Diminished by climate change and overuse, the river can no longer provide the water states try to take from it.
LINK: https://www.propublica.org/article/colorado-river-water-uncompahgre-california-arizona
Category: Flotsam-and-Jetsam
What the “other side” thinks
LINK: https://www.smalltowndicks.com/episode/deep-cover/
Usually, I’m not particularly eager to push people’s outrage buttons. However, I think this may include a teaching moment.
This is a “true crime” podcast that uses real, small-town cops telling their stories about small-town crime and is hosted by Yeardley Smith, the voice of Lisa Simpson.
Why I include this today is because it really struck me as a prime example of what law enforcement and mainstream folks think of radical environmentalists. So, take your blood pressure medication and listen and learn.
String of electrical grid attacks in Pacific Northwest is unsolved
Emails obtained by OPB and KUOW show that at least four electric substations in the region have been attacked, at least two by people with firearms
Bradley W. Parks / OPB
The electrical grid has been physically attacked at least four times in Oregon and Western Washington since late November, causing growing alarm for law enforcement as well as utilities responsible for parts of the region’s critical infrastructure.
According to information obtained by Oregon Public Broadcasting and KUOW Public Radio, at least two of the incidents bear similarities to the attacks on substations in North Carolina on Saturday that left thousands of people without electricity for days.
Portland General Electric, the Bonneville Power Administration and Puget Sound Energy each confirmed Wednesday a total of four separate attacks on electrical substations they manage in Oregon and Washington. Attackers used firearms in at least some of the incidents in both states, and some power customers in Oregon experienced service disruption as a result of an attack.
All three utilities stated they were cooperating with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI declined to confirm whether it was investigating.’
Bank robbery as performance art? Why a thief may have made a masterpiece
In stealing $1,000 and calling it artwork, Joe Gibbons assaulted reality like a Dadaist poet – or The King of Comedy’s Rupert Pupkin
Performance art is a kind of madness. Its greatest exponents in their greatest works often seem on the edge of some psychotic meltdown in which reality itself is exposed as a cosmic lunacy. Think of Chris Burden getting himself shot in the arm, or Vito Acconci masturbating under an art gallery floor. Or go right back to the origins of performance at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916 when the Dadaist poet Hugo Ball babbled inchoately at the nighthawks of Zurich.
When you think of this history – and let’s not forget the riots deliberately induced by Futurist Evenings before the first world war – it seems reasonable to claim that not only was film-maker Joe Gibbons genuinely staging “performance art” when he robbed a New York City bank, as he claimed, but that it was some kind of masterpiece.
LINK: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/jul/15/bank-robbery-performance-art-joe-gibbons
Breaking Down: Collapse
Episode 114 – Interview with Shaun Chamberlin
Shaun Chamberlin is an author and activist who has been exploring collapse and possible responses for over twenty years. He is the editor of ‘Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy’ and his late mentor David Fleming’s ‘Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It’, as well as executive producer of 2020 film ‘The Sequel: What Will Follow Our Troubled Civilisation?’
He puts the theory into practice as one of the custodians of Ireland’s legendary free pub ‘The Happy Pig’ and was involved with the Transition Towns movement since its inception, co-founding Transition Town Kingston and authoring the movement’s second book, ‘The Transition Timeline’, back in 2009. He was also one of the first Extinction Rebellion arrestees, in 2018, and now leads Sterling College’s online program ‘Surviving the Future: Conversations for Our Time’.
Shaun’s website: http://darkoptimism.org
‘Surviving the Future: Conversations for Our Times’ courses/community: http://ce.sterlingcollege.edu/surviving-the-future…
David Fleming’s books: http://flemingpolicycentre.org.uk/books/
Free access to David Fleming’s Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It: http://leanlogic.online
Destination Morocco Podcast
Listen to our podcast before your trip to Morocco!
Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
Environmental arsonist fled the country in 2005 to avoid lengthy prison sentence — it worked
via Federal Bureau of Investigations
Joseph Dibee, former international fugitive and supporter of the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front, got a shorter sentence than his co-defendants, raising questions about how the federal government prosecutes what it considers domestic terrorism
As California’s wells dry up, residents rely on bottled water to survive
In drought-parched Central Valley, thousands rely on trucked and bottled water as they wait for new wells
Wells are running dry in California at a record pace. Amid a hotter, drier climate and the third consecutive year of severe drought, the state has already tallied a record 1,351 dry wells this year — nearly 40 percent over last year’s rate and the most since the state created its voluntary reporting system in 2014. The bulk of these outages slice through the center of the state, in the parched lowlands of the San Joaquin Valley, where residents compete with deep agricultural wells for the rapidly dwindling supply of groundwater.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE
Analysis of “Joker”
I: Introduction
Joker is a 2019 supervillain origin story film directed by Todd Phillips and starring Joaquin Phoenix in the title role. Though based on the DC comic book character, this film takes many liberties with the story material by creating a background for the Joker that has hitherto been kept deliberately mysterious.
The notion of him starting out as a failed comedian comes from Batman: The Killing Joke, but other elements come from two Martin Scorsese films starring Robert De Niro—Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy. This origin story nonetheless can be reconciled with the comic book canon somewhat in that, given how the story is told from the Joker’s point of view, and given his psychotic penchant for mixing fantasy with reality, he is an unreliable narrator; so it hardly matters if events in the movie contradict those of the comic books.
Phoenix’s performance deservedly won him the Best Actor Oscar. For her plaintive, brooding cello soundtrack, Hildur Guðnadóttir won the Best Original Score. The film itself has also been praised (with nominations for such Oscar categories as Best Picture and Best Director), in spite of such controversies as the baseless fear that its sympathetic portrayal of a mentally-ill loner, who shoots people, would inspire incel murders. Actually, the film–despite Phillips’s denial of having intended any political message–is clearly presenting a drama of class war.
READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE
The Fourth Revolution
The Light Age is the Dark Age, part two
By now, you might have heard about the rising threat of ‘eco-fascism’. If you haven’t you soon will, because the number of people warning about this alarming new danger to civilisation seems to be growing exponentially. In publications right and left and neither you’ll be able to read long expositions of the origins and intentions of this frightening movement, which seems to be taking root all over the world.
Those essays and articles could be rolled into one easily enough, and sometimes it seems like they have been. The formula is always the same, and can be usefully applied across the political spectrum. Start with talk of the ‘rising tide of authoritarianism’ all over the world, as evidenced by ‘populism’, Brexit, Georgia Melloni, Viktor Orban, Justin Trudeau, Donald Trump, Joe Biden or any other leader you don’t like. Move on to explore how much of this ‘rising authoritarianism’ is reflected in environmentalism, as evidenced by Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion, the Green New Deal, the Great Reset, Bill Gates, Greta Thunberg or [insert name of bête noire here]
After this, list the historical inspirations for these new green authoritarians: Ted Kaczynski, Pentti Linkola and Dave Foreman should do for starters. Dig into the most miserable chans and reddits of the Internet and ‘expose’ a few anonymised avatars promoting race war in the name of the planet. Mention the Christchurch shooter. Use the phrase ‘dark undercurrent’ a lot. Quote Murray Bookchin. Chuck in the names of a couple of nature writers from the 1930s who became fascists. Mutter darkly about ‘blood and soil’ and how Hitler was a vegetarian. Did you know there was an organic garden at Dachau? It makes you think. If you’re lucky.
Having got here, you can move on to the meat of the thing: sombrely intoning about the ‘new threat to democracy’ which is represented by this ominous movement. Depending on where you’re coming from, you can now explain how these new eco-authoritarians represent either [a] a threat to our God-given right to drive, mine, manufacture, fly, burn oil and freely enjoy the glories that only Western Progress can provide, or [b] a threat to diversity, equality, human rights, LGBTQIA++ people, refugees, ‘global justice’ and a woman’s right to choose. Either way, the conclusion will be much the same: a non-specific but ominous call for more monitoring of ‘problematic’ views, more work to tackle ‘radicalisation’, more ‘hate speech’ or anti-protest laws and probably more Internet regulation. For the safety of us all, of course.
The problem, though, is that actual ‘eco fascism’ is notable mostly by its absence. Dark corners of the Internet aside – you can find any craziness there, after all – it’s hard to find a single ‘eco fascist’ anywhere out in the real world. No public intellectuals, no writers, no philosophers, no politicians, no popular movements embrace anything of the kind. Plenty of people get the label applied to them of course – without the prefix, the word ‘fascist’ has been a meaningless, all-purpose insult for decades – but they all reject it. I was in and around the green movement for a long time, but I never met an eco-fascist, though I did have the pleasure of being called one.
So why all the dire warnings? I can think of two possible explanations.
RED
By now, you might have heard about the rising threat of ‘eco-fascism’. If you haven’t you soon will, because the number of people warning about this alarming new danger to civilisation seems to be growing exponentially. In publications right and left and neither you’ll be able to read long expositions of the origins and intentions of this frightening movement, which seems to be taking root all over the world.
Those essays and articles could be rolled into one easily enough, and sometimes it seems like they have been. The formula is always the same, and can be usefully applied across the political spectrum. Start with talk of the ‘rising tide of authoritarianism’ all over the world, as evidenced by ‘populism’, Brexit, Georgia Melloni, Viktor Orban, Justin Trudeau, Donald Trump, Joe Biden or any other leader you don’t like. Move on to explore how much of this ‘rising authoritarianism’ is reflected in environmentalism, as evidenced by Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion, the Green New Deal, the Great Reset, Bill Gates, Greta Thunberg or [insert name of bête noire here]
After this, list the historical inspirations for these new green authoritarians: Ted Kaczynski, Pentti Linkola and Dave Foreman should do for starters. Dig into the most miserable chans and reddits of the Internet and ‘expose’ a few anonymised avatars promoting race war in the name of the planet. Mention the Christchurch shooter. Use the phrase ‘dark undercurrent’ a lot. Quote Murray Bookchin. Chuck in the names of a couple of nature writers from the 1930s who became fascists. Mutter darkly about ‘blood and soil’ and how Hitler was a vegetarian. Did you know there was an organic garden at Dachau? It makes you think. If you’re lucky.
Having got here, you can move on to the meat of the thing: sombrely intoning about the ‘new threat to democracy’ which is represented by this ominous movement. Depending on where you’re coming from, you can now explain how these new eco-authoritarians represent either [a] a threat to our God-given right to drive, mine, manufacture, fly, burn oil and freely enjoy the glories that only Western Progress can provide, or [b] a threat to diversity, equality, human rights, LGBTQIA++ people, refugees, ‘global justice’ and a woman’s right to choose. Either way, the conclusion will be much the same: a non-specific but ominous call for more monitoring of ‘problematic’ views, more work to tackle ‘radicalisation’, more ‘hate speech’ or anti-protest laws and probably more Internet regulation. For the safety of us all, of course.
The problem, though, is that actual ‘eco fascism’ is notable mostly by its absence. Dark corners of the Internet aside – you can find any craziness there, after all – it’s hard to find a single ‘eco fascist’ anywhere out in the real world. No public intellectuals, no writers, no philosophers, no politicians, no popular movements embrace anything of the kind. Plenty of people get the label applied to them of course – without the prefix, the word ‘fascist’ has been a meaningless, all-purpose insult for decades – but they all reject it. I was in and around the green movement for a long time, but I never met an eco-fascist, though I did have the pleasure of being called one.
So why all the dire warnings? I can think of two possible explanations.
The US megadrought won’t just end – it will change the land forever
Patterns of drought and deluge are common throughout history, but human-driven climate change is disrupting these cycles, making it more difficult to predict exactly how the current megadought in south-western North America will end
Getty Images/Bloomberg Creative/ David Paul Morris
The current drought began when Kent Norman was just 2 years old. Farming is in his blood. His family has worked the land in Stockton, California, for generations. But the last two decades have created one of the most severe droughts in the region history: Over the course of his life, south-western North America has become drier than it has been in more than 1000 years.