Noam Chomsky: We live in dangerous times

Is This A Fascist World?

Housing prices are too high for new buyers to get into the market.  Normally dedicated workers are quitting because they are threatened by violent patients, students, customers.  While the climate is changing, deniers are blocking roads. We are on the threshold of WW III.  There are predictions of starvation and grain shortages. The threat of new viruses. Water shortages predicted. Unbearable temperatures threaten the vegetables in our gardens and farms.  People fly off the handle at the smallest inconvenience. Crowded airports make travel difficult. Emergency wait times are putting strain on patients and health care workers.

This is coming from the broadcast news hourly and daily. New crises every hour.

There are millions of educated and wise people who have learned to fix problems, heal the sick and inform the troubled minds of Canadians. Why are we not hearing from them in the news reports? Why does the news simply give us short headlines that are barely understood? Why are intellectuals or prize winning reporters not given a voice in this conversation? 

Why does capitalism behave as though humanities are not worthy of investment? Should we turn off the radio, TV and internet because it no longer serves our community survival?

What authority will dare to organize as though life has meaning beyond the market? How long will we listen to corporate media when they do not acknowledge the need for information to help us engage in the problems, or at least acknowledge those who are already engaged? 

Haven't we learned that using fear and force atomizes community? Are we willing to allow fascism to destroy our options, our community and our future?

The wisdom accumulated over centuries can be tossed out in public and more dangerously in our minds if we adopt the habits of monsters who learned how to keep the masses cowering in fear.

How will our world look if no-one remembers how to be civil and all communities are markets and nothing more?

Noam Chomsky: The Alien perspective on humanity - Jung & Naiv: Episode 284

Spit Blood

 

Spit Blood

Essential history of humanity

back to Garden of Eden— Eve is to blame 

for women’s suffering in childbirth for eating 

forbidden fruit from Tree of Knowledge

said the Anglican Bishop when I went to church

pregnant with our first baby.

After King James VI of Scotland declared witchcraft illegal

2,500 women were burned at the stake.

British ships shackled millions of Africans 

to sell in America between 16th - 19th century.

Dark Satanic Mills in England’s green

and pleasant land were the Orthodox churches

in Blake’s poem not the factories.

Irish tennants farmed potatoes on land owned 

by absentee landlords until they starved

from famine and disease. Why

only one crop? For maximum profit.

Nine million died in WW1 then influenza 

killed 50 million. Germany sued by allies

with a bill too big to pay.  Jews were blamed

and six million murdered before 1945. 

Europe struggled to recover but America 

won the war and did well until they sold prisons

to private corporations where African Americans

were “sold” as slaves three hundred years

after they were freed.

First civilizations who learned how to care

for the land hundreds of years before

European contact were sent to Residential Schools 

and whipped, starved and raped to “kill the Indian”

in the child.

Women to be punished for aborting an embryo

yet a gunman can murder her children 

in elementary school. Murder for profit? 

Call it economics. 

The privileged learn to silence their own 

thoughts and prayers or risk public ridicule.

Women may give birth to children and raise them

but cannot  rule a world created  to destroy

their heart and soul. 

The Danger of USA Politics Today

Robert Reich has been sending out information on the trial of January 6th. Here is today's post.

 https://robertreich.substack.com/p/the-real-drama-behind-todays-fourth

I understand the risk now of those who choose not to be bullied by death threats.

Sitting Duck Theory of Monday Morning

 

Are we powerless sitting ducks beneath the power and wealth of machiavellian greed? Are we doomed to die of hunger, heat and fire? Have humans spent their lot on winning and losing? Do we suffer because we know better? Is this brain now redundant and our hearts bleeding to death?

Whoever rules the world for the sake of power and nothing else, might congratulate themselves..... we did it, we reduced the world to wizards and whiners, to the beautiful and the sad - but the winners are losing too.

Don't try and list all your achievements. It won't make you feel better for long. Forget your self for today. Not to the point of harm, but just to the point where you forget yourself as separate. 

In the vast pond we call the universe you are experiencing the grief of self awareness. You know less than you think you do.

The Chris Hedges Report: Struggle makes us human

Longish recording, worth hearing. May we learn to find peace.

What Changed America - the most powerful nation in the world?

" The gaping hole between the reality of what we have become, and the fiction of who we are supposed to be, is why spectacle is all the ruling class has left.  Spectacle takes the place of politics. It is a tacit admission that all social programs, whether the Build Back Better Plan, a ban on assault weapons, raising the minimum wage, ameliorating the ravages of inflation or instituting environmental reforms to stave off the climate emergency, will never be implemented. Those who occupy the “sacred space” of “our constitutional republic” are capable only of pouring money into war, allocating $54 billion to Ukraine, and passing ever higher military budgets to enrich the arms industry." Chris Hedges. https://scheerpost.com/2022/06/13/hedges-society-of-spectacle/

Men, Women, Management. Globe and Mail.

 “Any society that rewards men for their assertiveness, but encourages women to repress their aspirations and motivation, is not just perpetuating the underrepresentation of women in power, but also selecting leaders on the basis of their greed and perceived confidence, as opposed to their humility and actual competence,” they warn. Harvey Schacter. 

 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/careers/management/article-if-we-want-to-help-women-succeed-and-help-society-prosper-stop/

War gives rulers the excuse to imprison ideas they don't like

 "Not everyone took part in the celebration of the grandeur of their own state. In England, Bertrand Russell dared to question the party line; in Germany, he was joined by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht; in the U.S., by Eugene Debs. All were imprisoned. Some, like Randolph Bourne in the U.S., escaped that fate. Bourne was only barred from all liberal journals"

https://truthout.org/articles/chomsky-we-must-insist-that-nuclear-warfare-is-an-unthinkable-policy/?