“But all those materials? They’re also infra problems. We’ve spent millennia treating energy as scarce, despite the fact that fresh supplies of it arrive on Earth with every sunrise and every moonrise. Moreover, we’ve spent that same period treating materials as infinite despite the fact that we’ve got precisely one Earth’s worth of stuff, and fresh supplies arrive sporadically, unpredictably, and in tiny quantities that usually burn up before they reach the ground.”
(Source: pluralistic.net)
“For years, a Saudi Arabian dairy company called Fondomonte leased thousands of acres of farmland in the middle of Arizona. They’ve been pumping 3,000 gallons of groundwater per minute to irrigate their crops. They’re using it to grow alfalfa for milking cows. In case you also didn’t know, alfalfa consumes nearly three times as much water as other crops. Agriculture accounts for 80 percent of all the water used from the Colorado River, and half of that goes toward the growth of alfalfa, with large amounts exported to other countries.”
(Source: okdoomer.io)
“The United States has the power to pressure Israel to end its occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem. First the media must allow the American public to hear the voices of victims from all sides of this conflict.”— When the US Media Silences One Side’s Suffering, Only More Death and War Follow
(Source: commondreams.org)
“So where does that leave the Palestinians, a people who had consistently been treated as disposable by their larger Muslim neighbors long before Israel was even thought of? Well, it leaves them without a state to call their own, and their fears that Israel intends on pushing them out of the Southern Levant validated. It’s hard to imagine even if a two-state solution is revisited, that the sticking points of earlier discussions – control of East Jerusalem and the Palestinian Right of Return, the right of refugees to return to the land inside Israel they lost in 1947 – would be solvable after all this. That leaves the only other possibility a “one-state solution” in which Israel annexes the West Bank and Gaza officially and gives full citizenship and rights to the Palestinians.”
(Source: nickrafter.substack.com)
“But this is precisely the time that Washington must be the cooler head and save Israel from itself. The impending invasion of Gaza will be a humanitarian, moral, and strategic catastrophe. It will not only badly harm Israel’s long-term security and inflict unfathomable human costs on Palestinians but also threaten core U.S. interests in the Middle East, in Ukraine, and in Washington’s competition with China over the Indo-Pacific order. Only the Biden administration—channeling the United States’ unique leverage and the White House’s demonstrated close support for Israeli security—can now stop Israel from making a disastrous mistake. Now that it has shown its sympathy with Israel, Washington must pivot toward demanding that its ally fully comply with the laws of war. It must insist that Israel find ways to take the fight to Hamas that do not entail the displacement and mass killing of innocent Palestinian civilians.”
(Source: foreignaffairs.com)
“Who is being childish here? Is it the young college students, appalled at genocide looming in front of their eyes, possessed with the overwhelming urge to do something, who—despite not possessing a PhD in global affairs—flood into the streets and rage against the atrocity? Or is it the well educated and highly placed and influential adults, granted positions of great importance, who, as a crisis unfolds, as civilians are murdered, as neighborhoods are bombed, as oppression and religion collide in war, use their time griping about the hotheadedness of the young people protesting in the streets? Which of these groups has more accurately identified what should be our current topic of attention—the young people whose focus is on the governments that possess militaries and missiles and are poised to cause thousands of deaths, or the adults whose focus is on how some college kid said something annoying at a DSA rally? Wake the fuck up. The adults in the room are everywhere proving the kids’ critique to be true.”
(Source: hamiltonnolan.com)
“You must tell yourself: ‘No matter how hard it is, or hard it gets, I am going to make it.’” - Unknown
“In September 2023, the wealth of America’s 748 billionaires rose to $5 trillion, $2.2 trillion more than in 2017, the year the Trump administration passed massive tax changes favoring the rich.”
(Source: tomdispatch.com)
“Musk lives in a continual state of deranged failure, buoyed by his past successes and an army of ignorant dopes with blue checkmarks. He cannot save Twitter other than entirely handing it to somebody else, and every day that he spends at the helm damages a company already on life support.”
(Source: wheresyoured.at)
“Think about what happened with the breakup of Standard Oil in the first part of the 20th century. Standard Oil was not the only trust. There were trusts for everything: whiskey, railroads, iron, aluminum, cars. Standard Oil’s dominance made people so hopeless about whether or not they could have an accountable government that the toppling of Standard Oil opened up a floodgate of political will that saw all of those other trusts shattered. I want to go after tech because it has this characteristic interoperability that makes it a soft target. We start with tech, and that gives us the momentum, the credibility, and the political will to go after everybody else.”
(Source: spectrum.ieee.org)
“I taught Obama’s cohort—the Yale version. And I was struck by how many of them were so convinced that the whole purpose of the civil-rights movement was that people like them could go to Ivy League colleges and go to Wall Street afterward, how many of them were dispositively convinced that rich people are smarter than the rest of us.”
(Source: newyorker.com)
Tardis.cur Cursor
“You must tell yourself: ‘No matter how hard it is, or hard it gets, I am going to make it.’” - Unknown
Authoritarians destroy democracy.
