Much Later

106 years ago Emma Goldman wrote : "Sooner or later the American people are going to wake up." Open ended predictions such as this are never "wrong", but I think it is fair to say that by the time the American people "wake up", it will hardly matter. In the current conjuncture, being awake is taboo. People now strive to be extremely asleep, which somehow correlates with being "politcally uncorrect". If this seems incoherent, it's because it is. Such are the times we are living through. It is increasingly difficult to imagine the event or scenario that might precipitate Emma's awakening. It is not that people have unformed or ill-informed opinions or ideas. They now find it easier to let others have their opinions and ideas for them. Let others fuck with all that! Let the AI fuck with that. So far the strategy is working fabulously. Our country has the most bombs, the most famous celebrities, the Superbowl champions. We have the funniest President and the biggest cars and trucks. Why would you want to wake up from that? A lot of leftists worry that identity politics have superceded class politics. That happened about sixty years ago. It is now identity all the way down. Still the pundits worry about our "fragile democracy" and pine for the days of old. You know, FDR and the New Deal. Here is how capitalist "democracy" actually works.From the Washington Post: "The treasury secretary said he also has heard from “numerous US companies who intend to make substantial foreign direct investments in Argentina” if Milei’s coalition wins next month, which could boost reserves." Our elected reppresentatives get to make a few token decisions but the veto power rests with "foreign direct investments", another word for Capital. A word you won't hear Ezra Klien use as he considers ways for Democrats (the left?) to regain power ( basically conceding on culture). As to Argentina, they just made a deal to sell China the soybeans American farmers no longer can, due to tariffs and export controls. Farmers are angry but they also hate tansgender commies so they will take a payout and grouse and vote "conservative". And a lot of farmers are Christians and who is more Christ-like than Trump? Now we have to pretend to be interested in yet another "government shutdown" and yet another madman shooting up a church or shooting a celebrity or whatever. Sooner or later Americans will wake up.

Chevron: Green, Woke and Here for the Duration

In an interview with NYTImes, the CEO of Chevron says they are investing plenty in "carbon capture and storage, lithium and renewable fuels." And you thought they didn't care about warming. He also claims they " put a premium on diversity and inclusion," which they might want to keep a little closer to the vest. Cause it sounds a little bit like gay race communism to me. Basically, the CEO uses Doomberg's logic; every last molecule of hydrocarbons is going to be used by somebody so it might as well be us. " When the world stops using oil and gas, we’ll stop looking for it" he says with a shrug. They are just giving the customer what she wants. "We need to do things that meet demand as it exists and then evolve as demand evolves." In other words, capitalism. It's just the way it is. " The CEO says he has to " balance out all these competing interests." You know, the mass extinction of species versus making a profit. The forced displacement of millions of people versus keeeping his job. A very tough task, doing this "balancing". I'm not saying he is a monster, but what he does is monstrous. Not everyone is cut out for this line of work, balancing your children's future against keeping the economy humming. Actually, his kids will be mostly fine, they'll learn to live with the suffering around them much as he has. "We’re not engaged in idealism. We’ve got to be pragmatic and real," he says. He's real and realistic, not caught up in some idealistic "save the glaciers" bullshit, save the coral reefs, whatever. What is real is the lifestyle we have become accustomed to. Doomberg will tell you the same thing. Speaking of capitalist realism, some heavy hitters in NY are getting nervous about this Mandami upstart. "“The time to act is now,” read the email. “If we fail to mobilize, the financial capital of the world risks being handed over to a socialist this November. We cannot — and will not — let that happen.” Sounds like the Czar, fretting about the Bolsheviks. Maybe Rudy Guiliani should step in! In other world news, Gen Z has overrun the government of Nepal because "democratic" capitalism has failed the country. Old story, corruption, elite capture, rule of the wealthy. Which takes us to France where the government is calling for , wait for it...austerity! Cutting back on social provision and taxes for the wealthy. How original. The rich are threatening "capital flight" if they get taxed. The system cannot work. Period.

Conservative Thought

Harvard is working on a "center for conservative thought". No doubt in reaction to the pressure campaign the Trump administration is waging against "woke", which is equated with liberal thought. The problem of course is that what passes for conservative thought is just banal, nostalgic whining for a lost world that actually never existed. Liberal thought is no more coherent but that's for another day. I suppose you could find people who identify as intellectuals hanging out in think tanks or editorial pages who could give lectures at the new "center". But average Joe's who identify as conservative won't go to listen. They have influencers and pods to think for them. These Joe's and Jane's are riding high now that their cultural warrior in chief is writing daily decrees and posting on Truth Social. After years of being called stupid, they are, by proxie, now in charge. But they are still stupid. Nothing changes that sorry state of affairs. It's just that we live in a "democracy", and the stupids are in the majority. Plato warned us of the hazards. The Center for Conservative Thought would be very upset that Cracker Barrel wanted to change its logo. Sean Davis , chief executive of The Federalist would have a seat at the table thanks to comments like this: Cracker Barrel’s CEO and leadership clearly hate the company’s customers and see their mission as re-educating them with the principles of gay race communism.” They could put out a white paper on why it is necessary for Israel to annihilate the Palestinians. Not gay race communism but Islamic antisemitic terrorism. Conservatives like Bret Stephens would wince but end up going along.

All In

If, as the authors of All In: A Revolutionary Theory to Stop Climate Collapse tell us, it is time for revolution, the question is how to kick-start the process. We don't want to wait for another world war or global depression. We want folks to understand what those in power are doing to our world. But how? My idea is mass, militant, non-violent civil disobedience. Militant in the sense of filling the jails till those in power cede it. Globally. Nobody knows exactly how that works, but we know we have to get there. Here is how the scholars put it: "It is also evident, however, that as they are observed through the rearview mirror, disobedience and movement-generated social turbulence have defined the zeitgeist of the most storied periods of American history." Social turbulence. That's not easy to define in these days of Trumpism, when turbulence is the point, the new ambient modus operendi. What a poisoned atmosphere and ecosystem breakdown will bring is a turbulence that will be hard to structure into socialist revolution but what other options exist? The point of NVCD is moral suasion. We assume there still exists some sense of morality and that if the action is scaled up to the point where people feel compelled to get off the sidelines and join in, if it can start to feel like a duty to one's conscience, it can trigger a cascading effect. It is "all in" in both senses; risk everything and everybody doing it. Then comes the tricky part. Like the dog who actually catches the car, what is to be done with the power once you have achieved it? Vacuumes get filled qand these outcomes are dependent on many factors. My question for the authors and folks at Climaximo is whatthe world looks like the day after you have stopped all new fossil fuel projects and all those assets are stranded. Turbulence and then some.

Red Sea

Those of us in the comfortable, priviledged part of the world would prefer not to know how bad it is for those on the outside. At the moment it is Gaza that is intruding on our tranquility but if you just travel on down the Red Sea, towards the Horn of Africa, you find it is grim and grimmer. Luckily our media spares us these unpleasantries. You have to want to know about places like Eritrea and do some digging. While those few who care focus on starvation and genocide in Palestine, there are horrors and atrocities occurring throughout the region as tribal factions splinter off and take up arms, as they all scramble for gold or other precious resources, as outside powers like the Saudis, Egyptians, UAE and Turks fight proxy wars using corrupt elites and ambitious warlords. As the U.S. "superpower" trys to "manage" the conflicts, in other words, making sure proxy wars weaken our enemies and strengthen our allies. Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, Syria. Tigrays, Houthis, Druze - who can really keep up? Who recalls the devastating 2020–22 war between the Ethiopian federal government in Addis Ababa and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front which cost as many as 600,000 lives, including hundreds of thousands of civilians? How about the ongoing civil war in the Darfur region of Sudan? The army and a rebel group clashed in 2023 and now more than 150,000 people have died in the conflict across the country, and about 12 million have fled their homes in what the United Nations has called the world's largest humanitarian crisis. There are other conflicts in the region ( Niger, Syria, etc..) and plenty of corrupt regimes, but the point is that the architecture of the so-called global order doesn't work for a vast part of the population. We sit happily in our Western bubble, raking in the wealth and resources from around the globe to support a comfortable, relatively secure lifestyle. Just don't look behind the curtain. Now That Trump has declared the U.S. the number 1 global power and Russia number 2, we Americans can feel that surge of pride that goes along with being on top, being the alpha. This is what capitalism creates; a competitive hierarcy of power. What could possibly go wrong?

Gaia

I don't know if, as some suggest, the planet has a form of consciousness. But reading that forecasters are expecting up to nine hurricanes to form in the Atlantic between now and the end of November, I hope Gaia decides to make a statement about global heating. It would be particularly instructive if all nine were cat.6 and they all landed in major metro areas along the gulf coast. It is long past time for the kind of wake-up call even the most oblivious humans can't ignore, say, all the refineries shut down, tankers washed ashore, Corpus Christie under ten feet of water. I suspect that is what it is going to take. Barring a major, major catastrophe, the only way this juggernaut is slowed and eventually stopped is when the insurance industry collapses. As with so much of the economy, soon only the very wealthy will be able to afford insurance but it's hard to imagine that can last for very long. If ten thousand Los Angeles homes, all worth three quarters to a million dollars, all burn to the ground, there goes all the profit, right? The planet will be increasingly hostile as it rejects all of humanities big plans for a modern world of unlimted energy use. Sorry kids. Remember your physics. In the novel All The Water In the World, the Atlantic coast begins to experience what they call hypercains, mega-storms which drown all the lowlands. Its very ugly. And avoidable until it isn't.

Blind

In an interview in the NYTImes, an Israeli journalist describes how a small section of Israeli society is suddenly willing to look at images of Gaza. This is described as a positive development. Till now, there has been a general avoidance, a willed "looking away" at the horror inflicted on the civilian population because, according to the journalist, Oct.7. This is the way the so-called "war" in Gaza/genocide is framed; everything begins on Oct.7. All references to the decades of occupation and repression areswept away. The history around the formation of Hamas is swept away. Of course, this is not just an Israeli phenomena. Recall the American reaction to 9/11. History begins at the moment of exception. But Israel and Israelis have additional layers of trauma and neurosis, which this ethnic cleansing will only add to. I am reading South To America by Imani Perry, where she describes the legacy of slavery and the civil war on various southern cities. And all the ways that historical trauma manifests today. Very striking similarities and there dfoes seem to be some correspondence with this new conservative focus on anti-semitism and the desire to erase the white supremacy that is still so prevelant. And on the topic of blindness, two headlines, side by side in the NYTimes, says it all. First one describes torrential downpours and flooding in Tokyo. Next to it an article saying Norway wants to pump CO2 into wells deep underground. Except doing so is very "expensive". Yeah. So it goes.