and not just about our food systems.
With our food systems on the verge of collapse, it’s the plutocrats v life on Earth
"Climate breakdown and crop losses threaten our survival, but the ultra-rich find ever more creative ways to maintain the status quo"
(Revelation 6:6
Then I heard what sounded like a voice among the four living creatures, saying, “Two pounds of wheat for a day’s wages, and six pounds of barley for a day’s wages, and do not damage the oil and the wine!”)
"According to Google’s news search, the media has run more than 10,000 stories this year about Phillip Schofield, the British television presenter who resigned over an affair with a younger colleague. Google also records a global total of five news stories about a scientific paper published last week, showing that the chances of simultaneous crop losses in the world’s major growing regions, caused by climate breakdown, appear to have been dangerously underestimated.
(As was the Russians ability to withstand sanctions
and supply materials for its war efforts.
As is the coming banking crisis...just etc etc etc ad infinitum)
"In mediaworld, a place that should never be confused with the real world, celebrity gossip is thousands of times more important than existential risk."
"We rely for our subsistence on global smoothing: if there’s a bad harvest in one region, it’s likely to be counteracted by good harvests elsewhere. Even small crop losses occurring simultaneously present what the paper calls “systemic risk”.
"For many years, the number of hungry people fell. But in 2015 the trend turned and has been curving upwards since. This is not because of a lack of food. The most likely explanation is that the global food system has lost its resilience. When complex systems lose resilience, instead of damping the shocks that hit them, they tend to amplify them. The shocks amplified across the system so far have landed most heavily on poor nations that depend on imports, causing local price spikes even when global food prices were low."
(See the upcoming presentation about why Russia is targeting Ukrainian grain ports/storage and logistics facilities I did recently...)
"Other papers have been published with similar themes, showing, for example, the impacts of the rising frequency of “flash droughts” and concurrent heatwaves in grain-producing regions, and how global heating hits food security. All have been largely or entirely ignored by the media."
(Now you know why your hearing about submarines in the north Atlantic imploding and Hunter Biden and and and...its all a diversion to keep your mind/eyes/ears away from the truely important things that are going on in this world right now.)
We face an epochal, unthinkable prospect: of perhaps the two greatest existential threats – environmental breakdown and food system failure – converging, as one triggers the other.
(Those are only two of the "confluence of calamities" the leader of the IMF said a while back about all the crises we face.)
"There are plenty of signs, some of which I’ve tried to explain in the Guardian and, with a sense of rising urgency, in a presentation to parliament, suggesting that the global food system may not be far from its tipping point, for structural reasons similar to those that tanked the financial sector in 2008. As a system approaches a critical threshold, it’s impossible to say which external shock could push it over.
(Russia attacking Ukraiian Black Sea/Danube river ports for grain exports anybody? This is structural in nature, if the war ended right this second it would take years to repair. What do you really think is going to happen to global food prices? Historically when people cant feed their kids or themselves? Social unrest follows.)
"Once a system has become fragile, and its resilience is not restored, it’s not a matter of if and how, but when."
"So why isn’t this all over the front pages? Why, when governments know we’re facing existential risk, do they fail to act?...Why does everything else seem more important?"
"The underlying problem isn’t hard to grasp: governments have failed to break what the economist Thomas Piketty calls the patrimonial spiral of wealth accumulation. As a result, the rich have become ever richer, a process that seems to be accelerating.
(Revelation 6:6
Then I heard what sounded like a voice among the four living creatures, saying, “Two pounds of wheat for a day’s wages, and six pounds of barley for a day’s wages, and do not damage the oil and the wine!”
It's happening right in front of your faces in our lifetimes. Right now that very prophecy in the book of Revelation is being fulfilled. There's another book written 2000 years ago that says this was going to happen? Where is it? As they say in Missouri, "Show me.")
"In 2021, for example, the ultra-rich captured almost two-thirds of all the world’s new wealth. Their share of national income in the UK has almost doubled since 1980, while in the US it’s higher than it was in 1820."
"The richer a fraction of society becomes, the greater its political power, and the more extreme the demands it makes. The problem is summarised in one sentence in the resignation letter of the UK environment minister Zac Goldsmith: instead of attending a crucial environment summit, Rishi Sunak went to Rupert Murdoch’s summer party. We cannot work together to solve our common problems when great power is in the hands of so few."
(What they dont realize is they are fighting to preserve a system that is doomed to collapse no matter what they do...The Ultra rich that is. No top heavy system has ever self-perpetuated forever and now is absolutely no different, they always always always implode on them selves and we are witnessing the beginnings of that implosion right now.)
"What the ultra-rich want is to sustain and extend the economic system that put them where they are. The more they have to lose, the more creative their strategies become. As well as the traditional approach of buying media outlets and pouring money into the political parties that favour them, they devise new ways of protecting their interests."
"Corporations and oligarchs with massive fortunes can hire as many junktanks (so-called thinktanks), troll farms, marketing gurus, psychologists and micro-targeters as they need to devise justifications and to demonise, demoralise, abuse and threaten people trying to sustain a habitable planet. The junktanks devise new laws to stifle protest, implemented by politicians funded by the same plutocratic class."
(100% TRUTH!)
"It could scarcely be more screwed up. The effort to protect Earth systems and the human systems that depend on them is led by people working at the margins with tiny resources, while the richest and most powerful use every means at their disposal to stop them.
(It's not just about "The effort to protect Earth systems and the human systems that depend on them..."but a whole host of other things as well. See above about Russia war in Ukraine, Banks etc...)
"Can you imagine, in decades to come, trying to explain this to your children?"
Looking back on previous human calamities, all of which will be dwarfed by this, you find yourself repeatedly asking “why didn’t they … ?”
The answer is power:
(Lust
Epithumeo
ep-ee-thoo-meh'-o
Verb
NAS Word Usage - Total: 16
to turn upon a thing
to have a desire for,
long for,
to desire
to lust after,
covet
of those who seek things forbidden
It aint always about sex people.)
the power of a few to countermand the interests of humanity.
The struggle to avert systemic failure is the struggle between democracy and plutocracy. It always has been, but the stakes are now higher than ever.
Amen to that...
Journey well my friends....
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