2021-11-12T17:20−08* / at the about* post – at bit.ly/dateposted – anyone can link to this post from its date: November 12, 2021
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I'm on my way home from #COP26, full of frustration and fury after reading the draft declaration. The world's powerful governments propose to do more to defend the fossil fuel industry than to defend life on Earth.
A Sydney man has set an ambitious target to phase out his alcohol consumption within the next 29 years, as part of an impressive plan to improve his health.
The program will see Greg Taylor, 73, continue to drink as normal for the foreseeable future, before reducing consumption in 2049 when he turns 101. He has assured friends it will not affect his drinking plans in the short or medium term.
Taylor said it was important not to rush the switch to non-alcoholic beverages. “It’s not realistic to transition to zero alcohol overnight. This requires a steady, phased approach where nothing changes for at least two decades,” he said, adding that he may need to make additional investments in beer consumption in the short term, to make sure no night out is worse off.
Taylor will also be able to bring forward drinking credits earned from the days he hasn’t drunk over the past forty years, meaning the actual end date for consumption may actually be 2060.
To assist with the transition, Taylor has bought a second beer fridge which he describes as the ‘capture and storage’ method.
2021-11-11T21:20−08* / at the about* post – at bit.ly/dateposted – anyone can link to this post from its date: November 11, 2021
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from the Rohr Jewish Learning Institute (JLI) description on YouTube:
Dr. Bernd Wollschlaeger shares his story about the journey from his father's house of deceit and hatred to the ranks of the Jewish people. Horrified by his father's part in the effort to rid the world of Jews, Bernd found himself drawn to Jews, Holocaust survivors who did not hold him responsible and related to him with kindness and friendship. He eventually came to the realization that he wanted to join the Jewish nation. In this video he tells his fascinating story and ends with advice on how to prevent hatred from spreading in the future.
2021-11-10T17:43−08* / at the about* post – at bit.ly/dateposted – anyone can link to this post from its date: November 10, 2021
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from a Globe and Mail review of two new books on Israel/Palestine:
Both authors also agree on four fundamental issues underlying the quagmire: First, the occupation must end. Once this happens, they claim it will forge a path for achieving Palestinian statehood within the parameters of a two-state solution.
Secondly, they demonstrate how uneven the conflict has become. The body-count statistics speak volumes. According to B’Tselem, a Jerusalem-based Israeli NGO, between December, 1987, and April, 2021, 13,969 lives were lost from politically motivated violence between Israelis and Palestinians. 87 per cent of the dead were Palestinian.
Thirdly, Cypel and Roy also argue that Jewish settlements are a barrier to peace. In 2017, the Israeli Jewish settlement population stood at 427,000 in the West Bank, and 220,000 in East Jerusalem. The paradigm for negotiations between Jews and Arabs since 1967 has mainly centred around the phrase “land for peace.” But what happens when there is no land?
And finally, both writers claim no lasting peace settlement can occur unless the United States, the EU and other major international actors force Israel to give up its domination over the Palestinians. That view is also shared by many progressive Jews across the global Jewish diaspora. But can this influence Israel’s cozy relationship with Washington and other key political players in the coming years? Perhaps. But maybe not.*
2021-11-09T12:25−08* / at the about* post – at bit.ly/dateposted – anyone can link to this post from its date: November 9 2021
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Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, a powerful enabler of power, is not power itself but an effect of power
power cares about power and nothing else: not people, not the planet
power, like gravity, pervades our world, and as with gravity, although we can’t see it, we notice its effects
power is the force that – thanks to the powerful and other enablers – shapes almost everything we care about
power manifests as – and cannot exist without – hierarchy: hierarchies of enablers
power gives more power to those in its hierarchies who play their part well: it promotes them
power takes away power from those who fail to play their part: it demotes them or sidelines them
power grows stronger when we believe stories about ourselves and, spellbound, each play our part like robots
power helps a few people amass or inherit great wealth, and this makes them powerful enablers
power makes the powerful crave even more power: the love of power is an insatiable desire
power concentrates on and is concentrated by hiding from most of us what is really happening
power does untold harm to people and the planet, and gets away with it by manufacturing consent
power decides what happens and decides what people think about what happens: “the narrative”
power won’t quit until we begin to understand it and share that understanding
power is in the mind: once enough of us make a point of understanding power, it can no longer hurt us
…
Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.
—Aldous Huxley, 1958
power continues to plague us with “war, greed, exploitation [and] systematic indifference to others’ suffering”
power, as a social disease left unchecked, is terminal
power has many symptoms: selfishness, individualism, poverty, racism, militarism, vanity, overconsumption …
power at present looks set to destroy us and almost everything we care about unless we begin to understand it
2021-11-08T17:17−08* / at the about* post – at bit.ly/dateposted – anyone can link to this post from its date: November 8, 2021
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image credit: Caitlin Johnstone, in a satirical piece, archived*
power … is the force that shapes almost everything (!*) / (Jonathan Cook)
hierarchy: hierarchies of enablers / hierarchies of wealth, status, and power* / (David Graeber, David Wengrow)
spellbound*
a few people amass or inherit great wealth*
the love of power is an insatiable desire / Bertrand Russell (!?, !*)
what people think about what happens* / (Caitlin Johnstone)
understanding power (!*)
“Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy … run the show as they see fit.” —Aldous Huxley, 1958 (!*)
“war, greed, exploitation [and] systematic indifference to others’ suffering”* / (David Graeber, David Wengrow)
/ the hallmark of hierarchy: indifference to the fate of those at lower levels – unless that threatens the status quo
“The well off and the secure have too often become indifferent and oblivious to the poverty and deprivation in their midst.”
—Martin Luther King, Jr.**
symptoms: selfishness, individualism, poverty, racism, militarism, …
(/
MLK’s three evils – poverty, racism, and militarism (!?) – are symptoms;
power is the disease, and the cause of the disease is ignorance,
where the ignorance meant is of things as they really are (!*) (Jacob Needleman)
/ Chomsky – October 2021 – on manufactured ignorance, among other things:
/)
###
it’s up to us, who think we can’t, to confront powers and structures of evil (!?) by getting together and getting it together
“to make the power structure … say yes when they may be desirous to say no”:
2021-11-07T20:34−08* / at the about* post – at bit.ly/dateposted – anyone can link to this post from its date: November 7, 2021
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Bill Gates, world-famous Harvard dropout, as a 22-year-old
Bill Gates, longtime poster child for the very rich – people addicted to wealth and power – is currently being deferred to as someone apparently willing and able to help save us from the worst horrors of our time.
from the book On Corruption in America by Sarah Chayes:
We reinforce better values by ceasing to assume that if someone is spectacularly rich, he must be smarter and more hardworking than the rest of us. Instead, we should view such people with suspicion. If there is one thing work on this book has taught me, it is this: it is impossible to become a billionaire without bending the rules. Most of the members of that class run their operations and live their lives in ways that injure our communities. Most are trying to rig the system even further. These are not upstanding citizens. They are parasites and freeloaders—however they try to justify themselves. We do not owe them deference.
We can do this. We are our society. We can make it reflect the beauty in us. We don't have to wait for the next devastating calamity that lies on the horizon to discover, in survival, that precious communion. We can find it now, in the battle to ward off that calamity. We can find that fierce joy.
from an article on billionaires by Caitlin Johnstone published on October 31:
Human civilization is being engineered in myriad ways by an
unfathomably wealthy class who are so emotionally and psychologically
stunted that they refuse to end world hunger despite having the ability
to easily do so.
The United Nations has estimated that world hunger could be ended for an additional expenditure of $30 billion a year, with other estimates considerably lower. The other day Elon Musk became the first person ever to attain a net worth of over $300 billion. A year ago his net worth was $115 billion. According to Inequality.org,
America's billionaires have a combined net worth of $5.1 trillion,
which is a 70 percent increase from their combined net worth of under $3
trillion at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.
So we're
talking about a class which could easily put a complete halt to human
beings dying of starvation on this planet by simply putting some of
their vast fortunes toward making sure everyone gets enough to eat. But
they don't. This same class influences the policies, laws, and
large-scale behavior of our species more than any other.*
2021-11-04T20:28−07* / at the about* post – at bit.ly/dateposted – anyone can link to this post from its date: November 4, 2021
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it is impossible to become a billionaire without bending the rules / Sarah Chayes (!gb)
see also: articles by Caitlin Johnstone on Substack ! (!?)
That graphics file, uploaded to Google Drive and opened from there with Google Docs, results in a document that contains the image along with any recognized characters in it automatically appended as text.*
Now take a look at another example: a more challenging image* – and the result.*
2021-11-03T18:02−07* / at the about* post – at bit.ly/dateposted – anyone can link to this post from its date: November 3, 2021
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for more details on this feature, see the official Google Docs Help explainer*
it is impossible to become a billionaire without bending the rules (!gb) / source of first image
Order of Service, December 11, 2016 site:vancouverunitarians.ca ! (!?) / source of second image
2021-10-27T14:32−07* / at the about* post – at bit.ly/dateposted – anyone can link to this post from its date: October 27, 2021
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Britain now has Potemkin supermarkets. / Umair Haque*
image: from Google Books – screenshot (frame only)
Mammon:*
I felt rather shaken last year when asked to deliver an annual Oration to the London School of Economics and Political Science; I concluded that the Committee must have heard of my economic and political naïveté, and of my dedication to a poetic way of thought, and wanted perhaps to hear me enlarge on the text ‘If there's no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.’
I admit having once used this comeback on a businessman who was kindly urging me to write a best-seller rather than poems which no ordinary mortal (meaning himself) could understand. Yet poets need never have empty purses. . . . This may sound somewhat starry-eyed, like the Biblical injunction to trust in the Lord, for He will provide. . . . But since economists study the science of money, maybe they should be reminded once in a while of certain poetic and religious imponderables without which economics make no sense—or no more than do the logistical war-games, played by budding generals at Staff Colleges, which disregard such unlogistical factors in real warfare as morale, weather, accident and miracle.
Let me start with the etymology of ‘money’. . . .
2021-10-26T21:22−07* / at the about* post – at bit.ly/dateposted – anyone can link to this post from its date: October 26, 2021
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*Mammon: Annual Oration, The London School of Economics and Political Science, December 6, 1963 (!gb)
“If there’s no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.” —Robert Graves (!gb)
