RantSome Dan

@hunda
6 Followers
350 Following
452 Posts

USian expat in Mexico, humanist, eclectic, social progressive, cooperativist, collaborationist, post-capitalist, egalitarian, JEDI pluralist, romantic, caregiver, RPCV Guatemala, Mountain Songster, Skagitonian.

Header: view of Volcan Citlaltépetl (Pico de Orizaba) from Fortín de las Flores

"During trips to Israel, US law enforcement agents - including police, Border Patrol, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) - receive training and instruction from Israeli military, police, intelligence agencies, and private defense companies. Officials visit checkpoints and prisons while learning about Israeli practices of surveillance and racial profiling. These programs facilitate an exchange of what the US-based organization Jewish Voice for Peace has termed "worst practices". The group Researching the American-Israeli Alliance, in partnership with JVP, has demonstrated how counter-terrorism trainings "instill militarized logics of security into the civilian sphere, normalizing practices of mass surveillance, criminalization, and the violent repression of communities and movements the government defines as threatening". Counter-terrorism trainings purport to teach civilian police forces how to protect a civilian populace by using racial profiling and other techniques that cause harm to targeted groups, as honed by Israel through the military occupation of Palestine and the genocide and containment of Palestinian people."

— Shuli Branson, Raven Hudson, Mimi Thi Nguyen: Surviving the Future, p. 195

You can learn more about this cross-training of state violence at deadlyexchange.org/, as referenced by the book.

This is a big reason why the concept of a "two state" solution for Israel would result in the (continued) institutionalization of genocide: the state practice is to commit harm. The point of note here is that it's not the people that define security (which would be social security and focus on maintaining stability and welfare) but it's national security (justifying increased violence on behalf of maintaining its power). Civilians don't pick to make Muslim people, Black people, women and the like the targets of violence - the governments do. And those invested in this power reify it through culture (copaganda is garbage).

Surviving the Future - BookWyrm

Surviving the Future is a collection of the most current ideas in radical queer movement work and revolutionary queer theory. Beset by a new pandemic, fanning the flames of global uprising, these queers cast off progressive narratives of liberal hope while building mutual networks of rebellion and care. These essays propose a militant strategy of queer survival in an ever precarious future. Starting from a position of abolition--of prisons, police, the State, identity, and racist cisheteronormative society--this collection refuses the bribes of inclusion in a system built on our expendability. Though the mainstream media saturates us with the boring norms of queer representation (with a recent focus on trans visibility), the writers in this book ditch false hope to imagine collective visions of liberation that tell different stories, build alternate worlds, and refuse the legacies of racial capitalism, anti-Blackness, and settler colonialism. The work curated in this book spans Black queer life in the time of COVID-19 and uprising, assimilation and pinkwashing settler colonial projects, subversive and deviant forms of representation, building anarchist trans/queer infrastructures, and more. Contributing authors: zuri arman, Ryan Becker, Wriply Marie Bennet, Raxtus Bracken, Scott Branson, Beth Bruch, Scott Chalupa, Yold Yolande Delius, aems dinunzio, Zaria El-Fil, emet ezell, Amalia Golomb-Leavitt, Che Gossett, Raven Hudson, Jonesy and Jaime Knight, Cassius Kelly, Sandra Y.L. Korn, Stasha Lampert, Toshio Meronek, Yasmin Nair, Mimi Thi Nguyen, E Ornelas, Darian Razdar, Bry Reed, Adrian Shanker, Kitty Stryker, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Jamie Theophilos, and Rebecca Valeriano-Flores."

The library is one of the few spaces left in our society that is not thoroughly colonized by capitalism. Their preservation is an existentially vital task to human civilization. People who attack libraries are the worst kind of villain imaginable, because they want a world where every iota of human community is crushed into grist for the money machine

Just Israeli settlers taking over the famous Ibrahimi Mosque in Occupied Hebron (Occupied West Bank) and putting Jewish religious items in it while being heavily armed, and inviting their kids to take part in the pillaging.

The same Mosque where 20 years ago the American terrorist Baruch Goldstein opened fire and murdered 29 people.

This is a #genocide.

This is Judaism the same way ISIS is Islam. It's not. It's just settler colonialism.

Via https://x.com/MariamBarghouti/status/1830726563018469429

Mariam Barghouti مريم البرغوثي (@MariamBarghouti) on X

Look how Israeli settlers send their children to take over the Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron, the same mosque that the deranged settler Baruch Goldstein went into twenty years ago and opened fire at worshippers as they prayed dawn prayers. They’re literally sending their kids to

X (formerly Twitter)

@DrALJONES There are good, humanitarian people within Israel who oppose the madness.

But the government - and it has to be said a substantial proportion of the population - are involved in open genocide whilst the world, controlled by the US, looks on and lets it happen.

No other civilised country has its people pop across a border, harass its people and steal their land.

This is not a civilised country. It's a madhouse state, surviving only by US decree.

I agree. We learned so much from the pandemic and then very quickly forgot it all and went back to business as usual. Whilst I agree I just can't see reduced energy use really happening. We continually and seemingly exponentially increase our energy use all the time. Look at all the AI bullshit. More and more energy for something that is as intelligent as the dumbest person in the room.

Climate crisis is caused by human activity.
So - how is increasing our activity helping?
...

Watching the World Go Bye
Eliot Jacobson's Collapse of Everything Blog
Climate Change

Wind Power is Grotesque
June 6, 2024

You’ve got to know which side I’m on. I’m an old-school environmentalist, coming of age in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. More environmental f&%kery happened during my youth and more meaningful environmental policy was enacted in my youth than at any time or any place in modern industrial civilization’s history.

When I hear the youth of today complain about my generation and the actions we didn’t take, when they arrogantly utter “OK boomer” as if more should have been done back at some undefined moment when we knew better, I can only cite the anthropomorphic principle: but for what was accomplished they wouldn’t exist to complain about what wasn’t done. But for the policies, agencies, acts and laws we helped create through our protests and direct action, the environment would have already degraded into an unlivable hellscape. Rivers on fire. A massive hole in the ozone layer. Undrinkable water and unbreathable air. Oil spills and dead oceans. Nuclear waste and radiation from meltdowns. Toxic dumps spilling into waterways. Lead and DDT everywhere. The human population would be lower by billions.

Yeah, more could have been done, but here are just a few samples of what was accomplished in the 1970’s:

First Earth Day, April 22, 1970

Official Formation of NOAA, October 3, 1970

Official Formation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), December 2, 1970

Clean Air Act of 1970, December 31, 1970

Lead-Based Paint Restrictions, January 13, 1971

EPA Bans DDT, June 14, 1972

Limits to Growth is Published, October 1, 1972

Clean Water Act, October 18, 1972

Ocean Dumping Act, October 23, 1972

Leaded Gasoline Phase-Out, December 28, 1973

Endangered Species Act, December 28, 1973

Safe Drinking Water Act, December 16, 1974

Toxic Substances Control Act, October 11, 1976

Phaseout of Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), October 15, 1978

So what do we have today by way of new policy? The latest “accomplishment” is the so-called Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). At its core, the IRA is a money-dump to EV, solar and wind capitalists under the guise of speeding up the transition to renewable energy. The IRA is designed to facilitate the continued growth of industrial civilization, albeit with a shift in industries. Electric cars. Solar. Wind. Batteries. These are all products for sale by industries seeking growth and profit.

The most basic truth about the IRA is that it is emphatically not an environmental policy. The IRA is not fascilitating a choice between clean energy and fossil fuels. It is not either/or. The IRA is both/and. The more energy that the IRA helps create, the more our industries will find energy-hungry ways to use it. The latest energy scourges, crypto and AI, make this truth obvious to the casual observer. And like all new energy before it, the new energy we are creating with renewables will be sucked into the black hole created by Jevons paradox.

Today’s “environmentalists” are no longer the environmentalists of my youth. They want wind, solar, nuclear, so that they can have lives as comfortable as those of their parents and grandparents. But whenever the choice between the environment and humanity’s continued malignant growth is on the line, today’s environmentalists choose growth over the environment. Their choice is nowhere more clear than the green delusion of renewable “wind energy.”
...
And maybe worst of all, wind towers and blades are short-lived, with current lifespan estimates between 20 and 30 years, at which time the entire structure, all of it, steel, iron, copper, fiberglass and concrete, needs to be demolished, transported away as mostly unrecyclable trash, and replaced.

Drive by any large-scale wind farm that’s been in operation for five years or more and you will see a landscape littered with non-functioning towers.
...
Yes, fossil fuel use also suffers from a long list of tragic environmental impacts, many exceeding those of wind. Yes, fossil fuels are also grotesque. Our continued use of fossil fuels is powering the sixth great extinction. Yes, we should stop using fossil fuels. Yes, I am 100% behind groups like “Just Stop Oil” and the actions they take. But I am also 100% behind folks like Max Wilbert and other old-school environmentalists who are fighting new wind power developments.

The first step is to stop destroying the environment in a never-ending quest for more energy, believing that at some future time more energy will somehow help save the environment that same energy is destroying.

I often get asked for my solution, my answer to this predicament. I am an environmentalist. I love the environment. I love nature, life and biodiversity. I love this beautiful planet. And yes, I love it all more than global industrial civlization.

https://climatecasino.net/2024/06/this-is-grotesque/

Wind Power is Grotesque – Watching the World Go Bye

Pope Francis said at the Vatican that those who work systematically and with every means possible to repel immigrants are committing a grave sin.

Please make sure all Christian Republicans see this.

My vote is meaningless in this election but I'm going to do it anyway, since I figure 50/50 it might be the last time I ever get to do it.

Harris will win the popular vote, I'm very nearly sure. But I also still doubt that she will be president. It's a much harder lift that most of you realize.

...and yet somehow you'll still come at me with the best country and best constitution nonsense.

The American Delusion is strong. And our Constitution is an anti-democratic POS, here in the year of our lord 2024.