Sunday 20 August 2023
It's a Con.
Thursday 16 November 2017
A Planet Of Crazy Apes.
I would imagine that to an alien species viewing our world from some far off galaxy, we would appear to be a savage, callous, self destructive animal, lacking compassion and in most cases reason. Our blood letting, over the centuries, across the planet, would turn all the oceans to a deep red. Our history is a litany of brutal wars, that never cease, of countless millions slaughtered, in the name of some false mantra.
Today we are at an extremely advanced state of technology, which could transform our world to a paradise on earth, but we use that technology to kill and control, all in the name of greed, personal wealth and power. Glance across our planet, and what you will see is the endless wars, engineered by greed, the stupidity of racism, and the desire for wealth and power.
Below is just a snapshot of some recent headlines, which doesn't include Lebanon. Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Afghanistan, Libya, and a host of other ongoing wars.
Thursday 13 February 2014
Paint Your Face With War Paint?
Read the full article HERE:In the Middle East, those questions look like birth defects from residuals of depleted Uranium. Beneath the Arab Spring lie unattainable food costs. In China, you have nets built around factories to prevent suicides and screens projecting sunrise and sunsets since you can’t see them through the smog. Throughout Latin America you have displaced villages and toxin spewing factories demolishing forests. Throughout the affluent nations, you have chronic debt, depression, and people buried under their possessions and gadgets as real world connections wither.You have a world overrun by resource wars, power grabs, ponzi schemes, crushed egos, isolation and separation induced anxiety and depression, suppressed populations, and unthinkable wealth. But you have no middle ground. You have no escape.
Monday 20 March 2023
It's a Con.
Their latest little pleasure trip is a three year cruise, that will visit 135 countries visiting all the continents on the planet. How this thundering hulk of steel carrying 1,074 passengers plus crew, ploughing its way across the world, burning fossil fuel 24 hours a day fits in with saving the planet must be the joke of the year.
The cruise will take place on the MV Gemini, which can accommodate up to 1,074 passengers. Cabin sizes range from 130 square feet for interior staterooms (which include a double bed, a bathroom, and a desk) to 260 square feet for balcony suites (which have an additional living room area).
Pricing, which includes all meals, drinks (both alcoholic and nonalcoholic), laundry, Wi-Fi, gratuities, housekeeping, and port fees, starts at $90,000 and go up to $330,000 based on accommodations.
Monday 5 November 2018
Spaceship Earth Has No Escape Capsule!!
The planet is not dying, it is being murdered, by corporate greed, and by our inaction, we are complicit. A fine gift for our grandchildren.
Humans are killing the planet, and we seem unable to stop. But hey, nobody's perfect. A recent report shows that since the 1970s our actions have caused the deaths of 60% of invertebrates. And the news is not good for insects, either.Visit ann arky's home at radicalglasgow.me.uk
Humanity is facing the most extreme challenges in 200,000 years, and no one seems worried enough to take any kind of meaningful and collective evasive action.
“We have known for many, many years that we are driving the planet to the very brink. This is not a doom and gloom story; it is reality. Our day-to-day life, health and livelihoods depend on a healthy planet. There cannot be a healthy, happy and prosperous future for people on a planet with a destabilized climate, depleted oceans and rivers, degraded land and empty forests, all stripped of biodiversity, the web of life.” - Marco Lambertini, director general of the WWF
The majority reaction is that "nobody's perfect", and that we will just have to ride this thing out and see what happens. Too bad about all the extinctions.
That is the all-too convenient truth, and it overrides all the inconvenient truths confronting us.
We are far from perfect, but approaching perfection is a goal we should continually strive toward. If we did, we could tackle all our challenges with creative, life-enhancing solutions. For a dumb species, we can be pretty smart when we want to, or when faced with imminent death.
We CAN do better, and we will have to. If we fail to act, and soon, before long it will be human populations crashing.
There is nothing convenient about that.
Sunday 22 September 2019
Our Home Is On Fire.
This from Void Network:
Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.ukWhile the Amazon burns, many other fires are burning across the world, some even larger and more widespread than those in the Amazon.
The fires in the Amazon have been among the top news stories in the world for the past week because it is such an iconic location that is so important to the global ecosystem. However, it is important to note that these events come at a time where many other fires are burning across the world, some even larger and more widespread than those in the Amazon.
The areas affected include Angola, Congo, Spain, Greece, Alaska, and Siberia.
The World Meteorological Organization announced that this fire season has been unprecedented for the Arctic Circle, with over 100 major fires reported in the region.
In Siberia, it has been reported that over 21,000 square miles of the forest were recently damaged. Some reports, from Global News and other outlets, have indicated that these fires were started intentionally to conceal illegal logging activities, but these reports have not been confirmed.
Also last week, the Greek island of Evia was under a state of emergency after multiple large fires broke out. Earlier this month, a huge fire in Russia’s Krasnoyarsk Territory damaged over 1 million hectares of forest.
Alaska and Greenland, both known for cold temperatures, have also faced serious fires this summer. Last month, Denmark sent a team of firefighters to Greenland to put out huge fires that were spreading across the island nation.
A fire in Spain’s Canary Islands cased 9,000 people to evacuate. Another Spanish island off the northern coast of Africa, Gran Canaria, lost about 46,000 square miles of woodland due to fires this year.
At this moment, it seems that the largest fires in the world are currently burning in Angola, Africa.
According to MODIS satellite data analyzed by Weather Source, 6,902 fires broke out in Angola in the 48 hours between August 21st and 23rd. During the same time, 3,395 fires were reported in the Democratic Republic of Congo and 2,127 in Brazil.
Large wildfires are not uncommon in Central Africa this time of year, but once again, many of these fires are intentionally set by humans attempting to clear space for agriculture businesses.
According to data from the NASA Aqua satellite, more than 67,000 fires were seen in just one week during June of last year.
Experts believe that most of these fires are the result of a farming technique, known as slash and burn, which as the name implies, involves the burning of forest to make room for crops. Obviously, there are other far less-reckless ways of getting the job done, but burning everything down just happens to be the fastest and the cheapest. The ash also provides nutrients to the crops that will eventually be planted, but environmentalists warn that this practice could cause deforestation, soil erosion and a loss of biodiversity.
Saturday 25 July 2020
Another Lie.
Read the full article HERE:Protecting the environment has surely got to be A Good Thing.
Creating “protected areas” for nature in various parts of the world might therefore seem to be a positive move.
However, when these areas are being promoted by the same capitalist system which brought nature to her knees in the first place, the alarm lights start flashing!
Protected Areas” are in fact one aspect of the global capitalist scam being sold to us under the label of the ‘New Deal for Nature’.
Because, in typical capitalist style, this scam has been wrapped up in shiny green packaging and promoted by the well-known WWF, the New Deal for Nature initially attracted little opposition.
But in recent weeks, thanks to the truth-spreading efforts of the No Deal for Nature campaign and its supporters, support has been slipping away.
The human rights charity Survival International has been doing a great job of blowing the whistle on what is nothing other than a new phase of industrial capitalist imperialism, aiming to displace indigenous peoples and further exploit Mother Nature for the profit of the usual tiny and greedy elite.
Warns Survival director Stephen Corry: “The latest idea to be heavily promoted by big conservation NGOs is doubling the world’s so-called ‘Protected Areas’ (PAs) so that they cover thirty percent of the globe’s lands and oceans.
“This is now their main rallying cry and response to two of the world’s biggest problems — climate chaos and loss of biodiversity.
“It’s a marketing gimmick designed to funnel even more money to those who have for decades demonstrated their failure to mitigate either climate change or biodiversity loss.
“Many PAs aren’t really protected at all. They include industrial exploitation — mining, logging, plantations, trophy hunting concessions, or extensive, usually high-end, tourist infrastructure.
“The locals are thrown out as the land is grabbed by one or other industry, partnering with one or other big conservation NGO.
“It’s a new colonialism, the world’s biggest land grab, supposedly ‘green’ and supposedly to save the world — a really big lie. As Odette, a Baka woman from Congo, says of such imposed conservation projects which don’t work, ‘We’ve had enough of this talk of ‘boundaries’ in the forest. The forest is ours’.”
The alert is also being sounded via the World Rainforest Movement, notably in a statement entitled “Protected Areas feed corporate profiting and destruction”.
Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk
Sunday 10 December 2017
"---The Madness Of Men."
A curious thing about H. sapiens is that we are clever enough to document — in exquisite detail — various trends that portend the collapse of modern civilization, yet not nearly smart enough to extricate ourselves from our self-induced predicament.
This was underscored once again in October when scientists reported that flying insect populations in Germany have declined by an alarming 75 per cent in the past three decades accompanied, in the past dozen years, by a 15 per cent drop in bird populations. Trends are similar in other parts of Europe where data are available. Even in Canada, everything from casual windshield “surveys” to formal scientific assessments show a drop in insect numbers. Meanwhile, domestic populations of many insect-eating birds are in freefall. Ontario has lost half its whip-poor-wills in the past 20 years; across the nation, such species as nighthawks, swallows, martins and fly-catchers are down by up to 75 per cent; Greater Vancouver’s barn and bank swallows have plummeted by 98 per cent since 1970. Heard much about these things in the mainstream news?
Too bad. Biodiversity loss may turn out to be the sleeper issue of the century. It is caused by many individual but interacting factors — habitat loss, climate change, intensive pesticide use and various forms of industrial pollution, for example, suppress both insect and bird populations. But the overall driver is what an ecologist might call the “competitive displacement” of non-human life by the inexorable growth of the human enterprise.
On a finite planet where millions of species share the same space and depend on the same finite products of photosynthesis, the continuous expansion of one species necessarily drives the contraction and extinction of others. (Politicians take note — there is always a conflict between human population/economic expansion and “protection of the environment.”)
Remember the 40 to 60 million bison that used to roam the great plains of North America? They — along with the millions of deer, pronghorns, wolves and lesser beasts that once animated prairie ecosystems — have been “competitively displaced,” their habitats taken over by a much greater biomass of humans, cattle, pigs and sheep. And not just North Americans — Great Plains sunshine also supports millions of other people-with-livestock around world who depend, in part on North American grain, oil-seed, pulse and meat exports.
Competitive displacement has been going on for a long time. Scientists estimate that at the dawn of agriculture 10,000 years ago, H. sapiens comprised less than one per cent of the total weight of mammals on the planet. (There were probably only two to four million people on Earth at the time.) Since then, humans have grown to represent 35 per cent of a much larger total biomass; toss in domestic pets and livestock, and human domination of the world’s mammalian biomass rises to 98.5 per cent!
One needs look no further to explain why wildlife populations globally have plunged by nearly 60 per cent in the past half century. Wild tigers have been driven from 93 per cent of their historic range and are down to fewer than 4,000 individuals globally; the population of African elephants has imploded by as much as 95 per cent to only 500,000 today; poaching drove black rhino numbers from an already much reduced 70,000 in 1960 to only 2,500 individuals in the early 1990s. (With intense conservation effort, they have since rebounded to about 5,000). And those who still think Canada is still a mostly pristine and under-populated wilderness should think again — half the wildlife species regularly monitored in this country are in decline, with an average population drop of 83 per cent since 1970. Did I mention that B.C.’s southern resident killer whale population is down to only 76 animals? That’s in part because human fishers have displaced the orcas from their favoured food, Chinook salmon, even as we simultaneously displace the salmon from their spawning streams through hydro dams, pollution and urbanization.
The story is similar for familiar species everywhere and likely worse for non-charismatic fauna. Scientists estimate that the “modern” species extinction rate is 1,000 to as much as 10,000 times the natural background rate. The global economy is busily converting living nature into human bodies and domestic livestock largely unnoticed by our increasingly urban populations. Urbanization distances people psychologically as well as spatially from the ecosystems that support them.
The human band-wagon may really have started rolling 10 millennia ago but the past two centuries of exponential growth greatly have accelerated the pace of change. It took all of human history — let’s say 200,000 years — for our population to reach one billion in the early 1800s, but only 200 years, 1/1000th as much time, to hit today’s 7.6 billion! Meanwhile, material demand on the planet has ballooned even more — global GDP has increased by over 100-fold since 1800; average per capita incomes by a factor of 13. (rising to 25-fold in the richest countries). Consumption has exploded accordingly — half the fossil fuels and many other resources ever used by humans have been consumed in just the past 40 years. (See graphs in: Steffen, W et al. 2015. The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration. The Anthropocene Review, Volume: 2 Issue: 1, page(s): 81-98.)
Why does any of this matter, even to those who don’t really give a damn about nature per se? Apart from the moral stain associated with extinguishing thousands of other life-forms, there are purely selfish reasons to be concerned. For example, depending on climate zone, 78 per cent to 94 per cent of flowering plants, including many human food species, are pollinated by insects, birds and even bats. (Bats — also in trouble in many places — are the major or exclusive pollinators of 500 species in at least 67 families of plants.) As much as 35 per cent of the world’s crop production is more or less dependent on animal pollination, which ensures or increases the production of 87 leading food crops worldwide.
But there is a deeper reason to fear the depletion and depopulation of nature. Absent life, planet earth is just an inconsequential wet rock with a poisonous atmosphere revolving pointlessly around an ordinary star on the outer fringes of an undistinguished galaxy. It is life itself, beginning with countless species of microbes, that gradually created the “environment” suitable for life on Earth as we know it. Biological processes are responsible for the life-friendly chemical balance of the oceans; photosynthetic bacteria and green plants have stocked and maintain Earth’s atmosphere with the oxygen necessary for the evolution of animals; the same photosynthesis gradually extracted billions of tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere, storing it in chalk, limestone and fossil fuel deposits, so that Earth’s average temperature (currently about 15 C) has remained for geological ages in the narrow range that makes water-based life possible, even as the sun has been warming (i.e. stable climate is partially a biological phenomenon.); countless species of bacteria, fungi and a veritable menagerie of micro-fauna continuously regenerate the soils that grow our food. (Unfortunately, depletion-by-agriculture is even faster — by some accounts we have only just over a half-century’s worth of arable soils left).
In short, H. sapiens depends utterly on a rich diversity of life-forms to provide various life-support functions essential to the existence and continued survival of human civilization. With an unprecedented human-induced great global die-off well under way, what are the chances the functional integrity of the ecosphere will survive the next doubling of material consumption that everyone expects before mid-century?
Here’s the thing: climate change is not the only shadow darkening humanity’s doorstep. While you wouldn’t know it from the mainstream media, biodiversity loss arguably poses an equivalent existential threat to civilized existence. While we’re at it, let’s toss soil/landscape degradation, potential food or energy shortages and other resource limits into the mix. And if you think we’ll probably be able to “handle” four out of five such environmental problems, it doesn’t matter. The relevant version of Liebig’s Law states that any complex system dependent on several essential inputs can be taken down by that single factor in least supply (and we haven’t yet touched upon the additional risks posed by the geopolitical turmoil that would inevitably follow ecological destabilization). read more
Which raises questions of more than mere academic interest. Why are we not collectively terrified or at least alarmed? If our best science suggests we are en route to systems collapse, why are collapse — and collapse avoidance — not the primary subjects of international political discourse? Why is the world community not engaged in vigorous debate of available initiatives and trans-national institutional mechanisms that could help restore equilibrium to the relationship between humans and the rest of nature?
There are many policy options, from simple full-cost pricing and consumption taxes; through population initiatives and comprehensive planning for a steady-state economy; to general education for voluntary (and beneficial) lifestyle changes, all of which would enhance global society’s prospects for long-term survival. Unique human qualities, from high intelligence (e.g., reasoning from the evidence), through the capacity to plan ahead to moral consciousness, may well be equal to the task but lie dormant — there is little hint of political willingness to acknowledge the problem let alone elaborate genuine solutions (which the Paris climate accord is not).
Bottom line? The world seems in denial of looming disaster; the “C” word remains unvoiced. Governments everywhere dismissed the 1992 scientists’ Warning to Humanity that “...a great change in our stewardship of the Earth and the life on it is required, if vast human misery is to be avoided” and will similarly ignore the scientists’ “second notice." (Published on Nov. 13, this warning states that most negative trends identified 25 years earlier “are getting far worse.”) Despite cascading evidence and detailed analysis to the contrary, the world community trumpets “growth-is-us” as its contemporary holy grail. Even the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals are fixed on economic expansion as the only hammer for every problematic nail. Meanwhile, greenhouse gases reach to at an all-time high, marine dead-zones proliferate, tropical forests fall and extinctions accelerate.
Just what is going on here? The full explanation of this potentially fatal human enigma is no doubt complicated, but Herman Melville summed it up well enough in Moby Dick: “There is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.”
Saturday 8 October 2016
Capitalism Is Exploitation And Destruction.
Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola Company is perhaps the most widely recognized corporate symbol on the planet. The company also leads in the abuse of workers' rights, assassinations, water privatization, and worker discrimination. Between 1989 and 2002, eight union leaders from Coca-Cola bottling plants in Colombia were killed after protesting the company's labor practices. Hundreds of other Coca-Cola workers who have joined or considered joining the Colombian union SINALTRAINAL have been kidnapped, tortured, and detained by paramilitaries who are hired to intimidate workers to prevent them from unionizing.
In India, Coca-Cola destroys local agriculture by privatizing the country's water resources. In Plachimada, Kerala, Coca-Cola extracted 1.5 million liters of deep well water, which they bottled and sold under the names Dasani and BonAqua. The groundwater was severely depleted, affecting thousands of communities with water shortages and destroying agricultural activity. As a result, the remaining water became contaminated with high chloride and bacteria levels, leading to scabs, eye problems, and stomach aches in the local population.
Coca-Cola is also one of the most discriminatory employers in the world. In the year 2000, 2,000 African-American employees in the U.S. sued the company for race-based disparities in pay and promotions.
Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk
Friday 22 January 2021
Cruel Farce.
The following from Roots Action:
As a result of final hour demands made by the United States during negotiation of the 1997 Kyoto treaty, military carbon emissions are exempted from climate negotiations.Turn your thermostat down one degree to help save the planet!!!
But the U.S. military is the largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels in the world and a key contributor to climate collapse!
U.S. climate envoy designate, John Kerry, is right; the Paris Agreement is “not enough.”
We're organizing around this new petition:
To: John Kerry and the U.S. Congress
From: ---- -----
All emissions need to be included in order to justly meet international pledges made to protect the earth's climate. There must be no more exception for military pollution.
Add your name by clicking here!
Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk
Tuesday 4 May 2021
COP-OUT26.
Friday 6 August 2021
Green???
The world faces a crisis in CO2 emissions and the people are crying out for an end to fossil fuels among other methods of cutting those emissions, and hopefully in doing so save the planet and humanity. However, as we approach COP-OUT26, to be held in Glasgow later this year, the UK's response to this impending doom is to build a third runway at Heathrow to increase air traffic, have you ever seen a green jumbo jet? Another plan by the UK government that will be a slap in the face of those trying to cut emissions and end the of burning fossil fuels, is that they plan to drill more oil wells in the North Sea. At the same time they spout about being the greenest government on the planet, all hog wash and bullshit. These plans of insanity go ahead because a few millionaires could become billionaires and a spin off to their greedy leeches and hangers on. They are blind to the fact that they are driving at speed to suicide, which would be well and good, but sadly they will take us all with them, but we will not share in their looting of the planet. Not that it will make much difference, after the demise of humanity.
The capitalist world will never work at saving the planet, there is too much profit to be made from plundering the earth's resources for personal gain. The profit grabbing enterprises of the capitalist economic system offers the corporate plunderers far too much wealth, power and privileges, at the expense of everybody and everything else for them to stop, they are junkies on a trip of power and wealth, fed by the sweat of you and I. We have to be the ones to stop this madness before it destroys us all and all life on the planet. This is not a painting of doom, this is a statement of facts.
Visit ann arky's home at https://spiritofrevolt.info