"What brought you here?"  That's the question Paul Kingsnorth, the "recovering environmentalist" and founder of The Dark Mountain Project encourages participants to answer on a retreat to find a way forward within the ongoing collapse. Brian Calvert, writing about his experience on the retreat in a fine essay for High County News gives the same answer I would.  Perhaps you too.

What brought you here? This culture, these takers. My life’s history is tied to their system of plunder and its superstructure: a culture of greed and power; locomotives, interstates and Manifest Destiny; pavement and parking lots; extirpation and extinction; genocide, slavery, racism; combustion, warheads, oligarchs. The takers’ mentality runs through the environmental debate, too, and now we face the prospect of their bright-green vision, a dying world where humans have mastered, godlike, the technologies of dominion: massive solar arrays, geo-engineered shade, gleaming hydroponic cities and sweeping fields of mono-cultured soy — the output of a cultural algorithm that has been running thousands of years, a system of consumption and motion that will do anything to keep its wheels turning.  Brain Calvert (HCN July 24, 2017)

We need a new epistemology.

EJT

"Lights", image by Dylar Adddict

Here is the beginning of an interview with Franco Birardi, from the Vimeo clip below, the entirety of which has been transcribed on the Situationist blog, 10,000 little hammers...

                                                                  AFTER THE FUTURE

​"You know, all along the modern times the myth of the future has been connected to the myth of energy; think about Faust, for instance. This idea that the future is energy: more and more and more. More speed, more strength, more consumption, more things, more violence. Futurism is the point of passage, the final step to full modernity, and futurism is the exaltation of violence, of despising the woman, for instance. The woman is weakness, is senselessness, is feebleness. Everything the modern energy wants to forget about: forget the woman, despise the woman, exalt war, exalt violence, exalt acceleration. This is futurism.

The end of the future
Now futurism has brought the world to this point of total despair. Futurism without future. This is the present reality we are facing and we have to invent something beyond this obsession of the future because the future is over. And saying that the future is over does not mean that tomorrow we will not get up—we will get up—but please, don’t be obsessed about the idea that want more things, more violence, more speed. We want more time to live."

about 20 minustes.

Please watch and learn.  See if what he says resonates with you.  Then get his book and poor through it.  The book is certainly dense and theoretical, so do the best you can if you're not used to this type of reading.  Perhaps he'll soon put out a more accessible version.  I hope so.  His message is so important.

"Stop working now. Start living, please." Birardi

Love,
​EJT

A repost from Yonatan Zunger

Science. Politics. Economics. Ethics. Things blowing up. Forgotten history. We’ve got it all!
2 days ago
Trial Balloon for a Coup?

Analyzing the news of the past 24 hours
The theme of this morning’s news updates from Washington is additional clarity emerging, rather than meaningful changes in the field. But this clarity is enough to give us a sense of what we just saw happen, and why it happened the way it did.
I’ll separate what’s below into the raw news reports and analysis; you may also find these two pieces from yesterday (heavily referenced below) to be useful.
News Reports
(1) Priebus made two public statements today. One is that the ban on Muslims will no longer be applied to green card holders. Notably absent from his statement was anything about people with other types of visa (including long-term ones), or anything about the DHS’ power to unilaterally revoke green cards in bulk.
The other was that the omission of Jews from the statement for Holocaust Remembrance Day was deliberate and is not regretted.
A point of note here is that Priebus is the one making these statements, which is not normally the Chief of Staff’s job. I’ll come back to that below.
(2) Rudy Giuliani told Fox News that the intent of yesterday’s order was very much a ban on Muslims, described in those words, and he was among the people Trump asked how they could find a way to do this legally.
(3) CNN has a detailed story (heavily sourced) about the process by which this ban was created and announced. Notable in this is that the DHS’ lawyers objected to the order, specifically its exclusion of green card holders, as illegal, and also pressed for there to be a grace period so that people currently out of the country wouldn’t be stranded — and they were personally overruled by Bannon and Stephen Miller. Also notable is that career DHS staff, up to and including the head of Customs & Border Patrol, were kept entirely out of the loop until the order was signed.
(4) The Guardian is reporting (heavily sourced) that the “mass resignations”of nearly all senior staff at the State Department on Thursday were not, in fact, resignations, but a purge ordered by the White House. As the diagram below (by Emily Roslin v Praze) shows, this leaves almost nobody in the entire senior staff of the State Department at this point.

The seniormost staff of the Department of State. Blue X’s are unfilled positions; red X’s are positions which were purged. Note that the “filled” positions are not actually confirmed yet. [see graphic on link]

As the Guardian points out, this has an important and likely not accidental effect: it leaves the State Department entirely unstaffed during these critical first weeks, when orders like the Muslim ban (which they would normally resist) are coming down.
The article points out another point worth highlighting: “In the past, the state department has been asked to set up early foreign contacts for an incoming administration. This time however it has been bypassed, and Trump’s immediate circle of Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, son-in-law Jared Kushner and Reince Priebus are making their own calls.”
(5) On Inauguration Day, Trump apparently filed his candidacy for 2020. Beyond being unusual, this opens up the ability for him to start accepting “campaign contributions” right away. Given that a sizable fraction of the campaign funds from the previous cycle were paid directly to the Trump organization in exchange for building leases, etc., at inflated rates, you can assume that those campaign coffers are a mechanism by which US nationals can easily give cash bribes directly to Trump. Non-US nationals can, of course, continue to use Trump’s hotels and other businesses as a way to funnel money to him.
(6) Finally, I want to highlight a story that many people haven’t noticed. On Wednesday, Reuters reported (in great detail) how 19.5% of Rosneft, Russia’s state oil company, has been sold to parties unknown. This was done through a dizzying array of shell companies, so that the most that can be said with certainty now is that the money “paying” for it was originally loaned out to the shell layers by VTB (the government’s official bank), even though it’s highly unclear who, if anyone, would be paying that loan back; and the recipients have been traced as far as some Cayman Islands shell companies.
Why is this interesting? Because the much-maligned Steele Dossier (the one with the golden showers in it) included the statement that Putin had offered Trump 19% of Rosneft if he became president and removed sanctions. The reason this is so interesting is that the dossier said this in July, and the sale didn’t happen until early December. And 19.5% sounds an awful lot like “19% plus a brokerage commission.”

Conclusive? No. But it raises some very interesting questions for journalists to investigate.

What does this all mean?

​Continue reading here 

President Donald Trump signed a presidential memorandum Saturdaythat removed the nation's top military and intelligence advisers as regular attendees of the National Security Council's Principals Committee, the interagency forum that deals with policy issues affecting national security.

The executive measure established Trump's chief strategist Steve Bannon as a regular attendee, whereas the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Director of National Intelligence will be allowed to participate only "where issues pertaining to their responsibilities and expertise are to be discussed."...

A 'shadow National Security Council'

The Washington Post's Josh Rogin reported before Trump was sworn in that Bannon, Jared Kushner, and Reince Priebus comprised an informal "shadow national security council" that "sits atop the Trump transition team’s executive committee and has the final say on national-security personnel appointments."

Jared Kushner is Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser. Priebus is Trump's chief of staff.

"Bannon has been working on the long-term strategic vision that will shape the Trump administration’s overall foreign policy approach," Rogin reported, citing transition officials. He "is committed to working on the buildup of the military and is also interested in connecting the Trump apparatus to leaders of populist movements around the world, especially in Europe."

Prior to joining the Trump campaign, Bannon was the CEO of the far-right website Breitbart News — a website known for its antiestablishment, white-nationalist positions on issues such as immigration and trade. A week into his presidency, Trump has already prioritized a number of agenda items that reflect Bannon's own nationalist views, including a border wall and a crackdown on immigration and refugee admissions. He also echoed Bannon's claim that "the media is the opposition party."

Breitbart's role inside the Trump White House is growing: Sebastian Gorka, an editor for National Security Affairs at Breitbart who was paid by Trump's campaign for policy consulting, is expected to join the National Security Council. Julia Hahn, a hardline immigration writer for Breitbart, will join the administration as a special assistant to the president.

Continue reading here, please.

Repost from NYT Sunday Review January 8, 2017; A powerful essay; read-more includes 7 min. video clip

As Donald Trump Denies Climate Change, These Kids Die of It
Nicholas Kristof JAN. 6, 2017
 
TSIHOMBE, Madagascar — She is just a frightened mom, worrying if her son will survive, and certainly not fretting about American politics — for she has never heard of either President Obama or Donald Trump.
What about America itself? Ranomasy, who lives in an isolated village on this island of Madagascar off southern Africa, shakes her head. It doesn’t ring any bells.

Yet we Americans may be inadvertently killing her infant son. Climate change, disproportionately caused by carbon emissions from America, seems to be behind a severe drought that has led crops to wilt across seven countries in southern Africa. The result is acute malnutrition for 1.3 million children in the region, the United Nations says.

Trump has repeatedly mocked climate change, once even calling it a hoax fabricated by China. But climate change here is as tangible as its victims. Trump should come and feel these children’s ribs and watch them struggle for life. It’s true that the links between our carbon emissions and any particular drought are convoluted, but over all, climate change is as palpable as a wizened, glassy-eyed child dying of starvation. Like Ranomasy’s 18-month-old son, Tsapasoa.

Southern Africa’s drought and food crisis have gone largely unnoticed around the world. The situation has been particularly severe in Madagascar, a lovely island nation known for deserted sandy beaches and playful long-tailed primates called lemurs.

​But the southern part of the island doesn’t look anything like the animated movie “Madagascar”: Families are slowly starving because rains and crops have failed for the last few years. They are reduced to eating cactus and even rocks or ashes. The United Nations estimates that nearly one million people in Madagascar alone need emergency food assistance.

#EARTH2TRUMPJoin the Resistance to Trump's Attack on Our Environment and Civil Rights

The #Earth2Trump Roadshow is coming to a town near you in January.
The roadshow is rallying and empowering defenders of civil rights and the environment to resist Trump's dangerous agenda. Stopping in 16 cities on its way to Washington, D.C., it will bring thousands of people to protest at the presidential inauguration.

2-5PM at Federal Plaza, corner of Jackson and Dearborn

Hello, Chicago water protectors! We are very excited to announce that we’re holding our second #NoDAPLCHI rally! Our goal is to bring as many people together as possible to show support and bring media attention to what is happening in Standing Rock. Our rally will also include a celebration showcasing the resiliency of indigenous people through dance.
Please share this event and invite friends!
event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/813409268799705/
#noDAPL #waterislife
​

​https://environmentalcritique.wordpress.com/2016/10/29/police-military-attack-oceti-sakowin-treaty-camp/

Bill Jordan is one of the nicest and smartest people I’ve ever met—two characteristics that naturally go together.  He has a PhD in botany, but unlike many who study deeply, he refuses to be contained by that discipline or any other.  One of the great markers of modernity is the specialization of knowledge and this has produced what many call a “silo effect”.  Botanists do botany; engineers engineer and philosophers philosophize.  They stay in their silos. 
 
Bill is almost wildly interdisciplinary—his interests range from ecology to art, religion and anthropology, ritual, poetry and philosophy.  He studies all this and more, deeply, incorporating all into his being joining them fluidly as if there were never any separation between them.  And in fact, there never has been.  Silos are a fiction—a fiction most often employed towards some form of instrumentalization.  Usually profit.
 
Bill strips away the fiction and aims to see interconnections and relationships—and to speak and write about these in ways that touch humans deeply.  He has done this here, in his new blog, Environmental Prospect, and in particular with his work on "The Values Project".
 
In order to understand the world we have to place ourselves in it.  From there we must determine what is of value to us—true value—which is, in effect, asking what it means to be human.  Part of this work is to ask where values come from…and so follow Bill and his work.  It is my work and yours as we move through, and try to remake our home in the Anthropocene.
 
Excerpt from The Values Project:
 
The Dark Path to Beauty
In this department of Environmental Prospect we are exploring a theory of values, based mainly on the work of literary critic Frederick Turner, that we believe has important implications for environmental thinking and practice and so, ultimately, for the future of our planet.
Turner proposes:

• That the experience of value begins not with simple delight in nature, relationships or the experiences of beauty, mystery or meaning, but with the darker aspects of experience, crucially, for Turner, shame—that is, not guilt, which is the response of the conscience to moral transgression, but the response of the self to its awareness of and dependence on an others-than-itself, beginning with the body itself.
• That ritual and, more broadly, the fine arts, or what I have called the technologies of the imagination, provide the tools we need to deal with this troubling aspect of experience in a productive way, passing, as Turner writes, through shame to beauty.

Beauty, for Turner, is the value of values, the foundation of the complex of transcendent values such as community and meaning that underlie the behavior on which, successful societies have understood, the world—or at least the environment—really does depend.

​To introduce this idea, we can do no better than turn to the “climate change” scene in Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”.
​

Continue reading at Environmental Prospect 

See Bill's book, The Sunflower Forest: Ecological Restoration and the New Communion With Nature, William Jordan (U of California press)  My review here.

EJ Tangel

As I've been saying throughout this  blog and website, these two are, in fact, natural pairs while at the same time unnatural--they are aberrations, deviations that have become perversely normative.  Jon Ronson, author of The Men Who Stare at Goats and The Psychopath Test, gets it exactly right in this wonderfully concise 3 minute interview.

www.ttbook.org/listen/79946

​EJ Tangel