We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Saturday, March 7, 2020

Posts that I especially recommend today: Saturday, March 7, 2020

  • How I try to break climate silence by BaerbelW from Skeptical Science. (Note: This German scientist takes us through the many ways climate crisis deniers try to deceive us, and simultaneously promotes critical thinking. But alas, she only devotes two sentences to a claim that "There is also hope: We already have much of the technology we need to solve climate change. We 'just' have to deploy it at scale." And she follows these two sentences by saying "this clear for scientists". But this is not true. Many scientists remain in doubt that we can solve this problem, and some, like McPherson, have already decided that it is too late.)
  • Greta Thunberg | Youth Strike 4 Climate | Bristol, UK featuring Greta from Extinction Rebellion (via YouTube). (Note: She rallies British children to protest the inaction by adults (in the ruling class) who "despite all the beautiful words and promises from elected officials" (and the people who employ them in the capitalist ruling class) about  preventing climate destabilization, but the latter will result in the destruction of the children's futures and they sense that.)
Satirical comedians discover that capitalist controlled elections are corrupt, but they don't connect them to elections held in capitalist nations or nations held by ruling classes of any kind. The result is cynicism. The following two posts illustrate that:
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Thursday, March 5, 2020

Posts that I especially recommend today: Thursday, March 5, 2020

The Automatic Earth, for wind ensemble + electronics, addresses the ongoing climate catastrophe and evokes the psychological effect of the impending disruptive change to our entire way of living on the planet, even under a best-case scenario. Our way of life is unsustainable, therefore it will not continue. The piece weaves together two threads: the climate crisis, and the technological transformation of what it is to be human. The tandem acceleration of technological wonder and ecological catastrophe means, at best, a strange, unrecognizable future, likely within our own lifetimes. I do not know if we will survive as a species: if we continue as we are now, average world temperature will increase around 8ªC within eighty years, which would result in runaway warming and a Venus-like atmosphere that virtually no life on earth can withstand. If we do survive, it will be via monumental feats of geo-engineering and human re-engineering, surpassed only by an extraordinary change in our willingness to cooperate with each other. Humanity will be forever altered. This way of life will die. The question is whether or not we will die with it.
... God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.
  • Bernie Needs New Strategy For Biden His “Good Friend” featuring Jimmy Dore of The Jimmy Dore Show (via YouTube). (Note: Because Dore is once again (like in 2016) disillusioned by Bernie's (Sanders) namby-pamby (def.) campaign, he goes off on a rant against Sanders and his advisors for running such a campaign. Also, see this about another such comedian.)

Wednesday, March 4, 2020

Posts that I especially recommend today: Wednesday, March 4, 2020

  • A Green New Deal: Climate change is a collective problem and it demands collective action by David Lorimer from Wall Street International. (Note: I am posting this article as an example of the confused and misleading thinking of those that I would identify as "progressive liberals", those ideologically committed to capitalism but urging idealistic notions of modifying capitalism to save us from the climate crisis that threatens all life of Earth. What they mean by the "need for a system change" is "reviving and reinventing the public sphere, remembering how to plan, reining in corporations, re-localising production, ending the cult of shopping, and taxing the rich and filthy.", but not taking private ownership of the economy away from individuals and giving it to a government run by and for the people.)
  • Media Pundits Secretly Funded by Lobbying Firms! featuring Natalie McGill from a segment of the Redacted Tonight show on RT. "Viewers know that the mainstream media is paid to spit corporate propaganda. Natalie McGill delves into how they're encouraged to sell out to those interests." 

Tuesday, March 3, 2020

Posts that I especially recommend today: Tuesday, March 3, 2020

  • We’re Being Played by Shane Burley from Commune. (Note: Another article about fake news issued by media corporations.)

Monday, March 2, 2020

Posts that I especially recommend today: Monday, March 2, 2020

Sunday, March 1, 2020

Posts that I especially recommend today: Sunday, March 1, 2020

  • Economy vs. Ecology featuring a 22:09m talk by environmentalist Stuart H. Scott at the 2014 COP-20 in Lima, Peru (via YouTube). (Note: Because he was educated in the USA, he often refers to capitalism as euphemisms like money economy and "neoclassical economics".)
Once again the Middle East is heating up with the threat of major wars. The following posts shed some light of this latest threat that could escalate into a global nuclear war catastrophe: