Statism

On 15th October 2002, between 9 pm and 10 pm, five Dalits — Dayachand, Virender, Totaram, Raju and Kailash — were lynched in Duleena village, Jajjar district, Haryana, by a frenzied mob for the “speculated crime” of cow-slaughter, while the police and administrative officials – DSP, SHO Sadar, Jajjar, and three executive magistrates: the City Magistrate, BDO, Naib Tehsildar – stood by and watched.1 These Dalits, who were leather traders and were arrested on t

Ed Snowden recently gave fellow NSA whistleblower James Bamford an “extended cut” interview in Moscow.1 While Snowden offered up a few morsels of headline-worthy information, like how he purposefully left forensic artifacts for investigators or details on the NSA’s automated cyber-attack system called MonsterMind, Bamford’s piece ends with Snowden describing what he views as the answer to the NSA’s global surveillance program:

When is a troll not a troll?
The word “troll” originated in Scandinavian folklore as a synonym for a demon. Today the word is more commonly understood to mean someone who maliciously interferes with discussions in open internet communications – such as in discussion groups and forums – through being abusive to others in the group, or by knowingly contributing misleading or distracting information.

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

This is the continuation of an interview (see Part 1) with filmmaker Scott Noble based on his documentary series Counter-Intelligence. Noble’s films can be viewed for free online at metanoia-films.org.
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It is often said that the invention of terrible weapons of destruction will put an end to war. That is an error. As the means of extermination are improved, the means of reducing men who hold the state conception of life to submission can be improved to correspond.
– Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You (1849)

 Let’s Be Honest
Despite the seeming popularity of environmental and social justice work in the modern world, we’re not winning. We’re losing. In fact, we’re losing really badly.1

Why is that?

One day while Alice is winding up a ball of wool that Kitty persists in undoing, she gets it into her head that there must be a world behind the looking glass (mirror) where everything is backward. Suddenly, she finds herself up on the mantelpiece staring into the looking glass. Then she walks through to the reality on the other side to find a world that is set up like a chessboard and chess pieces are animated human-like creatures. The reflected reality is the opposite of real reality. Time goes backwards.

Preamble

The two countries I know best are India and the US. I spent the first 22 years of my life in the former, and the following 24 in the latter, where I continue to live. Recently I returned home, after spending three months in India. The combination of what I saw there in plain view, and what I see here in America, may shed some light on why we have arrived at the climate impasse.
Soon I’ll get to what is climate impasse, but first, here is what got me motivated to write this piece, before even I could recover from the jet lag.