ironies, contradictions, a case of a thousand elephants in the room stampeding
Cornel West said to the imperialism-compatible “left”:
“You’re still locked into a very knee-jerk defense of NATO so that the militarism still goes on—everybody knows if Russia had troops in Mexico or Canada there would be invasions tomorrow.”
Some call it discordance, or the fabric of seeing, hearing, speaking no evil, or the converse, seeing-hearing-speakng evil always in THAT direction.
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No, Putin is not Hitler, and alas, concision is the powerful automatic rifle of the propagandists, and we know they — double-speakers and news-speakers — are not just press flacks or spokespersons, and not just the handlers and the focus group creeps, but also the very people we supposedly vote into office to represent us.
So, we can miss the point of a people-centric form of organizing and developing communities that are vibrant, cohesive, resilient, creative and supportive to all those who are there, in it, to be part of a community of place and community of thought and purpose.
But then, a termor comes through the spinal column, to the point of crying and laughing and looking for the T-Ball bat:
Ahh, then there is Bill McKibben, who wants a green army, and wants Russia blasted away:
First, he’s a fucking English teacher, but besides that, he’s a fascist inside, and look at his bullshit empty brained lack of history:
We are worlds apart now, one of us terrorized amid the wreckage of invaded Ukraine and the other entirely safe in the United States. But because we’ve been engaged in the same global fight against fossil fuels for decades, we are well-situated to see some of the key drivers behind this wretched moment, and hence some of the solutions.
Above all, it’s obvious that the world’s banks have amorally worked to build Russia’s oil and gas industry, the industry that funds the Russian army, and the industry that Vladimir Putin has used as a cudgel for decades to keep Europe cowering. And that’s why we cheered so loudly Tuesday when President Biden — as part of his ban on Russian oil — told American banks to make no new investments in Putin’s oil. As Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky tweeted, it strikes at the heart of Putin’s war machine.
And it is what more than a million people around the world — and more than 75 prominent NGOs — have demanded. Indeed, Wall Street and the banks must go further and stop the ongoing funding of fossil fuels everywhere, because they are the bulwark of autocracy and the death of the natural world. The sooner we replace oil, gas and coal with cheap, safe renewable energy, the sooner we can all live in peace. (source)
He cites M. Jacobson as the solutionary for our global woes, tied to climate change.
Last August, Mark Jacobson, a renewable energy expert and senior fellow at the Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford University, was the leader of a study that identified how 139 countries around the world could obtain 100% of their energy from renewable sources by 2050. But that study got some pushback from people who questioned its assumptions. The naysayers said the study relied too heavily on energy storage solutions such as adding turbines to existing hydroelectric dams or storing excess energy in water, ice, and underground rocks. (source)
These are the technocrats, the lizard people, who have tidy minds and just know what the rest of the world, us, needs. In the end, these whippersnappers want green fascism, want digital control (fascism, tracking, you will be happy and own nothing mentality/PSYOPS), want a world uploaded and fixed onto a pay for succes model (digital fascism), and these fools have zero compassion for people — the others, you know, 70 percent of the world, not the so-called Golden Billion.
It’s as if this professor — Billy Bob Burning Man McKibben — is deficient in so many nutrients, as he believes Ukraine is some wonderland? Dirty Nazi’s, Dirty Proving Grounds for Weapons, Dirty Bio-weapons Joint, Dirty Corrupt Ukraine, and alas, the shitty control of everyone’s money, pay, bills, taxes, what have you. Blackrock anyone?
[USAID’s DC rollout of the dystopian Diia “state in a smartphone” app introduced by the government of Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky. Parampil and Blumenthal discuss how the Ukrainian conflict zone has been turned into a profitable laboratory for corporations seeking to profit from the harvesting of personal data from the war-torn population, how it is used to control and intimidate Ukraine’s population, and how this disturbing technology is being exported throughout the global south.]
These preachers of austerity are the Mengeles and Goebbels of our time.
And they are green, man, green — look at this Kraut, lecturing to Brazil, with a 20 percent poverty rate, telling them to instaneously feed the military war machine (the West’s merchants of death and stocks and bonds) in dirty Ukraine: German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock has called on Brazil to align with other democracies on geopolitical matters, particularly regarding its stance on the Ukraine war and China, and is offering a closer relationship in exchange.
Brazil is the only country among emerging democracies that have so far backed all UN resolutions against Russia’s war in Ukraine but still refuses to send Ukraine aid. Brazil also maintains a particularly close relationship with China, its top trading partner.
“Security and development are not opposites. They depend on each other,” Baerbock said at the Digital Democracy Festival in São Paulo, pointing to the global impact of rising food prices due to the war, warning that democracies could thus not show restraint in geopolitical questions.
It’s a pretty good one, this episode, looking at the counter-offensive of UkroNaziLandia, looking at RFK, Jr. and his love of Israel and condemning Roger Waters, and then the pathetic Amy Soros Goodman grilling Dr. Cornel West.
Now now, wouldn’t it be great if the so-called greens were anti-Imperialists, or were deeply rooted in food, fish, air, soil, people’s rights to live and to not be under the coffin nail or thumb of the Anglo-Saxon hell!
Ahh, contrast sicko Bill and Greta with:
Ahh, Bill and Greta, nope!
In this Rising Tide Foundation presentation featuring Jim O’Brien, Chair of the Irish Climate Science Forum introduces the reality of climate science, while debunking the pervasive belief in human-driven global warming, and outline what a healthy energy and climate science looks like.
Speaker Bio: Jim O’Brien is “retired” after a 39-year career in CRH plc, the leading multinational building materials group, for the latter 19 years being its Group Technical Advisor. He now is Honorary President of the European Aggregates Association and Convenor of the Global Aggregates Information Network (www.GAIN.ie).
He founded and chairs the Irish Climate Science Forum (www.ICSF.ie), an independent think-tank on climate science and energy policy, which cooperates with the Dutch-based CLINTEL (www.CLINTEL.org). He is a Fellow of the Institution of Engineers of Ireland, of the Irish Academy of Engineering and of the UK Institution of Engineering and Technology and is a Life Senior Member of the US Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers.
Fun stuff hearing Oliver Stone hawk his new documentary on nuclear energy. Missing?
indigenous knowledge and participatory governing
who writes the checkbook for nuclear power, and who gets the profits
what world are we hoping for . . . are there concerns about the shit we see now with Ukraine and USA and Israel going after nuclear facilities . . .
Oliver’s valorizing these so-called smartest people in the room, nuclear scientists, and alas, he’s stoked baby, stoked . . .
what is this world like, this Jetson’s world, this world of endless electricity
plastics, inequity, and this huge system of nuclear material mining, etc.
sure, here, we have some questions about how to deal good and caring and mutual aid to Haiti, Congo, Yemen, Cuba . . . versus this rush for so-called clean energy, for what
Ahh, fucking Kennedy, another rotten celebrity, goofball: Listen to Roger defend himself! [556,692 views Jun 6, 2023/ You’ve read the lies, now hear THE TRUTH]
Here’s someone I follow on Substack, and it’s a call to revolutionaries and communists to vote for Cornel West: “Hurting the Democratic Party is essential for revolutionaries, & voting Cornel West is our best way to do this”
At this moment, the best thing we can do to weaken the Democratic Party’s monopoly over organizing spaces is back Cornel West. Communists should vote for him not because he’s a communist, which he isn’t, but because voting for him will have an impact that advances our cause. What it will do is greatly expand the fissure that’s long been developing within the country’s left, the fissure that makes the communist movement better able to grow outside the DNC’s influence.
Here, a few years ago (12!!):
Cornel West praises Occupy Seattle movement at Green River Community College
Princeton professor, author and activist Cornel West urged the 300 people who gathered for his Nov. 16 talk at Green River Community College to go beyond getting credentialed and pursue a “deep education.”
It would not be easy, he warned his audience, about half of them students: “In the process of being educated you have to learn how to die in order to live.”
Drawing on Plato and Malcom X, West said the death process is part of real education — paideia — a concept developed by Socrates that means deep, critical thinking.
It is the antithesis of contemporary culture: “The problem in American society is we are a culture of death-denying, death-dodging… a joyless culture where pleasure-seeking replaces what it means to be human.”
Fresh from a trip to Occupy Seattle earlier in the day, West praised the movement, which he said represents “a deep democratic awakening where people are finding the courage to find their voice.”
Greed has corroded society, he said.
“Market moralities and mentalities — fueled by economic imperatives to make a profit at nearly any cost — yield unprecedented levels of loneliness, isolation and sadness. Our public life lies in shambles, shot through with icy cynicism and paralyzing pessimism. To put it bluntly, beneath the record-breaking stock markets on Wall Street and bipartisan budget-balancing deals in the White House, lurk ominous clouds of despair across this nation.”
West said that in this age of fear, economic instability and employment challenges, young people must learn “to have a love of wisdom, love of your neighbors and love of justice.”
Such love, embedded in our cultural and social justice traditions, is powerful, he said.
“That Coltrane love, that subversive love. It’s there in the Occupy Wall Street movement. … When it’s organized and mobilized, love is a threat.”
+—+
Ahh, that dirty Nation Magazine: “Cornel West Should Not Be Running for President” He doesn’t see a third party playing a spoiler role to Democrats as bad—and that’s inevitable.
Even Newsweek does a tad bit better in their bad-bad writing:
And within that group, most favors heightened government intervention in solving social problems, higher corporate taxes, and a higher federal minimum wage at a time Biden has largely been forced to compromise with a conservative—if fractured—majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.
West—a several-times surrogate for Sanders’ campaigns—seeks to take ownership of progressive policy issues from what he describes as the “milquetoast” progressivism of the Biden administration, which he claims is ill-equipped to overcome the policies of the right. And by embracing those policy positions, he claims, he’ll be able to win over those on the left and right alike.
“You cannot defeat Neo fascism by milquetoast neoliberalism,” West said Monday. “There’s no way you can do it. You’ve got to get at the roots of it. You’ve got to bring vision and passion to convince people not to follow Neo fascist Pied Pipers, but actually let them know that there are persons on the so called left—which is simply to say persons of integrity, honesty and decency—looking at the world through the lens of poor and working people. That’s really what it is. So I don’t want to get into the labels. I’m talking about the substance.”
Desert Pete was lost in a desert and dying of thirst when he found an old water pump. Next to the water pump was a note and a jar full of water. Travelers were warned in the note not to drink the water but to use it to prime the pump. If they did this, having faith in the person who wrote the note and built the pump, they would be rewarded with plenty of fresh, cool water to quench their thirst and enough to fill the jar for the next traveler.
Many desperate travelers surely were tempted to forget about priming the pump and thought to immediately drink the water readily available. But, that’s what a Taker would do, and you can see the detrimental effect that would have on those who came after.
It becomes a matter of faith, trust, and a decision about how to live when faced with a situation like the thirsty traveler, but when we choose to live like Leavers the note promises there will be water for all!
25 years ago, Daniel Quinn published the novel, Ishmael. This revolutionary book was awarded the 1991 Turner Tomorrow Fellowship, which was established to encourage authors to seek “creative and positive solutions to global problems.” Quinn’s message has transformed the lives of millions of readers who feel inspired to share the story with family, friends, neighbors and acquaintances. Listen for a conversation with Daniel Quinn about Ishmael, writing and where we go from here.
In March, more than 80 organisations and academics working on climate action called on the EU to reject voluntary carbon credit schemes as a solution to the climate crisis, after it was revealed that 90% of forest carbon credits sold by the certifier, Verra, are largely worthless. These ‘phantom’ credits, which companies buy to ‘offset’ their carbon emissions rather than changing their business models, make global warming worse.
This is not news to many farming and Indigenous communities in the global south, where carbon credit schemes have been operating since at least the early 1990s. These schemes are not just flawed as climate solutions; they have perpetrated devastating human rights abuses and land grabs. In Uganda, a forest carbon ‘restoration’ scheme run by Dutch NGO Face the Future evicted thousands of people using paramilitary rangers and soldiers so the forest could be ring-fenced for carbon credits. In East Africa, pastoralist Indigenous Samburu, Borana and Rendille people are under threat from the Northern Rangeland Trust’s (NRT) carbon offset project. Community-led conservation must be embraced, and green colonialism rejected; small-scale farmers and Indigenous peoples continue to be disproportionately affected by the ‘green rush’. (source)
Leavers: Farm Land Grab!
This website contains news about the global rush to buy or lease farmlands by agribusiness, governments and financial investors — and people’s resistance against it. Its purpose is to serve as a resource for those monitoring, researching or organising around the issue, particularly activists, non-government organisations and journalists. It was initially set up by GRAIN, to share evidence of the new global farmland grab documented in Seized: The 2008 land grab for food and financial security.
Starting in 2023, we have expanded the scope of the site to include land grabs for carbon farming. These are corporate initiatives that take land away from local communities in order to produce carbon credits, which are used by companies to offset their climate emissions, for international markets. Our coverage of this trend is limited to cases that involve the grabbing of farmland for the large-scale planting of crops and/or trees and are contested by local communities.
“You tell the truth about catastrophe,” West said in his announcement on actor Russell Brand’s Stay Free podcast Monday.
“On the one hand, you authorize a different future in light of a different conception of time in the present, and then you improvise. And you improvise based on what? Because you love something bigger than yourself.”
Elephants in the room, man. If you do not look at who controls so many parts of those levers of power, and if you can’t recognize their goals, and see them as an enemy against humankind, then, you will be trampled slowly, a slow death under Casino-Chlamydia-Disaster-Penury-Polluting-War Mongering-Enslavement-Zombified Capitalism.
Daniel Quinn One of the great puzzles that people have is that when they tell someone about the book, they say “Well, what’s it about?” (laughs), and that’s really a difficult one. What people have told me is that it changed their life. Yeah, I’ve heard this a thousand times, I’m not making it up. And they thank me for showing them that they’re not crazy, because the people around them have been telling them for years that they’re crazy. Some people thank me for giving them hope, because it is a message that has a kernel of hope when I think hope is very desperately needed.
Rob Kall: Well, you wrote the book, and it won Ted Turner’s Tomorrow Fellowship Award, and the funny thing is, I remember ripping the ad announcing the contest out of the New York Times. I’ve had some fantasies of being a Science Fiction writer at different times in my life; I’ve never really done it, but then the next thing I know, you won that award.
Part of the requirements of that award was that it be a hopeful vision of the future. Did you write it thinking, “I’m going to write this for this contest,” or — how did it come about that you wrote it?
Daniel Quinn It began twelve years before that. I knew I had something to write, and that was desperately important. ‘Important’ means “What I was born to write.” And I wrote a book; it wasn’t what I wanted, and I wrote another one — call it ‘versions.’ Over the next twelve years, I wrote eight versions, each one striving to be the book that I wanted it to be, and I left behind all seven of them. The eighth one was Ishmael.
Ishmael was the first one that had a telepathic gorilla in it. All of the others were different. Oh, yeah — about the Turner Tomorrow Award: that was definitely a nudge in a direction that I hadn’t had before. My wife had been telling me for years that I should write it as a novel, and I’d resisted that, thinking that people wouldn’t take it seriously if I wrote it as a novel. But the Turner Tomorrow Award was looking for a book that described my book very well. So I wrote it for the first time as a novel, and that’s when Ishmael was born.
Rob Kall: Did you have contact with Ted Turner in response to this book?
Daniel Quinn Yes, some contact; a bit on to odd contact. He was not comfortable with me. I think it was partly because first, Ted set out on this thing, he wanted to do this thing, because he wanted to make a movie. He was looking for a novel he could use as the basis for a movie. And the first thing his advisers told him: “You can’t write a movie out of this book” – which is what the judges had given him. So he had spent two million dollars basically getting something that he couldn’t use. Of course, he wouldn’t say that to me at the time we met; and it’s funny that the person that I was most in contact with, who was the head of Turner Publishing, said “We’re sort of playing down the gorilla thing, you know – not talking about the gorilla.”
And I said “Well, OK…”
And so when I met Ted, the first thing he said to me was, “Why a Gorilla?” (laughs) And I burst out laughing! And I’m sure he thought I was laughing at him, whereas I was laughing at this other person, who had said “We are trying to keep this quiet!” And of course, “Why a gorilla?” has been a question that’s been asked of me almost everywhere ever. Everywhere I’ve ever been, someone has asked that question.
Rob Kall: Why a gorilla?
Daniel Quinn Why a gorilla? Because what was needed was a voice from the living community, but not a human voice, and the gorilla was the first thing that came to mind. It couldn’t have been a pelican, or a shark, or a deer. It had to be a figure that would be believable, and carry weight; and of course, a gorilla carries a lot of weight.
My Ishmael: A Sequel
Unbeknownst to the narrator of Ishmael, a second pupil responded to the ad in the paper – twelve-year-old Julie Gerchak, whose interaction with Ishmael results in a dialogue strikingly different from the one found in Ishmael.
When Ishmael placed an advertisement for pupils with “an earnest desire to save the world,” he does not expect a child to answer him. But twelve-year-old Julie Gerchak is undaunted by Ishmael’s reluctance to teach someone so young, and convinces him to take her on as his next student.
Ishmael knows he can’t apply the same strategies with Julie that he used with his first pupil, Alan Lomax – nor can he hope for the same outcome. But young Julie proves that she is ready to forge her own spiritual path – and arrive at her own destination. And when the time comes to choose a pupil to carry out his greatest mission yet, Ishmael makes a daring decision – a choice that just might change the world.
An excerpt from My Ishmael:
“You know,” I said, “there’s something you could do that would help me a lot. I don’t know if I have any business asking, but there it is.”
Ishmael frowned. “Have I given you the impression that my program here is not subject to change? Do I really seem to you so rigid that I’m unwilling to accommodate you?”
Oops, I said to myself, but after thinking about it for bit, I decided not to be apologetic. I said to him, “It’s probably been a long time since you were a twelve-year-old girl talking to a thousand-pound gorilla.”
“I don’t see what my weight has to do with it,” he snapped.
“Well, all right, a hundred-year-old gorilla.”
“I’m not a hundred years old, and I weigh less than six hundred pounds.”
“Good Lord,” I said. “This is beginning to sound like something from Alice in Wonderland.” Ishmael chuckled and asked me what he could do that would be helpful.
“Tell me what you think the world would be like if we actually did manage to ‘start living a different way.’”
And so it goes, modern day pastoralists:
“Interview with Maasai pastoralist Ole Mepukori”/ FEB 26, 2023
Thank you for agreeing to this interview, Ole.
Grateful for the opportunity.
We’re going to speak today about pastoralism and how wildlife conservation poses a threat to this livelihood. But first could you explain briefly what pastoralism is in an African context?
Pastoralism is life. It is our lived reality. It is food, healthcare, social protection, dowry, housing. Basically without pastoralism we die.
For someone who hasn’t been to Kenya, could you explain what parks like Tsavo, location of the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, look like and the place of the Maasai and their livestock in these Protected Areas, historically and in the present day?
The Tsavo National Park covers an area 22,000 km², approximately 3.78% of Kenya. Growing up, we would move our cattle herds to the Tsavo when droughts were too harsh. Before this expansive grassland was carved out and protected, they were dry season pasture lands for the Maasai people. Our forebears grew up, lived, thrived, raised families and died here.
Our people call this rich grassland Olaililai. The name Tsavo is a colonial erasure of history and the history of the people. To the oppressors we did not exist and we still do not exist.
The soil is sandy and the grass cover is lush during the wet season and very nutritious for the cattle. It is a very hard environment when it is dry. Water is scarce and livestock move long distances to the watering points.
You recently had livestock impounded. Could you tell us more about this event and how the denial of pasture rights for your herds impacts both your livestock and your livelihood?
The policy to impound Maasai livestock in the Tsavo has been ongoing for about a decade. Before that they used to arrest the herders and impose fines. They would also use low flying fixed wing planes to round up and chase down the cattle off the park. They would pour corrosive chemicals on the cows from the planes. Our people lost huge numbers of cows to this.
This two-pronged strategy failed as a deterrence and they introduced huge cattle prisons in the parks. As we speak, there is a permanent fixed wing plane that spots and chases down the cattle, boots on the ground of ferocious drug-fuelled and heavily armed rangers who show no mercy to unarmed Maasai cattle herders and the cattle prisons where impounded livestock go to die of starvation and thirst.
Impounding livestock and issuing fines is nothing new, but you have said that the situation is now getting worse. What are the reasons for this do you think and what do you see as a long-term solution to these problems and how can others best support this fight?
Yes, these actions to deny our people right to pasture have been ongoing since 1948. But local arrangements were made especially during the President Moi regime to allow controlled grazing of Maasai cattle herds in the Tsavo.
Things changed during the President Kibaki regime and got worse during the Uhuru Kenyatta Presidency. The policy to completely finish off pastoralism as an economic system took hold in the last decade.
The Kenya Wildlife Service and the conservation organizations that work directly in the protected areas like the Sheldrick Trust have more funding from carbon offset financing to execute their nefarious mandates to dispossess and violently evict the Maasai people.
What we want is access to pasture and water for our livestock during difficult times of drought. We can work together to have controlled grazing plans in times of pasture stress like now. The Maasai people play host to huge numbers of wildlife in community controlled areas and we don’t understand why the Kenya Wildlife Service is showing bias towards the Maasai.
Our call to allies and partners across the world is to add their voice and shine light on the ongoing injustices against the Maasai people. The rangelands is home to both the Maasai and the iconic elephants. We must not allow the Kenya Wildlife Service and their eco-fascists backers to poison the savannah.
We call on citizens of the world to fund our legal actions against these rogue agencies and NGOs and our political action to change the laws and policies that govern conservation.
As a pastoralist in Kenya, what are your views on this?
Carbon credit financing and carbon offset projects are opening new war fronts against pastoralists. They basically want us off our lands to execute their nature-based solutions that will allow the global corporations to continue the destruction of the planet. We will resist but first we must survive the current onslaught against the Maasai cattle, our only source of livelihood.
Thank you so much for your time. Hope what you have shared with us will pique the interest of both Africans and Westerners, and encourage more to scratch beneath the surface of the images and narratives of “wild Africa” presented to us by the likes of Attenborough and Goodall, as well as the deceptive rhetoric behind carbon credits and nature-based solutions. Where can readers/listeners hear more from you?
Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak and share our lived experiences in the Maasai Rangelands of Africa.
Paul Haeder, Author 
