Those species that do not live in compliance with the law
become extinct. In the scale of biological time, they become extinct
very rapidly. And this is going to be very bad news for the people of
your culture - the worst they've ever heard.
(From a novel: Ishmael by Daniel Quinn)
Man is the first species of living being in our biosphere that has acquired the power to wreck the biosphere and, in wrecking it, to liquidate himself.
Arnold Toynbee, Mankind and Mother Earth
Mindlessness is what links environmental catastrophe, nuclear war, and genocidal oblivion.
How Democracy Ends: David Runciman p87
The human species, led by white Europeans and
Euro-Americans, has been on a 500-year-long planetwide rampage of
conquering, plundering, looting, exploiting and polluting the earth—as
well as killing the indigenous communities that stood in the way. But
the game is up. The technical and scientific forces that created a life
of unparalleled luxury—as well as unrivaled military and economic power
for a small, global elite—are the forces that now doom us. The mania
for ceaseless economic expansion and exploitation has become a curse, a
death sentence. But even as our economic and environmental systems
unravel, after the hottest year [2012] in the contiguous 48 states
since record keeping began 107 years ago, we lack the emotional and
intellectual creativity to shut down the engine of global capitalism.
We have bound ourselves to a doomsday machine that grinds forward. Chris Hedges
. . . our world is in trouble - right now, at this moment in time,
not is some blurry, fuzzy, distant future that no one cares about because we´ll all be gone by the time the worst, unimaginable
horrors migbht occur. A world that we have conquered and altered is beginning to turn against us. As a result, we are in trouble.
This is the Way the World Ends, How Droughts and Die-Offs, Heat Waves and Hurricanes are converging on America by Jeff Nesbit.
(pg 264)
Our way of life is going to be very different in the future than the way it is now,
though I don’t know exactly what that means. One of the complicated things about living through the end of the world as we know it
is that the end doesn’t come about because of a single event. It’s actually just a day-to-day occurrence that’s going to take a long time.
We’ll see transformation and degradation, an increase in violence and insanity, the breakdown of social order in neighborhood by neighborhood,
then city by city. We’re watching it happen now. Roy Scranton
Republicans seem determined to
make their vision of apocalypse for the planet a reality. They have a number of strategies for accomplishing it:
The trickle-up economy has been
propelled by oligarchs gaming the system, forcing wages and benefits
down, but also by tax cuts, union busting,
corruption, corporate friendly legislation, and deregulation. Deregulation, as Republicans
fashioned it, caused a sharp decline of democracy, a surge to plutocracy,
a carnival of corporate corruption, takeover of the economy by the
financial sector, individualism inciting the wilding of America, and there is no end in sight for it.
Corporate governance has structural problems. That
explains why CEO compensation is so extreme, why they can game the political process, why
they can block labor organizing, why workers are not
represented in decisions, why they can ignore the cost of
externalities, why they can ignore their stakeholders (like the
communities in which they operate, the democratic voices of their
investors, and the public), and, thanks to a Corporate supremacist
Supreme Court decision they need only concern themselves with their own
profit. A (corporate) person only concerned with profit is a sociopath.
Such persons run our political process and our government. We have,
according to studies, an oligarchy.
Rule by corporations is the dictionary definition of Fascism.
Corporate greed and fast-track trade policy result in American
workers competing with third-world wage rates. Automation may have some
benefits, but it also has the effect of eliminating jobs, depressing
wages, most likely bring us massive unemployment, universal surveillance and extreme income
inequality.
Corporate entities own our media and they have successfully kept
climate change out of public discussion. But CO2 is at record levels
and will persist for centuries, ice caps will melt, glaciers and
mountain top snow will disappear. sea level rise will cause huge populations to lose fresh
water. Crops will fail. There will be mass migration, and resource wars (probably nuclear).
Although there is no mention of it in the history textbooks,
the US military is a security force for multi-national corporations and
has taken action on their behalf many times.
There are limits to growth and we have already exceeded them. Population is already beyond the carrying capacity of the planet,
but traditional religions continue to advocate for 'pro-life' policy. There is no discussion of population control.
Salman Rushdie points out that there is great truth in fiction.
I'm reminded of the movie series, 'The Planet of the Apes'.
We will not get a second chance in space and probably will soon go extinct.
“After ages during which the earth produced harmless
trilobites and butterflies, evolution progressed to the point at which
it has generated Neros, Genghis Khans, and Hitlers. This, however, I
believe is a passing nightmare ; in time the earth will become again
incapable of supporting life, and peace will return. ” Bertrand Russell
Energy - The Republican approach to
energy is characterized by maximum pumping. The world has probably
reached peak oil production as
predicted.
Global Warming - Although oil
companies and their paid minions still argue that global warming is
not an issue, massive forest fires, disastrous storms, melting ice
caps, collapsing fisheries, drought, pollution, extinctions and other
environmental threats are persuasive. There is little doubt in the
science community.
Massive health problems are
likely as seen in the pandemic. Public health agencies have been undermined even as a large part of
the population goes without coverage. Republicans
worked strenuously to break (privatize) Social
Security. Your children will have virtually no social supports except the "faith based" ones so well
described in Angela’s Ashes.
Disease - militarization of
biological agents has taken
precedence over public health. Simple
techniques to monitor public health go unfunded.
Education is an important part of media,
and must be controlled to make sure that theocracy can not trump
science. Don't complain about sub-standard education, Republican
ideologues assured that real science
will not be taught in U.S. schools. Neither is history (See Lies My Teacher Told Me: James W. Loewen)
Lack of civics education is certain schools is yet another technique for voter suppression.
Elections have been rigged without
causing public outcry. The CIA has experience
rigging elections worldwide, we should have expected it sooner or
later here. Control of the media is an
essential part of election rigging and it is necessary to sell war. A large, well-funded part of our government operates in secret,
without effective oversight, acts on its own in ways the public would
never approve, and it supports undemocratic government world-wide
including here in the U.S.
Environmental safeguards are not
being heeded. The mendacious Bush administration
massively attacked environmental legislation. Increasingly concentrated
media assures people that they are
destroying the earth for good moral reasons. There is a fire sale on the
earth. Trump is accelerating it.
Religion can motivate people to
destroy themselves for the promise of the afterlife and with the promise of great reward
can lead to terrorism and self-destruction.
The message to dominate the earth, be fruitful and multiply, disregarding
the responsibility to the environment can lead to destruction.
An apocalypse will validate Republicans religious views, so they are
willing for it to happen. Religion, like media,
can deny science
and make it appear that business as usual is fine.
We have, by far, the world's largest military
...but Republicans could not keep our infrastructure in repair.
Democrats and Biden did.
Nuclear War - We withdrew from the ABM
treaty, embarked on a breathtakingly stupid Ballistic
Missile Defense program, and provoked
a new arms race that threatens us from a proliferation of nuclear
countries. The US is building a trillion dollar new round of nuclear
weapons, even though the UN made them illegal in international law.
Over Population - Republicans
don't believe in family planning, birth
control, gay marriage, or other population limiting options. They
are quite willing to impose their religious
beliefs on the rest of us. Even if it means apocalypse. After all, they are
expecting it and it validates their deepest beliefs. Being climate change deniers , they are like Jim Jones, only on
a planetary scale.
Either mass mobilization or a responsive government might
address some of these problems, but neither looks likely, so most likely...we are
headed for destruction.