Capitalism as we know it is over. So suggests a new report commissioned by a group of scientists appointed by the UN Secretary-General. The main reason? We’re transitioning rapidly to a radically different global economy, due to our increasingly unsustainable exploitation of the planet’s environmental resources.This report by Ahmed accurately reflects the tone and substance of the report (which I read) issued by the UN appointed scientists from Finland. Ahmed also provides other sources to corroborate the findings of the Finish scientists--notice especially one source who is a famous capitalist.
Climate change and species extinctions are accelerating even as societies are experiencing rising inequality, unemployment, slow economic growth, rising debt levels, and impotent governments. Contrary to the way policymakers usually think about these problems, the new report says that these are not really separate crises at all.
Rather, these crises are part of the same fundamental transition to a new era characterized by inefficient fossil fuel production and the escalating costs of climate change. Conventional capitalist economic thinking can no longer explain, predict, or solve the workings of the global economy in this new age, the paper says.
In a time when news lasts about as long as a minute, why has the story of Jamal Khashoggi dominated headlines for more than a week? Was Jamal Khashoggi ever questioned by the FBI at any time before or after the 9/11 attacks? If not, why not? Was Jamal Khashoggi ever employed by the CIA? Was Jamal Khashoggi ever deemed an asset of the CIA? When did Jamal’s employment for Saudi intelligence come to an end? Was Jamal Khashoggi a joint asset between the GIA [??] and the CIA? Did Jamal Khashoggi ever have any contact with the 9/11 hijackers or anyone in the support network of the 9/11 hijackers inside the United States? And, why did it take 15 Saudi assassins to kill Jamal Khashoggi? Doesn’t that seem a bit like overkill? And, is it just a coincidence that there were 15 Saudi hijackers on 9/11? Why would Jamal Khashoggi willingly go to the Saudi Consulate in Turkey—especially given his alleged sour relationship with Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman? What would inspire him to go there? And what was the entreaty MBS allegedly made to Jamal more than one month ago about anyways? Was it made in earnest? What was Jamal Khashoggi really doing at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul? [GIA = Armed Islamic Group?]Both investigations dove tell nicely with the theory that the US Deep State ordered their secret ("intelligence") services which colluded with Saudi Arabia and probably Israel to pull off history's greatest false-flag event in order to justify to the ever trusting US public the US Empire's campaign since then to topple one nation after another in the greater Middle East (although upset, Gen. Clark has been unable to overcome the many years of his indoctrination in Empire propaganda).
We are arriving at a moment called a paradigm shift. That is when the cracks in a system become so obvious they can no longer be credibly denied. Those vested in the old system scream and shout, they buy themselves a little time with increasingly repressive measures, but the house is moments away from falling. The critical questions are who gets hurt when the structure tumbles, and who decides how it will be rebuilt.
The new paradigm is coming anyway. If we don’t choose it ourselves, the planet will for us. It could be an improvement, it could be a deterioration, it could be extinction, depending on how prepared we are for it and how violently those invested in the old system resist the loss of their power. If enough of us understand the need for discarding the broken system, the greater the hope that we can build something better from the ruins.
While I earlier thought that the case would be settled rather sooner than later, I now expect the conflict to go on for weeks or months while collateral damage will accumulate around it.This is because the Middle East power situation is very unstable, and such an incident could tip its re-orientation in any direction.
The real problem is that both sides, Erdogan and MbS, are extremely headstrong. For both men the issue is much bigger than the Khashoggi case. The conflict has historic, strategic and very personal dimensions. That makes it difficult to find a deal.Another article entitled "Did Saudis, CIA Fear Khashoggi 9/11 Bombshell?" by Finian Cunningham offers some insightful speculation as to why this assassination is generating so much concern among politicos of the US Empire and beyond.
The U.N. climate report released this week had some stunning revelations, claiming that the 2020s could be one of humanity's last chances to avert devastating impacts.The reality is that ordinary people, who are brainwashed to believe only the "authorities", don't read these reports, and mostly believe what their capitalist masters tell them via corporate media (and all their other institutions). What I wrote in yesterday's commentary is another illustration of this childish mentality:
But some say its authors were being too cautious.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report states in plain language that averting a climate crisis will require a wholesale reinvention of the global economy. By 2040, the report predicts, there could be global food shortages, the inundation of coastal cities and a refugee crisis unlike the world has ever seen. [my emphasis]
A number of scientists contend that the report wasn't strong enough and that it downplayed the full extent of the real threat.
The sad fact is that so many of us naively believed what we were told by adults in elementary schools and Sunday schools, and by our parents who were also steeped in capitalist propaganda since they were born. Later we were subject to this same indoctrination in movies and TV. Now many people find it hard to believe otherwise, to believe their own eyes and ears as our masters crank up their propaganda to new heights of deception and engage in censorship of information that counters their self-serving propaganda. A major problem for activists and independent thinkers is that those who uncritically accept this indoctrination are well rewarded by career opportunities in our master's corporations, government, academia, etc.Environmental sustainability and the capitalist system are incompatible, but this glaring fact does not worry ordinary people because of their childish belief in their masters who are thoroughly addicted to the power and wealth that their system delivers to them. Like most addicts they prefer to have their supply of drugs than rather than life, and they don't care if the rest of us go down with them and the human species become extinct.
“We’re in danger of losing our democracy!” is a warning cry I hear often. A variant is that “we lost our democracy gradually over the last few decades.” They’re both wrong. The truth is that we never had a democracy; we’re in danger of losing our illusion of democracy.It's not hard to understand why, and he does in very simple terms. The sad fact is that so many of us naively believed what we were told by adults in elementary schools and Sunday schools, and by our parents who were also steeped in capitalist propaganda since they were born. Later we were subject to this same indoctrination in movies and TV. Now many people find it hard to believe otherwise, to believe their own eyes and ears as our masters crank up their propaganda to new heights of deception and engage in censorship of information that counters their self-serving propaganda. A major problem for activists and independent thinkers is that those who uncritically accept this indoctrination are well rewarded by career opportunities in our master's corporations, government, academia, etc.
In alliance with the state, Facebook and other social media companies are deciding what organizations constitute “well-developed networks” seeking to “manipulate” public opinion. Of course, this applies not to the mass media, which are engaged in constant government propaganda, but to oppositional groups. [my emphasis]
... we are living in a time of unprecedented technological media mind manipulation difficult to penetrate. Harold Pinter called it “a tapestry of lies” in which facts don’t matter. What happened never happened; what never happened happened. It’s all about believability in the national media’s hypnotic show, whose purpose Russell Baker described 25 years ago as being to “provide a manageably small cast for a national sitcom, or soap opera, or docudrama, making it easy for media people to persuade themselves they are covering the news while mostly just entertaining us.”
Deals will be made and the case will be buried. If the deals are good enough, several dozen billions will be required, the U.S. might even allow Mohammad bin Salman to stay in his position.
But [the aging elder] King Salman, or some Saudi citizens, may well find that the various crazy endeavors MbS tends to launch - the war on Yemen, the Qatar blockade, the Khashoggi assassination - are becoming way too costly for the country. A simple unlucky home accident could solve that problem.I'm not so sure. In any case, it is important that you know about this sordid history.
I almost thought that Michel Chossudovsky, founder and editor of Global Research, switched his opposition to the phenomenon of global warming until today when I noticed this post. He consistently ran such posts up until about 2012. Thus, I concluded erroneously that he had changed his mind given all the scientific evidence and just plain common sense regarding global warming and climate destabilization: the trends for extreme weather, melting of the glaciers, wildfires, and other global warming events. Unfortunately not.
The three years of war that followed [the Russian military assistance] had other objectives - on the one hand, to create a new state straddling Iraq and Syria within the framework of the Cebrowski strategy, and, on the other, to use Daesh to cut the Silk Road that Xi Jinping’s China were seeking to reactivate - thus maintaining continental domination over the "Western" part.
This would require a level of wisdom and insight that the majority of human beings simply do not possess right now. Right now, most people are very easily manipulated into advancing establishment interests by plutocrat-controlled media, and until that changes there will never be an effective and beneficial revolution. For that to change, humanity is going to have to shed its ubiquitous habit of creating mental egoic patterns which make us susceptible to manipulation via fear, greed, and herd mentality.
The doesn’t mean that the existing systems of capitalism and government aren’t going to have to change; of course they’ll have to change. But they’re not going to change unless we find a way to wake up from the deeply conditioned egoic patterns which are the norm in the world we were born into. We’ll keep repeating and repeating the same old patterns in whatever way we’ve been conditioned to until we either go the way of the dinosaur or find a way to transcend our conditioning.
The ruling classes love identity politics because they keep the working classes focused on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and so on, and not on the fact that they (i.e., the working classes) are, essentially, glorified indentured servants, who will spend the majority of their sentient existences laboring to benefit a ruling elite that would gladly butcher their entire families and sell their livers to hepatitic Saudi princes if they could get away with it. Dividing the working classes up into sub-groups according to race, ethnicity, and so on, and then pitting these sub-groups against each other, is extremely important to the ruling classes, who are, let’s remember, a tiny minority of intelligent but physically vulnerable parasites controlling the lives of the vast majority of human beings on the planet Earth, primarily by keeping them ignorant and confused.I have mixed feelings about this exploitation of the use of social identity politics, I still like latter because it eliminates the isolation that many of these groups felt in the past, and they can no longer be used as scapegoats or pitted against each other as they have in the past. Even attempts at targeting Muslims by the ruling class has fizzled out.