As I watch the world descend into COMPLETE insanity and disaster, I've started to think that the times we're living through are going to be world-transforming in a very bad way. We have the self-created threat of global warming, with all the feedback-loops in place and our governments and oligarchs are still pursuing a policy of denial and profit-taking. We have a worldwide pandemic that most of the OECD nations have decided to treat as a minor annoyance to be dealt with in a half-assed (at best) way. We have placed the profits of the pharmaceutical industries ahead of human lives by upholding patent protections for vaccines over the mass vaccination campaign that is so clearly required. The same percentage of the population that would vote for stupid grifters like stephen harper, Donald Trump, Jason Kenney, Rob Ford, etc., are, meanwhile, still convinced that the virus is a hoax, that wearing a cloth mask equals submission to totalitarianism and that vaccines are evil. By our own choice (collectively) we have decided to let the virus roam at will, infecting people and mutating itself, while we deny the risk that any of these mutations might become something beyond our control.
And then, ...
And then there's the completely deliberate orchestration of a world war between the NATO countries (plus maybe Japan, South Korea and Australia) against Russia and China.
[Take a look at this map of the world showing the countries that have imposed sanctions upon Russia and those that have not:]
Contrary to the breathless propaganda of a humanity united against the unprecedented evil of Valdimir Putin's Russia, almost the entire Southern Hemisphere has opted out. You could argue that my source for this map is a pro-Russian propaganda website but that doesn't change the level of accuracy of the map. My quick search of news sites confirmed that the list of countries matches the information provided by the map. India has been resisting US pressure to sanction Russia.
Also, contrary to the corporate news' propaganda, these sanctions on Russia aren't just going to hurt Russia. All you are hearing is that Russia's economy has fallen into a death-spiral under the hammer blows of the sanctions imposed by the human rights defenders of the West, led by the exceptional, essential nation, the United States of America. But make no mistake: This economic warfare is going to impose massive inflation on the entire world and European countries that depend on Russia fossil fuels are going to suffer. As a level of just how desperate the USA is to find other sources of fossil-fuel sources, the USA has gone to Venezuela's President Maduro [Wait! Why aren't they talking to Juan Guano??] to see about access to his country's oil. Also, they're moving quickly to welcome Iran's oil back into the international community.
I know for certain that Saudi Arabia's Clown Prince Bonesaw and the privileged asswipes running the UAE have refused to listen to Grandpa Biden's calls to increase oil production.
What you have to understand is that Joe Biden is an idiot. He's always been an idiot. His career has been pandering to racists about school integration; serving the sleazebags who used his state of Delaware to escape taxation and engage in money laundering. He passed a bankruptcy bill that immiserated millions of US-American and a crime bill that produced a massive increase in the US prison population. He genuinely [and therefore stupidly] believed that US Social Security was unsustainable and spent years trying to cut into it. He voted for the invasion of Iraq.
His Secretary of State Antony Blinken is an anti-Arab racist, delusional imbecile who is able to speak out loud about the dangers of Iran "destabilizing" the Middle East without dying of embarrassment.
That two such arrogant, hypocritical fantasists could have started an economic war without having fully throught through the ramifications seems to me entirely possible.
Well, that's all I feel like writing about this morning.
2 comments:
I actually think the climate change thing is going to work out . . . well, pretty bad, but not worst-case. The thing is that renewables, solar in particular, and also electric cars, seem to be working kind of like Covid: Exponential growth starting from just a few cases. Year after year, every year on average there's like one and a half or something times as much installed as the year before, but so far it still doesn't look like that much because it only recently beat the one or two percent mark. Up to now, the impact has been smaller than the impact of economic growth, so fossil fuel use has kept on growing.
But you iterate that for a few more times, and suddenly you have masses of people dying of Covid, or in this case masses of coal plants, natural gas plants, and gas and diesel vehicles dying of cleaner alternatives. And that in turn will accelerate the process more, because the fossil fuel lobbies will be shrinking; lower demand for their product will both mean they're smaller in absolute terms and tend to dump the price, lowering their margins dramatically. So their political control will slip, even as the political clout of the clean-stuff lobbies increase, creating much more room for sane policy. And the car lobby will stop caring about fossil fuels because they'll be making as much money from electric cars.
All of this still won't get us enough transit, or various other good climate-related stuff. And it's too late to avoid much more climate change than we want to see. But still, I can see writing on chunks of the wall.
Admittedly, none of this will save us if world war III happens.
PLG,
All of that good stuff depends upon the unavoidable feedback loops that we're both well aware of: melting permafrost leading to methane escaping; Arctic and Antarctic meltdowns raising sea levels; the impact of droughts, wildfires and species extinctions on civilization; etc., ... all of that not outrunning our ability to craft renewable energy sources for an ecologically sustainable society.
I might make a post for tomorrow about this whole military thing. It's a fact that I don't care if I die before I finish typing this sentence. But a lot of the people consumed with war fever (especially the liberal folks I can get along with) don't actually want to die. But their glib agreement with all the talk about enforcing no-fly zones over the Ukraine kind of cancels out their desire for self-preservation.
Post a Comment