Governments Lie, Media Deceives... What to Believe

we'd like to believe that our governments and institutions are run by good people, or at least normal people, people like us;

but they are not;

normal people, good people, people like us do not get the opportunity to be in their place

we are ruled by psychopaths

if that sounds too harsh, its just because we don't want to believe it;

if it helps, think of them as sociopaths instead; 

(sounds less bad; doesn't mean less bad; psychopaths are mass murderers that maybe kidnap and maybe use torture, perhaps even chainsaws, on their 1, or 4, or handful of victims; sociopaths use drones, or MOABs (the Mother of all Bombs), or Fat Man and Little Boy, or economic (starvation) sanctions, on their hundreds of thousands of victims)

the sociopaths that rule us are MUCH worse than the psychopaths we fear

in any case;

there is so much utter B.S. that it has become very hard to figure out what is true;

I grew up believing what Dan Rather told me on CBS News, or Tom Brokaw on NBC, or Peter Mansbridge on CBC, or just about anyone, with their cool accents, on BBC;

I watched the Gulf War on TV from my first year university dorm room;

so naïve at the time, believing what I was told, captivated by the light show on the TV screen

10 years later, I still hadn't taken the red pill

like most, I too was glued to the TV on that fateful morning, watching as the towers came down

it was only in retrospect that I thought:

how did that 3rd tower, WTC7, come down?

for that matter, how exactly did the Twin Towers come down in the fashion they did, at freefall speed, into their own footprints?

then later...

how exactly did they find the culprits' passports in the debris of the Towers' wreckage?

are you f'g kidding me?!

so many more questions (my questions)

so many B.S. pronouncements,

so few real questions (from the media, not digging into any of the questions that I was asking/thinking)

Red Pill taken

20 years later, I'm so tired of it;

so tired of the naïve complacency of the public believing the 4th Estate;

so tired of the lack of critical thinking;

of the lack of skepticism about the latest B.S. despite all the past BS;

so tired of those features of the public allowing the perversions of justice, the absolute evil, the perpetuation of grotesquely unsustainable practices that are destroying the biosphere that our civilization, nay, our species, depends on

so tired of the public arguing on Twitter about the trivialities... like which corrupt evil con-man should (pretend to) rule the world next, Trump or Biden (while the powers that be behind the scenes really direct the play)... that we keep missing the forest for the trees

its all a mess

and, honestly, we don't really want to know how bad a mess it is, do we?

its better to just believe the lies and try to do our best going on with living our lives

while rainforests get bulldozed,

while species after species goes extinct,

while we keep belching GhGs into our atmosphere,

while we keep acidifying our oceans,

while the coral reefs die,

while keystone species are imperilled, from bees and insects to oceanic plankton

..

while Yemenis starve,

and Venezuelans starve,

and Iranians, who can't be starved b/c of their own agriculture, are deprived of medication for their children,

and Libya has an actual slave trade with active slave markets

...

all because of the evil U.S. warlords (from Trump to Obama to Bush to Clinton to Bush to Reagan to …)

fxck

so...

first rule - don't believe either the government or the media just because they are the government or media -- they are to be distrusted -- instead of believing everything they say is true, we'd be better off believing everything they say is false, unless and until it can be substantiated and proved

how so?

b/c of all the preponderance of lies

what lies?

oh, oh so many

• Guantanamo, illegal rendition, torture
• Osama bin Laden's supposed capture and death
• Saddam's WMD
• the War on Terror
• the War on Drugs
  
• Assad's chemical weapons
• US drone strikes against civilians over and over again
  
• Russia shot down MH17
• Skripal affair
  
• attempted coups and character assassinations of any and all socialist-leaning Latin American leaders, from Venezuela's Chavez to Maduro; from Brazil's Lula to Bolivia's Morales
  
• color revolutions, including to install Nazis in Ukraine
• Russiagate
• DNC server "hack"
• Assange's rape case
• Snowden and Manning persecution
  
• Bezos in bed with the CIA
• Epstein's child sex blackmailing scheme on behalf of the CIA and whomever
• the NSA's surveillance state
  
• WTC7's collapse
• Twin Towers' collapse at freefall speed into their own footprints
• Project for New American Century
• etc etc etc
  

or, how about govt allowance of corporate malfeasance

• corporate capture of EPA
• safety of fracking
• Monsanto's toxic legacy
• tobacco, DDT, PFAS & PFOS
  
• FEMA - Katrina - disaster profiteering
• Halliburton - Blackwater - Afghanistan Inc. - contractors - war profiteering
• etc etc etc
  

how about we go further back?

• JFK, MLK and Robert Kennedy assassinations
• Operation Gladio
• Gulf of Tonkin
• Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile crisis and Operation Northwoods
  
• Nagasaki and Hiroshima
• Pearl Harbor
• the Spanish-American War and other Banana Wars
• the Civil War
• etc etc etc
  

so, I've become convinced that the official stories about all of those events are bullshit;

so, now I'm suspicious about so many other things as well, though perhaps not yet convinced one way or another

like what?

• Boston Marathon bombing
• Sandy Hook shooting
• Vegas shooting
• San Bernardino shooting
• Charlie Hebdo shooting
• Paris shooting
• any accusation made by US against Russia
• any accusation made by US against Iran
• any accusation made by US against China
• etc etc etc
  

and, most recently, George Floyd's death

at the end of the day, I am very much in favor of the social justice movement and very much in favor of reining in the unlawful and egregious actions by the police, (which, in my opinion, is a phenomenon that has certainly been exacerbated by racism, but is mostly about brutality and abuse of power by bullies and sociopaths);

so perhaps it shouldn't matter to me that the trigger for the BLM movement these past few months has been orchestrated on false premises

it sure looked on that video as if George Floyd was slowly asphyxiated by the knee of Derek Chauvin

BUT was that really what happened?

(and I wouldnt be surprised if Chauvin was nonetheless a nasty cop, a brutish cop, a dirty cop.... but, did Chauvin really kill Floyd?)

we saw video of planes crashing into the Twin Towers and the towers then later collapsing; but did the (2) planes really cause the THREE (3!) Towers' collapses?!

I don't always agree with Paul Craig Roberts (I think most particularly when he discusses race issues), but I have come to entirely trust his honest pursuit of truth, wherever that truth may take him/us. He, like me, thinks that if the facts don't fit the story, then there is something wrong with the story. That was true about JFK, 9/11, and his view on mask-wearing now to decrease transmission of COVID (yes, wear them... but not any and all masks are designed to prevent the transmission of virus); and it seems to be the case also with what happened to Floyd, which triggered the social uprising that we've seen in the U.S.

Here's PCR:

Should we be protesting about George Floyd or Julian Assange? Paul Craig Roberts. July 31, 2020.

(Don't let the first 3 paragraphs dissuade you from reading the rest)

if you truly want to know what is going on in the world, you can't choose the blue pill; 

if you want to take the Red Pill:

read less / none of the mainstream media

read more of 

Caitlin Johnstone

Ian Welsh

Chris Hedges

Also (perhaps more selectively than the 3 above):

Paul Craig Roberts

And:

Edward Curtin

Glenn Greenwald

Aaron Mate

Ben Norton

Yves Smith and her contributors at naked capitalism

And also:

Guy Crittenden

John Pilger

Noam Chomsky

Howard Zinn

John Perkins

David Ray Griffin

Oliver Stone

William Blum

Amy Goodman

Abby Martin

Jimmy Dore

Lee Camp

James Corbett

Jeremy Scahill

Sharon Lerner

Krystal Ball

Eva Bartlett

Vanessa Beeley

Finnian Cunningham

Cory Morningstar

Pepe Escobar

Matt Taibbi

Dylan Ratigan

Eric Margulis

Michel Chossudovsky

James Howard Kunstler

Mike Krieger

Dmitry Orlov

John Michael Greer ('s older stuff; i.e. archdruid report rather than ecosophia)

Cognitive Dissonance / Two Ice Floes

The Saker

Moon of Alabama

Chalmers Johnson

Michael Klare

Tom Engelhardt

Andrew Bacevich

My advice, fwiw:

Read the first 4 regularly

Johnstone and Welsh in particular are consistently fantastic

Roberts and Hedges may have some differing views but are candid, honest truth-seekers

Read the rest when you come across them or when you can

 

p.s. update

this from Caitlin Johnstone on Aug. 3:

Here is a link to an article full of tips on how to punch through the obfuscations of propaganda and make sense of things, and here is a link to a Twitter list of my favorite news-gatherers and dot-connecters which you can bookmark and scroll through daily.

Ian Welsh on America's Leaders/Predators

Understand American Elites Means Understanding Predators. Ian Welsh. July 30, 2020.

American elites are not incompetent at what matters to them.

People constantly make ridiculous statements like, “The American government has been incompetent in its handling of Covid-19.”

Anyone who makes such a statement reveals that they do not understand how the US operates.

Fact: According the Princeton oligarchy study, almost the only thing that matters in what policies government pursues in the US is what elite factions want.

Fact: Covid-19 has made the rich in the US much, much richer.

US billionaires saw their wealth increase by 20 percent, or $584 billion, roughly since the beginning of the pandemic.

Covid-19 is enabling the consolidation of US industry. Small businesses have to shut down, large businesses keep running. The oncoming tsunami of renters being evicted (depending on state, 25 percent to over 50 percent of renters are in danger of eviction) will wipe out landlords, allowing the richest Americans to buy up rental properties on the cheap, consolidating them. They will then charge, not market clearing rental rates, but profit maximization rents, leaving many people permanently homeless.

If you’ve ever researched how to make money, you know the standard advice virtually always includes one thing: You must have other people work for you or passive income, or both. You must be making money when you, personally, aren’t doing a thing. Your money must make money for you, and so must other people. Any person worth employing makes more money for you than you pay them. You take the difference.

In kinder capitalist epochs, this is kept under control by wealth taxes, inheritance taxes, high progressive taxation, and aggressive anti-trust policy, along with a monetary policy intended to raise wages and prices, not crush them.

But our era is built on three ideological assertions.

• There is no such thing as society.
• Greed is good.
• There is no alternative (TINA).

Whatever makes a profit, according to this assertion, is good. There is no society, and no social goals. There are only competing people and whatever they get is fair. And this is the only way to run society, there is no alternative. Thatcher noted that her victory was not sealed by Conservative party elections, rather it was Tony Blair’s Labour party adopting neoliberalism that meant that TINA went from assertion to fact; no matter who was elected, the same basic policies would be followed, Labour would just try to thinly mitigate the effects of so many rich people and so many poor people.

In the US, the victory of Reagan was when Bill Clinton helped create the “Third Way,” which was an adoption of neoliberal principle. Again, it would not matter if Republicans or Democrats were in power, the rich would get richer and the social state would be defunded.

Our elites are predators. They are taught that they have no obligation to other people. Greed is good, and whatever makes money is good. If someone else has less money, that’s because they deserve less money, and because they create less good.

In their daily lives, the rich become rich through passive income and exploiting other people; paying the lowest wage or price possible (Walmart and Amazon both famously fuck suppliers over, though in different ways), getting as much government money as possible, and making sure that they don’t have to work to make money, and that the stock market always goes up in the long run, along with other asset prices–no matter what’s actually happening in the economy.

Neoliberal elites are predators. This is true in every neoliberal country. It is simply most advanced in the United States. They view ordinary people as prey or useful tools. After the 2007/8 financial crisis, banks set up assembly lines to sign false paperwork so they could seize people’s homes. The Federal government knew, aided them, and later immunized them by making them pay fines far less than the value of what they stole.

You are food or a money-producing asset to elites.

You are not human, you do not have a right to anything. Not due process of the law. Not food. Not housing. Not affordable medicine or health care. Those things are for people with enough money, and if that’s not you, you don’t deserve them.

This is THE most important thing you can understand about society today. You can’t count on US elites to care about you at all. If it is in their best financial interest to impoverish you, kill you or any other thing, they will do so.

This may seem hyperbolic, but it meets the most important test of truth: It predicts their actions with far more accuracy than any other hypothesis.

If it was just incompetence, like for example, the favorite excuse of liberals, “Never assume malice when incompetence will explain something,” then they wouldn’t keep getting more and more money.

Somehow their “incompetence” just makes them richer. Even the financial crisis made the elites richer overall–the drop was a blip which allowed them to control more of the economy than before.

Neoliberal elites are predators. Their food is ordinary citizens and anything else (animals, plants, the ecosystem which allows human life to exist).

And yes, it’s true, all neoliberal nations are not as far gone. But this is where neoliberalism leads, this is what its internal logic demands.

It’s not an accident that the best Covid-19 performance on the planet was probably in Vietnam, right next to China, with huge trade ties.

Zero deaths.

Anyone who tells you it was hard to avoid Covid-19 deaths is lying. All it required was seeing that a pandemic was underway and doing what the epidemiology textbooks tell you to. The introductory textbooks.

Nor is this all on one person. No one rules alone. Without a huge supporting apparatus, including Congress, Trump could not have done what he did (and didn’t). If his incompetence had been costing elites, you can be sure it would have been brought to an end.

It wasn’t. It was making them richer and furthering their plans. At the end of this, US elites will control a larger percentage of the US economy than before. They will be richer and more powerful. And if that means tens of millions of Americans are homeless and hungry, then that is a price US elites are willing for you to pay.

If you deserved better, you’d be rich. You aren’t, so you don’t.

Your lords and masters kill you for money. That’s their function.

Act on this knowledge, or don’t.

Caitlin Johnstone: Narrative is crumbling

Narrative is crumbling. Caitlin Johnstone. July 26, 2020.

It’s difficult to understand what’s going on in the world.

It’s difficult to understand what’s going on in the world because powerful people actively manipulate public understanding of what’s going on in the world.

Powerful people actively manipulate public understanding of what’s going on in the world because if the public understood what’s going on in the world, they would rise up and use their strength of numbers to overthrow the powerful.

The public would rise up and use their strength of numbers to overthrow the powerful if they understood what’s going on in their world because then they would understand that the powerful have been exploiting, oppressing, robbing, cheating and deceiving them while destroying the ecosystem, stockpiling weapons of armageddon and waging endless wars, for no other reason than so that they can maintain and expand their power.

The public do not rise up and use their strength of numbers to overthrow the powerful because they have been successfully manipulated into not wanting to.

Narrative is crumbling.

The public have been successfully manipulated into not wanting to rise up and use their strength of numbers to overthrow the powerful due to the way the powerful have been able to shore up mainstream narrative control in the form of purchasing mass media outlets, funding think tanks, buying politicians, implementing government opacity, pushing internet censorship, and other forms of perception management.

The powerful use their control over mainstream narratives to ensure than enough members of the public believe they live in a free democracy where things aren’t perfect but it’s the best you could ask for, instead of in a corporatist oligarchy wherein the powerful exploit, oppress, rob, cheat and deceive them while destroying the ecosystem, stockpiling weapons of armageddon and waging endless wars.

As long as the powerful are able to exert control over mainstream narratives, there will never be enough members of the public willing to use their strength of numbers to shake off the powerful and create a healthy society.

The powerful will remain capable of exerting control over mainstream narratives for as long as the public maintains its current unhealthy relationship with mental narrative.

Narrative is crumbling.

A collective shift into a healthy relationship with mental narrative would mean thought becomes the useful tool we evolved it to be rather than this noisy, compulsive head-chatter which dominates our lives where we are driven by fear and attachment to imbue an endless string of mental stories with the power of belief.

If we had a healthy relationship with mental narrative we would naturally view stories about what’s going on in the world far more objectively, because rather than glomming onto them out of fear and attachment we would have psychological space enough to look at them and critically examine whether or not they are useful tools for us to use in the present moment.

If humanity collectively made such a transition on a mass scale–a transition which sages across the millennia assure us humans are fully capable of–then humanity would become impossible to propagandize effectively.

If humanity becomes impossible to propagandize effectively, the lies will be impossible to conceal via mainstream narrative control, and humanity using the strength of its numbers to create a healthy society will become an inevitability.

And the funny thing is, in a weird way from way out of left field that nobody could possibly have anticipated, humanity’s current relationship with mental narrative appears to be drawing to a close.

Narrative is crumbling.

The narratives are breaking down.

People’s old ways of understanding what’s going on in the world just aren’t holding together anymore.

Trust in the mass media is at an all-time low, and it’s only getting lower.

People are more aware than ever that anything they see can be propaganda or disinformation.

Deepfake technology will soon be so advanced and so accessible that nobody will even trust video anymore.

The leader of the most powerful country on earth speaks in a way that has no real relationship with facts or reality in any way, and people have just learned to roll with it.

Ordinary people are hurting financially but Wall Street is booming, a glaring plot hole in the story of the economy that’s only getting more pronounced.

The entire media class will now spend years leading the public on a wild goose chase for Russian collusion and then act like it’s no big deal when the whole thing turned out to be completely baseless.

There’s a virus causing a massive disturbance in the entirety of human civilization with two wildly different narratives about it running simultaneously, and both sides are 100 percent convinced that all the facts have fully vindicated their position.

There are protests where people are becoming more and more aware that they are being fed empty narratives of approval and understanding while their core demands are going completely unaddressed.

There’s a presidential election between two obvious dementia patients and the mass media are all pretending that’s fine and normal despite what people can see with their own eyes.

New cold war escalations between the US-centralized empire and the unabsorbed governments of China and Russia are going to cause the media airwaves around the planet to become saturated in ever-intensifying propaganda narratives which favor one side or the other and have no interest in honestly telling people the truth about what’s going on.

Now they’re even babbling about UFOs.

Narrative is crumbling.

It’s all accelerating toward a white noise saturation point.

How long do you think we can go on like this?

How far do you think humanity’s relationship with narrative can be stretched before it snaps completely and forces a completely new way of being?

How long before it becomes more and more common for people to begin looking to themselves as individuals to determine which narratives are useful to them instead of looking to establishment narrative managers like they used to?

How long before people find themselves more and more often asking the question “Is this true?”

How long before people find themselves more and more often asking the question “What is truth?”

How long before people find themselves more and more often asking the question “What else have I been deceived about?”

How long before people find themselves more and more often asking the question “How else have I been deceiving myself?”

The current strain that is being placed on our collective relationship with narrative is completely unsustainable.

This would be a bad thing if we’d had a healthy relationship with mental narrative, but we don’t; we have a profoundly unhealthy relationship with mental narrative which has left us susceptible to terrible abuses on a mass scale.

We are now, as a species, collectively squeezing ourselves out of our old unhealthy relationship with narrative.

Narrative is crumbling.

It’s all crumbling to the ground.

This cannot be a bad thing.

It could end up being very, very good.

Ian Welsh on The System

The “System” Did Not Appear Ex Nihilo. Ian Welsh. July 13, 2020.

Last week I wrote an article lampooning the idea that people are only following incentives and therefore are not bad people.

Let’s spell this out clearly.

The system, whatever the system is, whether it is New-Deal Capitalism, Stalinist Communism, English high-Feudalism, Neo-Liberal Capitalism or French late Medieval Feudalism, is a creation of humans.

Our system is always a choice.

It doesn’t feel like a choice to you as an individual, because it is a collective choice which weights a very few individuals preferences much higher than yours. Not being Barack Obama (who had a choice to end neo-liberalism) or FDR (who did choose to create a new type of capitalism) or Khrushchev (who created a different type of communism, recognizably different from Stalinism and much more pleasant to live in), you have never had much of a choice.

So, being weak and only one person, to you the system feels like a force of nature or God, given, not made.

But the system is always made and is always a result of choices. Sometimes individuals at key junctures get to make a choice or a difference, and most people only make choices as part of large groups. But it is a choice.

Even within a system, different results are produced. English feudalism was far kinder than French feudalism, with far more free men and far fewer villeins or surfs. England produced common law and even non-free men and women had rights. Russian serfdom by the end of the Czars was known for its cruelty, but it wasn’t always thus, and so on and so forth.

More recently, and if not within your memory (though it is within my memory), then certainly within the memory of people you know, the previous form of capitalism running American and most of the “free” world produced the following results:

• steadily increasing incomes after real inflation was measured;
• steadily decreasing share of income being made by the richest in society;
• steadily increasing prices (but slower than wages).

It did all those things because it was designed to do those things. A choice was made in 33 and made pro-actively every 4 years after that to keep doing it. After a while, people became wishy washy about its continuation. You can trace it in stages: the post-war Congress weakening unions; Truman deciding to keep the war time state running; Kennedy deciding to lower top taxes; qualified immunity in the 60s; Nixon deciding to start the war on drugs, and so on.

But it didn’t really end till Reagan. Reagan was a choice, that’s why there were elections. He had been worked for, hard, by various rich people who could see that the current system was slowly siphoning away their power, and they found, with racism and the fear engendered by the oil shock crises, enough of a wedge to get a voting majority of Americans onside.

Then they systematically changed how the system operated so that it would produce:

• stagnant income for the majority of the population (really decreasing if inflation were properly measured);
• steadily increasing share of income and wealth controlled by the wealthiest in society;
• steadily decreasing prices of production of goods. 

At first some of this was passed on, but most of it was kept as profit.

Neo-liberal Capitalism produced different results from New Deal Capitalism because it was designed to do so. It had different incentives, to use econo-speak.

To say “people just follow the incentives” is driveling idiocy when dealing with large social matters, because in large social matters the incentives are dependent variables: they are chosen by the leadership and the mass of the people (who, yes, do have power in large enough groups. Reagan is not possible if enough Democrats don’t defect. They were called the “Reagan Democrats.”)

Nor are people ex-nihilo. We are shaped by the society we live in. Reagan’s revolution could not have happened while the Lost Generation still had large numbers because the Lost generation remembered not just the Great Depression, but the roaring 20s. Knowing that the wealthy had caused the Great Depression, most Lost believed in keeping the rich poor. Those who came afterwards, not properly remembering the 20s, did not feel this in their gut and were willing to sell out.

Neoliberals said “you can have a suburban home, away from the blacks and we’ll spike the value of housing and stocks, so you’ll be rich and you won’t even have to work for it.”  Sub Voce: “since you get it for doing nothing, you won’t care about wages, which we’ll crush.”

More than this, a system selects for people who will do what it requires. You cannot join many gangs without murdering someone first. You cannot be in power in DC or almost any state capital if you are not onside with crushing wages and making the rich richer. You will not be allowed in power. You will not want power, because you will quickly find out that you can’t do what you want, you can only do evil.

The system doesn’t so much turn people evil as it selects for evil. The “incentives” don’t work on everyone, what matters is that if they don’t work on you, you don’t get into power or if you somehow fluke in (like Corbyn) you don’t stay in power. You won’t compromise enough.

People worked hard to create neo-liberalism. Once they were in power they worked hard to create a system which excludes those who don’t want to crush wages and make the rich richer. The rules of the system, the incentives, were created by men and women and are maintained by men and women.

They are not unchallenged, but so far every challenge has lost. Corbyn was a challenge. Sanders was a challenge. There have been other challenges. They all lost. This was true of every challenge to the New Deal order from 36-76. All challenges lost. It looked unbeatable.

One day the New Deal Order lost. One day Neo-Liberalsim will lose. The questions are only “when?” and “to what?”

Hitler and Mussolini and Lenin defeated older orders too.

So the people who run America and the developed world are almost all very bad people. They were selected to be very bad, and they also worked very hard to ensure that only evil people could get power, because only evil people will do what their system requires and it is the system that makes them powerful and rich. (Reminder, Nancy Pelosi is worth 120 million.)

The systems selects for evil, the system was created and is maintained by people who worked and work hard to make sure it selects only evil people to run it.

Just like Soylent Green, the system is people.

OR...

much more sarcastically (and entertaining to boot)...

The Well Meaning American Oligarchy Are SO Misunderstood. Ian Welsh, July 8, 2020.

Just saw a case of the argument that “the people who have been enriching themselves by fucking everyone else for four decades are misunderstood, they’re just following the incentives, and suggesting that the people killing and impoverishing you are bad is polarizing.”

Lovely.

Everyone is well-meaning, and it’s all just a misunderstanding. They don’t mean for people to die or suffer when they cut food stamps or Welfare or start wars or don’t handle a pandemic. Oh no, it’s all just a misunderstanding driven by market laws that the beneficiaries themselves didn’t create (they are far different than the market laws which existed from 33-79 and which produced very different results.)

Those laws just fell out of the sky, and weren’t created by men and women who wanted certain outcomes.

Why if only our rulers understood that the market laws that appeared during their reign without them doing anything to create them were bad for almost everyone, surely they would change those laws to laws which raised wages, removed the wealth of billionaires and ended American oligarchy while relieving poverty and providing universal health care.

It is, indeed, all just a misunderstanding, and I feel terrible that I have suggested that people who fought for well over 40 years (they took power in 80, but fought for 80 long before that) actually understood what they were fighting for. Surely they believed that reducing taxes on the rich and corporations, slashing welfare, creating a carceral state, running asset bubbles and deliberately crushing wage inflation with the Federal reserve would resound to the benefit of every American, not just those they favored.

Why yes, they had no idea that making the rich richer and ensuring everyone else got raises below inflation would not be to the benefit of all.

Phew.

It’s all just a misunderstanding. They didn’t know that they were doing evil. Every time they took food out of a mother or child’s mouth by cutting welfare and food stamps they said “this is for their own good” and believed it.

And a person who believes starving someone else is good isn’t bad, they’re good, just misunderstood.

Every time they crushed wages by raising interest rates to crash the economy when  wages increased faster than inflation, they were doing it for the sake of ordinary Americans, not to keep wages down to benefit their own class. And every time they gave money or tax cuts to the richest, well that’s so that the rich could pay high… er, do something for ordinary Americans, something I’m too stupid to understand, since I thought things like “people create market laws, they don’t drop out of the sky.”

Shows what I know!

Certainly people who crush wages, avoid universal health care, fuck up a pandemic, take food out of the mouths of children and poor people are just misunderstood. It’s all for Americans own good, and we just need to explain to those in power that they’re mistaken and politely ask them to change the rules (oh wait, they don’t create the rules, but perhaps new rules can fall out of the sky). Fourty years isn’t long enough for them to figure out on their own that doing more of the same thing will keep hurting everyone but the rich and the wealthy.

It’s good to live in such a world, a world where we all want the best for humanity, a decent living, kindness, food and shelter for all, and where we are just arguing over means. And surely we are all reasonable and can understand that our policies must change, even if after 40 years they have made a few filthy rich and impoverished everyone else. Who would think that deliberately crushing wages would crush wages? Who would think that running asset bubbles would favor those with more money rather than those with less money?

No one could have anticipated, and Nancy Pelosi, worth 120 million dollars, is aghast that all this happened. Why if only she had understood that crushing wages and favoring the rich would hurt most Americans and help the rich! It’s all just a big misunderstanding, and Nancy just didn’t get it. Neither did Obama, or Trump, or McConnell, or Reagan or Clinton or… why there are so many well-meaning people who didn’t understand. The Koch brothers would never have supported all these policies if they knew they would hurt almost everyone else but help them. Nor would all the other billionaires and centi-millionaries and deci-millionaires and the people who work for them!

This has removed a great burden off me. I know now that it’s all just a big misunderstanding, that the rulers are good people who want the best and are just a little thick, not understanding that policies meant to hurt ordinary people and make rich people richer would, in fact, hurt ordinary people and make rich people richer.

Good people can disagree, and now that we know that the majority of our leaders are good people, who are just a little mentally challenged, why I’m sure we can clear this up in no time, and have a good, kind, fair economy that helps everyone again. Pelosi and Trump will be thrilled to work together on this, I know.

What a RELIEF.

Haque's Howl

If Life Feels Bleak, It’s Because Our Civilization is Beginning to Collapse. Umair Haque, Eudamonia. July 3, 2020.

2030 Will Be Even Worse than 2020. And 2040 Will Be Even Worse than That. Unless.





There’s an old line from a movie called Office Space — do you remember that one? — that I’ve always loved: “Every day since I began work is worse than the day before it.” That’s kind of an apt summary for…everything…at the moment.

Life isn’t a happy thing right about now. It’s stressful, strange, upside-down. I’m weary with boredom, exhausted by isolation, tired of all the nothing…and I bet you are, too. So.

Is it just me, or living through the end of human civilization kind of…sucks?

There’s not — or there shouldn’t be, by now — any real debate on the point that we are now living through the probable end of human civilization.

The end of human civilization is now easy enough to see, over the next three to five decades. It’s made of climate change, mass extinction, ecological collapse, and the economic depressions, financial implosions, political upheavals, pandemics, plagues, floods, fires, and social breakdowns all those will ignite.

Coronavirus is a foreshadowing, a taste of a dismal future, a warning, and a portrait, too. Life as we know it is falling apart. Life as we know it will continue to fall apart, for the rest of our lives. How do you live through that?

I’m not your therapist, sadly — or luckily. I’m just an economist. So let me paint you a picture.

What did Coronavirus rupture? A sense of easy normality, of stability, of placidity. That things could just go on as before. Now, at least, we know how quickly life can simply…come to a screeching halt. How fast everything can change. True, in some countries, like America, things had been on a steady downward trajectory anyways. But don’t mistake the crucial lesson of the pandemic: life as we know it has now come to an end.

That’s not to say lockdowns and so forth will last forever. But they won’t end — like we all secretly hope — overnight, either. They’ll be with us, in fits and starts, as the virus ebbs and flows, for years. Or at least until a vaccine’s ready. It takes about five to ten years to develop one, usually. So Corona will probably define this decade — sapping the life from economies, causing a depression here, a stagnation there, another one here, yet again there, draining the cohesion from societies, as people grow tired of yet another lockdown, redefining politics, shifting power to authoritarians and nationalists, ripping a connected, cooperative world apart.

But that’s just a tiny, tiny taste of what’s to come.

Corona caused our lives to come to a standstill. But by and large, our systems still work. That’s not to say we have great and magnificent systems, or even really good ones — but mostly, they were kept functioning. Systems, meaning: social, economic, and financial systems, from healthcare to banks to jobs to wages and pensions and so on.

Those are what I’ll call in this tiny essay “superficial” or “secondary” systems. That’s not to say that they’re unimportant — it’s to say that they depend on other, deeper systems. But I’ll come to that.

What’s going to be different next time around is that these superficial systems will simply stop working.

A decade from now, by the 2030s, climate change is going to go nuclear. From relatively mild — although already badly disruptive — to catastrophic. And as it does, where it does, when it does, so too, all those systems we depend on will simply rupture and break. Suddenly. Bang! Just like Coronavirus did to our lives — but not our systems — today. Tomorrow, the difference will be that those systems will come to a halt, not just our temporary access to them. They will be “offline”, crashed, broken, devastated, wrecked, depleted, bankrupt, and paralyzed.

What happens when a continent burns? Take the example of America, or Australia. Both have already had an experience of “megafires.” Luckily, they’ve been managed to be controlled — or have burned themselves out. By the 2030s, though, we won’t be so lucky. Megafires will be a regular seasonal event, and they will just go on raging through canyons and hills and plains. What then? Well, then financial systems simply break. Who’s going to pay for the costs of repairing millions of incinerated homes, schools, offices, universities, clinics? The answer is: nobody.

Just like we have Rust Belt towns today — places that are being abandoned by deindustrialization — so too we’ll have Fire Belt and Flood Belt towns and cities and villages tomorrow. And as those places are destroyed, they’re going to take financial systems, healthcare systems, jobs, incomes, pensions, wages, and so forth with them. Not temporarily — like now, during the pandemic — but for good. Just like Rust Belt towns have been abandoned, so tomorrow’s Fire and Flood Belt will be uninhabitable. And the exodus fleeing from it will break most of our superficial systems. Banks won’t be able to cope with the costs of insuring all that, healthcare systems with the costs of treating all the ill, employment systems with providing for all those people, energy grids with the wreckage, and so on.

Bang! There go a civilization’s superficial systems. Of course, some places will be lucky — and they’ll escape much of this damage. Canada, Scandinavia — just some of the beneficiaries. 

[mw: we won't be "beneficiaries"; though we in Canada will suffer much less of the impacts of climate change, that will make us an easy target for invasion/plunder, first in soft form thru immigration, then thru medium forms of things like water theft, and, then, when push comes to shove, by military force; if you don't think the Americans will do to us for our resources what they have been doing for decades to less developed countries around the globe for theirs, well, then, you haven't read enough of the war and empire links on this site]

But they are a tiny relative proportion of humanity. The losers will be immense in number, and our systems simply don’t have the capability to cope, to provide, to offer them income, shelter, housing, medicine, food, even in rich countries. What happens then?

A depression does. Welcome to the Climate Depression of the 2030s. It’s much, much worse than the Great Depression — so-called — of the 1930s. Since huge chunks of the planet are now the Fire and Flood Belt, huge portions of humanity have nowhere to live, nothing to subsist on, and no way to earn a living, either. Demand falls through the floor, and the vicious cycle of falling incomes and lower employment sets in, with a vengeance.

How much does that kind of life suck? A lot more than now. That’s not to say today is fun. But tomorrow is going to make it look like a fond memory. What are you going to do when banking systems, healthcare systems, pension systems, all break down?

It’s OK. You’ll make it. It won’t be fun, but you’ll probably survive — you’re well off enough to be reading this, right? It’s the next [i.e. following] decade you really have to worry about.

By the 2040s, mass extinction will finally begin to bite. Climate change will have destabilized temperatures and seasons enough that the current rate of mass extinction — which is already horrifically high — will explode. Did you know fish can’t spawn when water are too warm? That’s OK, we’re overfishing them to death, anyways.

Life on planet earth will, by the 2040s, begin to keel over from the bottom. It’s great towers and chains of life will crash and topple, having had the roots and foundations ripped out from under them. All the little things are dying off fastest and first — insects, bees, fish, worms, and so forth. But all those chains and ladders of subsistence — right up to us — depend on them.

Who’s going to turn the soil when the worms are gone? Who’s going to clean the rivers from turning to mud, when the fish are gone? Who’s going to nourish the plants that keep the forests healthy when the insects are gone?

The answer is: nothing is. Bang. Life on planet earth begins to die off.

Oops. We’re part of that, too.

Now the real fireworks begin. I talked about our superficial, or secondary, systems. Now our primary systems — the most fundamental ones — begin to break, go bankrupt, end up depleted, crash, burn. Energy, air, food, water, medicine. The things which keep us clean, nourished, fed, watered, alive in the most basic ways.

Those systems now begin to break down. The soil turns to dust, no harvest, no food. Now you have to compete bitterly just for food. The rivers turn to mud, because the fish are gone. Now clean water becomes a luxury. Raw materials become inaccessible. The basic compounds medicines are made of become scarce. And so forth.

What happens then? Right about now, you pay maybe 25% of your income for these basics — water, food, energy, air, and so on. Maybe more, if you’re relatively poor. But by then? Most of your income — easily upwards of 50% — will go these basics. The price of all these things will skyrocket, because there simply won’t be enough to go around. And having a steady supply of them will seem like a luxury.

Now you — the rich person of the world, back then, in the 2020s — are learning what it is to live like a poor person globally always did. They always had to carefully ration their food, water, energy, medicine. Do I wash dishes today, or do I bathe? Do I eat — or do I treat my sick kid? Those are the decision the poor 80% of humanity always lived with. You were lucky not to — maybe you didn’t know it. Now you live like them, too, making just those choices. Between the very basics. Over and over again, every day. Rationing, squeezing, cutting out every last morsel of waste, trying to conserve.

Don’t worry. You’ll probably succeed at that. You’re resourceful enough. The problem is that when you’re spending most of your income on the basics — then what do you save? And what do you have left over to invest in? Never mind having fun — you’re living like one of the global poor now, which is what climate change and mass extinction will make nearly everyone. It’s not that they don’t have fun — but they don’t spend a lot of money on it. For you, now, subsistence has become the daily project, mission, goal.

The old goals of saving, investing, maybe splurging — all those are distant, distant memories. What’s that kind of life like? It’s not pleasant, that’s for sure. It has its moments of happiness and even abandon and joy. But by and large, it’s what it sounds like: a bitter, desperate struggle for mere subsistence.

You’ll get through it. Maybe you’ll learn something new, about the value of human connection, of warmth, of simpler things.

It’s the next decade that you really have to worry about.

The 2050s will be the age of the Final Goodbye. By now, earth’s great ecosystems will be in irreversible and catastrophic decline. The ocean currents, the reefs, what little is left of the polar ice. The forests which are the earth’s lungs will be charred, the rivers which are its veins will have turned to dust, the prairies which are its limbs will be made of floodwater, the oceans which are its organs will be bitter with acid.

The Final Goodbye, as in: there’s no coming back from this. Sure, life on earth will survive, in some form. But not as we know it, and not in the way that we depend on it.

It will be very, very different. Maybe jellyfish — the inedible kind — will roam the seas. Maybe bacteria that thrive in heat will live in the embers of the permanent megafires. Who knows? What’s for certain is this.

Now the collapse of our civilization’s primary systems — of energy, air, food, water, and medicine — goes permanent, and goes nuclear. Do you know how to put an ocean back together? A rain forest? A prairie? Neither do I. Once they’re gone, they’re gone. And having gone, so are the most basic of things they nourish us with, energy, air, water, food, medicine, and so on.

As those critical resources begin to [get] depleted for good, our systems will crash. How do you “price” food or water when there’s not enough to go around — for good? The answer is: you don’t. You take it, if you can, and if you can’t, you die. Our carefully planned technocratic systems — from the technical end, markets, prices, algorithms, currencies, options, to the practical end, stockpiles, pipes, reservoirs, and so forth — all simply crash, break, fall apart. They are no good anymore. What good is a “price” for the last antibiotic in a country? What good is a healthcare system full of finely educated and trained managers and accountants and CEOs for allocating antibiotics or operations when…there aren’t going to be many more?

Maybe you see my point. Nobody cares now even if you have “money,” because money is just the polite and agreeable fiction of a civilized society. Now all that matters is power, and the will to use it.

Now things break down in big, big ways. Nations fall apart, as cities and towns turn on one another. The idea of democracy comes to an end, and tribalism, factionalism, every kind of stupid and backwards superstition from the depths of history replaces it. All that’s left is everyone against everyone else — each tribe for themselves — in a desperate, doomed, idiotic battle for the last few morsels of life-giving stuff left on a planet that’s turning to dust, fire, and death.

Think of America, right about now — how it’s become this stupid, desperate, never-ending battle for self-preservation — only everywhere.

Corona, in its own way, is trying to prepare us for that. It’s trying to teach us how not to end as a civilization. By taking care of one another. Not in some meaningless, Hallmark-card kind of way. But in a razor-sharp one. Invest, now, in the things you will need tomorrow. All of you. Food, water, air, energy, medicine. Where do they come from? From the lungs, limbs, organs, blood, of the earth, the forests, skies, oceans, rivers. From the creatures, the animals, beginning with the smallest, which feed and nourish the bigger, right up to us. Invest in all that. Do it now. Do it like never before in history. Put aside your stupid squabbles, and your pointless pursuits. Put down the remote control, the phone, the drug, the fix. You are here on planet earth. Are you really here on planet earth?

Corona is a warning from the end of human civilization, backwards in time. To the beginning of the end of human civilization. It teaches us how you can see the end from here. You can see the lights going out. The lights of civilization — prosperity, democracy, freedom, justice, truth, beauty, goodness. All gone, incinerated by the fire, drowned by the flood, and all that’s left is a desperate, stupid, terrible, idiotic struggle, through the mud and ashes, for self-preservation, each against each other, all against all. I take your water, you take my energy, they take our food, we take their medicine. Around and around the maypole we go, ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

That is how our civilization ends.

Does it suck to live at the end of human civilization? Of course it does. Not just because life is wearying, boring, draining, or tense. But because you know. It doesn’t have to be like this. And yet it is. Maybe, then, it always did have to be like this. Maybe this is the only way. We have to fail so they can learn.

I take consolation, I suppose, in the fact that the next civilization will be — will have to be — wiser, gentler, truer, better than us. It’s a shame, though, that the rest of our lives are going to, well…you know. Suck.

Julia Steinberger's howl

Cogs in the climate machine. Julia Steinberger. July 10, 2020.

This is less of a blog post, and more of a howl.

The planetary climate clock, in human time

Let’s start by some human and planetary timescales. I don’t know why we don’t learn them in grade school (I never learned them at all). But they matter. And let’s represent them visually, in a stark, plain way.

“_” : this is our unit of time, and it’s 1000 years long.

_ is 10 long human lifespans, 40 generations, the time separating us from the first millennium and the Middle Ages in European history, when Canute of Denmark ruled Britain, before Marco Polo traveled the Silk Road. It’s a long time by any human account: twice the duration of the Roman Empire.

_____ is 5'000 years. It’s the age of the oldest known living tree, Mathuselah, in the Californian White Mountains.

____________ is 12'000 years. It’s the time span separating us from the last ice age. This time is the time during which humans slowly selected plants, developed agriculture, cities, writing: anything we would call civilization. It is the time when humans thrived, cultures multiplied, our population grew. This clement and stable climate interval, which sheltered us and the plants we depend upon to live so well, is known as the Holocene. Gaze upon that interval fondly, for it is already in our past.

Figure 1.2 from the IPCC’s Special Report on 1.5 degrees, showing that we have already left the temperature range of the Holocene.


_______________________________________________________________________________________________________ is 103'000 years: the duration of the last Ice Age. Ice Ages, compared with the Holocene, were pretty brutal times for human beings, and the plants and animals we depend upon. Human population was only 1–10 million at the end of the last ice age — and the one before that nearly wiped us out entirely.


__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ is 250'000 years, the rough age of Homo Sapiens, our species, us. This is the late stage of the Quaternary period: a time when our planet swung between ice ages and more clement interglacial periods (of which the Holocene was the latest one).

Now, time starts going much further back.

But stay with me (keep scrolling!): this is important. This is not just a distant past that our species never knew: it’s also a future we and our children will experience. Because time is moving slowly far back from us, but we are changing our climate with a rapidity never previously experienced on Earth. Ready? 3 million years to travel through now. Off — we — go!


____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ is 3.3 million years ago. We have left the Quaternary and its ice ages: we are now in mid-Piacenzian Warm Period of the Pliocene. Temperatures are more than 3 °C (5.5 °F) warmer than today, and sea levels are 20 meters higher. Homo Genus has just appeared, a short 100'000 years ago, and Homo Habilis walks in South-East Africa.

New research, published in Nature, has now measured much more precisely how much of the warming gas carbon dioxide (CO2) was in the atmosphere during this warm spell: 360ppm (parts per million) on average. When my father was born, in 1921, a mere 100 years ago, the CO2 level in the atmosphere was only 304 ppm. By the time my son was born, our fossil-fueled civilization had barreled (joke? hahaha? ha?) past this Pliocene average, to 393ppm. So we are already, today, at CO2 concentrations higher than the Pliocene average: and we’ve moved the climate clock of the planet back more than 3.3 million years in less than 100 years: the lifespan of my father.

CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere since 1700, overlaid with recent Pliocene study levels, and specific values from my family’s history.


If CO2 is so correlated with climate, why are we not already experiencing the temperatures and sea levels of the Pliocene, and witnessed by faraway Homo Habilis, with their almost-human eyes? Professor Gavin Foster, co-author of the Nature study, puts it this way: “The reason we don’t see Pliocene-like temperatures and sea-levels yet today is because it takes a while for Earth’s climate to fully equilibrate (catch up) to higher CO2 levels and, because of human emissions, CO2 levels are still climbing. Our results give us an idea of what is likely in store once the system has reached equilibrium.”

Time lags for equilibration vary between Earth systems: climate temperatures will catch up with the Pliocene with in a few decades, sea levels within a few centuries. But it gets worse. Because not only have we left the agriculture-sheltering Holocene. Not only have we zoomed through Pliocene the span than 1 human lifetime (reminder: we have no evidence that the large scale agriculture we depend upon, in our billions, for survival, is possible in this new climate. Cheers.). We are still going. We are accelerating, in fact, with concentrations of CO2 increasing faster and faster every year.

And by 2025, according to the Nature study authors (my son will be 13! So awkward being a teenager while zooming through geological epochs, don’t you think?), we’ll have exploded CO2 concentrations so much that we have to far, far, far further back in planetary times to find climate analogs. Is your down scrolling finger ready? Miocene, here we come!

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 is 15 million years ago. The mid-Miocene. According to the Nature study’s lead author, Dr. de la Vega “Having surpassed Pliocene levels of CO2 by 2025, future levels of CO2 are not likely to have been experienced on Earth at any time for the last 15 millions years, since the Middle Miocene Climatic Optimum, a time of even greater warmth than the Pliocene.”

This result echoes a previous study published in PNAS, which showed that future Earth climates will likely resemble ones from our distant past. They compared past Earth climates from the early Eocene (50 million years ago — I won’t inflict that much down scrolling on you, but only if you promise to be good little climate activists and stop this trajectory of destruction, m’kay?) and mid-Pliocene, and found that on our current high emissions trajectory we would zoom through the Pliocene during this century, and end up in the Eocene by 2150. It’s worth noting that many emissions modellers don’t believe that these high emission levels will actually materialize, but it’s also true that the climate response to emissions might be steeper than previously thought, so perhaps that’s not as reassuring as it should be.

Figure from Burke et al in PNAS, showing past and future Earth climates, with Homo genus and species arrows overlayed.

Where do we go from here?

I want to make two short points here.
1: An avoidable disaster

The first is that the current trajectory we are on is both utterly devastating, and utterly avoidable. The loss of life, human and non-human, will be horrific. There is no way that ecosystems and species can adapt to millions of years worth of climate change in the span of decades. We are already in the midst of the 6th mass extinction and have destroyed biodiversity equivalent to millions of years of evolution of our own branches of the tree of life. This is not looking good.

It’s looking particularly bad for those least to blame. So far, I’ve been using the word “we”, as though “we” humans, young, old, poor, rich, were all equally to blame for our current trajectory. We are not. Some of us, specifically the affluent, have a disproportionate share of the blame, and are in fact driving the systems of global production and consumption, extraction, pollution and exploitation, that are causing our disastrous planetary roller coaster ride into a climate unknown to our species. Some of us, the majority world, the young, the poor, the Black and Indigenous and migrants and generally people of color, will suffer the most.

To give one simple example, on our current high emissions trajectory, the tropics will become uninhabitable within this century due to heat & humidity — see the map below. The map of countries with high historical responsibility for emissions is almost the reverse of this one, a clear demonstration of the injustice built in to climate harms.

Figure of deadly heat & humidity days per year by 2100 from Moira et al in Nature Climate Change. (Yes this is RCP 8.5, but RCP 4.5 is not much better.)

But this immense harm is mostly avoidable, still. There is nothing predetermined about it. If we change our energy, consumption and production systems, to focus on sufficiency and decent living standards, we can both reduce our demand for energy while decarbonising our supply. If we change our diets to become plant-based, we can stop deforestation and remove a major source of methane and nitrous oxides, two potent greenhouse gases, as well as providing healthy and nutritious food to all. There is no historical evidence that we need fossil fuels to thrive, and looking into the future, we need to eliminate them to survive.

2: A struggle for survival

The second point I want to make is that we have a huge, immense struggle on our hands to achieve this livable, better (and entirely technically achievable) future. We are in a struggle for survival, and the odds are very much against us.

The main obstacles to our maintaining a planet on which the human species can thrive have names. Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway, in their short and excellent sciency science-fiction book “The Collapse of Western Civilization: a View from the Future” named two culprits in the world of ideas: scientific positivism (the overcautious nature of current scientific communication) and market fundamentalism (the belief in markets-above-all enshrined in neoclassical economics and neoliberal policy). In my research, I’ve circled around this problem, and come to name capitalism as the intertwined economic, physical and social system as the root cause of our current trajectory. Capitalism manifests itself in concrete ways, in the state capture by industrial interests which are antithetical to different trajectory (as we showed in the case of car dependency) and in the existence of ever growing inequalities, with the affluent most wedded to damaging patterns of consumption and production. The solutions put forward to comfort and maintain these existing power structures and inequalities, such as green growth, have been repeatedly shown to have no basis in reality.

This means that to avoid disaster, we must confront capitalism. That’s hard, certainly. But in my opinion, it’s probably easier than trying to cook a decent meal for one’s extended family of a few billion in the Eocene, you know? And fighting capitalism is definitely the topic for another post (or two or three — in the mean time you might want to read my “how to become a climate activist, just go do it already damn-it” trilogy).

But I did want to say a few words.

• It can be done.
• The history of learning how it can be done has been erased from our education. We don’t learn how to be activists, advocates, muckraking journalists or revolutionaries at school. But we can and need to learn this now.
• It takes the determination to become as revolutionary as we can.

Comfort and security are the past, if you ever had them. Many people never did. The Holocene is behind us. What lies in front is still undetermined, and can still be changed. But it will take the fight of our lives, for all of our lives, to change this. This will not be fun, or fulfilling, or a worthy adventure of self-discovery, or a cute feel-good movie, or a task of personal validation. I mean, maybe from time to time there will be those things, who knows. Who cares. This is a fight for life itself. We get to be depressed, despondent, little creatures against the crushing change of geological epochs and mighty economic systems. But we need to be little creatures who are learning to fight very very very fast and very very very well together against the brutal forces of domination which steer our current course.

So. Read Naomi Klein, Arundhati Roy, George Monbiot, Fantz Fanon, Rosa Luxemburg. Learn to become a revolutionary, get some courage and guts and analysis. Join Extinction Rebellion already, and/or the Sunrise Movement, and/or Fridays for Future, and/or all of them. Let’s do this. GO.