Public Service Announcement: If reading my links of the month is unbearably depressing for you, just skip down to the very bottom of this post and at least read Lyz Lenz’s little story on Mothering. Everything else here will probably be the same next month, anyway.
cartoon by Michael Leunig
No, I’m not making fun of protesters. Given the ever-increasing risks that protesters face everywhere in the west, protesters, and especially young ones, are seemingly the only ones brave and sane enough to challenge the increasing repression by our so-called “liberal”, “democratic” and “freedom-loving” governments.
What I take Michael Leunig’s cartoon to be referring to is that it seems to be in the nature of our species that people with power will always move to suppress dissent. Or as has often been observed, no one gives up power voluntarily. As collapse worsens, the ruling caste will either fight with every means at their disposal to hold onto their power, and try to commandeer all the lifeboats for themselves, or they will have power wrenched from them.
At another level, though, I think this cartoon points to the futility of us getting angry at our essential human nature. The atrocities, destruction, oppression and desolation of our planet are all the result of our individual and collective conditioned (and traumatized) behaviour, over which we have no control. We can and will of course be justifiably outraged at this behaviour and its ghastly consequences, but beyond it being outrageous, it is essentially just tragic.
As EO Wilson famously put it “Darwin’s dice have rolled badly for Earth”; the emergence of a species that always wants more, and is capable of endlessly producing more (until it can’t) seems an unlikely and tragic evolutionary turn.
So, thank you, protesters — please keep forcing us to face the truth, and stay safe.
COLLAPSE WATCH
chart by PNAS — look quick before they’re all gone; thanks to Jae Mather for the link
The utter madness of geoengineering: Richard Heinberg’s latest Museletter explains the horrors we could unwittingly leash upon the planet by messing with geoengineering. And he echoes a similar warning from European climate experts:
Once started, solar geoengineering cannot be stopped. Assuming that carbon emissions continued, the artificial sunshade would mask increasing amounts of extra warming. If geoengineering ceased abruptly—due to sabotage, technical, or political reasons—temperatures would shoot up rapidly. This termination shock would be catastrophic for humans and ecosystems. [“The sudden release of just one year’s worth of global warming energy”, Richard calculates, “would be the equivalent of nearly a thousand times the energy yielded by exploding the world’s entire nuclear arsenal.” So not only are we like kids playing with matches, not having the faintest idea what we’re doing, but if we stop once we’ve started, we’re basically doomed to extinguish life on earth.]
… but here come the geoengineering cheerleaders: When I was a youth, I was a huge fan of historian and environmentalist Gwynne Dyer’s writing, but now, it seems, he’s decided to go all in on geoengineering. And nukes. Yikes.
Here comes 3ºC: That’s the average expected increase by 2100 forecast by the world’s leading climate experts. More than 3/4 of them believe it will be 2.5ºC or more. They aren’t even trying to soften the blow anymore by saying “…if we don’t immediately do x“. They know we’re not going to do x. They know what this means, and they’re terrified.
The advent of lenocracy: What happens when governments, and other “players” in our broken economic system, give up the pretence of being able to do anything to avoid or even slow down economic collapse? It becomes a lenocracy, which, as John Michael Greer explains, does nothing whatsoever of value, but which, like cops and border guards in most countries, charges fees and takes bribes for not interfering in what the wealthy (and to some extent the rest of us) want to do. Everything hence becomes more difficult and more expensive, and you know ends up paying for that.
A sneak preview of the scavenger economy: The Honest Sorcerer reviews how things get done in India, which has already begun the transition from an industrial economy to the type of post-collapse scavenger economy that Anna Tsing told us was coming.
How not to build a viable food system: John Whiting warns us of the consequences of a monocrop industrial agricultural model that nutritionally starves, poisons and sickens us, and renders our entire food system fragile and unsustainable, in a presentation he made back in 2007, which is even more true today.
The pelletization of our forests: The Tyee’s Ben Parfitt explains how, especially since Fukushima, an ever-increasing proportion of our ‘forestry’ activities, including the clear-cutting of old-growth forests, is feeding the demand for wood pellets and other wood “biomass” that is simply being burned up.
A world without growth: Tim Watkins describes, in terms of what the day-to-day lives of all of us will be like, what it soon will mean to live in a world without growth. Another grim non-hypothetical preview of collapse; and it’s a long way down.
We’re already at maximum power on the warp drives, captain: Energy geologist Art Berman draws on several datasets and the work of several energy analysts to predict the trajectory of economic collapse. Thanks to Renaee Churches for the link.
LIVING BETTER
meme by Damian Barr; illustration by Barbara Kelley
CLT+LEC=Affordable housing: Housing developments that combine community land trusts with limited-equity co-ops offer the twin promises of truly affordable housing and a sense of real community. Here’s how the model works, and here’s a diagram explaining the legal and operating structure. Thanks to Kavana Tree Bressen for the link.
An alternative to the Tweedle parties: Jill Stein explains why she’s running for US president. Sadly, she’s become embroiled in a dispute with Cornel West, the only other candidate of reasonably sound mind.
POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL
Kent State University, May 4, 1970. National Guard opens live fire on mostly peaceful, unarmed demonstrators and others just passing by, murdering four and injuring nine others. The killers were found not guilty. Nothing, other than the new paramilitary riot gear, has changed in 54 years. Image from the Kent State University Library.
The Usual Empire Malfeasance: Corpocracy, Imperialism, Fascism, Propaganda, Misinformation, Disinformation and Censorship: Short takes (thanks to John Whiting for many of these links):
- JK Galbraith on voters’ realization that all the benefits of the current economic “recovery” are going to the ruling PMC caste, while for most the situation just keeps getting worse (thanks to Paul Heft for this link).
- Yanis Varoufakis has been banned from Germany for daring to tell the truth about the genocide in Palestine.
- Indrajit Samarajiva has been demonetized by Medium for daring to tell the truth about the genocide in Palestine.
- On the brutal suppression of dissent on western campuses: the violent police crackdowns, the Columbia faculty walkout over student suspensions, the Biden regime’s anti-free-speech rhetoric, a survivor of the Kent State Massacre speaks out, leading civil rights speakers cancel convocation speeches in protest, CNN compares student protesters to Nazis, and the rest of the western media dutifully follow suit. Thanks to Gerry Gras for some of these links.
- Israel continues to try to incite war with Iran to force the US further into its war on Palestine.
- The situation in Ukraine: Aurélien provides an explanation about the impossible dilemma of the west putting forces on the ground, and the even more impossible dilemma for the west to save face as the war ends. And correspondent Guy Mettan travels through the Donbas and reports on what he sees and hears as Russia consolidates its position.
- Alastair Crooke on the de-industrialization and collapse of Europe’s economies due to its pandering to US political and military demands, all for nothing. Thanks to Paul Heft for this link.
- The government of the Republic of Georgia has introduced a foreign influence transparency law, similar to that of the US, but US and anti-Russian groups are trying to topple it for doing so. Wonder what they don’t want people to know? Of course, in the western media, the opposition is being presented as a “pro-democracy” movement. Shades of Ukraine.
- Turkiye suspends trade with Israel over genocide; Israel threatens retaliation.
- Foot-in-mouth-disease corner: The doddering US president mistakes the cue instructions on his teleprompter for text to be read, sabotaging his message. Boris BoJo Johnston confesses that the defeat of Ukraine “will be the end of western hegemony”. Oops! And Tweedles Blinken and Romney admit they had to ban TikTok because “the emotion, the impact of images has a very challenging effect on the narrative [about the genocide]”.
- NYT repeats Big Pharma’s misinformation on the effectiveness of SSRI antidepressants, after the “research” was revealed to be fraudulent.
- The leaked NYT staff memo telling journalists what they can and cannot say about the genocide.
- Since 2018, the average tax rate for US billionaires has been lower than that for the bottom half of wage-earners.
- The new $300B tax windfall for ultra-rich Americans on their 401(k)s.
- Poison street drug deaths continue to spiral upwards, and are now the leading cause of death for young Canadians.
- Biden approves colossal new oil terminal, the largest in the US, with emissions equal to 90 coal-fired power plants.
- The Canadian right wing grows stronger: Alberta Conservative Premier wants to be able to veto municipal laws and expel municipal politicians she doesn’t like. Federal Conservative leader plots to use “notwithstanding” clause to override Canadian Bill of Rights and recriminalize abortion (and MAID). And the xenophobic CSIS wants new powers to surveil and control “foreign interference”.
- The staggeringly incompetent and politically tainted WHO finally admits, far too late, that CoVid-19 was/is primarily spread through “airborne transmission”, and not by “droplets” on surfaces. (And yes, I’m still getting boosters — #7 recently — and still masking in crowded public spaces.)
Wendell Berry on the “urban elite’s” misunderstanding of rural America: The distinguished 89-year-old novelist, poet and environmental activist minces no words when he chastises the NY Review of Books for its ignorant and condescending dismissal of the grievances of rural America. Apparently the NYRB doesn’t like to be taken to task — they declined to publish his letter to the editor. He wrote a similar, and even harsher, critique of Paul Krugman’s equally ignorant and condescending attack on rural Americans. I suspect it was received with similar hostility. What Wendell writes is important, but few of us (and the urban/rural mutual misunderstanding and antagonism is not unique to the US) are likely to listen. One point he makes is: If you don’t take the time to visit and pay attention to other cultures, including those in your own country, you will never understand or appreciate them, and that ignorance can quickly turn to mutual distrust. (Thanks to Paul Heft for these links.)
FUN AND INSPIRATION
cartoon by Everett Glenn in the New Yorker; add your own caption
The fascinating way fruit flies fly: A fascinating video explaining their flight agility bears witness to the astonishing complexity of even nature’s “simplest” species.
A feminist review of The Idea of You: Lyz Lenz at her brightest and funniest, reviewing the new romance flick.
The enshittification of everything AI touches: Cory Doctorow explains all the ways AI can be, and is being, used to enshittify every corner of the internet, from your search engine results, news sites, product “reviews”, social media, and even sites licensed under Creative Commons licences. As has often been said, for every promising new technology there will be ten assholes ready to exploit it for profit and the immiseration of others.
THOUGHTS OF THE MONTH
page from Lewis Hyde’s A Primer for Forgetting
From Caitlin Johnstone, on the American voter’s “choice”:
Remember, all this fascism would feel way more fascismy under Trump… You don’t have to like what’s happening to your country. You don’t even have to pay attention to it. All you have to do is make sure you keep telling everyone to shut up and stop criticizing the president and to tick that little box next to Biden’s name in November. Because it’s just a tough fact that in order to defeat Orange Mussolini, we’re going to have to get comfortable with fascism.
and on a similar note, from Indrajit Samarajiva, on the American voter’s “choice”:
There’s no need to wait for Trump to bring in fascism, it’s alive and kicking students in the teeth already. In many places (like NY and California), it’s happening under a Democratic President, governor, and mayor. America’s two parties are just left and right boot, stamping on a human face forever.
From Lyz Lenz, on Mothering:
I was going to write a small essay about how I bought a couch and economic fear and insecurity. But my 13 yo came into the office, saw me typing, and said, “No one cares about you buying a couch, mom!” I will still write about the couch and money. But for today, I want to write about mothering.
This same kid had a bunch of friends over on Saturday. And they are such women and also such children. Eating sushi, jumping on the trampoline. I’ve known my daughter’s friends since they were in kindergarten. I am not friends with their parents. But we are all familiar strangers in each other’s lives, pulled together by the gravitational force of our children.
After the girls left and my daughter and I were snuggling in bed she began to tell me that she and her friends have a list of which parents houses are good for which things.
One kid’s house is good for snacks. One house is good for being chill. Another house is the fancy house. I was furious my house wasn’t any of those houses. But I listened, finally asking, “Okay, what is my house good for?”
And my daughter said, “Oh, your house is the safe house. It’s the house we all know we can go to if anything goes bad.” She told me that her friends know I am accepting. And that throughout the years of playdates, birthday parties, and field trips they’ve learned this house I’ve built is the home where they can go to be themselves.
After my daughter went to bed, I sat on my sofa, the one she thinks no one cares about, and cried.
Greetings from Türkiye. Just wanted to add that Erdoğan suspended trade with Israel only after immense public pressure. When people from all sides of the political spectrum put aside their differences for a single cause even dictators cave in.
Thanks for another enjoyable Links post!
Thanks, Daoudjan, for the links! I always look forward to them, even if they are always quite depressing. Excellent cartoon!
Turns out Tim Watkins is a climate change denier/minimize – just coming out of the closet. He’s far from the first Angry, White, male, Boomer coming out. Fuck him. Hiding all these years is the same as lying. Perhaps he will go full neo alt-right to replace his lost readers just like Jim Kunstler had to. Lying climate change deniers gotta pay bills to.
I hope they both stay alive long enough to fry.
Hmm. DrS, are you basing that on the article I linked to above, A World Without Growth? If that’s the case, one of us is reading him wrong. I think he’s saying that we’re on the horns of a dilemma — our economy depends on perpetual growth, but the resources don’t exist to sustain that. So we’re going to soon be back in a world without growth, and it’s going to be awful, not because growth is good, but because our dependence on it is going to make its absence excruciatingly difficult, since we’ve assumed it could go on forever, and based our entire economy on that assumption.
Or am I misunderstanding something? (It wouldn’t be the first time.)
Thank you for these monthly links. So much of what you post is insightful, important, even brilliant. And then there are your posts about various geopolitical events, such as Russia/Ukraine, which seem shockingly slanted.
Even with your current beliefs, maybe you have the capacity to take a mental step back and contemplate the possibility that you may have bought into an ecosystem of propaganda that was created to lead as many people as possible to believe a host of falsehoods that serve the purposes of a few rogue autocracies like Russia and China.
This recent article carefully spells out how it works:
https://www.anneapplebaum.com/2024/05/06/democracy-is-losing-the-propaganda-war/
Please, for the sake of the importance of truth, would you consider reading it thoroughly, and see if you can imagine the possibility that what it says could be true and that the places where what it says conflicts with what you (and many other plainly smart people from Michael Hudson to John Mearsheimer) believe could be exactly the places where you, and they, have been taken in by that web of propaganda?
I wonder, have you heard and accepted any of the false narratives the article mentions? Here’s a list:
1. That 26 secret U.S.-funded biolabs in Ukraine conducted experiments with bat viruses, that U.S. officials had confessed to manipulating “dangerous pathogens,” and that Ukraine was planning to use migratory birds as a delivery vehicle for bioweapons, infecting the birds and then sending them into Russia to spread disease.
2. That many Ukrainians are Nazis and Ukraine is a puppet state run by the CIA.
3. That civic protest movements are always the work of outsiders, and that popular opposition leaders are puppets of foreign governments (when, in fact, the protests that led to democratic transitions in the Philippines, Taiwan, South Africa, South Korea, and Mexico; the “people’s revolutions” in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989; the Arab Spring in 2011; and the color revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia were all begun by those who had suffered injustice at the hands of the state, and who seized on the language of freedom and democracy to propose an alternative).
4. That Nancy Pelosi once praised the violence of Hong Kong protesters. (In fact, she had praised peaceful demonstrators, not violence.)
5. That European governments are stealing children from straight families and giving them to gay couples.
6. That Russian-controlled forces didn’t shoot down Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 over Ukraine in 2014, and that the Ukrainian army or the CIA did it, or that dead people were placed on a plane to fake a crash and discredit Russia.
7. That Putin’s illegal annexation of southern and eastern Ukraine, in which Ukranians were tortured and Ukrainian children kidnapped, was to protect Russia from the West.
8. That the Russian massacre of Ukrainian civilians at Bucha was staged, that Ukrainian soldiers were running away from the front lines, and that Zelensky appeared drunk on television.
9. That NATO leaders were planning to deploy Ukrainian paramilitary troops to France to quell pension protests.
10. That Biden sent a neo-Nazi criminal to fight in Ukraine.
11. Rumors about a new virus supposedly spread by mosquitoes, aiming to smear Western doctors, clinics, and philanthropists, and to build a climate of distrust around Western medicine.
12. (After the collapse of the Kakhovka dam in Ukraine last summer, a major environmental and humanitarian disaster caused by Russian bombing over many weeks) that Ukraine had destroyed it.
13. (After the ISIS terrorist attack on a concert hall in Moscow in March) that the Ukrainian government was behind the attack.
14. That the Election Integrity Partnership, a group that tracks election rumors coming from across the political spectrum and has observed that the MAGA right is far more prolific and significant than any other source, conspired with the Department of Homeland Security to censor 22 million tweets.
Of course, these 14 are only a few recent selections from the ocean of propaganda being put forth to make autocracies appear, at least, less dysfunctional than democracies.
And yes, the Western press also has its biases and also sometimes promotes false narratives, but that doesn’t make acceptance and repetition of false narratives promoted by Russia & China any more reasonable.
Chris: I regularly read the views of people who I generally disagree with, because I think it’s important to stay up to date with the thinking of various groups across the political spectrum. I have subscribed to Ms Applebaum’s publication The Atlantic and read it until I found it so intolerant, biased and hate-filled that I could no longer bear it. I know ordinary people who live and work in Russia and China, and I am far more inclined to listen to them than to people like her. The links I provide about ongoing wars and other political and economic news are my attempt to bring some balance to the firehose of propaganda and misinformation spouted by our uninformed and incompetent political leaders and the mainstream media, including your Ms Applebaum.
I have read a great deal about the troubled history of Ukraine, and was tracking events there long before the start of the 2022 invasion, and even before the civil war that has wracked the country since the 2014 coup. I know what has actually happened there, from multiple sources that have no axe to grind, and it is light years from the official narrative that the mainstream media and the US administration would have us believe. But of course, you’re welcome to your opinion otherwise.
Okay, so she sometimes writes for a publication you don’t like. That by no means implies that she is “uninformed and incompetent”! Would you be willing to read her article anyway and just consider the possibility that you some of your beliefs may be based on (people who were taken in by) a parallel, non-mainstream firehose of propaganda and misinformation? I’m just asking you to read it once carefully with an open mind.
What could give you such confidence that your collection of sources in Ukraine (how many of them have you actually met?) are more reliable than Applebaum’s thousands of personal and professional contacts and decades of dedicated journalism and lived experience there? (She was born in the US but lives in Poland – see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Applebaum – and is a Pulitzer prize winning author and journalist who has written multiple books specifically about authoritarianism, Eastern Europe, and Ukraine.) Given this, and the fact that you live in Canada, I think we can safely assume that her knowledge of what has actually happened in Ukraine is orders of magnitude broader and deeper and informed by a far wider variety of Ukrainians’ perspectives than yours has any realistic possibility of being.
I imagine that what gives you such confidence is that your Ukrainian sources confirm your beliefs by saying things that sound likely to you. That would make them feel compelling to you, but it doesn’t make them as reliable or as well informed as someone like Applebaum. That said, if any of your trusted Ukrainian sources write publicly, let me know where, because I’d be interested to see their perspectives as well.