AND THEN THERE WERE NONE

John Legry's Blog

DEATH BY 1,000 PIN PRICKS

There must be a new approach to public policy development that makes “Earth First” top priority.  “Property” “economy” and “jobs” must serve “Earth First.”

The planning frame should be at least 100 years, possibly 1,000, NOT 25.  Environmental change is occurring so fast that small decisions made locally avalanche regionally (e.g. downstream pollution), or even globally (e.g. ozone layer destruction).

The Economic Growth discussion is always the same: “highest and best value” (a misnomer if ever there was one – profits trump survival).

Fat City is over, although many are still trying to milk it for the last bit of cream.  We must do more with less, and the rich must share or move out.  We don’t need more deadhead users and freeloaders.  We must develop a mutually supportive community again.  The business of government is the people’s business; developers step to the rear.  Legislators…

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ABOUT WAR: While You Were Away…

Impression of Alexander the Great addressing his men when they refused to go on:

“Men, I don’t know why the gods set us on this great course, and what may be incomprehensible to me, must be doubly so for you.  And that’s why we have to go on, land after land, obstacle after obstacle, killing everyone who stands in our way, until the gods finally reveal their very great purpose to us.”

His men thought:

1:  Here we have one more useless heroic gesture from the parapet.

2:  It’s done to boost confidence/morale: cast admiring glances, swell with pride, rush/thrill with excitement, ache for the bittersweet glory of battle.

3.  Battle sucks, he’s a putz; and I hope they shoot his ass off before they get mine.

For some reason, his guys bought it; or maybe it was the execution of all the chief dissenters that encouraged the survivors’ understanding and will to carry on.

The troops who march off to war singing generally return silently if they return at all.  There is no sport in war, no winners, everybody loses, and the end result is disaster for some, and lifetime wounds for the rest – invisible, or not, we’re all disabled, dehumanized, and diminished by it, even non-combatants.  Even so, there are always those who yearn for Armageddon, who work for and revel in it, a giant I-told-you-so and a thumb in the eye for all the rest of us who must be made to suffer for ignoring them, I suppose.

The foolish gestures of war; the real heroism clichéd and trite, so prosaic, so real, is desperate stuff – what we console ourselves with as we face or lie dying, contemplate the dead, justify the holocaust. Innocence, forever startled. There is no glory, no promise, and no hope in warfare. Just blood.

 

“FILL ‘ER UP!”

©JLegry.

BERNIE SANDERS for President

“THERE WILL BE A RECKONING”

‘There Will Be A Reckoning’
by Jon Queally, Common Dreams, February 25, 2015
Environmental visionary Lester Brown delivers stark warning over dust bowl conditions spreading over Africa and Asia.

A satellite captured a 2001 dust storm swirling over China. The storm eventually crossed the Pacific and reached the United States. (Photo: NASA)

On the verge of retirement, noted environmentalist and celebrated systems analyst Lester Brown has a dire warning for the world he has spent more than half a century advising on issues of food and energy policy: there is no end in sight for the interrelated scourge of climate change, global poverty and hunger.

In fact, according to Brown, in several vulnerable areas around the world, the situation may be about to go from very bad to much worse.

“We are pushing against the limits of land that can be plowed and the land available for grazing and there are two areas of the world in which we are in serious trouble now,” said Brown, who founded both the Worldwatch Institute and the Earth Policy Institute, in an interview with the Guardian’s environment correspondent Suzanne Goldenberg.

“One is the Sahel region of Africa, from Senegal to Somalia,” explained Brown. “There is a huge dust bowl forming now that is actually stretching right across the continent and that dust bowl is removing a lot of top soil, so eventually they will be in serious trouble.”

At some point soon, he added, “there will be a reckoning” in those regions.

According to this NPR report from November, based on the work of the Earth Policy Institute, the dust bowl conditions forming in northern Africa and across central Asia are already having dire consequences:

In China, dust storms have become almost an annual occurrence since 1990, compared to every 31 years on average historically. In northern China and Mongolia, two large deserts — the Badain Jaran and the Tengger — are expanding and merging, often swirling together in massive sand storms when strong winds blow through each spring. The Gobi desert is also growing, inching ever-closer to Beijing as the grasslands at its edges deteriorate.

Meanwhile, in the Sahel region of Africa, millions of acres are turning to desert each year in countries including Burkina Faso, Chad, Niger and Nigeria. Dust from Chad’s Bodele Depression been traveling the globe for many centuries — in fact, scientists think it helped make the Amazon fertile. But the amount of dust blowing out of West Africa has increased in the last 40 years. Dust clouds from the Sahara can affect air quality as far away as Houston, and may even harm Caribbean coral reefs.

According to Brown, as the situation worsens in these areas, the impacts will likely be much worse than they were in the United States during the 1930s. “Our dust bowl was serious,” Brown explained to Goldenberg, “but it was confined and within a matter of years we had it under control … these two areas don’t have that capacity.”

The warning over soil erosion and the unsustainable farming practices that currently dominate large swaths of the planet have been on the mind of ecologists and agricultural experts for decades. As the threat of global warming has entered the public debate, the stakes have only intensified. Brown was among the first and most thorough minds to set attention on the threat of planetary climate change, devoting an entire series of books—collectively titled Plan B—which assess and put forth solutions to the approaching crisis. The most recent edition is Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization.

However, in a statement last month, Brown announced that he would officially retire later this year and wind down the Earth Policy Institute following the publication of his next book, The Great Transition: Shifting from Fossil Fuels to Solar and Wind Energy.

“After careful consideration of my life at 80 years,” announced Brown in the statment, “and with profound appreciation to my staff, collaborators and supporters, I have decided to step down as president of the Earth Policy Institute and end its work as of July 1, 2015.”

Brown continued, “I believe the Earth Policy Institute has accomplished what we set out to do when we began in 2001, and now it is time for me to make a shift and no longer carry the responsibility of managing an organization. I plan to continue to research and write on issues that I believe I can add to in some meaningful way.”

Speaking with Goldenberg, Danielle Nierenberg, who joined Worldwatch in 2001 and went on to co-found her own institute, Food Tank, said the world owes much to Brown for his decades of work and unique vision.

“He’s the godfather of merging environmental and food issues,” said Nierenberg. “If you are talking about food and the environment, everybody looks to Lester Brown.”

As the world continues to grapple with the catastrophes spurred by our own human development, Brown wrote this in the introduction to Plan B 4.0: “The question we face is not what we need to do, because that seems rather clear to those who are analyzing the global situation. The challenge is how to do it in the time available. Unfortunately, we don’t know how much times remains. Nature is the timekeeper but we cannot see the clock.”

He continued, “The thinking that got us into this mess it not likely to get us out. We need a new mindset.”

The last question society should ask, he concluded, is whether or not what needs to be done is considered possible.

DON IN IOWA

Mousetrump – nesting in the greenery.

Trump: The Ultimate Know-Nothing
Jim Moore, Washington, D.C.-based writer, editor, and photojournalist

Donald Trump descended on Iowa this past weekend, dropping from the skies to deliver words of wisdom to the masses of Hawkeye Christian Republicans starving for enlightenment at the feet of The Donald. To no one’s surprise — no one outside the GOP at any rate — Trump’s inchoate jawboning once again revealed a vacuous puffball incapable of organizing the basic parts of speech into coherent, declarative, and compelling sentences. And the subsequent interviews with the media further exposed a character completely unsuited for public office. When he told ABC’s Jon Karl that he would be willing to spend half-a-billion dollars or more in a 2016 White House bid (“I’d be willing to spend that kind of money. I’d spend whatever it took,”), it wasn’t so much about his aspiration to achieve a great and responsible office as it was about his desire to buy something new and big.

Maybe it’s me, but I’ve never gotten Trump, never felt the least bit comfortable with his utterances and his maze-like thought processes. I believe most Americans take the measure of a person not by his or her bank accounts, but by his or her accountability. With Trump, there is always a fog that accompanies his pronouncements — a smokescreen of obscuring rhetoric designed to cloak him in pseudo facts and vaguely damning suggestions of impropriety. His visit to Iowa showcased his directionless approach to real-world issues.

Consider this Trumpism, a 54-worder on the Republicans’ chances of recapturing a Senate majority, as quoted by NBC’s Kasie Hunt:
“Well I think you have six or seven states – I won’t mention the states ’cause I don’t want to put pressure on anybody, but I think you have six or seven states where you could really have in a couple of cases upsets, really, and you could have some good victories for the Republicans.”

When pressed for specific candidates, Trump passed, which is to say he doesn’t have a clue.

READ MORE:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jimmoore/donald-trump-iowa_b_3741408.html

Please sign petition:

We Move to Amend.

We, the People of the United States of America, reject the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United, and move to amend our Constitution to:Firmly establish that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights.Guarantee the right to vote and to participate, and to have our votes and participation count.Protect local communities, their economies, and democracies against illegitimate “preemption” actions by global, national, and state governments.

Signed by 380,00+ and counting . . .to 500,000

PETITION LINK: http://movetoamend.nationbuilder.com/petition

2014 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 4,600 times in 2014. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 4 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Don’t You Love The Smell Of Carbon In The Morning?

Friend Grumpy Lion continues to tell it like it is.

Grumpy Lion

Published on Tuesday, March 18, 2014 by Common Dreams

400 PPM: ‘Just a Matter of Time’ Before We Cross Climate Threshold ‘Forever’

Fossil fuel burning increasing greenhouse gases to levels ‘not seen in human history’

– Jacob Chamberlain, staff writer

The graph known as the Keeling Curve shows steady rise in carbon dioxide and seasonal variations (NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory/Scripps Institute of Oceanography)Climate scientists have long said that the earth cannot withstand more than 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for very long without tipping the scales against human life once and for all.

And according to Ralph Keeling, who runs the carbon dioxide monitoring program at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, that atmospheric concentration was recorded last week for the first time this year, two months earlier than last. Now, warns Keeling, it is only a matter of time before the atmosphere permanently…

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2013 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 4,400 times in 2013. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 4 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 3,800 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 3 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

SAME OLD STORY, SAME OLD SONG

True Progressives – CLICK IMAGE for the other side of the story.

True Story:

I shared this story before, but people couldn’t hear it. It seems preposterous. Things as they are, let’s try again.

In 1991, a senior assistant from President Bush Sr.’s office met National Association of Counties (NACo) President Michael Stewart (R – Salt Lake Co.) at a cocktail party at the Annual Conference in Salt Lake City. I overheard them discussing the “best” form of government, ever. They agreed that it was Medieval England around the time of King John. Its benefits?

• The king is the sole authority, secures obedience, neutralizes all possible challengers; gains the monopoly of force; and, maintains law and order.
• Patriotism is focused on the nation, not on the localities that comprise it, transferring identity from local to national level, at the disposal of the king.
• The state dominates or controls the religious life of society with a single authoritarian religion to manage the mob for advantage.
• The state controls economic life to facilitate circulation and exchange of goods, and grasps as much as possible of the national wealth for the king and his allies.

In the medieval model stability is created through divine hierarchy. The king rules all, the church facilitates obedience of the mass, the military protects the property of king and “state”, and the peasants work to feed everybody. It’s a simple model, which allowed it to last for several hundred incredibly stultifying and repressive years in which most of humanity subsisted on the level of cattle, or swine, and wars were fought at personal whim of a vainglorious, and occasionally religiously demented elite. Does this ring bells?

The important men at the 1991 cocktail party didn’t intend to install a king or a single church in America (at least right now), but in variation, updated and recycled form, favored state identification and alliance with a majority religion and a CEO working with a board of directors (perhaps preserving a hint of representative government – old habits, even bad ones such as participative management, die hard). Call king and court president and cabinet, or rose and garden, they envisioned a tyrant working with an oligarchy of the privileged elite that they believe is, of course, best suited to govern, operating above government and for the privileged elite. They think they’re nobility.

They were deadly serious and not amused when I asked if they had heard of Robin Hood or the Magna Carta. They looked at me as if I’d shit their shoes, then ignored me.

“Americans deserve the government they elect,” my father used to say, but we didn’t elect G.W. Bush, or the Koch brothers. Kings, as I recall, are divinely chosen – in our case, by fat cats and a corrupted Supreme Court. Kings and aristocracy represent the elite status quo, which presently resides in Wall Street. Wall Street wants to govern everything by itself, without any interference from the rest of us. Father knows best. Or, would that be “brothers?”

Koch Brothers Buy Their Way Into, Then Breezily Skew, Civic Discourse

Anti-American Terrorists

Following a strategy of ignoring the facts and killing the messenger, the billionaire Koch Brothers have responded to the Center for Public Integrity’s report on Koch lobbying activities by mounting a smear campaign against the Center – complete with the real “Koch facts” – while refusing requests to speak with them. In the last elections, though, the Kochs did tell 50,000 employees who to vote for and what disasters would befall them if they didn’t. Citizens United rendered such corporate politicking marginally legal, though still, of course, supremely sleazy. -Abby Zimet More… 4-20-11 TruthDig.com

KINGS KOCH [The ultra rightwing Koch Brothers are – PUBLIC ENEMIES 1 and 2]

Poor Beleaguered Billionaires

The rich have created and retain dominance in an amoral, or consciously immoral world of corruption, thievery, and violence, instead of trying to eliminate or improve conditions that would remedy or heal it. They would leave us with a permanently dysfunctional, and therefore, easier to manage wingnut government. The dog-eat-dog social consequences are devastating to consider. The cynicism is appalling.

The rich don’t expect any retribution or punishment, for it is the culture. They are so highly placed that they expect to tiptoe through the tulips while the rest of us fry in the ozone hole. See also:  ORGANIZED IRRESPONSIBILITY .

Corporate Coup d’état Coming Soon to a City Near You. Rania Khalek Wednesday, April 20, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

In The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein demonstrates how wealthy elites often use crisis and chaos to impose unpopular policies that restructure economies and political systems to advance their interests. She calls these orchestrated raids, “disaster capitalism.” Disaster capitalism is on display around the country, as legislators use the debt crisis afflicting their states as an opportunity to hollow out the public sector.

This so-called financial emergency is really a democracy emergency. Local governments are NOT corporations. The true purpose of emergency financial management is to convert a democratically elected government into a hierarchal business entity through economic “shock therapy”, which would be impossible if workers, elected representatives, and residents had any say. If we allow what is taking place to continue, disaster capitalism will find its way to a city, town, or school district near you. READ MORE: Rania Khalek blog at http://raniakhalek.com.

All U.S. Prime

GOP Wave Reshapes Nation’s Agenda State by State. Ann Sanner and Calvin Woodward Monday, April 18, 2011 by Associated Press

COLUMBUS, Ohio – State by state, Republicans are moving fast on a conservative agenda they had no hope of achieving before the big election gains of November. The dividends go beyond spending cuts. Republicans are restricting abortion, expanding gun rights, imposing polling-station photo ID laws and attacking public sector unions.

Democrats find themselves cowed or outmaneuvered, hoping that voters will see these actions as an overreach by the Republicans, an accidental revolution to be reversed.

It’s not all coming up tulips for rightwing extremists. New Mexico and Utah are among Republican-led states where governors are bypassing the GOP playbook; and the tea party movement is in tatters in Colorado and not much better off in Alaska. READ MORE: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/04/18-2

Final words: Keep on keepin’ on. We, the people, need each other. We can win this fight against the self-styled elite. We outnumber them. Vote Progressive as if your life depends upon it – it probably does, and cliché or not, every election is the most important election since our Constitution was ratified. Best regards and good luck to us all, j

ILLUMINATI APPLY IN REAR

Oops!

Did you ever notice that a lot of the religious conspiracy stuff clouds the water so that you can’t see the political conspiracy stuff as well?

Here’s my take on Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons, the Illuminati, so forth: AW, C’MON!
Lincoln’s, et al Holy Blood, Holy Grail (predicating a pregnant Mary Magdalene) is based upon Pierre Athanase Marie Plantard’s Priory of Sion legend, by which he claimed from the 1960s onwards that he was a Merovingian dynast and the “Grand Monarch” prophesied by Nostradamus. Plantard played along with this story for a while, but in 1986 parted ways, dismissing Holy Blood, Holy Grail and his own documents as false and irrelevant. In October 1993, a judge had Pierre Plantard’s house searched. The search turned up a hoard of false documents, including some proclaiming Plantard the true king of France. Plantard admitted under oath he had fabricated everything. He was threatened with legal action and therefore disappeared to his house in southern France. He was 74 years old. Nothing more was heard of him until he died in Paris in February 2000.
Holy Blood, Holy Grail authors maintain that only through “speculative synthesis can one discern the underlying continuity, the unified and coherent fabric, which lies at the core of any historical problem.” To do so, one must realize that “it is not sufficient to confine oneself exclusively to facts.”
“Mike Hockney” [the pseudonym of a ghostwriter engaged purportedly by the Illuminati to reveal in coded fictional form, various esoteric mysteries with which they are concerned – giggle, snort, LOL] says he’s got the real skinny. “Mike Hockney” writes confusingly enough in The Armageddon Conspiracy: “There are intersection points between the three mysteries , certain key facts that all three have in common [it really doesn’t matter for our purposes which three mysteries]. Even if a seeker has become entrapped in one of the fake mysteries (both of which are as highly compelling as the real mystery), he will still have opportunities to switch to the real mystery if he makes the right choice at an intersection point. He will make the right choice only if he has the strength to abandon all of the work he has performed on either of the fake mysteries. This, in fact, is part of the test. Virtually no one makes the right choice because abandoning years of hard work is simply too difficult for most to contemplate, especially when they believe they have been making good progress. There is another trap: it is possible to move from one fake mystery to the other fake mystery, bypassing the true mystery. Several seekers have encountered this misfortune.” – oh, la. Mysteries for days.
My favorite founding father Thomas Paine [who was a deist, believing god gave everything a jumpstart but was thereafter hands off] writes in the Age of Reason:
“Mystery is the antagonist of truth. It is a fog of human invention that obscures truth, and represents it in distortion. Truth never envelops itself in mystery, and the mystery in which it is at any time enveloped is the work of its antagonist, and never of itself.”
“When men, whether from policy or pious fraud, set up systems of religion incompatible with the word or works of God in the creation, and not only above, but repugnant to human comprehension, they were under the necessity of inventing or adopting a word that should serve as a bar to all questions, inquiries or speculation. The word mystery answered this purpose, and thus it has happened that religion, which is in itself without mystery, has been corrupted into a fog of mysteries.”
“As mystery answered all general purposes, miracle followed as an occasional auxiliary. The former served to bewilder the mind, the latter to puzzle the senses. The one was the lingo, the other the legerdemain.”
The Illuminati (“enlightened”) is a name given to several groups, both historical and modern, real and fictitious. Historically, it refers specifically to the Bavarian Illuminati, an Enlightenment-era secret society founded in 1776 that only lasted until 1784. In modern times it is used to refer to a purported conspiratorial organization which acts as a shadowy “power behind the throne”, allegedly controlling world affairs through present day governments and corporations, usually as a modern incarnation or continuation of the Bavarian Illuminati. In this context, the Illuminati are believed to be the masterminds behind events that will lead to the establishment of a New World Order.
However, as David DeGraw, Alternet, writes: “It has now become evident to a critical mass that the Republican and Democratic parties, along with all three branches of our government, have been bought off by a well-organized Economic Elite who are tactically destroying our way of life. The harsh truth is that 99% of the US population no longer has political representation. The US economy, government and tax system are now blatantly rigged against us. Current statistical societal indicators clearly demonstrate that a strategic attack has been launched and an analysis of current governmental policies prove that conditions for 99% of Americans will continue to deteriorate. The Economic Elite have engineered a financial coup and have brought war to our doorstep. . . and make no mistake, they have also launched a war to eliminate the US middle class.”
At the center of this group is the Business Roundtable, an organization representing Fortune 500 CEOs that is also interlocked with several lead elite organizations. Most Americans have never heard of the Business Roundtable. However, it is the most influential and powerful Economic Elite organization. READ MORE: http://www.alternet.org/economy/145996/the_business_roundtable%3A_the_most_powerful_corporate_business_club_most_americans_have_never_heard_of
To hell with bunk mysteries. It isn’t some jury-rigged Jesus-freak conspiracy group that has declared war on the rest of us, it is the corporatists. It is time to fight back against them, clear-minded and with full vigor from every side. Let Freedom Ring!

RELATED LINKS:

HOLY GRAIL, BABOON HEART

WOW, CLOWNS!

 

 

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