Climate Links: August 2018

Quote of the Month:

"Canada can't transition to a lower-carbon economy, Notley said, until it creates the jobs and raises the tax money needed to do so by selling its natural resources at fair market value." 

CBC. Aug. 30, 2018.

that's Rachel Notley, who is apparently Alberta's new Minister for Orwellian Doublespeak.
to paraphrase: "we will shift to a low-carbon economy once we have sold off and burned up every ounce of carbon we can first extract profitably!"

Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene. Will Steffen, Johan Rockström, Timoth Lenton, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, et al., PNAS. Aug. 6, 2018.

Our analysis suggests that the Earth System may be approaching a planetary threshold that could lock in a continuing rapid pathway toward much hotter conditions—Hothouse Earth. This pathway would be propelled by strong, intrinsic, biogeophysical feedbacks difficult to influence by human actions, a pathway that could not be reversed, steered, or substantially slowed. 

Where such a threshold might be is uncertain, but it could be only decades ahead at a temperature rise of ∼2.0 °C above preindustrial, and thus, it could be within the range of the Paris Accord temperature targets. 

The impacts of a Hothouse Earth pathway on human societies would likely be massive, sometimes abrupt, and undoubtedly disruptive. 

Avoiding this threshold by creating a Stabilized Earth pathway can only be achieved and maintained by a coordinated, deliberate effort by human societies to manage our relationship with the rest of the Earth System, recognizing that humanity is an integral, interacting component of the system. Humanity is now facing the need for critical decisions and actions that could influence our future for centuries, if not millennia.

Scientists Have Uncovered a Disturbing Climate Change Precedent. Peter Brannen, The Atlantic. Aug 6, 2018.

During the rise of mammals, Earth's temperatures spiked in a scary way that the planet may experience again soon

They were strange days at the beginning of the age of mammals. The planet was still hungover from the astonishing disappearance of its marquee superstars, the dinosaurs. Earth’s newest crater was still a smoldering system of hydrothermal vents, roiling under the Gulf of Mexico. In the wake of Armageddon our shell-shocked ancestors meekly negotiated new roles on a planet they inherited quite by accident. Before long, life settled into new rhythms: Earth hosted 50-foot-long boas sliding through steam-bath jungles, birds grew gigantic in imitation of their dearly departed cousins, and mildly modern mammals we might squint to recognize appeared. Within a few million years, loosed from under the iron heel of the vanished giants, they began to experiment. Early whales pranced across a Pakistani archipelago on all fours, testing out life in the water. The first lemur-like primates leapt from the treetops, and hoofed things of all varieties dashed through the forest

But the most striking feature of this early age of mammals is that it was almost unbelievably hot, so hot that around 50 million years ago there were crocodiles, palm trees, and sand tiger sharks in the Arctic Circle. On the other side of the blue-green orb, in waters that today would surround Antarctica, sea-surface temperatures might have topped an unthinkable 86 degrees Fahrenheit, with near-tropical forests on Antarctica itself. There were perhaps even sprawling, febrile dead zones spanning the tropics, too hot even for animal or plant life of any sort.

...

“You put more CO2 in the atmosphere and you get more warming, that’s just super-simple physics that we figured out in the 19th century,” says David Naafs, an organic geochemist at the University of Bristol. “But exactly how much it will warm by the end of the century, we don’t know. Based on our research of these ancient climates, though, it’s probably more than we thought.”

No Wiser Than Before: An Introduction. Erik Wallenberg & Ansar Fayyazuddin, Science for the People. Special Issue, Summer 2018.

The world is predominantly conceptualized as split between the subjects of history (humans) and the objects of history (everything else). The undifferentiated mass of everything else–identified as nature, or the environment–is treated as if it is simply for human use. Only in periods of crisis do we recognize that there are limits to what can be done to nature before the balance is tilted to a degree that things begin to go horribly wrong for humans as well. Against this reductive split, the world is in fact an ecological whole. Whatever conceptual divisions one makes, one cannot wish away our interdependence and the ultimate unity of the human and non-human worlds. 

We are living through an ecological disaster. Fueled by the drive for profit, the exploitation of both nature and human labor are defining features of our time. Ecosystems are collapsing under the assault of fossil fuel extraction, geological manipulation, and the systematic release of toxins into our water, air and earth. Islands are sinking as sea levels rise. Children are poisoned by lead in their water. Bee colonies are dying off as weather patterns change. And rapacious capitalist greed remains unabated. 

The crisis of climate change is undeniable and requires urgent attention for anyone concerned with the fate of humanity and the world. However, when thought of in the narrowest terms, climate change is shorthand for the rise in global temperatures driven by the precipitous increase in heat trapping greenhouse gases. When the problem is formulated entirely in terms of physical data and timeless mechanism, it is shorn of its historical and social specificity and its provenance in the capitalist drive for profit and its reliance on fossil fuels. Without historical and social context, climate change appears simply as a problem of science, to be solved with technology. 

From Barack Obama’s science advisor to the current Republican House Science Committee, the large-scale manipulation of the climate to mitigate global warming–geoengineering, for short–has gained a hearing in the halls of government.1For their part, billionaire tycoons such as Bill Gates and Richard Branson champion their own role to drive geoengineering innovation. As several contributors to this collection point out, even the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has legitimated geoengineering as a possible solution. 

With this special issue of Science for the People, we aim to engage with this current of thought and interrogate the research and technology, the assumptions and costs, as well as the general focus on the technological and how that relates to the social, political, and economic questions that drive this crisis. 

...

The Global Rightward Shift on Climate Change. Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic. Aug. 28, 2018.

It points to an emerging pattern: Moderate national leaders—on both the center-left and center-right—in some of the world’s richest and most advanced countries are finding it far easier to talk about climate change than to actually fight it. 

At a basic level, this pattern holds up, well, everywhere. Every country except the United States supports the Paris Agreement on climate change. But no major developed country is on track to meet its Paris climate goals, according to the Climate Action Tracker, an independent analysis produced by three European research organizations. Even Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom—where right-wing governments have made combatting climate change a national priority—seem likely to miss their goals. 

Simply put: This kind of failure, writ large, would devastate Earth in the century to come.

Why so many people on Earth? Brief manifest of ethical-political anti-natalism. Guest post by Natan Feltrin & Eleonora Vecchi, Cassandra's Legacy. Aug. 19, 2018.

We live in a finite system: The Earth is a not a closed, nor an isolated, but a finite system. Thereby it is meant that from a biogeochemical perspective there are limited chances of expansion and proliferation on the planet. In other words, the growth of both consumption and consumers, engine par excellence of GWP (Gross World Product), has physical constraints that are flexible but not breakable. There's no possibility to throw our hearts over thermodynamic rules! To state it even more clearly, the ideology of growth inherent in the contemporary capitalistic economy is heading towards a crash against the hard cliff of reality. 

Violation of ecological boundaries: In the last two hundred years, Homo sapiens not only turned fossil fuel into human biomass but also our species increased its unequal prosperity to the detriment of natural systems. This phenomenon, known as The Great Acceleration, has resulted in an abnormal anthropic effect on a geologic scale: the Anthropocene is not only the Epoch of Man because sapiens has become a hyperobject - an all-pervasive entity in the lives of present and future beings- sed etiam because of the "human quantity". In the Epoch of Man - "Man" and not "Human" due to the anthropocentric perspective of geo-history - loss of biodiversity, global warming, ocean acidification, desertification, plastic pollution, land consumption, water pollution, alteration of many biogeochemical cycles and much more, are consequences of the product between consumption and consumers. An unprecedented impact in history…

How Did the End of the World Become Old News? David Wallace-Wells, NYMag, July 26, 2018.


Which cities are liveable without air conditioning – and for how much longer? Nolan Gray and Antonio Voce, The Guardian. Aug. 14, 2018. 

Mapping the world’s cities where you can live comfortably without heating or air conditioning reveals how few boast such ideal climates – and how global warming may further narrow the field

Worst "red tide" toxic algae bloom in years killing turtles, manatees in Florida. CBS News. Aug. 2, 2018.

Red Tide Is Devastating Florida's Sea Life. Are Humans to Blame? Maya Wei-Haas, National Geographic. Aug. 8, 2018.

The rising tide: perhaps, 2018 flood is only a gentle warning. Arundhati Roy, The Week. Aug. 21, 2018.

Australia’s drought is like a cancer eating away at farms and families. David B Gray, Reuters. July 31, 2018.


Warmer soil releasing more carbon, worsening climate change. Seth Borenstein, AP. Aug. 1, 2018.

Apart from the human toll, the violence in the Amazon is also driving an ominous trend in the earth’s climate system. Last October, Science published one of the most important—and least noticed—climate studies in years. Tropical forests in the Amazon and around the world have been so degraded by logging, burning, and agriculture that they have started to release more carbon than they store, according to scientists from the Woods Hole Research Center and Boston University. In the parlance of climate change, these forests are flipping from carbon sinks to carbon sources. 

This is very bad news, for two reasons. First, until now, the capacity of forests to absorb carbon dioxide via photosynthesis has been a crucial buffer against greenhouse-gas emissions: The forests’ absorption of CO2 has limited the global temperature rise to considerably less than it would otherwise be. Second, forests must absorb even more carbon going forward if humankind is to contain that temperature rise to a survivable amount. Current trends put the earth on a trajectory to an increase of 3.5 degrees Celsius, an amount that scientists have warned is “incompatible with organized society.” Minimizing future emissions is imperative, but it’s not enough. To meet the Paris Agreement’s commitment to hold the temperature rise “well below” 2°C, humankind must also “go negative.” That is, we must extract the CO2 that’s already in the atmosphere and store it where it can no longer trap heat, notably in the earth’s trees and soil. And that means growing more trees, not cutting them down.

Tropical Forests Are Flipping From Storing Carbon to Releasing It. Sam Eaton, The Nation. Aug. 30, 2018.

Scientists Warn Millions Of Sea Creatures Are "In Real Peril" As Pacific Ocean Temps Rise To New Records. Michael Snyder via zerohedge. Aug. 17, 2018.

Ocean temperatures continue to rise, and scientists are extremely alarmed as a mass die-off of sea creatures appears to be imminent.

This week, environmental experts were stunned when ocean water off of the San Diego coast hit an all-time record high of 81.3 degrees Fahrenheit. Daily measurements began all the way back in 1916, and since that time a higher ocean temperature has never been recorded off of the California coast. Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident. Studies have shown that ocean temperatures have been rising rapidly all over the planet, and this has already had a devastating impact on many ecosystems. The oceans are the foundation of the food chain, and if sea life starts dying off on a massive scale it could mean unprecedented famine all over the planet.

Scientists draw new connections between climate change and warming oceans. Sean Bettam, UoT. Aug. 1, 2018.

Great Barrier Reef headed for ‘massive death’. The ‘Godfather of Coral’ predicts a ‘planetary catastrophe’. Rebecca Wright and Ivan Watson, CNN. Aug. 2018.

John "Charlie" Veron – widely known as "The Godfather of Coral" – is a renowned reef expert who has personally discovered nearly a quarter of the world's coral species and has spent the past 45 years diving Australia's Great Barrier Reef. 

But after a lifetime trying to make sense of the vast ecosystems that lie beneath the ocean's surface, the 73-year-old is now becoming a prophet of their extinction. 

"It's the beginning of a planetary catastrophe," he tells CNN. "I was too slow to become vocal about it."

... 

"So, you take out coral reefs and a third to a quarter of all marine species gets wiped out. Now that is ecological chaos, it is ecological collapse."

... 

“Mass extinction event”

This doomsday scenario seems extreme, but after decades of studying scientific evidence around this topic, Veron believes that this eventuality is a certainty. 

"We have got now also the phenomenon of a mass extinction event looming," he says, which he describes as a "man-made asteroid" that would compare to the dinosaurs being wiped out.

The world’s oceans and all marine life are on the brink of total collapse. James Bradley, The Monthly. Aug. 2018.


NASA Discovers Bubbling Lakes In The Remote Arctic - A Sign Of Global Warming. Trevor Nace, Forbes. Aug. 30, 2018.

Summer weather is getting "stuck" due to Arctic warming: What happens in the Arctic doesn't stay in the Arctic. Desdemona Despair. Aug. 20, 2018.

“What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic. By upsetting the energy balance of the planet we are changing the temperature gradient between the equator and the pole. This in turn sets in motion major reorganisations of the flow patterns of the atmosphere and ocean,” said Chris Rapley, professor of climate science at University College London. “The consequences are emerging and they are disruptive, and likely to become even more profoundly so. We are on a journey and the destination doesn’t look good.” 

 Some Arctic Ground No Longer Freezing—Even in Winter. Craig Welch, NatlGeo. Aug. 20, 2018.

"This really is astounding," says Max Holmes, an Arctic scientist with Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts.

The discovery has not been peer-reviewed or published and represents limited data from one spot in one year. But with measurements from another scientist nearby and one an ocean away appearing to support the Zimovs' findings, some Arctic experts are weighing a troubling question: Could a thaw of permafrost begin decades sooner than many people expect in some of the Arctic's coldest, most carbon-rich regions, releasing trapped greenhouse gases that could accelerate human-caused climate change?

...

Nearly a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere's landmass sits above permafrost. Trapped in this frozen soil and vegetation is more than twice the carbon found in the atmosphere.

As fossil-fuel burning warms the Earth, this ground is thawing, allowing microbes to consume buried organic matter and release carbon dioxide and shorter-lived methane, which is 25 times as potent a greenhouse gas as CO2.

...

more than a dozen Arctic climate scientists contacted by National Geographic agree that this year's active-layer data highlights the limitations of global climate models. The sophisticated computer programs that forecast future climate scenarios often used by government decision-makers simply can't capture major changes in permafrost.

"When we simulate these things there are a number of processes the models don't include—processes that multiply the transfer of heat," says Daniel Fortier, an associate professor of geography with the University of Montreal. "I think it's safe to say that things are happening faster than we were expecting."

The weather all over is not just extreme … It’s downright freakish. William Blum, AER. Aug. 17, 2018.

The argument I like to use when speaking to those who don’t accept the idea that extreme weather phenomena are largely man-made is this: 

Well, we can proceed in one of two ways: 

1. We can do our best to limit the greenhouse effect by curtailing greenhouse gas emissions (carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide) into the atmosphere, and if it turns out that these emissions were not in fact a significant cause of the widespread extreme weather phenomena, then we’ve wasted a lot of time, effort and money (although other benefits to the ecosystem would still accrue).
2. We can do nothing at all to curtail the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and if it turns out that these emissions were in fact the leading cause of all the extreme weather phenomena, then we’ve lost the earth and life as we know it. 

So, are you a gambler? 

Irony of ironies … Misfortune of misfortunes … We have a leader who has zero interest in such things; indeed, the man is unequivocally contemptuous of the very idea of the need to modify individual or social behavior for the sake of the environment. And one after another he’s appointed his soulmates to head government agencies concerned with the environment. 

What is it that motivates such people? I think it’s mainly that they realize that blame for much of environmental damage can be traced, directly or indirectly, to corporate profit-seeking behavior, an ideology to which they are firmly committed.

Much of Western America Will Be Uninhabitable In 40 Years. Ian Welsh. Aug. 21, 2018.

Capitalism Killed Our Climate Momentum, Not "Human Nature". Naomi Klein, The Intercept. Aug. 3, 2018.

rebuttal to

Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change. Nathaniel Rich, NYT Mag. Aug. 1, 2018.

Readying the Mind. Albert Bates. Aug. 5, 2018.

We may have to recognize, as Lynn Margulis tells Charles Mann in Wizard, each species, our own included, comes with an expiration date. We just don’t quite know when that expiration date falls

Tar Sands Documentaries

Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives on the Alberta Tar Sands. youtube. 2009.

Canada's Tar Sands: The most destructive project on Earth? youtube. 2013.

The Ooze: a documentary on the Alberta tar sands. youtube. 2015.

Canada Under Siege - Part 1 - The Tar Sands, Free Trade, & Government. youtube. 2013.

Tar Sands: The Selling of Alberta. trailer.

Downstream. Vimeo. trailer.

H2Oil. Vimeo. trailer.

War and Empire Links: special McCain edition

1 less demented evil war hawk plaguing the world.

John McCain's death makes the world a better (less nasty and evil) place.

But, sadly, only ever-so-slightly so.

From Kissinger to Madeline Albright to Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld to Killary Klinton to Drone-King Barrack Obama and all their henchmen and supporters, including the authors of the Project for a New American Century, Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan, to Kagan's wife Victoria Nuland (not to mention our very own Chrystia Freeland) to Lindsey Graham to John Bolton, to... the list of warmongering psychopaths ruling the world is endless, and though McCain's death is worth celebrating, just like Cheney's and Rumsfeld's will be, it won't change much of anything.


John McCain is dead. By Willy B via Sic Semper Tyrannis. Aug. 26, 2018.

Of course, you already know that because the headlines are dominating the news coverage. Most of the coverage is also lionizing him as some kind of hero who defended America from his time as a POW in Vietnam to his attacks on Russia for supposedly trying to undermine American democracy. The fact is, and I know this because I've documented some of it in the course of my own work in recent years, he was a warmonger supreme. McCain never met a war–especially a regime change war–he didn't like, nor a terrorist he couldn't endorse as a "freedom fighter," especially, as in the case of Syria, if that terrorist was in the service of the regime change war he endorsed. In Iraq, Libya, Syria and Ukraine, a million or more people have died and tens of millions more are suffering as a result of these wars that McCain did so much to bring about. 

In a short but to-the-point piece. Sputnik summarizes McCain's extreme Russophobia and his love for the Nazi regime in Kiev. Vladimir Putin was being charitable when, as Sputnik recounts, he told Oliver Stone that McCain was a patriot, but one who couldn't accept that the world had changed. "People with such convictions, like the Senator you mentioned, they still live in the Old World," Putin said. "And they're reluctant to look into the future, they are unwilling to recognize how fast the world is changing." That Putin was able to say that says more about his genuine humanity than it does about McCain, who gave up whatever humanity he had a long time ago.

Anyone fighting for a genuine peace in the world will not mourn the passing of John McCain.

Why you should celebrate loudly and unapologetically when John McCain [finally fucking] dies. Caitlin Johnstone. May 8, 2018.

Arizona Senator and murderous psychopath John McCain is rumored to be at death’s door, and already the world is being admonished by high-profile empire loyalists not to voice any criticism of his blood-saturated, obnoxiously long career. 

... 

“These repressive decrees prohibiting criticisms of John McCain as he dies are like those who insist gun control not be spoken of after mass shootings,” tweeted journalist Glenn Greenwald. “Discussions of his life are inherently political. If you’re going heap praise on & sanctify him, you can’t also silence critics.”

"Insisting on the right to convert every US political leader into a heroic & noble saint upon death, while condemning critics as gauche & classless, is propaganda. It's easy to dismiss all the deaths McCain has caused because they're distant and invisible, but they still matter."
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 7, 2018

I would take it a few clicks further, personally. I say it is the duty of everyone who opposes acts of mass military slaughter for power and profit to cheer loudly and unapologetically when John McCain dies. 

We should all celebrate McCain’s death. Not in a spirit of vengeance for the lives his relentless warmongering has helped end. Nor because his death may save innocent lives, though that possibility is surely an added perk. No, we should celebrate the end of McCain’s despicable life first and foremost to prevent such bloodthirsty depravity from being normalized, or worse, immortalized as heroism. 

Many people will recoil from such a notion in horror, like the pearl-clutching ladies onThe View did when discussing my article “Please Just Fucking Die Already” which I wrote about McCain shortly before his cancer diagnosis. 

These people are cowards. They have compartmentalized themselves away from the horrors that McCain has helped inflict upon this world because it is more psychologically comfortable than acknowledging that such a pervasively evil presence has been working so intimately with the nexus of power in their country.

If everyone could be forced Clockwork Orange-style to look at all the death, destruction and suffering that John McCain has helped inflict upon our species, they would feel nothing but relief upon his departing from this world. It is only the aforementioned power to dissociate and compartmentalize which enables people to spew nonsense about McCain being a hero and a good man. 

It is this pocket of compartmentalization that we are being bullied into by establishment loyalists who demand solemn reverence for this unforgivable monster simply because his time here is almost up. They are doing this because it benefits and protects them. The ability of the servants of empire to proudly show their faces in public after helping to ensure the deaths of countless thousands of human beings is absolutely essential for the survival of the Orwellian oligarchy which rules over us. If we could see these murderous beasts for what they truly are, the illusion would be shattered and we’d never consent to being ruled by a system which empowers them. 

To truly see John McCain for what he is and what he has done is to see the face of the oppression machine that rank-and-file Americans have been manipulated into supporting. The empire which spends medicine money on bombs overseas and insists on an economic system that is propped up with the barrel of a gun depends on keeping its most hands-on servants normalized and celebrated. Mainstream Americans seeing McCain clearly will also be seeing themselves and what they’ve been duped into consenting to. Rejecting this illusion and pissing on McCain’s grave is a direct act of rebellion against the oppressive, war profiteering oligarchs and their allied defense and intelligence agencies. 

The reason the US-centralized war machine is able to get away with unleashing unspeakable horror after unspeakable horror upon our world is because that war machine has become normalized and celebrated. So it is therefore our duty to call John McCain the wicked witch that he is and celebrate like munchkins when he dies.

In a healthy world, war-peddling neoconservatives like John McCain will be treated with the same social stigma as child molesters and serial killers. So let’s create that world. 

Abnormalize war. Abnormalize the campaigns of mass slaughter for power and profit by the US-centralized war machine. Abnormalize the system which tries to normalize John McCain. 

Normalize peace. Normalize an expectation that leaders will not advocate war at every opportunity. Normalize an environment where someone seeking out opportunities to push for war will be recoiled from in horror like the demonic freaks that they are. Normalize a world with no John McCains. 

Oppose the calls of the social engineers for reverence and good behavior. The war machine is not entitled to our politeness. McCain’s family is not entitled to force the entire world to pretend that he wasn’t evil child-killing monster. We need to drag this abomination out into the light where everyone can see it and call it what it is. 

When the time comes (hopefully sooner than later), join me in celebrating John McCain’s death. Here’s to a world where such vile ghouls are treated like what they are.

DO NOT let them make a saint of this asshole. Caitlin Johnstone. Aug. 25, 2018.

McCain is at the top of the trends list on Twitter in the US as I write this, and clicking on his name brings up countless blue-checkmarked establishment loyalists from both sides of the imaginary partisan divide sternly admonishing us all to put aside our differences and show reverence for this brave, noble hero in his final days. They are using guilt, sympathy and patriotism to bully their followers into showing reverence for a man who has dedicated his entire political career to facilitating the violent slaughter of human beings at every opportunity, and in so doing they are sanctifying his legacy. 

One of the most aggressively protected narratives in corporate liberal circles is that John McCain is a hero whose very name should be uttered with the greatest reverence. It gets traction with rank-and-file Democrats because supporting McCain for his opposition to Trump allows them to feel as though they are non-partisan free thinkers, in exactly the same way Trump supporters believe their hatred of McCain makes them non-partisan free thinkers. In reality, McCain is just one of the many bloodthirsty neocons like Bill Kristol and Max Boot who have aligned themselves with the Democratic party in recent years in order to better advance their warmongering agendas. 

It is those agendas that are being promoted with the hero worship of John McCain. By committing the outrageous heresy of mocking, ridiculing and scorning that sacred cow, we are fighting the attempts of the empire loyalists and war propagandists to normalize and sanctify the act of inflicting neoconservative military bloodbaths upon innocent people around the world.

Map: All the Countries John McCain Has Wanted to Attack. Mother Jones. Sep. 6, 2013.


The Real John McCain. Navy Releases McCain's Records. Edward Morgan. Sep. 11, 2017.

The narrative propagated by McCain, of his five and a half years as a Prisoner of War in North Vietnam is about as far from the truth as one could possibly imagine. They allege that McCain, from the very first moments of his capture behaved as a COLLABORATOR and propaganda tool for his North Vietnamese captors.

...

McCain’s disgraceful and wholly reprehensible conduct (along with that of John Kerry) during the 1991-93 Senate Committee on POW/MIAs, where McCain made massive efforts to block the release of classified documents and is described here as the person who did the “most harm” to the movement of families who wanted to rescue any remaining loved ones, left behind in Vietnam and Laos. 

McCain is described by those interviewed in this clip as perhaps the person who did the most to quash this movement – and they suspect that this was because he didn’t want the truth to be revealed by them.

The Manufactured McCain: Lifting Up A Bloodstained, Lying, Venal Servant of Capitalist Empire. Bruce A. Dixon, Black Agenda Report. Aug. 30, 2018.

The Manufactured McCain and the Real McCain 

There’s a real John Sidney McCain III and there’s a fake one, manufactured for the public relations of US empire. Imperial PR needs to justify, even sanctify the ecocidal and genocidal rule of the rich by portraying its servants not as the venal and bloodthirsty thieves they are, but as the brightest, the best, the most noble and deserving among us. The Manufactured McCain whom the corporate media will spend another week on top of the previous one lifting up to the heavens bears only passing resemblance to the real John McCain. The real McCain was no hero. He was a lying, bribe taking, neo-nazi sympathizing politician and war criminal, who served the US empire and himself for all of his long life.

... 

The manufactured war hero VS the real accident-prone pilot. 

The Manufactured McCain sometimes called himself a “fighter pilot.” That’s not what the US Navy called the Real McCain. In navy language, fighter pilots are the elite of the elite, the ones who fight other planes in the air. The Real McCain flew ground attack aircraft, which in Vietnam meant bombing mostly undefended civilian ground targets.
The real McCain was a slipshod and reckless pilot who totaled 3 aircraft in incidents where navy investigators pinned the cause of the crash upon lapses in pilot’s judgment, in each and every case contradicting the Real McCain’s official reports of those accidents.

...

During his 32 years in the US Senate, the real John McCain was a consistent warmonger, advocating US military intervention in Africa, South America, Korea, and almost everywhere. He sang “bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran” before a veterans group, and called demonstrators against Henry Kissinger “despicable scum.” The record of his public calls for coups, invasions, blockades, bombings and assassinations to advance US military and economic domination of the planet is far too long to list. 

All this explains why corporate media are lifting up their whitewashed and manufactured version of John McCain. He’s one of their own, a genuine war criminal and loyal servant of capital. Lifting him up, creating and embellishing his heroic story lifts up and legitimizes the rule of the rich.

A senator masquerading as a gas station. Dmitry Orlov. Aug. 28, 2018.

His “martyrdom” as a POW helped pave his way to a political career, first in Congress, then in the Senate. During his obscenely long career in national politics, McCain did what he could to make American “democracy” look like a complete joke and to hasten America’s collapse. This, by the way, wasn’t a tall order: American “democracy” had long been a cesspool—a playground for lobbyists and political technologists based on a fully gerrymandered system of fake elections. But he did his thing, and is therefore twice the hero. 

Defecating into the cesspool of American politics doesn’t alter its chemistry much, but McCain pushed the limits here as well. If only he and the native genius that is Sara Palin had won the Presidency!

Bathwater. Ilargi, The Automatic Earth. Aug. 26, 2018.

Let’s try a different angle. How about the world through the eyes of children’s? I don’t want to dwell on John McCain, too many people already do today, but I would suggest that your thoughts and prayers are with the souls of the hundreds of thousands of children that died because McCain advocated bombing them. Or, indeed, 50-odd years ago, were bombed by him personally. I wanted to leave him be altogether, don’t kick a man when he’s down, but I can’t get the image out of my head of him singing “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran”. 

To remember that, perhaps the most vile and infamous thing he’s ever done (it’s in the top ten), and then see someone like Ocasio-Cortez say he was an “unparalleled example of human decency”, it’s almost comedy. But not as funny as when in the 2008 campaign the woman in the red dress asked him if Obama was an Arab, and he responded: “No, ma’am. No, ma’am. He’s a decent, family man, citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues and that’s what this campaign is all about”. 

That is full-blown hilarious. And hardly a soul caught it, which makes it many times worse. It made him a decent man in the eyes of Americans to defend Obama by declaring that Arabs are per definition neither decent nor family men. Yeah, well, you might as well bomb them all then. But enough about McCain: it’s about the children, and their souls, not his. 

... 

Abroad, Americans treat children even a lot worse than they do their own. With the shining example of John McCain in mind, they have supplied the Saudis with much of the weaponry needed to murder many thousands more children in Yemen. 1.2 million human beings are estimated to have died in Iraq alone. Thanks John. That’s what, half a million children there alone?

The Real John McCain. Jack Kerwick, Lee Rockwell.com. July 25, 2017.

McCain is not alone in having their blood on his hands. Yet in a Regime, a Government-Media-Complex, comprised of warmongers, McCain enjoys the dubious distinction of being the warmonger par excellence.

Best Way to Say Farewell to McCain: Piss on His Grave. Mike Mish Shedlock. Aug. 26, 2018.

McCain's "Legacy" Lives On: What "Legacy" Is That? Mike Mish Shedlock. Aug. 26, 2018.

McCain's Legacy 

1. In the 15-year war in Afghanistan wasting over a trillion dollars.
2. In drone policy, where the US military gets to act as prosecutor, judge and jury, where innocent lives are tossed aside as "collateral damage".
3. in support of useless weapons systems like the F-35 that McCain supported.
4. In asinine foreign policy in Syria and Iran.
5. In hypocrites and comedians like Kathy Griffin singing the praise of McCain.
6. In mainsteam media looking the other way when thousands of innocent children are killed in Yemen.
7. In support of torture programs despite McCain himself being tortured.
8. In support of holding people with no charge in prisons in Cuba.
9. In support of meddling in Ukraine while accusing Russia of meddling in the US.
10. In support of sanctions that kill or harm innocent people.
11. In support of no-fly zones along with Hillary that may have meant direct confrontation with Russia.
12. In ISIS, a direct result of misguided US policies that McCain strongly supported

John McCain and the POW cover-up. Sydney Schanberg, The American Conservative, Via Unz Review. May 25, 2010.


John McCain as Metaphoric Myth. Edward Curtin. Sep. 2, 2018.

It’s still the same old story. The best propaganda places individual stories within a larger framework. The individual is extolled or damned in the service of the controlling myth. 

Senator John McCain is a case in point. As an individual, he is not important, except as the glorified stories about him and his own confabulations about himself can be used to enhance the controlling myth. 

... 

The recent spectacle over John McCain’s death is a perfect example of myth creation. McCain is, however, a metaphor for the larger ongoing narrative that has been going on for centuries and seems to have no end.

John McCain requests ashes be launched onto Iraq. The Onion. Aug. 24, 2018.


Comment. Gary Weglarz, Medium.

I appreciate the Onion’s comments about McCain wanting his ashes launched into Iraq. However, I think the most karmically perfect ending might be to watch John Bolton, Lindsey Graham, Nancy Pelosi, and the rest of that whole cabal of war-mongering psychopathic vampires in Washington — “snort”- McCains ashes off a blood soaked copy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (the U.S. is the only industrialized country that has still failed to ratify it). Just saying.

Chris Hedges

Saying Goodbye to Planet Earth. Chris Hedges, Truthdig. Aug. 19, 2018.

The spectacular rise of human civilization—its agrarian societies, cities, states, empires and industrial and technological advances ranging from irrigation and the use of metals to nuclear fusion—took place during the last 10,000 years, after the last ice age. Much of North America was buried, before the ice retreated, under sheets eight times the height of the Empire State Building. This tiny span of time on a planet that is 4.5 billion years old is known as the Holocene Age. It now appears to be coming to an end with the refusal of our species to significantly curb the carbon emissions and pollutants that might cause human extinction. The human-induced change to the ecosystem, at least for many thousands of years, will probably make the biosphere inhospitable to most forms of life.

The planet is transitioning under our onslaught to a new era called the Anthropocene. This era is the product of violent conquest, warfare, slavery, genocide and the Industrial Revolution, which began about 200 years ago, and saw humans start to burn a hundred million years of sunlight stored in the form of coal and petroleum. The numbers of humans climbed to over 7 billion. Air, water, ice and rock, which are interdependent, changed. Temperatures climbed. The Anthropocene, for humans and most other species, will most likely conclude with extinction or a massive die-off, as well as climate conditions that will preclude most known life forms. We engineered our march toward collective suicide although global warming was first identified in 1896 by the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius.

The failure to act to ameliorate global warming exposes the myth of human progress and the illusion that we are rational creatures. We ignore the wisdom of the past and the stark scientific facts before us. We are entranced by electronic hallucinations and burlesque acts, including those emanating from the centers of power, and this ensures our doom. Speak this unpleasant truth and you are condemned by much of society. The mania for hope and magical thinking is as seductive in the Industrial Age as it was in pre-modern societies.

Ate and Nemesis were minor deities who were evoked in ancient Greek drama. Those infected with hubris, the Greeks warned, lost touch with the sacred, believed they could defy fate, or fortuna, and abandoned humility and virtue. They thought of themselves as gods. Their hubris blinded them to human limits and led them to carry out acts of suicidal folly, embodied in the god Ate. This provoked the wrath of the gods. Divine retribution, in the form of Nemesis, led to tragedy and death and then restored balance and order, once those poisoned with hubris were eradicated. “Too late, too late you see the path of wisdom,” the Chorus in the play “Antigone” tells Creon, ruler of Thebes, whose family has died because of his hubris.

“We’re probably not the first time there’s been a civilization in the universe,” Adam Frank, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester and the author of “Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth,” told me when we met in New York.

“The idea that we’re destroying the planet gives us way too much credit,” he went on. “Certainly, we’re pushing the earth into a new era. If we look at the history of the biosphere, the history of life on earth, in the long run, the earth is just going to pick that up and do what is interesting for it. It will run new evolutionary experiments. We, on the other hand, may not be a part of that experiment.”

Civilizations probably have risen elsewhere in the universe, developed complex societies and then died because of their own technological advances. Every star in the night sky is believed to be circled by planets, some 10 billion trillion of which astronomers such as Frank Drake estimate are hospitable to life.

“If you develop an industrial civilization like ours, the route is going to be the same,” Adam Frank said. “You’re going to have a hard time not triggering climate change.”

Astronomers call the inevitable death of advanced civilizations across the universe “the great filter.” Robin Hanson in the essay, “The Great Filter—Are We Almost Past It?” argues that advanced civilizations hit a wall or a barrier that makes continued existence impossible. The more that human societies evolve, according to Hanson, the more they become “energy intensive” and ensure their own obliteration. This is why, many astronomers theorize, we have not encountered other advanced civilizations in the universe. They destroyed themselves.

“For a civilization to destroy itself through nuclear war, it has to have certain emotional characteristics,” Frank said. “You can imagine certain civilizations saying, ‘I’m not building those [nuclear weapons]. Those are crazy.’ But climate change, you can’t get away from. If you build a civilization, you’re using huge amounts of energy. The energy feeds back on the planet, and you’re going to push yourself into a kind of Anthropocene. It’s probably universal.”

Frank said that our inability to project ourselves into a future beyond our own life spans makes it hard for us to grasp the reality and consequences of severe climate change. Scenarios for dramatic climate change often center around the year 2100, when most adults living now will be dead. Although this projection may turn out to be overly optimistic given the accelerating rate of climate change, it allows societies to ignore—because it is outside the life span of most living adults—the slow-motion tsunami that is occurring.

“We think we’re not a part of the biosphere—that we’re above it—that we’re special,” Frank said. “We’re not special.”

“We’re the experiment that the biosphere is running now,” he said. “A hundred million years ago, it was grassland. Grasslands were a new evolutionary innovation. They changed the planet, changed how the planet worked. Then the planet went on and did things with it. Industrial civilization is the latest experiment. We will keep being a part of that experiment or, with the way that we’re pushing the biosphere, it will just move on without us.”

“We have been sending probes to every other planet in the solar system for the last 60 years,” he said. “We have rovers running around on Mars. We’ve learned generically how planets work. From Venus, we’ve learned about the runaway greenhouse effect. On Venus the temperature is 800 degrees. You can melt lead [there]. Mars is a totally dry, barren world now. But it used to have an ocean. It used to be a blue world. We have models that can predict the climate. I can predict the weather on Mars tomorrow via these climate models. People who think the only way we can understand climate is by studying the earth now, that’s completely untrue. These other worlds—Mars, Venus, Titan. Titan is a moon of Saturn that has an amazingly rich atmosphere. They all teach us how to think like a planet. They have taught us generically how planets behave.”

Frank points out that much of the configurations of the ecosystem on which we depend have not always been part of the planet’s biosphere. This includes the Gulf Stream, which carries warm water and warm air up from Florida to Boston and out across the Atlantic.

“Hundreds of millions of people in some of Earth’s most technologically advanced cities rely on the mild climate delivered by the Gulf Stream,” Frank writes in “Light of the Stars.” “But the Gulf Stream is nothing more than a particular circulation pattern formed during a particular climate state the Earth settled into after the last ice age ended. It is not a permanent fixture of the planet.”

“Everything we think about the earth just happens to be this one moment we found it in,” he told me. “We’re pushing it [the planet] and we’re pushing it hard. We don’t have much time to make these transitions. What people have to understand is that climate change is our cosmic adolescence. We should have expected this. The question is not ‘did we change the climate?’ It’s ‘of course we changed the climate. What else did you expect to have happened?’ We’re like a teenager who has been given this power over ourselves. Just like how you give a teenager the keys to the car, there’s this moment where you’re like, ‘Oh my God I hope you make it.’ And that’s what we are.”

“Climate change is not a problem we have to make go away, in a sense that you don’t make adolescence go away,” Frank said. “It is a dangerous transition that you have to navigate. … The question is are we smart enough to deal with the effects of our own power? Climate change is not a pollution problem. It’s not like any environmental problem we’ve faced before. In some sense, it’s not an environmental problem but a planetary transition. We’ve already pushed the earth into it. We’re going to have to evolve a new way of being a civilization, fundamentally.”

“We will either evolve those group behaviors quickly or the earth will take what we’ve given it, in terms of new climate states, and move on and create new species,” he said.

Frank said the mathematical models for the future of the planet have three trajectories. 

• One is a massive die-off of perhaps 70 percent of the human population and then an uneasy stabilization. 
• The second is complete collapse and extinction. 
• The third is a dramatic reconfiguration of human society to protect the biosphere and make it more diverse and productive not for human beings but for the health of the planet. This would include halting our consumption of fossil fuels, converting to a plant-based diet and dismantling the animal agriculture industry as well as greening deserts and restoring rainforests.

There is, Frank warned, a tipping point when the biosphere becomes so degraded no human activity will halt runaway climate change. He cites Venus again.

“The water on Venus got lost slowly,” he said. “The CO2 built up. There was no way to take it out of the atmosphere. It gets hotter. The fact that it gets hotter makes it even hotter. Which makes it even hotter. That’s what would happen in the collapse model. Planets have minds of their own. They are super-complex systems. Once you get the ball rolling down the hill. … This is the greatest fear. This is why we don’t want to go past 2 degrees [Celsius] of climate change. We’re scared that once you get past 2 degrees, the planet’s own internal mechanisms kick in. The population comes down like a stone. A complete collapse. You lose the civilization entirely."

Richard Smith on Ecosocialism

The fires this time: implications for ecosocialist strategy. Richard Smith, climate and capitalism. Aug. 15, 2018.

A call for public discussion of the role of deindustrialization in building an alternative to the catastrophic course of 21st century capitalism.

Deindustrialization.”That’s a word you virtually never hear in the debate around global warming.

Not surprising. It’s a word that’s loaded with negative implications: economic collapse, mass layoffs, falling living standards. Who wants to think about those, let alone think about this as a strategy of suppressing CO2 emissions? Imagine suggesting to the next oil driller, auto worker or airline flight attendant you run into that the only way to stop global warming is stop producing oil, park the cars, and ground the airplanes. Even the word “degrowth” is beyond the pale of thinkable thought in mainstream discourse. 

Yet we had better start thinking and talking and organizing around this strategy because, as is becoming more and more apparent, deindustrialization is the only means to avert global ecological collapse. If we do not organize a rationally planned partial but very substantial deindustrialization of the over-industrialized nations of the North including China, Mother Nature is going to do it for us in a much less pleasant manner and we will face the prospect of the collapse of civilization in this century. 

If humanity had taken serious steps to reduce emissions decades ago in the 1980s when climate scientists began warning us (as the New York Times magazine reminds us) then perhaps we wouldn’t be in the fix we’re in right now. But we didn’t and haven’t and so now scientists tell us we face a climate emergency. 

For decades the developed economies of the world and the rogue party-state of China have ignored the threat of global warming and kicked the can down the road on the assumption “dangerous” global warming is not imminent or not much of a threat to them at least in the near future. After all, we in the temperate regions of the northern hemisphere have not suffered so much because the heating is more extreme at the poles than the temperature latitudes. The Arctic and Antarctica are melting very fast, with immediate and dire implications for the whole world. And global warming is hitting the neo-tropical Middle East, India and Africa very hard. 

But in the U.S. all the media talks about is increased flooding along coastlines, more frequent droughts in the West and Southwest, more fires in the west and so on. 

But this summer, the belt of furious fires all around the northern hemisphere from California to Greece to Japan which cost the lives of hundreds has finally grabbed public attention, even the media. I don’t know if this is the first time that the NY Times even published an article on global warming on the front page (above the fold) but I believe this is the first time it has explicitly blamed global warming for the fires this time in a top-of-the-page headline. And this is only the beginning. 

As climate scientist Michael Mann is quoted in the lead editorial of the New York Times of August 10th: “What we call an ‘extreme heat wave’ today we will simply call ‘summer’ in a matter of decades if we don’t sharply reduce carbon emissions.” 

Yet from the first warnings of scientists and the first efforts to come up with plans to restrain emissions, all efforts to reduce emissions have been subordinated to maximizing economic growth: Whatever we do, we must not slow economic growth. Or, as G.W. Bush put it: “We will never sacrifice the American way of life.” 

So instead of simply imposing rationing of fossil fuels, suppressing vehicle production, grounding civilian aircraft (all of which President Roosevelt did during WWII), all mainstream efforts from the voluntary curbs of Kyoto in the 1990s to the cap & trade schemes of the 2000s to the carbon tax schemes of today, have been explicitly premised on the assumption that they must not impede growth. In other words, they were all designed to fail. Which they have. In result, as global economic growth soared since the 1980s, so have emissions. So now what? 

We certainly can’t expect any change from the powers that be. So long as we live under capitalism, governments, industries, industrial unions, as well as most workers and consumers will continue to prioritize growth over saving the planet because, given capitalism, what else can they do? The planet may collapse tomorrow but degrowth or deindustrialization would mean I’m out of a job today. This is how we drive off the cliff to collapse — “unless” (as the Lorax said) … 

Unless we change the conversation. Unless we get people to start thinking about and talking about and working for a viable alternative to the market-driven collapse of civilization. Our job, as ecosocialists is to put forward a practical plan to slam the brakes on emissions, an emergency response to the climate emergency. This plan has to begin with brutal honesty: 

1. We can’t have an infinitely growing economy on a finite planet. This growth-till-we-bust logic “worked” in Adam Smith’s day. But today, this is the road to collective suicide. All mainstream efforts to suppress emissions while maintaining economic growth have failed. The only way to suppress emissions is to suppress emissions: impose firm caps, impose rationing regardless of the impact on the economy. We have to say this, and hammer this point home relentlessly. People and planet have to take priority over profit or we’re doomed. 
2. We can’t suppress emissions without closing down companies. Suppressing emissions means closing down the producers of those emissions – the oil companies, auto manufacturers, power plants, chemical companies, construction companies, airlines, etc. According to the EPA in the U.S. the largest generators of CO2 emissions are transportation (28.5%), energy (mainly electricity generation) 28.4%, manufacturing 22%, construction 11%, industrial farming 9%. We have to say to people, “Sorry, but lots of companies, beginning with fossil fuel producers but also fossil fuel-based companies will have to be shut down or drastically retrenched. It’s either that or your children are going to burn up in an uninhabitable planet.” This is the only way to suppress emissions in brief window of opportunity we still have left. There is no other alternative.
3. We need to socialize those companies, nationalize them, buy them out and take them into public hands so we can phase them out or retrench them. ExxonMobil, General Motors, United Airlines, Monsanto and Cargill can’t put themselves out of business even to save the planet because they’re owned by private shareholders. Either we save the companies (till the planet collapses) or we take them over and put them out of business or reduce their production to sustainable levels. 
4. If we close down/retrench industries then society must provide new low- or no-carbon jobs for all those displaced workers and at comparable wages and conditions. Corporations, typically limited to one line or field of production, like oil production for example, can’t be expected provide new jobs in an entirely different field for displaced workers and have no mandate to do so. Society has do this. Otherwise those workers will not be able to see their way to joining with us to do what we have to do to save them and their children. 
5. We have to replace our anarchic market economy with a largely, though not entirely, planned economy, a bottom-up democratically planned economy. The environmental, social and economic problems we face cannot be solved by individual choices in the marketplace. They require collective democratic control over the economy to prioritize the needs of society and the environment. And they require national and international economic planning to reorganize and restructure our economies and redeploy labor and resources to those ends. In other words, if humanity is to save itself, we have to overthrow capitalism and replace it with some form of democratic eco-socialism. 

This is the public conversation the whole nation and the whole world needs to be having right now. There is no other alternative. It’s up to us ecosocialists to motivate this conversation because no mainstream organization is willing to risk challenging the government, capitalism, unions, workers, and consumers, let alone taking them on all together. 

The abject failure of all mainstream approaches opens the way for us to put forward more radical approaches to a mass audience. Awful as things are at the moment, this presents a huge opportunity to ecosocialists. But we really need to get moving on this, develop educational materials of all kinds from videos to bumper strips, organize forums, teach-ins, write opinion pieces, and develop ecosocialist politics within the rapidly growing 45,000-member Democratic Socialists of America, and so on.

Views of Hans Joachim Schellnuber

Take unprecedented action or bear the consequences, says eminent scientist and advisor. David Spratt and Ian Dunlop, Climate Code Red. Aug. 20, 2018.

“Climate change is now reaching the end-game, where very soon humanity must choose between taking unprecedented action, or accepting that it has been left too late and bear the consequences.” 

Those are the challenging words from Prof. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, for twenty years the head of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, and a senior advisor to Pope Francis, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the European Union. In the foreword to a new report, Schellnhuber says the issue now "is the very survival of our civilisation, where conventional means of analysis may become useless”.

...

Schellnhuber argues that calculating probabilities makes little sense in the most critical instances, such as the methane-release dynamics in thawing permafrost areas or the potential failing of entire states in the climate crisis. Rather, he says, we should “identify possibilities, that is, potential developments in the planetary make-up that are consistent with the initial and boundary conditions, the processes and the drivers we know.” 

This calls for a new approach, with less emphasis on climate models in endless runs, and a new focus on such methods as scenario planning, where the consequences of a number of future possibilities, including those which may seem highly unlikely, but have major consequences, are evaluated. This way, he says, "one can overcome the probability obsession that not only fantasizes about the replicability of the singular, but also favours the familiar over the unknown and unexpected".

... 

Schellnhuber concludes that it is “all the more important to listen to non-mainstream voices who do understand the issues and are less hesitant to cry wolf. Unfortunately for us, the wolf may already be in the house."

Slow Thinking, by Albert Bates

Slow Thinking. Albert Bates. Aug. 19, 2018.

"Plastics and climate change have a lot in common with a broken Maytag."

The sudden emergence of plastic in the 20th Century caught evolutionary biology by surprise. The same might be said of the atomic bomb, but there the threat was more visceral. Human brains aren’t wired to respond easily to large, slow-moving threats.

According to a 2014 article in The Guardian:

“Our brain is essentially a get-out-of-the-way machine,” Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard best known for his research into happiness, told audiences at Harvard Thinks Big 2010. “That’s why we can duck a baseball in milliseconds.”

While we have come to dominate the planet because of such traits, he said, threats that develop over decades rather than seconds circumvent the brain’s alarm system. “Many environmentalists say climate change is happening too fast. No, it’s happening too slowly. It’s not happening nearly quickly enough to get our attention.”

Humans are saddled with other shortcomings, too. “Loss aversion” means we’re more afraid of losing what we want in the short-term than surmounting obstacles in the distance. Our built-in “optimism bias” irrationally projects sunny days ahead in spite of evidence to the contrary. To compound all that, we tend to seek out information not for the sake of gaining knowledge for its own sake, but to support our already-established viewpoints. 

I discussed two types of cognitive bias — confirmation and normalcy — in my November 24, 2011 post:

In the case of the former, we sentient bipeds with tripartite brains actively seek out and assign more weight to evidence that confirms our views of the world — views we mostly formed as children as we “aped” our parents and teachers or our inspiring leaders and celebrities. Our fondness towards normalcy lets us box out things that make us feel uncomfortable and allows us to focus on ways to blend into the crowd. If the crowd thinks peak oil, climate change, JFK’s assassination or the inside job at the World Trade Center are just weird conspiracy theories by crazies at the fringe of our society, we ape the crowd. That’s just Sapiens’ Social Software. 

Considering that human minds are capable of great feats of irrationality, is there really much hope we will respond quickly enough to the emerging, but slow moving, threats of plastics, environmental radioactivity, petrocollapse or climate change?

We are accustomed to most threats to our well-being being reversible or avoidable. We are accustomed to them emerging with ample warning, so we have time to consider and need only act once a problem becomes big enough or close enough to be really, really, scary.

Our linear cognition evolved before we came down from the trees, when you could plot a course three branches ahead, like Tarzan, but if you projected your mental map to a fourth branch there was a good chance you might miss the nearest one while you were so deep in thought.

Bobby Fisher could see more chess moves ahead than Boris Spassky. We need more of his genes amongst us. But Spassky had three children and some number of grandchildren and Fisher died childless..

Nonlinearity and quantum phenomena puzzle us. How is it that prey can sense they are being observed even when there is no sight, sound or smell to reveal their predator? Our pattern recognition only extends to “as before so thereafter,” or even “after this, therefore because of this” (ie: “stocks were down today on growing discomfort from trade sanctions”). We can’t ken that when something jingles over here, something unrelated jangles over there. Surely a just God would assign cause! Have we angered Him?

So it is that when ice in the Arctic describes a superlinear melt curve, or record-breaking wildfires level whole neighborhoods in California, we are so dumbfounded we are more than willing to accept that “Its just the weather, stupid.”

We prefer to take complex phenomena and break them into categories so we can assign pidgeonholes. Fuzzy continua get broken into inches and pounds.

In the appendix to their seminal paper in PNAS August 6, 17 scientists aligning the Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene included a table of progress humanity has been making since adopting the Paris Agreement on climate change. There are pluses and minuses, but the shortfalls are pretty glaring. 

• Biodiversity loss and biosphere degradation continues in most regions.
• Emissions from livestock still increasing.
• Although cement industry has made commitments to lower CO2 intensity, no signs of slower growth.
• Rising incomes in many regions are increasing per capita consumption.
• Little progress globally to change consumer attitudes and business practices towards waste.
• High fertility in some countries means that although rates are slowing, population growth will continue until at least mid-century.
• Governing conventions are disconnected from trade agreements; aviation and shipping emissions are still exempt.
• Renewable energy has augmented energy growth, not reduced carbon dependence. Fossil fuels continue to increase in both supply and demand and are projected to continue that gradual rise through mid-century.

Like our bridges and dams, Earth systems are showing serious repair deficits. It is as though you have a 1960s Maytag washer that worked just fine until a couple years ago but since then has developed an erratic wobble that is getting progressively worse. Now every time you do your laundry it rattles the windows upstairs and shakes the dishes in your kitchen cabinets. You’d like to repair or replace it, but you don’t have the spare cash to do that, so you just keep loading it up and hoping it doesn’t shake apart. One of these days, it will.

Plastics and climate change have a lot in common with a broken Maytag. None of the three would be insoluble problems if humans were Vulcans. You know, logical.

We are not. Rather, we still go on reptilian impulse — ignore distant threats but display hair-trigger awareness of immediate ones. Not making the rent this month is an immediate threat. Locking Earth into a million-year Hothouse is so distant as to be of little concern.

It’s the same with plastics. They crept up slowly on us. Before plastics, if you couldn’t afford a toilet seat, you sat or squatted on wooden boards. After plastics, everyone could afford a nice comfy seat. Before plastics, you washed cloth diapers. After plastics, you never had to touch those, never mind scrubbing them or dealing with where it went.

To do away with plastics now would force us to go back to expensive toilets and cloth diapers wouldn’t it? What would we use to charge our iPhones? Cotton-wrapped wire?

Actually, it really is much simpler to get rid of plastics than to have to deal with climate change. We can make biodegradable plastics or substitutes and they don’t cost any more the other kind. We don’t, because to demand replacement requires we see the long-term impact of that plastic persistence — its manufactured invulnerability — while to keep buying plastic requires little thought at all. Rationalization, by virtue of its ubiquity, is socially acceptable.

This part of our psyche is probably our biggest Achilles Heel as a species. We have others, like our need to achieve, acquire, produce and consume in order to gain self-respect and the respect of our tribe, or hubris, or our opposable thumbs. But our threat-discounting ability is the real killer.

Until we grew to be 7 billion, going on 8, the world was big enough that there was somewhere we could think of as away. Most of the world was ocean. Cities could barge their trash out to sea and just dump it. Now even the oceans are too small. They are finite, while homo colossus’ capacity to consume and pollute is exponential. Sooner or later, and later is now, those two rates have to meet. 

What can you do? Do without. Reject plastic in your life.

It can start by simply refusing to be served a single use plastic straw. It can move to buying only wooden toys and home furnishings. Bag groceries in paper, if not reusable cloth. Encourage anyone who is inventing biodegradables by buying their products. If there is to be a future, this is where it begins.

And while we do that with plastics, we have to also do it with fossil fuels.

We should also encourage chess champions to marry.

War and Empire Links: August 2018

The American Sea of Deception. Paul Street, Truthdig. Aug. 5, 2018.

Keeping up with Trump’s erroneous and duplicitous statements is exhausting work, hazardous to one’s own sanity. Just as depressing as Trump’s serial fabrication and invention is the apparent willingness of tens of millions of ostensibly decent and honest ordinary Americans to tolerate, dismiss or even believe the endless stream of nonsense and bullshit.

Still, if much of the populace has become inured to presidential lying and misstatement, it’s hardly all the current president’s fault. 

Deception and misstatement are “as American as Cherry Pie” (to quote H. Rap Brown on violence)—though here perhaps I should say “as American as George Washington’s childhood cherry tree fable.” 

While we’ve never seen anything on Trump’s psychotic scale, the problem of U.S. presidential deception goes way back in American history.

...

I recently asked a dozen or so online associates and friends for their top five nominations under the category of the Big Lies of Our Time in the United States. We came up with fully 50 great national fairy tales and untruths (one for each U.S. state). Here are my nominations for the Top 10 Big National Lies:

1. We live in a democracy.... 

2. Capitalism is about democracy...

8. Growth is good....

9. We have an independent and mainstream media...

10. The U.S. is a force for good and peace in the world...

American Society Would Collapse If It Weren’t for These 8 Myths. Lee Camp, truthdig. July 25, 2018.

Our society should’ve collapsed by now. You know that, right?

No society should function with this level of inequality (with the possible exception of one of those prison planets in a “Star Wars” movie). Sixty-three percent of Americans can’t afford a $500 emergency. Yet Amazon head Jeff Bezos is now worth a record $141 billion. He could literally end world hunger for multiple years and still have more money left over than he could ever spend on himself.

Worldwide, one in 10 people only make $2 a day. Do you know how long it would take one of those people to make the same amount as Jeff Bezos has? 193 million years. (If they only buy single-ply toilet paper.) Put simply, you cannot comprehend the level of inequality in our current world or even just our nation.

So … shouldn’t there be riots in the streets every day? Shouldn’t it all be collapsing? Look outside. The streets aren’t on fire. No one is running naked and screaming (usually). Does it look like everyone’s going to work at gunpoint? No. We’re all choosing to continue on like this.

Why?

Well, it comes down to the myths we’ve been sold. Myths that are ingrained in our social programming from birth, deeply entrenched, like an impacted wisdom tooth. These myths are accepted and basically never questioned.

I’m going to cover eight of them. There are more than eight. There are probably hundreds. But I’m going to cover eight because (A) no one reads a column titled “Hundreds of Myths of American Society,” (B) these are the most important ones and (C) we all have other shit to do.

Myth No. 8—We have a democracy.

If you think we still have a democracy or a democratic republic, ask yourself this: When was the last time Congress did something that the people of America supported that did not align with corporate interests? … You probably can’t do it. It’s like trying to think of something that rhymes with “orange.” You feel like an answer exists but then slowly realize it doesn’t. Even the Carter Center and former President Jimmy Carter believe that America has been transformed into an oligarchy: A small, corrupt elite control the country with almost no input from the people. The rulers need the myth that we’re a democracy to give us the illusion of control.

Myth No. 7—We have an accountable and legitimate voting system.

Gerrymandering, voter purging, data mining, broken exit polling, push polling, superdelegates, electoral votes, black-box machines, voter ID suppression, provisional ballots, super PACs, dark money, third parties banished from the debates and two corporate parties that stand for the same goddamn pile of fetid crap!

What part of this sounds like a legitimate election system?

No, we have what a large Harvard study called the worst election system in the Western world. Have you ever seen where a parent has a toddler in a car seat, and the toddler has a tiny, brightly colored toy steering wheel so he can feel like he’s driving the car? That’s what our election system is—a toy steering wheel. Not connected to anything. We all sit here like infants, excitedly shouting, “I’m steeeeering!”

And I know it’s counterintuitive, but that’s why you have to vote. We have to vote in such numbers that we beat out what’s stolen through our ridiculous rigged system.

Myth No. 6—We have an independent media that keeps the rulers accountable.

Our media outlets are funded by weapons contractors, big pharma, big banks, big oil and big, fat hard-on pills. (Sorry to go hard on hard-on pills, but we can’t get anything resembling hard news because it’s funded by dicks.) The corporate media’s jobs are to rally for war, cheer for Wall Street and froth at the mouth for consumerism. It’s their mission to actually fortify belief in the myths I’m telling you about right now. Anybody who steps outside that paradigm is treated like they’re standing on a playground wearing nothing but a trench coat.

Myth No. 5—We have an independent judiciary.

The criminal justice system has become a weapon wielded by the corporate state. This is how bankers can foreclose on millions of homes illegally and see no jail time, but activists often serve jail time for nonviolent civil disobedience. Chris Hedges recently noted, “The most basic constitutional rights … have been erased for many. … Our judicial system, as Ralph Nader has pointed out, has legalized secret law, secret courts, secret evidence, secret budgets and secret prisons in the name of national security.”

If you’re not part of the monied class, you’re pressured into releasing what few rights you have left. According to The New York Times, “97 percent of federal cases and 94 percent of state cases end in plea bargains, with defendants pleading guilty in exchange for a lesser sentence.”

That’s the name of the game. Pressure people of color and poor people to just take the plea deal because they don’t have a million dollars to spend on a lawyer. (At least not one who doesn’t advertise on beer coasters.)

Myth No. 4—The police are here to protect you. They’re your friends.

That’s funny. I don’t recall my friend pressuring me into sex to get out of a speeding ticket. (Which is essentially still legal in 32 states.)

The police in our country are primarily designed to do two things: protect the property of the rich and perpetrate the completely immoral war on drugs—which by definition is a war on our own people.

We lock up more people than any other country on earth. Meaning the land of the free is the largest prison state in the world. So all these droopy-faced politicians and rabid-talking heads telling you how awful China is on human rights or Iran or North Korea—none of them match the numbers of people locked up right here under Lady Liberty’s skirt.

Myth No. 3—Buying will make you happy.

This myth is put forward mainly by the floods of advertising we take in but also by our social engineering. Most of us feel a tenacious emptiness, an alienation deep down behind our surface emotions (for a while I thought it was gas). That uneasiness is because most of us are flushing away our lives at jobs we hate before going home to seclusion boxes called houses or apartments. We then flip on the TV to watch reality shows about people who have it worse than we do (which we all find hilarious).

If we’re lucky, we’ll make enough money during the week to afford enough beer on the weekend to help it all make sense. (I find it takes at least four beers for everything to add up.) But that doesn’t truly bring us fulfillment. So what now? Well, the ads say buying will do it. Try to smother the depression and desperation under a blanket of flat-screen TVs, purses and Jet Skis. Nowdoes your life have meaning? No? Well, maybe you have to drive that Jet Ski a little faster! Crank it up until your bathing suit flies off and you’ll feel alive!

The dark truth is that we have to believe the myth that consuming is the answer or else we won’t keep running around the wheel. And if we aren’t running around the wheel, then we start thinking, start asking questions. Those questions are not good for the ruling elite, who enjoy a society based on the daily exploitation of 99 percent of us.

Myth No. 2—If you work hard, things will get better.

According to Deloitte’s Shift Index survey: “80% of people are dissatisfied with their jobs” and “[t]he average person spends 90,000 hours at work over their lifetime.” That’s about one-seventh of your life—and most of it is during your most productive years.

Ask yourself what we’re working for. To make money? For what? Almost none of us are doing jobs for survival anymore. Once upon a time, jobs boiled down to:

I plant the food—> I eat the food—> If I don’t plant food = I die.

But nowadays, if you work at a café—will someone die if they don’t get their super-caf-mocha-frap-almond-piss-latte? I kinda doubt they’ll keel over from a blueberry scone deficiency.

If you work at Macy’s, will customers perish if they don’t get those boxer briefs with the sweat-absorbent-ass fabric? I doubt it. And if they do die from that, then their problems were far greater than you could’ve known. So that means we’re all working to make other people rich because we have a society in which we have to work. Technological advancements can do most everything that truly must get done.

So if we wanted to, we could get rid of most work and have tens of thousands of more hours to enjoy our lives. But we’re not doing that at all. And no one’s allowed to ask these questions—not on your mainstream airwaves at least. Even a half-step like universal basic income is barely discussed because it doesn’t compute with our cultural programming.

Scientists say it’s quite possible artificial intelligence will take away all human jobs in 120 years. I think they know that will happen because bots will take the jobs and then realize that 80 percent of them don’t need to be done! The bots will take over and then say, “Stop it. … Stop spending a seventh of your life folding shirts at Banana Republic.”

One day, we will build monuments to the bot that told us to enjoy our lives and … leave the shirts wrinkly.

And this leads me to the largest myth of our American society.

Myth No. 1—You are free.

And I’m not talking about the millions locked up in our prisons. I’m talking about you and me. If you think you’re free, try running around with your nipples out, ladies. Guys, take a dump on the street and see how free you are.

I understand there are certain restrictions on freedom we actually desire to have in our society—maybe you’re not crazy about everyone leaving a Stanley Steamer in the middle of your walk to work. But a lot of our lack of freedom is not something you would vote for if given the chance.

Try building a fire in a parking lot to keep warm in the winter.

Try sleeping in your car for more than a few hours without being harassed by police.

Try maintaining your privacy for a week without a single email, web search or location data set collected by the NSA and the telecoms.

Try signing up for the military because you need college money and then one day just walking off the base, going, “Yeah, I was bored. Thought I would just not do this anymore.”

Try explaining to Kentucky Fried Chicken that while you don’t have the green pieces of paper they want in exchange for the mashed potatoes, you do have some pictures you’ve drawn on a napkin to give them instead.

Try running for president as a third-party candidate. (Jill Stein was shackled and chained to a chair by police during one of the debates.)

Try using the restroom at Starbucks without buying something … while black.

We are less free than a dog on a leash. We live in one of the hardest-working, most unequal societies on the planet with more billionaires than ever.

Meanwhile, Americans supply 94 percent of the paid blood used worldwide. And it’s almost exclusively coming from very poor people. This abusive vampire system is literally sucking the blood from the poor. Does that sound like a free decision they made? Or does that sound like something people do after immense economic force crushes down around them? (One could argue that sperm donation takes a little less convincing.)

Point is, in order to enforce this illogical, immoral system, the corrupt rulers—most of the time—don’t need guns and tear gas to keep the exploitation mechanisms humming along. All they need are some good, solid bullshit myths for us all to buy into, hook, line and sinker. Some fairy tales for adults.

It’s time to wake up.

Britain Prepares for War Against Russia. Brian Cloighley, Strategic Culture Foundation. Aug. 26, 2018.

Unfortunately, as we see from the bizarre headline quoted above, claiming absurdly that “Putin's armed forces ratchet up pressure on the Royal Navy,” there is a strong propaganda movement aimed at convincing British taxpayers that by suffering spoliation of their standard of living they are helping to defend their country against an alleged enemy who is intent on... doing what, exactly?

...

In 36 years wearing the uniform of Her Majesty the Queen I heard some stupid things said by officers of all three services, and indeed said a few myself. But in all my time I never heard such a preposterous and barmy public utterance as that load of drivel.

A milestone in Afghanistan. Richard Faustian, Rand Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. Aug. 17, 2018.

Sometime late next year, possibly as early as September, news crews will gather in Afghanistan for a unique event: To interview an American serviceman or woman who was not born when the war they are fighting began. He or she will not remember 9/11, and will have grown up with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as background noise. 

No doubt also a senior commander will be on hand to pronounce that the war against the Taliban is making progress, the same pronouncements the young recruit will have seen on TV all his or her life.

Sanctions, Sanctions, Sanctions – The Final Demise Of The Dollar Hegemony? Peter Koenig, Saker blog. Aug. 17, 2018.

Sanctions left and sanctions right. Financial mostly, taxes, tariffs, visas, travel bans – confiscation of foreign assets, import and export prohibitions and limitations; and also punishing those who do not respect sanctions dished out by Trump, alias the US of A, against friends of their enemies. 

The absurdity seems endless and escalating – exponentially, as if there was a deadline to collapse the world. Looks like a last-ditch effort to bring down international trade in favor of — what? – Make America Great Again? – Prepare for US mid-term elections? – Rally the people behind an illusion? – Or what? 

All looks arbitrary and destructive. All is of course totally illegal by any international law or, forget law, which is not respected anyway by the empire and its vassals, but not even by human moral standards. Sanctions are destructive. They are interfering in other countries sovereignty.They are made to punish countries, nations, that refuse to bend to a world dictatorship.

Looks like everybody accepts this new economic warfare as the new normal. Nobody objects. And the United Nations, the body created to maintain Peace, to protect our globe from other wars, to uphold human rights – this very body is silent – out of fear? Out of fear that it might be ‘sanctioned’ into oblivion by the dying empire? – Why cannot the vast majority of countries – often it is a ratio of 191 to 2 (Israel and the US) – reign-in the criminals? 

...

Imagine Russia – more sanctions were just imposed for alleged and totally unproven (to the contrary: disproven) Russian poisoning of four UK citizens with the deadly nerve agent, Novichok – and for not admitting it. This is a total farce, a flagrant lie, that has become so ridiculous, most thinking people, even in the UK, just laugh about it. Yet, Trump and his minions in Europe and many parts of the world succumb to this lie – and out of fear of being sanctions, they also sanction Russia. What has the world become? – Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, would be proud for having taught the important lesson to the liars of the universe: “Let me control the media, and I will turn any nation into a herd of Pigs”.

In a recent interview with PressTV I was asked, why does the US not adhere to any of their internationally or bilaterally concluded treaties or agreements? – Good question. – Washington is breaking all the rules, agreements, accords, treaties, is not adhering to any international law or even moral standard, simply because following such standards would mean giving up world supremacy. 

...

What is really transpiring is that Washington is isolating itself, that the uni-polar world is moving towards a multipolar world, one that increasingly disregards and disrespects the United States, despises her bullying and warmongering – killing and shedding misery over hundreds of millions of people, most of them defenseless children, women and elderly, by direct military force or by proxy-led conflicts – Yemen is just one recent examples, causing endless human suffering to people who have never done any harm to their neighbors, let alone to Americans. Who could have any respect left for such a nation, called the United States of America, for the people behind such lying monsters?

This behavior by the dying empire is driving allies and friends into the opposite camp – to the east, where the future lays, away from a globalized One-World-Order, towards a healthy and more equal multi-polar world.

Seymour Hersh and the Death of Journalism. James Bovard via The American Conservative. Aug. 18, 2018.

He won a Pulitzer for My Lai and cracked Abu Ghraib wide open. But this reporter is still a lonely breed.

When people are comforted by government lies, trafficking the truth becomes hellishly difficult. Disclosing damning facts is especially tricky when editors en masse lose their spines. These are some of the takeaways from legendary Seymour Hersh’s riveting new memoir, Reporter.

Censoring Alex Jones. Dmitry Orlov. Aug. 15, 2018.

This Week Showed Internet Censorship Is As Much A Threat To The Left As The Right. Danielle Ryan via zerohedge. Aug. 17, 2018.

The mind of the mass media: Email exchange between myself and a leading Washington Post foreign policy reporter. William Blum, AER. Aug. 17, 2018.

To Survive The Midterms With Your Mental Health Intact, Turn Off The "News" & Social Media Now. Charles Hugh Smith, via zerohedge. Aug. 17, 2018.

If you want to preserve your sanity and avoid unhappy derangement, turn off all corporate and social media from now to Thanksgiving. 

Since elections are extremely profitable for traditional media / social media corporations, your sanity will gleefully be sacrificed in the upcoming election--if you are gullible enough to watch the "news" and tune into social media. Elections are extremely profitable because candidates spend scads of cash on media adverts. 

The greater the discord and derangement, the higher the media profits. The more outraged you let yourself become, the more time you spend online, generating insane profits for the corporations that own whatever platforms you're addicted to.

The Three Headed Monster. James Howard Kunstler, clusterfuck nation. Aug. 17, 2018.

The faction that used to be the Democratic party can be described with some precision these days as a three-headed monster driving the nation toward danger, darkness, and incoherence. Anyone interested in defending what remains of the sane center of American politics take heed: 

The first head is the one infected with the toxic shock of losing the 2016 election. The illness took hold during the campaign that year when the bureaucracy under President Obama sent its lymphocytes and microphages in the “intel community” — especially the leadership of the FBI — to attack the perceived disease that the election of Donald Trump represented. The “doctors” of this Deep State diagnosed the condition as “Russian collusion.” An overdue second opinion by doctors outside the Deep State adduced later that the malady was actually an auto-immune disease. 

The agents actually threatening the health of the state came from the intel community itself: Mr. Brennan, Mr. Clapper, Mr. Comey, Mr. Strzok, Mr. McCabe, Mr. Ohr, Ms. Yates. Ms. Page, et. al. who colluded with pathogens in the DNC, the Hillary campaign, and the British intel service to chew up and spit out Mr. Trump as expeditiously as possible. With the disease now revealed by hard evidence, the chief surgeon called into the case, Robert Mueller, is left looking ridiculous — and perhaps subject to malpractice charges — for trying to remove an appendix-like organ called the Manifort from the body politic instead of attending to the cancerous mess all around him. Meanwhile, the Deep State can’t stop running its mouth — The New York Times, CNN, WashPo, et al — in an evermore hysterical reaction to the truth of the matter: the Deep State itself colluded with Russia (and perhaps hates itself for it, a sure recipe for mental illness). 

The second head of this monster is a matrix of sinister interests seeking to incite conflict with Russia in order to support arms manufacturers, black box “security” companies, congressmen-on-the-take, and an army of obscenely-rewarded Washington lobbyists in concert with the military and a rabid neocon intellectual think-tank camp wishing to replay the cold war and perhaps even turn up the temperature with some nuclear fire. They are apparently in deep confab with the first head and its Russia collusion storyline. Note all the current talk about Russia already meddling in the 2018 midterm election, a full-fledged pathogenic hallucination. 

This second head functions by way of a displacement-projection dynamic. We hold war games on the Russian border and accuse them of “aggression.” We engineer and pay for a coup against the elected government of Ukraine, and accuse Russia of aggression. We bust up one nation after another in Middle East and complain indignantly when Russia acts to keep Syria from becoming the latest failed state. We disrupt the Russian economy with sanctions, and the Russian banking system with a cut-off of SWIFT international currency clearing privileges, and accuse them of aggression. This mode of behavior used to be known as “poking the bear,” a foolish and hazardous endeavor. The sane center never would have stood for this arrant recklessness. The world community is not fooled, though. More and more, they recognize the USA as a national borderline personality, capable of any monstrous act.

The third head of this monster is the one aflame with identity politics. ...

Why US Imperialism Loves Afghan Quagmire. Finian Cunningham, Strategic Culture Foundation. Aug. 28, 2018.

Longest war in US history... 6 years longer than Vietnam... why it will go on and on and on

40 innocent children killed on a bus in Yemen.

Our ally.

Our missile.

Our crime.

pic.twitter.com/yQ7FULulj2

Jim Carrey (@JimCarrey) August 17, 2018

Yet Another US-Saudi Massacre In Yemen: UN Condemns Airstrike Killing 22 Children. zerohedge. Aug. 25, 2018.

Craig Murray Rages At Britain's "Gangster State". Craig Murray via zerohedge. Aug. 22, 2018.

It appears to me in this sense it is fair to call Britain a gangster state. It has contracted out the exercise of state violence, including in some instances to the point of death, against prisoners and immigration detainees to companies including G4S, who exercise that violence purely for the making of profit from it. It is a great moral abomination that violence should be exercised against humans for profit – and it should be clear that in even in most “humane” conditions the deprivation of physical liberty of any person is an extreme and chronic exercise of violence against them. I do not deny the necessity of such action on occasion to protect others, but that the state shares out its monopoly of violence, so that business interests with which the political class are closely associated can turn a profit, is a matter of extreme moral repugnance.

All sanctions against Russia are based on lies. Eric Zeusse, Strategic Culture Foundation. Aug. 17, 2018.

All of the sanctions (economic, diplomatic, and otherwise) against Russia are based on clearly demonstrable intentional falsehoods; and the sanctions which were announced on August 8th are just the latest example of this consistent tragic fact - a fact which will be proven here, with links to the evidence, so that anyone who reads here can easily see that all of these sanctions are founded on lies against Russia.