Thursday
By: John Allen
Tags: Movies, Politics, Environment, Ecology, Democratic Debate

Yech

“…Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.” Derrick Jensen — The Culture of Make Believe ; Emphasis mine

Debates

Again I missed the debates to watch a bland movie about eco-terrorism; “Night Moves”, Netflix. They, the main people in the film, blew up a dam on some river in Oregon, though it may be unclear in the film where the supposed river is. I’m stumped as to why the film got good reviews. The message of destruction of the river was really only delivered by one of the minor characters in passing. If the film was supposed to deliver a massage on the harm of dams on rivers, it failed. I am critical on the bland messages about the destruction of Earth. Dams rearrange the ecosystems of rivers. They kill native species of river life. They eventually fall into disrepair and need to be dealt with somehow. None of these massages were in the film. Sorta, kinda, at best.

Oh yeah, the debate. It was the efforts of the corporatist, centrist, do-nothing faction of the party’s night to get their message out. I’m unclear if Tulsi Gabbard got her non-intervention message out or not. I believe she was the most progressive candidate on the stage. The W Post gave the nod to Bernie and Elizabeth by default. Yep, the Post! Just like the film, bland. The crooks continue to pillage average hard working Americans with nothing offered on ways of actual relief for their issues. Like higher education, Medicare for all, living wages, no more wars, things that improve lives all over, including the ones killed on the US’s war of terror. Here’s a link to an essay on Medium.

https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/the-global-pandemic-of-anti-muslim-genocidal-violence-c9e735d4575e

I no longer call it the war on terror. It’s the war of terror. The US and it’s proxies are the largest terrorist cabal in the world. The US is the biggest arms dealer and to sell arms there has to be wars. And as long as the US economy depends on wars to stay afloat we’ll have war, This has to end. If we are to save the planet for future generations, wars must come to an end. The US military is the single biggest emitter of CO2 in the world. Eco-terrorism on a grand scale. Makes a single dam pale by comparison. Until the huge elephant is addressed, head on, the world will continue to heat. Even cutting back excessive use of say, electricity and motorized vehicular travel, won’t help until the militaries of the world are scaled back drastically. Nothing ever like this will appear in any debate. So Green New Deal or not, the military has to be part of the grand calculus to save Earth. And it’s never mentioned.

Activists

The ‘woke’ activists do know how bad wars fought by the various military actions around the world are for the ecology. They do talk about how submarine’s sonars can harm whales. Even worse than subs are the sonic booms used in deep exploration for oil reserves under the seas. Some of the beached whales and dolphins are the result of them committing suicide because their delicate sonar systems above their heads are so damaged they can’t navigate any more, which lets them starve slowly. Some people are so unawares that it makes me sick seeing the damage they do without a thought. Activists know better, They aren’t fooled by the bullshit on corporate(MSM) media outlets. The movies of the 90’s had better eco-messages than the films of recent make. There are though, a lot more post-apocalyptic films. They just skip over what’s happening now. Tree-huggers are a pejorative in today’s parlance. I cried when I viewed some old photos of giant tree stumps with a dozen lumberjacks dancing upon the dead remains of a thousand year old tree. 95% of old growth forests in the US have been decimated by humanity’s disregard for nature, and we are interconnected with all nature. Profit from the death of thousand year old trees. Nature murder. Nature’s not “out there” or a nice photo in a large book. Even cities are part and parcel of nature.

End

So I said yech in the header. That’s the way I feel about things. They continue to deteriorate while a spectral spectacle of vast proportions are displayed to keep us distracted. As long as capitalism has its tentacles firmly interlaced with modern living we will be a large burden to Earth’s ecosystems. The energy giants have been busy spreading lies and disinformation for about forty years or so. There is and never has been controversy on global warming for a long time, at least since WW II. Some few scientists expressed concerns way before the war. It’s time to end war. It’s time for drastic change to save Earth’s ecosystems. We have to. Peace, The Ol’ Hippy