Solar False Prophets: Shell Game

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“In the heart of the Permian oil patch in West Texas, a massive $416 million solar array began converting sunshine to electricity this summer. One of the project’s main financiers has a very familiar name — Facebook. The social media corporation helped make possible the 379-megawatt Prospero I solar array, located about 18 miles west of the city of Andrews and covering an area five times larger than New York City’s Central Park…

 

“Mark Zuckerberg [said] “These new solar projects will help us reach” a goal “for all our data centers and offices to use 100% renewable energy by 2020.” But the renewable energy commitments and corporate bluster belie a simple truth about the Prospero I solar project. The energy produced here will not directly power a Facebook data center; it will, in fact, be routed to Shell Energy North America to power the oil and gas giant’s fracking operations in the Permian, the nation’s most booming and polluting oil play.”

 

 

Industrial commodity fake-“renewable” energy depends upon a fossil fuel base for its mineral extraction, steel and cement requirements and the transportation of all these elements from quarry to factory to sacrifice site.

 

The avowed purpose of industrial solar and wind is to perpetuate the ecocidal cancer (aka “growth”) economy of industrialism and high-maintenance technology. Every version of the “Green New Deal” propaganda is explicit about this.

 

And as we see here, industrial fake-renewable electricity often goes directly to power fossil fuel extraction.

 

This may seem ironic but actually, given the entire premise of industrial electricity generation, is the most logical use of this electricity short of using it directly to set forests on fire.

 

It’s both the most typical outcome and the most symbolically rich.

 

 

The now yearly incidence of “five hundred year” storms and “thousand year” conflagrations have been Gaia’s shots across the bow of this Ship of Fools. She aims her shots ever closer to the magazine while ever more inexorably turning up the heat in compliance with the economic civilization’s actions. The two quintessential actions are to destroy all carbon sinks and unleash all the stored carbon of hundreds of millions of years in the geological blink of an eye, just a few centuries and almost all in just a few decades.

 

Industrial electricity, whether generated directly from fossil fuels or adding the extra fake-renewable step within this fossil fueled framework, is indelibly ecocidal. As always the only difference between the de jure climate deniers and the “green” cancerous de facto deniers is that the latter are even more morally and aesthetically repulsive on account of their gross hypocrisy and treason. As a practical matter they seek the exact same outcome of total ecological destruction and collective suicide.

 

 

Repent; and Stop. There is no lesser evil, only evil to continue or to renounce completely. There is no lesser commodity sin, only sin to continue or to renounce completely.

 

The only way to avert the worst: End all industrial emissions; stop destroying carbon sinks; all natural sinks – forests, wetlands, grasslands, most of all the great oceans – must resume their natural ranges in all redeemed health.

 

Anything else is a lie. Therefore we must reject and denounce the false prophets that claim we can commodify and mine and deforest and desertify and carbon-spew and poison and hyper-produce and hyper-shop and hyper-consume our way out of the climate crisis and ecological blowback and collapse, as long we paint the death machine green and put a new bumper sticker upon it.

 

We’ll never go wrong with this postulate: Anything such social media as Facebook, Twitter, Google does or endorses is a lie; anything they suppress and censor is truth.

 

 

 

 

 

Politics is Dead, Only the Movement Can Bring Life

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It’s wishful thinking to believe that all the systemic horrors will, in the near future, quickly collapse. It’s equally wishful to believe that if everyone just sits passively, doing nothing more than “prepping” on an atomized individual level (and usually not even doing that, just talking about it on the internet), the rising turbulence is likely to bring down the elites before it first further guts the people. On the contrary, it’s far more likely that those peak oil Galtians will hang separately because they refused to hang together.

 

That’s why I insist that the only way we the people can navigate this turbulence with the best chance of adapting to the crises and minimizing the damage is to build the movement which will be simultaneously self-defense, preservation of what little can be salvaged from modernity, and most of all the vehicle of the necessary transformation on the basis of agroecology and other ecological evolutions which are necessary if humanity is to have a future at all. Right now humanity is reduced to the level of the original mammals skulking in the underbrush while giant reptiles still ruled the Earth. So far it looks like no one has any idea other than the remain in that state, even once the reptiles are gone.

 

It’s also true that the stronger this human movement, the more effectively it can help hasten the downfall of the productionist corporate system. In the same way that economic factors will limit how much fossil fuel ultimately will be extracted and burned, so political factors can, if organized and deployed the right way, also limit this and other aspects of corporate power and ability to sustain itself. That’s one of the main reasons I’ve been so emphatic about the possibilities of fighting it out in the food and agriculture sectors. (Of course I don’t say that political factors have been well organized and deployed so far. On the contrary, almost all “political” people in the West today are morbid cultists of historically disproven electoralism. This is a core reason why Politics is Dead.)

 

When I ponder the low traffic and sparse comments this site currently receives, I recall how I used to do much better when I wrote about Wall Street. That was also in the years immediately following the 2008 forced crash. More people were more radical, and it’s easier to condemn Wall Street than to think about our food and feel obligated to actually do something about it, where there’s so many opportunities for constructive action even right now. That’s by contrast with opposition to the finance sector, where it’s difficult to see where one could even get started with action.

 

The other problem is how self-imprisoned everyone has become by social media. It’s a mass disease. But there’s enough of an historical record already to prove that no meaningful thought or action can get off the ground from social media. It can be used as a supplement to thought and organization cultivated elsewhere, as publicity media only. But ideas and initial attempts at organization can only be strangled in the cradle, if they try to arise on social media in the first place.

 

But try telling that to people, try deprogramming them to get them off Facebook or Twitter and onto more human media platforms. It’s literally like talking to a wall: They won’t even reply to such a proposal, let alone try to make a rational argument. But then, that’s standard for all cultists today. I say this in the knowledge that the blogosphere missed its first big chance to be an incubator of new ideas, mostly because it too became dominated by system “reformists”. But I think the potential remains. I do think the internet has one last chance to be constructive for humanity, while there’s still enough grid electricity to power it and still enough flexibility and open space in the structure for independents and dissidents to evade censorship like Google’s and still effectively propagate a message so that large numbers of motivated users, and in certain cases like food even the unmotivated, can register it. But this space, this frontier, is closing rapidly.

 

 

 

 

 

There Was Never a Housing Bubble, and Beware the Fake News of Those Who Say There Was

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1. “In the 17 years I’ve spent covering Silicon Valley, I’ve never seen anything shake the place like his victory. In the span of a few months, the Valley has been transformed from a politically disengaged company town into a center of anti-Trump resistance and fear.”

 

They can’t really fear Trump, a regular status quo neoliberal politician continuous with the Clinton-Bush-Obama lineage, this way. There’s no objective correlative, as a literary critic would say. Made-up fears like this are always a proxy for something else.

 

What does Silicon Valley fear, and why is Facebook’s proximate response to pay lip service to the old corporate media establishment? On the surface it sounds like agoraphobia. As the authority of the conventional mainstream media collapses, the techno-totalitarians may be feeling some fear over the prospect of really leaving the old establishment behind and having to take the lead in their own right. Where it comes to political Leadership, the technocratic instinct is to hide behind a conventional political and media facade. That’s part of why neoliberalism has been their preferred organizational and propaganda model.

 

 

2.

During the U.S. election, propagandists — some working for money, others for potentially state-sponsored lulz — used the service to turn fake stories into viral sensations, like the one about Pope Francis’ endorsing Trump (he hadn’t). And fake news was only part of a larger conundrum. With its huge reach, Facebook has begun to act as the great disseminator of the larger cloud of misinformation and half-truths swirling about the rest of media. It sucks up lies from cable news and Twitter, then precisely targets each lie to the partisan bubble most receptive to it.

After studying how people shared 1.25 million stories during the campaign, a team of researchers at M.I.T. and Harvard implicated Facebook and Twitter in the larger failure of media in 2016. The researchers found that social media created a right-wing echo chamber: a “media network anchored around Breitbart developed as a distinct and insulated media system, using social media as a backbone to transmit a hyperpartisan perspective to the world.” The findings partially echoed a long-held worry about social news: that people would use sites like Facebook to cocoon themselves into self-reinforcing bubbles of confirmatory ideas, to the detriment of civility and a shared factual basis from which to make collective, democratic decisions.

 

In other words, Facebook and social media are a more potent version of what the corporate media does. Crack to the NYT’s cocaine. Social media mostly transmits the same hyperpartisan perspective as the US government, the NYT, CNN: Pro-capitalist ideology, pro-corporate ideology, mainstreamed Randroid “wealth creator” ideology, Hobbesian lies about human nature and Malthusian lies about food and natural resources, the ideology that the problems of society and the environment are technical engineering problems rather than cultural and spiritual crises, and most of all the fundamentalist religion of civilization based on high-maintenance technology and extreme energy consumption.

 

But the conventional corporate media believes it was already performing its Goebbels Ministry role adequately, and its fear is that because Facebook and social media are so potent, they may give new and opposing ideas a way to wedge into the public consciousness. The mass hysteria among status quo cultists over “fake news” really means that the mainstream media’s fake news flock fears competition, in exactly the same way a big mainstream church will disparage a newer or more obscure, at any rate smaller, religion as a “cult”.

 

Therefore the Leaders among mainstream corporate media are attempting to impose their gatekeeper role upon Facebook, and according to Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony Facebook wants to become part of a propaganda continuity with the NYT model rather than any kind of break with it.

 

 

3.

Scholars and critics have been warning of the solipsistic irresistibility of algorithmic news at least since 2001, when the constitutional-law professor Cass R. Sunstein warned, in his book “Republic.com,” of the urgent risks posed to democracy “by any situation in which thousands or perhaps millions or even tens of millions of people are mainly listening to louder echoes of their own voices.”

 

I’m sure Sunstein makes a point of reading the latest criticism of capitalism each day in order to ensure that his position remains correct.

 

But the rest of those in the media who propagated their consensus that there was no housing bubble and that housing prices literally would rise forever are now arguing among themselves about what constitutes “fake news”. These same commentators said Wall Street had to be bailed out, and today say there’s no stock bubble and no fracking bubble and that there never really was a housing bubble. In 1929 they all said there was no stock bubble. They all say climate change can be solved by emitting more greenhouse gases and destroying more carbon sinks. They say all currently deployed industrial poisons are safe for people and the environment. They say that the US government’s military presence in the Middle East is a normative law of nature and that Arab and Muslim resistance to this presence has some arcane, perverse basis. They say that the hundreds of times the US has interfered in foreign elections and overthrown elected governments is all normative and above discussion, while the thinnest rumor about Russia influencing a US election is a world-historical crime. They all said Iraq had WMDs and therefore had to be invaded. They still call the general US war around the world a “war on terror” and advertise this as necessary and indeed as a permanent law of nature. Most of them agree there is no US empire, and they all agree this empire is self-evidently good and at any rate a law of nature. They say globalization works for humanity and at any rate is a law of nature. They all agree that health care should be controlled by the profit motive and they all deny that the rest of the industrialized world does things differently and better. They all continue to insist with the strongest emphasis that young people should go into debt to get higher education and they continue to promise good, secure jobs to those who go into debt to obtain these degrees. They all deny that these are all political choices, they say that all these things are laws of nature, and most of all that there is no alternative to any of them.

 

There’s just a small sampling of Truth according to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Columbia Journalism Review, and Snopes, just to name some of the leading establishment media outlets who comment about Facebook and the news in this NYT piece. They call all this “good information”. Bad information is anything which questions or contradicts this corporate and militarist party line.

 

Therefore, much of this is the mainstream media’s angst over its imploding authority and its looking for racketeering-style ways to get it back. Here we have the sclerotic Mafia trying to intimidate the rising Colombian and Russian gangsters into some sort of deal.

 

 

4. And Zuckerberg says he agrees, in a new “manifesto”:

 

[Facebook’s] next focus will be developing the social infrastructure for community – for supporting us, for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for the inclusion of all….

There are questions about whether we can make a global community that works for everyone…Giving everyone a voice has historically been a very positive force for public discourse because it increases the diversity of ideas shared. But the past year has also shown it may fragment our shared sense of reality.

 

This is nothing more or less than the standard authoritarian Volksgemeinschaft boilerplate which goes back thousands of years. Feel free to read it as par for the mainstream course and/or as portending incipient fascism. Either is correct. It all means reinforcing the corporate mainstream monoculture and suppressing diversity, alternatives, dissent.

 

The piece goes on to describe Facebook’s commitment to “news literacy” according to the corporate party line and Zuckerberg’s avowal that “a common understanding needs to exist.” To paraphrase Chicago’s mayor Chuck Daley, what Zuckerberg really means is that a common misunderstanding needs to exist. That’s the business of the mainstream media, including social media like Facebook.

 

 

5. All this is in the service of the same status quo insanity and evil.

 

“We’re getting to a point where the biggest opportunities I think in the world … problems like preventing pandemics from spreading or ending terrorism, all these things, they require a level of coordination and connection that I don’t think can only be solved by the current systems that we have,” Zuckerberg told me. What’s needed, he argues, is some global superstructure to advance humanity.

 

All this, it generally goes without saying in the mainstream media, must be done under corporate control and toward corporate profit goals, from which every other good allegedly will trickle down.

 

In truth, trickle-down, together with the infinity of fossil fuels and the infinite capacity of the environment to assimilate our assaults upon it, comprise the three core lies of modern civilization. Modern media is dedicated to propagating these three lies and suppressing all news of the reality which contradicts them.

 

 

More importantly, everyone knows that systemic risk is maximized by such “global coordination and connection”, and that the inevitable conclusion of globalized corporate civilization is general famine and chaos as industrial agriculture, and everything else which is 100% dependent upon finite fossil fuels, enters its predestined collapse. We also know that neither regional ecosystems nor the global ecology shall stably sustain much more of the destruction this mode of civilization inflicts upon them as its systematic policy. We know that the inevitable kinesis of all this destructive potential shall return the chaos and destruction a hundred-fold upon the head of the civilization which launched the campaign of waste and destruction.

 

There’s no doubt about the deliberate character of the campaign of destruction or the fact that waste and destruction as such are the intentional goals. For we also know that the only way to lower risks and vulnerability and to preserve stability is to decentralize power and control, build resiliency, build redundancy, build diversity, all in harmony with the natural decentralization, resiliency, redundancy, and diversity of ecology and evolution.

 

Thus Zuckerberg regurgitates the foundation lie of the extreme destruction model of “civilization”.

 

 

The NYT concludes with an approving nod: “This is not an especially controversial idea; Zuckerberg is arguing for a kind of digital-era version of the global institution-building that the Western world engaged in after World War II.”

 

All we need to change there to make it true is: What the Western world engaged in as its continuation of World War II.

 

And this globalization war has worked so well for humanity, as the “news” of the likes of the New York Times repeats every single day.

 

 

As for abolitionists and any other kind of true dissident, anyone who cares about the future of humanity and the Earth and hears the mission call to propagate the necessary ideas, we see how Big Propaganda, old and new, is trying to come together to suppress us. Part of our mission is to see to it that we exploit every tool social media affords us and seize every opportunity it opens up, but without being co-opted by it or succumbing to the many pathologies inherent to it.

 

We must do this in a disciplined, coordinated, cumulative, relentless way, according to a coherent strategic and tactical doctrine and always keeping the clear concrete abolition goal directly before our eyes.

 

 

 

Help propagate the necessary ideas.