One of Mano Singham’s readers makes an excellent point in commenting on Mano’s post We’re really #1!

Marcus Ranum writes:

The US leads the rest of the world in military spending—we spend as much as all of them combined. Note, I didn’t hew to the national lie that it’s “defense” spending. In today’s military environment, there is no “defense”—it’s all offense. The US military is entirely about “force projection.” That’s Versailles On The Potomac’s code for “offensive warfare” (something our leaders declare democracies never do. How telling!)

What gave me a clue about this was a few years ago I was invited to a friendly pistol-shooting match with some Swiss friends of a friend. All well and good. Over beer afterward we got to talking about “defense” and one of the Swiss, who was a Colonel in the defense forces, said something that changed my entire world-view. Basically it was: “you can tell what an army is for by how its logistics are set up.”

Me: “What do you mean?”

He: “For example, if our leaders told me tomorrow, to attack France, I’d ask them, ‘how am I supposed to get there? Lufthansa via Frankfurt?”

I am rarely speechless but that was one of the times. If you look at the US military it is entirely oriented toward getting killing power into someone else’s space and delivering death elsewhere. If you look at Swiss military, they have all the mountain road-passes mined with deeply buried collapsing charges and tele-guided remote-controlled anti-tank and anti-air missiles. They have fixed defenses that are designed to cost an attacker an appalling butcher’s bill, but they don’t have tank transporters (their tanks are already where they need to be) and aircraft refuelling for long-range bombing strikes (they only need to bomb the survivors of whatever tried to come through the mountain pass) They don’t have the gear to construct and secure airports in faraway places but they have all of the runways of their airports mined with deep wire-controlled cratering charges… In case, you know, the Americans try to land on them without proper clearance and carrying weapons.

The rest of the conversation was kind of a replay of the Mitchell and Webb sketch, “are we the baddies?”

Who first said that the best defense is a good offense appears lost to History, but in his Principles of War, Carl von Clausewitz wrote:

A fundamental principle is never to remain completely passive, but to attack the enemy frontally and from the flanks, even while he is attacking us. We should, therefore, defend ourselves on a given front merely to induce the enemy to deploy his forces in an attack on this front. Then we in turn attack with those of our troops which we have kept back. The art of entrenchment, as Your Royal Highness expressed so excellently at one time, shall serve the defender not to defend himself more securely behind a rampart, but to attack the enemy more successfully. This idea should be applied to any passive defense. Such defense is nothing more than a means by which to attack the enemy most advantageously, in a terrain chosen in advance, where we have drawn up our troops and have arranged things to our advantage.

Not much of a bumper sticker or a gym poster, but Carl got the message across.

For our first 160 years as a nation, we held to the name decided upon by our founders: The United States Department of War. In 1949, as we entered what would become The Cold War, the name was changed to the Department of Defense. The founders, at least, were honest about what the department was for.

We need to return to that honesty.

It’s been a busy week in Wally World: the Universe’s source of cheap plastic crap from China. On The Writing On The Wal—the blog USA Today says should be on its readers’ radar—I continue my singular work dedicated to drawing back the curtain on the Bentonvile Behemoth’s corporate disinformation and other flackery.

WOMEN OWNED OR WOMEN-OWNED, WHICH…? I’m all for women in leadership positions, particularly in Congress, but Walmart’s announcement of another special vendor label bothers me for two reasons. First, for the opportunistic timing. Walmart rolled out … Keep reading…

WALMART SEEKING SOME GOODWILL…? Goodwill industries, an organization I support and place where I occasionally shop, has a long history of doing good work. The organization’s mission statement says that: Goodwill works to enhance the… Keep reading…

WHERE DO WALMART WORKERS SHOP…? Do Walmart workers make their dollars go further by shopping at their local Dollar General store, or does their employee discount (if such still exists) make up the difference? Why do I ask, you very well may… Keep reading…

BREAKING REALLY BAD AT WALMART… I don’t usually write about crimes at Walmart for two reasons. First, I’m much more interested in crimes—both statutory and ethical committed by Walmart, than I am those committed at Walmart; and second, the… Keep reading…

MORE ON WOMEN OWNED (-OWNED?) LABELS… I commented last Thursday about the whole women owned business vs. women-owned business question (I ignored the question of should the logo be singular or plural—woman-owned vs. women-owned—… Keep reading…

WORKING AT WALMART IS AMAZING…? Sigh. I was prepared to write one of my rare positive pieces about affairs de Walmart when I read the headline: Scott Family Amazeum in Bentonville slated to open July 15. The family featured here is that of… Keep reading…

Previously on Walmart Wednesday…

OK. Serious question. Has the Federal Bureau of Investigation discovered, arrested and provided sufficient information to convict a single individual in the United States on terrorism charges that the FBI did not, in fact, actually train to be arrested? Any one? Got a name? Hint. That name is not Sami Osmakac.

IN THE VIDEO, Sami Osmakac is tall and gaunt, with jutting cheekbones and a scraggly beard. He sits cross-legged on the maroon carpet of the hotel room, wearing white cotton socks and pants that rise up his legs to reveal his thin, pale ankles. An AK-47 leans against the closet door behind him. What appears to be a suicide vest is strapped to his body. In his right hand is a pistol.

Recording, says an unseen man behind the camera.

This video is to all the Muslim youth and to all the Muslims worldwide, Osmakac says, looking straight into the lens. This is a call to the truth. It is the call to help and aid in the party of Allah … and pay him back for every sister that has been raped and every brother that has been tortured and raped.

The recording goes on for about eight minutes. Osmakac says he’ll avenge the deaths of Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and elsewhere. He refers to Americans as kuffar, an Arabic term for nonbelievers. “Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth,” he says. “Woman for a woman, child for a child.”

Osmakac was 25 years old on January 7, 2012, when he filmed what the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice would later call a “martyrdom video.” He was also broke and struggling with mental illness.

After recording this video in a rundown Days Inn in Tampa, Florida, Osmakac prepared to deliver what he thought was a car bomb to a popular Irish bar. According to the government, Osmakac was a dangerous, lone-wolf terrorist who would have bombed the Tampa bar, then headed to a local casino where he would have taken hostages, before finally detonating his suicide vest once police arrived.

But if Osmakac was a terrorist, he was only one in his troubled mind and in the minds of ambitious federal agents. The government could not provide any evidence that he had connections to international terrorists. He didn’t have his own weapons. He didn’t even have enough money to replace the dead battery in his beat-up, green 1994 Honda Accord.

Osmakac was the target of an elaborately orchestrated FBI sting that involved a paid informant, as well as FBI agents and support staff working on the setup for more than three months.

I see two choices (but I’m open to others) either the FBI is a corrupt organization filled with lazy idiots who have no clue as to how to catch a criminal and so must manufacture one or the FBI is filled with highly intelligent and trained agents shackled by politicians and their monied masters tasked with creating threats where none exist so as to keep the populace quaking in their safe rooms out of unfounded fears of convenient fairy tale monsters.

Which would you choose?

Censorship is wrong. Full stop.

How many times do I have to say: the right response to objectionable speech is never censorship (or the threat of violence) but rather more speech.

On 16 March, DC Comics released a statement saying that the Albuquerque cover was now not going to run—at the artist’s request—and said that there had been “threats of violence [emphasis, here and below, mine, JH] and harassment” over the cover…

Wait, wait, here’s the real twist:

Albuquerque himself said: “My Batgirl variant cover artwork was designed to pay homage to a comic that I really admire, and I know is a favourite of many readers. The Killing Joke is part of Batgirl’s canon and artistically, I couldn’t avoid portraying the traumatic relationship between Barbara Gordon and the Joker.

“For me, it was just a creepy cover that brought up something from the character’s past that I was able to interpret artistically. But it has become clear, that for others, it touched a very important nerve. I respect these opinions and, despite whether the discussion is right or wrong, no opinion should be discredited.

“My intention was never to hurt or upset anyone through my art. For that reason, I have recommended to DC that the variant cover be pulled. I’m incredibly pleased that DC Comics is listening to my concerns and will not be publishing the cover art in June as previously announced.”

Batgirl’s regular artist, Cameron Stewart, took to Twitter to clarify DC’s statement and said harassment hadn’t been directed at Albuquerque personally, but to people objecting to the cover.

So, the threat of violence is coming, not from the people objecting to the cover, but from the people supporting the cover? Has Gamergate come to comics?

I understand why fans, on both sides, are upset, but this is a matter of art and free speech. Protest, in the form of copious response through more speech, is right and proper, but threatening violence simply makes you a bully, a coward and an ass.

Above you see one of the iconic views of the formerly 26,300 square mile Aral Sea. Mouse over the photo and you see the formerly 18 square mile Folsom Lake in Northern California.

Humans can live for about three days without water and we are seriously fucking up our second most precious resource—air being the first—in our suicidal extraction and consumption of fossil fuels.

I live on the shore of one of the Great Lakes, the reservoir of five percent of the world’s, yes The World’s, potable water. Will our children live to see the Great Lakes states mounting troops behind walls to fight off the thirsty hoards?

Climate change is moving our water elsewhere and we’re running out.

As California experiences the fourth year of one of the most severe droughts in its history, a senior Nasa scientist has warned that the state has about one year of water left.

In an LA Times editorial published last week, Nasa Jet Propulsion Laboratory senior water cycle scientist Jay Famiglietti called for a more “forward-looking process” to deal with the state’s dwindling water supply.

Famiglietti, who is also a professor at University of California at Irvine, said the state had about one year of water in reservoir storage and the backup supply, groundwater, was low.

“California has no contingency plan for a persistent drought like this one (let alone a 20-plus-year mega-drought), except, apparently, staying in emergency mode and praying for rain,” Famiglietti wrote. “In short, we have no paddle to navigate this crisis.”

Nasa data shows that water storage has been in steady decline in California since at least 2002, before the drought began.

Famiglietti called for specific measures to combat the crisis, including accelerated implementation of a law that requires groundwater sustainability, a state taskforce focused on long-term solutions and immediate, mandatory rationing. He also said there was a need for the public to be more involved in the issue.

A Field poll released in February showed that 34% of California voters supported a mandatory rationing policy, though 94% agreed that the drought is “serious”. The majority of respondents – 61% – favored the voluntary reductions the state currently encourages.

On Tuesday, the State Water Resources Control Board is scheduled to vote on a conservation measure that would limit landscape watering, the strictest mandate directed at such water use the state has considered.

That’s the plan? Turn off the sprinklers?

(bangs head on keyboard…)

Kyoto, following five years after the 1992 The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, was sufficient proof for me that nothing was being done. Every national and international meeting to yammer on about Global Warming’s existential threat to our civilization and our planet has been an exercise in smoke and mirrors to distract us and create a false sense that something is being done. Well, that isn’t true. Governments serve at the pleasure of those who pay the bills and the carbon extraction industry—oil, natural gas and coal—pay a lot of bills.

Here in my home state of Ohio the fracking frenzy has produced huge dollar signs that keep people from seeing anything but the money for today hiding the devastation of tomorrow. We won’t to see a direct threat from rising ocean levels here, but our rivers are flooding more and our crops are suffering.

We very well may be living in the end days before a devastating ecological crash.

My silence, your silence, our silence causes me to fear for our grandchildren.

There is nothing random about the pattern of silence that surrounds our lives. Silences occur where powerful interests are at risk of exposure. They protect these interests from democratic scrutiny. I’m not suggesting that the negotiators decided not to talk about fossil fuels, or signed a common accord to waste their lives. Far from it: they have gone to great lengths to invest their efforts with the appearance of meaning and purpose. Creating a silence requires only an instinct for avoiding conflict. It is a conditioned and unconscious reflex; part of the package of social skills that secures our survival. Don’t name the Devil for fear that you’ll summon him.

Well, that hasn’t worked. The Devil is among us and preparing to make a hell on Earth.

If you visit the website of the UN body that oversees the world’s climate negotiations, you will find dozens of pictures, taken across 20 years, of people clapping. These photos should be of interest to anthropologists and psychologists. For they show hundreds of intelligent, educated, well-paid and elegantly-dressed people wasting their lives.

The celebratory nature of the images testifies to the world of make-believe these people inhabit. They are surrounded by objectives, principles, commitments, instruments and protocols, which create a reassuring phantasm of progress while the ship on which they travel slowly founders. Leafing through these photos, I imagine I can almost hear what the delegates are saying through their expensive dentistry. “Darling you’ve re-arranged the deckchairs beautifully. It’s a breakthrough! We’ll have to invent a mechanism for holding them in place, as the deck has developed a bit of a tilt, but we’ll do that at the next conference.”

This process is futile because they have addressed the problem only from one end, and it happens to be the wrong end. They have sought to prevent climate breakdown by limiting the amount of greenhouse gases that are released; in other words, by constraining the consumption of fossil fuels. But, throughout the 23 years since the world’s governments decided to begin this process, the delegates have uttered not one coherent word about constraining production.

Compare this to any other treaty-making process. Imagine, for example, that the Biological Weapons Convention made no attempt to restrain the production or possession of weaponised smallpox and anthrax, but only to prohibit their use. How effective do you reckon it would be? (You don’t have to guess: look at the US gun laws, which prohibit the lethal use of guns but not their sale and carriage. You can see the results on the news every week.) Imagine trying to protect elephants and rhinos only by banning the purchase of their tusks and horns, without limiting killing, export or sale. Imagine trying to bring slavery to an end not by stopping the transatlantic trade, but by seeking only to discourage people from buying slaves once they had arrived in the Americas. If you want to discourage a harmful trade, you must address it at both ends: production and consumption. Of the two, production is the most important.

We need, no we must, push past our denial and leave the carbon in the ground.

Listen…

Then read the rest, read the series, read the book, stop reading and take action…

On 19 November of last year, Ursula K. Le Guin received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation, which administers the National Book Awards. I still have my much-read copies of her Earth Sea Trilogy, which I first read in high school. Those books lead me to The Left Hand Of Darkness and The Lathe Of Heaven and The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia and on and on and on.

I missed this speech and I am pleased now to listen to Le Guin’s words.

Could there be a more noble vision than to aspire to be one of the writers who can remember freedom?

Thank you Neil [Gaiman], and to the givers of this beautiful reward, my thanks from the heart. My family, my agent, editors, know that my being here is their doing as well as mine, and that the beautiful reward is theirs as much as mine. And I rejoice at accepting it for, and sharing it with, all the writers who were excluded from literature for so long, my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction—writers of the imagination, who for the last 50 years watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists.

I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality.

Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship. (Thank you, brave applauders.)

Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial; I see my own publishers in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an ebook six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience and writers threatened by corporate fatwa, and I see a lot of us, the producers who write the books, and make the books, accepting this. Letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish and what to write. (Well, I love you too, darling.)

Books, you know, they’re not just commodities. The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words.

I have had a long career and a good one. In good company. Now here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want—and should demand—our fair share of the proceeds. But the name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom.

Thank you.

The fight is worthy of our efforts.

(In 2000, Billy Moyers interviewed Ursula K. Le Guin about the film adaptation of her The Lathe Of Heaven. I didn’t see the film until sometime in the early ’80s.)

Then of course, there was George Carlin’s take on educational debt…

In the eyes of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and those who control that organization (hint: not We The People) we are all terrorists until proven otherwise, and then only provisionally.

Members of an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force tracked the time and location of a Black Lives Matter protest last December at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, email obtained by The Intercept shows.

The email from David S. Langfellow, a St. Paul police officer and member of an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force, informs a fellow task force member from the Bloomington police that “CHS just confirmed the MOA protest I was taking to you about today, for the 20th of DEC @ 1400 hours.” CHS is a law enforcement acronym for “confidential human source.”

Jeffrey VanNest, an FBI special agent and Joint Terrorism Task Force supervisor at the FBI’s Minneapolis office, was CC’d on the email. The FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces are based in 104 U.S. cities and are made up of approximately 4,000 federal, state and local law enforcement officials. The FBI characterizes them as “our nation’s front line on terrorism.”

Activists had planned the protest at the mall to call attention to police brutality against African Americans. “Our system disproportionately targets, profiles and kills black men and women, that’s what we are here talking about,” organizer Michael McDowell told a reporter at the time. “We wanted to show people who have the everyday luxury of just living their lives that they need to be aware of this, too.”

According to an FBI spokesman, Langfellow’s Confidential Human Source was “a tipster with whom Mr. Langfellow is familiar,” who contacted him “after the tipster had discovered some information while on Facebook” that “some individuals may engage in vandalism” at the Mall of America protest. Upon receiving the email, Bloomington police officer and task-force member Benjamin Mansur forwarded it to Bloomington’s then-Deputy Police Chief Rick Hart, adding “Looks like it’s going to be the 20th…” It was then forwarded to all Bloomington police command staff. There is no mention of potential vandalism anywhere in the email chain, and no vandalism occurred at the Mall of America protest.

The FBI spokesman emphasized that “As for any ‘FBI interest’ in the Black Lives Matter campaign, the FBI had (has) none,” and “makes certain its operational mandates do not interfere with activities protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.” The spokesman acknowledged that vandalism does not fall under the Memorandum of Understanding establishing the parameters under which local police officers are detailed to Joint Terrorism Task Forces and the task force mission of “prevention, preemption, deference and investigation of terrorist acts.” Asked why VanNest, the Joint Terrorism Task Force supervisor, was CC’d on Langfellow’s email, the spokesman responded “I don’t know” but speculated it was “as a matter of courtesy.”

Well, isn’t that special.

As I think of how paralyzing are the myriad of injustices—global warming/climate change, police militarization, racism, sexism, water pollution, air pollution, mass surveillance, the list goes on and on—I realize that I, we, have to think about the root cause, our runaway economic system that allows the Masters Of The Universe and their legions of toadies that serve this 0.01 percent to ravage and plunder unrestrained.

Constantly focusing on treating the symptoms, without seeking solutions to the cause, is a losing strategy for the rest of us because the Masters have rigged the game.

Just as the Bush administration and the U.S. media re-labelled “torture” with the Orwellian euphemism “enhanced interrogation techniques” to make it more palatable, the governments and media of the Five Eyes surveillance alliance are now attempting to re-brand “mass surveillance” as “bulk collection” in order to make it less menacing (and less illegal). In the past several weeks, this is the clearly coordinated theme that has arisen in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand as the last defense against the Snowden revelations, as those governments seek to further enhance their surveillance and detention powers under the guise of terrorism.

This manipulative language distortion can be seen perfectly in yesterday’s white-washing report of GCHQ mass surveillance from the servile rubber-stamp calling itself “The Intelligence and Security Committee of the UK Parliament (ISC)”(see this great Guardian editorial this morning on what a “slumbering” joke that “oversight” body is). As Committee Member MP Hazel Blears explained yesterday (photo above), the Parliamentary Committee officially invoked this euphemism to justify the collection of billions of electronic communications events every day.

The Committee actually acknowledged for the first time (which Snowden documents long ago proved) that GCHQ maintains what it calls “Bulk Personal Datasets” that contain “millions of records,” and even said about pro-privacy witnesses who testified before it: “we recognise their concerns as to the intrusive nature of bulk collection.” That is the very definition of “mass surveillance,” yet the Committee simply re-labelled it “bulk collection,” purported to distinguish it from “mass surveillance,” and thus insist that it was all perfectly legal.

Legal is what those who writes the laws say is legal. Can the rest of us work within the system to reform the laws or are we just jerking off.

The above is only the first eight pages, 3,478 words of the full 47-page, 23,060-word Terms and Conditions contract to which I agreed because I wanted what I wanted right now.

Last weekend my bank went offline to upgrade its online systems. When I logged on following the upgrade I was greeted with a 47-page, 23,060-word behemoth of an End User License Agreement to which I was required to check that I had indeed read and accepted the Terms and Conditions. To my own peril, like any reasonable, over-stressed drone living in the modern world, I checked the box. First, however, I downloaded the agreement and dumped the 47 pages and 23,060 words into a Word file. That how I know that the agreement actually contains 23,060 words.

Anyone who has seen Gene Wilder’s interpretation of Roald Dahl’s Willy Wonka may remember this precursor to the EULA and Sam (father of Violet, the soon-to-be-blueberry) Beauregarde’s Don’t talk to me about contracts, Wonka, I use them myself. They’re strictly for suckers.

Well, fast forward to 2015 where we’re all suckers.

Enter Oliver Burkeman writing in Capitalism was supposed to reduce red tape. Why is bureaucracy worse than ever? for The Guardian:

[T]here’s something strange about this utterly familiar aspect of modern life, as the anthropologist David Graeber notes in his new book, The Utopia of Rules: it’s the opposite of how the free-market world’s meant to work. Capitalism is supposed to be “dynamic, free, and open”; even those of us who favor a big role for government in promoting social welfare tend to accept that this comes at the cost of more red tape. We oppose free-market fundamentalists – but we grudgingly concede that the world for which they yearn would probably involve less brain-meltingly tedious admin.

Not so, insists Graeber, a self-described anarchist best known for his role in the Occupy movement and for his previous book, Debt: The First 5000 Years. Abandon the narrow definition of “bureaucracy” that exclusively involves government functionaries, and it becomes plain that America in 2015 is the most bureaucratic society there’s ever been. “No population in the history of the world has spent nearly so much time engaged in paperwork,” he writes—and not in spite of free-market capitalism, but because of it.

Assuming that Violet survived her juicing and learned from her experience, she very well might have grown up to become JD-impaired, rise to head the New York City Bank legal department and author the 47-page, 23,060-word bureaucratic monstrosity that is the bank’s Terms and Conditions agreement that I, because, like the children, signed because I wanted access and I wanted access now.

At 59 I have not yet grown up.

Burkeman concludes:

[A] society based on rules at least allows us to pretend that everyone’s being treated fairly, which is handy, since it means that I get to guiltlessly enjoy the ways my position of privileged position means I get to bend some of those rules—even if Citibank’s senior executives get to bend them far more. So not only do I have to suffer the indignities of trying to get a basic working internet connection in one of the world’s richest megacities; Graeber’s book is a reminder that I’m complicit in those indiginities, too.

As Lieutenant General David Morrison, Chief of Army, Australian Defense Force, told us last year, The standard you walk past is the standard you accept.

The time has come to stop walking past.

As much as we might wish the contrary, life is not a bumper sticker or coffee mug,

We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do. —From VOL 13, Ch 153, “General Knowledge About Health”, Page 241, Printed in the Indian Opinion on 9/8/1913 from The Collected Works of M. K. Gandhi, published by The Publications Division, New Delhi, India.

Yet, the unnamed author who possibly, or not, paraphrased Gandhiji’s words spoke a Truth, one that I take to heart.

If I wish to make the world a better place for all, then I must be the change I wish to see: no excuses.

The alarm bells of the climate crisis have been ringing in our ears for years and are getting louder all the time – yet humanity has failed to change course. What is wrong with us?

Many answers to that question have been offered, ranging from the extreme difficulty of getting all the governments in the world to agree on anything, to an absence of real technological solutions, to something deep in our human nature that keeps us from acting in the face of seemingly remote threats, to—more recently—the claim that we have blown it anyway and there is no point in even trying to do much more than enjoy the scenery on the way down.

Some of these explanations are valid, but all are ultimately inadequate.

We know what must be done, so what prevents us from taking the appropriate actions? Naomi Klein unambiguously continues:

So my mind keeps coming back to the question: what is wrong with us? I think the answer is far more simple than many have led us to believe: we have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism, [emphasis mine, JH] the reigning ideology for the entire period we have been struggling to find a way out of this crisis. We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe – and would benefit the vast majority – are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets. That problem might not have been insurmountable had it presented itself at another point in our history. But it is our great collective misfortune that the scientific community made its decisive diagnosis of the climate threat at the precise moment when those elites were enjoying more unfettered political, cultural, and intellectual power than at any point since the 1920s. Indeed, governments and scientists began talking seriously about radical cuts to greenhouse gas emissions in 1988 – the exact year that marked the dawning of what came to be called “globalisation,” with the signing of the agreement representing the world’s largest bilateral trade relationship between Canada and the US, later to be expanded into the North American Free Trade Agreement with the inclusion of Mexico.

We do not need to tear down civilization and live in caves We do need to decide which side of a war on humanity we are on.

[O]ur economic system and our planetary system are now at war. Or, more accurately, our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life. What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity’s use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it’s not the laws of nature.

Fortunately, it is eminently possible to transform our economy so that it is less resource-intensive, and to do it in ways that are equitable, with the most vulnerable protected and the most responsible bearing the bulk of the burden.

I, as a white male living in the United States of America, am among that most responsible group.

As Fatih Birol, the IEA’s chief economist, bluntly put it: “The door to reach two degrees is about to close. In 2017 it will be closed forever.” In short, we have reached what some activists have started calling “Decade Zero” of the climate crisis: we either change now or we lose our chance. All this means that the usual free market assurances—A techno-fix is around the corner! Dirty development is just a phase on the way to a clean environment, look at 19th-century London!—simply don’t add up. We don’t have a century to spare for China and India to move past their Dickensian phases. Because of our lost decades, it is time to turn this around now. Is it possible? Absolutely. Is it possible without challenging the fundamental logic of deregulated capitalism? Not a chance.

For once, fear, properly channeled can be our friend.

When fear like that used to creep through my armour of climate change denial, I would do my utmost to stuff it away, change the channel, click past it. Now I try to feel it. It seems to me that I owe it to my son, just as we all owe it to ourselves and one another.

But what should we do with this fear that comes from living on a planet that is dying, made less alive every day? First, accept that it won’t go away. That it is a fully rational response to the unbearable reality that we are living in a dying world, a world that a great many of us are helping to kill, by doing things like making tea and driving to the grocery store and yes, okay, having kids.

Next, use it. Fear is a survival response. Fear makes us run, it makes us leap, it can make us act superhuman. But we need somewhere to run to. Without that, the fear is only paralysing. So the real trick, the only hope, really, is to allow the terror of an unlivable future to be balanced and soothed by the prospect of building something much better than many of us have previously dared hope.

Ultimately the question must be, for everyone, What will I do?

I don’t have my answer yet, but I am thinking about what I will do every day.

This I do accept: I must be the change I wish to see.

Really could not care less that our economy somehow benefits from golf courses and retailers doing more business in the evenings.

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Happy Pi Day.

Every number ever memorized, every number that will be memorized, every number, full stop, is contained in Pi. How magical is that?

BILL MOYERS: Welcome. In this broadcast you will meet an effervescent man who still believes we can make democracy work. Later we’ll talk about those people in Washington who refuse to let it work, but first Wendell Berry. A master of the written word, he rarely appears on television. For one thing, when he’s not writing, he’s farming—and that can keep a fellow busy from sunrise to sunset. But we met recently and after considerable persuasion he said “OK, bring your cameras with you.” This portrait is the result. Produced with the Schumann Media Center, which I head.

WENDELL BERRY: We don’t have a right to ask whether we’re going to succeed or not. The only question we have a right to ask is what’s the right thing to do? What does this earth require of us if we want to continue to live on it?

BILL MOYERS: For Wendell Berry, the defense of the Earth is a mission that admits no compromise. This quiet and modest man who lives and works far from the center of power on a farm in Kentucky where his family has lived for 200 years has become an outspoken, even angry advocate for a revolution in our treatment of the land.

WENDELL BERRY: “A Warning to My Readers.” Do not think me gentle because I speak in praise of gentleness, or elegant because I honor the grace that keeps this world. I am a man crude as any, gross of speech, intolerant, stubborn, angry, full of fits and furies. That I may have spoken well at times, is not natural. A wonder is what it is.

Watch. Listen. Listen again. Repeat. Often.

Previously…

What’s a nerd to do…?