ancianita
ancianita's JournalWhatta fuckin' country. Glad Joe Biden Leads It
comforting 13 grieving families in Delaware,beating covid,
handling over 100,000 evacuations and terrorists half a world away,
and now this hurricane.
So much threat and death.
But Joe be all like Yes We CAN.
Can Democrats Stand Acquitted By History? Yes We Can.
Remind America of Republican history -- hearings & trial videos, texts, documents, crimes and criminal leaders, polls. Constantly.The real reason Republicans side with ME fundamentalists
The real reason Republicans will threaten Kamala Harris' life in perpetuity.
A Reminder About America's Labor Force and The Unions That Support Them
Follow the AFL-CIO on Facebook for more helpful support and information.(Proud member of AFT Local #1)
Yes, as with all unions, we are antifa.
When we get the chance let's also remind others that Organized Labor has been officially pro-vaccination for months.
Open Our Eyes Toward Our Greatest Ally
If you can, please watch David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet, his latest (and maybe last) film on Netflix.This shorter version, How to Save Our Planet, moves toward its more powerful counterpart above.
Planet of the Humans -- Biomass Fuel is Human Consumption of the Finite Earth From Above Ground
We have bamboozled ourselves. We must disavow our allegiance to green sustainability promoters.
Our descendants will curse us for not facing the truth -- that human growth on a finite planet is suicide.
If our descendants are to live through a 'good anthropocene,' it will only come because we make the necessary sacrifices ahead.
D's vs R's
Also politically relevant
excerpt...
I thought that when we fought I was to blame
But now I know you play a different game
I've watched you dance with danger, still wanting more
Add another number to the score
Watch them all fall down
(All day, all day)
Domino dancing
(All day, all day)
Watch them all fall down
(All day, all day)
(Domino dancing)
When you look around you wonder
Do you play to win
Or are you just a bad loser?
Prince -- 1000 Light Years From Here
Just caught up today with the ever prescient Prince & his Welcome 2 America album. Just wanted to share.
Feels like he's come back to dance & nudge us some more.
Frenzied evacuation of U.S. citizens kicks into high gear as the Taliban approach Kabul.
Source: New York Times
Aug. 15, 2021
Updated 11:12 a.m. ET
KABUL, Afghanistan As the Taliban stood at the gates of Kabul on Sunday, completing the near total takeover of Afghanistan two decades after the American military drove them from power, an eerie quiet that had enveloped the city in recent days transformed into chaos.
A frenzied evacuation of U.S. diplomats and civilians kicked into high gear, while Afghans made a mad dash to the banks, their homes and the airport. Crowds of people ran down the streets as the sound of gunfire echoed in downtown Kabul.
Helicopter after helicopter including massive Chinooks with their twin engines, and speedy Black Hawks that had been the workhorse of the grinding war touched down and then took off loaded with passengers. Some dispensed flares overhead, a new addition to Kabuls skyline.
Those being evacuated included a core group of American diplomats who had planned to remain at the embassy in Kabul, according to a senior administration official. They were being moved to a compound at the international airport, where they would stay for an unspecified amount of time, the official said.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/15/world/asia/us-evacuation-kabul.html
The Pentagon and White House are scrambling to keep up.
Revisiting Bertrand Russell's Nobel Prize Lecture
Some call Bertrand Russell's lecture a mapping of human power.
I see this lecture as a warning about human inertia.
In light of how humans approach a novel virus pandemic, and in light of how global big fossil block all attempts to transition themselves to clean infrastructure, saying "sure, we concede climate change is man made, but we're in too deep, so find a way that doesn't demand our sacrifice," I see it as a mapping of human inertia.
Russell says that four fundamental human desires -- acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity, and love of power -- are the motives that make up power.
I'm more interested in his detailing of "less fundamental but still considerably important" motives -- excitement (fight club, vices & sports kind of escape from boredom), fear and hatred -- since, from DC to local commissions and councils, those motives seem to deflect & drag on our politics and media.
Joe Biden takes these human foibles into account as he makes a better future, imo. What makes President Biden so great, particularly for a country this size, is that he's shown that he uses the benefit of hindsight as one of his tools to secure more political unity on covid, climate and infrastructure.
In thinking more along those lines, and watching where Biden goes from here, I appreciate in hindsight Bertrand Russell's "state of the human union" address here.
(The lecture's paragraph text is unwieldy by today's standards, so I've broken up a couple here.)
...We love those who hate our enemies, and if we had no enemies there would be very few people whom we should love.
All this, however, is only true so long as we are concerned solely with attitudes towards other human beings. You might regard the soil as your enemy because it yields reluctantly a niggardly subsistence. You might regard Mother Nature in general as your enemy, and envisage human life as a struggle to get the better of Mother Nature. If men viewed life in this way, cooperation of the whole human race would become easy. And men could easily be brought to view life in this way if schools, newspapers, and politicians devoted themselves to this end. But schools are out to teach patriotism; newspapers are out to stir up excitement; and politicians are out to get re-elected. None of the three, therefore, can do anything towards saving the human race from reciprocal suicide...
If you consider how many Germans were killed in the late war, and how much the victors are paying in income tax, you can, by a sum in long division, discover the cost of a dead German, and you will find it considerable. In the East, it is true, the enemies of the Germans have secured the ancient advantages of turning out the defeated population and occupying their lands. The Western victors, however, have secured no such advantages. It is obvious that modern war is not good business from a financial point of view. Although we won both the world wars, we should now be much richer if they had not occurred.
If men were actuated by self-interest, which they are not except in the case of a few saints the whole human race would cooperate. There would be no more wars, no more armies, no more navies, no more atom bombs. There would not be armies of propagandists employed in poisoning the minds of Nation A against Nation B, and reciprocally of Nation B against Nation A. There would not be armies of officials at frontiers to prevent the entry of foreign books and foreign ideas, however excellent in themselves. There would not be customs barriers to ensure the existence of many small enterprises where one big enterprise would be more economic.
All this would happen very quickly if men desired their own happiness as ardently as they desired the misery of their neighbours. But, you will tell me, what is the use of these utopian dreams ? Moralists will see to it that we do not become wholly selfish, and until we do the millennium will be impossible.
I do not wish to seem to end upon a note of cynicism. I do not deny that there are better things than selfishness, and that some people achieve these things. I maintain, however, on the one hand, that there are few occasions upon which large bodies of men, such as politics is concerned with, can rise above selfishness, while, on the other hand, there are a very great many circumstances in which populations will fall below selfishness, if selfishness is interpreted as enlightened self-interest.
And among those occasions on which people fall below self-interest are most of the occasions on which they are convinced that they are acting from idealistic motives. Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power. When you see large masses of men swayed by what appear to be noble motives, it is as well to look below the surface and ask yourself what it is that makes these motives effective. It is partly because it is so easy to be taken in by a facade of nobility that a psychological inquiry, such as I have been attempting, is worth making. I would say, in conclusion, that if what I have said is right, the main thing needed to make the world happy is intelligence. And this, after all, is an optimistic conclusion, because intelligence is a thing that can be fostered by known methods of education.
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1950/russell/lecture/
Our problems always return to the huge human equality gap in "methods of education." Education has always been how humans kept their power over others. Big fossil knew before Silicon Valley did -- own data, own the world. In hindsight, America's founders' class bias is revealed in their failure to make education a fundamental constitutional right.
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Gender: Do not displayHometown: New England, The South, Midwest
Home country: USA
Current location: Sarasota
Member since: Sat Mar 5, 2011, 12:32 PM
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