On 9/5/19, Carl Jarvis <carjar82@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
During my lifetime I've entertained some really, really stupid
beliefs, but never, ever did I believe that the USA could keep secret
how to build an Atom Bomb.
And only briefly did I fancy our world being run by nuclear energy.
Very early on I remember thinking that it was similar to a two year
old child discovering a box of matches. Until we can build reactors
that are absolutely fool proof, and failure proof, and above all,
develop a safe method of neutralizing and disposing of nuclear waste,
Humans are far better off without it.
On 9/4/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I'm reading a novel, the title of which is Trinity. It's about Robert
Oppenheimer, the scientist who invented the atom bomb. This is an
interesting time to be reading it, given the fact that we now seem to be
back where we were before all the international agreements not to use
nuclear weapons. Clearly, people don't seem to learn anything from
history,
or else they wouldn't keep making the same mistakes. The mistakes are the
need for power and domination which translate into nationalism,
militarism,
and cut throat capitalism. Back when the American scientists first
understood what the result of nuclear war would be, they wanted to share
all
of the information that they had with the countries which seemed most
likely
to become enemies. First on the list was Russia. They met with all of the
government officials who were involved, and tried to explain that if
scientists in Russia understood the devastation that would occur, they
would
explain this to Russian government leaders and the world would not be
living
under the threat of nuclear annihilation. But our government wouldn't
agree.
Russia was an enemy and didn't yet have the bomb, and the US did.
Therefore, we must keep our military superiority by keeping this new
weapon
secret. This whole scenario is just touched on briefly in the book
because
the book is a novel, focusing on people. But what follows from this
tidbit
of history is the explanation for those Americans, like the Rosenbergs,
who
may have given nuclear secrets to the Russians. I remember reading in the
book about Ethtel Rosenberg's brother, something to the effect that
people
were attempting to prevent nuclear war by ensuring equal knowledge by
both
countries. Whatever actually happened, the wish to prevent use of nuclear
weapons of those original scientists, wasn't fulfilled. And the ethical
question that Oppenheimer faced when he acquired the knowledge that could
destroy humanity? Was his search for scientific truth worth the price?
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Wednesday, September 04, 2019 10:43 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Last Act of the Human Comedy
Wise words:
"...Our little lives blink on for a moment and then go dark.
Nothing truly important can be achieved in a single lifetime. We must
work
toward something greater than ourselves."
Yet, when Human Beings are faced with something too big to be dealt with
in
a short time, denial becomes the first line of defense.
Climate change? Denied. Human polution destroying the Eco System?
Denied.
It all began when Man was confronted by his own mortality. Denial!!!
But even more than denial, a strange behavior took over. Man invented
God.
God was perfect and all knowing. Best of all, God had a place for our
Souls
after they left our mortal bodies. No proof. No way of demonstrating
this
God and his Eternal Land. Despite all evidence to the contrary, Human
Beings embraced this God Story because it eased our fear of death...of
the
unknown.
Human Beings are truly amazing animals. The same imagination that has
enabled us to rise above all other life on this planet is the same
imagination that is silently destroying us...and all Life, as we know it.
Carl Jarvis
On 9/2/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The Last Act of the Human Comedy
The Last Act of the Human Comedy
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
There is nothing new to our story. The flagrant lies and imbecilities
of the inept and corrupt leader. The inability to halt the costly,
endless wars and curb the gargantuan expenditures on the military. The
looting of a beleaguered populace by the rich. The destruction of the
ecosystem. The decay and abandonment of a once-efficient
infrastructure. The implosion of the institutions, from education to
diplomacy, that sustain a functioning state. The world has seen it
before. It is the familiar disease of the end of a civilization. At
first it is grimly entertaining, even amid the mounting suffering. But
no one will be laughing at the end.
Human nature does not change. It follows its familiar and cyclical
patterns.
Yes, this time, when we go down the whole planet will go with us. But
until then we will be mesmerized by fools and con artists. What are
demagogues like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, positive psychologists
and Candide-like prognosticators such as Steven Pinker other than
charlatans who insist the tragedy facing us is not real? What are the
technocrats and scientists arguing that education and Western
civilization can turn us into rational beings other than shamans? What
are the corporate titans who make their fortunes off the arms,
chemical, fossil fuel and animal agriculture industries that are
destroying the natural world other than high priests demanding human
sacrifice?
There is one human story. Dressed in new clothing and using new tools,
we endlessly relive it. If we still read philosophy, literature,
history, poetry and theology we would not be surprised that greed,
hedonism and hubris have easily defeated empathy and reason. But
because we do not, because we spend hours each day getting little
bursts of dopamine from electronic screens, we think we are unique in
human existence. We are unable to see that the climate conditions that
allowed civilizations to flourish during the last 10,000 years will
soon be replaced by a savage struggle to survive.
Human beings have inhabited the planet for about 200,000 of its 4.5
billion years. For most of those 200,000 years, humans did not
radically alter the ecosystem. But the Industrial Revolution, which
began about two and a half centuries ago, saw human beings extract
fossil fuels, tapping into a hundred million years of sunlight stored
in the form of coal and petroleum. The energy from fossil fuels
provided unparalleled wealth and military superiority to the planet’s
industrialized north, which used its power to subjugate most of the
rest of the globe to cheaply extract resources and abuse cheap labor.
The human population rapidly climbed to over 7 billion.
The air, water and ice have seriously degraded under the onslaught as
the planet shifts from one climate to another, a climate that will no
longer be hospitable to human habitation.
The only existential question left is how we will choose to wait out
the finale. But to pose that question is to defy the cultural mania
for hope, the yearning for collective self-delusion. If reality is
grim, you banish it. You invent impossible scenarios of inevitable
salvation. Which explains how we ended up where we are.
Most of the climate activists and operatives of democracy see
themselves, like the wider consumer culture, as being in the business of
selling hope.
Without hope, they argue, people would succumb to despair. People
would not resist the looming catastrophe. Of course, the opposite is
true. Hope, or rather false hope, exacerbates despair and lethargy. It
infantilizes the population. Carbon emissions may continue to rise,
the polar ice caps may continue to melt, crop yields may continue to
decline, the world’s forests may continue to burn, coastal cities may
continue to sink under rising seas and droughts may continue to wipe
out fertile farmlands, but the messiahs of hope assure us that all
will be right in the end. Only it won’t. We will not be able to adapt.
Those who sell you the false hope that we can adapt are as
self-deluded as those who brand global warming a hoax. And, at least
subconsciously, many people know it.
The longer we publicly deny the bleak reality before us and privately
cope with our existential dread and pain, the more crippling despair
becomes.
This schizophrenic existence is a form of emotional abuse. It is
imposed on us by a dominant culture that will not allow us to speak this
tragic truth.
This censorship forces us to struggle with reality in solitude,
eroding our confidence in our perceptions and judgments.
Andrea Dworkin in her essay “A Battered Wife Survives” wrote of
effects of sustained abuse, saying that “one’s mind is shattered
slowly over time, splintered into a thousand pieces. The mind is
slowly submerged in chaos and despair, buried broken and barely alive
in an impenetrable womb of isolation. This isolation is so absolute,
so killing, so morbid, so malignant and devouring that there is
nothing in one’s life but it, it. One is entirely shrouded in a
loneliness that no earthquake could move.”
She went on to ask “What is reality?” and then answered.
“
The woman who was a battered wife and has escaped knows the answer:
reality is when something is happening to you and you know it and can
say it and when you say it other people understand what you mean and
believe you. That is reality, and the battered wife, imprisoned alone
in a nightmare that is happening to her, has lost it and cannot find it
anywhere.
Compared with the earth, none of us are around for very long. We are,
to the cosmos, ephemerons. Our little lives blink on for a moment and
then go dark.
Nothing truly important can be achieved in a single lifetime. We must
work toward something greater than ourselves. We must live fully, as
Dworkin did, by summoning the courage to confront the starkness of the
human condition and demanding justice, not because it will be
achieved, since in its perfect form it will never be achieved, but
because it defines us as distinct and sentient individuals. Justice
cannot be fought for in the abstract. It must be grounded in a
concrete confrontation with power—which is almost always embedded in
white, male patriarchy—on behalf of the oppressed. This means
sustained acts of defiance and civil disobedience that shut down city
roads, airports and pipelines. Corporate capitalism and imperialism,
which created the ecological debacle, will be destroyed or these
forces will kill us in an unprecedented global genocide.
“The struggle for climate justice is a struggle at the crossroads of
historic and present injustices and a looming disaster that will prove
to be, if allowed to unfold unchecked, the mother of all injustices,”
writes Wen Stephenson. “Because the disaster that is unfolding now
will not only compound the suffering of those already oppressed
(indeed, is already compounding it); it may very well foreclose any
hope of economic stability and social justice for current and future
generations. Why, then, does the term ‘climate justice’ barely
register in the American conversation about climate change? Lurking in
that question is a tension at the heart of the climate struggle: a
tension between the ‘mainstream’ climate movement (dominated by
largely white, well-funded, and Washington-focused green
NGOs)
and those—most often people of color—who have been fighting for social
and environmental justice for decades.”
Resistance grounded in action is its own raison d’être. It is
catharsis. It brings us into a community with others who are coping
with the darkness by naming it but refusing to submit to it. And in
that act of resistance we find emotional wholeness, genuine hope and
even euphoria, if not an ultimate victory.
“The certitude that there is no salvation is a form of salvation, in
fact is salvation,” wrote E.M. Cioran. “Starting from here, one might
organize our own life as well as construct a philosophy of history:
the insoluble as solution, as the only way out.”
As the Grand Inquisitor pointed out in “The Brothers Karamazov,” those
who possess the emotional and intellectual fortitude to face what lies
before them will always be in the minority. There is a numbing comfort
that comes with surrendering moral autonomy for abject servility and
obedience, and this comfort is especially attractive in a crisis.
“No doubt there will be free societies in the future as there have
been in the past,” writes the philosopher John Gray in “Straw Dogs:
Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals.” “But they will be rare, and
variations on anarchy and tyranny will be the norm. The needs that are
met by tyrants are as real as those to which freedom answers;
sometimes they are more urgent. Tyrants promise security—and release
from the tedium of everyday existence. To be sure, this is only a
confused fantasy. The drab truth of tyranny is a life spent in
waiting. But the perennial romance of tyranny comes from its promising
its subjects a life more interesting than any they can contrive for
themselves. Whatever they become, tyrannies begin as festivals of the
depressed. Dictators may come to power on the back of chaos, but their
unspoken promise is that they will relieve the boredom of their
subjects.”
And yet, no more than 3% to 5% of the population need be engaged to
challenge despotic power. This means, first, naming and accepting
reality.
It will not be easy. It means grieving for what is to come, for there
is certain to be mass death. It means acting, even if defeat is
certain, to thwart those who would extinguish us. Extinction Rebellion
plans to occupy and shut down major city centers around the globe in
October. This is a good place to start. By defying the forces of
death, we affirm life.
Chris Hedges
Columnist
Chris Hedges is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning
journalist, a New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the
college degree program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by
Rutgers… Chris Hedges
