Links of the Month: July 2024

yep, whether you look at us through a moral lens, a scientific lens, a philosophical lens, or a satirical lens, we cannot help be only and exactly what. and who, we are; cartoon by Will McPhail

Everyone’s obsessed with the Trump assassination attempt. Except me, apparently. Everything I know about American politics suggests that, as much as the politicians and their media scribes tell us this US election is a life-and-death fight over freedom and democracy, both the clowns running for the major parties have demonstrated over their four-year terms two things: (1) They don’t give a fuck about freedom or democracy, or the crises facing the world, or the citizens they purportedly “represent”, and (2) You can be an incoherent, raving psychopath or an incoherent doddering sponge-brain, and it doesn’t matter a bit as to what actually gets decided and what actually gets done in the halls of power in the US. The administration of the US political machine is hopelessly broken, running on autopilot, sclerotic, ignorant, and incapable of doing anything other than starting wars and getting people riled up, and it just serves as a revolving door between the government and the corporate C-Suite. Same incompetent “caste of characters”.

I think my attention is better focused on creative work, so you might see a shift in that direction in my future posts.

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COLLAPSE WATCH

average global surface temperature stayed at 1.5ºC above preindustrial average for the 12th straight month; at 16.66ºC, the average global surface temperature in June 2024 broke an absolute record for the 13th straight month; the planet has not been this hot since pre-human times; chart from Europe’s Copernicus C3S

An economy without sound oversight or rudders is built to fail: Tim Morgan explains how massive complexity risk, resource depletion, and government, corporate, and regulator ignorance and incompetence have led to a fragile, precarious, and unsustainable economy.

Fossil fuel use and emissions continue to accelerate: We just broke records for consumption and carbon emissions, again, and the trend is not even slowing down.

The utter folly of fracking: Andrew Nikiforuk explains how the extraction of hydrocarbons by fracking is the most destructive, risky, polluting and costly fossil fuel foolishness yet.

Something wrong with our heads: The Honest Sorcerer asks whether wetiko, the indigenous name for the European culture of conquest, colonization and resource exhaustion, is behind our massively destructive ways of doing things.

Small brags: My explanation of the inevitability of civilization’s collapse has been covered by Charles Hugh Smith on ZeroHedge. And Just Collapse has linked to my collapse scorecard.

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LIVING BETTER

drawing by Chaz Hutton; thanks to Wendy Bandurski for the link

Michoacán rejects ruinous avocado monoculture: It’s taken an actual ‘war’ by indigenous-led groups in México to combat the horrific destruction of forests, water supplies and arable land by globalist corporations seeking profits from avocados. Thanks to Tom Atlee and Kavana Tree Bressen for the link.

And México also rejects GMO corn: Bayer/Monsanto has finally abandoned its long and expensive lawsuits against the Mexican government over the government’s prohibition of US-government-subsidized GMO corn and the toxic Roundup/glyphosate poisons used to maintain it.

Young people opt for voluntary sterilization to get around abortion and contraception restrictions: Tubal ligations have doubled and vasectomies tripled since Roe was overturned in the US.

Canada criminalizes coercive control: MPs unanimously voted to make patterns of abuse that often lead to domestic violence and murder, illegal. Now, the question is, is the new law enforceable?

Nate Hagens interviews Daniel Schmachtenberger on creating a better society: Daniel is brilliant, and always worth listening to, but this time his defence of a better type of “progress” struck me as naive and idealistic. Your experience may vary.

Harper’s replaces your doom scroll with one long weekly paragraph: One of the few remaining un-coopted US magazines has a weekly, sassy, irreverent, concise but information-packed summary of the week’s top stories you can subscribe to by email, with supporting links if you really feel you have to read more detail.

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POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

Two days ago at the NATO summit, Biden referred to Zelenskyy, standing right beside him, as “President Putin”, and went on to describe Kamala Harris as “Vice-President Trump”. How on Earth can 36% of Americans possibly “approve’ of his performance? Chart from CNN.

Imperialism, Militarism & Fascism: Short takes:

• Peter Dimock stresses the urgency of progressives seizing back control of the Democratic Party from its war-obsessed establishment, and dumping Biden and his ilk
• AOC capitulates to the party’s dominant right wing, doing a pro-Zionist podcast with supporters of Palestinian genocide
• India’s extremist Modi government has arrested Arundhati Roy and charged her with terrorism
• In Canada, government-financed “Catholic” hospitals refuse physician-approved MAID treatments, forcing patients to transfer to hospitals that honour the law
• In 2023 alone, 171,000 Americans were forced to cross state lines to get abortions
• Jill Stein provides a voice of reason in responding to the ghastly Biden/Trump debate (thanks to Gerry Gras for the link)
• Biden’s dementia has been in evidence for his entire term as President
• Iowa’s new blanket abortion ban will inevitably condemn many pregnant women to death
• The US Supreme Court’s latest ruling puts presidents above the law, even if they assassinate political opponents; much evidence that could be brought against them in criminal cases will now be inadmissible; and dissenting justices say the ruling “makes a mockery of the principle that no one is above the law”
• The Bundys, who perpetrated dangerous armed stand-offs with government officials in three states, remain free and now have a supporter ‘cult’ defending them
• Former US Joint Chiefs chair Mark Milley, defending the Israeli genocide, remarkably argued the following: “Before we all get self-righteous about what Israel’s doing, and I feel horrible for the innocent people in Gaza that are dying. But we shouldn’t forget that we, the United States, killed a lot of innocent people in Mosul, Iraq. That we, the United States, killed 12,000 innocent French civilians—and here we are on the 80th anniversary of Normandy—on the prep fires for Normandy. We destroyed 69 Japanese cities—not including Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We slaughtered people in massive numbers – innocent people who had nothing to do with their government.”

Propaganda, Censorship, Misinformation and Disinformation: Short takes:

• The Pentagon ran a high-budget propaganda campaign to discredit Chinese CoVid-19 vaccines, likely causing thousands of unnecessary deaths in places like the Philippines.
• A review of the litany of lies about China that have been and are being planted and propagated in western media. Even right-wing sinophobic publications like Foreign Affairs and the Economist admit western governments and media have gone too far, and it’s hurting both sides.
• How the western media are continuing to manufacture consent for wars, genocides, and other Empire misdeeds.
• Rebecca Watson deconstructs the latest nonsense from the CoVid-19 lab leak conspiracy theorists.

Corpocracy & Unregulated Capitalism: Short takes:

• The latest US Supreme Court ruling substantial prevents regulatory agencies from doing their job to reduce corporate malfeasance; it will also allow corporate criminals to continue to manipulate stock prices for personal gain, and to lie, cover up illegalities, and intimidate opponents and whistle-blowers.

Administrative Mismanagement & Incompetence: Short takes:

• More explorations by Aurélien of the incompetence of the western Professional Managerial Caste, with a focus on Europe.
• BC’s provincial Health Officer developed a substantial report full of comprehensive and courageous recommendations for actually dealing with the poisoned street drugs emergency. The provincial government immediately rejected them (hint: it’s an election year).
• More on the staggering waste of money and effort going into developing a patently non-viable “hydrogen economy”.

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FUN AND INSPIRATION

image by Kirk Diedrich on the “man or bear” meme, riffing off the distracted boyfriend meme; via Lyz Lenz

Weighing in on “man or bear”: Laura Killingbeck, inveterate long-term bike traveler, discusses how women learn to deal with patriarchy and its dangers, because they have to. Once you’ve read it, you’ll ‘get’ the meme image above. Thanks to Wendy Bandurski for the link.

Lost pet donkey is adopted by elk herd: Powerful story on all sorts of levels.

Fighting Edith Wharton’s ghost: Lovely writing by Lyz Lenz about the challenges of writing stories, real and unreal, about characters who are all too believable, and unbelievable. Especially when you’re a woman. The horrific recent revelations of Alice Munro’s daughter echoed as I read Lyz’s story. Excerpt:

We are inheritors of narratives of the past. From bachelorette parties to changing our last names, we continue to follow customs in our country, rarely thinking about how they trap us. Breaking out of these narratives is the hardest work. It requires force and imagination, and it’s so lonely. As Simone de Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex, “And without a doubt it is more comfortable to endure blind bondage than to work for one’s liberation; the dead, too, are better suited to the earth than the living.”

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THOUGHTS OF THE MONTH

cartoon by Dan Piraro & Wayne Honath (Bizarro)

From Frederick Barthelme‘s short story Elroy Nights:

As I drove across the bridge, I thought how we’d started as young people insisting on living the way we wanted, and how we’d gradually retreated from that, from doing what we wanted. Things change. What you want becomes something you can’t imagine having wanted, and instead you have this, suddenly and startlingly not at all what you sought. One day you find yourself walking around in Ralph Lauren shorts and Cole Haan loafers and no socks. You think, How did this happen? It isn’t a terrible spot, and you don’t feel bad about being there, being the person you are in the place you are, with the wife or husband you have, the step-daughter, the friends and acquaintances, the house and tools and toys, the job, but there is no turning back. You have a Calendar full of things to do. You have an iPhone and names and addresses and contacts, and there is no way back. Even if there were a way back, you couldn’t get there from here, and you probably wouldn’t go if you could. The effort required isn’t the kind of effort you can make anymore.

From Hank “Bonesaw” Lucille (apparently a guru invented by Caitlin Johnstone):

I’ve killed off so many Hanks along this crazy path. Angry Hank. Hank the victim. Hank the cage fighter. Tough guy Hank, and then spiritual guy Hank after him. One of the last ones to leave was Cool Hank, but he had to go, because, man, you really do not get to be cool on this path. You really, really don’t. Being radically truthful on every level leaves you raw and undisguised, right out in the open, in all your dorky awkwardness. If you really let old lady Truth have her way with you, you’ll never get to feel cool again. How could anyone be cool with their fuckin’ ribcage splayed open to the whole entire world?

From Shuly Xóchitl Cawood, from Something So Good It Can Never Be Enough:

The Man I Did Not Marry

met me for grilled chicken sandwiches on whole wheat laced
with mayonnaise in a little underground pub on High Street. I was leaving
for the summer, and he was staying, but I kept taking the treeless highway back

into the city, and sometimes we would walk the concrete pathways
between buildings and stop. We talked about the other people in our lives
to make a crowded conversation. I was working then for the agronomy

office, writing up stories of crops and pests and the petulance of weather,
how a hard rain could save or spoil, you never knew, it depended on what
you had done to prepare. Every day that summer, the heat beat down

on every road. Soybean fields made promises they could not keep. I wrote
about storms, but what did I know? I went underground for lunch
where there were no windows. People came in and out, finished quickly,

but we lingered for hours, talking of nothing, ordering the same thing
as before, unaware of what time can do, how it, too, can save or spoil
a whole field of knowing. If the rain came, we pretended we could not hear it

from so far below.

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