Recognizing The Language of Tyranny, By Chris Hedges
ORIGINAL POST Empires communicate in two languages. One language is expressed in imperatives. It is the language of command and force. This militarized language disdains human life and celebrates hypermasculinity. It demands. It makes no attempt to justify the...
How Is An Oil Shortage Like A Missing Cup of Flour? By Gail Tverberg
ORIGINAL ARTICLE If I bake a batch of cookies and the recipe calls for two cups of flour but I have only one, it is pretty clear that I can’t bake a full batch of cookies. All I can make is half a batch. I will end up with half of the sugar, and half of the eggs, and...
Super Bowl 2011: Last Supper For The American Empire? By Robert Lipsyte
ORIGINAL POST If you are still passionately following football or, worse, allowing your kid to play, you may just be an old-fashioned imperialist running dog. Not that all football fans are bloodthirsty hounds feeding off the crippled hindquarters of the dying animal...
Catastrophic Weather Events Are Becoming The New Normal, By Bill McKibben
For two decades now we’ve been ignoring the impassioned pleas of scientists that our burning of fossil fuels was a bad idea. And now we’re paying a heavy price.
A Food Manifesto For The Future, By Mark Bittman
For decades, Americans believed that we had the world’s healthiest and safest diet. We worried little about this diet’s effect on the environment or on the lives of the animals (or even the workers) it relies upon. Nor did we worry about its ability to endure — that is, its sustainability.
The Great Unraveling: Tunisia, Egypt, And The Protracted Collapse Of The American Empire, By Nafeez Ahmed
No wonder then that the chief fear of Western intelligence agencies and corporate risk consultants is not that mass resistance might fail to generate vibrant and viable democracies, but simply the prospect of a regional “contagion” that could destabilize “Saudi oil fields.” Such conventional analyses, of course, entirely miss the point: The American Empire, and the global political economy it has spawned, is unravelling — not because of some far-flung external danger, but under the weight of its own internal contradictions. It is unsustainable — already in overshoot of the earth’s natural systems, exhausting its own resource base, alienating the vast majority of the human and planetary population.