> a 2013 piece by the remarkable, now 94-year-old Noam Chomsky looking at a future that — from the latest devastating news about #ClimateChange to the revival of #NuclearFears thanks to the war in #Ukraine — is all too of the moment. Of course, Chomsky’s vision of our world was always remarkably ahead of his time

https://tomdispatch.com/humanity-imperiled/

#TomEnglehardt #TomDispatch #BestOfTomDispatch #Chomsky #NoamChomsky

> it’s not just #PhoenixArizona, with those 31 straight days of 110 degrees Fahrenheit..., or even #Chile, which recently passed 100 degrees Fahrenheit in what’s still known as… “winter” there. #Temperatures.. breaking records in an extreme fashion across the planet... should be, daunting, and yet, according to the latest polls, barely half of Americans (... 23% of #Republicans) consider the climate emergency a major threat
https://tomdispatch.com/collapse-2-0/
#TomDispatch #TomEngelhardt
/HT @Brendanjones

> ... nothing meaningful is ever proposed to truly diminish the violence.
> In the weeks that followed, his popularity became monetized and his personal charity, which reportedly had raised only modest thousands of dollars, soared into the millions in a few weeks.
> Too bad that money wasn’t for him... he may be way underinsured for what could lie ahead.
https://tomdispatch.com/why-damar-hamlin-didnt-die-for-our-sins/
#DamarHamlin #TomDispatch #RobertLipsyte
With the needed changes both the #NFL and War might fade away... Rage

This visualization of drought in the #USA reminded me of a #TomDispatch article by #RebeccaGordon. Years ago Mike Davis talked about towns in Western USA (and Mexico?) disappearing because of drought.. The Climate Catastrophe is getting harder and harder to ignore.
https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/
/HT @rustoleumlove

> ... the trifecta: climate change isn’t real; or if it is, humans (and especially fossil-fuel companies!) aren’t responsible; and anyway it might be a good thing. Titled “Unsettled Science,” the piece falsely argued that scientists could not agree on whether climate change was happening. (By that time, 90% of climate scientists, including #ExxonMobile’s, had reached a consensus that climate change is real.)
https://tomdispatch.com/rain-and-heat-fire-and-snow/
#RebeccaGordon on #TomDispatch on #Climate and #California

> Republicans and Democrats who fight over everything else find remarkable accord on the issue. With a few exceptions, the investment of at least half of our discretionary budget in the military-industrial complex no longer seems to make anyone blink.

https://tomdispatch.com/can-the-military-industrial-complex-be-tamed/
#TomDispatch #WIlliamAstore #HalfTheBudget #ThePentagon #MilitarySpending

> A Bush aide (later identified as key adviser #KarlRove)... disparaged #EvidenceBasedReality, though in his case by favoring facts created not through faith but power. As he so resonantly explained to those stuck “in what we call the #RealityBasedCommunity”:
'... We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality... We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'
https://tomdispatch.com/rebecca-gordon-confronting-alternative-facts/
#TomDispatch #RebeccaGordan #BushJunior #OnBullshit?

> ... neither nuking the planet, nor overheating it beyond compare gets anything like the attention it deserves.
> Ending the world as we’ve known it, whether in a matter of weeks or in slow motion over countless decades should, it seems to me, evoke the screaming headlines of our times.
https://tomdispatch.com/old-news-in-a-new-year/
#TomDispatch #TomEngelhardt #NYT #SubStack #ClimateChaos #NoNukes #ClimateChange

> ... neither nuking the planet, nor overheating it beyond compare gets anything like the attention it deserves.
> Ending the world as we’ve known it, whether in a matter of weeks or in slow motion over countless decades should, it seems to me, evoke the screaming headlines of our times.
https://tomdispatch.com/old-news-in-a-new-year/
#TomDispatch #TomEngelhardt #NYT #SubStack #ClimateChaos #NoNukes

> .. 1993.. President #BillClinton.. started to militarize the border, once again.. increasing the budget and staff of the #BorderPatrol and supplying it with ever more.. advanced equipment: infrared night scopes, thermal-imaging devices, motion detectors, in-ground sensors, and software that allowed biometric scanning of all apprehended migrants. Stadium lights went up, shining into #Tijuana.
https://tomdispatch.com/greg-grandin-bricks-in-the-wall/
#Mexico #TheWall #TheFence #TomDispatch #TrumpsWall #GregGrandin

> .. if you are an American, you are statistically in less danger of dying from a terrorist attack in this country than from a toddler shooting you. And by the way, you’re 2,059 times more likely to die by your own hand with a weapon of your choosing than in a terrorist attack anywhere on Earth. You’re also more than nine times as likely to be killed by a police officer as by a terrorist.
.https://tomdispatch.com/ann-jones-answering-for-america/
#USA #guns #toddlers #firearms #TomDispatch #AnnJones

> .. the world’s ruling elites have chosen to place their #geopolitical rivalries above.. critical concerns.. planetary salvation. As a result, #GlobalWarming is indeed likely to surpass 2 degrees Celsius sometime during this century. It’s a given that almost unimaginable calamities will ensue, including the inundation of major cities, monstrous wildfires, and the collapse of agriculture in many parts of the world.
https://tomdispatch.com/the-ukraine-wars-collateral-damage/
#MichaelKlare #TomDispatch #Climate #GeoPolitics

> They’ve had no choice, however, but to watch by video as whole families died from the Hellfire missiles and other munitions they released and, often enough, they evidently find themselves devastated by the experience.. “A fighter jet might see a target for 20 minutes. We had to watch a target for days, weeks.. We watched his whole life unfold.. Then you watch the death. You see the remorse and the burial.. there is no reset button.”
https://tomdispatch.com/the-civilian-deaths-you-havent-heard-about/
#DroneWars #TomDispatch #NickTurse

#DavidVine's book Base Nation looks really good. I lapsed from reading #TomDispatch for a few years but #TomEngelhardt's work with #ChalmersJohnson makes it easier to appreciate the maps in #BaseNation. #InformationDesign techniques can be used for worthy causes, like learning #Geography it prevent wars before they happen. God won't have to use wars to teach us anymore, we can be proactive. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!
https://www.basenation.us/maps.html

> “In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true… Mass #propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.” #HannahArendt
https://tomdispatch.com/rebecca-gordon-confronting-alternative-facts/
#RebeccaGordon #TomDispatch

I'm looking around #TomDispatch for #TomEngelhardt's on #Rumsfeld's admission that reality wasn't an issue in the #IraqInvasion. Maybe it was #Petraeus that was confident they could create the desired #FactsOnTheGround . Either #HannahArendt or #SimoneWeil writes of the totalitarian's constant stream of facts and how contradictions don't matter just keep giving followers something to get excited about.
https://tomdispatch.com/whose-future-is-this-anyway/
#FictionBasedReality
#BetweenPastAndFuture #Arendt

@Aether @clacke @strypey @cirnog @deprecated_ii @skylar
This thread reminds me of headlines I've seen on the #TomDispatch site. Now I have three tabs open to #NickTurse articles from 2012, 214 and 2015, gonna try to read them in order but I'll past the middle link: the intro mentions 'curious pro-#Russian protestors in eastern #Ukraine who tried to liberate an opera house in the city of Kharkiv, mistaking it for city hall'
https://tomdispatch.com/nick-turse-africom-becomes-a-war-fighting-combatant-command/
#MikeDavis on #BlackHawkDown comes to mind?

A Start Page search fro the Japanese translation of a #MikeDavis interview on #TomDispatch turned up a writing I did about the #EnglishThroughPictures books. I wish I could find that org-file again, but I've been thinking of recreating the quote and source pointers with #racket 's #scribble for a while. But it was hard for me to focus on writing while using scribble. https://www.gdm-japan.net/uploads/yearbooks/yearbook_68.pdf
#GDM #IaRichards #LiberalEducation #FreedomLearning #humanities