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bnappi -- Have you listened to Thom when he had Guy McPherson on his show?
http://transitionvoice.com/2013/08/19-ways-climate-change-is-now-feeding...
You write as if there was some certainty in the global warming process. It seems to me that everything about global energy capture has various degrees of uncertainty.
Oklahoma City and 9/11 were terrorist attacks resulting in thousands of deaths. With extraordinarily rare exception, the common defining factor of murderous terrorists is that they are male. These violent individuals come in all races and religions, with a full range of ideologies, but are overwhelmingly male. What's the solution?
Question: What if Roof's defense (team?) proves he was brainwashed by white supremicists? Wouldn't that make Roof a victim? Shouldn't he be "de-programmed" and treated, rather than jailed or executed?
White supremacists have been brainwashing young people for decades, no less than religious fundamentalists - Christian, Muslim, etc.
Who is the FIRST victim?
The entire country is the victum. Our failed citizenship is the culprit. Citizenship is the key, which is culture driven, and culture is everything. But as you witnessed the ascension of the MBA degree programs being offered at every university in the land, you witness the symtom of the transformation in culture, forsaking the fundamentals of citizenship for the almighty dollar........well its no wonder. Embodied in the typical themes intrinsic to the notion of MBA........there is one preemptive goal and one only, get the money, and never mind what you have to destroy to get it, anything goes as long as you make money at it..........all other values are not a consideration, not at all. So the liability of the community for failing to properly instill the beliefs of our culture, and keep track to make sure the individual is properly taught and cared for, that he in turn would feel compelled to transmit and act intelligently on behalf of his fellow citizens is dismissed. Our most recent history manifests a singular commitment to one thing only, greed, nothig else matters. And so a child, improperly raised and nurtured by freshly minted values grounded in the assumptions comensurate with the culture of greed.......well what can you expect. The child is not solely at fault.....his family is, his community is, his culture is.........in a world this new drift in what is known to be a derivative of western civilization is failed, a bankrupt investment in that which had already been previously beaten back to offer the hope of the American experiment, but in the end the wrong road was taken. That any one segment of the society is at fault is a ridiculous notion. The most recent manifestation of this debacle was percipitated by the community; real estate agents, private in house loan vendors, home apprasiers (commercial and private), development firms comprised of builders, archietects, lawyers, the inevitable money guy, institutional loan officers, bankers the list is long and exhaustive........the financial sector where the johnny come latelys in this enterprise, enthusiastically jumping in once they perceived the money to be made.........and now culminating in "high speed trading".........a joke to call it investment...........greed and greed only prevails now, and that will not last much longer in any meaningful way..........short of a radical return to some sort of intelligent cultural set of norms, based in whatever you like, religion, philosophy, science, reason, whatever..........we have torn the fabric that bound that culture to shreds, and nothing will restore its once fabulous strength and potential, with all its threads of enlightenment.............but then this was obvious even before Viet Nam, but Viet Nam was the catalyst, the starting gun, that sent the horde on a mad dash to this brutal end of what was once a truly fantastic possibility.........but it is no more
ekurpiel -- Who do you respectfully disagree with?
Also, Ireland would challenge your statement that no other country has shown that much hatred towards their fellow countrymen.
Thom Hartmann you will get no agrument from me. His actions were clearly those of a lone wolf terrorist. His targets were people he hated merely because of the color of their skin. This is what racist people do when they act out their feelings. This young terrorist was taught to hate black people, and he took the easy opportunity to murder his chosen innocent victims. He chose the victims, the location, and the manner of their deaths in hopes to causing terror among black Americans. That was his intention. He failed to terrorize us, but that was his intention. He is a murderer and a coward. I hope they place him in prison for nine consecutive life sentences so he will have ample time to consider the terrible and senseless actions he took with a pistol. I do not want him to be sentenced to death, that would be too easy. I rather see him live for the next 70 years in a dark, dank prison surrounded by people just like him.
I respectfully disagree that his motives are irrelevant. They are essential in differentiating between domestic and foreign terrorism. It is essential to understand that whenever anyone advocates hatred against another, race or ethnicity, those people need to be called out and recognized for what they are.....terrorists. Motivation is the key to perhaps understanding and possibly preventing further massacres such as this one in S.C. It is essential to understand that no other country has such hatred against their fellow countrymen and women. To understand that the lack of gun control in this country is also a factor. To understand that racism is rampant in this country and needs to stop immediately. But until the same prejudices are experienced by white people, I don't see any major changes.
When basic terms do not share a common meaning, rational discourse is
impossible.
First noticed this in right and left wing talk shows.
Each side immediately sets up their own vocabulary, and after that
their conclusions seems obvious.
Take away: do not waste your energy in dialog with the other side.
Rather spend your energy getting similar thinking people to the polls.
ct
Terrorism has become a handy catch-all for any acts--violent & non-violent--which challenge the official order. Persons & groups in solidarity with Palestinians are de facto terrorists according to our Zionist influenced press. Groups, like Hamas & Hezbollah, which are in actuality primarily self-defensive, are called terrorist.
The white supremacist movement is never termed terrorist, outside the Left media, because it is too close, in its core ideology, to the ruling paradigm of the times. The elite 1% in this country is lily-white, & fully intends to remain so.
Imagine the hysteria and outrage against the Obama administration had this product of American economics and education - the land of "exceptionalism" - been dark skin with an Arabic name!
Since the forcible defeat of the economics of slavery – known as the Civil War - the United States has ever since been living through an unspeakable cold war of economic indebtedness; proliferation of religion in the name of cheap labor; and in my lifetime has rejected education, science, and outsourced our jobs, sent millions to prison, and is a witness to war on our city streets – and destroyed our political discourse.
Victims’ families spoke out offering forgiveness. Children of Chicago lives are brutally cut short by gun violence. We offer forgiveness. Crazed souls terrorize innocent kindergarten children without provocation. We offer forgiveness. A congresswoman, federal judge, a young girl, and others are insensibly gunned down in Tucson. We offer forgiveness. Families are destroyed in a Denver movie theater. We offer forgiveness.
American terrorists – for that is what they are – perhaps are seeking to stir up another civil war. Shall we forgive them?
Why are those who forgive not gathered in the streets by the thousands upon thousands to say “No More.” Like lambs, Americans have given up their identity to assure for the common welfare and defense – and I am not referring to another nation.
Hey there Thom;
It would seem that the DOJ agrees with you for they have charged him with Domestic Terrorism as they should of.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/06/19/doj-investigating-charleston-...
It is about time they start charging these guys this way and then investigate and go after any group that they associated with as a Domestic Terrorism organization.
By not lowering the Confederate flag to half staff as it has done with the American flag, South Carolina is flying the Confederate flag higher than the American flag, a violation of flag-flying rules.
Lawn Jockey is the term for the thing Reagan was pictured with.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawn_jockey
Is St. Sen. Clementa Pinckney (victim of Dylann Storm Roof) somehow related to the South Carolina Pinckneys of the Revolutionary era?
To me, it really doesn't matter. I never really understood the "hate crime" thing other than it allows the Federal Government to get involved. The suspected perp has been caught. Give him his due process/trial and if he is found guilty,( word is he has confessed) put him away for life, hang him, sit him down in ol' sparky and flip the switch, stand him in front of a firing squad, or whatever the jury decides.
Whatever his motivations were, they are irrelavent at this point.
Thom,
While the title of your post is accurate, it begs the question. In a representative government, the government has to be DIRECTED by the people to take action. We still live in a country of climate deniers. So the bigger question is, how can so many people be so blind?
You start out highlighting California as a model for energy, including a recent recovery. But their energy crisis 15 years ago was pure politics. It had nothing to do with natural limits. If anything, the issue to dig into there is how they made the political change. On the climate front, California is a disaster. Their real problem is water. In 1971, a scientific panel made a presentation to the California government which stated that the mid 20th century in California was an anomaly. California had not seen this much water for the past 100,000 years, and should not establish water policy based on such an anomaly. The real question to California leaders should be: what’s their plan for California as a desert? Thus the question, can California deal with its water politics?
You then jump to the issue of the other states and federal government, and hit the nail on the head: the fossil fuel companies (plus electric utilities). BUT, the nail bends and doesn’t go in. Even with all the fossil fuel propaganda, the major question is why do Americans allow themselves to be so deluded? My reply is the same long reply I provided for your article on the control of the denial cult’s kool-aid. http://www.thomhartmann.com/blog/2015/06/stop-drinking-climate-denial-cult’s-kool-aid .
But, let’s look in the mirror and ask if climate activists aren’t also guilty of drinking the kool-aid. We are. The biggest one is MYOPIA - what I call Single Sentence Logic. You describe how Stanford researchers claim the U.S. can go 100% renewable by 2050. That would also create many jobs, and reduce health problems. It's a good goal and we should do it. But it’s only the tip of the iceberg and misleading not to see it that way.
People reading this discussion should be very ALERT and CONCERNED by what is NOT being said. Would this switch to all renewable energy in the U.S. solve the climate crisis? NO! Why? Because it is ALREADY TOO LATE TO SOLVE the crisis the way most people envision the word “solve”. There is already over 400ppm CO2 in the atmosphere. By 2050, it will be higher because more carbon will be burned getting to 2050. It will take hundreds of years for the earth to reabsorb enough CO2 to get back to traditional levels. During that time, global heating will continue to increase and humanity will pay the penalty. But it will not just be a climate penalty. We are rapidly crossing the tipping points for depletion of available materials: potable and irrigation water, soil nutrition, ocean fish. We have failed to comprehend the dynamics of jobs, and how automation has fundamentally changed work. We have grossly failed to comprehend the impact of the internet on confronting the wealth disparity. We have entirely failed to comprehend the impact of infrastructure destruction from the wars in the middle east and 20 million refugees pouring into western society.
In summary, being more precise, I agree that only government level action can effectively “address” the climate problem. But the push needs to come from the people. For that to happen, the thinking of people must change so they understand, CLEARLY and DIRECTLY, how coming changes can radically affect their lives, and that they cannot escape those changes. New discoveries discussed at A3society.org explain why traditional communication methods have failed to achieve these changes.
Fascist are on the Left! Big business , big bank, big labor, big government working together to rule ..... And that the Dems are promoting!
Hush, Mister Pope
. . . . .
So it’s not in his bailiwick?, the Pope’s, -
- to say that our Earth is on the ropes?
Yet the Rightwing’s political dopes
can spew Christianity in their tropes.
“YOU stay off OUR theme,
while WE invade YOUR regime.”
. . . . . . .
DHBranski's claim Obama "has maintained the agenda he discussed as a candidate" is patently dishonest nonsense, typical of what we will be hearing from Democratic Party operatives as the election campaign intensifies.
Obama the Orator ran in 2008 on three pivotal promises. These were: (1)-restoration of our constitutional rights; (2)-single-payer/public-option health care; (3)-enactment of the Employee Free Choice Act (which was the last and final hope of ever restoring Working Class power via the U.S. political system).
But as soon as Obama was elected -- not even inaugurated -- he shape-shifted into Barack the Betrayer, the hard-right Republican he has repeatedly proven himself to be.
Moreover -- and I am convinced this is the ultimate purpose assigned him by his Ruling Class masters -- he has thoroughly discredited not just the Democratic Party but the aspirations of all U.S. people of color.
The damage he has done -- done not accidentaly but with obvuious malice of forethought -- may take generations to undo.
And if it fosters -- as I fear it will -- the 2016 Republican landslide that will formally and forever redefine the United States as unapologertically fascist, the ruination wrought by Obama is literally forever because, whether by envronmental depredation, thermunuclear war or both, it will assure our species' extinction.
In this sense he has betrayed not just his obvious constituency. Inasmuch as he is the de facto emperor of the world, therefore responsible for establishing and perpetuating the four freedoms articulated by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Freedoms ), Obama has literally betrayed all humanity.
One of the most pathetically patronizing and condescending aspects of the TPP seems to model how the American public is now being treated: The bill is a secret, crafted by those who would benefit, without being open to review or debate. The talking heads tell us in generalizations how great it will be (remember Bill Clinton and NAFTA?) while those that have found scraps of the bill in print point to corporate tribunals, in their pursuit of profits, overriding sovereign governments. Who's right? I have my suspicions, but why can't I read it for myself?
And why is there no outcry in the media about the blatant attempt to kidnap our legislative proceses?
How did Obama betray anyone? He never promised rainbows and unicorns. and within the obvious limitations of dealing with the two right wings in Congress, Obama has maintained the agenda he discussed as a candidate.
This generation is stuck because we can't answer this: Who are The People, and what do they want? Pols and media recognize only the consumer and campaign donor class, but this is a segment of the population that has been shrinking for years. The poor and middle class, workers and the jobless, are deeply divided, pitted against each other. The "masses" have been divided and subdivided by class and race. The rich are now doing to the middle class what the middle class already did to the poor, and there's nothing we can do about it.
Maybe Thom Hartmann listened too much to MSNBC? To explain: Usually, the VP goes on to run for president, and VP Joe Biden will be launching his campaign later in summer. (Google it.) Any Dem pol can then challenge him for the nomination, and the primaries will determine which one will run for president in 2016. MSNBC (and other lib media) went all out to disappear Biden and sell Clinton -- pro-war, anti-poor, pro-corporate empowerment, anti-New Deal Clinton. In one segment, they will rail against the TPP, and in the next, try to sell Clinton. They know that before she launched her pre-campaign spoeaking tour, Clinton was working at promoting the TPP.
Democrats remain true to their history of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, and the 2014 election defeat was a preview of 2016. America has a poverty crisis. Dems in Congress responded by deeply slashing food stamps to the elderly poor, the disabled and the working poor. Reportedly, they are either considering, or have already agreed to, resume dismantling Social Security, a job begun by Bill Clinton. Democrats cannot win elections with the votes of middle class Dems alone.
U.S. mass media is what it is -- a privatized version of Josef Goebbels' Nazi German Ministry of Propaganda -- because it is owned by the same people who own the two major political parties and the federal, state and local government.
Whether labeled Ruling Class or One Percent, this cabal of capitalist aristocrats has the same absolute power formerly possessed by Adolf Hitler. They are the tyrants who not only rule us but shape our consciousness by their ever-more-total control of information.
Nor is there any hope for improvement. The triumphant imperial trade coalition -- which defied the will of the U.S. electorate, further slashed wages, sent still more jobs abroad and gleefully flung millions more U.S. workers into inescapable poverty -- did everything in its power to serve the One Percent by blatantly destroying the last remnants of the American experiment in representative democracy and the so-called "American Dream."
The One Percent's long-term, global goal is replacing the policy-making functions of local, state and national governments with zero-tolerance edicts handed down by dictatorially empowered boards of corporate managers. Under this system, the only purpose of traditional "government" is to maintain the goon squads of police and soldiers essential to enforce the corporate decrees.
For a prophetic view of existence beneath the boots of the resultant global imperium, look at the wretched conditions that prevailed in the coal towns of Appalachia, where the mine owners also owned everything else -- houses, stores, schools, clinics -- and every person as well.
As part of its march toward the global corporate imperium, the One Percent's more immediate goal is the reduction of the United States to fascist oligarchy -- actually a uniquely USian form of Nazism in which the corporate cabal has replaced the individual despot, with the mandatory ideology a combination of (implicitly white) exceptionalism, Christian intolerance and Ayn Rand socioeconomic savagery. And -- yes -- exceptionalism with its implication of divine-right rule is indeed the 21st Century version of the Nazis' concept of ubermenschen or Master Race.
IDespite the implicit whiteness of exceptionalism, it is no accident the present U.S. figurehead is Barack the Betrayer, who makes no secret of being the tyrannical cabal's most cravenly obedient servant thus far. Indeed it is the Betrayer who personifies the One Percent's strategy and tactics. He is not just the most malicious liar ever to occupy the presidency, but in truth a hard-Right Republican who used his membership in the Democratic Party and his own skin color as false flags to scam the U.S. electorate into imagining he might provide desperately sought relief from the succession of One Percent vassals who have lorded it over us since the coup of 22 November 1963.
The One Percenters need the U.S. not for its (now-surplus) workforce or its (irremediably poisoned) agricultural lands, but rather for the goon-squad function of its war machine.
Mass media's function in this unprecedented deceprion was merely to provide its imprimatur, thereby giving whichever Big Lie whatever appearance of truth the One Percent demanded.
As Goebbels repeatedly affirmed to Hitler, taking control of policy is only half the victory essential to total dictatorship. Full victory is achieved only when policy and the public mind are each controled with identical absolutism -- precisely what happened in Germany after 1933, precisely what has happened here in the United States in the aftermath of 22 November 1963, the subsequent decade of political murders. and the Reichstag Firer of 9/11 -- a slow-motion coup that gathers speed and momentum as it approaches its terminal events.
Which, by the way, explains the death-blow to representative democracy dealt by today's anti-worker trade vote. The national mobilization against fast-track and the Trans-Pacific Partnership made it clear a vast majority of the voters -- I have seen figures ranging from 55 percent to 80 percent -- oppose so-called "free trade." But, exactly as I predicted would happen, Congress dropped any and all pretence of representing anyone but the One Percenters, and even here in Moron Nation, such a brutal sklap-in-the-face cannot be portrayed as anything other than what it was.
This means the era of charade democracy is over, and the era of unapologetic tyranny is upon us.
But I wonder how U.S. mass media -- the world's first fully privatized government propaganda machine -- will play the story. Will they try to explain it as yet another manifesttion of how 9/11 "changed everything"? Or will they merely try to flush it down the Orwell hole?
Thom says "if the media talked about real issues, no one would vote Republican." Hell, I bet they would still rack up a couple hundred votes from wealthy Fascists.
I totally agree with Thom. We all need to expose the corp media for the billionaire tool/weapon it has become. Truth is not a matter of opinion, but when profit is deemed more important than truth, opinion solely for the purpose of distraction becomes the multi billion dollar goal, and we no longer have a free press, or a free country.
Corp media right wing hate speech killed those fine citizens in Charleston. The shooter simply carried out the mission he was programmed to do. The cops killing blacks are products of the same right wing hate machine. Media inspired terrorism!
The republicans only use religious figures to try and control womens health care, and justify their bigotry.