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| New York B4 The Steroids |
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| Whales After The Steroids |
That Dredd Blog post caused a stir among young Catholics, the Kavanaughts, who live in heaven instead of here on Earth alongside us mortals (You Are Here).
Anyway, one American with vision to spare puts it this way:
"When you think about it, Earth is a relatively modest-sized planet -- about 25,000 miles in circumference at the Equator, with a total surface area of 197 million square miles, almost three-quarters of which is water. It’s not so hard, if you’re in a certain frame of mind (as American officials were after 1991), to imagine that a single truly great nation -- a “sole superpower” with a high-tech military, its capabilities unparalleled in history -- might in some fashion control it all.(In the Heart of a Dying Empire, Tom Dispatch). The Kavanaughts are now here to make America grunt again (How To Identify The Despotic Minority).
Think back to that year when the other superpower, the lesser one of that era, so unbelievably went down for the count. Try to recall that moment when the Soviet Union, its economy imploding, suddenly was no more, its various imperial parts -- from Eastern Europe to Central Asia -- having largely spun free. It’s hard now to remember just how those months after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and that final moment in 1991 stunned the Washington establishment. Untold sums of money had been poured into “intelligence” during the almost half-century of what became known as the Cold War (because a hot war between two nuclear-armed superpowers seemed unimaginable -- even if it almost happened). Nonetheless, key figures in Washington were remarkably unprepared for it all to end. They were stunned. It simply hadn’t occurred to them that the global standoff between the last two great powers on this planet could or would ever truly be over.
And when you think about it, that wasn’t so illogical. Imperial rivalries had been the name of the game for so many centuries. A world without some version of such rivalries seemed genuinely unimaginable -- until, of course, it happened. After the shock began to wear off, what followed was triumphalism of a soaring sort. Think of that moment as the geopolitical equivalent of a drug high."
Another American with vision to spare puts it this way:
"So, of all Trump’s policies, the one that is the most dangerous and destructive, in fact poses an existential threat, is his policies on climate change, on global warming. That’s really destructive. And we’re facing an imminent threat, not far removed, of enormous damage. The effects are already visible but nothing like what’s going to come. A sea level rise of a couple of feet will be massively destructive. It will make today’s immigration issues look like trivialities. And it’s not that the administration is unaware of this. So, Donald Trump, for example, is perfectly aware of the dangerous effects, in the short term, of global warming. So, for example, recently he applied to the government of Ireland for permission to build a wall to protect his golf course in Ireland from rising sea levels. And Rex Tillerson, who was supposed to be the adult in the room before he was thrown out, as CEO of ExxonMobil, was devoting enormous resources to climate change denial, although he had, sitting on his desk, the reports of ExxonMobil scientists, who, since the '70s, in fact, were on the forefront of warning of the dire effects of this accelerating phenomenon. I don't know what word in the language—I can’t find one—that applies to people of that kind, who are willing to sacrifice the literal—the existence of organized human life, not in the distant future, so they can put a few more dollars in highly overstuffed pockets. The word “evil” doesn’t begin to approach it. These are the kinds of issues that should be under discussion. Instead, what’s being—there is a focus on what I believe are marginalia."(Chomsky, emphasis added) "Marginalia" (of current civilization) is an idea that gives new meaning to "lost civilizations."
Pete Seeger:
Bob Dylan:
Perhaps the Kavanaughts coined one of their mottos "Rape girls, not boys" from the protestants (link)
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