how to save the world

This map, from Multipolarista, shows how ‘western’ countries, in repeated UN votes last month, have consistently refused to condemn sanctions as human rights violations, opposed the principle of a democratic and equitable world order, opposed the promotion of human rights and cultural diversity, and opposed restrictions on the use of mercenaries. These votes are not just symbolic, meaningless rhetorical statements of principle. The lockstep ‘no’ votes illustrate precisely the map of Empire, including its Sub-Imperial Powers (in red) versus non-Empire nations committed to multipolarity and the international rule of law (in green). These are the battle lines in the struggle to control the planet’s political power structure and its remaining resources, as our civilization slides into global chaos and collapse.

Billmon at Moon of Alabama recently reposted a review by Arnaud Bertrand of a new short book by Clinton Fernandez, an Australian professor and former intelligence officer. The book is called Sub-Imperial Power and it attempts to explain the position and role of countries like Australia, Canada, Japan, Israel, and Germany in the current political order. The UK is a bit of a special case Sub-Imperial Power, as the sort of ‘lieutenant’ in the order.

In the book, Clinton acknowledges that the US is the current Imperial Power in the world, struggling to obstruct attempts by many countries (and, by its mandate, the UN) to establish a multipolar world in the face of the Empire’s growing and increasingly belligerent hegemony (political, economic and military dominance). Sub-Imperial Powers, he asserts, are not the vassals or client-states we imagine, but rather they have struck a bargain with the Imperial Power to enforce the Imperial Power’s rule in their geographic region, in return for political, economic and military favours (including “security”).

This makes considerable sense to me, as a Canadian with a typical fear-respect relationship with our southern neighbours. American corporations own the majority of Canadian public companies, and with that, substantial control over our economy, our natural resources, and much of our land and infrastructure.

Like many Canadians, I have always felt a combination of anxiety and resentment about this dependence, which always struck me as a devil’s bargain. When the US runs low on oil and water, which it will soon enough, it will have no hesitation in taking Canada’s, not by military force (though that remains a background threat), but by simply using its economic control to move resources it already effectively owns, south, as a ‘business decision’, without even asking permission. For example, US regulators actually control a number of critical Canadian dams, for the purpose of regulating cross-border water flow in the best interests of Americans. This control was quietly negotiated in return for — of course — cash. Like the cash that bought them control of Canada’s oil & gas industry.

It will do the same to Australia to access its mineral needs and to second the Australian military forces (recently equipped with US-standard planes and other war equipment) for its planned war against China. Sub-Imperial Powers do what they’re told, by the Empire’s boss, until they’re no longer needed or useful, or misbehave, and they are then summarily ‘terminated’.

What do Canadians actually get in terms of concessions and “security” in return for our dependence and subservience? Basically, we don’t get invaded by the US, as they’ve invaded and destroyed so many other countries that didn’t toe the line. Both major Canadian parties have toadied to the US consistently for the past 75 years. We (Canada’s government and mainstream media) quickly supported the Empire’s decision to fight a proxy war, through NATO, in Ukraine, and have been unflagging in our support for continuing that insane war. We (Canada’s government and mainstream media) likewise condemned Hamas for its attack on Israel (like Canada, Israel is a Sub-Imperial Power), and have enthusiastically supported Netanyahu’s retributive siege, genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

When you’re just a junior partner, you don’t argue with the boss. And you don’t criticize other Sub-Imperial Powers. Only the boss is allowed to do that.

It’s quite a revelation, when you’ve been scoffing at the gutlessness of Canadian ‘leaders’ to criticize the US for half a century, to realize that our ‘leaders’ have been conditioned, indoctrinated, and carefully ‘taught’ by their administrations to never openly challenge or criticize what the massive, ruthless, temperamental nuclear power next door commands. They’ll remind you of what happened to Gough Whitlam in Australia, or Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, or Salvador Allende in Chile, or dozens of other critics of the Empire.

But the real eye-opener of Clinton’s book IMO is that, if you really want to understand why the Empire and its governments are acting the way they are, even when those actions seem totally out of step with most citizens’ opinions, despite massive and systematic propaganda programs, you need to look beyond the state and government to the corpocracy that actually rules it. That is where the real power lies. That is who is actually making the decisions.

I know this is not a new idea, but it’s the first time I’ve seen it articulated so well, and used to help make much more sense of seemingly utterly illogical western government decisions.

The argument is that the US government, which is always portrayed as the bogeyman in international interventionist political and military actions and as a stooge for domestic corporate campaign donors, is actually, for all its staggering arrogance and hubris, just the ‘executive front’ for the US (Empire’s) corporate interests. Above the President, the corpocracy is pulling all the strings, telling the President what to say. Telling him what policies and programs to approve and veto. Writing many of the laws for him, especially on deregulation. Telling him what wars to launch and what governments to sanction, blockade, and overthrow. Telling him what countries and pipelines to bomb and giving him (barring a few intrepid investigative reporters) plausible deniability. Telling him which elected members of his party to shut up, on threat of primarying or defeating them in the next election.

Why doesn’t he object? Because he’s a good Company man. The Company, and on a larger scale the Corpocracy, speaks with one voice, through its President and Chair. It brooks no messy public dissent among its members. The President is mostly a figure head, preferably with good hair, who convincingly announces the Executive Committee’s consensus, even if he fervently disagrees with it.

So what is this corpocracy (my term, not Clinton’s)? It is absolutely not a secretive all-powerful group. Corpocracy is government by and in the interests of collective moneyed interests whose goals are entrenched in their corporate charters, and those goals are always to maximize growth and profit of the collective, the “shareholders”. Not in order to be mean and miserly and greedy, but to acquire as much wealth a possible and distribute it, not immorally but amorally, to its members. As Joel Bakan argues in The Corporation, corporations (and corpocracies) behave in inherently pathological ways, and they do so by design.

Indrajit Samarajiva has argued that the corporation was the first form of AI, and remains its dominant form. It has a life of its own, and through intensive lobbying and other ‘means’ it now has all the rights and privileges of ‘personhood’. And unlike messy democracies, it arrives at its consensus on how to amass and distribute wealth and profit (and the spoils of war) not on a one-person-one-vote basis, but on a one-investor-dollar-one-vote basis. It is unapologetically undemocratic. We invented it because it’s efficient.

It’s so efficient that the corpocracy — the large set of corporate oligopolies that now collectively dominate every significant industry in the Empire’s economy — has now amassed power that is vastly greater than that of any political group or party, to the point that it can and does now control all political parties with any chance of being elected to govern. And while campaign contributions play a role in this, what plays a far greater role is the ability of this collective to condition the leaders, administrators, and parties to believe that their in-group — the political and economic elite groomed to lead and run things and make important decisions — knows better than the citizenry what is best for the world, and that a corpocratic-style loyalty to this in-group and to behaviours and practices that have emerged in corporate culture over five centuries is what is needed to prevent chaos and tyranny from prevailing.

Biden recently put it this way: “American leadership is what holds the world together”. And Blinken followed it up in case that wasn’t clear enough: “The world doesn’t organize itself. When we’re not engaged, when we don’t lead, then one of two things happens: either some other country tries to take our place, but probably not in a way that advances our interests and values, or no one does, and then you get chaos.”

So if you want to understand why the US government does things that the citizens absolutely don’t like or want, this is the reason — the government doesn’t actually report to the citizens, if it ever did, and the citizens can easily be propagandized to fight among themselves when they threaten corporate interests anyway. And in the process, the befuddled citizens can be brought around to the “correct” ways of thinking (eg that China is now the principal enemy of Empire and an existential threat to “our” security) with sufficient propaganda and conditioning. And they’re right about that — Modern media are astonishingly effective at propagandizing and conditioning the beliefs and “values” of a largely ignorant, distracted and disinterested citizenry that lacks even basic critical thinking skills.

The government actually reports to the corpocracy, which now has far more power than the government, and the corpocracy’s power is growing as the US government sinks deeper into technical bankruptcy and as public resources become increasingly privatized, to the point government can finally be, as was infamously said by an arch-neocon, “drowned in a bathtub”.

But the corpocracy doesn’t actually want to run government, a messy, unpalatable and unprofitable business. Instead, having a crypto-democratic government doing the corpocracy’s bidding has its PR advantages, and so it will be tolerated unless one of the Tweedle parties puts forward a Bernie Sanders or some other figure who threatens to misbehave. The American Empire is not an empire of a government and its people. It is an empire of corporate interests, for whom the government and the people are just pawns to be manipulated.

I wrote an article a while ago, suggesting that once a corporate oligopoly has subdued all its competitors, it then turns on the remaining ‘enemies’ it can’t control — first, the government, that sometimes dares to offer services that could be run profitably by the oligopoly; second, foreign competitors (which have to be bought cheaply, or discredited and crushed à la Huawei or TikTok); and finally, the customers, who sometimes misbehave and complain about prices, service, or the shoddy quality of products, but whom a sufficiently large army of expensive corporate lawyers can subdue and silence without too much difficulty.

The corpocracy collectively operates the same way. It seeks to privatize (or dismantle or deregulate) just about everything governments do, because that maximizes its profit and growth. It seeks to dismantle foreign governments it doesn’t control and divide up those countries’ resources among its own members, and develop them for profit to be repatriated to the Empire. And it seeks to stifle political and other dissent among the citizens (its ostensible “customers”) and condition them (us) all to be obedient little consumers, mindful of what their advertising and PR and other forms of propaganda (through the mainstream and social media that they completely control) tells us is true, and tells us to do.

This is absolutely not a conspiracy theory. There is no secret cabal ‘controlling’ the corpocracy. It’s simply the effect of millions of shareholders independently doing what they’re incented and conditioned to do — buy up and shut down all competition, form oligopolies, and use their immense economic (and hence political) power to advance their own (profit and control) interests, all over the world.

This is not coordinated. The corpocracy is the complex, unorganized expression of the collective (conditioned) will of millions of shareholders and ‘stakeholders’, using the undemocratic leverage of wealth and power to do what they have been conditioned to believe is the right thing to do, and what the corporations that aggregate that wealth and power are absolutely compelled by their corporate charters to do. No one and no group is in charge of it. The corpocracy is simply a very effective vehicle for conditioning large numbers of people — within the oligopoly corporations, within the governments and administrations they have effectively indoctrinated over generations, and among the populace at large.

And perhaps what is most amazing is that while the corpocracy is conditioning all of us, we are in turn conditioning it, each in our own little ways. Sometimes, like in ending the Vietnam War, that conditioning can take some surprising turns. But mostly it is pretty sclerotic — like any mechanistic, uncontrolled behemoth, the larger a corporation or corpocracy gets, the less innovative and resilient it becomes, and the less able to change course.

This driving of the Empire’s political and economic decision-making by the preferences of the corpocracy, rather than the will of its citizens, is one of two overarching, complex political realities that, I think, currently dominate the precarious state of our contemporary political reality. Now I want to say a bit about the second overarching reality, which is the longing for people everywhere for stability and security in an increasingly insecure, precarious, collapsing world, and our propensity to be easily and totally conditioned in what we believe by our peer group and by the information we are exposed to.

Aurélien has written extensively on this subject, but one of his essential arguments, which he reiterates again in his most recent post, is that most people will support whatever political power group offers them the most security and stability in their lives, whether that is a democratically elected government (or a corpocracy masquerading as one), a populist or military dictatorship, a theocracy, an organized crime syndicate, or a street gang. Most people are, understandably, suspicious of large and opaque power structures of all kinds, and more aware of how much they are lied to by those in power than many would like to admit, but they will take what they can get.

In addition to that, their political sensitivities, fears, and hatreds, are conditioned over generations and centuries by the relentless stories (often, stories of outrage) that they have been saturated with for their entire lives. Part of human nature is the natural desire to belong to a group (humans don’t fare well in the wild outside of the protection of community), and belonging means adapting your worldview and “values” to those of the group.

Applying these three political ‘drivers’, can we make sense of some of the seemingly senseless things going on in our world? Let’s see:

• Trump, and other populist sociopaths in many countries: Many citizens of most countries, if you believe the surveys, believe their government doesn’t represent them, and nostalgically want to a return to simpler times when there was apparent order and homogeneity of beliefs, so they vote for whoever offers to throw out the current government (and the immigrant ‘Others’ they hold largely responsible) and make their lives easier/better. They’re right that the government doesn’t represent them. But having never studied history, most don’t realize that populists do not (and in fact usually cannot) represent their interests either. The result is often civil war, in the back rooms of power and possibly in the streets.
• Biden & co’s bloodthirstiness for war against Russia, China, and any of the other non-Empire countries that are seen to threaten the Empire: A good Company Man speaks for the corpocracy. The corpocracy wants to control Russia’s (and other countries’) resources, especially now that the Empire’s are running short, and it wants to control China’s manufacturing industries (having offshored its own capacity to the point it no longer knows how to make anything of value itself except munitions — oops!). So, in their minds, those Other countries’ governments need to be labelled as enemies to allow the corpocracy’s Empire to dismantle them and take over economically — a simple, sound business decision to deal with pesky ‘competitors’ through ‘liquidation’. And the hegemony of the corpocracy’s Empire depends on the continuation of the exorbitant privilege of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency, to command all nations to settle accounts in Empire money, and to be able to uniquely print unlimited amounts of Empire money without consequence. So, in their minds, any country that threatens that privilege must likewise be neutralized.
• America’s incapacity to provide basic universal health care for its citizens: To do this makes some sense in the long run — healthier, happier citizens are likely going to buy more stuff. But corporations and corpocracies are designed to think only about the short-run, the next year at most. Universal health care would cost money and require the raising of taxes, and make citizens less dependent on the corpocracy as well as hurting its bottom line. Not acceptable to corporate interests.
• The 2008 financial collapse and bailout: Well, the corpocracy doesn’t care if citizens go bankrupt, but they can’t allow their corporate members to go bankrupt, even as a result of their own stupidity. Their thinking: “Tell the President what to do. He knows what will happen if he disobeys.”
• Canada’s obsequious obedience to the US, despite its history as a neutral, peace-loving country: The Empire’s thinking: “You’re a junior partner in this organization, Canada. But play your cards right, and do what you’re told, and we’ll make space for you here in the corpocracy’s Empire. Lots of money in it for you if you do. Lots of grief for you if you don’t.”
• The Ukraine War: The Empire’s thinking: “Hmmm. Great opportunity to destabilize Russia and get access to their natural resources, and eliminate one of our biggest competitors. Should have finished the job in 1991 when we had the chance! Get rid of that Ukrainian government (2014), put in our own guy, and have him abolish the pro-Russian political parties, remove Russian as an official language, hire some Russophobes to bomb the Donbas, and apply to join NATO. That will get Russia to invade, and then we can use the Ukrainians to fight the war for us. Great opportunity to sell the corpocracy’s arms to the Ukrainians, and we won’t have to risk a single Empire body to get the Russians to overthrow their government, so we can then move in. Ukraine? Meh; it’s a hopelessly corrupt, failed state and not worth anything to us.”
• The War in Palestine: The Empire’s thinking: “Israel is a Sub-Imperial Power in our Empire. The Empire has always had Israel’s unconditional support, and they’ll do whatever we say. The least we can do is give them our unconditional support in return. After all, they’re our permanent aircraft carrier in the midst of those oil-rich Arab states who we just can’t manage to destroy or coerce into joining the Empire. So they’re committing genocide? Probably not terribly wise to do so so overtly, and it’s a dubious strategy in any case. But we need them, to help prevent the Arabs’ oil from falling out of our grasp. So hold your nose, don’t look, and don’t tell the Empire’s citizens what’s really going on. The Israelis have been abusing the Palestinians since we put them in charge of that department of Empire 75 years ago, and there’s no money in it for us to intervene. Not our problem to solve. Get HR and PR to deal with the fallout. It’ll blow over. Bad timing though, damn it.”

Of course this is a huge oversimplification of a set of massively complex political challenges. But it does seem to explain a lot.

And, once again, I’m not saying that the Empire (or the corpocracy) is ‘evil’. Their behaviour is pathological, for sure, but in our precarious, horrifically overpopulated, collapsing civilization some form of mental illness is inevitably present everywhere, in all of us. Some of the countries in green in the chart above have long histories of pathological behaviour themselves, and in some cases it is ongoing. All I’m saying is that human behaviour is entirely conditioned, and hugely driven by fear, and what it has led to in the world we find ourselves dealing with today can largely be explained by understanding that conditioning. Not condoning, understanding. There are no good guys and bad guys.

And the rise to power of the corpocracy as the driving force and muscle behind the power of the current western Empire, unintended as it most surely was, is also understandable. We thought it was for the best. Many of us still think it is.

But if the growing battle between the Empire (the red countries in the chart) and the Other countries (in green), leads us into WW3, you won’t see me taking sides. I’m just chronicling collapse, as best I can, telling it as I see it.

Fridge magnet by cedarmountainstudios.com, from Salt Spring Island BC

Why do we build the wall, my children, my children?
Why do we build the wall? We build the wall to keep us free.
That’s why we build the wall. We build the wall to keep us free.

How does the wall keep us free, my children, my children?
How does the wall keep us free? The wall keeps out the enemy,
and we build the wall to keep us free.
That’s why we build the wall. We build the wall to keep us free.

Who do we call the enemy, my children, my children?
Who do we call the enemy? The enemy is poverty,
and the wall keeps out the enemy, and we build the wall to keep us free.
That’s why we build the wall. We build the wall to keep us free.

Because we have and they have not, my children, my children!
Because they want what we have got!
Because we have and they have not! Because they want what we have got!
The enemy is poverty, and the wall keeps out the enemy,
and we build the wall to keep us free.
That’s why we build the wall. We build the wall to keep us free.

What do we have that they should want, my children, my children?
What do we have that they should want? We have a wall to work upon!
We have work and they have none.
And our work is never done, my children, my children,
and the war is never won.
The enemy is poverty, and the wall keeps out the enemy.
And we build the wall to keep us free
That’s why we build the wall. We build the wall to keep us free!

— Why We Build the Wall, Anaïs Mitchell, from Hadestown

Well, another month’s passed. We’re now up to as many as 500,000 “casualties” (the war industry loves euphemisms) in the NATO-Russia proxy war in Ukraine, with no end in sight. And we have both of the US Tweedle parties cheering the deranged career criminal Netanyahu’s genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestine, with upwards of 12,000 dead, half of them children, almost all of them civilians, and a couple of million to go. The 2024 US presidential election seems almost certain to be a rematch of the two demented thugs from 2020, with the choice between a slide into fascism, or a ratcheting up of brinksmanship and war with nuclear powers, or maybe both, depending on who ‘wins’. Meanwhile 2024 looks almost certain to be a year of multiple climate catastrophes, the hottest year on record by a margin worse than even the worst estimates of climate scientists a year ago, and another record year for carbon emissions, ecosystem destruction, and biodiversity loss. And global productivity of real goods, which has eked out a few more (wildly unequally distributed) gains at a staggering cost to the environment, is now stuttering, with nowhere to go but down.

Good thing we’re all doing our best.

COLLAPSE WATCH

The IMF totals up the cost of continuing to subsidize and prop up a dying and massively destructive industry. Thanks to Just Collapse for the link.

Bracing for impact: John Michael Greer encourages us to “collapse now and avoid the rush“.

Antarctica is melting: We were far too optimistic about the pace of polar ice loss, as usual.

Otis, harbinger of the future: No one knows how tropical storm Otis became a Cat 5 hurricane so fast. Maybe because parts of the ocean are now the same temperature as a hot tub?

First of the water wars: As the US west and central states run out of water, they’re starting to look at Canada’s dams and glaciers, and demanding their share.

Methane release cycle is accelerating: Just what we didn’t need. Tropics and wetlands are the main sources of the increase. Thanks to Just Collapse for the link.

The global economy stalls out: Tim Morgan explains once more why our economic systems will collapse faster than the ecological ones.

Corporatism meets the limits to growth: Tim Watkins explains how the relentless neoliberal/neoconservative agenda being pursued today mirrors the rise of corporatism (fascism) in the 1930s, and is on a collision course with our accelerating economic and ecological systems collapse. And nobody has a plan. A reading of the first chapter of his new book Death Cult, which draws heavily on John Ralston Saul’s The Unconscious Civilization.

The religion of perpetual growth: Jonathan Cook explains the divergence between the economic and ecological realities we are now facing, and the utter myths that the neocorporatists are spinning, which we’d love to believe are true.

LIVING BETTER

cartoon from Andrew Marlton’s First Dog on the Moon

Understanding what’s really going on: Aurélien suggests a mountain of books to help you understand current events and the history behind them, so you don’t have to rely on the bullshit from the MSM, the spooks, and the op-ed columnists. And he explains why each book is worth reading.

Circumventing the paywalls: FamousDrScanlon suggests using Spaywall to read articles buried behind corporate paywalls. Here’s an example of how it works.

How to die a good death: A compassionate and nuanced explanation by Michael Greger of the process called VSED: Voluntarily stopping eating and drinking. It’s legal, and not agonizing as the religious right would have you believe. But it is not a DIY process and does pose ethical challenges to sort through before you need to apply it. Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. You can read the transcripts below the videos if you don’t like watching videos.

Citizens’ assemblies to deal with polarization and political gridlock: A good summary of the uses of this direct democracy technique. Thanks to Kavana Tree Bressen for the link.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

The 1 megaton tonne MK-84 bombs the US is sending to Israel to facilitate the siege and genocide of Gaza; thanks to Indrajit for the link. In what must be the cleverest wordplay of the year, and drawing on how rich corporations are financially benefiting from the proxy wars, Indrajit calls this “Capital Punishment”.

“American leadership is what holds the world together”: That’s the highlight of Biden’s latest deluded White House speech, filled with a litany of inflammatory, propagandized untruths about his avowed “evil” “enemies”. This man really believes it — the very idea of a multipolar world, such as the United Nations was designed to facilitate, is completely anathema to him. His toady Blinken added in a subsequent speech: “The world doesn’t organize itself. When we’re not engaged, when we don’t lead, then one of two things happens: either some other country tries to take our place, but probably not in a way that advances our interests and values, or no one does, and then you get chaos.” What utter fucking arrogance! The rest of the world can only hope that America’s massive and insoluble domestic problems will soon cause it to vacate the world stage to address its own hopeless incompetence at home, and leave the rest of us to collaboratively sort out the problems of the world, most of them caused or exacerbated by America’s “leadership”, in a relatively sane manner. /rant

The bozos driving the bus: Aurélien explains why most of the world no longer cares much about how western “leaders” or their compliant media “explain” what (they think) is happening in the world. He also explains why genocide is so often a mumbled but real strategy for “resolving” conflict (even though it has almost never been successfully carried out). Excerpts:

The prevailing [neo]Liberal discourse of conflict at the moment is this uncomfortable and unattractive mixture of normative moral hysteria and half-understood technical legal concepts, which accounts for the incoherent, and frequently incomprehensible, way in which [the current] conflicts are reported and commented on. Worse, it also affects the way in which western governments see the options for management of crisis and conflict itself. For example, western governments cannot comprehend that what they say about the Gaza fighting is of no interest to Hamas, whose political and propaganda targets lie elsewhere, and for that matter of very limited interest to the Global South generally. Indeed, the West’s incapacity to understand the reality of conflict and atrocity, unwillingness to learn, and insistence on loudly trying to impose its mixture of moral bluster and legal fussiness pretty much rules it out as a credible actor.

It is not as if these things were actually that difficult to understand. We do know a great deal, from first-hand observation, about how conflicts arise and atrocities happen. The briefest possible summary would say that they typically occur because people feel themselves justified in acting that way—even to have no choice—and usually because they are scared…

The “us or them” discourse has fear as its starting-point, and fear is a major component in the advent of war and conflict. Fear that if I don’t kill my rival, he or she will kill me. Fear of the minority surrounded by a majority. Fear of the majority with a minority inside it. Fear that minorities will combine against you, perhaps orchestrated by an outside power. Fear that the Other will want revenge for what you did to them last time. Fear that the Other will do what they did to you last time, but worse. Fear that the weaker will become strong enough to challenge you. Fear that the stronger will attack just because they are stronger. In such circumstances, the only solution is to get your blow in first and hardest Only when you have completely wiped out the enemy can you be sure that there can never be a threat.

Corpocracy, Imperialism & Fascism: Short takes: Thanks to John Whiting for many of these links:

• The siege, genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestine:
  • Yanis Varoufakis summarizes how the west has been enabling it by allowing illegal occupation and apartheid for years.
  • Why it’s OK to change your mind about this war.
  • Why Netanyahu thinks expelling Palestinians (ethnic cleansing) is the answer.
  • Why UN rights leader Craig Mokhiber resigned over the UN’s refusal to intervene.
  • Former French PM Dominique de Villepin lays out the argument for an immediate internationally-brokered peace.
  • The position of Egypt in the conflict.
  • How the Palestinians see the conflict, and what might be done (surprised this has not been censored by CIA/Google).
  • How to talk about Gaza with those who don’t know the history or background.
  • An Egyptian confronts a British interviewer indoctrinated by anti-Palestinian propaganda.
  • The media’s gaslighting of us about the IDF’s hospital bombings.
  • Have the siege’s overt atrocities torn a hole in the credibility of the west’s entire PR/propaganda machine?
• Why Russia didn’t intervene in the latest US bombing of Syria.
• Turning away from Biden, an Arab-American asks: “What sense is there in an argument that values a lesser evil when that lesser evil is still so great? And in a separate interview, another Arab-American weighs in.
• Is Armenia’s new alignment with the US alienating it from its Caucasus neighbours?
• The rising tide of anti-Islamic hate in Canada. Ooh, I wonder why?
• US Supreme Court may re-legalize “bump stock” machine guns for anyone who wants to buy them. Y’know, for ‘personal security’.
• The toxic additive brominated vegetable oil, found in these products and more, is only now being reviewed by the US FDA; after the decongestant scandal, it makes you wonder what these ‘regulators’ actually do.
• As long-term bond yields spike sharply up, the mortgage market wobbles.
• Biden nominates arch-neocon war criminal Elliott Abrams to another important post.
• Following the US ‘lead’, thanks to tax breaks for the rich, the chasm between rich and poor in Canada is also growing quickly.
• Biden accelerates the building of Trump’s US/Mexico border wall. But it’s OK, they’ve outsourced it to private corporations. About 1,000 people die trying to cross it each year. And one of the Republican presidential hopefuls wants a similar wall on the Canadian border. Tweedledum! Tweedledee!
• The new US House Speaker shares weekly updates on his porn viewing with his son, produced by spyware developed for his church. Kinda like “just say no!”, the AI edition.

Propaganda, Censorship, Misinformation and Disinformation: Short takes:

• Arab-Americans protest US anti-Arab propaganda perpetrated by the media, right to their faces.
• The Atlantic “covers” events in the Middle East without talking with any Palestinians. That’s OK — they don’t talk with Russians or Chinese either. Don’t want to muddy readers’ thinking with contrary ideas. (God, to think I used to subscribe to this magazine!)
• The right-wing media recently combined with racist groups to inundate Australians with anti-indigenous propaganda — enough to change popular opinion and defeat a referendum that would have provided a simple “voice” for indigenous Australians in their government. The polls swung from 60% in favour to 60% opposed in the last few weeks before voting.
• Trumpian Canadian Conservatives hauled the head of the CBC, Canada’s public broadcaster, in front of a committee to shriek at her for not ensuring that the CBC adopted a uniform and unequivocal pro-Israel stand in its war reporting, and for daring to interview some Palestinians affected by the war.
• As of October 15th, an overwhelming majority (70%-to-8%) of Americans of all ages and both genders supported Netanyahu’s genocide in Gaza. That’s what a good propaganda campaign can buy you. A November poll saw the support dwindle to 50%-to-35% in one survey, and 36%-to-40% in another. Time for some more decapitating babies stories, I guess. The numbers for Canada are, as usual, consistent with but slightly less hawkish than the US polls.
• The NYT and other US mainstream media are planting stories accusing Russia and China of being antisemitic for not supporting the siege and not taking sides in the war. I suppose they feel the same about the more than 100 countries that voted in the UN for a ceasefire. Kinda wearing a bit thin.

CoVid-19 the endless saga: Short takes:

• Slight dip in the numbers this month, though on average the number of deaths and the number of people in hospital has been pretty constant throughout 2023. Cases are up (judging by water sampling), though the new variants seem slightly less deadly than previous ones. I’d guess the pandemic continues to kill about 1 person per million per day, and that in countries with decent hospital systems about 40 people per million are in hospital with CoVid-19 on any particular day. Of course these numbers are wildly skewed by age, so your risk is as much a 50x greater if you’re over 80. So I have the latest booster, mask in crowded public places, and will test if I have symptoms, and isolate if I test positive. It seems the least I can do for a top-5 killer of people my age.

FUN AND INSPIRATION

from the memebrary

Why Shakespeare didn’t care about getting his plays published: A fascinating review of the bard’s First Folio, with the argument that in those days, most communication, including learning play scripts, happened orally from those who’d memorized the lines, not from printed copy. And, he might have thought, a little improvisation might actually have made the show even better. There was a play about this, by the celebrated American playwright Lauren Gunderson, called “The Book of Will“. I saw it in Ashland Oregon, and it was one of the most extraordinary performances I have ever seen. Brilliantly written, and performed by a true ensemble cast. This all reminded me of an earlier post of mine on the pre-corporate model of how groups get things done, in the arts at least: by ensemble, which is like an enriched version of consensus, and through rehearsal, not textbook learning. So many corporate terms (players, roles, ‘staging’, ‘company’, performance reviews) actually came from the world of theatre.

More than just “production values”: Naked Capitalism’s Lambert Strether admits that, like me, he stans for K-Pop. But as much as I like Twice, I think XG is even better.

Talking to nobody: Radical Non-Duality speaker Tim Cliss delivers the impossible message and answers questions at a meeting in Copenhagen. Best parts are Friday and Sunday sessions. This is the reason I am so intrigued by the Entanglement Hypothesis. Favourite quote: “Life still appears to be the same hamster wheel. The only difference is, the hamster is dead.”

Freakonomics falsehoods: Rebecca Watson exposes the highly dubious arguments in the best-seller, especially the Roe vs Wade leading to lower violent crime rates 20 years later ‘correlation’. Heaven save us from pseudoscientists.

Cutting through the shit in online dating: Alicia Bunyan-Sampson asks potential dates to answer 30 questions of her own formulation, before she will date them. Some of them are serious, some of them are funny, and filling it in informs both parties what they might be in for in dating the other. Way better than the commercial ‘profiles’ of most dating services. There is no magic to the questions, and she suggests you create your own, to get the answers you really want to know before you meet someone new.

THOUGHTS OF THE MONTH

cartoon by Barry Blitt in the New Yorker

From Canadian living in China Daniel Dumbrill: “In the west you can change the party but not the policies; in China you can change the policies but not the party. Which is more important?”

From Caitlin Johnstone: “I feel sorry for Zelenskyy. The US abandoning your country for Israel is like your husband leaving you for his first wife.”

From my friend John Whiting on the state of America (reprinted with his permission):

An American academic friend who lives in a good neighborhood near D.C. recently wrote to me:

My wife told me this morning that if she didn’t have children, she’d emigrate somewhere else. It is becoming really unpleasant to be in public in the United States. The level of hostility is startling. The disparity of wealth is depressing. The struggle is ongoing. The roads are falling apart. Fewer and fewer human beings relate to customers anymore. I am flooded with commercials everywhere I turn, including on public radio. I have 100 to 130 emails every morning when I wake up and only five or six are from someone I want to hear from. Facebook is much the same. Instagram is gone. TikTok is a joke. I survive with self-medication.

From Aurélien on the schism in the Professional-Managerial Caste (PMC) in the west [slightly paraphrased]:

So there’s actually a deep and irreconcilable conflict between the interests of the main body of the PMC, and those of the real elites; often described as the “one per cent.” The main body of the PMC is subject to discipline, loyalty checks and compulsory ideological conformity, yet seems to enjoy little extra status or concrete advantages over ordinary people. The main body of the PMC is the historical descendant of the intellectual servant class: the tutors and secretaries, the functionaries in great houses, the lawyers and intellectuals. It is significant, perhaps, that this is the class which hijacked the French Revolution from ordinary people and took it to its conclusion. Like the intellectuals of the eighteenth century, today’s members of the main body of the PMC, prize (or affect to prize) logic, science and rationality. And like those intellectuals, they are, I suspect, boiling with frustrated ambition and anger, hating both the aristocracy [the elite portion of the PMC] on the one hand, and the common [working class] people on the other.

From Indrajit Samarajiva, on genocide:

The truth is it’s all one genocide, and we are all Palestinians.

It’s the same imperative as American colonizers attacking ‘merciless savages’ in their Declaration of Independence. Kill the native people and take their land… The Original Genociders are human rights experts now; their founding genocides are covered up and the money’s long-since laundered… White supremacism and human supremacism are one continuum, the separation of us from each other, from our animal kin, and from the land. It is, in the short run, the genocide of the Palestinians, but in the long run, it’s the ecocide of us all.

From my colleague Daniel Cowper, from Grotesque Tenderness:

Last Wishes

From the white void
hiding the sea,
familiar foghorns roll.

Why are they so worried?
There’s no better way to be buried.
When it’s my turn, wrap

my failed body in linen straps,
between the loops slip
skipping stones for weight.

Send me down the thermoclines
with silver dollars on my eyes,
watch me become a brightness,

shrinking and fading
as I sink. I’ll take
my Thieves’ Communion

with the crabs, bless them.
Let my meat repay the sea for meat
I’ve taken out with line, with net and trap.

No doubt, the dogfish
will find me and weasel
their fill from the loosening linen,

but bless them too. If I leave
debts behind,
and nothing in the till

to make them good, don’t pay the banks.
No, pay them, if you like,
it’s no concern of mine. By then

my only business will be
with sharks and crabs
and worms, the ocean’s undertakers,

among bottles and sunken
deadheads from which fishhooks
float translucent lines.