You’re Witnessing the Death of American Capitalism
A very mainstream and slickly produced source tells you what you already know.
I have very little patience for the whimpering blue No-Kings nonsense about how Trump is the one bad actor bent on destroying freedom. He’s all that, for sure, but some of your favorite boss men are no different.
From the point of view of capital, the eradication of freedom is a feature of the system, not a bug.
Capital doesn’t give a shit who you vote for, so long as it owns every candidate.
Which it does.
Yay, ‘democracy’.
***
Thriving in the Human Hellscape
This is nominally a feel-good story about a few species who are suffering less rather than more, in the horrible world we’ve built.
But for every species on the margin that is arguably doing better, there are a dozen doing worse, and another dozen going extinct, and …
It’s still a literal hellscape, regardless.
***
Has Earth Already Crossed MAJOR Tipping Points?
~nods~
***
Because in essence, permafrost melting leads to melting permafrost and runaway methane plumes.
Methane is 85 times more potent at creating greenhouses effects, compared to the CO2 we’re instructed to fret about endlessly.
Arctic Sinkholes : NOVA on PBS
New Evidence We Are Entering An Ice Age Termination Event
In my heart I feel that if “we” somehow manage to dodge every bullet and survive the apocalypse, that wouldn’t even be a triumph, but rather a crime against natural justice, like prematurely granting parole to a mass murderer.
It’s very cheering no doubt to indulge ourselves in the Voyages of the Starship Enterprise, and meddle by proxy in the affairs of other worlds; all the worse and inferior species across the galaxy, infecting them with the same rot that’s killing everything meanwhile here in the real world.
I choose to indulge instead in the cold comfort of knowing we’ll never get the chance to fuck up any second Eden.
***
Sometimes of late you’ve implied that I need to forget all that and focus on the Beauty of this World.
It’s not much, but here’s the best I can do at the moment.
I instinctively love these mountains and I choose to think of myself as almost-native to them.
I’ve stumbled across a better name for them, and that does make me happy.
Their rightful name, in my twisted little view, is:
The Cordillera.
Without the capitalization, it’s a generic term for any chain of ranges.
But near here, and for a long way north and south, from the furthest tip of so-called south america and perhaps beyond, up to the rugged Arctic Circle, the capitalization is earned.
Cordillera
is particularly applied to the various large mountain systems of the American Cordillera, such as the Andes of South America, and way up clear into at least the Brooks Range in Alaska.
The etymology says it means: Rope.
Thus am I bound unto it for life. See the derivations for the word: religion. If you want.
The difference between abiding out here on the relative flatness of the Colorado Plateau, and moving to Silver, is that down there I would be nestled in the heart of La Cordilla Madre, instead of out on its fringes.
Home Base.
The only trips I really care about now are ones up and down the Rope. I wouldn’t mind seeing the Yukon parts of it, nor the Costa Rican ones, nor Bolivia and Tierra del Fuego.
Those adventures are optional and speculative. None of them will happen until I am towing my bed and kitchen, and most of them will never happen at all, in this life.
Keep your Greece. Keep your Spain. Good for you and all, but those were always just pipe dreams in the life I’ve lived, and I don’t need them any more.
Just bury my heart at Mangas Springs, or out on the edge of the peaks of the Wind River, and that’ll be plenty enough for this soul.
***
Rupert Read: civilisation is finished: so what is to be done?
Yes. And.
Dr. Read’s co-author, Manda Scott, said it simpler still three days ago as of this writing.
Forget about the heat spiking because methane continues to pour ever more rapidly into the atmosphere.
Forget about the plastics in the brain, and the for-profit carcinogens in the rain, and the starving people and the ugliness and the AI going rogue.
Let’s imagine that all that doesn’t matter in the end because the oceans are dead by 2045. A very real possibility.
Dead oceans means they don’t replenish the oxygen supply, and that supply drops by 50 percent, and keeps dropping
and those of us who breathe air suffocate.
How I wonder does one prep for that?
Personally, I am compelled to believe that this 20-year clock is ticking for me whether any of these particular varieties of armageddon befall us or not.
All I have is this moment, and at the outside either way maybe a couple more decades of such moments.
This is true more or less for all of us individually, and possibly true for the species as a collective too.
Awaken?
Awaken, and Resist.