I do ground-truthing from a very folksy and small-townish perspective. I have found myself “stuck” here on the Central Oregon Coast, really, where my own destiny seems etched in the crumbling sandstone holding up the tourist-laden Highway 101.
I’ve exhausted the labor market here, since the school district has banned me as a substitute teacher for, well, subbing and answering high school students’ questions about my work with homeless, with just released incarcerated, and those with substance abuse issues. Of Mice and Men, as well as Animal Farm, I was filling in for the teacher.
I was frog-marched out of the classroom halfway through third period. Banned for life, and, of course, this county has a major deficit in both full-time teachers and subs.
This is just one peek into a broken national system of idiocy. We’ll have the Pride Parade for the first time in Newport down here, September 16-18, but we have complete soiled minds in the school system. They aren’t teaching them to think, but then, we have this uncanny ability to truly ruin future generations with the fear porn of Pfizer and Fauci, all those mandates, the six-foot lines taped all over the schools, outside, masks for track and fiel events.
Children’s brains in adult heads. The school system is a reflection of the chronically ill teaching and administrative establishment. The virtue signaling rules, and no amount of smart critical thinking works with these youth anymore . . . . Except for those who drop out.
It is a hook and release and recapture and never let go again for each next cohort, next generation.
Other aspects of this county include so much cowardice and dysfunction. I can only imagine what is and is not off limits in the classroom now.
Alas, don’t just blame Texas, as this mentality is the stuff of Americans:
‘I am not upset. I’m enraged’: Administration asked school librarian to take down banned books display after one parent complained. ‘I serve over 700 students, not one student alone.’ (Source)
I am stuck (proverbially) in this most gorgeous of places. Stuck in that sort of Walden Pond perspective, albeit, more along the Dollar General Store sensibility.
I do have lofty philosophical ambitions:
Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden, August 9, 1954
What I am finding is that I have dislocated myself from my earlier roots of working with my sleeves rolled up as a teacher. So much has passed under the bridge since 1983. Forty years is a drop in the geological bucket, I know, but from a 25-year-old’s perspective, up until now, with all that has broken down the collective human spirit largely on the back of capitalism, the writing was on the wall even then when I had so much hope for some enlightenment and change within the ranks of teaching in El Paso.
Being around youth, around first generation high school graduates, around young people who came from humble beginnings, I found at least some pride in working with them.
The disease of the Aministration Class, or the Provost Clan, all the waste that is a university — football field resurfacing and brand new library buildings and a top-down loading up of worthless institutional advancement creeps — it wasn’t enough then to infect me to throw in the towel.
Forty years later, well, so much in this country is broken, and so much about higher education is plain wrong. It’s all on this trajectory of truly a reset of values, or at least, in the USA, very few values for the majority of the people, now have been stripped. This concept of digitization of everything is easily digested by youth.
Where do they get these all-comers? That’s 87,000 more IRS armed agents. This is the Democrats, man:
An IRS job form seeking ‘Criminal Investigation Special Agents’ was briefly taken offline and edited on Wednesday after its language stoked outrage on social media, according to Fox News and other outlets. Though a previous version of the page (archived August 10) noted that “major duties” of the job would include carrying a firearm and being “willing to use deadly force, if necessary,” the listing visible on Thursday evening no longer contains that requirement.
Journalist Ford Fischer was among the first to note the mention of ‘deadly force’ in a series of tweets on Wednesday. Less than 24 hours later the agency had taken down the notice, removed the offending bullet-point and reuploaded it. (Source)
The US society is so geared to complete rip-off of the 80 percent, those of us not in the point zero-zero percent, One Percent or captured inside the 19 percenters who are the true enemies of the people. The Eichmann’s. The hatchet men and women. The Dream Hoarders.
This at the Aspen Institute, that “institute”: The Aspen Institute is largely funded by foundations such as the Carnegie Corporation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Gates Foundation, the Lumina Foundation, and the Ford Foundation, by seminar fees, and by individual donations.
Trees and a High School Drop Out Making His Way in LaLa Land
September’s here, the month that brings in Fall. Looking at the national holiday list for September (celebratory themes), I notice over 30 “themes” celebrated or commemorated. Here are just a few:
National Hispanic Heritage
Childhood Obesity
Childhood Cancer
Self-Improvement
Honey
Potato
Pain Awareness
Intergenerational
Prostate
Diving into that intergenerational theme, I realize I’ve been intently interfacing with people decades younger than I am. In Waldport, Portland, Spokane, Seattle, and Alaska, I have talked with people thirty and forty years my junior.
I have deep conversations with some of the houseless rough sleepers in Waldport: guys that are in their thirties who have taken to life outside the “norms” of job, home, roots. Much of what I have discovered is trauma piled onto each individual since childhood. I hearken to Dr. Gabor Mate:
“From early infancy, it appears that our ability to regulate emotional states depends upon the experience of feeling that a significant person in our life is simultaneously experiencing a similar state of mind.” (documentary, “The Wisdom of Trauma”).
I’ve met one young guy at a Newport pharmacy who had dreams of being a marine biologist but whose poor health limited that aspiration.
I’ve got a book out, “Coastal People inside a Deep Dive,” featuring amazing Lincoln County folk from my column at Oregon Coast Today. Many of those I featured were both old and young, and every age in between.
Every day I meet amazing young people in various stages of their wonderful evolutions. Many are living with complex PTSD. Others are working through financial strain. Each conversation with someone younger than I takes me to their spiritual home.
Listening is important in today’s age. Many old timers say in the old days we listened more, engaged more with people outside our socio-economic and cultural-ethnic backgrounds.
I’ve had deep conversations with Chuck Ellard who runs Newport’s Pacific Digital printing (“Finding a path“). I’ve written about him, and he is featured in the Coastal People book. He’s in his late thirties, just had a son, and moved from Logsden to Seal Rock. He sees himself as a vital member of the community, assisting individuals with their framing needs or getting huge printing jobs from the Lincoln County School District.
A young woman who is working in a five and dime tells me of her dreams of being a writer, and wants to major in literature at U of O. A single parent’s health issues forced her to help pay the bills, so she is in a holding pattern working 50 hours a week. She has a real grace in this derailed point in her life.
I’ve been spending a few hours with a “tree man,” an arborist. Tyler Muth is from Waldport, went to school here, and now this 29-year-old has his own tree service business. He is tall and lanky. Think of a bearded young Brad Pitt.
Muth likes climbing trees. He respects the tree and encourages people to keep healthy trees.
He uses ropes to climb and small chain saws and handsaws. He knows the species of trees, and he is studying for certification through the International Society of Arboriculture.
We talk about Tyler’s years trying to make it as a pro surfer. He likes hitting waves, and he’s surfed up and down the Pacific Coast. He first competed when he was 12.
His business, Dr. Hingewood, allows for some free surf time. He’s worked in construction, and he even did a stint for a mobile slaughter house killing and dressing cows. He tired of that job, as he says it got to him: “I don’t like killing animals. I don’t own a gun. I even had a hard time last week killing a fish.”
He’s done some gnarly jobs, up in big timber, and those cuts are dangerous. He knows his back cuts (the third and final cut made on the opposite side of the notch). His business’ name, Dr. Hingewood, ties into how the portion of a tree left uncut – the hinge — can control the direction of the fall.
We talk about family, and he isn’t married and says doesn’t want children. “My freedom and lifestyle would make it difficult to raise a child. I like my freedom to just pick up and go surfing.”
He’s a businessman with a contractor’s license, and he says he has challenges keeping guys on payroll since many just pick up and take off for other gigs, like building wind turbines or commercial fishing.
He is a self-described tree nerd. I’ve written many stories about arborists, urban forestry programs and the value of trees in places like Spokane and Seattle. Out here, Tyler works with mostly private customers, usually with nuisance trees.
We both look up at the aging cypress on the neighbor’s property overhanging my wife and my backyard. He sees the canopy, the architecture of the tree, the hidden deadwood and fossilized wood in the middle of the trunk.
That sky — those crows, the giant unruly evergreen, blue herons squawking – gets Tyler and I talking. He’s an easy-going man with keen sense of follow- through. I listen; he listens. He tells me about the time a 14-foot great white shark “sort of just appeared” under him while he was surfing off the Oregon coast.
This is the kind of intergenerational discourse we all need. We talk about how men struggle to communicate and to know themselves.
Tyler goes about life with an even keel, he says, and while he isn’t blind to the world, he tells me that he is not so engaged in huge political debates.
“I keep busy. I love trees.” He relishes climbing, figuring out what to cut, and how to get that cut wood down without breaking a patio or his own neck.
We both interject our “almost broke my neck” stories. This is intergenerational communication at its best, looking up at a 100-year-old busted up cypress.
And there is cultural and retail and consumer insanity doing the same thing over and over and over expecting different results, as in doing the same wrong thing over and over, or, following the wrong ways over and over, and expecting different results is, well, sort of insane.
Or that system of thinking, SOPs, the working rule book for this system of extraction, destruction, razing, paving over, polluting, degrading, destroying, developing, and diseasing is what rules the insanity of the systems of oppression.
Imagine that, no, this system, and the underlying cause and effect, effect and cause in an endless back and forth cause drawn by effects. Beach renourishment is this terminology of sanity. Amazing Orwellian PR spinning. That is, taking sand from off the wrack line, offshore, to dump and plow on the beachhead, because, well, seas pull and push, pull and push, and reorient the actual beach architecture. Rising seas, and then, of course, coastal luxuries and development (human) means that the beaches have to have sand and weight and dimension to be a usable beach. Commercial, and now, we figured out that mangroves and wetlands and deltas and sand hold back the big waves of storms.
Earlier this year, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers discovered around 300,000 tires underwater as they were surveying an area to draw sand from for the latest renourishment project.
One generation’s problem is another’s problem sort of solved, insanely, and that sort of solve becomes the next generation’s problem. Or in the case of us, we see the problem sort of solved at age 20 and see the solve/solution becoming a bigger problem.
The tires were likely part of an artificial reef placed by the state in the 1970s or 1980s that have since drifted down the coast. Patricia Smith with the NC Division of Marine Fisheries says there could be more than half-a-million tires along the shoreline even though the practice of using tires for that purpose ended in the 80s.
“Over the years some of these tires have drifted off of the artificial reefs,” said Smith. “Some of them have washed ashore, when they do that we pick them up we get them disposed of properly.”
The tires underwater, however, are too expensive to remove. That means the Army Corps of Engineers working on the project will have to work around them to find enough sand. (Source)
So, hurricanes, and big surge storms, all of that, eroding those beaches. Now, sand is like oil is like gold is like data. Those 500,000 tires are now of a magnitude of 1,000 or more times globally, just dumped, not strategically dumped for “artificially reef building (sic)”.
Yeah, invest in plastics, young man. That solution (sic) that never was but now is the problem on a multiple level scale:
Most folks who work to end our plastic habit focus on the environmental impacts — such as trash, oil use, and manufacturing emissions. All important. EWG looks at it from another angle, too: the plastic pollution inside us. In you. In newborn babies. (Source)
Plastic pollution is an environmental, wildlife, climate, human health, and social justice issue. Hormone distrupter. Brain barrier crosser. Gut killer. Blood leveler. Diabetes and brain fog and, well, what a sane solution, sort of.
The great garbage patch:
How compliant are we stuck in Capitalism, stuck in this western cultural lie of elites – them are better, us — we are dependent upon them – elites. How we in modern civilization draw on acceptance, and seeing us as them, and them as the other.
Here, “I came back home a little afraid for my country, afraid of what it might want, and get, and like, under pressure of combined reality and illusion. I felt—and feel—that it was not German man that I had met, but Man. He happened to be in Germany under certain conditions. He might, under certain conditions, be I.” — Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free
Here are the section headings for Mayer’s book,
Section headings from the article discussing Mayer’s book and how relevant it is now — They Thought They Were Free by Joshua Styles.
Overcoming Decency
“Even if many Germans did not harbor anti-Semitic prejudices (at least not initially), the forced separation of Jews and non-Jews created a devastating rift in German society, tearing the social fabric and paving the way for tyranny. In our day, the separation of the masked and unmasked, the vaccinated and the unvaccinated, has divided populations around the world like nothing we’ve experienced in our lifetimes. And the global scale of this separation has perhaps not happened in recorded history.”
Our Own Lives
Our Own Fears
Our Own Troubles
The Tactics of Tyrants
The Common Good
“Governments across time have used the “common good” as an excuse to consolidate power and implement authoritarian measures that under normal circumstances would be rejected….Tyrants understand how to exploit our desire to care for others. We must understand their tendency to exploit our good will. Indeed, to understand this tactic and to resist encroachments on liberty is the way to preserve the actual common good. Tragically, many people do not realize that they have been exploited—that their desire to work for the common good has become obedience without question.”
Endless Distractions
Science and Education
“‘Trust the science.’ Or so we have been told the past two years. Yet another tactic used by authoritarians across time is the appeal to science and expertise….over the past two years, ‘science’ has meant whatever the public health authorities claim to be true, regardless whether the claims are supported by evidence. In fact, much of this so-called science has proved to be demonstrably false.”
Suppressing Speech and Encouraging Self-Censorship
Uncertainty
Gradually, Then Suddenly
“Think back to March 2020. We should have resisted then. We should not have tolerated stay-at-home orders or various (and even non-sensical) restrictions on local businesses and private life. Governments had already gone too far. And then came the masks, and some said that masks were the hill. Individuals who shared these concerns were derided as fanatics and conspiracy theorists, but they were right.”
Reading, “The Patrescene: When men hold the power, humanity fades” by Amy Irvine.
Yes, this is so true, though today, unfortunately, with Western Culture, warring, the war against children, nature, land, soil, air, water, food, trees, people, we do not have that clear deliniation that we have had over time: “When men hold all the power, we are dumbed down; we die.“
SO, without getting into the Military Industrial Complex’s female CEOs and the war drumming by so many women in the EU to send more Ukrainians to the front, to the grinder, and the Hillary and Albright situation, this writer does hit sparks:
Our hands bloodied and bodies bent beneath the weight of an animal ten times our size, a thing we stalked and killed together because together there was nothing we couldn’t do. Things were fairer. We were fed. This is not some romantic revision of our beginnings; it’s in bones and relics and rock art. The earliest shamans were female. Many of the handprints stenciled into the walls of Europe’s famous painted caves are female. The remains of an early big game hunter just unearthed in the Americas are also female. Or maybe the ancient ones thought of these bodies in a less binary way. Maybe the binary is to blame as much as the seed.
The fossil record reveals that, a half million years ago, the brain size of both our African and Eurasian human ancestors burgeoned. This is the longest and arguably most successful era, the time of hunter-gatherers. A time when there was materially more energy for females and their offspring—not only is more food available but females also have equal part in the acquisition and distribution of nutrients and calories. In such a society, maternal and child health are valued and, in turn, the species thrives—so calorie-demanding brains grow bigger. But the stauncher the patriarchy, the higher the death rates of mothers and children. When men hold all the power, we are dumbed down; we die.
Yes, I hammer it hard on how insane the people I have worked with and worked for have been, and how traumatized they are, but how traumatizing they become. I have worked in fields that are dominated by women — college English teacher, social work, environmental sustainability, writing, journalism, literary editing. Truly, I have to say that capitalism has that uncanny ability to chronically disease people, both male and female. It is inflammatory, it is dehumanizing, it is violent and dog-eat-dog, and it is based on white supremacy, racism, the ability to steal souls and sell them for a pound of gold. To see the white disease come into a land and steal and subjugate. It is amazing to see how much the world’s native and indigenous people have suffered under that formula of pain.
I expect the Orionpiece to be creative, soul crafting, and not always centered in the reality of our politics, geo-politics, and the hell on earth this country has unleashed on the rest of the world. Just being an American or a Brit or Canadian or European unleashes pain from centuries ago, now and into the future.
Here, another piece from the Summer Orion:
The real Age of Dominion would come much later. After the Crusades, in which Christians first unleashed large-scale violence against non-Christians. After the adoption of mercantilist conquest and slave-based racial capitalism. After the emergence of the scientific revolution. In other words, after the West had constructed a dominant and dominating culture, devoted above all to extracting and accumulating: Land. Power. Wealth. All of this conquest and extraction justified by patriarchy, white supremacy, an arrogated license to conquer or kill the infidel. And, eventually, by scriptural passages that seemed to give humans ownership of the natural world. ( The Age of Dominion by John Biewen)
So it comes back to tires, and back to plastics. And, in that summer issue is an interview of Handmaid Tale’s Atwood. Of course, we get the masking, and we get those concepts of what woke is, and, then, the fragile generation, and while I like Solnit on many levels, we do get into the LGBTQ stuff, and see things that the USA will be non-white majority in two decades, and somehow the world will be good. I can’t believe Solnit has to bring in Putin, and alas, these are captured conversations.
It is so-so much more complicated than these dichotomies, and so sad that Solnit and Atwood equate their belief system to their understanding or misunderstanding of USSR and Soviet Union and Russia. Amazing. Oh well, some of the good with the bad. Here you go.
Oh, so much in the news, in the stupendous news of the UK and EU and USA and Klanada and Ukraine. So much news about Japan wanting nukes, wanting the rising sun banner, again, lifting up with its imperial rays. So-so much about how dead the lands are becoming. First it was those cold winters and sanctioning Russian gas, but now, temperatures in Lisbon and Madrid, hitting 116 F!
The chaos is the message, and the messangers are the most corrupt, the most incapable of seeing systems of oppression — capitalism — running a scheme to drain every cent from the 90 percent of the world, and from 80 percent of the Western world. Draining coffers means polluting air-soil-water-seas and grinding earth into compacted nothingness.
If we think about it, though, it comes down to krill, first, and this creature is yet another canary in the mine shaft: “Climate Scientists Stunned to Find Atlantic Plankton 90% Gone; Marine Life, our Oxygen Imperiled!”
Yeah, air, that thing we need to live. Plankton provide oxygen. Water, sun, air, food, some simple needs and things to plan seven generations out for. These for us, the commoners, are not on the Billionaires’ agendas. And now that the Amazon rainforest is coming close to being a carbon emitter, versus a carbon sink, and now that sea grasses are being mowed down by pollution, heating waters, acidification, well, air and ocean bounties, will be going, going, gone … on the capitalism-at-any-cost chopping block.
Yet, oh, yet, we will debate the cocaine consumption of Zelensky versus Hunter Biden’s prostitution and crack habits; we’ll look at the decaying brain of Biden and the amped up super-predator brain of another aging fool, Trump. We will see the inept EU, Nato, UK, Canada, USA, watch all those at the top (sic), go on and on about nothing. Even the perverted George Soros, he gets quoted these days along with war criminal deluxe, Kissinger. They are the message, since Soros in particular, owns some of the media:
“We have a fund in Ukraine, and it turned out to be one of the best. I also want to mention that there is one person who has been very deeply involved in Ukraine and that is Biden.” (Source)
So, which image is more important to the world? The krill above, or the felons pictured in all the news, including that one just above ?
Many leftists will deny the climate crisis. Amazing fools, and tools, really. No, there will be no shift from hydrocarbons to solar and wind. That is a fact. Yes, the sea rise will be affecting billions as ports will be inundated. Ports! Think about everything that comes and goes through capitalism and general commerce — ports, cities, people.
Those temperatures in Spain and Portugal? In Seattle a few years ago, thousands died, and that was a 20-day stretch of global regional heating. Air conditioning, man, not there in Seattle. Then the electricity, where’s that in Trump-Bidenistan, in the UK and EU? So, the fears of a cold German winter are not there yet since the heat and death waves are coming NOW. Take a look at ZioLensky’s world below.
Yeah, it is fear factor Number 999. Monkeypox and Ninja Covid and Nukes to Ukraine, and war with China, and Israel looking for a new Davidistan (think Ukraine). Yes, heat wave 2022, an echo of heat wave 2015.
The heat and wet bulb temperatures in the Middle East, India, Austin, TX? Oh, those 142 degree ground temperatures in Iran. Normal, or easily weathered? Greenie weenies and Coal-mouthed Capitalists and Mike Pence Armaggedon Freaks, it’s all the same to them: the world as a chessboard, the world as a game of thrones, the world as shark tank and dog-eat-dog.
This is the holy map of the next Armaggedon fear pron:
But again, it’s the bees, man, or the krill. How many bees have you seen in California, in Oregon, in Washington? Come on, is this the Insect Apocalypse many deny? I have tomato and pepper plants that are not getting pollinated. Last year they did. This is it for the world of despotic Goldman Sachs and Black Rock and Black Stone perversions. End of pollinators.
“There are lots of tiny little things in this world that hold aloft everything that we value,” said Oliver Milman, an environmental author of a new book called The Insect Crisis: The Fall of the Tiny Empires That Run the World.
A world without insects is a world we don’t want to live in. Yet we don’t seem to pay these critters much attention — even as many of them slip toward extinction. Science is increasingly showing that insects, on the whole, are declining quickly, he said. Some populations have fallen by more than 70 percent in just a few decades. (source)
So, again, the value of nothing (hedge funds, investing in stocks and bonds, criminal hostile takeovers), all the same as that value put on missiles destroyed in their canisters by the Special Military Operation. The value of Ukraine’s armed forces and Nazi forces bombing schools, maternity wards, city blocks, markets, homes in Donbass. The value of bumbling Biden and his Killer King Oil Can.
These are horror show images above. Absolutely horrific images of dudes who need extinction NOW.
And the guy with 20 books, who has verve and knowledge, but hardly anyone listens to fellows like Peter Ward. In fact, his most recent book was written by himself, in English, and only published in Germany, translated into that language. He teaches at University of Washington-Seattle, so a 100 students at a time is not a game changer!!
Oh, darn, now almost everything Ward broaches in this interview is spot on, or at least in need of huge global discussion and mitigation planning now. I do not agree with his assessment of SARS-CoV2 masks, and the interviewer is, of course, another lite-lite liberal college teacher who yuks it up about, nonchalantly, getting more of the fringes on the left and right out off the WWW, that science needs to be science, and get all the hot spot algorithms, while the rest of us should get deplatformed or junked into cyber jail. The book in question is titled, The Flooded Earth. Imagine, US book publishers saying, “It won’t sell. No one will read it. We won’t publish it.”
Here, the show notes with subtopics and running times:
00:45 – Peter Ward website and books
03:00 – We need a little bit of CO2, but it’s easy to have too much CO2
04:20 – Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe (co-written with Dan Brownlee)
04:40 – Excessive heat and mortality
05:12 – Volcanic activity responsible for past CO2 spikes
05:40 – Previous mass extinctions
05:57 – Non-animal mass extinctions
07:18 – Uneven atmospheric heating
08:00 – Ocean currents and how they work
08:51 – Hydrogen Sulfide (H2S)
09:12 – Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum
10:25 – Fossil fuel availability
10:50 – Under a Green Sky
11:50 – The Gulf Stream
13:22 – What lives at the bottom of the ocean?
15:13 – Shallow ocean grasses and climate
19:11 – Oxygen in the ocean has dropped 2%
20:20 – North pacific ocean increasing acidity
20:48 – Billions of sea creatures died during summer ‘21 heat wave
23:11 – 30% of houses in Seattle have air conditioning
23:50 – Positive feedback loop
25:00 – We are highly attuned to smell hydrogen sulfide
25:45 – 400 ppm of hydrogen sulfide will kill a human
28:25 – Fred Hutchinson Institute
28:50 – Warm blooded animals are more sensitive to H2S than cold blooded
29:45 – Atlantic meridional overturning circulation has slow 15-20% in the last 30-40 years
31:56 – We’ve lost 15% of the Amazon, if we lose 20% it will tip into a carbon source
34:10 – In the last 20,000 years sea level rise has gone up 450 ft
34:30 – How many of the world’s ports are built 3ft above sea level
34:52 – Wet bulb temperature + *Factual Correction – Higher wet bulb temperatures do not prevent sweating, it makes sweating less effective
36:15 – What temperature can mammals still reproduce at
40:10 – Eric Steig
41:48 – Social media algorithms encourage polarization and extremes
44:25 – 40% of students at the University of Minnesota are using some mental health aid
45:39 – A switch to renewables completely will not fix all of our issues
45:45 – The energy Americans use outside of the body is 100x the amount they eat
46:08 – 20% of Americans lost everything during COVID
48:13 – The Flooded Earth
48:41 – Northern Europe most at risk for sea level rise
49:46 – Rice is the number one food source for the largest portion of people
49:53 – Bangladesh rice crop destruction via salinization
53:31 – Sam Wasser
55:58 – Giant clams are replacing ivory
57:23 – We’ve lost 50% of animals since the late 1960s
57:55 – 5,500 mammal species and 10 million other species we share the earth with
59:07 – Save the Nautilus
1:01:25 – 25 million dollars worth of clams being shipped to China
1:01:49 – Giant clams are extinct in many places
1:03:23 – We’ve underpaid for the main income to our economies
1:03:30 – We can shift away from GDP as measure for success
1:04:49 – Male libido and the exotic trade market
1:06:25 – Pangolin scales second most trafficked item
1:12:10 – Human biases and drives
1:12:31 – We are energy blind
1:13:00 – Emergence
1:13:40 – Elephants have evolved to be tuskless because of the ivory trade
Sea level rise will happen no matter what we do. Even if we stopped all carbon dioxide emissions today, the seas would rise one meter by 2050 and three meters by 2100. This–not drought, species extinction, or excessive heat waves–will be the most catastrophic effect of global warming. And it won’t simply redraw our coastlines–agriculture, electrical and fiber optic systems, and shipping will be changed forever. As icebound regions melt, new sources of oil, gas, minerals, and arable land will be revealed, as will fierce geopolitical battles over who owns the rights to them. — Peter Ward!
Yet, trillion$ for War. Trillion$ for $urveillence. Trillion$ about to be pick-pocketed from humanity from the likes of the techno wizards and the WEF, Davos men and women, Klaus $chwab and Gate$ and Company. Truly, look at the stuff over at Silicon Icarus and Wrench in the Gears. The tsunami is flooded earth and super-heated cities. But in the meantime,
The following will make most vomit. Deemed a ‘Young World Leader.’ More like Hitler Youth. Orwellian.
My biggest concern is all the people who do not live in our city. Those we lost on the way. Those who decided that it became too much, all this technology. Those who felt obsolete and useless when robots and AI took over big parts of our jobs. Those who got upset with the political system and turned against it. They live different kind of lives outside of the city. Some have formed little self-supplying communities. Others just stayed in the empty and abandoned houses in small 19th century villages.
Once in a while I get annoyed about the fact that I have no real privacy. Nowhere I can go and not be registered. I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me.
All in all, it is a good life. Much better than the path we were on, where it became so clear that we could not continue with the same model of growth. We had all these terrible things happening: lifestyle diseases, climate change, the refugee crisis, environmental degradation, completely congested cities, water pollution, air pollution, social unrest and unemployment. We lost way too many people before we realized that we could do things differently.
Now, I ran into this sort of colonized and corrupted thinking as a college teacher for four decades. Even as a sustainability coordinator, who was always against the grain of so called green building this and New Urbanism that, I got so much of that mumbo-jumbo non-reality: Smart Growth and Tiny Homes and Walkable Cities and Transportation Hubs and Community Gardens and Food Forests. All of that, without SOCIALISM. These people have not just drunk the Kool-Aid; they mix up their own concoctions of this shit. These people are drones, broken, bought and sold, and the WEF is their colonizer, master. So is 350.org, and Greta and Naomi Klein and the others in green pornography hunger games.
Now compare the insipid quote above by this co-ed with this guy’s words and his article:
LONDON — According to the Cambridge English Dictionary, an economy is “the system of trade and industry by which the wealth of a country is made and used.” For the last few centuries, this system has been dominated by the paradigm of capitalism, in which the private owners of capital, and not the state, control the trade of goods and services.
The slave trade and plantation economy of the early colonial period in America were among the original manifestations of this economic paradigm, as the European propertied classes asserted their newfound power over dwindling tributary systems and the interim feudal arrangements were replaced with John Locke’s quasi-religious notions of private property, which would come to conquer Western economic theory for the next three hundred years.
Today, that paradigm has exhausted the moral justifications its proponents have relied upon to maintain its supremacy and the naked truth of capitalism’s rapaciousness is laid bare, once again, as wealth inequality skyrockets while millions sink into poverty and resource wars continue to ravage entire nations across the world.
Having squeezed every last drop of “value” from the earth, and with no more land to settle or markets to discover, capital’s approaching apotheosis finds it looking for a lifeline by creating a virtual copy of itself, where intellectual property supplants physical property and human biological and behavioral processes are recast as a grotesque form of human labor.
Efforts are now underway to “translate” the real world into a digital counterfeit that can provide financial markets with the figures and statistics it needs to execute the contracts of the incipient human capital markets – an insidious new form of capital assembled from our genetic code and other kinds of data that will form the basis of a financialized wonderland, enforced by blockchain technology and constantly monitored and updated through the burgeoning biosecurity state.
Led by the world’s most powerful hedge funds and transnational corporations, the so-called Great Reset amounts to little more than a campaign to turn humanity into datasets, which they can use to create more profits for themselves and their clients. (Raul Diego)
And, heck, all the flooded landscape, the desertification, the deforestation, all the cold homes in Germany with stacks of firewood, man. And, where is that global coordination, that working together spirit, that look at shared resources and the vast kingdom of animals that we all should be blessed with and bless ethos?
Here’s a thought experiment, about that pencil, you know the Number 2 lead pencil (not lead). It is written from a libertarian and let the human race just be super creative (sic) in inventing x, y and z tool, technology, any bit of fun consumer item. But read into the ingredients of that pencil. Check out in your minds all that embedded energy to get that Number 2 Pencil to the school house. The writer doesn’t do that, that is, look at embedded energy, but it is an interesting way to see where that simple tool comes from, resource-wise and human activity wise:
Does anyone wish to challenge my earlier assertion that no single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me?
Actually, millions of human beings have had a hand in my creation, no one of whom even knows more than a very few of the others. Now, you may say that I go too far in relating the picker of a coffee berry in far off Brazil and food growers elsewhere to my creation; that this is an extreme position. I shall stand by my claim. There isn’t a single person in all these millions, including the president of the pencil company, who contributes more than a tiny, infinitesimal bit of know-how. From the standpoint of know-how the only difference between the miner of graphite in Ceylon and the logger in Oregon is in the type of know-how. Neither the miner nor the logger can be dispensed with, any more than can the chemist at the factory or the worker in the oil field—paraffin being a by-product of petroleum.
Here is an astounding fact: Neither the worker in the oil field nor the chemist nor the digger of graphite or clay nor any who mans or makes the ships or trains or trucks nor the one who runs the machine that does the knurling on my bit of metal nor the president of the company performs his singular task because he wants me. Each one wants me less, perhaps, than does a child in the first grade. Indeed, there are some among this vast multitude who never saw a pencil nor would they know how to use one. Their motivation is other than me. Perhaps it is something like this: Each of these millions sees that he can thus exchange his tiny know-how for the goods and services he needs or wants. I may or may not be among these items.
Fascinating, really, in a hyper-libertarian way, coming from the voice of that pencil. It starts with that tree, a cedar of straight grain that grows in Northern California and Oregon. But as you read, he’s talking about all the mined and milled steel for the saws and the ships and all the oil pumped and refined to move the material. What the lacquer is made of and the graphite is really the “lead,” and the eraser, shoot not rubber. He looks at the pencil mill built with concrete and steel and wood. All the electricty used. But he also looks at all of this in an amazed way, in awe of the processes, all the disconnected workers, mining, milling, cooking, drilling, cutting, moving the various things to bring this pencil to fruition.
And that is the entire “supply chain thing,” that is, all the goods and services that go back and forth across oceans. Sure, China and Russia are going to rule the iceless Arctic with their already developed ice cutters and infrastructure. That new sea route will cut down on container ship miles by 5,000 miles at trip! Read Pepe Escobar and others looking at that northern world next step in the melting ice.
“‘This conjunction of Russia and China’s northern policies around the Polar Silk Road should come as no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to the close strategic friendship between both countries since the 2015 announcement of an alliance between the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union and Belt and Road Initiative. This northern extension of the Maritime Silk Road represents a powerful force to transform the last unexplored frontier on the Earth, converting the Arctic from a geopolitical zone of conflict towards a new paradigm of mutual cooperation and development.”
Putin gave a speech at a recent BRI forum stating’:
“the Great Eurasian Partnership and Belt and Road concepts are both rooted in the principles and values that everyone understands: the natural aspiration of nations to live in peace and harmony, benefit from free access to the latest scientific achievements and innovative development, while preserving their culture and unique spiritual identity. In other words, we are united by our strategic, long-term interests.”
“Weeks before this speech Russia unveiled a bold plan for Arctic development during the conference Arctic: Territory of Dialogue which has since grown in leaps and bounds. This bold plan ties to the “Great Eurasian Partnership”, not only extending roads, rail and new cities into the Far East, but also extending science and civilization into a terrain long thought totally inhospitable. One of the keystone projects driving this program involves the completion of the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC) launched as an Indian-Iranian-Russian program in 2002 and which has been given new life in the last several years.”
+–+
More here with Escobar and Danny Haihong,
Well, here, a silly fast-paced look at plankton:
Go back to Peter Ward, and the play notes I listed and boldfaced. He is a great educator, and most of his books are easily read by anyone, except politicians and billionaires. He talks about the beautiful green, wet and dark Puget Sound of old, pre-logging days. How the great trees went all the way to the sea. Big conifers. But the world was dark, light night even midday in the summer. The first and easiest trees to cut down, transform into timber, and ship north or south or west or east were along the coastlines.
And that cutting down of those vital forests gave rise to broad-leafed plants to fill the so-called niche. Decidious, maple and red alder varieties. Broad-leafed, dumping tanin-laced and acidic decaying leaves into the Puget Sounds edges. They lose their leafs in the fall, and those leafs end up in the coastal waters, and lo and behold, high acidity prevails, which has messed with the ecosystems, including sea grasses, vital to carbon sequestration, but more importantly, the hiding places and growing places for juvenile marine species. No more sea grasses, no more big fish and invertebrates.
Again, this is not hypersonic missile science or the science of information wars and satellite hacking in UkoNaziLand. Simple biology and water chemistry, most of which is not understood by so many hundreds of millions in the greatest country on earth. Take a look at what I bold faced from the Peter Ward interview. Nothing to shake a stick about. Nothing on the Israel-UK-USA-Ukraine-Nato-EU agenda.
Nero fiddling and financing the ZioLensky while the cities burn. While the lights go out on Broadway. Reset my ass.
It’s truly amazing that the capitalists see the end of the world — human species, I suppose — way before they can imagine the end of capitalism. You know, that perfect system of slavery then, slavery now, and even more draconian slavery for the future. That sort is not based on whips, 15 hours a day toiling, not run by the masters of the Anglo Saxon variety raping and starving. The new-new slavery is capitalism on a digital bender. Food, water, activities, housing (not a house, but housing in the very generic term such as tents or mini-sheds), where one can live, jobs, the like. All will be dictated, and you and I will own nothing!
If the mRNA vax dance has its way, more and more dead bodies, warped minds, sterilized wombs, dropping sperm counts, and zygotes from hell might end humanity, and, well, capitalism will live on in the metaverse, in the global computer. That old eugenics drama — corona bioweapons — but masked up with the Fauci’s and the Gates and those presidents and dictators following the jab jab lies will do it by death through 2 billion jabs.
It’s amazing the lies fed us, and amazing how incredibly stupid we are as a collective. As if this SARS-CoV2 wasn’t/isn’t a fix, isn’t a messed with and serialized and gain of function facilitated “virus.” As if all those true ways to stop viral loads building up in the mucous cavities, in the lungs, in the cells are suddenly treated like snake oil. Imagine that, all the naturopathy and preventative potients, all thrown out the window. How can you get your pudding if you don’t eat your media meat (propaganda)?
Daily, it is me meeting people who have zero idea about world history or about the USA, and I am not just talking about Ukraine and that part of the neighborhood. We are talking about our own neck of the woods, lands stolen by the white man, man. So much mind bleaching occurs in k12. And in higher education!
I hear people talking to me about the visitors here, the vacationers, who just have that entitled disease of myopia. “Yeah, I talk to my customers that not all is rosy here on the coast, that there are homeless people big time. They say, ‘What homeless people? I don’t see any.’ They say that while looking out the window at the bay where several men are hanging out smoking and just chilling. Homeless men. These tourists are looking right through them.”
That’s the issue, no, seeing right through or just not noticing what’s around us. Out of sight, well, this time, In Plain Sight, Out of Mind. What did the original people of Mexico see when those ships entered the tidal shore? Nothing? Because ships were not of their culture, their natural order of things.
(Why did Herman Cortez burn his ships when he invaded Mexico?)
Then, another friend in Vancouver, WA, with his Handy Man service, and business is booming, as in mold and mildew mitigation and tear outs, he’s struggling to pay the taxman, to get all his bills and receipts in order. He’ll never have good credit score (sic) to buy a home. You know, AmeriKa, giving missiles and bombs and guns to Ukraine with, well, you get it, no real accounting, receipts, etc. All those things on the dark web, black market, gone. So, my friend will have taxes to pay, and fines, double taxes, penalties, late fees to pay, and weathering admonishments, threats. He finds it difficult to get young men and women to sign on for $20 an hour for all the work he undertakes. So he resorts to hiring, well, some of those very same people mentioned above: the homeless.
Many are carless because of the fact they have had their driver’s licenses revoked for unpaid bills — child support, court fines, etc. There are almost 10 million in the USA with driver’s license revocation because of unpaid fines, or unpaid child support. Not because of driving under the influence of whatever.
Debt-related driving restrictions make everyday life impossible. Currently, more than half of U.S. states still suspend, revoke or refuse to renew driver’s licenses for unpaid traffic, toll, misdemeanor and felony fines and fees. The result: millions of people are struggling to survive with debt-related driving restrictions.
License suspensions are the primary way debt-related driving restrictions occur in the United States. However, many states restrict registrations, or other administrative automobile requirements, as a counterproductive means of coercing debt payments for unpaid parking, tolls and other court fines and fees. (Source)
Check out the site,
As I repeat incessantly — this is just one of a million things about capitalism that demonstrates the system is not for or about The People, We the People. This is just one of a million absurdities in our system. And there is always a gravy train for endless systems of oppression and bureaucracies and middle men and women. The entire systems of pain and double-pain in the USA is about debt, managing people’s pain, laying on shame and setting forth endless struggle to make it (pay for) in capitalism. So it makes sense in a sadistic way to take away the only viable thing — a car — for these people to get to work to pay these fines or child support.
We know the fines are highway robbery, from the point of origin, to the add-ons and the endless late fees and penalties and handling fees.
Best to listen to Michael Parenti to understand this ugly ugly system, that for many, will never die. Imagine, capitalism will never die! Over the human species dead body.
Here: “If value is to be extracted from the labour of the many, to go into the pockets of the few, this system has to be maintained. The conditions of hegemony must constantly be refortified. And that’s something that no one IBM or General Motors could do for itself… to put it simply the function of the capitalist state is to sustain the capitalist order. And it must consciously be doing that.” Michael John Parenti is a political scientist who was raised by an Italian-American working class family in the East Harlem neighborhood of New York City. He received an M.A. from Brown University and a Ph.D. in political science from Yale University.
Here, just the essence of it all, capitalism:
And then, my real profession, in the old days, was journalism. I’ve heard all of my life that journalists are not real, that all of it is yellow journalism, that even the earnest work of a young reporter in a small town is smeared with the Yellow in Yellow Journalism. Bullshit!
This is, of course, a lie, a broad brush stroke lie. Not that journalists are somehow immune from the reality of American Exceptionalism and the Lie after Lie of what this country is and was about. Yes, Mom, Flag and Apple Pie.
Yet, that is not so true, that regular ethical journalists want to lie or damage or invent fake news. When I was learning the craft of journalism, we had a code of ethics. We worked hard as college newspaper reporters and editors to get the news of the campus, publicizing some amazing students and programs and departments, and to get the bead on the city, in this case, Tucson. The neighborhood, the people, the police beat, all the unique things that newspapers can do to publicize the goings on. Yes, school boards and city councils and all the college, in this case, University of Arizona, things that make a university like this one a mini-town, we tried to cover fairly.
We were not after smear campaigns. We were not attempting to do hit pieces on people. We had a code of ethics. Really:
Preamble
Members of the Society of Professional Journalists believe that public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy. Ethical journalism strives to ensure the free exchange of information that is accurate, fair and thorough. An ethical journalist acts with integrity.
The Society declares these four principles as the foundation of ethical journalism and encourages their use in its practice by all people in all media.
Seek Truth and
Report It
Ethical journalism should be accurate and fair. Journalists should be honest and courageous in gathering, reporting and interpreting information.
“The SPJ Code of Ethics is a statement of abiding principles supported by explanations and position papers that address changing journalistic practices. It is not a set of rules, rather a guide that encourages all who engage in journalism to take responsibility for the information they provide, regardless of medium. The code should be read as a whole; individual principles should not be taken out of context. It is not, nor can it be under the First Amendment, legally enforceable.”
Now, I know of so many other professions with codes of ethics, but so many have few ethics, or the profession is based on unethical foundations. Even as new reporters, we understood power, that is, the powers that are, and that powers that shouldn’t be. The headlines and stories about malfeasance or wrong doing, those could literally kill people. We knew the value of sources, and in our small town journalism work — we worked on a lab paper in Tombstone, Arizona, of all places — we had a duty to the people in that town. Did we want to break stories? Of course. Did we want to uncover wrong doing, or some sensational story? Yep. But our goal was simple news reporting and news writing. We had so many beats, and each beat had it’s own culture — arts, music, sports, entertainment, city, state, police, business, etc. But as students who were paid through student association money and who did not have direct oversight from the journalism department; we took our jobs seriously. We went to conferences, we did internships, we met with all sorts of people to understand the needs and wants of the small town, the big town, etc. We had advertising, and we were a big part of the community’s lifeblood: where communities get their news and information.
We could break a story about the football coach’s unethical practice of pocketing unused travel (airline) vouchers, and we could see how much cost overruns the new engineering building was entailing. Each one of those controversial pieces we spent hours and weeks attempting to get right and not do unnecessary harm. We would report on interesting members of the community, on people who had unusual stories. The newspaper was a source of cultural connection. We strived for accuracy.
We highlighted authors, authors, orators, movers and shakers, community enterprises, members of the community who were unique.
We covered crime and punishment, codes and planning, and took many beads on the life of people, organizations and the community.
Yet, even back in 1977, we knew how some newspapers were bending too close to the leanings and yearnings of big business, or at the owners’s whims. We were concerned about newpapers dying, concerned about editorial decisions that hurt our code of ethics listed above. We believed in newspaper ombudsmen, and we always wanted to learn what other newspapers and what other parts of the country were doing to enhance the community.
Indeed, that was the goal of newspapers, and while everything is bastardized in capitalism and media, and while we knew the CIA infilitrated newspapers decades earlier, and we know that now, newspapers are in most cases, skeletons, and many cities and towns have no newspapers, we still took our roles seriously. We knew that on-line / WWW publications would eat at the soul of newsprint dailies and weeklies. We knew that once lively newspapers or magazines would get bought up by large and mid-sized media groups. Then decimated and sold.
In the end, we still wanted to know. We wanted fairness and accuracy in journalism. We did want to do the stories that few were doing.
Just listen to these three folk. It shows you the robust work of thinkers. In my other professions –education, planning and social work — we do have that level of scrutiny, and self-examination. But here, the journalists look really hard at themselves. I do not find this hard look into my other professions as robust and penetrating.
Virtually nobody trusts what they read any more. The United States ranks dead last among 46 nations surveyed in confidence in the press. Only 29% of Americans say they broadly believe what they read, see or hear in mainstream media. And more than three quarters of the public think that big outlets knowingly publish fake news.
The term “fake news” first came into common usage around the contentious 2016 election, where both the Trump and Clinton campaigns attempted to weaponize the term against their opponents. Clinton claimed that Trump was being buoyed by false information put out by Eastern European bloggers and shared on sites like Facebook, while Trump shot back at her, claiming the likes of Clinton-supporting networks CNN and MSNBC were themselves fake news.
But joining MintPress Senior Staff Writer Alan MacLeod today are two guests who know that fake news and false information have a long history in America. Dr. Nolan Higdon is an author and university lecturer of history and media studies at California State University East Bay. Meanwhile, Mickey Huff is professor of social science, history and journalism at Diablo Valley College in California and the director of the critical media literacy organization Project Censored.
But, now, with the Brave New World of up being down, Nazi being Jewish President, Lies as Truth, I am both disgusted and not surprised at how terrible the propaganda is and how lock step those who follow the lies of society and government have infected so-called traditional journalism. Yes, still, in the local rags, we get news, we get entertainment, but when it comes to the stories of a lifetime — Weapons of No Mass Destruction, World Trade Center 9/11, War for Oil, Cocaine for Contras, all of it — newspapers fail. Local newspapers do not have the guts to question everything.
That failure in journalism is tied to consumerism, capitalism, collective delusion, Stockholm Syndrome Writ Large, Collective Trauma, Agnotology, and the Comic Book Ideology of the common people and the leaders in the USA/UK/Klanda/EU.
The first casualty of capitalism is truth. Capitalism of course relies on deception, thieving, extirpation, extinction, survival of the fittest, divide and conquor, racism, classism, poisoning mind/body/soul/soil. So we lead back to the above, to Michael Parenti. Listen to him.
The young people of the world are not all going to hell in a hand-basket. Really. Amazing journalists blazing trails. This is just one most recent example of attacking truth, the messenger:
“Independent Donetsk-based journalist Alina Lipp of Germany speaks to Max Blumenthal about being prosecuted by the German state for violating new speech codes through her reporting in the breakaway Donetsk Republic. As the only German reporter on the ground in Donetsk, Lipp has exposed Ukrainian forces shelling civilians, attacking a maternity ward, mining harbors, and bombing a granary filled with corn for export. She faces three years in prison if she returns to her home country.”
