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

Sunday, March 28, 2021

Posts that I especially recommend for Sunday, March 28, 2021

  • Smart Cities: Digital Prisons of The Great Reset by Derrick Broze from The Last American Vagabond. My commentary follows: 
     
    The Great Reset is all about our masters' fantasy: the transnational capitalist ruling classes, who are directors of the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire and have a fantasy about saving their system of capitalism. Our billionaire masters are finally concerned about preventing the climate crisis and destroying their beloved system of capitalism, which is a system of organized plunder of the Earth's resources and the labor of working people. 
     
    Thus, it is more of the same: the ruling class is trying to co-opt us into following their self-serving plan to save capitalism for the future. If you like their past record of exploitation, never-ending wars, extreme inequality, full-spectrum control of everything, etc., you will absolutely love their plan for the Great Reset of capitalism. Brose expressed it in a nutshell when he wrote:

    In truth, the push for smart cities, the UN SDGs, and the Great Reset is based in a deeper agenda to monitor, control, and direct all life on the planet using technology. The true agenda of the WEF and the United Nations is to establish a global Technocratic State where alleged experts and technologists make decisions for the vast majority of the people in the name of saving the environment.

    The description of our masters' plans sound familiar. Doesn't it sound like what we experienced during this pandemic where dissenting voices about pandemic policies, contrary medical evidence, and scientific arguments from equally qualified experts are all dismissed or silenced? And you are confined to your homes, must wear masks, and get "vaccinated" with potentially unsafe and unknown substances in order to work or travel? And they're promising to make us happy despite owning nothing--because they will own, and thereby control, everything! Do you want such a world?

    Just because they have recognized (too late) that unlimited growth, which capitalism requires, on a finite planet is impossible, we should follow them meekly and their self-serving fantasy-plan. I think not!   
Words cannot convey how chilling and authoritarian this all is: watching government officials, hour after hour, demand censorship of political speech and threaten punishment for failures to obey. As I detailed last month, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that the state violates the First Amendment’s free speech guarantee when they coerce private actors to censor for them — exactly the tyrannical goal to which these hearings are singularly devoted. 
 
And he concludes with this statement:
 
We are taught from childhood that a defining hallmark of repressive regimes is that political officials wield power to silence ideas and people they dislike, and that, conversely, what makes the U.S. a “free” society is the guarantee that American leaders are barred from doing so. It is impossible to reconcile that claim with what happened in that House hearing room over the course of five hours on Thursday. 
The team found that human activities have caused the radiative forcing on Earth to increase by about 0.5 Watts per square meter from 2003 to 2018. The increase is mostly from greenhouse gases emissions from things like power generation, transport and industrial manufacturing. Reduced reflective aerosols are also contributing to the imbalance.
at