almost every aspect of this pathetic life is based on shekels and dimes and trillion$ misspent, all going to the wrong causes, and the worthy projects begging for dollars, and so many mired in bureaucracy
I was attempting to do this in person, this meeting of the Mid-Coast Watershed Council [read: “Fish Do Grow on Trees” ], but my bridge across one of these estuaries was clogged from the death of a motorcyclist who was hit head on by a truck. I turned around since the meeting would have been a bit of a stretch getting there on time.
I succumbed to the Zoom Doom.
The speakers above, talked, and of course, this entire issue of marsh restoration and the work around resilience in a time of rising seas and over-developing along shorelines, and the rampant destruction of habitat (read, HOME) for salmon, et al, and this idea of more and more species are failing because estuaries have been for decades plowed over, diked off, cut off, rerouted because of roads, homes and logging — it all is parsed out penny by penny, because Timber and Microchip and Tourism and Second Home Building are KING in Oregon.
Good people for sure, but this is just one drop in the one of a million buckets that need funding and work on, and the amount of money available for studies (god, so many fucking studies, so many talking circles, so many white papers, so many PowerPoints, so many planning action plans, so many groups and stakeholders), that, it is a drop in the bucket.
And so, here I am juxtaposed against the reality of people in this country, still working on their worthy projects, not questioning what they really think about at night with this rampant and destructive CAPITALISM, i.e. WAR capitalism . . . and what do they really believe about this country’s anti-exceptionalist exceptionalism? There are huge wars brewing, and trillion$ sent to the corrupt and worthless country, Ukraine, and alas, all those big plans for high tide mitigation and all those talks at universities and with non-profits about restoring salmon, wolves, eels, it’s all moot.
Amatuer stuff, compared to the daily stream of diarrhea.
Example A = “Carbon markets are ‘bogus solutions’ as rich world keeps polluting, African Climate Summit is told”
A Nigerian environmental activist declared Wednesday at the first African Climate Summit that carbon markets are “bogus solutions,” providing a sharp reminder that not all of Africa’s 1.3 billion people support richer countries using the continent’s green spaces to offset continued polluting at home.
“We reject forced solutions on our land,” Dr. Priscilla Achakpa, founder of the Nigeria-based Women Environmental Programme, told summit participants on the event’s final day. She urged the so-called “Global North” to “remove yourself from the perspective of the colonial past.”
Absolutely, man, the entire project of exploiting and evicerating Africa will stop, and all those so-called resources for a green new fascist digitized and handcuffed world are not up for sale.
Example B = Greenhouse Gases And Global Sea Levels Hit Record Highs, According To New NOAA Report
Three key climate change indicators set records in 2022, according to an annual report released Wednesday from the National Oceanographic Atmospheric Administration.
Concentrations of global greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere were the highest they’ve been since record-keeping began in the late 1800s. Sea levels and ocean heat content were also at their maximum on record.
“Greenhouse gas emissions make temperatures warmer, both on land and in oceans, and drive rising sea levels,” weather.com meteorologist Ari Sarsalari said. “All of that contributes to more extreme weather as well as worse impacts from things like hurricanes and heavy rainfall events.”
For fuck’s sake, this story is empty of the real grist for the mill — billionaires gone wild, and the party hardy AI-VR-MR-AR motherfuckers of the world wanting more and more AI and cloudservers and 5 G arrays and satellites and charging stations and, well, they want their own cities in the desert, too.
Now now, who is coming to our rescue? The Military Destruction Industrial Complex and all their fuckers? Action plans, non-profits, lots of studies, but lives and homes and habitats are destroyed.
Example C = Oh, those investors.
‘Pure Garbage’: School Cafeterias Start Serving Up Big Food’s Lunchables.
Two Kraft Heinz ready-to-eat prepackaged Lunchables are being added to K-12 school lunch programs across the U.S. this fall. Kraft Heinz — which is primarily owned by institutional shareholders, the top four being Berkshire Hathaway, BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street — is a partner of the School Nutrition Association.
School nutrition guidelines written and overseen by WHO?
Example D = Russia decries U.S. plan to send Ukraine depleted uranium rounds/The announcement coincides with top U.S. diplomat Antony Blinken’s visit to Kyiv in a gesture of support amid the ongoing counteroffensive.
Oh, all those wonky scientists, all those planners, all these nights out to discuss our little river estuaries, and the few millions of dollars spread out over the entire state and five coast counties, but the real problem is, US . . . U$A. And this isn’t the background noise of our time? Radioactive gifts delivered to Ukraine/Russia with all those tax dollars that should be used for climate chaos mitigation?
Sick, a world of planners planning with the billionaires how Ukraine will be cut up and parsed out and where the hot zones will be and which land is mined (explosive) for centuries and which soil is the best for more pig fodder wheat and oats and, well, we know what is happening, but I have a sinking feeling most of the people I talk with and who are into this environmental “thing” here on the coast are full throttle Biden Blinken sychphants. TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) afflicted, or worse, and lesser of evils thinkers, and so I wonder what gets them thinking hard at the end of the day? Sure, bean counters and outdoor surveying is cool, sometimes, all that is part of the daily grind, I know, a job is a job, but how in the world do they take these fucking sick stories? USA irradiating — through nanoparticles — entire swaths of humanity?
Climate change my ASS =
Is this just retrograde thinking? The world IS warming/going to warm above 2 C, and that has much to do with solar activity, albedo effect lessening, feedback loops, and where civilizations have sited, and where they need to move away from so where is that mighty Marshall Plan for Planet B?
That is the new abnormal normal — climate anxiety disorder, among many other ailments. And so, what’s this USA and killing the Russians and Chinese about?
Coral islands are contracting, causing habitat loss in the Solomon
Eroding wetland at Towra Point in Sydney
Example F = US military planning to fund fleets of ‘small, smart, cheap’ drones/ The Pentagon is considering adding AI-powered systems to its surveillance and defense network.
And we get the springy and loving voice of this female military monster here:
According to The Wall Street Journal, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks said the Department of Defense plans to develop AI systems “intended to be small, smart, [and] cheap” to counter threats from China and other countries.
The Journal said Hicks will announce plans to add more capabilities to the country’s network of drones and sensors that monitor military activities in other countries. One such possibility is a fleet of solar-powered “distributed pods of self-propelled [autonomous] systems” that can provide near-real-time information. The department may also look into autonomous ground-based and space-based networks for logistics and defense.
These are dual-use monsters, and no number of community meetings about reseliency will do squat since this society, Western Society, is a Warring Society.
Drones? Or sea walls? Fucking Orwellian Triple Speak = “distributed pods of self-propelled [autonomous] systems”
The proposal includes funding for 3,447 new air, ground, and sea drones
Just how much money is in the taxpayers’ pot for assisting with climate disasters, with the stormwaters, the storms, with all those kiddos hobbled with health issues?
Lufthansa, a la Volkswagen and BMW and Nazi Germany, is in it for that MONEY. How much has the German taxpayer subsidized that Nazi company?
Getting hot under you collar yet? All those systems in place to mitigate the pain, the deaths?
Example G = UK heatwave: Hottest day of year as temperatures top 32C but Met Office warns it could go higher Thousands will die! Thousands do die because of sanctions, lack of global effort to electrify Africa, and then even First World UK, all those white bodies can’t take the spike in hot air!
Example H = How about those turbo cancers [ Our research set out to check the reliability of a Chinese study that claimed that if certain species of mice were given too high a dosage of the Pfizer vaccine this could result in inflammation of their heart muscles. We injected 14 mice with the vaccine twice in two weeks. Another group of mice were injected with placebos”.
Two days after the mice had been given a second dose the scientists found one of the mice that had been given the Pfizer vaccine dead in its cage. “The animal had developed lymphoma. We found this striking, so we published a report. This provided the impetus for further research,” Mr Eens told VRT News. ]
A few weeks after publication Mr Eens and his colleagues’ study went viral as antivaxxers claimed that it was “proof” of the existence of so-called “turbo cancer”.caused by mRNA? ]
Or, before = New study finds alarming rise in cancer rates among people under 50
Researchers examined data from 204 countries between 1990 and 2019. They found that there were more than 3.26 million early-onset cancer cases reported in those countries in 2019, up from 1.82 million in 1990, an increase of 79.1%.
Example I = More of those dialing for billion$ down the DARPA and DoD and Billionaires’ drain = The federal government has a $22 million surveillance clothing program, according to The Intercept.
The initiative will develop shirts, pants, socks, and underwear that can record audio and video.
If viable, the washable garments will be used by US intelligence employees or those in high-stress environments.
Yep, wetlands mitigation, my ass =
So the rich motherfuckers, the Titans, the thieves, the robbers, the smash and grab artists, the bait and switch masters, the extortion ring leaders, the armed stick up bros and chicks, you betcha! EU and Europe, now, now many premature deaths?
Example J = Air pollution: Nearly everyone in Europe breathing bad air
Fucking Biden-Blinken-Nuland-Obama-Trump-Harris-Yellen-Garland-Kagan . . . . Criminals of a third blind eye kind
Virtually everyone in Europe lives in polluted towns and cities where annual average levels of fine particulate matter are higher than the World Health Organization’s (WHO) recommended limit.
In practical terms, this means that almost everyone on the continent is breathing bad air that has been shown to be fatal.
Air pollution increases the risk of respiratory and heart disease and lowers life expectancy.
“With the current levels of air pollution, many people [are getting] sick. We know that lowering air pollution levels reduces these numbers,” said Mark Nieuwenhuijsen, director of the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal).
And, alas, it is Barbarism and Savagery, for sure. Shoulda-coulda-woulda chosen the socialism route, the route where people and planet and groupings and regions and a global discussion and global planning coulda woulda shoulda been advanced in 1945 after USA bombed the shit out of civilians.
This is all about the money, man, so much money to be had by those investors and those hedge funders and all those CEOs and it is what is polluting the world.
Jesus was referring to that needle in saying it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to gain eternal life (Matthew 19:24; Mark 10:25; Luke 18:25). The Persians expressed the concept of the impossible by saying it would be easier to put an elephant through the eye of a needle. The camel was a Jewish adaptation (the largest animal in Israel was a camel).
Since wealth was seen as proof of God’s approval, it was commonly taught by the rabbis that rich people were blessed by God and were, therefore, the most likely candidates for heaven. Jesus destroyed that notion, and along with it, the idea that anyone can earn eternal life. The disciples had the appropriate response to this startling statement. They were utterly amazed and asked,
“Who then can be saved?” in the next verse. If the wealthy among them, which included the super-spiritual Pharisees and scribes, were unworthy of heaven, what hope was there for a poor man?
Jesus’ answer is the basis of the gospel: “With man this is impossible, but not with God; all things are possible with God” (Matthew 19:26). Men are saved through God’s gifts of grace, mercy, and faith (Ephesians 2:8-9). Nothing we do earns salvation for us. It is the poor in spirit who inherit the kingdom of God (Matthew 5:3), those who recognize their spiritual poverty and their utter inability to do anything to justify themselves to a holy God. The rich man so often is blind to his spiritual poverty because he is proud of his accomplishments and has contented himself with his wealth. He is as likely to humble himself before God as a camel is to crawl through the eye of a needle.
“Advent” by Suzanne Underwood Rhodes
Through the needle’s eye
the rich man came
squeezing through stars of razor light
that pared his body down to thread.
Gravity crushed his heart’s chime
and his breath that breathed out worlds
now flattened as fire between walls,
the impossible slit stripped him
admitting him
to stitch the human breach.
This poem was first published in What a Light Thing, This Stone (Sow’s Ear Press, 1999) and is used here by permission of the author.
[Grace Carol Bomer (Canadian American, 1948–), Through the Needle’s Eye the Rich Man Came, 1993. Mixed media on torn canvas on wood, 48 × 48 in.]
In their book Snakes in Suits, Paul Babiak and Robert Hare point out that as the old corporate bureaucracies have been replaced by flexible, ever-changing structures, and as team players are deemed less valuable than competitive risk-takers, psychopathic traits are more likely to be selected and rewarded. Reading their work, it seems to me that if you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a poor family, you’re likely to go to prison. If you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a rich family, you’re likely to go to business school.
Let’s say you’re about to hire somebody for a position in your company. Your corporation wants someone who’s fearless, charismatic, and full of new ideas. Candidate X is charming, smart, and has all the right answers to your questions. Problem solved, right? Maybe not.
We’d like to think that if we met someone who was completely without conscience — someone who was capable of doing anything at all if it served his or her purposes — we would recognize it. In popular culture, the image of the psychopath is of someone like Hannibal Lecter or the BTK Killer. But in reality, many psychopaths just want money, or power, or fame, or simply a nice car. Where do these psychopaths go? Often, it’s to the corporate world.
Researchers Paul Babiak and Robert Hare have long studied psychopaths. Hare, the author of Without Conscience, is a world-renowned expert on psychopathy, and Babiak is an industrial-organizational psychologist. Recently the two came together to study how psychopaths operate in corporations, and the results were surprising. They found that it’s exactly the modern, open, more flexible corporate world, in which high risks can equal high profits, that attracts psychopaths. They may enter as rising stars and corporate saviors, but all too soon they’re abusing the trust of colleagues, manipulating supervisors, and leaving the workplace in shambles.
Snakes in Suits is a compelling, frightening, and scientifically sound look at exactly how psychopaths work in the corporate environment: what kind of companies attract them, how they negotiate the hiring process, and how they function day by day. You’ll learn how they apply their “instinctive” manipulation techniques — assessing potential targets, controlling influential victims, and abandoning those no longer useful — to business processes such as hiring, political command and control, and executive succession, all while hiding within the corporate culture. It’s a must read for anyone in the business world, because whatever level you’re at, you’ll learn the subtle warning signs of psychopathic behavior and be able to protect yourself and your company — before it’s too late.
Are rich people psychopaths? If you can’t answer that yes, then you are Turbo Dumdowned Diseased. Get help!
The data are stark and compelling. The richest 400 families in the United States own financial assets that exceed the wealth of the bottom 60% of all American households combined. U.S. billionaires pay taxes at a lower effective rate than working class families. The CEOs of S&P 500 companies, averaging over $14 million in annual compensation, make roughly as much in a single day as their median employee earns in an entire year. At the same time, research shows that such extreme inequality between rich and poor is a driving force behind many of society’s most profound and corrosive ills. These disparities are associated with diminished levels of physical health, mental health, educational achievement, social mobility, trust, and community life. They’re also linked to heightened levels of infant mortality, obesity, drug abuse, crime, violence, and incarceration.
In light of these realities, it’s no surprise that some political leaders are calling for dramatic policy changes designed to tamp down economic inequality. Equally unsurprising, some members of the so-called billionaire class in this country are outraged by these proposals. Responding to Senator Bernie Sanders’s comment that he doesn’t think billionaires should exist, Stephen Schwarzman — the billionaire CEO of the private equity firm Blackstone Group — told a New York City audience, “Maybe Bernie Sanders shouldn’t exist.” On the Fox Business Network, Ken Langone, the billionaire co-founder of Home Depot, angrily called Sanders a “blowhard” and asked, “What the hell has he done for the little people?” And CNBC host Jim Cramer reported that Wall Street executives — privately discussing the aspirations of Senator Elizabeth Warren — had told him “she’s got to be stopped.”
Complaints like these are nothing new from America’s super-rich. Almost a decade ago, Schwarzman (noted above) compared the possible elimination of a favorable hedge fund tax loophole to “when Hitler invaded Poland.” A few years later, in a letter to the Wall Street Journal, now-deceased billionaire venture capitalist Tom Perkins wrote,
“I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its ‘one-percent,’ namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one-percent, namely the ‘rich.’”
And fellow billionaire Sam Zell told Bloomberg News,
“This country should not talk about envy of the one-percent. It should talk about emulating the one-percent.” (source)
Paul Haeder, Author 