Discovery of fire. Development of language. Rise of civilizations. Acceleration of industrialization. Proliferation of the Internet. Invention of memes. The newest genus on our planet, commonly known as Gen Z, embodies the pinnacle of human evolution, according to a new study published in Nature.
I chose this title for two reasons: one simple, the other more complex. The basic facts state that 7 adults were killed during the Sandy Hook atrocity; that 6 of those adults were women, and 20 children, all between the ages of 6 and 7; and also the shooter himself, Adam Lanza, the only adult male on the Sandy Hook death list.
It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.
— Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, 2005
I’m watching the Pacific heave up a king tide in the tiny town of Waldport on the Oregon Coast. Houses right above the beach line are now soaked, their back and front yards littered with driftwood, logs and tree stumps.
The date 11 November is well known and commemorated in many parts of the world because it marks the Armistice ending World War I – ‘the Great War’ – in 1918.
In the evocative words used by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., an atheist humanist, in his novel Breakfast of Champions, the day is remembered thus:
Will Trump go to war with the Iranians or the homeless? Or both?
Trump is a coward. The nation of Iran has the means and the will to fight. Do you recall the will displayed by Iranians when repelling foreign invaders when Iraq attempted to invade Iran as a de facto US proxy force? Conversely, the homeless do not possess any defence against assault by the agents of the US police state.
The exile of prisoners to a distant place, where they can ‘pay their debt to society,’ make themselves useful, and not contaminate others with their ideas or their criminal acts, is a practice as old as civilization itself. The rulers of ancient Rome and Greece sent their dissidents off to distant colonies. Socrates chose death over the torment of exile from Athens. The poet Ovid was exiled to a fetid port on the Black Sea.”
— Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History, 2003
I have previously written a summary of the interrelated psychological, sociological, political-economic, military, nuclear, ecological and climate threats to human survival on Earth which threaten human extinction by 2026.
“the worst
thing that ever happened
to
the world
was
the white man coming across gun powder.
–– the end of the world | the beginning of white supremacy”
― Nayyirah Waheed, Salt
