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

Wednesday, August 4, 2021

Posts that I especially recommend for Tuesday and Wednesday, August 3 and 4, 2021

  • The Big Syria Lie Falls Apart EVEN MORE! featuring Lee Camp from his channel Redacted Tonight on YouTube (06:00m) protesting and defending corporate media in a "tongue in cheek" (def.) style in contrast to solid evidence reported by UN and other independent agencies. It is clear (once again) that corporate media has for many years been "messing with our minds" with their 24/7, Syrian "poison-gate" propaganda. 
Colombia is the first supplier of cocaine to the United States, every year it beats its own record as a producer of the narcotic, and this fact is closely linked to two aspects in which its coincidence with Israel is absolute: war as a permanent mechanism of an elite to exercise supremacy and the paramilitarization of this mechanism.

However, in the area of drug trafficking, which today is vital to the capitalist economy, the two imperial enclaves are not similar. In this “division of labor” they do not play the same role because Colombia provides the raw material while Israel provides the weapons and genocidal strategies to protect production.
Some of their scenarios have up to 50% of primary energy coming from fossil fuels by 2050! Others rely on technologies not yet deployed at scale, such as BECCS, for 20% of energy by 2050. The scenarios are a veritable show bag of technocratic dreaming, gas expansion and assumptions about economic growth unconcerned by material resource limits.

NZ2050 also lacks short-term ambition. Despite the growing enthusiasm for this seemingly positive development, a global stocktake of net zero plans finds 80% fail to meet a minimum set of robustness criteria and lack substance and short-term ambition, leading to greenwashing and marketing deception, says Ketan Joshi, writing for Renew Economy, and a catastrophic failure to form action that will provide meaningful protection.
... mainstream media rarely point out that climate change is getting worse and even more so due to feedbacks that can amplify extreme weather events and can further speed up how climate change unfolds.
  • Science Update: Shifting the Baseline featuring the views of Prof. (retired) Guy McPherson, an independent scientist (via his YouTube channel--06:31m), who has fearlessly focused his attention throughout his career on the climate crisis.
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