New Year ... bah humbug

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consumer-activism
Well, it was a happy New Year and we all had a right old time at the Mushrooms gig, despite a brief 30 minutes or so while the police inspected the premises. 

However, outside the world of music is quite another world that we shouldn't forget about. If we had a good year and had a job and some mobility, food on the table and all that - then we were in the minority.


Forget Copenhagen or if you believe in man made global warming or not. Even if it's not true, there's still enough pollution, deforestation and extinctions (100 species a day) to crash our eco-system in no time at all. 

What's more, they go largely unpunished. Know what a superfund site is? There's even a list and maps. Check it out. If you or I took a truck load of barrels with that amount of toxic waste in them and started dumping them into a river, we'd be locked up in a jiffy and made an example of. But those guys are all good. When you look at the delegations to meetings like Cophenhagen, you're looking at the offenders and enablers, not the saviours.

Almost half of all deforestation in the global south comes from the cattle industry. Beef and leather. Not to mention the emissions. So if we all go veggie, there's no need for leaders to blow more meetings. Here's 10 more good reasons. In fact, if we all went veggie, rode bikes to work and stopped buying so much junk and luxury goods, a lot of problems would go away and the death-race consumer system would collapse.

Also, war inc. plods on. The US military is the world's biggest, the world's biggest polluter, biggest domestic taxer and the world's biggest killer. The UK are not much better. And they are lying b*stards too. As the Guardian runs this story on Iran and has the balls to put a footnote on it stating there's no evidence, consider this on the last Iran incident story in The Times: It was made up.

So here's my New Year's message to you all, courtesy of Derrick Jensen:

Every morning when I awake I ask myself whether I should write or blow up a dam. I tell myself I should keep writing, though I'm not sure that's right. I've written books and done activism, but it is neither a lack of words nor activism that is killing salmon here in the Northwest. It's the dams. Anyone who knows anything about salmon knows the dams must go. Anyone who knows anything about politics knows the dams will stay.

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2 Comments

It is just plain scary how determined we are as a species to destroy ourselves, and to allow ourselves to be 'controlled' by a minority that had never shown any sign that it is acting in anyone's interest but their own.

As worrying is that the US is no longer the #1 polluter, but not because they reduced emissions, rather they were overtaken.

Hope the next 12 months treats you and yours well.

Hey Ross

Happy New Year.

Yes, it's a bit depressing. In his book Endgame, Jensen lists up his premises at the start and they are all dead on. He also mails civilization perfectly by describing a city as a place where there are more people than resources to sustain them and there for it has to be taken from somewhere else. This can then be done by stealing or by organising a large country and making people supply the cities out of national duty, demoting their own needs.

F*ck it, I feel a new post coming on.

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This page contains a single entry by Andy Best published on January 1, 2010 3:15 PM.

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