulness, compounded by Earth’s finite resources, guarantees that the planet’s 7 billion people are living on borrowed time. Exactly what ‘short-term’ means, however, is a question none of us can really answer. It may mean the day after tomorrow or another 500 years. Again, nobody can say. But given the upsurge of interest, for example, in “doomsday prepping” among people of average means (a topic that even the high-brow Financial Times reported on), to the construction of sprawling underground bunkers for the elite, there is a growing consensus among many people that it is time to start taking back some control of our lives.

• America’s unending reign of police terror by Niles Niemuth from World Socialist Web Site. 

While racism plays a role in some police killings, and in the brutal measures directed against immigrants, this is entirely subordinate to the role of the state as an instrument of class rule. It is not a matter of making the police more racially diverse or electing more African American prosecutors. Decades of racially integrated police forces have illustrated quite starkly that black cops can be just as vicious, corrupt and murderous as their white counterparts.

The fight against police violence is a class question.

What If There Were No Official Narratives?

Click here to access article by Caitlin Johnstone from her website. (I thank an activist for alerting me to this excellent article.)

This Australian wonder woman strikes again with this brilliant essay about how our masters thoroughly manipulate the news about major events in order to control us for their benefit of power and profits. In this essay her remarkable imagination takes us into a world where we are only fed raw material about events across the world, and what that would be like. Unfortunately, most people already believe what they are fed by mainstream sources is raw material instead of fabricated stories. But there are increasing numbers who believe the exact opposite, and someday maybe they will prevail. She imagines that someday.