Paul Haeder, Author

And, that is the deal, right, somehow the Jan. 6 event, selfies and all, and mostly middle class whites “storming the Capitol” could only happen in some Banana Republic or Third World backwater?

“There is no ‘Third World.’ There were the oppressed and the oppressors,” says Karan, who was born in India, grew up in Los Angeles and is now on staff at Harvard Medical School.

It’s this obsession with 1, 2, 3, and the terms were coined in the 1950s during the start of the Cold War. So, third world would be those countries with abject poverty, no governance, no health care, no infrastructure. You know, the salt of the earth. The oppressed. Those countries that did not decide to fail or succeed.

And it’s not like the “First World” is the best world in every way. It has pockets of deep urban and rural poverty, says Paul Farmer, co-founder of the nonprofit Partners in Health and a professor at Harvard Medical School. “That’s the ‘Fourth World,’ ” Farmer says, referring to parts of the United States and other wealthy nations where health and economic problems loom large.

That is the reality — Fourth World, or the underdeveloping West. See Manfred Max-Neef here on underdeveloping USA:

And then, in addition, you know, bring consumption closer to production. I live in the south of Chile, in the deep south. And that area is a fantastic area, you know, in milk products and what have you. Top. Technologically, like the maximum, you know? I was, a few months ago, in a hotel, and there in the south, for breakfast, and there are these little butter things, you know? I get one, and it’s butter from New Zealand. I mean, if that isn’t crazy, you know? And why? Because economists don’t know how to calculate really costs, you know? To bring butter from 20,000 kilometers to a place where you make the best butter, under the argument that it was cheaper, is a colossal stupidity, because they don’t take into consideration what is the impact of 20,000 kilometers of transport? What is the impact on the environment of that transportation, you know, and all those things? And in addition, I mean, it’s cheaper because it’s subsidized. So it’s clearly a case in which the prices never tell the truth. It’s all tricks, you know? And those tricks do colossal harms. And if you bring consumption closer to production, you will eat better, you will have better food, you know, and everything. You will know where it comes from. You may even know the person who produces it. You humanize this thing, you know? But the way the economists practice today is totally dehumanized. (Max-Neef)

99 percent of human qualities and abilities are simply redundant for the performance of most modern jobs

The Chilean economist is talking about the embedded energy, the cost of that butter from New Zealand puttering its way all the way to Chile. Energy expended to produce that butter. You know, green grass, ferilizers, all the internal combustion engines, the metals milled and mined, all of that, plus the animals, the dairies, and the vast problems with confined animal operations, and then, zoonotic diseases, all the drugs needed (sic) to keep those cows producing, and then the hormones to produce 10-20-30 Percent more milk? Well, then the way of life those dairymen and dairywomen have, and then, well, just what is that cost? But then to have taxpayers subsidize the entire systems that would produce, package, transport the butter to Chile? What cost is that? Who makes the money — how many middle men are there? This is what modern capitalism, unfettered, driven by hydrocarbons, driven by the people’s caches, from their futures.

This is a discussion that is dead in the water. No more deep critiques of this corporate fascism, this corporate upside down world of ineffeciency and hubris and endless waste of resources and energy. With all of that container ship insanity, well, here we are — oceans and oceans worth of crisscrossing goods, back and forth, raw logs from Oregon to Korea, and then back as cardboard products, and then, well, you get the picture. This is what unfettered capitalism and monopolyism is all about.

Oh, yes, Korea has the biggest one: Today’s largest container ship can carry about 24,000 TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent unit). The carrying capacity of today’s largest container vessels is equivalent to no less than a 44-mile long freight train.

The amount of fuel, depending on speed, can be up to 63,000 gallons a day. That’s 20 days at sea: 1.2 million gallons? Many cargo ships still use “bunker fuel”—the sludgy dregs of the petroleum refining process. The noxious blend is dirt-cheap, making it possible to charge next to nothing to ship goods internationally. All of which means our unbridled consumerism hitches a ride on some of the dirtiest vehicles on earth. And these ships idle waiting to be unloaded, or loaded.

And, 90 percent of the stuff we buy came to us via container ship.

Oh, those externatlities.

Then, those clean energy things, Turbines:

From the 1,000 pounds (1 ton) of rare earth minerals required to manufacture a single wind turbine to the massive mineral demands of the data center industry currently flourishing across the remnants of Paleogene-era volcanic plains stretching from Scotland to southwest Greenland known as the North Atlantic Igneous Province, dependence on the extraction of non-renewable resources represents the first fault line in the prevailing narratives surrounding our “clean” digital future.

Clever marketing terms like “cloud computing” and the ubiquitous “world wide web” have fostered the mistaken perception of the Internet as some kind of ethereal, immaterial entity floating above us rather than a physical reality with very definite and destructive relationships to geography and land use. This fantasy helps to diffuse the potential for social unrest and solidarity with any resistance movements transnational companies might encounter along the way, making recent events in Greenland all the more important. (Raul Diego)

Oh, that clever brainwashing and Stockholm Syndrome and fear pornography. Double-speak and image creation and massaging and pseudo events and co-opting ideas, spinning the old into something a far cry from the new, that is the criminal enterprise of marketing, propagandists, liars, the elite, mass communication, the art of un-Journalism.

We have no agency as teachers to bring these issues of planned and perceived obsolescence into the critical thinking arena as Marxists and deep ecosocialists because going against marketing and buy-buy-buy mentality and the consumption-consumer model is, well, communism: the state or some entity telling us what to do, think, eat, drink, read, watch, use, build, grow, mine, mold, mill. You get the picture. We have the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the oligarchs and the Bill Gates and the WEF and Davos people all geared up for the universal basic poverty income, the idea of “You will own nothing and be happy,” all of the social impact, the transhumanism, all of those plans to put us into a digital gulag for control, for holding our feet to the fire, for the benefit of these fascists who put on a green cap and jet set all the way to their Epstein-like islands. The world is upside down, as I stated. Having global groups work to save the manatee, to stop coral bleaching, to maintain forests, to work on marine harvests, to help the poor, the farmers, to provide shelter and education, to work on moving people away from rising sea levels and 120 degree F summers, 70 days straight. Water, food, air, soil, safety — what a terrible thing to do on a bio-regional and cross national level. This is what the right wing has done, and the fake left wing has moved center right, and so, we have not real honest debate.

Until we have this useful idiot, smart as hell in terms of articulation and sick transhumanist glee, historian Yuval Noah Harari offers a bracing prediction: just as mass industrialization created the working class, the AI revolution will create a new unworking class.

But he calls us the useless generation. As we can see in California, where teachers have to get into a room-letting deal just to live, or where school districts have to building apartment complexes to house teachers, we will be quickly shifting education to a superstar master course sort of scenario — MOOC, massively open on-line courses. Imagine that, those beautiful lazy hazy days sipping Arizona Tea and chewing on Snicker’s bars while attending your graduate class via the internet, the web, the Zoom Doom. This is something I was warning about in 1983, and or course, the sheeple scoffed or laughed it off.

So, how do we look at the energy embedded in Zoom, or the ramifications of Zoom versus in-person, and the value of urban and suburban space with bricks and mortar schools, colleges? And, why haven’t the college reinvented themselves to bring more people to campus, to expand horizons, to have temporary housing there for those struggling to find housing. Pallet Shelters, or thereby like them?

Affordable, quick-build ‘tiny homes’ can serve as a key stepping stone to a permanent housing situation for people experiencing homelessness.

There are 20 Pallet shelters at Safe Stay Community. The village replaced an encampment located in the same area. Outsiders Inn, an organization dedicated to lifting people out of homelessness through advocacy, support, and resources, is the service provider. All of their staff have lived experience.

There is so much work to do here, in USA, elsewhere. Bottled water to Jackson, Mississippi because pump motors are fried?

Now now, what did Bumbling Biden say last night in his unstately state of the union? Trump This, and Trump That? It is a sickness in this duopoly: Republicans love Trump and Democrats hate Trump, but the duoploy does nothing for the people. Nothing. 70 billion dollars worth of war weapons and some cold cash for the most corrupt and ruthless country in Europe, Ukraine, as the strategy of the Neo Nazis and the Legacy Nazis under the leadership (sic) of a Jewish Comic and his Jewish-Israeli Ooligarchs is to bomb Europe’s largest nuclear power station?

The Ukrainian military publicly admitted striking the area of the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant in an official General Staff briefing on Friday. Previously, Kiev had claimed that Russian forces used the plant as a military base; now it says all troops have relocated due to the visit by IAEA inspectors.

And so, the decay is here, and so many people I interact with see the USA and Europe turning into Third World outfits. Again, that’s just more soft-shoe mumbo-jumbo. Because, Canada, USA, UK and Israel, and other places in EuroLand, they are advancing this transhumanism agenda. China, too, wanting everything on a digital chip — eye scans, DNA markers, entire histories of us, as files. We are the new Homo Datapithecus.

The issue is now these rare earth minerals, and the Silicon Icarus piece listed above under Diego’s link is all about Greenland.

Michael Bloomberg, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman and Bill Gates are among the many investors in another mineral staking project using proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) technology to identify deposits of nickel, copper, cobalt and platinum for electric batteries and other ‘clean energy’ products. The joint venture is located about 650 miles north of Narsaq and has been making headlines in recent weeks as hundreds of people, including geologists, geophysicists, cooks and pilots, descend on the southwestern coast of Greenland to scavenge for mineral samples.

Oh, Greenland: “Greenland’s entire population could fit inside Soldier Fieldin Chicago with room to spare. Almost 90% of its 56,000 residents are native Inuit, with the remainder mostly consisting of Danish transplants and other Nordic peoples. Denmark’s colonial tutelage has not disappeared entirely and despite the granting of home rule privileges, the European country still controls Greenland’s foreign policy and defense.”

[Mariane Paviasen, anti-uranium mining activist and MP for the Inuit Ataqatigiit Party in Greenland]

And so it goes, now in this giant rock polishing machine, as we get tossed around and around until we either crack like a fissured agate, or get our hard truths polished down to a glimmering facade. Too old, too young, too woke, too rich, too poor, too sick, too healthy, too smart, too dumb, too west coast, too east coast, too flyover state, too coached, too raw, too refined, too bought, too sold, too colonized, too radical, too conservative, too capitalist, too communist, too this and too that.

So the conversations are almost always now in a cul-de-sac, with a million keyboard or Zoom warrior, pumping themselves up with endless streaming madness. We have so many off-limits talks, and in some sense, people want but don’t want the truth . . . or truths that at least fit their square pegs in a round hole world.

While all the bullshit green new fascism deal rules are unfolding, while a slice of humanity deems nitrogen fertilzer or burning hydrocarbons off limits, the reality is that we have to retrench, and work bio-globally to mitigate some very very harsh times a coming. Having forced eletric vehicles is not the step. Charging $1000 a month for heat and hot water in the winter is not the step. These steps are all for the rich, for their financial aggrandizement. For us, a new Grapes of Wrath, this new The Jungle, all these freaks in power circles, especially now in the Eurozone and UK. Unbelievable shallow and tone-deaf and history challenged fools.

Hothouse Earth (Icon Books, August 2022.) by Bill McGuire, Emeritus Professor of Geophysical and Climate Hazards at University College London pulls no punches. Accordingly, “There is no chance of avoiding climate breakdown.” That statement prompts the idea that maybe climate breakdown is already here. It sure looks and feels that way.

Climate experts still blather on that we have time left, although not very much, to bring about meaningful reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. It’s not going to happen without a global force from the grassroots up, not top down by Elon Musk and Bill Gates and the likes of the World Economic Forum or the Pro-Pro-War greens we are seeing coming out of German.

I know a lot of people working in climate science who say one thing in public but a very different thing in private. In confidence, they are all much more scared about the future we face, but they won’t admit that in public. I call this climate appeasement and I believe it only makes things worse. The world needs to know how bad things are going to get before we can hope to tackle the crisis. (“How Bad Can It Get?”  by Robert Hunziker) 

The great divide is widening, while these elites like Macron vacation on their champange cruises telling the world that there is now an end of abundance. Imagine that, EuroZone France, a Rothschild worker, Macron, blurting out to the lowly people, “let them eat cake but not take hot showers or take a Sunday spin in the Renault for a picnic. “

Condemning the Capitol Hill riot, President George W. Bush and Senator Marco Rubio likened it to political upheavals in “Banana Republics” and the “third world.” But Lucia Dammert, a Wilson Center Global Fellow and Professor at the University of Santiago of Chile objects to the comparison to the Global South — adding that the U.S. has played a key role in sparking the turbulence, especially in Latin America. (Source)