The longer the corporate state erodes the social bonds that provide a sense of purpose and meaning the more inevitable an authoritarian state and a Christianized fascism becomes.
Follow the Money – by Mr. Fish.
By Chris Hedges
Original to ScheerPost
Political paralysis is snuffing out what is left of our anemic democracy.
It is the paralysis of doing nothing while the ruling oligarchs, who have increased their wealth by nearly a third since the pandemic began and by close to 90 percent over the past decade, orchestrate virtual tax boycotts as millions of Americans go into bankruptcy to pay medical bills, mortgages, credit card debt, student debt, car loans and soaring utility bills demanded by a system that has privatized nearly every aspect of life in the United States.
It is the paralysis of doing nothing about raising the minimum wage, despite the ravages of inflation, around 600,000 homeless Americans and 33.8 million people living in food insecure homes, including 9.3 million children.
It is the paralysis of ignoring the climate crisis, the greatest existential threat we face, to expand fossil fuel extraction.
It is the paralysis of pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into the permanent war economy rather than repairing the nation’s collapsing roads, rails, bridges, schools, electrical grid and water supply.
It is the paralysis of refusing to institute universal health care and regulate the for-profit insurance and pharmaceutical industries to fix the worst health care system of any highly industrialized nation, one in which life expectancy is falling and more Americans die from avoidable causes than in peer nations. More than 80 percent of maternal deaths in the U.S. alone are preventable, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
It is the paralysis of being unwilling to curb police violence, dismantle the world’s largest prison system, end wholesale government surveillance of the public and reform a dysfunctional court system where nearly everyone, unless they can afford high-priced lawyers, is coerced into accepting onerous plea deals.
It is the paralysis of standing passively by as the public, armed with arsenals of assault weapons, slaughter each other for crossing into their yard, pulling into their driveway, ringing their doorbell, angering them at work or school, or are so alienated and bitter at being left behind, they gun down groups of innocent people in acts of murderous self-immolation.
Democracy Slayers
Minnesota State Patrol troopers in riot gear on May 29, 2020, following the publication of a video showing a white Minneapolis police officer kneeling on the neck of George Floyd, a handcuffed and unarmed Black man, and killing him. (Tony Webster, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Democracies are not slain by reactionary buffoons like former President Donald Trump, who was routinely sued for failing to pay workers and contractors and whose fictional television persona was sold to a gullible electorate, or shallow politicians like President Joe Biden, whose political career has been devoted to serving corporate donors. These politicians provide a false comfort of individualizing our crises, as if removing this public figure or censoring that group will save us.
Democracies are slain when a tiny cabal, in our case corporate, seizes control of the economy, culture and the political system and distorts them to exclusively serve its own interests. The institutions that should provide redress to the public become parodies of themselves, atrophy and die. How else to explain legislative bodies that can only unite to pass austerity programs, tax cuts for the billionaire class, bloated police and military budgets and reduce social spending? How else to explain courts that strip workers and citizens of their most basic rights? How else to explain a system of public education where the poor are, at best, taught basic numerical literacy and the rich send their children to private schools and universities with endowments in the billions of dollars?
Democracies are slain with false promises and hollow platitudes. Biden told us as a candidate he would raise the minimum wage to $15 and hand out $2,000 stimulus checks. He told us his American Jobs Plan would create “millions of good jobs.” He told us he would strengthen collective bargaining and ensure universal pre-kindergarten, universal paid family and medical leave, and free community college. He promised a publicly funded option for healthcare. He promised not to drill on federal lands and to promote a “green energy revolution and environmental justice.” None of that happened.
But, by now, most people have figured out the game. Why not vote for Trump and his grandiose, fantasy-driven promises? Are they any less real than those peddled by Biden and the Democrats? Why pay homage to a political system that is about betrayal? Why not sever yourself from the rational world that has only brought misery? Why pay fealty to old truths that have become hypocritical banalities? Why not blow the whole thing up?
As research by professors Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page underscores, our political system has turned the consent of the governed into a cruel joke. “The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence,” they write.
David Émile Durkheim. (verapatricia_28, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
The French sociologist Emile Durkheim in his book On Suicide called our state of hopelessness and despair, anomie, which he defined as “rulelessness.” Rulelessness means the rules that govern a society and create a sense of organic solidarity no longer function. It means that the rules we are taught — hard work and honesty will assure us a place in society; we live in a meritocracy; we are free; our opinions and votes matter; our government protects our interests — are a lie. Of course, if you are poor, or a person of color, these rules were always a myth, but a majority of the American public was once able to find a secure place in society, which is the bulwark of any democracy, as numerous political theorists going back to Aristotle point out.
Tens of millions of Americans, cast adrift by deindustrialization, understand that their lives will not improve, nor will the lives of their children. Society, as Durkheim writes, is no longer “sufficiently present” for them. Those cast aside can participate in society, he writes, only through sadness.
The sole route left to affirm yourself, when every other avenue is closed off, is to destroy. Destruction, fueled by a grotesque hypermasculinity, imparts a rush and pleasure, along with feelings of omnipotence, which is sexualized and sadistic. It has a morbid attraction. This lust to destroy, what Sigmund Freud called the death instinct, targets all forms of life, including our own.
These pathologies of death, diseases of despair, are manifested in the plagues that are sweeping across the county — opioid addiction, morbid obesity, gambling, suicide, sexual sadism, hate groups and mass shootings. My book, America: The Farewell Tour, is an exploration of the demons that grip the American psyche.
A web of social and political bonds — friendships and family ties, civic and religious rituals, meaningful work that imparts a sense of place, dignity and hope in the future — allows people to engage in a project larger than the self. These bonds provide psychological protection from impending mortality and the trauma of rejection, isolation and loneliness. We are social animals. We need each other. Strip away these bonds and societies descend into fratricide.
Predatory Forces
Joe Biden’s victory celebration, Wilmington, Delaware, Nov. 7, 2020. (David Lienemann, Biden For President, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Capitalism is antithetical to creating and sustaining social bonds. Its core attributes — relationships that are transactional and temporary, prioritizing self-advancement through manipulating and exploiting others and the insatiable lust for profit — eliminates democratic space. The obliteration of all restraints on capitalism, from organized labor to government oversight and regulation, has left us at the mercy of predatory forces that, by nature, exploit human beings and the natural world until exhaustion or collapse.
Trump, devoid of empathy and incapable of remorse, is the personification of our diseased society. He is what those who have been cast adrift are taught by corporate culture they should strive to become. He expresses, often with vulgarity, the inchoate rage of those left behind and is a walking advertisement for the cult of the self. Trump is not a product of the theft of the Podesta emails, the DNC leaks or James Comey. He is not a product of Russian President Vladimir Putin or Russian bots. He is a product, like aspiring doppelgängers such as Ron DeSantis, Tom Cotton and Margorie Taylor Greene, of anomie and social decay.
Individuals are “too closely involved in the life of society for it to be sick without their being affected,” Durkheim writes. “Its suffering inevitably becomes theirs.”
These charlatans and demagogues, who reject the customary restraints of political and civic decorum, ridicule the “polite” elites who sold us out. They offer no workable solution to the crises besetting the country. They dynamite the old social order, which is already rotten, and cry for vengeance against real and phantom enemies as if these acts will magically resurrect a mythical golden age. The more that lost age remains elusive, the more vicious they become.
“Since the bourgeoisie claimed to be the guardian of Western traditions and confounded all moral issues by parading publicly virtues which it not only did not possess in private and business life, but actually held in contempt, it seemed revolutionary to admit cruelty, disregard of human values, and general amorality, because this at least destroyed the duplicity upon which the existing society seemed to rest,” Hannah Arendt writes in The Origins of Totalitarianism of those who embraced the hate-filled rhetoric of fascism in the Weimar Republic. “What a temptation to flaunt extreme attitudes in the hypocritical twilight of double moral standards, to wear publicly the mask of cruelty if everybody was patently inconsiderate and pretended to be gentle, to parade wickedness in a world, not of wickedness, but meanness!”
U.S. society is deeply diseased. Americans must heal these social illnesses, mitigate this anomie, restore the severed social bonds and integrate the dispossessed back into society. If these social bonds remain ruptured it will guarantee a frightening neofascism. There are very dark forces circling within the U.S. Sooner than many expect, they could have Americans in their grip.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of “The Chris Hedges Report.”
Author’s Note to Readers: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Bob Scheer, who runs ScheerPost on a shoestring budget, and I will not waiver in our commitment to independent and honest journalism, and we will never put ScheerPost behind a paywall, charge a subscription for it, sell your data or accept advertising. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, “The Chris Hedges Report.”
This column is from Scheerpost, for which Chris Hedges writes a regular column. Click here to sign up for email alerts.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
“Magnified, sanctified, be the holy name. Vilified, crucified. In the human frame. A million candles burning. For the help that never came. You want it darker?” (Leonard Cohen)
“Follow the Money.” (Mr. Fish). IMO, you are here: APRIL, 2023. The USA nka The Divided $tates of a Corporate America, chained to capitalism, walks the plank, needs a “Torch” to take the edge off, “El Capitolismo es el Viruz!” IMO, The Center of Democrat Control.
For all the yapp’n & ytell’n POTUS does, BIDEN-HARRIS lack genuine emotion & zero ownership of promises, pledges, principles, passion. POTUS is HOLLOW; and, everything echos…….No crafted video or artificial intelligence can fill an empty sack that has no soul to rock!!! More than any event, the Rona pandemic made clear that the capitali$t elite are willing to accept any level of death in the population. Stumpy stump speeches read off a Jumbo-Tron are NOT gonna save U$.
IMO, 1) “There is no division between “establishment” and “non-establishment” Democrats. 2) The Democrat Party is the establishment. It is the state. It is the C.I.A. It is the M.I.C., and the F.B.I. 3) It is an institution through which the capitalist class maintains its rule, suppresses social opposition and plunders the world on behalf of the corporations;” AND, “The Empire Strikes, again” w/ a 2024 plot aimed @ conditioning “US” to live w/BIDEN-HARRIS until d#*th do “US” part. FOR EXAMPLE, “our political system has turned the consent of the governed into a cruel joke.”
—“The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence,” Martin Gilens & Benjamin I. Page.
It’s straight-up confirmation the Biden-Harris Oldigarchy is so far detached from the public from which it extracts its wealth that it can act entirely independent of it!!! Rather than call on the world to unify in the fight against the crises, SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19), Hunger, Homelessness, Helplessness, “A Diseased America;” Biden-Harris called for the US/NATO vs. Russia War in Ukraine.
The fakery “lives,” the fake WH set, a playschool desk in a a fake Oval Office in a fake White House w/fake windows.” ARTIFICIAL Influencers/FAKES!
What’s NOT Fake? The Knife POTUS put through the heart of the Working Class!!! The same knife that independent, hot-air factory from Vermont & his impotent Revolution, used!!!
Concluding, “a parasite cannot live alone.” POTUS has deteriorated into nervous hardness, full of rage, i.e., piss & vinegar NOT peace of mind, body & soul. POTUS is look’n to restore the Nation’s soul; BUT, he can’t find his own a$$ w/both hands!!! POTUS’ knowledge, memories, & opinions are all knotted together; what he spews out is f/randomness. No One is Safe! Hence, “Videos” highlighting POTUS’ daze & a gaggle of jacka$$es aka Democrats, “Let’s Go Brandon!; but, we know what they say’n,” is used to convince Con$umers all is good in the hood; when it f/ain’t!!! Just say, NO! NO means NO!!! F/BIDEN-HARRIS, et al. The Gerontocracy has sucked the life outta democracy.
POTUS’ Ba$e’s only role in capitalist politics is to turn out every two or four years to cast their votes for one or the other of the two corporate-controlled parties who represent the interests of the super-rich. “The Party of Canines. One’s the Wolf. The other’s the Fox. No matter what, they’ll both eat you!!!” That is the real nature of American “democracy.”
…p.s. 1) If, Trump is all that Hedges says he is, wtf, is Biden-Harris? 2) Don’t say Biden doesn’t keep his promises. He vowed to give Neera Tanden a job in his White House and she just landed one,” MAY 14, 2021 I.E., “ Neera Tanden, Biden’s former budget chief pick, to join White House as senior adviser The president had originally tapped Tanden to lead the Office of Management and Budget, but her nomination was scuttled amid bipartisan opposition in the Senate.”
“People are crazy and times are strange. I’m locked in tight. I’m outta range. I used to care; but things have changed.” (Bob Dylan). …..Ciao.
Valerie – I think both you and Michael are correct. If the US, UK, EU China and India addresses the issue, it should significantly slow down the approaching disaster. Many countries in the Global south are not the issue. We/they could plant more trees for sure but they are not the biggest polluters and are big on true recycling.
Of course, all that Hedges presents here is the absolute truth, the descriptions of the disease. However, there is another way to look at the same symptoms, as adaptations to Reality; process adaptations, not conscious ‘rational’ adaptations. The underlying reality is excess, vast incomprehensible excess: excesses of material, of energy, of invention….and the incredible excesses of human action, driven by our numbers and the illusions of our expectations. Humanity has come to depend on vast excess and can accept or conceive of nothing else. All that Hedges describes will have no solution, will always form as a terminal adaptation, as long as there is a vast excess, beyond the emotional comprehension of the species mind.
Neither Christianization, nor Fascism, nor something third will there be, but only the downfall.
It is over, although only the fewest can imagine it today.
Neither the USA nor any other country was ever Christianized, but only rare individuals, in many countries.
If the Americans (and others) consider their presidents who swear: “So help me God” for Christianized/ Christians, then they have no idea at all how a Christian must be.
This is the worst country that has ever existed. For sheer evil decade after decade there are simply no challengers. Never in history has one country been responsible for so much death and destruction.
This country can’t collapse soon enough. The world will be better for it.
Take a deep breath Chris ! I was going to write about your Easter message to the Princeton Theology college, but figured the Lord would reach you. It is too bad when History repeats itself and all these complaints you spoke of are just that in a different day. God is Love and Christ came to show us. Let’s not call religious zealots OF EITHER PARTY OR SPECTRUM defined as Christian because of what they say. I learned as a preacher kid that they will know you are by your LOVE. Another side note is: When a tree fell on my car, the insurance called it “an act of god”. My dad said “they blame everything bad on god”. LOL
Keep up your great writing and have some dopamine LOL
Perhaps if OUR country would quit picking fights with the boogieman of the day, we might remember how to focus on our nation and it’s citizens. We have coward politicians, coward journalists in the MSM, and large percent of the population daily programmed toward stupidity.
We need a reset, but definitely NOT the type that Klaus Schwab has in mind. We need large corporations to go back to making widgets instead of trouble. We need a financial system that is not a politically correct master to the corporations; Blackrock (Larry Fink) – here’s looking at you.
We have allowed EVIL to take over our nation, media and souls. That needs to be blown-up as a first step.
The US been in decline since the Vietnam War.
The incredible rise in homelessness is a visible sign of what is happening. And it is getting worse, and worse. Despite that, guess who I often unwittingly blame: the homeless. Now\, I admit, that’s actually pretty damn sick.
Of course, the answer to this is well known.
Create a counter-culture, which in resistance, strengthens the social bonds and rejects the corporate state.
And yes, it is very possible, and yes, it is a proven way to stop a war, summed up in what used to be a well known slogan …
“Make Love! Not War!”
Social bonds over corporate state.
Just now, viewed a taped video of the supposed American Presidents announcement of ‘his’ intention’ to run again for re-election.
They put out a video announcement that Biden is running again!
Who are ‘they’ you may ask. They are the puppet masters.
Their video runs for a breathtaking 3 minutes; awe inspiring in its deception.
All that the viewer sees of the mans lips actually moving in synchronicity with what they are hearing of his voice, is all of 10-20 seconds, in the 3 minute video, if that.
As far as this viewer can ascertain, the video was first released to the public at 6 a.m. EDT, April 25th.
It’s a script writers narrative dream, written by adept ventriloquist producers, for their well –worn puppet.
The American audience, suckers for the glib, as they are, by SHOW, are the only ones who actually believe that what they are seeing is believable. That’s the celluloid intent behind the Disneyland fantasy of the exceptionalism they have been reared on!
Yes the writer is part of the audience too, but …
“When will they ever”… be weaned???
A herald’s voice, crying in the desert.
Good representation Mark. (Dare i say, of futility.)
From the middle 19th to the 20th and early 21st centuries an historical pattern has been, and continues to be, played out in terms of geopolitics, economics, culture, and war. Huge tectonic shifts taken place; paradigms that were thought permanent have collapsed to be replaced by new paradigms. Elite political power was never absolute but always adaptive, transforming itself from one structure – e.g. monarchy – to democracy – and then from democracy to oligarchy, which is the present mode of rule and dominance. For elements of the non-elite there was always the possibility of genuine democracy, but it somehow always slipped from their grasp. To quote William Shakespeare ‘now is the winter of our discontent’ – which in this year of blight, (2023) is the dominant paradigm of financialized imperialism – a system overseen by a totally corrupt global clique who would appear to be frankly deranged.
As Emile Durkheim wrote:
‘’If, in activities that almost completely fill our days, we follow no rule save that of our own self-interest, as we understand it; how then can we acquire a taste for altruism and forgetfulness of self and sacrifice? Thus, this lacking of any economic discipline cannot fail to produce effects that spill over beyond the economic sphere bringing with it a decline of public morality … Truces imposed by violence are never anything than temporary and pacify no-one. Men’s passions are only stayed by a moral presence that they respect. If all of authority of this kind is lacking, it is the law of the strongest that rules and a state of warfare, either latent or acute is necessarily endemic” (Emile Durkheim – The Division of Labour in Society).
The question which now (alarmingly) confronts humanity and which should be placed at the centre of any discussion is whether the establishment of the liberal-globalist economic, social and political order and eventual outcome is ‘final’ – in Fukuyama’s words ‘the end of history’ or on the contrary whether it is ‘sustainable’.
“Capitalism is antithetical to creating and sustaining social bonds.”
This, in itself, is a very extremist and simplistic view. Capitalism isn’t antithetical to sustaining social bonds, human greed is. The idea that another system that will replace capitalism will sustain social bonds is utopic since it is the human being at the core of whatever system comes into place.
Capitalism has proven to sustain social bonds, otherwise America would not have survived the Cold War. Yet, capitalism worked because Western values were based on Christianity – unity of the family being an important value. The other value, and the most important, was that God was the greatest Power in the world.
Capitalism alongside Christian values worked. Yes, this statement may annoy many people but it’s true.
It is when Christian values were being demolished one by one that Capitalism turned into a Leviathan since the moral backbone of those in charged collapsed. At that moment those in charged start believing that they are their own gods. “What does it mean to master the future?” has become their slogan.
Well, where can you go from there?
Capitalism is a tool and like any other powerful tool it can be used by human beings to create or to destroy.
Thus the statement that capitalism is antithetical to creating and sustaining social bonds is false.
Nonsense. There are millions who no longer subscribe to your antiquated views, and are more moral for it. Capitalism stopped working for the majority of the human species a long time ago. It’s long past time to start thinking about more intelligent ways to organize society, else there is no future.
@ J Anthony. The moral values of the West come from Christianity. It is psychology 101. Even the most ardent atheist from the West has his/her psychological values stemming from Christianity. Love thy neighbour is now called humanism. Again, psychology 101. Everything in the West can be traced back to Christianity. I mean, heck, science itself can be traced back to Christianity. Before Christianity appeared people projected whatever diety they had onto nature and thus were more or else identified with nature. This meant that they could not objectively see nature.
When Christianity came people started looking inwards for a diety which meant that the projections that they put onto nature stopped. This left room for seeing nature in an objective way.
Science owes its existence to Christianity.
And another thing, when I speak of Christianity, do not assume I speak of those zealots who believe that God created the world 6000 years ago, I speak of the core values of Christianity that have existed for 2000 years and make the backbone of our cultures.
“It’s long past time to start thinking about more intelligent ways to organize society”
Agreed J Anthony. And i personally will start by ignoring any more posts by this Michael person.
“It’s long past time to start thinking about more intelligent ways to organize society” Yes indeed and certainly an understatement in this day and age. However your reflection of this statement does not seem to match your commentary in my view.
Do you really think that by shutting down dissenting voices is an intelligent way to organise society? Ignore Michael why? Talk to the hand right. To ignore someone’s views and experiences because they differ from your own narrative would be the opposite of how an organised society should be defined in my view. And it’s also a form of passive aggressive violence. The way I see it we need as many different voices as we can because we are losing this war with the oligarchs and their masters who bankroll them. Maybe the war has already been lost? Diversity right? Or is it diversity as long as you agree with my own personal narrative? That is how it seems to me with many multinational corporate pressure groups today. Just look at what PayPal and the ADL did to consortium news for a difference in opinion. How Pathetic and pusillanimous they are. They behave more like “Diversity Supremists” that don’t want real honest diverse opinions. What they want is bridled conformity.
To ignore someone’s views is typical today. This type of thinking and behaviour only enables more blinded conformity of the masses and group think which has already reached its limits long long ago. You are either with us or against us.
There are many Orwellian quotes that could be written here.
This is exactly what the mainstream media want for us. They want us to ignore dissenting voices and to take it even further by cancelling them in order to override free speech truth and personal freedoms. It’s not for us, it’s for them!
Sadly, They are winning, just look at Julian Assange. They are trying to ignore him and his rights, while they smear him, persecute him and ultimately prosecute him with more and more lies in order to reach their objectives. Julian is Us and we are him, how long until people realise this?
I think it’s important to try and listen more to different perspectives like Michaels or anyone’s for that matter. You don’t have to agree but to ignore may be where the first drop of water in the waterfall begins for human censorship. To shut people down. Perhaps a bit extreme, but so is ignorance in my view.
Your opinions should be just as valid as his and I do not need to ignore what you are saying in order to disagree with you. Isn’t that why we are on here writing our comments?
Hopefully this comment serves as a reminder for all of us. We are behaving exactly how they want us too.
Christianity and Capitalism have been saving each other from destruction for 500 years. Separately, neither stands a chance. They are like that sculpture of Laocoon: the truth-telling and the serpents attacking them for its deliverance either feed off each other or else neither of them exists. There comes a moment in every period of Christianity when you either pass off the daughter you’ve impregnated (Borgia) as a virgin, or else you sell Capitalism as an eternal moral structure. We’ve already experienced the latter with Milton Friedman. Look where it has led us. At best, we’ve discarded the idea that virginity has any meaning beyond individual interpretation, much like gender.
I don’t think it’s paralysis; it’s willful greed, callousness and detachment. As for “ignoring the climate crisis”, well here you go:
“The biggest petrochemical plant to be built in Europe in 30 years will be a “carbon bomb” that will worsen the climate crisis and threaten human life, environmental groups including the NGO ClientEarth will argue in court.
Fuelled by ethane from shale gas fracking in the United States, the “cracking” plant to be built in Antwerp by Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s company Ineos will create ethylene and contribute directly to huge increases in plastic production on a scale not seen in Europe, they argue.”
The Guardian 24 April
Water shortages are worsening everywhere.
@Valerie. Typical Western thinking. I am from Eastern Europe. Many village houses still have toilets in the back garden with a hole in the ground and many villages still burn wood and coal to keep themselves warm during the winter (my family still does it).
Do you think that we will ever stop keeping ourselves warm because of the Western propaganda of climate crisis? No.
Do you also think that we will ever bow down to E.U laws that say that we have to reduce this or that by 2030 otherwise doom and gloom? No. If communism taught us something is that systems can be bent and rules can be circumvented in order to survive.
We don’t give a tiny rats ass about climate change. And if Eastern Europe thinks like this, how do you think that other continents that struggle to survive think?
And water shortages don’t happen everywhere.
I do not want to get into a climate breakdown argument, Michael. I base my beliefs of this threat from very personal experience in many countries over the past 40 years and recorded analysis/videos/testaments from reputable agencies and individuals.
Good luck with bending “mother nature” to accommodate you.
Again, perfect Western arrogant assumptions. How do you plan we heat our homes when there are -20 degrees outside? Hmm. Sing songs for mother Earth?
There are no more reputable agencies (or individuals) anymore in the West (or anywhere else). This is the problem with you people. You blindly believe anything that “reputable” agencies tell you. We, in the East, have learned a long time ago that the State or any other agencies that to some degree depend or are attached to the State are never to be trusted. Even the NGOs today are tied to some extent to the State via corporations.
I mean, heck, in the UK people vote with a pencil. That is absolutely hilarious. You can have an eraser with you and switch a vote just like that. For someone like me, who comes from the East, witnessing how people vote in the UK was an absolute shock.
Stop believing anything that “reputable agencies” tell you.
The world isn’t going to end. What is ending is the West.