requiem for a revolution?

the link at the bottom of this post is to a breakthrough news report on the great peril the cuban revolution now faces due to the trump administration's unhinged militarist imperialist foreign policy against socialist countries in latin america. it lauds the generous peaceful spirit of it that may be about to be violently shattered, which made me think of it in terms of the title of this post.

here's a comment i posted to the video:

the quote below comes from the last paragraph of bill blum's anti empire report #75 (link below). if i recall correctly, somewhere else he wrote (paraphrasing) 'the real reason the usa wants to destroy the cuban revolution is because it can't tolerate having a successful socialist country in latin america to serve as an example for others to follow'. now for the quote:

"On April 6, 1960, Lester D. Mallory, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, wrote in an internal memorandum: “The majority of Cubans support Castro … The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship. … every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba.” Mallory proposed “a line of action which … makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.” Later that year, the Eisenhower administration instituted the suffocating embargo."

https://williamblum.org/aer/read/75

Trump Says Cuba Is Next After Venezuela Attack. Population Armed to Defend Country

The Collapse of International Law

this video is excellent! featuring former senior united nations human rights official craig mokhiber talking about how the usa and it's little buddy israel get away with genocide and all sorts of other egregious violations of international law, with the always pertinent rania khalek of breakthrough news.

Iran, Venezuela, Palestine: The Collapse of International Law | Craig Mokhiber

fascism has come to america

donald trump, his administration, and his followers are the scum of america. brutal, racist, mendacious hypocrites, as bad as any right wing authoritarian nationalist movement there has ever been.

'NSPM-7 is a declaration of war on anyone who does not support the Trump administration and its agenda'

Trump’s NSPM-7 Labels Common Beliefs As Terrorism “Indicators”

god's bastard child

a literal reading of the bible informs us that jesus christ was god's bastard child. the spirit of our heavenly father impregnated the virgin mother mary without first marrying her makes jesus his bastard. this divine conception also must explain how it was that jesus managed to live a sinless life, the only human to ever do so.

what does this say about the rest of we sinful humans? it strongly suggests we are not god's children, not even his bastards, for we are sinners, and how could such flawed and evil children be the offspring of a perfect and righteous deity?

so we are obviously lower than bastards in god's view. i think 'he' clearly has disowned us.

of course, i regard christianity and all dogmatic faiths as utter nonsense, and as george carlin has previously opined, concocted to control us 'commoners', 'peasants'. just a part of dystopia.

"The Fundamental Issue - Overshoot"

 i think it's well worth reading some of william e. rees writing here:

standstoreeson | William E Rees | Substack

then there's this 2 hour long conversation with him on youtube:

William E. Rees: "The Fundamental Issue - Overshoot" | The Great Simplification #53

finally, this excellent comment to that video from CitizenK1969 :

there is something sort of "mathematically inevitable" (note the quotation marks) about our predicament. Human cultures that are rapacious simply out compete those that are restrained in resource use... so without pan-species behavioral changes, we can't escape our "fate." I think this is why Nate started out looking at energy and the environment, but has arrived at a place of increasingly talking about human motivation, human nature. We either have to transcend our nature, or literally transform into something different, a species less inherently competitive, more in tune with its ecosystem... I'm reminded of the end of Vonnegut's novel /Galapagos/, which sees humanity survive, long term, by regressing into a kind of sea lion species. I want to believe we can overcome out nature, but history puts that in serious doubt.

what is education for?

 i came across this article linked below thanks to another source of wisdom and knowledge i recently became reintroduced to, a blog by a professor named william rees, another 'doomer'. i'll likely post a link to one of his posts soon. below are a couple of little excerpts from the article link posted here:

'What might be managed is us: human desires, economies, politics, and communities. But our attention is caught by those things that avoid the hard choices implied by politics, morality, ethics, and common sense. It makes far better sense to reshape ourselves to fit a finite planet than to attempt to reshape the planet to fit our infinite wants.'

'A fourth myth of higher education is that we can adequately restore that which we have dismantled. In the modern curriculum we have fragmented the world into bits and pieces called disciplines and subdisciplines. As a result, after 12 or 16 or 20 years of education, most students graduate without any broad integrated sense of the unity of things. The consequences for their personhood and for the planet are large. For example, we routinely produce economists who lack the most rudimentary knowledge of ecology. This explains why our national accounting systems do not subtract the costs of biotic impoverishment, soil erosion, poisons in the air or water, and resource depletion from gross national product. We add the price of the sale of a bushel of wheat to GNP while forgetting to subtract the three bushels of topsoil lost in its production. As a result of incomplete education, we’ve fooled ourselves into thinking that we are much richer than we are.'

What Is Education For?

intelligence and stupidity

 if i had any devoted readers they should know by now that in my worldview humans are idiot savants, which is to say we , both collectively and individually, all to some extent exhibit both extreme intelligence and extreme stupidity, depending on the subject. link below to an interesting article which sort of makes this point: 

The Evolution of Stupidity (and Octopus Intelligence)