OUR HOUSE IS ON FIRE

I decided to make the title of this post in all caps in mimicry of the book of the same title upon which it is inspired. for what it's worth, a warning such as this is worthy of ALL CAPS!

The subtitle of the book is 'Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis'. It is by Greta Thunberg's family. I've read less than 1/2 of it so far, but couldn't wait to write this review. It is based on a book published in Sweden in aug. 2018 titled Scenes from the Heart in which authorship is credited primarily to Greta's mother Malena Ernman (less so to her father, Svante Thunberg)

The reason i can't wait until completing reading this is because it's so good, at least for the (very) few of us who take the climate and sustainability crisis seriously. That is, after part I of the book, the first 65 pages, which in my opinion ought to have been edited out, as it mostly details matters of little interest outside of the Ernman-Thunberg family. Part II, which i'm only about 1/2 way through, is another matter. it consists of many brief observations (the book is further divided into 'scenes' ranging from 1 to a few pages in length) all of which are very relevant to our climate and sustainability crisis, and to the (here, adequate words fail me) absurd manner in which our absurd species is failing to respond to it, as is repeatedly pointed out.

This brings me to the crux of this crisis as i've expressed before: our species is simply too damned stupid or irrational. Long ago it became abundantly clear to me that this was so, and that consequently there was no way in hell that we would / will ever respond to the crisis in a manner which even remotely is adequate. Here i may disagree somewhat with Greta and her family, who according to this book seem to think that climate denialism is no longer rampant, and that the main problem is that we're simply unwilling to give up the luxurious comforts and possibilities that living in a fossil fueled 'paradise' affords us. It seems abundantly clear to me that if the vast majority of humans actually fully comprehended what was / is at stake with this crisis, they would be willing to make such radical changes, but they don't. They may acknowledge in a rather superficial way that the crisis exists, but it isn't surreally surreal to them yet, and it won't be until civilization is collapsing and we are going extinct.

I must admit there is some validity to the POV that humans are just to selfish to make the sacrifices necessary to address this crisis, but i believe the greater and ultimately more intransigent problem remains the inherent inability of humanity to think and behave rationally, as pointed out previously:

https://dystopiananddoomed.blogspot.com/2026/09/the-truth-will-set-u-free-and-other.html

imperfect world

to me donald trump and the republican party are pure evil. this is a problem, but perhaps the bigger problem is that their supposed opposition, the democrats, are far from their opposite. rather than standing for reason, inclusion (as with 'foreigners'), the sharing of wealth (socialism or communism), and environmentalism, they mostly stand for nothing, which is why they're so despised by true progressives.

indeed, it seems to me it's impossible to be purely good in this imperfect world. my definition of pure goodness would be to live fully without harming other beings including non-humans. some come closer to this ideal than others (vegan peace, justice, and environmentalist greta thunberg for example), but our world is inherently competitive, violent, and destructive to some extent. i find this very troubling. 

black or white?

feeling terribly lonely and depressed, i turned once again to greta thunberg for a bit of inspiration and hope. this led me to her ted talk 8 years ago, when she was just 15 and already famous as a climate activist. in it, she mentions being on the autism spectrum, and that because of this, 'almost everything is either black or white' to her, and that this, rather than being a handicap, acts as a 'superpower'.

i too tend to see things as black or white once i understand and know relevant facts. thus i have long held the same view as greta re. the climate issue. yet here are paths diverge widely, as she became an activist while i, after failing to persuade a few sheeple to become educated on it, despite my best effort, have proceeded to do nothing more.

here's a bit of what she had to say:

'So why are we not reducing our emissions? Why are they in fact still increasing? Are we knowingly causing a mass extinction? Are we evil? No, of course not. People keep doing what they do because the vast majority doesn't have a clue about the actual consequences of our everyday life and they don't know what the rapid changes required. We will think we know and we will think everybody knows, but we don't because how could we. If there really was a crisis, and if this crisis was caused by our emissions, you would at least see some signs, not just flooded cities, tens of thousands of dead people, the whole nations leveled to piles of torn down buildings. You would see some restrictions, but no, and no one talks about it.

There are no emergency meetings, no headlines, no breaking news. No one is acting as if we were in a crisis.'

here again i think things are rather black and white. emissions aren't being reduced due to ignorance, true, but why are sheeple so ignorant about something this dire? is it simply that they can't know, as greta wishes to believe, or could it be that, to paraphrase al gore, the truth is too inconvenient? are sheeple too stupid to understand the science, or too lazy to learn about it for themselves?

and what does it mean to be 'evil' in this context? again, this possibility is too awful to be countenanced by greta in this talk, but if it's evil to not prevent or try to prevent such a catastrophe from taking place, what are sheeple (the vast majority of us anyway) if not evil?

this is the crux of the matter. for whatever reason our species is unable or unwilling to deal appropriately with this crisis, making the question 'are we evil' moot, as it won't be long before we'll be extinct.

near the very end of this short talk, she has this to say:

'we do need hope. Of course, we do. But the one thing we need more than hope is action. Once we start to act, hope is everywhere. So instead of looking for hope, look for action. Then, and only then hope will come'

i don't know about this. seems like hopium to me. hopium being false hope that acts like a drug, staving off the despair of no hope.

sigh. i guess there is no inspiration, no respite from despair and ultimate loneliness, to be found here.

https://www.rev.com/transcripts/greta-thunberg-ted-talk-transcript-school-strike-for-climate

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAmmUIEsN9A

false flag day

the title of this post comes from a speaker (jonathan cole) who proposed it to commemmorate 9/11 at a 9/11 25th anniversary convention of truthers, which lined up several highly qualified and dedicated speakers to continue the lonely quest for 9/11 truth against all odds, over a 4 day period last month. if it needs to be spelled out yet once again, 9/11 was a false flag terrorist attack designed to mobilize public support for things like the subsequent 'patriot act' which helped turn america into an orwellian surveillance state, the military invasions of afghanistan and iraq, and of course, the perpetual 'war on terror' used to justify and maintain grossly bloated military spending. the very notable quote below was also a feature of his speech, found 2 hours and 23 minutes into the video linked below:

“Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.

Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”  -the german nazi hermann goring

another quotable quote at the 2:41:40 mark :

"the individual is handicapped by coming face-to-face with a conspiracy so monstrous he can't believe it exists" -former FBI director J. Edgar  Hoover

i think this quote sums up how and why the perpetrators of this false flag incident could proceed with utter confidence that the public at large would swallow their monstrous bald-faced lies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qf524Jc6PN0

note: this 4 hour 4 minute video has a 1/2 hour slot in the middle from about 1:45:00 to 2:15:00 that is blank space. i don't know why it wasn't edited out, but it wasn't.

further note: while i found this whole presentation interesting, especially the latter 1/2 after the break, i must add a note of caution that it's possible if not likely that some of these 'truthers' could be CIA plants meant to throw shade or discredit upon the whole movement by their embrace of other alleged 'conspiracies' which have no sound evidencary basis, and whose support of obvious con artists such as donald trump (bret weinstein) further creates doubt as to their credibility.

who will cry when i die?

The most important reasons for my unhappiness being social isolation and alienation, and that no one will cry when i die. Related, and perhaps the main reason i sometimes think of moving to a different country is that for many americans if not most, there is little sense of community. When i hear in the media some place like my little hometown being described as 'tight-knit', i think that's bs. I don't even know the names or for that matter the faces of most of the people living on my street, and i think that's not all that unusual in america. Our society is highly individualistic, with the general mentality being it's up to every individual to sink or swim on their own. By contrast, there's a documentary on PBS  titled La Manplesa that's about what was a tight-knit community of latinos mostly from el salvador in a washington dc neighborhood who got along pretty well until things changed, including the police harassing and brutalizing them for hanging out in public and being noisy, which from what i understand is typical behavior in latin cultures. In this doc. the residents describe how close they were and how the spirit of community among them was very strong. Since i'm so used to american culture i don't know how well i would adjust to such a change, but the thought of trying does intrigue me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9lB5yzMrCQ

"This is a sick society."

note: this post was originally composed as a letter to a friend in denial who is 'confrontation shy'.

i tend to shy away from confrontation too, but as i'm sure u're aware, this can be problematic. a sign of weakness or cowardice. a reason for shame.

i'm ambivalent about confronting u as i am about confronting people in general, for several reasons, including this one: rather than setting one free, awareness of unpleasant truths can be debilitating or even sickening. this is because knowledge isn't necessarily empowering; it may simply be vexing in the extreme. much of what i've learned about our world via my independent reading and research has been this way. things like manmade climate disruption and our species ongoing predilections for war crimes including genocide, knowing about them doesn't empower one to do anything about them. trying to do something, being a brave selfless activist like greta thunberg and the millions of people around the world who have demonstrated and protested against war in general and genocidal war in particular, has accomplished little if any desired change. when taking into consideration that such protests also often lead to being arrested and sometimes victimized by police brutality, it's easy to see that it might be better to limit one's knowledge and awareness of such things. to use the red pill blue pill example, maybe it's better to opt for relatively blissful ignorance (taking the blue pill) than to take the bitter red pill of immiserating truth.

it's also said that misery loves company, but i'd rather not make anyone miserable, at least not unbearably so. the truth of this world does make me miserable, but not unbearably so.

i've been learning more about and from the author of that book i just read (only partially) titled AN ARMY LIKE NO OTHER. his parents survived holocaust death camps. he was raised in israel and in the military there for 2 wars, which led him to move to the UK and become outspokenly critical of his native country. this has placed him at odds with the authorities in his adopted land, who, as in other nations in the western alliance, are staunchly pro zionist (israel). the quote which serves as the title of this post came from the article linked below, in which he shares some of his views with the middle east eye, a non-western media source with a decidedly non-western worldview, the sort of worldview that consumers of western mainstream media are never exposed to. here's another quote from the article:

"We are in an upside down world, it's an inversion of reality; our elite - the media - is supporting the breaking of international law, refusing to admit this genocide is taking place."

i think this guy knows what he's talking about and is telling the truth about 'the democratic republic of genocide', as he refers to israel in this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVoAKcDJhzA&t=16s

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/there-little-which-jewish-about-israel-haim-bresheeth-antisemitism-and-gaza

so which do u prefer, the bitter truth, or the comforting illusion that israel and it's western backers are fighting a moral battle against 'terrorists'?