Month: May 2019

Solastalgia In The Late Anthropo Scene

By the mid 70s, I had harbored a belief that frenetic societal norms were approaching a tipping point. Unfortunately, I did not turn that gnawing Angst into a Greta Thunberg moment. Since that time, generational thieves continue to place the young closest to the brink. The wealthiest of the most privileged draw up CYA plans, such as keeping a pilot on call and insuring that the bunkers stay well stocked and well armed.

Solastalgia: a form of mental or existential distress caused by environmental change.

An item from today’s (28 May 2019) New York Times:

In the next few months, the White House will complete the rollback of the most significant federal effort to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, initiated during the Obama administration. It will expand its efforts to impose Mr. Trump’s hard-line views on other nations, building on his retreat from the Paris accord and his recent refusal to sign a communiqué to protect the rapidly melting Arctic region unless it was stripped of any references to climate change.

Trump Administration Hardens Its Attack on Climate Science

Everyday ecologies slip away every day and every where. My particular “where” is in a fly-over State, the point where Ohio and Kentucky meet Indiana.

What I saw a generation ago, that I do not (or very seldom) see now:

  • fire flies,
  • grubs,
  • moles,
  • mole hills,
  • ants crawling up a tree,
  • skunks,
  • inch worms,
  • bag worms,
  • bees,
  • native flora,
  • native-blossoming trees,
  • diverse wild birds,
  • earthworms in puddles,
  • butterflies,
  • moths,
  • groundhog colonies,
  • snakes,
  • water bugs,
  • locusts,
  • praying mantises

Cicadas flew by the billions here in 2004. Will they hatch in 2021?

Plastic molecules form islands in every ocean, plastics permeate lungs and digestive tracts, they extend to the peak of Everest (see photo below) and drop into the Marianna Trench. Sea life ingests those products manufactured using fossil fuels, transported with fossil fuels. Furious resource-extraction teams purchase ice-breaking ships to the Arctic for rare minerals needed in throwaway electronics.

An urgent suggestion: stop eating fish — and all other sentient things. Industrial nets extending 75 miles behind enormous tankers cull sea life efficiently enough to shorten the intervals between individual eco-extinctions.

Did you know that Greta Thunberg is vegan? She confronts eco-criminals with action plans that address the root of the problem. It’s not Climate Change, it’s not Climate Crisis, it’s nothing less than a Climate Emergency.

Go Vegan like there’s no tomorrow.

Take “Scale Mt Everest” off your plastic-bucket list.

Bad ideas:

  • Accumulating crap,
  • wasting lives by consuming them,
  • trashing lives for folly, fashion, fad, or geopolitical advantage,
  • frenzied shopping experiences,
  • joining traffic jams on the highways if avoidable,
  • frenetic frequent flying,
  • idling your ass in a drive-thru for the In and Out of it all,
  • ingesting the toxins that dwell in fast food,
  • tossing single-use plastic utensils and drinking straws,
  • salt, pepper, ketchup, mustard, secret sauce, soy, sugar… packets into an environment already fulsomely (my favorite word) thick with them.

Thanks for reading.

The Enemy is not Resistance

“Hamas is no rogue militant group, with anonymous, shadowy operators. It will not disappear or shirk its leadership responsibility. It remains an authentic and powerful part of the Palestinian people, for over thirty years… much older than some of the current Israeli political parties in the Knesset. While many of its founders, all those years ago, have been killed by Israel, Hamas continues to speak on behalf of the dignity and hope of millions of Palestinians worldwide. Like them, it carries the kindle of resilience and self-determination of a People rendered stateless but neither hopeless nor powerless by a European colonial project. Like them, it will not cease to exist or fade into silence.”

Stanley L. Cohen

More posts on BillZiegler1947 regarding Stanley Cohen47

Thanks for reading.

caged but undaunted

{Originally published May 10, 2019)

The Enemy is not Resistance

The Islamic Resistance Movement began more than thirty years ago at an historical moment in time which it knew to be fraught with absolute peril for their people. The founders of this national liberation struggle examined the overwhelming military capabilities of Israel, fostered by its global superpower sponsor, the United States. They looked at Israel’s expansionist programs… the Zionist project of illegal settlements erasing their homes and villages, dispossessing mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers… and at the failure of the international community to stop them. They knew then, that within a generation Palestinians would lose it all … their motherland and patrimony and their nation… leaving them homeless captives to the whims of another man’s door. In that moment, resistance was not a lifestyle choice or a revolutionary pose. It was existential necessity, just as it is now.

Everything…

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Veganism: Motives Matter

A repost from There’s an Elephant in the Room — “Veganism; do motives matter?”

This is an essential article — a clear and sustaining statement that maintains its focus. It quite simply dispels facile, self-serving, soothing delusions that keep the inconceivably evil nihilist machinery profitable and unstoppable. Motives matter enormously.

“Underpinned by the decision to stop the deep injustice of creating victims, no checklist is needed to determine which species deserve to be respected; it’s ALL of them. This is what veganism actually is and once an individual has acknowledged that this is their choice, it is unshakeable. It becomes completely unthinkable to even consider going back on that decision; it becomes an integral part, even the defining part of who we are as individuals.”

https://theresanelephantintheroomblog.wordpress.com/2019/05/18/veganism-do-motives-matter/
Image by Tras los Muros / Aitor Garmendia

Thanks for reading.

Nakba: a 71-year perspective

A reign of terror began 71 years ago in Palestine: aptly called The Catastrophe, that terror continues to this day. That land lies at an ancient crossroads, located directly along the shortest land route from Africa to Europe. You have to be a resilient people to have lived there over the past few millennia, resiliency is something that defines such people. Palestinian Social Customs and Traditions

Ethnic cleansing continues even as the Palestinian birthrate increases more rapidly than the Israeli birthrate. There are now 5.3 million Palestinians and 5.2 million Israelis living in the same geography.

71 years of Nakba. 52 years since the Naksa (fubar) , 52 years of additional decimation on the West Bank and Gaza.

Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire from 1516 to 1917 — the United States has only been around for 243 years. How much history, culture, traditions, arts, sciences, music, dance, cuisine, celebrations had flourished in those 401 years? Here is that link again: Palestinian Social Customs and Traditions.

The current political milieu in Israel extends from Rightwing to Ultra Rightwing, and all points in-between. Michael Oren, former Netanyahu ambassador to Washington and now a part of Netanyahu’s government, spoke over the telephone with Isaac Chotiner of the New Yorker, the interview went off the rails with quite a flourish. Here is an excerpt:

Isaac Chotiner: I am trying to disaggregate the ideas that this is being done for safety and security and there is no alternative, and that it is being done because people are traditional and religious—

Michael Oren: That’s my point. It’s not just security. It’s also ideology, it’s also belief.


Isaac Chotiner: Do you think that there are moral consequences to those beliefs, if they include increasing settlements in the West Bank?

Michael Oren: I have to distinguish between what’s right and what’s smart.


Isaac Chotiner: Increasing settlements is which?


Michael Oren: Again, you want to put this in black-and-white terms, but it is not black and white. Increasing settlements where? They are not all the same.

Isaac Chotiner: Sure. I just didn’t understand what you meant by right versus smart. I didn’t mean to interrupt you.


Michael Oren: It is definitely our right. I think it is our incontrovertible right as Jews to live anywhere in our ancestral homeland.


Isaac Chotiner: Really?


Michael Oren: No question. No question about it. Anywhere. And a member of the Sioux nation has a right to live on Sioux-nation territory. These are our tribal lands. The cradle of our civilization.

Michael Oren Cuts Short a Conversation About Israel

Occupation and demolition is heartless and it is brutal. Is it “a moral imperative” to uproot a thousand olive trees tended for a thousand years? The occupiers, protected by the IDF, routinely force families onto the street, then demolish their homes. Does it matter that those families have lived there for centuries? Housing developments in the Occupied Territories look like they’ve been transported from Southern California: reliable electricity, clean water, sewage pipes that dump onto the small isolated pockets that remain well isolated — where dwell the huddled Palestinian masses. Homeless in their own country. The “settlements” connect to Israeli jobs, markets and families over modern highways, fences run along the entire length of both shoulders. “For Israelis Only” — Jim Crow echoes there. Zoom out and you witness the spectacle of a 200 state solution, 200 isolated pockets of huddled masses yearning to be free.

Where you can meet Palestinians

Visualizing Palestine creates data-driven tools to advance a factual, rights-based narrative of the Palestinian-Israeli issue. Our researchers, designers, technologists, and communications specialists work in partnership with civil society actors to amplify their impact and promote justice and equality.

What is it like to be dispossessed, to live under terror for 71 years? The IDF doesn’t just knock on your children’s door in the middle of the night, they break the door down and terrorize the entire family, the entire neighborhood. They do it at whim and with impunity, they keep the kids in holding cells indefinitely.

The British Empire took advantage of several remnants of the Ottoman Empire in 1917 by obtaining a legal instrument (a Mandate for Palestine) drawn up by the short-lived League of Nations. Lord Balfour feared an influx of Semites arriving at British shores, undesirable refugees in an otherwise polite country. He sought to keep them far away from Britannia. Palestine was on the other side of Europe, far from the White Cliffs of Dover.

I maintain that the British Empire signed over their “Mandate for Palestine” to Palestine’s present occupiers.

In 1948, Truman pulled a Balfour on the Palestinians.

Thanks for reading.

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