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By
the fourth day of record high temperatures and tropical humidity, I was
convinced that this unusual Midwestern heatwave was more than it
appeared. I haven’t seen such record high temperatures linger for more
than a day or two since I lived in the Southwest. I can’t recall
anything like this amount of heat and humidity for days on end growing
up in this part of the world. The weather suddenly seems very unnatural
and deadly. Deliberately so.
I’m
not a conspiracy theorist—the name the CIA devised to smear the
reputations of those who early on thought the details surrounding JFK’s
assassination seemed highly suspicious. I don’t believe in UFOs or
flying saucers because, let’s face it, what intelligent alien species
would want to land on this hellhole of a rock? No self-respecting alien
would come to a planet where babies and children are forfeit if they
come from the wrong indigenous ethnic group or are seen as “playthings”
for the pedophile perverts in power.
Sorry
to disappoint, but I’m not talking conspiracy theories here. I have
some evidence to back up my opinion that global warming/climate change
is happening because the perverse people in power find it’s a useful
tool to keep us poor folks in our place. The weather works well as a
weapon in their arsenal to fight foreign enemies, too...
During
this heatwave, I wondered how much longer can I carry on like this. I’m
not getting any younger. I’m not sure I’ll be able to take care of my
garden in the future during a similar extreme heatwave, especially if
they become regular events. Maybe it’s time to call it quits, sell my
house and garden, and move on? Who really cares about the native plants
I’ve encouraged to grow so they and their pollinators don’t become
extinct? Who else but me and my spouse cares about the trees we’ve
planted as a small attempt to restore some of the vast forests that used
to cover this part of the world?
Now,
take my experience and observations in my garden recently and multiply
them times a thousand or even a million. What if every small land holder
or backyard gardener in the US decided within the next few years that
it’s impossible to keep growing their own fruit and vegetables in this
extreme weather? What if they decided it’s not worth planting trees if
they’re going to dry up due to not receiving our “typical” rainfall
amounts?
Expand
these ideas to include farmers on the few small family farms still
remaining in the US. Do they continue to struggle to make a living in
this hostile climate? Why not sell off their cows, pigs, goats, and
chickens? Why not sell off their old tractor and move into the city and
work at a Walmart? Suddenly there’s a lot of “unused land” on the market
for Tech Bros to buy cheap so they can build more heat-producing,
water-hogging AI data centers, isn’t there?
Without
gardeners and small farmers “hogging” water for their crops and
livestock, there’s much more water to be had for cooling AI data
centers. I can hear the gears clicking in the greedy idiots’ heads in
the Trump administration even now...
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Imagine
living in a world where you could get arrested for saying “Don’t kill
the children!” because it might hurt the feelings of the killer.
Imagine
living in a world where all children are cherished and taken well care
of, always have enough to eat, a safe place to live, access to a decent
education, and medical care whenever necessary.
Imagine
living in a world where your country uses your tax dollars to provide
the armaments, bombs, planes, and bullets for a genocide of innocents
and won’t allow you to speak out against these war crimes upon pain of
prosecution.
Imagine
living in a world where you are free to speak your mind about the
immorality of genocidal war crimes no matter how it casts a dark shadow
upon the reputations of those in power, the oligarchs, their political
henchmen, and their celebrity endorsers, and your tax dollars go to
support programs that actually serve the public.
Imagine
living in a world where proxy wars have become commonplace and your tax
dollars go to finance these conflicts in order for wealthy CEOs in the
oil industry, the military-industrial complex and related industries to
make even more billions at the expense of millions of lives.
Imagine
living in a world where the polluting fossil fuels industry is no more
because clean and plentiful sources of green energy from the sun, the
wind, the tides, and the geothermal activities of the Earth itself have
been developed and made available to all, thus making the need to start
wars for oil and other resource grabs entirely unnecessary...
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This
is most evident in the the comment sections of blogs and social media
sites like Twitter and Facebook. When someone responds to your
carefully thought-out comment with a string of curse words, or worse,
a nonsensical tirade that begins, “Climate change is a vast
Russian-financed conspiracy begun in the seventeenth century by the horse
antibiotic pharmaceutical manufacturers working for anti-vax
Illuminati sex traffickers led by the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein,”
you gotta wonder. What planet do they live on?
Can’t
they observe the severe
rise in summer temperatures and wild changes
in the jet
streams?
Can’t
they see how much money is changing hands behind the scenes so
politicians are more than willing to bend over backward and protect blatant pedophiles? Can’t
they understand that Sleepy-Creepy-Jim-Crow-Joe-Warmonger isn’t a “charismatic and dynamic president”? (Yes, some
poor deluded fool actually wrote that on
a post on Facebook. No, I don’t think they were joking.)
Perhaps when you’ve been convinced that, “War
is peace,” and “Ignorance is strength,” you don’t really
exist in this reality after all?
Here’s
my attempt to write a protest song from
the ear worm that crawled into my mind and kept repeating itself this
week:
What planet are you on?
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If
you don’t think it's possible to write an article incorporating a climate catastrophe story along with the opening bell of an
alternative party presidential run story, then you have another thing
coming to you! It’s also includes poorly written filks of old
tunes as segues. (Sorry about that, but they just seem to fit.)
In
the news climate-wise, people in New York City were forced to
give up breathing this past week due to particulate pollution caused
by Canadian wildfires. The
Air Quality Index (AQI) in parts of Brooklyn
reached
484 — nearly
double San Francisco’s highest hourly reading during
California’s 2020 fire season. And
it wasn’t just New Yorkers who were gasping for air. The smoky haze
and micro-particulate clouds covered skies from Illinois
to Ohio to Pennsylvania to South Carolina to New York State to Maine…
In fact, just about everybody east of the Mississippi experienced
horrible air quality indices this week.
Who cares though, right? Breathing is for sissies! We're told that unhealthy AQIs can cause serious health issues for vulnerable
populations such as asthmatics and those with COPD as well as
children and the elderly. But what’s more important—keeping poor
working class people alive or growing sociopathic billionaires’
bank accounts? You know which group is more important to please for
those idiots in Washington DC and in your own statehouse, don’t
you? For your sake, I hope you do.
The
fossil fuel industry takes no responsibility for causing
a build up of carbon monoxide in the atmosphere
due to the
polluting by-products which
come from combustion engines and coal-fueled power plants. It’s not like carbon monoxide and other gases have caused the
so-called “greenhouse effect” that bring on heatwaves and dry up
the forests of North America. No, not at all. It’s just coincidence
that record breaking spring temperatures this year occurred. In no
way could they have helped to spontaneously ignite tender-dry forests
that have continued to burn unabated for weeks now. Pure
coincidence.
It’s
also pure coincidence that my garden in Northwest Ohio
hasn’t seen a speck of rain in over 21 days—setting a dry spell record that
is unheard of in the Midwest since the “Dust Bowl” era of the
1930s. The brown, hazy skies and dry winds that smell like a
permanent bonfire have only caused me to reach for my emergency
inhaler a dozen times this week.
Well,
who doesn’t need to quit breathing from time to time? The tears
streaming down my face from my smoke-irritated eyes can go a long
ways in filling our bone-dry rain barrels, too.
If
you’re thinking I’m being facetious, think again. Between the
millions who are still suffering from the lasting effects of COVID-19
and this recent air quality disaster, who knows just how many
Americans have or will suffer a debilitating illness that could
disable them for life? The time to take action to eliminate
the use of fossil fuels and other polluting methods to generate power
isn’t today—it was yesterday. In fact:
A newstudyby 50 leading scientists conducted to supplement the “information gap” betweenIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(IPCC) reports said globalgreenhouse gas emissionshave soared to a record high and are threatening to push our planet into “unprecedented” global heating.
Which
leads me to the next story…
Oh,
hazy day! Oh, hazy day!
When
Cornel West… came to show us the way!
(*Sung
to the tune of Oh, Happy Day)
Cornel West at BGSU in 2017
This
next story is one that has captured the focus of many a leftist
thinker. Dr. Cornel West, academic, philosopher, and former
Bernie Sanders delegate to the DNC, has announced that he is running
for the presidency in 2024. The biggest controversy at the start of his candidacy is that Dr. West has stated
he is running as a People’s Party (MPP) candidate. He’s not
running as a Green Party candidate or as an independent but as a
candidate for an alternative party that barely exists.
To
say this has caused an explosion of conversation and cursing in
online forums where Lefties hang out is an understatement. Dr. West’s
decision to go with the MPP is being questioned on several levels.
Does he realize that the MPP doesn’t have ballot access (or even
statewide organizations) in more than a handful of states? Would he
be open to becoming a “fusion candidate” that several
left-leaning alternative parties such as the Green Party US would be
glad to nominate, thus giving him broader ballot access and more
experienced organizers? Chris Hedges has said he’d speak to his
good friend about switching to the Green Party. Could we see a
West/Hedges 2024 ticket? We’ll see.
UPDATE:
Chris Hedges did talk to Dr. West and he has decided to run as a Green
after all! The West campaign website doesn't reflect this recent change
in Dr. West's plans yet, so please be patient.
It’s
early days so
Dr. West has time to change his mind about running, or
he could simply
switch his choice in a party
and run in one with less controversy attached to it. The MPP has fallen apart
(in spite of its auspicious start with West, Nina Turner, Paula
Jean Swearingen and other big names supporting it) because of sexual
harassment and financial misuse charges brought against its current
chair
and founder Nick Brana. One would hope Dr. West would address the
harassment mess and that Brana would step down so West could run
without being associated with any nasty business.
Dr. West is a decent and compassionate human being. He might
actually believe the voting public will look past the inadequacies of
the People’s Party and concentrate on his message. One
would hope
that proves true, but for now… The
discussions and debates continue online. (UPDATE:
Even with Chris Hedges talking Cornel West into running as a Green,
things are still relatively up in the air and the discussions are
ongoing. You're not going to please everyone, in other words!)
West posing with friends in 2017 (photo by author)
To
draw these seemingly radically different stories together—hazy, polluted
skies and Cornel West running for office—I’d like to posit that
only a presidential candidate of Dr. West’s moral caliber would
do anything worthwhile to end the reign of the
fossil
fuels oligarchs and help put our ailing
planet back on a path toward wholeness.
My
reasoning? The duopolists
take millions of dollars yearly from capitalists who
don’t
care about the health of the people or our Earth. (I
suppose these rich types expect a ticket on Musk’s or Bezos’
rocket to their “Elysium” in space once they’ve destroyed our
world.) Leftists
candidates like Dr.
West
would more
than likely put
the fates of the poor and working classes before the billionaires’
bank accounts.
During
a Cornel West administration, we’d probably
see action taken to convert our energy
grid from dirty
to clean energy sources, along with punitive measures taken against capitalists who don’t cooperate
in
these lifesaving measures. That’s why it’s imperative those who care
about their lungs, their family members’ lungs, and the health of
the entire planet leave the duopolists’ ranks and join with independent thinkers to destroy the corrupt, planet-killing system
currently in power.
With
cleaner skies, the end ofwars
for oil, health care for all guaranteed,
civil rights assured for the people, we’ll be singing:
Roll
out those non-hazy, crazy, lazy days of summer!
(*And
you thought I was done with the filks? That’s what a lack of
clean air gets you. Bwahaha!)
Coming soon, the first book from The Revolution Continues blog: The Little Red Book of Revolution
How can you get your e-copy? The easiest way is to subscribe to The Revolution Continues on Substack as a paying subscriber. Choose what level you'd like to subscribe at via the buttons on any post online at https://therevolutioncontinues.substack.com
