Category: Uncategorized

How the Saudi Oil Field Attack Overturned America’s Apple Cart

“It’s a moment when offense laps defense, when the strong have reason to fear the weak,” observes military historian Jack Radey
I find this is a very interesting comment. I now want to reblog the whole post!

stuartbramhall's avatarThe Most Revolutionary Act

ECOCIDE, ENDLESS WAR & SOCIAL CHAOS IN OUR TIME

BY CONN HALLINAN

OCTOBER 1, 2019

In many ways it doesn’t really matter who — Houthis in Yemen? Iranians? Shiites in Iraq? — launched those missiles and drones at Saudi Arabia. Whoever did it changed the rules of the game, and not just in the Middle East. “It’s a moment when offense laps defense, when the strong have reason to fear the weak,” observes military historian Jack Radey.In spite of a $68 billion a year defense budget — the third highest spending of any country in the world — with a world-class air force and supposed state-of-the-art anti-aircraft system, a handful of bargain basement drones and cruise missiles slipped through the Saudi radar and devastated Riyadh’s oil economy. All those $18 million fighter planes and $3 million a pop Patriot anti-aircraft missiles suddenly look pretty irrelevant.

This is hardly an…

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Video from the conference: interviews and plenary talks

RESOURCE POLITICS
ESRC STEPS Centre conference | 7th-9th Sept 2015

These videos from Sept. 2015 do look interesting to me!

Admin's avatarResource politics

Watch video interviews with key speakers and footage from selected plenary sessions below.

Interview clips

1-2 minute clips of interviews with Betsy Hartmann, Rohan D’Souza, Myint Zaw, Michael Watts and Dianne Rocheleau on resource politics, filmed during the conference. Click on the icon in the top left hand corner to browse the list.

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No Class

I started reading this article. I find it stimulates my thinking, very much so. “Risking the direction for needed change by allowing capital investments to chart the course is a very dangerous idea.”
This is just one of the sentences that I would like to think about a lot . . . .And so it goes on. I want to see whether reblogging this article by John Stepling is going to help me to continue with a bit more thinking! 🙂

stuartbramhall's avatarThe Most Revolutionary Act

By John Stepling

Class analysis is not conspiracy theory. Full stop. Class exists and is part of the hierarchical system of global capitalism. The so labeled *Climate Change* crisis — as it exists on the level of Green New Deal or Extinction Rebellion — has very little to do with protecting Nature. Global warming is a fact that humanity will have to adjust to and learn to live with. So much of the rhetoric and identifications that exist in the Greta narrative are driven by a subterranean belief in technology to fix any problem. Global warming can’t be fixed. And there are enormous difficulties for the entire global population, really. . . The incursion of technology into nearly every waking moment of the daily life of the Westerner has conditioned a populace, one that doesn’t read, to see the acceleration of everything as natural. . . And capitalism is not…

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Are we a humane Society?

In this post from 2016 Peter says, that capitalism is not interested in a humane society . . . .

I made at the time this comment to Peter’s blog:

I think capitalism would not be so bad if somehow “exploitation” could be avoided. Maybe it is not that capitalism as such is inhumane, only what people make of it because of their greed and not being satisfied with profits that can be had without any exploitation of people or countries. Letting everyone have their fair share, wouldn’t that bring about a ‘humane’ society?

What do you think, would it not be possible to let everyone have their fair share if people were only willing to be totally fair in every way? People were then also able to see that it is not right to profit from things that are bad for the environment!

Who, for heaven’s sake, could have the power to change people’s behaviour??

Peter’s blog was posted in Essay and tagged , , , , ,  by berlioz1935

berlioz1935's avatarBerlioz1935's Blog

There is so much strife in the world today. Sixty-five million people are refugees and looking for a better place where they could bring up their children in safety. The refugees often assume the nations of the European Union are shining examples of a “humane” society.

I wonder where they got that idea from? We, in the West, believe that the Western nations have indeed achieved a high level of human existence. We convinced ourselves, that since the end of the 18th Century, and the birth of the Enlightenment, we had turned the corner to a better world populated by enlightened people. We thought we had become more humane.

The educational reforms following the Enlightenment produced a better-educated populace. Research and inventions pushed us progressively towards a capitalist society in which the majority of people were indeed better off in the material sense. But the seeming progress also brought extreme…

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The €ost of $aving Ourselves, Oct 26, 2018

 

 

As amazing as it seems, we seem to be a species that is unwilling to spend the money to save ourselves from extinction. Mind boggling realization. This is not just the rich, who are completely corrupted and dominated by Money. But even ordinary folks, who are unwilling to pay a bit more for their electricity or fuel to avoid the CO2 that is wreaking havoc with the climate system. What’s worse, money and the ideology it has bought, create trolls and deniers who are dead sure (emphasis on the ‘dead’ part) that these planetary changes are IN THEIR OPINION a hoax. In fact, the ‘hoax theory’ is the hoax. But Money is in control, and will have it’s way. Create more Money until the host (humanity) is gone. Sad way to end a beautiful species.

Climate Change: Are You Scared Enough? feat. David Wallace-Wells

Maybe if you’re not scared, you’re not paying attention… Like this video? SUBSCRIBE to Hot Mess! ►► http://bit.ly/hotmess_sub Climate change is scary, because it will negatively impact just about every part of our lives. But the conventional wisdom on how to talk about climate change and inspire people to do something about it has always been “don’t scare people”. At least until recently. In the past couple years climate scientists and climate journalists have started talking in scarier and more worst case terms than ever before. Why? And is this a good thing? I talked to author David Wallace-Wells, author of “The Uninhabitable Earth” to learn more. #climate #climatechange #globalwarming Read more: Wallace-Wells, David. The uninhabitable earth: Life after warming. Tim Duggan Books, 2019.

Wildfires: Planet emergency BY OAKLANDSOCIALIST ON JULY 30, 2018

Wildfires: Planet emergency

Wildfires burning throughout California

In this Planet Emergency article the following question is asked:

“Human” caused or capitalism caused?
“We all know what is happening: Global climate disruption. And, no, it’s not caused by god, nor by “people”; it’s caused by capitalism. Unable to do anything but strive for the quickest, most immediate short term profits, capitalism is destroying the environment and taking the future of all life on the planet with it. And the representatives of capitalism are burying the issue.”

 

Global warming, “grass” farming and a planned economy

“. . . 60% of the corn produced in the US goes to feed cattle on the feed lots, known as “Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations” or CAFO’s.” You say: “CAFO – an environmental disaster and cruel to the animals.” Finding out about these methods, you may perhaps want to stop eating beef?

oaklandsocialist's avatarOakland Socialist

As the Global Climate Strike date (Sept. 20) approaches, the question that will be on the minds of millions will be: “Is there a possible way to avoid a disaster that could threaten the existence of life on earth?” Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma helps provide an answer, and that answer is “yes”, but with some qualifications. Here’s why:

Teosinte, the plant that was evolved into corn

A short history of corn
Pollan starts with an explanation of corn, which is the largest crop grown in the United States.Corn seems to have evolved from the grass called teosinte. It is a most unusual plant, starting with the unusual way in which it recruits carbon from the atmosphere, also known as photosynthesis. Most plants create carbon compounds that have three carbon atoms. Corn has a simple trick: It creates compounds with four such atoms. That sounds like a…

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