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, April 23, 2022

Posts that I especially recommend for Saturday, April 23, 2022

  • The Pandemic Isn't Over? features Russell Brand, a British comedian and former drug addict turned serious political critic--from his channel on Rumble (15:39).
  • I notice that the Strategic Culture Foundation has been taken off the internet, that is, the one I can access. In my 12 years of administrating this website, I have posted articles from this source as much as any other. This censorship policy of the Empire's capitalist ruling class illustrates how much they want to censor anything that will contradict their narratives. This also demonstrates how insecure they are. RH  4/25/2022 update: this note was probably in error. This link is only temporarily down. Later 4/25/2022 update: I accessed the site today, but I have my Firefox set to VPN. According to a west coast activist, one can only access the site if one has one's browser is set to VPN.
When the ecosystem is dying because of economic systems which depend on infinite growth on a finite world, your choices are either (A) abandon those systems or (B) pray that sociopathic oligarchs somehow get us into space in the next few years. Guess which one we’re going with.

Humanity’s major problems arise from the impulse to control. Ecocide arises from the impulse to control nature. Empire arises from the impulse to control civilizations. Oligarchy arises from the impulse to control political outcomes. Ego arises from the impulse to control life.

A healthy humanity would be free of the impulse to manipulate and exert control: over life, over people, over nature. But it would be so different from the humanity we know now that falling into that way of functioning would be a kind of death. And it would feel like a death.

Sometimes it seems like people want the world to end, want humanity to go extinct. I’d suggest that this may be a confused expression of an intuited truth: that there’s something good on the other side of ending all this. But it’s the end of our dysfunction, not of our species. 
  • Oh, So It’s Just Bullsh*t Then features Russell Brand, a British comedian and former drug addict turned serious political critic discussing the imminent extradition of Julian Assange to the USA--from his channel on YouTube (13:48).
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