15 ways to stop destroying our world won’t be easy changes to make – but they have to be made.
We need to immediately stop the race to the edge of ecological abyss. There are indeed practical and viable alternatives to the way we live our lives as humans. The transition wont be easy, and most of the rich bastards are going to go to the wall- c’est la vie!
But we need to start now before large scale catastrophe forces us to stop this crazy way of interacting with the world we live in.
In order to reach the Paris Accord goals according to the Intergovernmental Panel, the world would need to see:
rapid and far-reaching” changes in energy systems (immediate end of fossil fuels),
land use (agricultural land replanted with trees),
city layouts and transportation (to reduce car use),
buildings (all retrofitted to renewable energy),
vast reduction or elimination of road and air travel, and
However much more is needed to save our world; including….
Education of the young (and older humans) about the vital importance of respecting and protecting all living things-an understanding that other species are not commodities for human use and are essential for our mutual survivability.
An understanding and agreement that technology will not save the world from the climate emergency or catastrophic species loss- natural living solutions are the only solution
The planting of indigenous trees and shrubs in every available green space
The banning of artificial pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers
The planting of billions of indigenous trees -replacing areas used for monoculture farming; particularly meat and dairy production
The pulling up of vast areas of concrete and tar and replacing it with perennial vegetation trees and shrubs
The end of all ‘growth’ economies- a return to no-growth- (an end to consumption for its own sake)
The encouragement of wildlife into urban areas
The banning of killing of all wildlife
The re-enlivening of buried urban rivers and streams
The end of non repairable goods
The compulsory education of all children in permaculture gardening
The banning of all non essential air traffic
The construction of efficient light-rail rail networks
The building of food and energy self-sufficiency in all communities
Even then, the cumulative impacts of 2000 years of global species loss, and 200 years of CO2 and other gas emissions into our atmosphere will not be ‘put right’ in a few hundred years…
Therefore the sooner we begin to implement the above processes and policies, the easier the transition will be, with less loss of human and other species lives.
The September 19th precision attacks on the oil processing facility at Abqaiq in Eastern Saudi Arabia have raised many questions for the Saudis and their allies in UAE, the United States and Israel. How did the attackers ( whether they be Houthi, Iranian or Saudi dissidents or a combination of any of those),manage to breach what should have a very well protected site from air borne attack.
The attacks should not have come as a surprise however. The Houthi “rebels’ in Yemen (against which the Saudis and their British, U.S. , Al Qaeda and UAE allies have been conducting a barbaric war of attrition for the past 4 years ) have both threatened and carried out increasingly ambitious attacks on Saudi infrastructure in the past year with drones and missiles to varying effect. (note the map below showing earlier Houthi drone attacks on the oil pipeline leading to Abqaiq.)
Recent news releases from the Houthi indicate major military successes against the Saudi mercenaries on the front line.; and the latest report of 500 Saudi mercenaries killed and 2000 captured in ongoing Houthi/Yemen Army raids into Saudi territory is outlined here.
So if by some absurd chance , what Western governments are saying is true; how did the Iranians fly drones and missiles at Abqaq from across the Persian Gulf directly in the face of large batteries of Saudi and American air defenses? The analysis by “Juliet Guy Oscar” clearly shows that Houthi manufactured Quds1 cruise missiles have both the capacity and range to have attacked Abqaiq and beyond.
For U.S. Secretary of State Pompeo to state that “the foreign minister of Iran is threatening all-out war and to fight to the last American,(and) we’re here to build out a coalition aimed at achieving peace and a peaceful resolution to this,” is of course pure nonsense and lies. America wants to make Iran once again a client state like the Saudis , Egypt or Jordan, which can bend to the expansionist whims of the Israelis.
While its very likely that the Houthis have been using and adapting Iranian missile and drone technology, the evidence suggests that the Yemen military, supported by the Houthis, have also been making their own or adapting military equipment salvaged from the Saudi/UAE conflict – with perhaps technological advice from Iran.
The Saudis, amusingly enough, cannot believe that Houthi “savages” could develop and deliver such weapons. ( the same kind of sad racist mistake that the Americans have continuously made against the Russians, Chinese, North Koreans and many other nations. (“If they have such weapons then they must have stolen the technology from us”.)
The Yemen ‘rebel’ commentary on the attacks is however interesting, noting that “various kinds of combat drones were used in the Second Deterrent Balance Operation, noting that they were launched from three different locations according to their flight endurance and designated targets. He underlined that the third generation of domestically-designed and -manufactured Qasef (Striker) combat drones, long-endurance Sammad-3 (Invincible-3) drones – which have an operational range of 1,500 kilometers to 1,700 kilometers and newly-developed drones equipped with jet engines.
Houthi drone
Each of the new drones can carry four precision-guided bombs with fissionable heads every time, and can monitor and hit their targets from several angles.“Other aircraft were also used so the main combat drones could hide in their shadow without being detected, and signal jamming devices effectively disabled the enemy’s air missile defense systems.”
Like the Iranians, the Houthi and the Yemen military are fighting for their survival against much better equipped and financed opponents. Opponents whose ruthlessness and commitment to war crimes on a grand scale is known to all.
This will not end well for all sides…but the writing is on th wall for the Saudi clan if Pepe Escobar’s analysis is anything to go by
We have often heard that it is in America’s “interests” to start this or that war, to “defend democracy and human rights” or some other envisioning of the United States as that Shining City on the Hill of freedom and light. However when we come to examine what particular Interests are at stake for the United States in these aggressions, we somehow fail to note that those interest are solely business interests- – and not just any businesses- but big business- large powerful corporations with tentacles in many countries whose financial interests may either be jeopardized or opportunities lost if this or that country is not subjugated once again by the U.S. military for the profit margins of United States’ businesses.
Pity the poor country that dares to not bend its knee to U.S. corporate interest…it will be sanctioned, ridiculed, its minority groups funded and trained to create instability, (or worse), and if that doesn’t succeed in bringing that recalcitrant country to the ‘negotiating’ table- then a little genocidal war might help.
As U.S Major-General Smedley Butler has often been quoted:
Supporting big business in any way the U.S. military can ( regardless of international conventions, human rights, human lives, human decency or any other ‘soft’ issue) is and always has been, therefore the complete and total sum of United States international relations- it has no other purpose.
“Foolish” and soft issues like the global emergency ( maybe more like global ‘catastrophe’?) are therefore a complete irrelevance. American exceptionalism is seen in its true form- red in tooth and claw as Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote about nature. No morality, no ethics, pure barbarism and pure profit.
It is small wonder that those poor American soldiers coming back from America’s pointless and endless wars of total barbarism, struggle to come to terms with their “moral injury” to the propaganda they have been force-fed from an early age, of the United States being a civilizing and enlightened country in a world of barbarism.
U.S. bases surrounding Iran
Peculiar to those pink-skinned Americans who front for big business in the military and in Washington, is a deeply entrenched racism of those who are “other” and darker skinned:- whether they be Plains Indians, Filipinos, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Iraqi’s, Libyans, Syrians- even the Slavic Russian and Serbian nations .. the list goes on and on and on….
It is time for the world to recognise the savagery and brutality of United States’ international relations. It is time to press for reparations for the environmental destruction, the war destruction, war crimes, loss of life, the torture and the murders that the United States has inflicted on the world in the fictitious name of “democracy and freedom” in the past 100 years. It is time to end this barbarism and stupidity.
The United States is indeed ‘exceptional’, but not quite in the way that their propagandists planned it. The American state is exceptional in it being a war machine; the government’s role is largely to fund and plan wars which will assist the American armament industry to sell more weapons at home abroad.
For most people who live in big cities ( an ever increasing proportion of the world’s population) the issue of species loss seems an irrelevance.
What does it matter if one more species is irretrievably lost for ever, when I have my house and car and my job in the city? Their lack of connection with the living world -other than other humans in their urbanised world, does not mean that they are not inextricably linked to the other species who live on this planet- they just cant see it. Their food is bought at the supermarket in vinyl halls – plastic packaged and often pre-prepared. They do not see, nor do they care , about where those former living things came from: -what lives they had, how they interconnected, how they communicated, their thoughts and feelings… The food they gather at the supermarket is simply a dead product- sublimely and most ridiculously illustrated by the little plastic stickers on the fruit we buy there.-the ultimate commodification of nature.
But the reality is that all that food- animal and vegetable arriving at the supermarket storehouse, was once living, was in fact directly connected to the rest of the living world in subtle
and often invisible ways to humans. That interconnection between species is the net that keeps us all alive-a net that is steadily being undone by humans through ignorance and greed.
As recent research over the past decade has noted, all species on the planet not only posses their own unique DNA, but also multiple strands (often in much larger volume) of DNA and micro
biomes from multiple other species, mainly microbes. Anything and everything, from the bacteria that inhabit our guts and allow us to digest food that would be otherwise indigestible to us, to the bacteria and microbes that come into contact with our skin and that we inhale. As Bordenstein noted in 2015- Animals and plants are no longer heralded as autonomous entities but rather as biomolecular networks composed of the host plus its associated microbes, i.e., “holobionts.”- from ‘Host Biology in Light of the Microbiome: Ten Principles of Holobionts and Hologenomes’
.)
The microbiome concept, that is, the collective communities of microorganisms, their genomes and interactions, was first used in the context of microorganisms that inhabit the human body. Since then, numerous studies have adopted this term to describe microbial communities associated with other mammals, insects, fish or plants. For humans, the microbiome significantly contributes to metabolism and provides functions that humans did not need to evolve on their own (Gill et al., 2006). Hence, the genes present in the human microbiome are considered the secondary genome…. In the human microbiome, the highest density of microbes is found in the gastrointestinal tract, where ‘they synthesize essential amino acids and vitamins, and process components of otherwise indigestible contributions to our diet…..-Cross-kingdom similarities in microbiome functions, Rodrigo Mendes & Jos M Raaijmakers (2015)
Thus, (the) nature-relatedness (a person’s level of connectedness with the natural world [58]), biodiversity of ecosystems in which humans reside or to which they are exposed, access to greenspace and/or habitation in rural environments can have beneficial effects on physical and mental wellbeing [59]…..(However the) erosion of environmental ecosystems is affecting biodiversity and microbial ecology. Together with declining nature-relatedness this is reducing human contact with immunomodulatory organisms found in natural environments – reflected in differences in skin microbes. This is increasingly being recognised as a risk factor for chronic inflammatory diseases……..There is now consistent evidence that environmental degradation, whether by climate change, invasive species or industrial activity, is linked to diminished human physical and mental health [110, 111].
The very existence of this skin-environment interface raises important questions about how erosion of global biodiversity, and declining contact with the natural environments is affecting skin ecosystems and human health [5]. Examining this question in the context of the epidemic rise of allergy and other inflammatory diseases is informative because allergy is one of the earliest manifestations of inflammation often first observed in the skin as disruptions in barrier function and atopic eczema. Furthermore, the declining microbial diversity that has been long linked to the rise in allergic disease also has important implications for other organ systems across the life course. – The skin microbiome: impact of modern environments on skin ecology, barrier integrity, and systemic immune programming: Susan L. Prescott et al (2017)
Or again….It is increasingly evident that inflammation is an important determinant of cognitive function and emotional behaviors that are dysregulated in stress-related psychiatric disorders, such as anxiety and affective disorders. Inflammatory responses to physical or psychological stressors are dependent on immunoregulation, which is indicated by a balanced expansion of effector T-cell populations and regulatory T cells. This balance is in part driven by microbial signals. …. With the global trend toward urbanization, humans are progressively spending more time in built environments, thereby, experiencing limited exposures to these immunoregulatory “old friends.” Here, we evaluate the implications of the global trend toward urbanization, and how this transition may affect human microbial exposures and human behavior.-The Microbiome of the Built Environment and Human Behavior: Implications for Emotional Health and Well-Being in Postmodern Western Societies. Stamper CE1 et al (2016)
The Implications….
All organisms are capable of genetic change in their own lifetimes through external microbiome absorption and adaptation ( an adaptation of the old Lamarckian evolution theory, with a Darwinian perspective)
The importance of being in regular physical contact with the rest of the living world has been vastly under-rated in its effect on health and mental wellbeing. An organism’s health and wellbeing depends on having a wide variety of external microbiomes to incorporate into its body and genetic structures on an ongoing basis.
Modern human society is dramatically reducing, not only human’s interchange with microbiomes, but also through poisonous agribusiness practice and destruction of habitats, is irretrievably destroying all species’ capacity to genetically adapt and change and to have optimum wellbeing.
The steadily decreasing number of species in the world ( largely by human ecocide) markedly increases all species’ capacity for survivability
Human beings’ obsession with creating cities, with ‘clean’ environments and the sealing over of the living world with concrete and tar, are rapidly reducing microbiome diversity on the planet.
For the human species to survive for further millenia it has to acknowledge its interdependence with the rest of the living world, and stop creating dead spaces on the planet. Celebrate all life!
While 16 year old Greta is a passionate and well-meaning advocate for change to our headlong dash to climate and species loss disaster; it is eminently clear that talk-fests by leading politicians and climatologists are definitely not going to make one damn bit of difference to our current polices rapidly destroying the planet.
The Paris Accord, hailed as some turning point in human behaviour to our planet, was simply a cruel facade and a hoax. Global emissions have increased, not declined since that accord was signed, and the environmental destruction of our living world has accelerated. We now elect clowns and idiots to run our countries. Those who participate in those climate talk-fests are those who are in league with those who knowingly destroy our world- the business men, the media men, the investors, the politicians- all locked in to making more money from the destruction of the thin veneer of life that used to make our little blue world a safe place for all its inhabitants.
The solutions are not to be found with those who have created this disaster. The solutions are simple ones which do not provide any profits or backhanders for those in power. In fact the solutions will help to demolish the lie of the ‘human progress’ model that has been sold to us for the past 200 years.
Planting billions of indigenous trees, ripping up the concrete and tar that seals the life out of our once living earth; growing plants of all kinds, not for profit or ‘development’ but to help restore our natural world, is our only saviour. We cannot ‘develop’ our way out of this tragedy, or find a new technological solution- that is the way of the con-man. We must return to nature- our natural heritage.
Native indigenous trees not only breathe in carbon dioxide , they provide a refuge for enormous numbers of living things, from the insects that feed from trees, the local fungi and bacteria that symbiotically live near the roots of the trees, the birds that live on the insects and the multiplicity of other organisms ( including humans) that thrive in proximity to the trees. Trees also have a huge capacity to provide shade in hot climates, to eliminate human made toxins from the air , and to increase the level of water vapour in the air bringing life-giving rain while protecting the soil beneath from erosion. Despite the ongoing hype and lies from the mass- killers of animals – we humans do not need to consume the vast amount of dead cows, pigs and sheep that we are led to believe keeps us healthy. Dramatically reducing the area of land used for grazing and replanting with the trees that once lived there, can indeed help save our planet.
The fishing industry empires, scouring the seas for the last surviving fish in our over-heated oceans are not required. Humans can and will have a much smaller footprint on our earth.
Do you need that air plane trip to Bali for your holiday? Do you need that new car? that non- repairable piece of technology ?
Each of us can plant a tree, can help save our world- now!
That racist old warmonger, Winston Churchill, has often been quoted as saying, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”…
Is it true now?- and was it ever true?
The capacity of taxpayer funded government institutions to manipulate public opinion has grown over the past 100 years as the theories of propaganda and the power to influence individuals’ beliefs with media, particularly electronic media, has grown exponentially.
Modern government bureaucracies have always constructed ‘stories’ for their publics about how the world is: who is our ‘enemy’ – what is ‘safe’ and what is ‘appropriate’ etc; and the major medium in the past has been via status quo newspapers ( the vast majority of modern newspaper and visual media publishers are active mouthpieces of state propaganda ( as in the U.K. with the BBC and The Guardian) perhaps because of the enormous costs of printing and distribution which requires substantial funding from status quo funders.
Solely online social media however; blogs and online newspapers require far less input and resources, and their legitimacy and media sources can be easily hidden. They are easily accessible at minimum cost to every member of society, and the public can be ‘fed’ the official line-subtly and invisibly through advertising and other online preference algorithms. The one small downside of the electronic medium world for governments however, is that ‘rogue’ alternative media outlets also have access to this cheap media distribution process (hence the desperate measures by ‘respectable’ news outlets and governments to promote the ‘fake news’ narrative and the need for major search engine algorithms to be tightly controlled by ‘respectable governments.
To foster and maintain the government narrative therefore requires more and more input to feed the official media line. As Craig Murray notes, in the U.K. there are very large amounts of tax payer money going into manipulating public opinion for the benefit of those currently in power. The 77th Brigade of the British Army, the Integrity Initiative, MI5 and MI6 and GCHQ all run major programmes of covert online propaganda. These information warriors operate on twitter, facebook, and in comments sections across the internet.
We can be sure that those U.K. manipulation agencies also exist everywhere across the world where there is sufficient taxpayer money, and sufficient need to maintain the status quo.
We could accurately call these individuals and agencies, the ‘Secret Thought Police’.
Perhaps, if those agencies had some access to a higher truth; a global need for a better life for all, saving the planet or simply creating a more equitable world, we might be able to possibly argue that those secret agencies are to our mutual benefit. But the reality is far from that. Those agencies are designed to entrench those in power with more power, and with more money, and to negate, satirize and destroy by whatever means available, alternative arguments, alternative strategies that might benefit and save ourselves and the planet. They are in consequence, administered by humans with limited understanding of their world, with vast prejudices and with limited ethics and morality.
With those huge resources of thought engineering at their disposal, ‘governments’ which across the world, have demonstrated their blindness and total incapacity to respond to the catastrophes of global heating and species loss facing us now, have instead steadfastly maintained their incestuous linkages with the very corporations and industries which have created the nightmare unfolding day by day in front of us.
When many Western governments, but especially the U.K. and U.S., have knowingly and actively collaborated with states, individuals and agencies over many years in many countries that create public fear through violence (the anatomy of terrorism), then we have a sick and debauched set of governments who have no moral right to govern. Certainly the current leaders of Britain and United States will, in the future, be key defendants in the dock for war crimes in Yemen and other countries.
The Colour revolutions of the past 10 years , (harnessing local discontents with resources from foreign governments and NGOs and businesses such as Soros) which have destabilized both authoritarian and socialist governments alike across the globe, have also, perhaps inadvertently , cast into question the authority of ‘democratic’ governments. Election results are more easily able to be questioned and invalidated in their eyes of their voting publics. Even those governments who have destabilised other foreign governments with such tools for many years; particularly the U.K. and the U.S. , now find themselves the victims of such anti-establishment processes.
We have the somewhat unique situation of the U.K.s Brexit poll being questioned by many in the U.K.; not because the voting was flawed, but simply because it was not the result that the powers that be , wanted. The U.K. may therefore hold further Brexit votes until they get the answer they want; a process which naturally underlines the key premises of the democratic system- that you vote for a party or issue at a certain moment in time to make longer term changes which you may or may not disagree with later.
The recent Hong Kong riots are an example of the complexity of the issues where governments are actively destabilised by internal groups. The fears that the proposed new extradition laws from semi-autonomous Hong Kong to mainland authoritarian China will create opportunities for Hong Kong dissidents to be controlled or imprisoned in China are likely correct. As a former British colony , ceded by the Qing dynasty of China to the British after the First Opium War, a brutal and ethically bankrupt war raged by the British to ensure a good supply of Chinese opium addicts, British Hong Kong was governed by a British Governor appointed by the British “Crown” and who had significant powers of authority up to 1997 . The current dissidents therefore hancor for a non existent time when there was in fact a democratic Hong Kong not controlled by ‘foreigners”. It is very likely that , in the current anti-Chinese climate being rapidly developed by U/S. intelligence agencies, that their British underlings are supporting the dissidents in Hong Kong to put further pressure on Communist China, along with the National Endowment for “Democracy”, an NGO front for the U.S. government destabilization agenda.
We are in desperate need of change. Our ‘democratic’ system is deeply flawed, easily manipulated by the powerful, and does not benefit in the longer term or even, in many cases, the short term , its constituent publics.
The Dutch investigation into the crash of Malaysian Airlines MH17 on 17th July 2014 in Eastern Ukraine where fighting between “Russian-backed” Eastern Ukrainian separatists and government forces was occurring , with the death of all 298 passengers and crew, has finally been released.
The crash followed the disappearance of another Malaysian Airlines plane flight 370 over the Indian ocean on 8th March 2014: again with all passengers and crew lost- a rather unusual coincidence .
To no-one’s surprise, the investigation has indicted 3 Russians and one Eastern Ukrainian, who will be unlikely to face the court because both countries’ extradition laws would forbid their extradition.
Several hours before the investigation results were announced , the “independent” investigative online journalist Bellingcat (according to Wikipedia “Half of (Bellingcat’s) funding comes from grants and donations, the other half from running workshops training people in the art of open-source investigations”, released their more comprehensive list of Russians supposedly involved in hauling a BUK ground to air launcher and targetting system across the Russian/Ukrainian border, shooting down the civilian jet and then hauling it back across into Russian territory. The reasons for going through this elaborate process to shoot down a civilian jet with Malaysian, Dutch and Australian nationals on-board are not explored….
However the OffGuardian notes that Bellingcat’s funding is largely “from the Atlantic Council and the National Endowment for Democracy’- institutions not known for their pro-Russian, let alone neutral stance on anything. Bellingcat is well-known for his very dubious statements and ‘proof” of direct Russian involvement in the Eastern Ukraine war, his curious MI6 related account of the Skripal poisonings (well-debunked by Craig Murray), and his accusations of Syrian (Russian supported) SAA involvement in gas attacks against civilians, recently debunked by leaked reports from the OPCW.
And, as The Saker notes;the list of these (four) “suspects” can be randomly expanded, up to the country’s top brass. After all, in order to transfer the Buk across the border, a whole interdepartmental operation is necessary. It is possible to take it only from a military unit. And before this – the (Russian) Ministry of Defence. It has to move to the border along roads and through settlements. This means the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which such a movement has to be coordinated with.
And lastly, protecting the border is a prerogative of the FSB. It is clear that any officer of any of the listed departments will not take part in such an operation without the approval of the highest administration.
Well, and the heads themselves will not involve themselves in such complex and dangerous work without having coordinated it first with the Supreme Commander – the president.
While such further accusations will suit many in the Russophobe West- they simply do not stack up as being possible, plausible or rational. For what possible reason would the Russian Government authorise the shooting down of a Malaysian civilian airliner over disputed Ukrainian territory ?
The Dutch investigators say the missile launcher crossed the border from the Kursk Oblast, Russia, into Eastern Ukraine, and returned after the aircraft had been brought down, a one way distance of approximately 130 kms. The BUK launcher would have travelled at a maximum speed of 65 km/hour.
Despite an all-Malaysian crew, and Malaysian passengers being the second largest group of nationals on the plane, and the owner of the airline , Malaysia (along with Russia) was denied access to the plane’s black boxes and other parts of the investigation, while the Ukraine, who may or may not have been the guilty party, was allowed free access and the right to deny the public access to any parts of the information collected by the investigative team. A curious state of affairs.
There is much dispute online about the weapon used to bring down the plane, but the current evidence does seem to suggest a Russian -made BUK type ground to air missile with a fragmentation head. The missile appears to have hit the plane primarily in the cockpit area, causing catastrophic immediate damage and immediate loss of flight recording – although curiously little external damage aft of the cabin until the plane hit the ground and exploded. Russia maintains the missile numbers found indicate that it was an early version of the BUK missile which was likely owned by Ukrainian government forces, but the investigation states that it was a recent BUK version only owned by the Russians.
With dear little Mike Pompeo immediately accusing Iran of attacking two Japanese-bound tankers in the Gulf of Oman with supposed “torpedoes” or limpet mines (note that limpet mines have limited effect above the waterline and would only punch a small hole in a large tanker, and that torpedoes have not been known to fly out of the water to hit targets above the waterline) – we reach new heights of lunacy within the United States foreign policy arena. The attack was precisely timed to ‘fit’ with Iran’s meeting with a Japanese foreign policy team attempting to defuse a confrontation between Iran and the U.S. -which cannot be defused. (Clear principle of mediation Mr Trump (oh wise and great mediator!) – where one party is attempting to threaten and bully another party into total submission- no agreement is possible until the bullying party desists. The other party will fight to defend itself unless physically defeated. Where the bullied is aware of the bully’s strengths and weaknesses , the bullied party can and will come up with alternative strategies that defeat the bully at their own game…they are after all, fighting for their survival and their lives, not for new profits in the weapons industry..
It is quite likely that one of John Bolton’s terrorist allies, like his good friends the brutal MEK , played a part in the tanker bombings after having not achieved the desired result a few weeks ago in a botched attack on other tankers in the Gulf that caused minimal damage . The fact that Pompeo, -ex CIA Director, ( it tells one a lot about ‘intelligence’ agencies when they have men with the extraordinarily limited intellectual capacities like Pompeo at their heads ) has immediately come out saying it was ‘Iran wot did it’, does somehow demonstrate the crudity and stupidity of American foreign policy, and its total reliance on violence and intimidation as its sole foreign policy tool.( with a little bit of bribery and corruption thrown in for good measure)
The United States has been forthright in saying that Iran does not behave like a ‘normal country’ . What they mean is that Iran does not accept the United States’ right to impose its will and ‘values ( such as they are) on other countries – Iran does not behave according to ‘accepted international norms’.
An article by Christopher Black in New Eastern Outlook article by notes that the (U.S.) ‘Indo-Pacific Strategy Report’, of June 1, 2019 includes the statement that, “We will not accept policies or actions that threaten or undermine the rules-based international order (my emphasis)– an order that benefits all nations. We are committed to defending and enhancing these shared values”.
Christopher Black notes that, ‘”What they mean by “rules based international order” is not the order of international law as accepted by the world governments in the United Nations Charter and other international agreements but a US imposed international order, – an order that does not yet exist except in the fantasies of these gangsters-but which they never stop trying to impose on the world, an order of militarism, fear, and tyranny for the rest of the world”.
The fact that the United Kingsom’s current government can immediately endorse the wild accusations of these crazed and foolish Americans about Iran being the cause of the tanker attacks , is not unsurprising. Britain since the First World War has promoted and supported the brutal Saud tribe in Arabia and its fanatical Wahhabist ( and anti-Shi-ite) teachings, and used to such great effect in Libya, Iraq Afghanistan and Syria in promoting sectarian division and violence to provide power and profit for both British and American business interests in the Middle East.
What is perhaps most disturbing in recent analyses of the rumours that the U.S. will bomb Iran’s non-existent nuclear bomb facilities -even by those opposed to the bombing-is that this is not going to end well for the United States. As with the previous multiple acts of murder against the Iranian people; (not least the attack by USS Vincennes on an Iranian civilian jumbo-jet which killed 290 people in 1988: -(just one of so many attacks the United States has never apologised for ; let only compensated the victims for)we see the complete absence of analyses of what terror, murder and destruction such attacks will inflict on Iran’s 80 million people -already under atack from years of United States’ vicious sanctions . As with almost every United States war; this is a rascist war- a war of agression against darker skinned peoples who clearly are no match for ‘exceptional’ (white) Americans like John Bolton and Mike Pompeo.
It’s time to acknowledge that the United States is simply a rogue state that needs to be controlled by others more mature and steady and with some modicum of intelligence. Hvaing pychopaths at the helm does not bode well for the survivability of the planet.
As Lord Acton noted: “There are two things which cannot be attacked in front: ignorance and narrow-mindedness. They can only be shaken by the simple development of the contrary qualities. They will not bear discussion”.
Having quoted that very useful piece of advice, it is also useful to note that ‘ignorance” and ‘narrow-mindedness’ are comparative things. We could also quote that epitome of evil and narrowmindedness Donald Rumsfield , ex-U.S. Secretary of Defence: Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.[1].
What we don’t know , we don’t know how to find, let alone know it when we see it!. Our human brains are re-wired from birth to only see those things that are acceptable and useful at a given moment in time. Those things that don’t fit our schema of the world are ‘unsee-able” . Combine that with homo sapiens’ endless proclivity for self-delusion, and we have billions of animals wandering this planet in a complex state of complete ignorance; all with the capacity to kill and ‘de-humanise’ many of their fellow human being and destroy countless other numbers of non-human species. The most ‘wonderful’ extreme example of that delusion is the majority of the population of the United States and its so-called ‘leaders”.
The endless cycle of myth-making in the United States starts with the hype that the United States was founded by their so-called “Founding Fathers’ to espouse justice and freedom from oppression. In reality it was founded to ensure that those who had money in the new American colony , retained and expanded that wealth. The genocide against the indigenous population of North America and the exploitation of black people, first as slaves and then as second class citizens, and the ongoing institutionalized process to keep poor people poor with the bare minimum of state support, puts the lie to those noble statements of the Founding Fathers.
Finian Cunnginham’s elegant summary of the United States’ brutal colonial policy makes it clear that the United States’ wealthy have never limited themselves to extracting profit from those less fortunate in their own populations, but has conducted a centuries’ long endeavour to extract wealth by war and terror from any country unable to defend itself from the United States’ predations.
We should note however that the United States is simply emulating its previous colonial oppressor , “Great” Britain, who in turn emulated their European neighbours’ brutal colonial drives, and which in turn , go back to the empires of Rome and beyond. Exploitation and the brutalising of those more vulnerable (and especially other species) appears to be one of those characteristics of mankind that is contagious. For the sake of the planet , we now have to eliminate that contagion.
However, as Lord Acton noted, confronting that ignorance and narrow-mindedness will not be the answer . To ensure the survival of this planet we must now work to build a world that makes it impossible for human beings to not only exploit each other- but to exploit other living entities . For living things to survive on this planet, we must all learn to co-exist.
It is now very fashionable to talk about George Orwell’s ‘1984’ promulgations from the Oceania government to its population that ‘War is peace / freedom is slavery [and] ignorance is strength.” And it would appear governments are increasingly actively engaging in this double -speak, whether using terms such as “fake news” to undermine the capacity of people to explore and understand the world, or simply through the relentless pumping out of extreme banal “news” to numb the population.
However it is important to note, that if we examine closely, we can see that all ideologies engage in this double-speak. Ideologies destroy our direct understanding of the world – our capacity as individual human beings to directly experience the joy and sanctity of other living things, of all of our glorious living world.
As United States ‘ gunboats’ sail into the Persian Gulf to confront a completely imaginary threat from Iran; as we witness UK politicians floundering to come up with some deal to exit or not exit the EU, and as we witness Vladimir Putin and his capitalist Russian entourage in total denial about climate change; as we see literally crazed American decision-makers like Marco Rubio, John Bolton and Mike Pompeo ( “We lied we cheated, we stole” – and we murder and torture and commit genocide)
move inexorably forward to a completely fictitious casi belli and lethal wars in Venezuela ( or anywhere else in the world that they have decided they don’t like), the world burns. (We are now at record-breaking levels of 415 carbon dioxide parts per million and accelerating) The combined and inter-related drivers of climate change and species loss are causing the world to move ever faster to environmental breakdown.
Perhaps having these very stupid psychopaths in positions of (human) power across the world is Gaia’s way of ensuring that humanity will no longer, in a few very short years, be able to continue to devastate the living world.
It is then more than a little disturbing to hear from greatest of powerful fools Donald Trump that:
Under my Administration, we are restoring @NASA to greatness and we are going back to the Moon, then Mars. I am updating my budget to include an additional $1.6 billion so that we can return to Space in a BIG WAY!
The United States has displayed a woeful and complete lack of moral and intellectual rectitude for over a century on this planet. Inflicting the United States on the rest of Universe to plunder, destroy and murder ( assuming there are other living entities ‘out there” ) is not exactly good for the rest of our Universe.
While it would appear that Putin has some modicum of intellect, ( but with a very narrow focus of Russian nationalism and capitalist economics, and no insight or long term view of the world’s need for survival), its very clear every American politician and policy maker with any influence in Washington has such a limited understanding of the world beyond America’s borders, and such a distorted understanding of their barbaric violent history, let alone an understanding of climate and species loss, as to render any rational decision-making impossible. The extraordinary ‘Russia-gate’ accusations and investigations have unsurprisingly not come up with any Russian collusion or electoral hacking despite the best efforts of the American corporate media and politicians . Pure logic would have shown that it would be impossible to sway a sufficient proportion of the largely uneducated American public with rational arguments. The last presidential election choice between a small boy with matches and a psychopath did not leave the Russians with much room to maneuver!
And in China, under General Secretary Xi Jinping, the Belt and Road initiative is well on its way to vastly increasing consumerism across Eurasia and its resultant environmental depredations, and further despoliation of the remaining few natural environments in Laos, Burma and beyond with railways, roads, dams and the other usual marks of human “progress” .
It would thus be very helpful if a higher power could lock away those in Washington and their ‘Defence’ department, along with a few of those somewhat less malignant cancers on the planet, despoiling our planet for their own safety and the safety of all other living things on this planet, for the rest of their lives.
The world has no leadership of anyone with a modicum of intellectual or moral rigor. The human race is being inexorably ‘lead’ by incompetent fools towards disaster. We have to turn away from pushing the living world to catastrophe. And make no mistake; a superficial blaming of capitalism for the world’s woes is not enough. Our depredations of the environment go back far further than the 19th century Industrial Revolution (although the damage has been greatly exacerbated by that revolution) .
Richard Attenborough ably delineated the massive damage to the Mediterranean world by Roman and other ‘civilizations” in destroying the natural forests of the region, and changing the climate of the Mediterranean world . Its also likely that pre-Roman civilizations are also largely responsible for the almost total loss of forests and habitat in North Africa. We not only have to remove capitalism as a driver for “progress’ – we also have to instill in every human being an understanding that we cannot survive without our fellow species- that all life is sacred.- and that human “progress” is a self-absorbed, self-perpetuating, myth. All human change has to be balanced against the inevitable loss of species and habitat to other species- and we can no longer afford that species loss
As George Monbiot notes: A system based on perpetual growth cannot function without peripheries and externalities. There must always be an extraction zone, from which materials are taken without full payment, and a disposal zone, where costs are dumped in the form of waste and pollution. As the scale of economic activity increases, until capitalism affects everything from the atmosphere to the deep ocean floor, the entire planet becomes a sacrifice zone: we all inhabit the periphery of the profit-making machine.
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