how to save the world

(right click on the image, or click here, to open full size in another tab/window; I made this in 2015 so it’s a bit dated)

A lot of people who profess to be atheists or pantheists in their youth, tend to adopt religions when they get older. More than anything else, this seems due to their running out of capacity for feeling responsible for all the world’s ills. Deciding to believe in some higher power and authority — a god, a guru, a Gaia — to some extent gets you off the hook.

Most of my friends throughout my life have been salvationists of one stripe or another (right half of the chart above), and the lion’s share of them have been what I would call Humanists — people who, in wikipedia’s words have a “philosophical stance that emphasizes the individual and social potential and agency of human beings”. They believe that humans can and must exert social and ethical responsibility for our personal and collective actions, and the stewardship of the entire planet. More importantly, they believe, mostly, in the myth of progress, and that there is almost nothing that humans cannot accomplish if we set our minds to it.

This can, of course, be exhausting, especially when things are going particularly badly for the human experiment, as they are now.

Religions offer the comforts of tradition, rigour, continuity and ritual, all salves for the exhausted and disenchanted. In most people’s lives, it seems, there comes a time when they just want to be told what to do, what to think, and what to believe by someone they trust, instead of being overwhelmed by having to make personal, informed, rational, caring decisions about every little thing.

Because few of my friends have been religious, my observation of this has been mostly in, of all places, the workplace: In most offices and factories, a ready co-dependence develops between bosses, who come (I believe psychopathically) to believe they are divinely inspired/gifted to lead and impose their decisions on others, and their exhausted, clueless workers, who are more than content to leave their brains and hearts at the door when they arrive at work. Like military troops on the front lines, they run no risk for simply following orders, and are usually rewarded for doing so even when the results are disastrous. (Though, as in most hierarchies, a “suck up, shit down” culture prevails.)

I see the same mentality among the devoutly religious — a willingness to cede personal authority and control over their own decisions and lives, in return for absolution from any ‘sins’ because they’re doing some god’s will. It’s perhaps no coincidence that much of the military comes from areas with high levels of religious fundamentalism.

More devout atheists might see this as moral and intellectual laziness, but my sense is that it’s mostly a matter of conditioning — We tend to believe the same things as the people around us, and in our modern isolated world where most never meet people with radically different ideas or cultures one-on-one, those beliefs are often never challenged and hence fervently held. And to some extent it’s also a matter of exhaustion, of overwhelm, of giving up when everything seems impossibly complex. So, a retreat to the simple.

I do believe we’re all doing the best we can, but I don’t believe this the same way humanists do. Humanists would say “We need to try even harder, and keep trying”. Whereas, as a non-believer in the cruel philosophy of free will, I don’t believe we have any choice whatsoever in what we do, think, or believe. People who are conditioned by other humanists and not exposed to other belief systems are going to become humanists, full stop.

The life of a humanist is not an easy one, holding all that sense of responsibility, frustration, anxiety, distress, despair and grief about what we have done and are doing to each other and to this planet, when, in their minds, we could have done better.

It’s also a trap: If you’re a Denialist, someone who always believed civilization was going to last forever, you have a lot of pretty easy alternative salvationist political philosophies to migrate to. If you’re religious, you can become a Rapturist. If you’re a one-world idealist, you can become a Globalist and pray to the Davos gods. If you think Elon Musk is not deranged and love reading about singularities, you can become a Technotopian. If you’re drawn to new-agey gurus who urge you to transform to purple, you can become an Integral. If none of these appeals to you, the Humanist tent is big enough for everyone else, and you can go on believing that salvation will come, though it’s going to take a lot more work than you’d hoped.

But once you’ve become a Humanist (and, damn, I was there a long time), you’re trapped. There’s no going back to denial, or to any of the forms of simplistic, idealistic utopian thinking. And going forward to accept that civilization’s collapse is inevitable, no matter what, is a violation of everything you believed, an admission of the personal and collective failure of our entire species. Ugh!

And even if you are able to admit that failure, and move on to collapsnik thinking, it doesn’t get any easier: Become a Deep Green Activist, and risk imprisonment, death, and losing most of your friends, when you know nothing you do will change the end game anyway. Or become a Communitarian, trying to create a functional system that is constantly undermined by the existing economic system and replete with really dysfunctional people who were drawn to communitarianism out of desperate need rather than idealism. Or become an Existentialist and watch your Humanist friends call you a lazy defeatist and “part of the problem”. Or become a Voluntary Human Extinctionist and watch them call you a misanthropic nihilist. Or become a Near Term Extinctionist and have them call you a nutcake. The options are all grim.

Better to stay in the Humanist camp, even if it is a trap. At least your friends will still talk to you.

Paul Kingsnorth was one of the first to articulately convey the absurdity of believing that civilization’s collapse can be avoided or mitigated. He got a lot of flak for that, but he co-started (with Dougald Hine) a movement (Dark Mountain). That movement, unfortunately has devolved, like Rob Hopkins’ and Ben Brangwyn’s Transition movement, into yet another idealistic humanist movement, preoccupied with the need for “social justice” and drawing on “indigenous wisdom” and “mythic transformation” and other platforms of belief about what we can and should do to make the world, and ourselves, “better”.

Humanists can be a bit of a cancer — they will infect and take over anything they touch. But the two movements were (like the humanist Occupy movement) fascinating while they lasted.

Paul has recently converted to Orthodox Christianity and regularly speaks on the subject. He has also “changed sides” and now opposes all government mandates, including vaccines. He has not become a salvationist, but his endless search for a “new story” to replace the hopelessly flawed story of civilization has taken him to embrace religion. He now asserts that the “question of the times” is: “If/when I fully accept the reality of this time, how am I called to live a faithful, fully human life, here and now?” Called by whom? Faithful how and to whom? ‘Human’ meaning what? I guess he knows what he means. To me this question is as meaningless as “What am I going to do once the Rapture comes?” But I bet a lot of people like his question, especially the humanists who can take it to mean almost anything they want.

When I met him at a Dark Mountain gathering during its early days, a group of us attempted to identify the myths held by and underlying our civilization, and some of the new myths embraced by its discontents. Of course, myths aren’t necessarily false, and they are the foundation of almost all religions. Paul seemed nonplussed when, back then, I suggested that, rather than look for a new story, we should give up on stories, and myths, and see whether, like wild creatures, we could live just fine without them. So now he has his new story, an ancient one, and I am still trying to live without one, shaking off the ones that seem, like burs, to cling to me at every turn. Salvation, and collapse, are, of course, stories too. And all stories are fictions.

Living with “unknowingness”, with uncertainty and complexity and ambiguity and endless cognitive dissonance is something humans seem disinclined to do. I will never understand that about most people, and have no idea why I embrace them with such endless curiosity and joy.

Beliefs and ideas and stories, to me, are fascinating, and fun, and exploring them is a bit like trying on new clothes. They can be pretty, and flattering, but after a while they wear, and wear on you, and fade and fall apart. They are affectations, unnatural, and they start to smell when they get old.

I suppose I pick on humanism because it afflicted me for much of my life, and still characterizes most of those I know. It’s an old and compelling story, like the story of progress, but any objective examination of the evidence shows it to be untenable.

Just like all the other stories that so many people, so fervently, believe.

Chart of relative stock market values since 1870, from Morningstar via Indrajit Samarajiva. Note that the scale is logarithmic. Since 1870, while energy and industrial production have increased by a factor of 20, stock “values” have increased by a factor of 20,000. 

Economic systems are horrifically complex and how they operate is generally poorly understood. Economists who glibly claim they understand what’s going on, and that it’s possible to control unwanted economic events through managed ‘interventions’, have been repeatedly proved wrong.

In fact, you might seriously ask whether there even is such a thing as an ‘economic system’, since it’s essentially the result of 7.9B people doing ‘economic’ things (buying and selling things, getting into debt, having children etc), and their behaviour is often illogical and always unpredictable.

And economic systems are also enormously fragile. Reckless lending practices very nearly ushered in a global economic collapse in 2008, and trillions of dollars of taxpayer money were shovelled out to the reckless gamblers to bail them out and prevent that collapse. Yet those practices have now been fully resumed, and we’re once again on the brink.

What has happened over the past century, and especially over the last 40 years, has been a dramatic shift from an economy that is industrial — focused on producing goods and services of value to citizens, though at a catastrophic ecological cost — to an economy that is financial — focused on hyping the value of assets (physical property, “investments”, and “intellectual property” in order to relentlessly shift wealth from consumers and producers to the “rentiers” (passive owners) of these insanely overpriced assets.

This boondoggle has been sold to us on the basis that, as long as we can become “rentiers” ourselves (ie own property and investments), we benefit from this Ponzi scheme: Our homes and investments go up in value, giving us security, more “wealth”, and possibly a nest egg for our retirement. Of course, the billionaires own a million times as much property and investments and benefit a million times as much, while essentially doing nothing except gambling in the real estate and stock market, producing essentially nothing of value at all.

And as long as interest rates are kept artificially low, way below actual inflation, as has been the case for almost 40 years now, the rentier gamblers can borrow vast sums of money almost free (secured by the market “value” of their assets), and use that money to “invest” (gamble) on even more hyper-appreciation of their assets.

Who loses in the boondoggle? The environment, and hence all future generations, who will have to repay the costs of our extravagant overconsumption, pollution and waste of finite resources, and pick up the pieces of the economic and ecological collapse we have created. The poor, who can’t afford the ante to get in on the game. The billions of citizens of the Global South, whose resources are stripped and stolen for a pittance by the gamblers, and who are left with desolated and polluted land, slave labour wages (or no employment at all), and massive debts which the World Bank and IMF demand be repaid promptly to the rentiers on threat of crushing sanctions, and requiring brutal austerity measures to be imposed on their defrauded and impoverished citizens. And the unlucky, who get ripped off by the rentiers, bombed or starved because their governments didn’t play ball with the hegemony of rentier nations, or evicted from their homes, or who are foolish enough to invest their paltry life savings in the Ponzi scheme just before it goes bust.

The thing about valuation of assets is that they’re worth only what we all agree they’re worth. This is, in short, all about trust. That trust can be earned genuinely, or acquired through arm-twisting, bribery, extortion, blackmail, propaganda, and mis- and disinformation. And the number of ‘votes’ we get in determining the value of assets and what’s done with them is proportionate to the value of the assets we have, as any minority shareholder will tell you. The owner of a $100B hedge fund or currency speculation fund has far more say than we do in what assets are “worth”.

New Yorker cartoon by Paul Noth

Financial and currency collapses occur when that trust is lost, which can happen for many reasons.  The value of each currency is therefore the result of a kind of highly-unbalanced collective agreement.

An industrial economy is only as healthy as its capacity to sustainably produce goods and services that are of value to citizens. By contrast, a financial economy is only as healthy as the confidence of citizens that assets are worth what they are currently priced at. As soon as it becomes clear that prices bear no resemblance whatever to the underlying real value-in-use of the goods and services they represent, then the Ponzi scheme is over, and everyone who still has money in the game loses big. When houses are “valued” at 10x the cost of replacing them, and stocks like Tesla are trading at a value equal to more than 1,000 years’ current earnings (P/E ratio), you know this is now just a game of nerves to see who will, and who won’t, bail out in time.

So, for example, if some deranged billionaire were to decide to invest $40B in the Vancouver real estate market, the effect of this would probably at least quadruple the average house price there from $2M to $8M. Many Vancouver homeowners have ridden the housing market up as it actually has quadrupled over the past 15 years, and used the appreciation to finance multiple additional house purchases on the way up. They would instantly become multi-millionaires if prices quadrupled again.

Would they use their new mega-wealth to buy even more Vancouver homes? Or would the “market” say “enough is enough” and burst the bubble, selling out and moving their profits to other less-inflated markets? Given the amount of (low-interest, cheap, risky) mortgages many real estate speculators have taken out on these high-priced homes, the bursting of the bubble could instantly bankrupt tens of thousands of suddenly-underwater homeowners, and possibly (unless bailed out by the government) bankrupt the banks that recklessly offered these mortgages. Not to mention hollowing out the city with unpaid mortgages many times higher than the value of the foreclosed and shuttered properties they “secure”.

There are a series of cons that are essential to keep this big con going.

The first con is to convince people that the economy is in much better shape than it actually is, by replacing legitimate measures of economic health and well-being with fake numbers. When this is done, those not doing as well as the fake statistics indicate, are made to feel that this must be their own fault — that they are failures, and need to work harder to catch up.

A second con is to count things as productive activity (GDP) that actually add no value to the economy at all. So, for example, the $40B in mostly-munitions expenses just earmarked for Ukraine, which military experts predict will most likely be blown up by the Russians before they are actually deployed, is included, as are the rest of the $1T annual military/security expenditures. The $3M/inmate/annum cost of running Guantanamo, is included. Oil spill and other eco-disaster clean-up costs are included. Subsidies to Big Oil, Big Pharma etc are included. Arbitrary administrative fees charged to foreign subsidiaries to repatriate profits to the home office country and avoid taxes, are included. The value of all new property and other new “investments”, is included, as are your rent, and the “imputed rent” (at today’s rates) on your house if you’re a homeowner. The amount of bonuses and stock options given to executives, is included. Other than property construction, none of these expenditures actually produces anything, or provides anything of value to citizens. But that, the government tells us, is how we measure increase in wealth and well-being. If you’re not feeling it, you must be doing something wrong.

The stock markets, which would have you believe (see chart above) that since 1870 a “smart” investor’s wealth would have risen by a factor of 20,000, even though actual production of real stuff has risen only by a factor of 20, play upon this con in three main ways:

1. First, these values are “adjusted” only for “official” rates of inflation, which, since 1870, have averaged 2%/year. Actual average rates of inflation, at least since Reagan changed the “official” rate calculations to make the economy look vastly healthier than it actually is, have been closer to 8%/year, per SGS data. So these “inflation-adjusted” values of real wealth appreciation are overstated by a factor of 12.
2. Second, these values ignore the values of stocks that were delisted or went bankrupt and hence were removed from indices; only the “winners” are counted. You invested in the “losers”? You idiot.
3. Third, these values depend substantially on “income” from things that have only ‘financial’ value, not real value from producing anything of use to citizens. For example, a 50% buyback of a company’s stock using a company’s excess cash, will double that company’s stock price, when no new value has been created. The creation of monopolies and oligopolies in every industry sector likewise pumps up prices and hence stock “values” while creating nothing of value. And since as much as 40% of stocks are owned by the richest 1%, who therefore wildly disproportionally determine what every stock is “worth”, the lion’s share of this “value growth” merely reflects the transfer of wealth from average citizens to the 1% rentier class, who keep pumping their paper wealth back into the markets, creating ever-greater bubbles, because it’s their best return on investment.

As many people have pointed out, the net worth of the poorest 90% of the population has steadily declined since 1980, and that’s true even using the fake government inflation statistics.

All of the increase in “wealth” since 1980 has accrued to the richest 1% of the population, and all of that increase has been produced as a result of a combination of (a) ever-increasing production of non-renewable resources (and commensurate environmental destruction), and (b) the financial shenanigans that create utterly non-productive “wealth” described above.

So, what role does the “highly-overvalued” (per Goldman Sachs) US dollar play in the unravelling of this? It depends. Here’s a bit of background:

In 1944, the US dollar became the sole “official” reserve currency in the world.  Then, fifty years ago, in 1971, Tricky Dick Nixon, dealing with double-digit inflation and a collapsing war-based economy, decided, unilaterally, that the US would no longer honour the gold standard (converting other countries’ US dollars into actual gold, when requested), and that henceforth, the US dollar would simply take the place of gold in all financial affairs.

The combination of these two things has given rise to what economists call Exorbitant Privilege, which means that the value of the US dollar is dramatically higher than its national balance of payments and accumulated debt would warrant, were it any other nation’s currency, allowing the US to print unlimited dollars and borrow money far more cheaply than its precarious financial situation would otherwise allow. The IMF has been worried about this for decades and has proposed a number of ‘currency basket’ alternatives that would be less subject to collapsing the entire global economy if the US economy tanked. But guess who controls the IMF?

As a result, many countries are required to keep large amounts of money in US dollar reserve accounts in order to pay for things like oil, fertilizer, food, and their massive foreign-owned national debts, in US dollars, under various often-coercive agreements imposed upon them.

That was OK when the US respected that those reserve funds belonged to those countries. But, starting with Iran, and then Venezuela, and then just this year Afghanistan and Russia, the US government first “froze” those accounts as part of sanctions against those countries in punishment for acts disagreeable to the Pentagon and US government, and has now seized (ie stolen) those funds — hundreds of billions of dollars of other nations’ money, causing, among other horrible things, widespread starvation in once-affluent Venezuela and in Afghanistan.

Of course the US government mouthpieces have furiously attempted to reassure other countries that the US would never do that to them. (At least as long as they behave.) But this rash action has essentially destroyed trust in the US dollar as a “safe-harbour”, reliable currency, and there is now a scramble going on in many countries to move assets, as much as possible, out of US dollar reserves into domestic or other currency.

What’s worse, the oil crisis that the sanctions/siege against Russia has created, has driven up oil prices to nearly twice pre-sanction levels, creating economic crises in many countries, especially in the Global South.

And in many countries, inflation is now at record levels, driven up by massive increases in debt loads (much of it to pay costs of the CoVid-19 pandemic and, in the US, by multiple costly military adventures including Ukraine), and by soaring commodity prices, especially oil,  due to supply disruptions.

These massive debt loads are going to have to be repaid, or at least renegotiated, at dramatically higher interest rates. At the household level, at the corporate level, and at the government level, the combination of wildly excessive debts (partly the result of reckless levels of leverage — sound familiar?) and much higher interest rates will almost certainly result in massive numbers of bankruptcies and possibly a full-scale global economic collapse. All because of reckless lending, obscene levels of military spending, overinflated property and stock prices, and our complete dependence on artificially suppressed interest rates.

This is especially true in the US. No surprise, then, that many countries and investors are very worried about keeping their accounts and investments in US dollars, even though it is the reserve currency of record and has always therefore been considered a “safe haven” currency during military, political and economic upheavals.

There have been a lot of discussions about what might replace the US dollar as the international reserve and settlement standard currency, including suggestions of digital and cryptocurrencies and currency ‘baskets’, and a return to the gold standard. No currency or commodity seems large, stable and reliable enough to serve as the international reserve. The assumption has been that there has to be a replacement, because there always has been (prior to WW2, which essentially bankrupted the UK, the British Pound had been the international reserve currency for over a century).

My perhaps-naive belief (I am not an economist) is that there is actually no need for an international reserve currency. If the US dollar can no longer be trusted, and there is no ready replacement, then an obvious solution, at least in the interim, in this day and age of vast, rapid and secure electronic communication, is to continually negotiate, track and post bilateral trade and settlement agreements in whatever currency or currencies the participating nations agree to use.

This is already how things are commonly done in the Global South, where US dollars are at a premium and where trade with the US is not as dominant as it is in the North. Saudi Arabia and China have an agreement to settle oil sales in Chinese yuan (renminbi). Several Latin American countries are negotiating to create a new common Latin American currency called the Sur. The Indian rupee is increasingly used in Asian agreements.

This of course infuriates the US, since challenges to US dollar hegemony threaten to devalue the US dollar and undermine or end its Exorbitant Privilege. And meanwhile, the Euro, Pound and other European currencies, and the Canadian dollar, are in free-fall relative to the US dollar (or in the case of the Canadian dollar, to half of its value relative to what it would normally be trading at with $115/bbl oil). Their utter dependence on the US and its currency is now clear to all, and can only further attempts in the rest of the world to distance themselves from falling into the same trap.

What happens when you have a ton of US dollars that no one really wants because they don’t need them for most of their trade or financial transactions, and when US debt loads are out of control and substantially un-repayable? You have massive market turmoil. And with the economies of so many countries, over-leveraged, drowning in debt, dependent on low inflation and interest rates, and with ownership of their resources and industry largely bought by western corporations (often in league with corrupt domestic dictators) at bargain-basement prices, teetering on a knife-edge, market and currency turmoil could easily tip them, and the whole world, into economic collapse.

Sri Lanka is an excellent case study. While government incompetence has clearly greatly exacerbated that country’s economic crisis, many of the same factors that have had them on the edge of bankruptcy for years, similarly threaten many other countries.

So in most so-called “developing” nations, economically and ecologically ravaged by domestic corruption and foreign rapacity and greed, the economies are dysfunctional, dependent on massive loans and constant renegotiations with the IMF and World Bank, and ever-increasing austerity forced on their already-suffering populations to pay for them.

And meanwhile the so-called “developed” nations, utterly economically dependent on a US that is so horrifically in debt that, were it not for its “privileged” status, would be declared obviously bankrupt, desperately curry favour and support the US’s endless imperial ambitions for fear of being cut off and having their money stolen, and prop up the US dollar to which their currency is inextricably tied, a dollar that is issued in unlimited quantities by a country with a hollowed-out economy that essentially now produces nothing of real “value” except weaponry.

Sounds like a recipe for collapse to me. But then, what do I know? I’ve been predicting this for fifteen years, and, still, the old boys pony up another trillion, and another, since they have no better use for their money, hoping against hope that things will keep going a few more years, until it’s no longer their problem.

Once a gambler, always a gambler, I guess. But we all know how it’s going to end.

If you’re interested in learning more about this from a real economist, I would recommend Prof. Michael Hudson’s recent talks, including one with Margaret Flowers (audio, transcript), and one with Ben Norton (video, transcript).

Also worth reading on this subject:

• An Afghan journalist explains how the US theft of Afghan’s money in US dollar reserves is starving Afghan’s people
• CNN explains how stealing Russia’s reserves “weaponizes” and “debases” faith in the US dollar as reserve currency
• A survey of several economists predicting the US dollar’s collapse
• James Galbraith explains what the decline of the US dollar and the rise of a multi-polar economic and political reality might look like (thanks to Paul Heft for the link)

cartoon by Ali Solomon

Despite my aspirations to be more equanimous, and to accept that my role is simply to witness and chronicle the collapse of our global industrial growth culture and the sixth great extinction, I am quite terrified these days by how quickly misinformation and disinformation — especially when it plays into what people really want to believe — can spread and lead to levels of distrust, dangerous actions (and inaction), and violence that are utterly incompatible with maintaining a civil society.

Dmitry Orlov in his five-stage collapse model worried about limiting collapse to financial, economic and political collapse, which are at least survivable, and avoiding social collapse. I’m worried, now, that social collapse might actually come first, or at least hand-in-hand with looming global economic collapse and the accelerating global slide into fascism.

I hadn’t expected things to come apart quite this fast, or in quite this way.

COLLAPSE WATCH

chart from showyourstripes.info, updated to May 10 2022; thanks to Indrajit Samarajiva for the link

No hope of stopping climate collapse: Indrajit Samarajiva reviews the latest evidence and reaches the obvious conclusion : “The hard truth is that the climate has already collapsed, and there’s no going back.” And he talks about how we might manage the grief that comes with this realization. And in a related article, he describes how his country, Sri Lanka, is coping with collapse now, giving us a preview of what we’re all going to have to face in the coming decades. That includes rationing, folks. Not sure how the anti-all-government ‘freedom’ fanatics are going to handle that.

Open letter from Roger Hallam to XR: The “R” in XR was supposed to stand for Rebellion. And “this is a war“. Thanks to Jerry McManus for the link, and the one that follows.

“The road ahead is a dead end”: Another synopsis of our current state, and how we got here.

End of the story of progress: Rhyd Wildermuth explains how current events have shattered “the fantasy of historical progress, urban civic religion, and the Pax Capitalis — the faith that universal capitalism could unify all people in peace”, and that defenders of these myths, and those who desperately want to believe in them, are furious about it.

Actions speak louder than words: And as we continue to posture and proclaim our concern, governments’ approval of more non-renewable energy projects, more military spending, and utter inaction on collapse, tells us what they really believe. Even when that entails knowingly destroying ocean life to foster commercial fish farms.

Big Oil steps up: Encouraged by high oil prices and urging from Biden and other western leaders to increase production to reduce dependence on Russian sources, Big Oil has put forward proposals for new projects that will produce a total of 192B barrels of new oil, of which construction commitments and financing is already in place for 116B barrels. These projects alone will emit 646B tons of CO2, which is 125% of the entire globe’s remaining budget for emissions to have a 50% chance of staying below 1.5ºC of warming.

LIVING BETTER

cartoon found on Relax It’s Only Art facebook page, artist not cited; anyone recognize/read the artist’s signature so s/he can get credit for it?

Love letter to all draft dodgers: Caitlin Johnstone understands.

No pronouns for me, thanks: “You didn’t consider how this ideology is erasing women and removing their spaces.” Thanks to Kavana Tree Bressen for the link, and the one that follows.

Janelle Orsi wants to reform “lawyering”: It’s a worthy goal, but probably an impossible one. The whole “legal system” IMO needs to be replaced, not reformed, by what might be called a “conciliation system”, whose function, and functioning, would be utterly different from the current legal system, which exists solely to exercise, sustain and enforce power, not to achieve reconciliation or remediation.

Addressing antibiotic resistance: Sabine Hossenfelder explains the enormous dangers we face if we don’t find better ways of dealing with bacterial infections than soaking everything in antibiotics, and suggests some different approaches.

I dream a world: Joan Szymko’s deeply-moving choral music set to the famous Langston Hughes poem.

A tool for thinking differently: My friend Dave Snowden recommends the use of aporia (irresolvable internal contradictions or tensions) as a means of shocking the brain into thinking about something differently. So an example of a linguistic aporia might be coming up with a neologism like exaptation, a foreign word like weltschmerz, or a metaphor. An example of an aesthetic aporia might be a drawing, cartoon, photo, or other work of art, improvisation or storytelling. An example of a physical aporia might be exhausting exercise, meditation, ritual, fasting, or immersion in water — any means of “creating a space of difference” to allow something out of the ordinary to emerge.

A not-for-profit world: Jennifer Hinton’s podcast and book explaining how an economic system based entirely on not-for-profit enterprises might work. Thanks to Kavana Tree Bressen for the links.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

cartoon by Michael Leunig

Maybe it’s not quite that bad: Tom Lewis suggests several seemingly-awful political developments are not as bad as they might appear, and that if we have to be afraid, we should be afraid of climate collapse instead. Thanks to Paul Heft for the link.

Striving for Peace: I wrote a lot about Ukraine in a recent post, so this time around I just want to focus on how we might work towards, and achieve, peace, there and in other war zones:

• Craig Murray, who has extensive experience as a peace broker, suggests a nine-point peace plan for Ukraine
• John Quigley, who was involved in negotiations in Donbas and Crimea, suggests a similar peace plan
• Caitlin Johnstone explains how after running as a peace candidate, Ukraine’s president was forced to take sides in the ongoing civil war in Donbas and how that decisions now ties his hands in peace negotiations

Corpocracy, Imperialism & Fascism: Short takes (thanks to John Whiting for several of these links):

• Yanis Varoufakis suggests that while Russian oligarchs are a despotic lot, American, Saudi and other nations’ oligarchs are no better.
• And Yanis also explains how the social media oligarchs have become “cloudalists who are turning conventional capitalists into a new vassal class that must pay tribute to them for the chance to sell to us”.
• Benjamin Norton interviews a Pakistani affairs expert who asserts the US was heavily involved in the recent coup overthrowing Pakistan’s PM Imran Khan, due to his friendliness with Russia and China. (What, you didn’t know about that?)
• Thom Hartmann describes the war on democracy, on Disney, on minorities and on women being waged by the neofascist administrations in Florida and Texas. Truthout also reports on Florida’s statewide ban on ranked-choice voting.
• The increasingly arch-conservative New Yorker describes the ghastly conditions in the collapsed state of Venezuela, conspicuously not referring once to the US siege that has caused them.
• The brutal oppression of Palestinians by the Israeli apartheid state is growing. Yesterday, Israeli cops attacked and brutalized mourners at the funeral procession of an Al Jazeera journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, who was shot to death by Israeli soldiers a few days ago.
• The New Yorker reports that the US Supreme Court’s overturning of the right of women to sovereignty over their own bodies may be just the start of further racist, sexist and fascist rulings from the court’s extremist majority, and points out the massive legal flaws in their reasoning in the decision. The Atlantic’s Jessica Bruder summarizes the actions women will have to take now that Roe has been overturned.
• In signs of growing dissatisfaction over dependence on the US dollar and unhappiness over US embargoes against the people of Venezuela and Cuba, Brasil’s leading presidential candidate Lula da Silva wants to create a Latin American currency, and México’s President AMLO called for an end to the embargoes and sanctions against Cuba.
• Craig Murray recaps the decades-long corporate prosecution of environmental journalist and lawyer Steven Donziger by Texaco-Chevron, a terrifying example of what they can do to you if you dare to take on Big Oil.
• After Musk’s takeover of Twitter, Elizabeth Warren argues again for a wealth tax and greater regulation of social media.
• NPR reports that the Trump-appointed woman judge who struck down the US travel mask mandate was rejected as unqualified for the court by the ABA.
• Chris Hedges explains how the incompetence, hypocrisy, and gutlessness of Biden and his Democratic Party predecessors has enabled the rise of neofascism in the US and disgust with the party among left-of-centre voters.

Propaganda, Censorship, Misinformation and Disinformation: Short takes:

• Google has banned and deleted content of those it identifies as spreading pro-Russian disinformation, including any suggestion of Ukrainian wrongdoing in the war. It has blocked ‘monetization’ of others.
• John Green’s young adult books have been banned and removed from many US red state schools and libraries. If there is an obscenity here, it is the book banning, not the material in his books. Truthout’s Graham Slater explains what underlies the massive book-banning in neofascist states.
• PayPal, started by right-wing US oligarch Peter Thiel and later owned by eBay, which has long used its power against those who PayPal’s board has political disagreements with (starting with WikiLeaks), has banned Consortium News and other alternative news organizations, and threatened to seize their balances.
• The US DHS has created a “Disinformation Governance Board” (what Orwell called a “Ministry of Truth”). to be run by an ex-CIA operative who was charged with working to promote regime change in Russia and Belarus. The bone-headed White House press secretary Jen Psaki insinuated that anyone opposing the establishment of this ‘Board’ might be an enemy of the state.
• Trevor Noah, who I once respected, shamefully pandered to the mainstream press and the government at the annual correspondents’ dinner, saying, I kid you not: “In America, you have the right to seek the truth and speak the truth even if it makes people in power uncomfortable, even if it makes your viewers or your readers uncomfortable. You understand how amazing that is?” Such a disgraceful statement in the face of the ongoing imprisonment and torture of Julian Assange, the imprisonment of Daniel Hale, and the exile of Edward Snowden, who actually did dare “speak the truth”.

And the poisoned street drug death toll keeps rising: As governments of all stripes dither, backslide and stall, the monthly death toll from poisoned street drugs has now surpassed, in many places, the monthly CoVid-19 death toll. There is a simple answer — legalization, testing, dispensing and regulation of currently illegal drugs, and treatment of users as ill patients, not as criminals. But the “war on drugs” moralizers will have none of it.

CoVid-19 Becomes the Pandemic (mostly) of the Unvaccinated: Short takes:

• What more is there to say about this horrific pandemic and how it’s been managed? If you’re not still wearing a proper medical mask whenever you’re indoors or in a crowded place for an extended period, you’re being reckless. If you’re not vaccinated and boosted, you’re being reckless. You should no sooner be going around unmasked and unvaccinated than you should be driving a car without wearing a seat belt. But the governments have all abrogated their responsibility for dealing with this ongoing emergency, and in many cases are no longer even reporting the data, or are doing so in an inconsistent, imprecise, untimely and unreliable way. It’s up to us, now, folks, exactly as the conspiracy theorists wanted all along.
• New data reported in JAMA suggests that without vaccines, death tolls would have been roughly three times what they have actually been.
• Ready for the next one? Influenza virus H5N1 has already caused 35 million deaths in North America this year alone. Of course, they’re deaths of poultry in factory farms, where because of its >50% fatality rate, a single infection requires killing (by gas chamber suffocation) of the entire farm’s poultry (average factory farm size affected: 20,000 birds). There have been a slowly-increasing number of reports of H5N1 and similarly-dangerous H7N9 viruses crossing the species barrier to humans since 2000, but they’re still rare. We shouldn’t worry just because a new strain might cross the species barrier easily, should we? After all, the virus only has 33 billion unhealthy chickens on crowded antibiotic-soaked factory farms to serve as a soup to develop new variants in. If there were a risk, we’d know, right?

FUN AND INSPIRATION

cartoon by Will McPhail

You don’t have to be you all the time: Lovely reflection by Indrajit Samarajiva on how our identities are varied, and emerge from our relationships. We only exist through our relationships, and we are never alone.

Occupy Sri Lanka: Indi also describes the almost surreal, circus-like atmosphere of the public display of anger against the government where he lives in Sri Lanka. It seems eerily similar to what Occupy Wall Street was like, in those crazy, disorganized, early days.

The unexpected mass murderer: Veritasium explains how three inventions by one well-meaning scientist caused millions of deaths.

In which Paul Kingsnorth confesses to having converted to: Orthodox Christianity.

Blind side: Euan Semple explains how we assume we all see the world the same way, but we don’t. Not even close.

Funny (fake) headlines of the month:

• “Florida judge rules that airlines cannot require passengers to have tickets” (Andy Borowitz)
• “Kids play house by having their imaginary friend price them out of the market” (Beaverton)
• “Businesses experiencing ‘just average’ call volume for the first time since 2020” (Beaverton)

THOUGHTS OF THE MONTH

Poll results over 60 years, graphic by Olivier Berruyer translated by Ben Norton at Multipolarista. Thanks to John Whiting for the link.

If you didn’t already know the world was fucked: First the US Democrats removed (‘de-coupled’) all the funding for CoVid-19 projects from a bill that would also provide $33B of additional munitions for Ukraine, because the first was ‘controversial’ (ie wouldn’t pass filibuster) while the second was ‘bipartisan’. Then the House inexplicably increased the war funding to $40B. And then the bill passed, with all Democrats (including the entire so-called ‘Squad’ of ‘leftists’) voting for it, and the Republicans split. Questioning in the Senate came only from Republican Ron Paul, not from Bernie Sanders. And then today there was a tweet from Marjorie Taylor Greene (fresh off accusing ‘leftists’ of torching food processing plants to create a global food shortage), who voted against the appropriation, to AOC, who voted for it:

@AOC, what’s the carbon footprint of the proxy war with Russia you voted to fund?

From Joanna Klink:

Some feel rain. Some feel the beetle startle
in its ghost-part when the bark
slips. Some feel musk. Asleep against
each other in the whiskey dark, scarcely there.
When it falls apart, some feel the moondark air
drop its motes to the patch-thick slopes of
snow. Tiny blinkings of ice from the oak,
a boot-beat that comes and goes, the line of prayer
you can follow from the dusking wind to the snowy owl
it carries. Some feel sunlight
well up in blood-vessels below the skin
and wish there had been less to lose.
Knowing how it could have been, pale maples
drowsing like a second sleep above our temperaments.
Do I imagine there is any place so safe it can’t be
snapped? Some feel the rivers shift,
blue veins through soil, as if the smokestacks were a long
dream of exhalation. The lynx lets its paws
skim the ground in snow and showers.
The wildflowers scatter in warm tints until
the second they are plucked. You can wait
to scrape the ankle-burrs, you can wait until Mercury
the early star underdraws the night and its blackest
districts. And wonder. Why others feel
through coal-thick night that deeply colored garnet
star. Why sparring and pins are all you have.
Why the earth cannot make its way towards you.

This is the second of a multi-part series. In this part, I’m going to use the Ukraine War, and specifically the destruction of Mariupol, as a case study of the importance of asking Why?, and moving beyond the rhetoric, the propaganda, the mis- and disinformation, the censorship, and the absurd oversimplification of the narratives the leaders, media and spokespeople of both the west and Russia have (very successfully) shoved down the throats of their citizens about what is going on there. And why. 

Citizens of the ruined city of Mariupol, walking the streets because their homes have been destroyed or are unsafe to occupy, cook meals on outdoor grills and tell Ukrainian journalist Patrick Lancaster that the destruction of their city was almost entirely a scorched-earth operation by the Azov Battalion, not bombing by Russian forces. April 29, 2022. At the end of the video they beg Patrick not to edit and distort their comments, so that viewers can see what’s really going on there.

In my previous post, I attempted lay out some of the factors, which are mostly more about emotions than reason, that provoke people to launch or support wars. This time I’d like to delve into the emotions (and a bit about the ‘logic’) of the Ukraine War.

If you have been reading the press releases developed jointly by the US DOD, NATO command, the CIA, and the Ukraine government, and dutifully transcribed, mostly without any critical review, by the mainstream media, you have probably been led to believe:

1. That the attack on Ukraine was completely unprovoked, evil, insane etc.
2. That the vastly outgunned Ukrainian army have bravely and successfully beaten back the Russian invaders so they are stalled and demoralized.
3. That Russia’s invasion has been chaotic, resulting in blanket bombing of Ukraine’s cities, and multiple atrocities committed against citizens.
4. That millions of have fled Ukraine out of fear of being killed by shock-and-awe attacks by Russian invaders on civilians.
5. That despite its pleas, Ukraine has basically held off the invaders using their own troops, resources, technologies, arms, ingenuity, courage and intelligence.
6. That Mariupol has been destroyed by a barrage of indiscriminate Russian bombing and missile attacks, leaving the remaining citizens trapped in a vast steel mill with Ukrainian troops, desperately seeking a humanitarian corridor which Russia refuses to provide.
7. That the US/NATO has no desire to see regime change in Russia. They just want Russia to end the invasion and withdraw from Ukraine.

The mainstream media and many of the so-called ‘alternative’ and ‘progressive’ media, have been faithfully reporting these ‘truths’ since the war began, along with photos of the country’s leader comforting troops and civilians and witnessing Russian atrocities.

Before we can discuss why the war started and why it’s still going on, I want to provide some other sources of information about what has been happening in the area over the last decade. This information is entirely provided by western sources, many of them with a long history of working in or reporting on the region, and none of them has been censored (at least not yet) by the western media and social media czars that are now determining what news we receive about Ukraine. None of these sources think Putin was right to invade Ukraine. But they provide a very different perspective on what has happened, in historical context, that might help us better understand why he did it. We’ll get to that in a moment.

And I am not saying that all of the following are true. Some of it may be disinformation, or even propaganda. All I’m saying is that these reports and interpretations are credible, and worth considering in trying to understand the current situation. Articles that I think are the most important to read are boldface, since I don’t expect anyone to read all of them. Thanks to John Whiting, Paul Heft, Caitlin Johnstone and Bart Anderson for many of these links:

1. Russia is still emerging from a devastating, sustained economic and social collapse: What precipitated the collapse of the Soviet Union 30 years ago, far more than member states clamouring for independence and democracy, was an utter economic collapse. This was caused by an unsustainable debt load, a collapse in the value of its major resource and export (oil & gas) and hence a huge trade deficit and collapse in the value of the ruble, a vastly over-extended military, and a wrong-headed attempt to rush the transition from a centrally-planned economy to a free-for-all capitalist one. That idealistic transition meant that almost all government workers, including those in important scientific and medical positions, were laid off or left unpaid, while a small cadre of well-connected oligarchs essentially stole all the government assets and moved their money offshore. There were, essentially, no jobs. As a result, in the 1990’s, Russian male life expectancy dropped to a lower-than-third-world level of 57 years. Suicide, malnutrition, addiction, grinding poverty, ‘accidents’, crime, corruption, and even starvation, especially outside Moscow, soared as living conditions plummeted. With rubles worthless, many citizens lived off barter and scrip, and huge lineups and empty shelves became the norm. Even today, Russia’s once-giant economy remains smaller than France’s (source: Dmitry Orlov et al)
2. The west has repeatedly broken promises on expanding NATO to countries on Russia’s borders: Putin came into power determined to bring Russia back from collapse, to restore some pride to the citizens of a broken nation. Many Eastern European nations, remembering Stalinist brutality and oppressive Soviet puppet governments, chose to join NATO to be protected from a feared resurgent Russian state, and allowed a massive buildup of military and missile bases right on Russia’s doorstep. This happened in contravention of repeated promises that had been made by the US and NATO to keep these Eastern European countries as neutral buffer states. As these deadly weapons pointed directly at Moscow began to completely surround Russia, there were again promises that at least Ukraine and Georgia would be kept as neutral buffer states. (source: Noam Chomsky; Sky News, et al)
3. The US government has a long-term, publicly-declared plan to destabilize Russia (and China) to achieve pro-US regime change there, rather than allow a multipolar world to emerge: Biden did not “misspeak” when he said that US policy is to take out Putin. (sources: award-winning war correspondent Chris Hedges; Foreign Policy; Michael Brenner; wikipedia; RAND Corporation)
4. Putin has been absolutely clear and consistent in his messaging and his actions on his reasons for the invasion and the tactics he has used: (sources: Prof. Michael Brenner; Noam Chomsky; Putin press conference)
5. The US, Canada and NATO were complicit in the Ukraine coup of 2014 that overthrew its democratically-elected government, following the Maidan Massacres whose snipers’ origin has still not been resolved. (sources: Aaron Maté; Prof. Ivan Katchanovski)
6. US, Canadian and NATO troops have armed and trained and provided intelligence to “tens of thousands” of troops in Ukraine’s army and militias since the civil war began in 2014, and continue to do so. (sources: CTV news Canada; Ottawa Citizen; Noam Chomsky;  Yves Engler; Jerusalem Post)
7. Zelenskyy has banned all leftist political parties in Ukraine, arrested all of their leaders, consolidated all media under his personal control, and declared Ukrainian the only official language of the country. (source: Multipolarista ; Human Rights Watch et al)
8. The civil war in Donbas has been going on since 2014, with western peacekeepers documenting that most of the violations of the Minsk accords came from Ukrainian militias bombing Russian-speaking areas of Donbas. Much of the weaponry used by the independence forces in Donbas came from demoralized Ukrainian militias who changed sides during this useless conflict. As many as 15,000 people in Donbas died before the invasion began. (sources: UN/NATO advisor Jacques Baud; VICE news)
9. The full-scale war in Ukraine actually began on Feb 16, with a massive artillery barrage by western-supplied troops on Donbas; Russia invaded two days later. (source: UN/NATO advisor Jacques Baud.)
10. Most of the Ukrainian military in the Donbas region are a mixture of foreign mercenaries, and cobbled-together deputized militias whose leaders are openly xenophobic, racist and fascist, with a history of atrocities against Russian-speaking Ukrainians like the 2014 Odessa Massacre, in which they burned 48 anti-coup protesters alive. (sources: Consortium News; wikipedia; Rhyd Wildermuth)
11. Many of the people who fled Ukraine at the start of the invasion were young anti-war pacifists fleeing the draft, leaving the Ukrainian army and militias staffed mostly with old people and extremists. (source: Yahoo news)
12. The Russian invasion was meticulously planned to succeed quickly (but patiently) and completely, with minimal casualties and risks and quick destruction of Ukraine’s firepower, and it has been hugely successful. (source: UN/NATO advisor Jacques Baud.)
13. Much of the billions of dollars in US-taxpayer funded spending on munitions for Ukraine is being blown up by Russia as soon as it lands, resulting in immediate “repeat orders” to the corporate arms manufacturers (source: Ron Paul, of all people)
14. The Russians quickly occupied Mariupol, and surrounded and ordered the Azov Battalion, who essentially are the Ukrainian army there, to surrender, with minimal damage to structures and complete demobilization of Ukraine’s aging tanks. (source: UN/NATO advisor Jacques Baud)
15. The Azov Battalion responded by retreating to the Mariupol steel mill complex, and from there launched what locals described as a scorched earth program of destroying as many as possible of Mariupol’s structures. (source: Patrick Lancaster)
16. US and NATO have continuously refused to talk with Russia about a ceasefire or a peace settlement; and their delivery of billions of dollars of additional arms has come at times when Ukraine and Russia have been closest to agreeing to hold peace talks. (sources: Prof. Richard Falk ; Noam Chomsky; Prof. Richard Rubinstein); Jacques Baud; Quincy Institute; Salon; The Intercept; Antiwar)
17. The US government has admitted that it is using propaganda — deliberately spreading lies through western media about what Russia is and is not doing in Ukraine — to “counter” Russian propaganda. (source: Caitlin Johnstone et al)
18. This war is dangerously destabilizing economies globally, causing famines in the south, causing countries to seek to abandon the wildly overpriced US dollar in favour of regional currencies, and causing massive distrust in banking systems that are now freezing and stealing nations’ and people’s money on behalf of the US and NATO governments. (sources: Credit Suisse; Swarajiya; Multipolarista; Democracy Now)

If you’ve waded through this list, you might now have at least a fuller and more balanced idea of what has actually been going on in Ukraine. So now come the Whys:

• Why has the US/CIA/DOD/NATO pursued a policy of belligerence towards Russia for so many years, rather than, say, inviting them into NATO? (and no, it’s not because they are evil, war-crazed, corporatists)
• Why did Putin actually decide to invade Ukraine (and no, it’s not because he’s evil, insane, or aiming for global domination)
• Why have Canada and Europe, including traditionally neutral countries, gone along with the US position and sanctions, while those in the global south have not? (and no, it’s not because their leaders are stupid and gullible)
• Why has the Ukraine government, elected as a protest against corruption and hate from both sides, swung so hard right so fast? (and no, it’s not because they’re dominated by fanatical ‘Pure Ukraine’ xenophobic fascists)
• Why is no one talking about a negotiated settlement? (I mean seriously talking, not posturing for the media)

While we can’t know for sure, we can at least make better guesses now that we’ve been equipped with more information about what has actually happened. My guesses start with continually asking Why? — The answers are complex, not simple. And I start with the presumption that everyone is doing what they think is “best” for the people they care about. And then I try to figure out how they got to where they got, and, as a consequence, how the world has rapidly slued to the edge of a global, perhaps nuclear, war precipice.

Here are a few of my thoughts on these Whys:

• Most of all, I think it’s about fear. I don’t think the people who work in the overwhelmingly largest US government department, the revolving door between the war and security and intelligence apparatus and the private munitions corporations, have ever heard any other narrative than that Russia and China threaten us and they have always been evil, opposed to everything Americans believe in. It’s like the Satan myth — hear it often enough and you believe it. Americans are hugely isolated from the rest of the world — most of them don’t even have passports, and most have never seen a culture other than their own. They’re even terrified of ‘alternate’ cultures in their own country. All of the recent American presidents have been xenophobes and war-mongers, I think because that ‘fear of others’ — Russians, Chinese, and Arabs in particular — has been pounded into them from birth. Like cops, they’ve been conditioned to think the world is full of bad guys who must be suppressed or defeated. We fear what we do not understand. Doddering Biden’s speech about China pretty much terrifyingly tells the story:

[I have] made it clear that no American president, at least one did, but no American president had ever backed down from speaking out of what’s happening in the Uyghurs… So I see stiff competition with China. China has an overall goal, and I don’t criticize them for the goal, but they have an overall goal to become the leading country in the world, the wealthiest country in the world and the most powerful country in the world. That’s not going to happen on my watch because the United States is going to continue to grow and expand.

• Putin quite justifiably also fears a western coalition that is twenty times its size and military might. He’s seen the US and NATO destroy other countries they fear or dislike. He doesn’t want to be the guy in charge when that happens to Russia.
• That same phobia permeates the NATO countries as well, even though they are more likely to have travelled to Russia or China. Here’s the worldview of the current head of Canada’s CSIS spy organization, for example, per wikipedia:

The institutional focus of CSIS returned to state actors (such as Russia and China) after a February 2021 speech by the CSIS director, David Vigneault, warned that the Chinese “strategy for geopolitical advantage on all fronts — economic, technological, political and military” uses “all elements of state power to carry out activities that are a direct threat to our national security and sovereignty.”

• I think there is a tendency among most of us to cheer for the underdog, especially if we’ve been oppressed or bullied. Except, of course, if we are the bully. Especially if we’re in denial that we are the bully.
• Ukraine has a long and complex history that has entailed more death and suffering relative to its size than almost any country in the world. It doesn’t surprise me that people close to or descended from those who have suffered at the hands of another country or empire would have long-simmering animosity towards that country. The US since the Civil War, the ‘Troubles’ of Ireland — those hatreds and that distrust die slowly and it doesn’t take much to stir them up again.
• In the previous article I identified fear, guilt, shame, indignation, outrage, resentment, the desire for retribution or redemption, grief, hopelessness, desperation, scapegoating, simplistic thinking, ego, and imaginative poverty as some of the main emotions and mindsets underlying a willingness to fight or support a war. Just about all of these can be seen in the civil war that has been raging in Ukraine since 2014. Ukraine is a failed state, riven by corruption and duelling oligarchs, plutocrats and kleptocrats who robbed the state of everything and left it bankrupt and dysfunctional. Through much of its history it has been brutalized, exploited and robbed by invaders from all sides. That’s true of much of the world, especially countries that seem to be endlessly at war.
• What I think underlies the unwillingness of any of the leaders of the participants in this war to engage in serious negotiations for a peace settlement is, most of all, a fear of backing down, or being seen to back down. While I think the victims — most of the peoples of all ethnic and linguistic groups in Ukraine — would have no hesitation about seeking peace at almost any cost, the leaders don’t dare to be seen as opting for a “dishonourable” peace. Shame, fear, ego, guilt and outrage prevent them from seeking it.

Of course these are only my guesses. We can’t know what any of them are going through. But by trying to understand Why, which starts with gathering different perspectives and information, and getting around the inflammatory propaganda, censorship, mis- and disinformation, I think we can at least start to appreciate the different positions. And from there we can at least understand that there are no “good guys” and no “winners” in any war. And that any peace is better than any war.

I was a peace protester in the 1960s. My Dad helped find homes and jobs for Vietnam War draft dodgers who fled to Canada. I have never cheered the so-called “winner” of any war, just breathed a sigh of relief that the war, at least for a while, was over. I am bewildered that so many of my age cohort are far more outraged about the invasion than they are about the utter absence of any real efforts to bring a quick and lasting peace to Ukraine. And to Yemen and all the other countries still at war, many with our complicity, for that matter.

That’s the question I have no “Why?” answer for. Maybe, there isn’t one.