.."..an age when the fake, the fraudulent, the fabricated and the theatrical supplant reality"..

..."America imposture is identity.. values are not beliefs but the product of occasions.. and social identity is virtually an arbitrary matter, depending not on character nor an appearance but on the chance definition of one’s nature..

..we founded the nation on genocide & slavery, we ravage the globe with endless wars and the theft of its resources, enrich an oligarchic elite at the expense of our citizenry, empower police to gun down unarmed citizens in the streets, and lock up a quarter of the world’s prison population.. while wallowing in the supposed moral superiority of American white supremacy...
..the more debased the nation becomes, the more it seeks the reassurance of oily con artists to mask truth with lies."

.."..in a 2005 promotional video for a scam that made him about $40 million, [he] employs the familiar hyperbole of the con artist in declaring: “At [My] University, we teach success. That’s what it’s all about—success. It’s going to happen to you. We’re going to have professors and adjunct professors that are absolutely terrific—terrific people, terrific brains, successful. We are going to have the best of the best. These are people that are handpicked by me.”    ..... Only there was no university."

.."[His] get-rich-quick schemes and seminars, including his books, were a con. His casinos were a con. His paid speeches on behalf of self-help gurus such as Tony Robbins were a con. Tales of his sexual prowess, spread by himself masquerading over the phone as a Trump spokesperson, were a con. His building projects were a con. [He] even had.. “imaginary employees.”

Trump and his kleptocrats and grifters are today triumphant, and neither democratic norms or simply human decency will inhibit their pathological lust for more."

.."..skillful creation of illusion and the manipulation of our emotional response, actions that profit the elites to our financial and political detriment, have seeped into religion, education, journalism, politics and culture. They solidify mob rule and magical thinking.  

Trump’s crass vulgarity, greed, unchecked hedonism and amorality, along with his worship of himself, are intrinsic to America, but his ascendancy, and the ascendancy of the character traits he personifies, represents cultural death."

~ @ChrisLynnHedges

.."We live in an age when the fake, the fraudulent, the fabricated and the theatrical supplant reality"


..Chris Hedges is an astute seer.. with knowledge vast & profound..

"The Cult of Trump" 

- an American journalist, Presbyterian minister, & visiting Princeton University lecturer...
- he has to date written 14 books, winning various awards for his many works..
- a columnist for the progressive news & commentary website Truthdig... also a host for the television program On-Contact on RT. ..
- spending nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, West Asia, Africa, the Middle East, & the Balkans...& has reported from more than 50 countries..
- he has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, NPR, Dallas Morning News, & The New York Times, where he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years (1990–2005).
- in 2001, Hedges contributed to The New York Times staff entry that received the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for the paper's coverage of global terrorism.
- he's also received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism.
..he has taught at Columbia University, New York University, the University of Toronto & Princeton University, where he is a visiting lecturer in African American studies.
..Hedges has taught college credit courses for several years in New Jersey prisons...
- he teaches a course through Princeton University in which the class is composed of half prisoners & half Princeton undergraduates.
- he describes himself a socialist & more specifically a Christian-anarchist, identifying with Catholic activist Dorothy Day.

... he is a brilliant writer & scholarly thinker.. well worth listening to carefully..

..his harsh criticisms & outlook, come in part from his background as a former war correspondent, witnessing & reporting all the horrible things human beings do to other human beings..
...this is a important talk.. don't fall to the temptation not to listen.. he's saying what many don't want to believe or hear.. but what he's referring to will unquestionably rule all our lives completely.. unless we act on our own behalf to now change direction.. 

..and be sure to go on YouTube to watch his other speeches & interviews.. 
..his ultimate outlook for the predicament in which we have embroiled ourselves requires our efforts to have any hope of salvation.. huge amounts of effort..  

..only if we truly comprehend that we must firmly attempt to try, can we have ANY prospect at all of succeeding..


.

...enough-is-enough... progressive changes need to start NOW..!!

..surprise...surprise... Claire doesn't much like Alexandria (who hasn't even yet served a day in office)... wow.. moderates saying not so nice things about progressives.. whodathought..!!

..(this acerbity spewing forth from an abortion-rights wavering politician from Missouri whose constituency just unceremoniously dumped her..
..towards a much younger one from New York, whose star is rising, with a growing legion of followers altogether admiring her message of hope & change)

.
..look where we are right now:

• ..tens of millions of Americans in poverty & homelessness, and it's getting much worse by the day..

• ..embroiled in wars everywhere, and actively seeking to get into more 'profit-conflicts'...

• ..as a majority of our budget goes annually down the military rabbit-hole..

• ..fossil-fuels damning climate heating up.. continually threatening our entire civilization.. and government doing its best to seal our fate in twenty short years..

• ..hatred & fear coveted & used against immigrants as if they were the cause of all our troubles..versus greatly benefiting our society - as they do..

• ..inequality the greatest it's been in our history.. handful of men controlling most all wealth of the world

• ..big-money controlling our elected officials & government

• ..Wall Street sucking the life's-blood from all that it can

• ..we're housing 25% of all the 'for-profit' prison population on the planet

• ..our college grads with mortgage-sized crippling debt.. as it is increasingly sought to 'profitize' additional schools..

• ..Americans with medical & drug bills that are bankrupting them... as industry profits soar..

• ..while against all fairness transferring trillions to the wealthy not needing a dime of it..!!!   (most all of it going to stock-buybacks.. increasing share profits.. & executive bonuses)

..it's WELL-PAST-TIME to stop doing the same-old..same-old...
..it's worked for the small minority very well now for decades..


 ...enough-is-enough... progressive changes need to start NOW..!! 

Ocasio-Cortez became the youngest woman ever elected to Congress after stunning the political world by beating 20-year incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary.

The Bronx native ran on a bold set of policy proposals, including Medicare for All, a federal jobs guarantee, and tuition-free college — an agenda that she and others on the left argue is popular among working-class voters across the political spectrum.

.

..what's that saying.. what you don't know might wind up doing you in.. (or something like that)

 ..being out of our limited sphere of awareness, we pay scant attention to might what occur
.. here's an event shows just how precarious life on our planet is for all of us..

..in the lands of the 'Ring of Fire'.. the line of frequent earthquakes & volcanic eruptions that circles virtually the entire Pacific rim.

..in this instance today, hundreds will have been killed..

..and just this past September, more than 1400 people died when a powerful earthquake struck just off the central Indonesian island of Sulawesi, setting off a tsunami that engulfed the coastal city of Palu.

..one of the worst events occurred on 26 December 2004, when a series of huge waves triggered by a powerful earthquake in the Indian Ocean killed almost a quarter million people in 14 countries, mostly in Indonesia.

Anak Krakatau (Child of Krakatau) is a new island that emerged in 1927 from  the Krakatoa volcano.
.. in August 1883, Krakatoa underwent one of the most violent volcanic eruptions in recorded history..
..massive tsunamis with waves up to 135ft killed more than 36,000 people.. thousands more were killed by hot ash
..the eruptions were equivalent to 200 megatons of TNT - about 13,000 times the nuclear yield of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945

.. these eruptions were heard thousands of kilometers away.. world temperatures dropped by more than 1C the following year.. the volcanic island virtually disappeared
.. justifiably rated as one of the most destructive volcanic eruptions of modern times, Krakatoa was not the largest eruption in the recent history of Indonesia....

.. the eruption of Mount Tambora on April 10, 1815 was immense.... it was the only eruption in modern history to rate a VEI of 7. .. even in the U.S., 1816 was known as the "year without a summer."

.. global temperatures were an average 5 degrees cooler because of this eruption..
.. crops failed worldwide.. in Europe & the U.S. an unexpected outcome was the invention of the bicycle, as horses became too expensive to feed.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

..we pay little attention to these 'natural-time-bombs' ticking all over our 'active' planet..

..ask the average person, might they know what is a 'caldera'..

..you'll probably get some unexpected & very interesting answers..

... 'our-caldera' is one of the largest in the world..

.. unbeknownst to most, Yellowstone National Park sits on a subterranean chamber of molten rock and gasses so vast that it is arguably one of the largest active super-volcanoes (calderas) in the world...

.. a magma chamber not far below the surface fuels all the volcanic attractions that Yellowstone is famous for...
.. the last major eruption at Yellowstone, some 640,000 years ago, ejected 8,000 times the ash & lava of the Mount St. Helens eruption on May 18th, 1980 .

.. it is alive and well today.. tens of thousands of years past its next approximate eruption date..  (geologic time is a bitch for humans)

.. so it could blow tomorrow.. or a 1,000 or 100,000 years from now..

.

.. it's time...

..this trip has been the perfect reason/ example why we don't want to 'own' real estate any longer..

..have not been to Delray since very early in the year...
..show up now and three things need..'taking-care-of'

..1. the Internet wasn't working..
..as usual, someone else had some ATT wiring work done on their unit

..and that work knocked out our service.. two days wait for the tech to show up & repair
..has happened before... of course, will happen again.

..2. while we were away they did some balcony repair work.. great.. but in doing said repair, they somehow managed to damage one of the rollers on a sliding glass door..

..called to get it repaired.. it's Christmas, so the wait will be at least one to two weeks..
..they will call day before, when someone is available for the next day to come and give an estimate..
..that date does not work.. you go back on the 'list' for the next cycle.. then they need to come again to fix it..

..3. out from nowhere, there's now a slight hum originating from one of the a/c units up on the roof..
..life on the top floor is nice, but has its unique challenges..

..the noise isn't really that much.. just enough though to keep you awake, once you've gotten up to go to the bathroom middle of the night

..so both bedrooms are now occupied.. at least one of us might get almost a full night's sleep.
..and it's Christmas and the guy we need to speak to in the building regarding this whole thing is away for the holidays

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

..for a year and a half, while we were building the house out west, we rented one a few streets away..

..when something needing fixing.. got on the phone, told the landlord.. and went on about our business..

..looking forward to that stress level once again..  we are sooo over home ownership..

.

..democracy w/o effort is doomed to fail..

..and that's what's brought us to where we are now....
..taking it all back from the guys that 'have' been interested & have 'invested'
..time & again paying & lobbying to get-what-they-wanted

..it is going to require a lot more involvement on the part of ordinary citizens..
..don't wanna do it.. too busy to find-time..
..then don't expect much at all to happen different..
..and it all just comes to an end LOTS sooner..

..having a discussion recently.. someone asked.. where are all these progressive leaders..
..well, you have to go looking for them, and  they are not hard to spot..
..they believe that:

1.  ..the threat of climate disruption is our number one concern.. and must be dealt with NOW..!!.. moving from all fossil fuels to alternative energy needs to happen ASAP..!!
2. ..money must be removed from politics.. they must not accept ANY donations from corporate PAC's..or big donations from corporate executives.. period....!!
3. ..healthcare & education should be free and provided to all citizens.
4. ..Wall Street must be re-regulated to protect citizens from exploitation...and the economy from recession and depression
5. ..the super wealthy must pay their fair tax share.. tax avoidance and use of tax loopholes stopped..!!
6. .. endless wars, and war-for-profit are to end.. spending 2/3's of our annual budget on the MIC is insane and harmful to the country..!!
7. .. reform immigration policy so that it respects the rights of ALL immigrant peoples..
8. .. reform the voting system..eliminate abuses & voter suppression..

..there are others ..marriage & gender equality, abortion rights, minimum wage, infrastructure renewal, prison-system reform.. etal.. but would they believe in the above.. they will all these others as well..

..listen to progressive leaders like Elizabeth Warren & Bernie Sanders & Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.. they understand what's desperately needed to solve the very daunting challenges this country is facing..

..get names.. do searches what they have been saying.. what they believe in.. and yay/nay voting records are hard to hide or deny..

..democracy without much effort has brought us to this juncture.. the more effort we put into educating ourselves, the more we will be able to create a better government..

..there is no alternative.. we are now crashing & burning and it will only continue unless we change it.. doing the same thing over & over and expecting any change is futile & dumb..

..we pull our heads out from wherever.. or live continually amongst increasingly dire circumstances..

.

Kill all that is around you.. and you will have perpetrated suicide.

... loss of species.. getting far less attention than the dangers of climate change... in the end, it may prove more difficult to mitigate than global warming...the de-carbonizing of the global economy, however hard, won’t be harder or more improbable than the kind of wholesale restructuring of modern life and institutions that would prevent species annihilation from continuing...
...from Insects to starfish, we’re edging toward 'biological-annihilation'

 ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

..we share the planet with as many as 8.7 million different forms of life... 86% of all plants and animals on land and 91% of those in the seas have yet to be named and catalogued... about 70% are insects... and many of them are as foundational to the food chain for land animals as plankton are for marine life... if insects vanish, the environment will collapse into chaos... 

'The Insect Apocalypse' 

....this @NYTmag article by @brookejarvis you will need to hold onto and read again & again.. and pass on to as many people as possible..
..there's good evidence here why her work is so highly regarded... ..this piece is absolutely brilliant..!!


...many entomologists are convinced the collapse of insect populations is now a worldwide phenomenon... 'biological-annihilation' is now an essential part of life.. main causes are over-exploitation of species, agriculture, and land conversion (and geoengineering..?) — all driven by 'runaway human consumption'...

..climate change, too, is a growing threat... old-growth trees are dying all over the world... from global climate-change-induced forest mortality.. hundreds of millions of trees have recently died and many more hundreds of millions will soon be dying... now think of all the other lives, including birds, animals,and insects, that depended on those trees...

..the oceans are rapidly heating up and dying.. ..in the '60's there were 49 'dead-zones' in the oceans.. now there are more than 400.. and the number is growing...

.."barely 14% of creatures on Earth have been logged in central databases – just 9% of those in the seas.. .. many of those species will be extinct before scientists have even registered their presence... governments are more preoccupied with finding life on Mars than on Earth.... one flight to Mars could fund research for decades in exploring and understanding life on this planet.."

.."the truth is we are still so ignorant … there is still not a plot of tropical forest anywhere in the world that has been inventoried completely – not even a hectare."

"There is no safety in unlimited technological hubris.”

 ...we have made and are making colossal mistakes in our priorities & pursuits, 

that are eventually to cost us everything..  'existence' on this planet.

Earth's 6th mass extinction is underway—Humans causing 'biological annihilation' of all life.

...extinction is not the only tragedy through which we’re living... what about the species that still exist, but as a shadow of what they once were? 
..the world’s largest king penguin colony shrank 88% in 35 years, that more than 97% of the bluefin tuna that once lived in the ocean are gone..
 ..tigers still exist, but 93% of the land where they used to live is now tigerless..

..one result of all the loss is what’s known as trophic cascade.. the unraveling of an ecosystem’s fabric as prey populations boom & crash, and various levels of the food web no longer keep each other in check... these places are emptier, impoverished in a thousand subtle ways...
..and we have begun to speak of functional extinction (as opposed to the more familiar, numerical extinction)...functionally extinct animals & plants are still present, but no longer prevalent enough to affect how an ecosystem works...
..some phrase this as the extinction not of a species, but of all its former interactions with its environment — an extinction of seed dispersal & predation & pollination & all the other ecological functions an animal once had, which can be devastating even if some individuals still persist...
..the more interactions are lost, the more disordered the ecosystem becomes...

...since 1970, earth’s various populations of wild land animals have lost 60% of their members...
..we most relate to mammals, and for every six wild creatures that once ate & burrowed & raised young.. only one remains. ...what we have instead is ourselves... if you look at the world’s mammals by weight, 96% of that biomass is humans & livestock.. just 4% is wild animals...  
..7.6 billion people represent just 0.01% of all living things, yet since the dawn of civilization, humanity has caused the loss of 83% of all wild mammals and half of plants, while livestock kept by humans abounds..

..in “The Once and Future World,” the journalist J.B. MacKinnon cites records from recent centuries that hint at what has only just been lost: “In the North Atlantic, a school of cod stalls a tall ship in mid-ocean; off Sydney, Australia, a ship’s captain sails from noon until sunset through pods of sperm whales as far as the eye can see. ... Pacific pioneers complain to the authorities that splashing salmon threaten to swamp their canoes.”

...there were reports of lions in the south of France, walruses at the mouth of the Thames, flocks of birds that took three days to fly overhead, as many as 100 blue whales in the Southern Ocean for every one that’s there now.
“These are not sights from some ancient age of fire and ice,” MacKinnon writes.
“We are talking about things seen by human eyes, recalled in human memory.”

.."The future will be unlike anything humanity has experienced before."..

..we are today brought up in a world far removed from nature.. never being adequately instructed how critically important a 'complete-nature' is to our continued survival on this planet..
..we can continue to keep on ignoring what we are doing to wipe out species.. but not for very much longer.

... In the Face of Extinction... a Moral Obligation

.."I have surrendered and accepted the inevitability of our situation: that we will live the rest of our time, however long each of us might have left, on an irrevocably changed planet, while the Sixth Mass Extinction event continues apace... we will daily walk further into that frontier."

~  Dahr Jamail, Truthout.org  (12.03.18)

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Not easy agreeing with these words, but they are absolutely true...
...we have decisively entered a time of altered 'earth-systems'..

• ...the last time the oceans were as acidic as they are now, 96% of ocean life was extinct...

• ...at 1.5°C warming (Earth currently is 1.1°C), the planet will lose 80% of its coral reefs... at 2°C they will all be destroyed... the whole prognosis is extremely somber, for not much can be done, given there's nearly a 50 year time lag between us trying to control carbon dioxide emissions, and ocean temperatures beginning to drop...

• ...rapidly disintegrating Arctic sea ice leaves scientists ‘shocked’.. and the stunning result of this is that 95% of the oldest & thickest Arctic sea ice has disintegrated in just three decades. That means faster sea level rise, faster global warming, and more extreme weather for us.

•  ...run-off from the vast northern Greenland ice sheet – currently the biggest single source of meltwater adding to the volume of the world’s oceans – is 50% higher than pre-industrial levels and increasing exponentially... rising dramatically over just the past 20 years....the recent increase in ice melt is ominously unusual...and the response more rapid than previously expected.. (now up to 500 billion tonnes of melt a year..!! ..and increasing annually)

• ...climate policies of China, Russia & Canada alone will bring Earth above catastrophic 5 degrees Celsius (9°F) warming by the end of this century...

• ...warmer temperatures are wiping out bird species already living atop mountains for the cooler climate... the 20 warmest years on record have been in the past 22 years, and the top four in the past four years...

• .. powerful heat waves are contributing to declines in biodiversity around much of the world, along with many other factors, mass extinction of the planet’s wildlife is now as big of a danger as climate change itself... ...since 1970, humans have annihilated 60% of Earth’s mammals, birds, fish and reptiles...

• ...one of the largest sources of freshwater on Earth, part of a massive blanket of ice in Central Asia, called the “The Third Pole".. the 3rd largest store of ice behind Greenland & Antarctica (size of New Mexico & Texas combined), it is vital as a water source for billions in Asia... The Third Pole contains the world’s highest mountains, including all 14 peaks above 8,000 meters (26K ft), and is the source of 10 major rivers in Asia, that rely heavily on seasonal melting, forming a formidable global ecological buffer... The Third Pole is in serious trouble, loosing 60% of its ice mass since just 1982... scientists found in 2015 that 82% of glaciers in China had retreated.

• ...California isn’t the only place experiencing increasingly intense and devastating wildfires... unprecedented fires all over the planet are worsening due to ongoing drought and increasingly warming temperatures...
  ..(see.. World Wildfire Map.. patience loading)..

• ...climate warming is allowing species to spread northwards, which is bringing new diseases with them that are having an increasingly devastating impact on the invaded region’s fragile ecosystems...

• ... 'co-extinctions'...plant & animal species wiped out by any extreme environmental changes dramatically increases the risk of a domino effect that could annihilate all life on Earth... heating tends to remove the ecologically most important species first.. loss of plant life set in motion the annihilation of life on Earth, because plants have a relatively low tolerance to rapidly changing temperatures, and when the plants die, so do the herbivores that eat them... then, obviously, the predators that eat the herbivores are left foodless... including humans... ..in the case of global warming, the combination of intolerance to heat combined with co-extinctions mean that five to six degrees of average warming globally is enough to wipe out most life on the planet.

..“last-chance tourism” is having a dramatic rise.. people wanting to see places already irrevocably changed by climate, likely soon to be gone entirely

...every U.S. president from JFK on was warned about the dangers of climate change... and what really did ANY of them do.. very little, or nothing..!!

...we must brace ourselves for a truly dystopian climate future that is inevitable.. we’re not just facing a “new normal” of climate extremes and the catastrophes accompanying them... in effect, we are entering a New Cretaceous period...where global temperatures were 3-10°C hotter than pre-industrial temperatures..

• ...CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere are 146% higher today than they were before the industrial revolution...

• ...a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, methane (CH4) is now present in the atmosphere at 257% of its level before the industrial revolution, with a rate of increase constant over the last decade...

 ... all living species are in exceedingly serious trouble...

10,000 species are wiped out every year..

...we are fast approaching an end to 'our' world.. 

...catastrophic impacts of runaway climate are upon us as of right now...

..each and every one of us must consider how to use our time and energies most wisely and carefully, facing down the most monumental test of survival 

humans have ever experienced...

..some might not want to listen.. disregard being their false-immunity..
..the planet doesn't care.. what we're doing to it, will eventually catch up to everyone..

... In the Face of Extinction, We Have a Moral Obligation

.

... how did it get so late so soon..?

.."Our only real chance of contending with climate change and inequality is through a sustainable way of life - which means wholly altered social, political, and economic systems that value biology over business, ecology over economics.
More equitable and sustainable ways of living have been illustrated during protests in recent years, but for them to matter, they need to be maintained after these short-term gatherings and adopted as "normal."
The cultural values that indigenous communities hold embody a critical route toward sustainability and justice. Our greater societal embrace of their values may be our last best hope to save our species."  
  
~ K. Mattis

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

..Earth-systems are enormous.. taking decades or longer reacting to change..
..and the world-wide 'capitalistic-system' we have vigorously engaged and let run-amok would be no different..
..in a world that were to attempt 'altering' its ways.. this might very well be possible... but it would as well require decades or more to turn the 'beast' around..

and even under 'prime-conditions', can our world really sustain a population of 10+ billion people.. even if it were possible we'd all revert to a lifestyle much more 'naturally-sustainable'..
..the ultimate question would still remain.. does the climate we are now to enter allow for these enormous numbers of humans to exist in such a stressful environment.?

..personally, just don't see us reaching a 'safer-zone' in time.. there is absolutely no evidence of mass awareness or willingness to modify behavior..
..realizing extremely large numbers of the world's inhabitants are going to be dying-off.. the 'hot-house' climate hell we'll be forced to survive in will allow for 'pockets' of a new type of adaptive-civilization to hold on for awhile, until temperatures rise to the point, where even restrictive-existence will likely no longer be possible..
.

.."How did it get so late so soon.. night before its afternoon... December here before its June... ...my goodness how time has flewn...  ... how did it get so late so soon?"

.

"..the 20 warmest years on record have been in the past 22 years,
and the top four in the past four years."

..we are hurtling toward Armageddon..

 ... In the Face of Extinction... a Moral Obligation

.