Category: Human Rights

The Striking Stupidity of Western Leaders

15/4/24

I am writing this blog post the day after Iran’s retaliatory attack on Israel after Israel’s missile attack on the Iranian legation in Damascus which killed several high-ranking IRGC officers. It is worth noting that one of rationales given by Iran for its subsequent attack on Israel was the fact that-despite the UK, France and the US knowing full well that Israel’s Damascus missile attack was a blatant and unique (at that point) breach of both the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, they refused to endorse a UN Security Council resolution condemning the attacks. By doing so, the US, UK and France have acknowledged that they and their Israeli proxy do not choose to abide by the international rule of law or human decency.

While Israel and the West claims that most Iranian drones and missiles were shot down and that there was minimal damage; there are other reports from Iran, Hezbollah and military analysts that there was significant damage to two Israeli airforce bases and a command post in the Golan Heights– all of those Israeli military sites had been used in the Israeli Damascus attack.

Given that there appear to be no casualties from the Iranian attack, it would seem that Iran has taken some care to avoid deaths-in contrast to current and historical Israeli genocidal actions in Palestine and, to a lesser degree, Lebanon.

There are also unverified reports that Iran notified the US of its intentions before the attacks, which then allowed the US , the UK and the Jordanian Army to shoot down many of the Iranian drones before they reached Israel. However there are strong indications that Iranian high velocity/hypersonic missiles did get through and hit the 3 Israeli bases.

Washington reports that President Biden persuaded the Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu not to launch a further reprisal attack on Iran despite Netanyahu’s earleir threats to do so. That’s a possible reason for the current uncharacteristic restraint from Israel, but in my view the more likely reason is that Israel’s military advised Netanyahu that a further attack on Iran would be suicidal, given Iran’s capacity to break through Israel’s much vaunted ‘Iron Dome” anti missile shield.

In addition,Washington on both the Republican and Democrat wings, have been itching to attack Iran ever since the Iranian revolution in 1979 which threw out the US and UK intelligence agencies supporting the brutal Shah’s Savak secret police, invaded the US embassy in Iran and nationalised the Iranian oil industry. This most recent Iranian attack comes after Iran’s previous attack on America’s illegal military bases in Iraq in response to President Trump’s decision to murder General Solomeini, Iran’s chief commander coordinating the destruction of ISIS in Iraq and Syria. That previous precisely targetted Iranian attack- despite again giving the US fore-warning, resulted in some considerable destruction and injuries at several American air force bases in Iraq.

Washington is thus now well aware that Iran can and will respond to further aggression from the US or Israel. The US’s multiple military bases in the Middle East are highly vulnerable to Iranian missile attacks, as are its navy and its commercial shipping in the Gulf of Iran. Sky-rocketing oil prices caused by blazing oil tankers in the Gulf would not improve Joe Biden’s chances of re-election for one thing!

So, predictably the West will further sanction Iran for responding to Israel’s major breach of international conventions when it bombed Iran’s Damascus embassy.

All of this action comes on the back of 6 months of the most depraved genocidal attacks on the Palestinian population in Gaza by the Israeli ‘Defence’ Force. The accuracy of that genocidal description has been confirmed by both the International Court of Justice and the UN, despite the denials from Israel’s Western allies, who continue to pretend that Israel’s genocide is a war against terrorism- there is however too much money at stake for the West to back down from their collusion in genocide now. President Biden alone gets enormous ($5.2 million over 34 years) money personally from the Jewish American agency AIPAC, and most of Congress is likewise in the pocket of AIPAC.

And the EU will of course not sanction or condemn Israel for its ongoing murderous savagery in Gaza.

Western media (and particularly my own New Zealand media) works hand in glove to desperately support the illusion of rectitude by America and its allies and reject their complicity in Israel’s genocide . We cannot be informed about the Nakba of 1948 for instance, the international implications of destroying another country’s Embassy, and we are never admitted into the mystery as to how Gazans are somehow dying of starvation- (what could be causing that we wonder?), or why there are many thousands of Palestinian brutalised hostages in Israeli ‘jails’ who might be exchanged for Israeli hostages?

We are not to learn how really depraved and corrupt our Western politicians are..

In Britain there are clear indications that the Jewish lobby funnels huge amounts of money into both the Tory and Labour parties (as Craig Murray notes 40% of Labour’s shadow cabinet, at least, are financed by the zionist lobby)as well as what they bizarrely call the ‘House of Lords’ to ensure both parties unanimously support Israeli mass murder in Palestine, despite their government lawyers acknowledgment of that genocide. Ironically Keir Starmer, the current Labour leader who is likely to sweep to power in the next UK general election, despite his incompetence and corruption, was once a human rights lawyer, so is knowingly complicit in this murder. And let’s not forget their dear ex prime minister Boris Bojo Johnson, whose sabotage of a Ukraine/Russia peace deal in 2022 has now resulted in his having the blood of over 400,000 Ukrainian men on his hands and his non- existent conscience.

I am ever hopeful as the world moves away from this brutal Western ‘rule based order’ to a multipolar world, that these corrupt stooges in the West will be committed to the International Court of Justice and spend the rest of their lives behind bars. It remains a mystery to me how these Western ‘leaders’ can face the world (and the mirror), knowing they have no integrity, no honesty and no compassion. If it were not for their savagery, I would pity them.

And corruption further drives our environmental destruction- government subsidies for oil companies to produce more oil to produce more global heating from CO2 now total more 7 trillion dollars in 2023. Why would politicans do that, knowing full well that global CO2 levels have already passed the 1.5C degree maximum the world agreed on only a few years ago? Follow the money…’There are no pockets in a shroud’ as my grandma used to say…

Critical thinking is clearly not a strong point for a Western ( or any other)politician . The amazing level of simple blind prejudice of Russia for instance allowed the analysts and leaders of the West to assume (contrary to the actual pre-existing evidence) that Russia would collapse under the West’s sanctions , that the ‘brutal dictator Putin’ would fall and be replaced by someone eager to please the West, while Russia would be defeated in Ukraine because NATO’s Western weapons were so much better than Russian ones and their Western military geniuses so much smarter than Russians!

So it was quite ok to fund train and support neonazis and other nationalist crazies in Kiev who believed they were descended from the Nordic master race, whilst the inferior ‘asiatic’ Russian hordes only had outside toilets and stole washing machine chips for their weapons!

Even now the West simply can’t seem to get it into their heads that they are on the wrong side of history and the wrong side of humanity. The Global South wants no more of the West’s brutal exploitation and colonialism and flat-out lies. And for some strange reason the Global South wants a liveable world!

The evidence is unequivocal, our so-called civilisational ‘progress’ has been made on the backs of environmental destruction and ecocide. Politicians across the globe have consistently refused to acknowledge the real costs of energy consumption and human ‘development’ on our planet and ourselves. The charade of the COP meetings fools no-one

Those devastating costs are only now being made manifest and will continue to do so at an accelerating rate for the next 1000 years or more.

But hey!- whose counting?

Postscript

Israel supposedly DID send a few Sparrow small air to ground missiles into Iran in response, and their terrorist proxies in Iran, the MEK, supposedly also sent a few toy quadrocopter drones of Isfahan– so I kind of got my analysis wrong- but not really!

As a sidenote: ‘In 2017, the year before John Bolton became President Trump’s National Security Adviser, Bolton addressed members of the MEK and said that they would celebrate in Tehran before 2019.’-wikipedia

New Zealand Supports Gazans to Die Faster

The New Zealand government , unsurprisingly, has, along with 11 other Western countries, decided to withhold funding to UNRWA because of allegations by the Israeli apartheid regime in Tel Aviv that 12 of its thousands of staff in Gaza and the West Bank had been involved in the October 7th attack by Hamas on Israelis.

As Amnesty International makes exceptionally clear-‘At a time when Israel, the occupying power, continues to flagrantly violate its obligations vis-à-vis Palestinian refugees in Gaza and the rest of the Occupied Palestinian Territories, UNRWA has long served as a sole lifeline, offering indispensable humanitarian aid, education and shelter. The agency also provides desperately needed aid for millions of other Palestinian refugees living in neighbouring Arab countries.”

As is made clear in the video below of an Israeli Knesset representative calling for the destruction of UNRWA several months ago-the elimination of aid to Gazans has long been a strategic goal of Israel as it continues to demolish and kill everything in its path in Gaza.

Please note that Noga Orbel’s statements are not the ravings of a lone psychopath, they are what passes for normal and acceptable in Israel’s parliament.

The United States, United Kingdom , Germany, France, Japan, Switzerland, Canada, Netherlands, Italy, Australia and Finland –and now New Zealand have all agreed that, despite the fact that they know Israel has been consistently lying for its 75 years of existence, to justify its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, that they should ‘suspend’ funding to the UNRWA which has been the literally sole lifeline of food and water to Gazans trapped in Gazan while Israel bombards them into oblivion and blockades and destroys all essential services to Gazans.

What additionally needs to be said about the pyschopaths coordinating this genocide?

What these 12 ‘white’ countries (Japan is an honorary obedient white country in their eyes) are doing is directly aiding and abetting the psychopaths in Tel Aviv, in the mass murder of Palestinians. Without UNRWA aid to Gazans, many many more Palestinians will die.

The Zionist’s bizarre ideology insists that only Jewish people can live in the land of Palestine, and anyone else who has lived there who is not Jewish must be removed one way or another- through murder, imprisonment in Israeli jails or the open air concetration camps of the West Bank and Gaza , or expelled to refugee camps in another country.

This 75 years old strategy, begun in 1948 by Israel’s military with the Nakba (the Palestinian ‘Catastrophe’), is apparently all kosher and ok with those 12 white countries.

That 2 million Gazans will now either starve to death, die by disease from polluted water, freeze to death from lack of shelter or lack of health services destroyed by Israel, is of course of no concern to these ‘civilised’ countries.

Purely coincidentally of course, the Israeli allegations and the very prompt response from Western nations to halt aid, comes just days after the interim ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) which (despite the subsequent denials of Israel, its Zionist supporters and many of these same white nations) established a prima facie case of genocide by Israel against Gazans.

The so fondly quoted US “rule based international order”(which Scott Burchell  has aptly described as ” Washington’s confected alternative to international law, the so-called “rules-based international order”, is now exposed as nothing more than a hypocritical protection racket in free fall’.) and the western governments and their politicians and bureaucrats who so slavishly support it, has now been brutally exposed for what it is – the ghoulish face of racist psychopaths perfectly content to let millions die, in that so honorable cause of propping up their careers and profits.

Postscript

https://www.1news.co.nz/2024/02/02/nz-eyes-aukus-pillar-two-what-is-it-and-how-could-it-impact-us/

One might have thought that NZ politicians were not quite so stupid as their Aussie colleagues in signing up to the U.S. inspired AUKUS protection racket-confronting non-existent threats from Russia & China & wasting millions in taxpayers money.

Perhaps they might have been better to consult with the new Argentinian president’s dead dog?

____________________________

Links

Parliament debates NZDF Red Sea deployment | RNZ News

https://www.indcatholicnews.com/news/49030

Has International Law Survived, or Has the Western Political Class Killed It?

https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/israels-allies-accelerate-genocide-freezing-unrwa-funds

The Western club- with its own morals, rules and rewards

https://amnesty.org.nz/reverse-cruel-decision-to-withdraw-unrwa-funding

Gaza 2023 -Wikimedia
Gaza 2023 -Wikimedia
Gaza 2023 -Wikimedia
Gaza 2023 -Wikimedia
Gaza 2023 -Wikimedia
Gaza 2023 -Wikimedia
Gaza 2023 -Wikimedia

Fmr. UNRWA Spox Refutes Israeli Smears (usefulidiotspodcast.com)

New Zealand Aligns itself with Genocide

23/01/23

New Zealand’s new Coalition government has, as of 23rd January 2023, formally agreed to support Israel’s genocide in Palestine by agreeing (at US request) to provide a small military force to support the American ‘coalition” to bombard Yemen.

The New Zealand prime minister Christopher Luxon, has committed outrageous lies to say there is no connection between the Gaza terror and the actions of Ansarallah (Houthi). Ansarallah has made it abundantly clear that the reason it has been attacking shipping heading to Israel is to try and force Israel to agree to a ceasefire in Gaza.

Mr Luxon is self-evidently lying through his teeth in saying there is no connection between the Red Sea attacks by Ansarallah and Gaza. Unsurprisingly, our ‘great’ New Zealand journalists at the news conference where Luxon was interviewed on the Yemen announcement, blindly accepted these lies without a question.

The UK and US in their bombing campaign in Yemen are simply continuing the genocide that their previous Saudi proxy had waged in Yemen for 9 years from 2014, using American and UK weapons, American and UK military instructors and guidance systems, and in all likelihood, “retired” British and American pilots to bomb one of the poorest countries in the world.

New Zealand’s conservative National Party which Chris Luxon leads, has a long history of sucking up to every US war of atrocity- from Korea, (shelling North Korean fishing villages from our warships) Vietnam (sustained mortar fire into Vietnamese villages), Iraq( hiding in their military camp in Basra) , Afghanistan (supporting the US and Australians to murder and torture Afghans) to its proxy war in Ukraine ( providing logistics to Ukrainian neonazis to shell Donetsk City civilians with cluster munitions) ; but all tiny amounts of military support  intended to bolster the U.S.’s ‘legitimacy’ in fighting these wars on the world stage.

However, the United States no longer has the credibility or respect of the Global South or indeed much of the world; particularly because of its unconditional support for Israel’s genocidal savagery in Gaza.

As Caitlin Johnstone notes:

We live in a dystopian world where it’s completely normalized to subvert human interests to commercial interests, to toss tens of thousands of lives into the incinerator for wealth and convenience. Where war profiteers rake in vast fortunes for selling instruments of mass murder to genocidal governments, and where the most powerful empire in history declares a war to defend shipping containers at the cost of human life.

Don’t ever let these sick freaks convince you that this is normal.

The National Party, along with its right wing allies; New Zealand First and ACT, are stuck in a time warp where the “civilised’ white man rules the world, and might is right.

New Zealand’s credibility globally has just sunk to a new low.

_________________________-

Links

The Biden Administration’s Absurd Justification For Its Yemen War

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2024/01/hoping-that-china-will-help-with-yemen-is-delusional-bullshit.html#more

Humans’ ‘Intelligence’

I was reminded of human beings’ selective cognition by a wonderful recent quote from Patrick Lawrence: ‘The core purpose of ideology is to preclude all need of thinking of any kind’.

As Patrick succinctly points out- frameworks for thinking necessarily limit what we can see and understand- what is outside the framework is often invisible, and unknown to us, or simply incomprehensible or dangerous.

We are of course all limited by pre-determined reference points in our attempt to understand how the world works. The subtle and not so subtle messages we acquire by osmosis for those who care for us (or don’t) in our early formative years. There are a multitude of hypotheses about how that works- from Freud to Piaget to Vygotsky to Stephen Krashen.

Suffice to say that who we become and how we perceive the world is largely determined by our environment, and that environment is, in our early years at least, predetermined by others and random events that impact us. But even those ‘random events’ will be framed in our consciousness by what we have experienced before. One person’s experience and response to an event will often be entirely different to anothers..

And while our childhood provides the strongest framework for perception which may last our lifetime, we are constantly being impacted by new experiences which may subtly, or not so subtly, impact that framework; the experience of trauma for instance can profoundly rewire that mental framework.

And as that wired framework becomes more solid and impermeable to new experience, the lifelong construction of our egos begins. New experiences begin to predominantly simply validate our previous experience and mental framework, rather than providing new insights on the world and ourselves; we become progressively ‘locked-in’ to being ‘this particular person’- or rather this particular ego construction. Validation and inflation of the ego becomes the predominant ‘mind-set’ for many human beings for the remainder of their lives. In a way, our egos take up the brain space that might have been left for inspiration and insight!

And in addition, (going back to Patrick Lancaster’s point), we might choose one or other ideology, or fixed mindset, to further validate that sense of who we ‘think’ we are, and which group of humans we believe we belong to.

Taking all that into account, we might guess that those humans who desire to becomes ‘leaders’ of a particular section of the human race; their predominant driving force is not the furtherance of the good of that group they wish to lead – but the furtherance of their own egos. Once their egos are partially satisfied with that power that leadership endows, there is only one way forward; more power and a larger inflated ego!

And, as we have just stated, the bigger the ego,the smaller resultant brain power there is available to respond to events in innovative and open ways; the cliched, the prejudiced, the racist, or the violent response, is what comes first and easiest.

As 2024 begins to unfold in a multitude of often violent tumultuous ways, it is becoming abundantly clear that our current global leaders are definitively, not up to the job. Whether it be the weather balloon sized egos of Trudeau or Macron, the ruthless egos of Putin or Xi Jinping, or the demented ego of Joe Biden determined to bring the world down around his ears as his dementia unfolds. And let us not forget the pyschopaths like Israel’s Netanyahu, or the excessive intellectual limitations of Germany’s Olaf Sholtz or Britain’s Rishi Sunak!

And lets not go anywhere near Ukrainian comedians who become politicians!

With potential emergencies like global wars initiated in Ukraine or Taiwan, and the very real mammoth global disaster that is global warming and bio-diversity loss, the world desperately needs leaders who can put aside their egos, who can bring people together with really innovative ideas, and who then have the courage to make those ideas happen, for a sustainable and more peaceful world!

What global structure do we need to make that leadership pool happen?

Welcome to 2024! 

The Immorality of Western Politicians

On 7th October , the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur war, Hamas, a militant group in Gaza , the home to three quarters of a million Palestinians imprisoned behind concrete and wire fences by Israel since 1967, launched a surprise attack against Israelis.

Moon of Alabama talks about this new Hamas raid (doomed to failure against overwhelming military odds) as a retaliation against Israel’s recent military support for Israeli settler thug’s invasion of the Muslim Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.

In reality, this is one more desperate attempt by Palestinians to reassert their legitimate rights as free Palestinians, rather than prisoners of the Israeli apartheid regime – which many have described as slow motion genocide, since the 1948 Nakba (The Catastrophe) when Israeli soldiers, with the full support of the US, UK and many other Western countries, killed thousands of Palestinians and brutally forced many hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes into refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria.

247 villages in Southern Palestine were ethnically cleansed by Israeli forces in 1948. The refugees from those villages were then forced into a concentration camp that came to be known as the Gaza strip.

And while any responsible government should deplore any violence by any party in another part of the world; the response from Western governments, including my own New Zealand government, has been to condemn Hamas’ violence, without in any way acknowledging that the causes for this violence are the direct result of the barbaric actions of multiple Israeli governments since 1948. A long-standing pattern of ‘legalised’ (by Israeli courts) sustained violence against Palestinians for their crime of owning land that Israeli settlers wanted to acquire at no cost.

Let us not pretend that Western politicians are not aware of these barbaric crimes by the Israeli state- crimes which continue to this day, and every day, and yet somehow, year on year, we do not hear condemnation of these crimes by the Israeli state and the settler thugs they support. Instead we hear that Israel is a key partner of the US, the UK and the EU in helping conducting the West’s business of extortion of Arab and Iranian assets in the Middle East.

And for many years the United States purported to act as an ‘honest broker” between the Israeli state and Palestinians; pretending that a Palestinian state was still a viable option, while all the while providing unlimited military and other resources to the Israeli regime to continue it expansionist agenda in Lebanon and Syria, and almost nothing to the West Bank and Gaza enclaves.

This is one moment in this decades’ long war against Palestinians where Western countries could really do the honourable thing, and strongly pressure Israel to ensure it complies with international law by tearing down the walls containing Palestinians in their tiny prison encampments, grants them full rights as Israeli citizens, allows the right of return for all Palestinians since 1948 and fully compensates Palestinians for the theft of their lands.

Do we in fact have any Western politicians with any honour?

____________________

Postscript

As Jonathan Cook so lucidly outlines ,the West’s enthusiastic swooning over Israel’s ‘retaliation’ is sick-making; and who gives a flying f*** that Israel’s much vaunted ‘intelligence” (read ‘Terrorist’) services didn’t have advanced warning of Hamas’s attack? How about some long term justice for the Palestinian people (after 75 years of Western enthusiastic support for Israeli injustice). As Jonathan says; ‘This moment rips off the mask and lays bare the undisguised racism that masquerades as moral concern in western capitals’.

_____________________________

Links

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/10/palestine-strikes-back.html#more

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Palestinian_expulsion_and_flight

Remembering the Nakba

https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/gaza-israel-west-hypocrisy-jailbreak-stomach-turning

https://kevinbarrett.substack.com/p/gazans-break-out-of-worlds-biggest?publication_id=314817&post_id=137770975&isFreemail=true&r=5hf4x

– IMEMC News International Middle East Media Center

https://richardfalk.org/

PCHR: “Israeli Human Rights Violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (Weekly Update | September 14-20, 2023)” | – IMEMC News

Mansour: Israel’s ‘License to Kill’
Chris Hedges: Palestinians Speak Israel’s Language

Media in an Unstable World

The world for humans continues to become more uncertain and more unstable; although you would largely not know that from our mainstream media. Climate Change is a little problem but we are working on it ,they say. Lets just ignore that we nowhere near achieving any of our much vaunted global targets of containing, let alone reducing, Co2 emissions- we are therefore definitely heading for global climate disasters in less than a decade.

Catastrophes like the recent flood devastation in Dera in Libya are third world issues, not our problem (and absolutely nothing to do with the avaricious Western world’s destruction of Gadaffi’s prosperous Libya (and his brutal death with a bayonet up his anus by Western supported jihadists, which US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton subsequently delightedly cackled about).

We are witness to an existential war in Ukraine, where, we are told, Ukraine will inevitable triumph against Putin and the evil Russians, but where in fact the West continues to coerce the Ukrainian military into sending thousands and thousands of its troops into slaughter against overwhelming superiority of Russian arms (Russian total air superiority, vast mine fields and overwhelming artillery capacity) .

And once independent academic analysts like Robert Patman in New Zealand along with the rest of the West, now regurgitate the nonsense of China being a threat to the West (and to New Zealand) and thus the appropriateness and necessity of the West continuing its brutal and sadistic “rule based international order” to confront both Russia and China.

Strangely too we hear very little mention in Western mainstream media of the drumbeat of a new multi-polar world. A world where the West can no longer dictate the economic terms through violence, war and blackmail of the South. Perhaps the images of African Sahel countries finally booting out their French colonial occupation forces raises some eyebrows in countries other than France, but there appears little recognition that this anti -Western movement is gaining steam across the South.

And strangely we how somehow not informed by mainstream media that the $6 billion that the US government has now so generously released to suppliers of essential goods to the Iranian population for the release of five Americans held by Iran for spying, was in fact Iranian state money stolen by the United States with their unilateral illegal sanctions against Iran, because of Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons development.

Or perhaps you missed the very quiet admission by the US’s General Milley recently that the much hyped Chinese ‘spy’ balloons that drifted over the United States in February 2023 actually didn’t have any spy gear installed on them at all.

But hey, who needs facts when you need to inflame good white folks against the evil Russians,Chinese and Iranians ( let alone the North Koreans that the US committed 3 years of brutal genocide against in the Korean War).

And let’s just forget about climate change, what is more important than ensuring our global economy and consumerism keeps expanding?- right to the very end…

_________________________

Links

Climate Collapse – The Grim Silence Of Our Leaders
New Zealand’s priority is helping defeat Russia in Ukraine
Why the media aren’t telling the whole story of Libya’s floods
Why the media aren’t telling the whole story of Libya’s floods

How Americans released in swap deal engaged in espionage activities in Iran (presstv.ir)

A Saner New World

As the world heads into an unknown climate world, we need to be planning for a different future than the globalized one we imagined we would continue to live in.

In my little country of New Zealand, tucked away deep in the South Pacific ocean, rapidly warming surrounding oceans are creating a new climate world for us of sudden intense rainfall with increasingly damaging floods and higher temperatures.

More intense and more frequent weather events are allowing us the opportunity to see how completely dependent the living world is, including us humans, on the weather.

Where once we could rely on relatively stable weather patterns, the reality has dawned on us that our weather will become increasingly more unstable, intense, erratic and more damaging; not just for a few years, but for many many centuries to come.

But nowhere do we seem to be planning for this inevitable future. A globalised world of long supply chains of ocean going behemoths, cargo jets and steel rails are becoming rapidly increasingly vulnerable to weather events and ever-increasing insurer’s costs. (even if we ignore the impact of the massive CO2 injections to the atmosphere those long supply lines make!)

We must therefore rapidly plan for vastly localised food, energy and other necessity production and distribution; with short supply lines which are less impacted by climate extremes.

The result of localised production will be a smaller range of products, often less sophisticated, an immense reduction in exports to far-flung places which will be offset by localised production employment, cheaper local food and products produced on a smaller scale which require far less local resources and exploitation of the environment, and ultimately a political realisation that each economic /state entity can be largely independent of its bigger and more powerful neighbours and just needs to simply be accountable to its local population.

This does not mean a return to feudal times or the loss of many of the gains in communication and shared knowledge humans have acquired in the past 200 years. But it does mean an end to the big international corporations whose only motivation for existence is greed rather than also serving their local populations.

It also means a gradual decline in consumerism and international tourism as populations re-learn to connect to their local environments and draw strength and joy from their local communities without further destroying their own natural environments.

In the case of building a sustainable world for humans other species- less is most definitely more!

_____________________________

Links

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/ocean-temperatures-heating-up

Super-charging our Descent into the Unknown

While a savage war grinds on in the Ukraine, killing hundreds of thousands of young men and women on its battlefields for no good reason (along with the other less visible but nonetheless as brutal wars in Yemen, Palestine, Syria and various states of Africa); planet Earth heads ever more rapidly down the slope to a new world: a world where wild weather is the norm, where temperatures and sea-levels climb ever higher at an increasing rate, and where fewer and fewer living things can exist.

A world where humans have increasingly become the predominant inhabitants. A world of humans convinced of their supreme intelligence and foresight when all the factual evidence suggests otherwise. A world where humanity’s short-term avarice has become the dominant driving force for major decisions about our long-term future.

Global warming and loss of bio-diversity are creating a world for which humans and others species are not prepared and will likely not survive in. That global warming and biodiversity loss is purely driven by greed. We do not need all this inanimate ‘stuff’ we have created to lead a full and happy life, but we are hell-bent on acquiring it!

Note that the emissions shown in the above graph relate to the country where CO2 is produced (i.e.production-based CO2) , not to where the goods and services that generate emissions are finally consumed. 

But the greatest threat to us is not so much the steadily increasing temperatures and wilder weather around the globe caused by man’s constant production of Co2- but the loss of other species. Note that the graph below by Living Planet relates only to ‘wildlife’ , which in their terminology, only includes figures on vertebrate species – mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians. It does not include insects, corals, fungi, or plants. The corresponding loss of total volumes and different species of insects is equally catastrophic. And man, not simply through his/her actions in increasing global temperatures, but predominantly through loss of habitat to produce more stuff, is the cause of these losses.

If we were to take the current reductionist simplistic approach to these losses we might say that we have no idea what impact these losses will have on humans, or what ‘benefits’ we could extract from those species if they were to survive. However if we were truly the intelligent species we claim to be, we would be examining the relationships between all these species, including ourselves and determining to preserve wherever possible, the current species we have.

We simply do not have a clue how each of the millions of species on this planet uphold the web of life here.

Increasingly ‘science’ is coming to the conclusion that all living things are sentient– they have awareness and are thus worthy of our respect, empathy and kindness, and a recognition and desire by humans to wherever possible preserve the lives of all other living things.

Death by a thousand cuts: Global threats to insect diversity. Stressors from 10 o’clock to 3 o’clock anchor to climate change. Featured insects: Regal fritillary (Speyeria idalia) (Center), rusty patched bumble bee (Bombus affinis) (Center Right), and Puritan tiger beetle (Cicindela puritana) (Bottom). Each is an imperiled insect that represents a larger lineage that includes many International Union for Conservation of Nature “red list” species (i.e., globally extinct, endangered, and threatened species). Illustration: Virginia R. Wagner (artist). https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2023989118

And while various mainstream media in the West (and almost nothing in China and Russia) talk about the latest research about climate change and biodiversity and how we need to be doing ‘something’ to address it, and while politicians and bureaucrats put in place global and state agreements to ‘manage’ climate change-in reality , nothing is happening to reduce the risks to us all.

And agreed, the path we are heading down is now a predetermined one, to very high global global temperatures for the next few hundred years or more that will almost certainly make life a living hell literally, but no-one is actually creating the mechanisms to stop humans creating more and more energy for more ‘stuff” we don’t need.

Our rate of destruction of this planet is not reducing!

And yet we humans are Masters of the Universe, are we not?

___________________________________________

Links

https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/nature-decline-unprecedented-report/

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2023989118

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/apr/02/bees-intelligence-minds-pollination

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/apr/12/the-trauma-doctor-gabor-mate-on-happiness-hope-and-how-to-heal-our-deepest-wounds

Highest ever readings of atmospheric carbon dioxide in human history recorded

A Letter to New Zealand’s Defence Minister

Kia ora  Mr Henare

I note with interest your and the Labour Party’s unequivocal support for the current government in Kiev on your recent visit to Ukraine.

https://www.1news.co.nz/2022/11/20/defence-minister-peeni-henare-visits-ukraine-meets-counterpart/
Concurrently and interconnectedly  I note New Zealand’s decision to vote against  the annual  UN resolution   ‘COMBATING GLORIFICATION OF NAZISM”.

https://stuartbramhall.substack.com/p/52-countries-vote-against-un-resolution

FROM https://stuartbramhall.substack.com/p/52-countries-vote-against-un-resolution

These two  interconnected decisions make clear New Zealand’s position to  support the Kiev government, a regime which  is  unequivocally militarily and politically supported by neonazi groups like the Azov and Aidar battalions  and political  groups like the Right Sector, and which  for 8  years has been  shelling and  killing  more than 10,000  innocent Ukrainian people in  the Donbas simply because they  want to  speak  their native language, Russian (note that these figures are  confirmed by the Organisation for Security in  Europe (OSCE)

New Zealand equipment and targeting information is undoubtedly also being used by the Kiev military to  continue to fire missiles at Donetsk City and its civilian  infrastructure.

While the Russian invasion of Ukraine is to be unequivocally condemned, a path to peace must be negotiated which dispassionately  examines the reasons for this war  and Western  governments’ refusal  to  honour the Minsk  agreements signed by  Kiev, which would have  meant the Russian  invasion would never have happened.

While previous Labour administrations like David Lange’s and Norman Kirk’s had the moral  courage to  push back  against  the NATO white mans’ club, which continue to drone murder,  torture and initiate wars against those who do not wish  to ‘compulsorily share’ their resources with the Western  world, this Ardern government has cemented its relationship  as a NATO ‘ally’  and a key member of the Five Eyes group and continues to  enthusiastically  facilitate those illegal and immoral  activities. 

One would have that thought that those who have been victims of white man’s colonialism would have  taken some courage and   initiative to  distance New Zealand from  these activities of the white man’s club. New Zealand  is, and will increasingly become a pariah  state in the South  and East while it maintains it enthusiastic support for  NATO and the current ‘international  rule based order’,  which  every  non  Western  state recognises as code for the right for the US and its allies to do  whatever it wishes , including sanctions, targetted killings and  extreme violence against  whole populations. 
Does not the current Labour government have the courage to  push back  against  this ever expanding and dangerous war  that  NATO is fuelling at  the expense of likely  hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers, and demand that  each  side sit down to negotiate firstly a cease-fire and then a peace agreement which  is endorsed at the UN?

I sincerely  hope that  this Labour Government does belatedly recognise that New Zealand’s international and defense policies and actions  are currently not on  the moral side of rectitude.

Postscript 6th November 2022

The Telegram channel Rybar made the following post on 5th November.

#Ukrainian #Nazi group, within Azov Movement, Karpatska Sich, translated to Ukrainian the New Zealand shooter Manifesto that inspired the #Buffalo White Supremacist shooter.

The Ukrainian-language translation of the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto, flanked by a sticker for Ukrainian neo-Nazi group Karpatska Sich.

The New Zealand shooter Manifesto that inspired the #Buffalo shooter is a “must read” for all #NeoNazis and White Supremacists worldwide.
Here a group of #Ukrainian #Nazis from Karpatska Sich holding copies of the book translated to Ukrainian by the Nazi elitist group inside #Azov movement.

Neo Nazi Polish/Ukrainian group Karpatska Sich made a hateful video regarding the Pride marches in the EU the year.

(Note also the ‘sieg heil’ Nazi salutes)

Follow:
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses

In other words, the New Zealand government’s military is funding, training and likely imbedded with neonazis in Ukraine who are directly implicated in the New Zealand mosque shooting in Christchurch in 2019, which the same NZ government has roundly condemned as a terrorist act.

New Zealand is supporting terrorism.

There is(apparently) only one ‘Truth’

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has it seems irrevocably pinned her flag to the mast of the ‘dark side’- the U.S. ‘rule based order’ ( not to be confused with the UN charter of human rights or anything silly like that, but with the right of the YS to do anything it damn well likes to any country and people it pleases. (bombing an allies’ gas pipeline is just one of so many examples)

Once a president of ‘International Union of Socialist Youth’, which among its neoliberal causes, supposedly also stands for ‘Social justice and democracy – to ensure participation for all citizens based on the principles of freedom and equality, against authoritarianism, populism and dictatorship; for the right to self-determination, to liberty, and freedom of expression of all peoples‘- Jacinda is now calling for the world to install what Zerohedge calls a ‘world censorship system’

Whil insisting there is only one truth in regard to world conflicts (no room for peace negotiations there!) she also insisted there could only be one view about climate change. As one who does not deny the reality of climate change, I find it astonishing that Ardern suggests we can legislate climate impacts away by saying we will not allow the world to increase global temperatures by 1.5C.

Either she is amazing badly informed by her science advisors about climate change, or she is simply posturing. The reality is that it is now inevitable that the world will experience much more than 1.5C warming. Governments across the world (including her own) have talked a lot about climate change impacts and what should be done- but have in fact done nothing more than pretend to their voters they are doing something. Co2 global production continues to increase, not decrease.

And in fact Ardern’s government has continued to push for more international tourism (which in New Zealand results in massive production of Co2 from the passenger jets winging their way around the world to the South Pacific from the Northern hemisphere), more extensive dairy and agribusiness farming which continues to destroy our environment in multiple ways and generally more ‘progress’ (which means more businesses which inevitably destroy more of the environment and induces more consumption of goods people don’t need.

Ardern and her Labour are like her National Party opposition and all the other New Zealand political parties, locked into requiring financial support from businesses- and ‘more business’ and ‘progress’ are simply euphemisms for making money from environmental destruction.

But, to return to the earlier argument about there being simple single truths about the Ukraine war; that a democratic Ukraine with ‘European’ values of tolerance and freedom is fighting against a relentless ruthless behemoth of Putin’s Russian Empire, we might put forward a counter ‘truth’. That Ukraine is in fact a brutal single party white supremacist state whose only reason for Western support is to defang the Russian bear so that Western corporations can once again (as in the Yeltsin years) begin to appropriate Russian assets at bargain prices.

As the Scrum notes: Incited by Western powers, Poland, Lithuania, and the Habsburg Empire, the key to Ukrainian nationalism was that it was Western, and thus superior. Since Ukrainians and Russians stem from the same population, pro-Western Ukrainian ultra-nationalism was built on imaginary myths of racial differences: Ukrainians were the true Western whatever-it-was, whereas Russians were mixed with “Mongols” and thus an inferior race. Banderist Ukrainian nationalists have openly called for elimination of Russians as such, as inferior beings.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1577289845155983361

The destruction of the Russian state was the prime agenda for UK and US ‘intelligence’ operatives after the second world war, making enthusiastic use of Ukrainian neonazi groups like Stepan Bandera’s OUNB and then latterly with OUNB’s successors like the Right Sector and their militants the Azov and Aidar battalions, and the consequent overthrow of the corrupt (as every Ukrainian president has proved to be) but democratically elected President Yanukovych in the US backed Maidan revolution of 2014.

Western intelligence has since played a major role in re-arming the Ukrainian army and the neonazi militant groups to not only get rid of the problem of Russian speaking Ukrainians in the Dombas, but also to fight a war with Russia itself.

These Ukrainian ultra-nationalists have also been enthusiastically supported by strong Nazi elements in the Baltic States, Germany, Poland and the Ukrainian post WW2 diaspora, particularly in Canada.

So, naturally, any compromise in the grand Western agenda, not to mention a reduction in the Western PR media effort to discredit Russia (and now China) in any way possible how ever implausible, is completely impossible- peace negotiations are not an option. Nuclear war with Russia is also being promoted in Western media as also an option, deliberately misrepresenting (as Scott Ritter-former UN weapons inspector notes)the Russian position on first use of nuclear weapons.

The ‘perhaps’ unintended consequence of this glorification of the ultra-nationalist agenda, along with the self-destruction of European economies causing poverty and anger and demonstrations on the street, is the resurrection of the white supremacist ultranationalist movements, like Zelensky’s, across Europe.

First in 2022 we saw the ‘Sweden Democrats’ far-right movement gain political power in Stockholm and then the ascendance to power in Italy of the ‘Brothers of Italy’-a direct descendant of Mussolini’s fascist party.

These far-right groups not only celebrate intolerance of minorities, but also any dissent of the view that the state is pre-eminent in all things, that the corporations should rule in tandem with government (as in the US), and that consequently any collective view of humanity outside of the state apparatus is a threat to be stamped out.

However the far-right’s biggest threat to humanity is their denial of the climate change disaster. How can the state become strong in their view, without industrial ‘progress’ and a strong war-machine?

We can already see that view reflected in those European ‘moderate’ parties who currently control the EU. They’ll talk about mitigating climate change and green energy and all those cute things, as long as it doesn’t impact on the economy and the money that rolls into party coffers from the corporations-‘fire up the coal boilers for electricity again ‘cos we need to destroy Russia first!’

We are, after all, talking about Jacinda Ardern’s favourite ‘international rule-based order’ here!

Let’s get our priorities straight with the one true Truth!

_______________________________________________

Links

https://thescrum.substack.com/p/a-cia-theme-park?

Who profits from Pipeline Terror?
https://consortiumnews.com/2022/09/30/scott-ritter-the-onus-is-on-biden-putin/

https://thescrum.substack.com/p/revanchism-in-germany

The Nightmare of Military Spending on an Overheating Planet
https://original.antiwar.com/mcgovern/2022/09/25/nyt-on-ukraine-vietnam-dj-vu/
Kharkov and Mobilization

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2022-10-05/uks-secret-diplomacy-and-european-wars