image by Layers on Pixabay (please check out the rest of her extraordinary and anonymous work at the same link)
I’m in the process of writing an essay, and a song, about how, when it hurts too much, we reach the point we have to stop reading, stop watching, and even stop caring ‘too much’ about the endless atrocities happening everywhere in this world, and the suffering they cause.
I keep linking to some of the news and articles about this, but I can no longer bear to read them, or internalize them, in full. An example is Cara Marianna’s latest article about how Israel’s US-funded and US-armed genocidal savagery has now expanded beyond Gaza and to other countries. This article includes first-hand accounts of Israel’s overt, deranged, unimaginable brutality in the West Bank.
I couldn’t finish reading it. Half-way through I jumped to the end, to read this:
Let us keep on bearing witness together. Palestinians I know tell me how much this means to them. But, however important, bearing witness is the first and least of what you, I, we are called up on to do. This struggle is our struggle. This fight is our fight, too.
And of course it is. I will keep ‘bearing witness’ by chronicling it in my monthly links. But now I have to limit my witnessing, and often turn away. It is too overwhelming, too ghastly to keep observing, too hard to face it directly, and to cope with the helplessness and hopelessness of knowing it cannot be stopped. Not by me, or us, or any political or military or economic process.
This is who we are, now, as collapse deepens.
COLLAPSE WATCH
back in record territory as El Niño starts to gather steam. Chart from Climate Reanalyzer.
CITY=CAFO: Adrian Lambert makes the compelling case that cities are Confined Animal Feedlot Operations, for human animals, with all the staggering cruelty, hidden suffering, toxicity and utter un-sustainability of any other CAFO, and not just metaphorically.
When “Net Worth” goes negative: Steven Newbury explains how the ‘wealth siphon’ of untrammelled capitalism relentlessly and massively shifts wealth from the poor to the rich, until the whole system collapses.
Northern oil & gas exploration is accelerating climate collapse: Disturbing the fragile arctic peatlands triples the amount of methane release from those lands.
You can’t ‘reform’ oligarchs’ behaviour: All the things we ‘need to do’ to restore democracy and a functional economy simply cannot be done. What we’re seeing are the convulsions of political systems in the first stages of collapse.
The ‘roadmap’ of roads that can’t be taken: In the same vein, Bill Rees summarizes the UN’s ‘roadmap’ to eradicating global poverty, and explains why its 23 key objectives are unachievable, as we are locked into our present course towards inevitable collapse.
Sliding into permanent economic decline: Tim Morgan again summarizes our current economic predicament and what global economic collapse will likely look look like.
The Screwworm Fly lesson: An important explanation from Elisabeth Robson about what holds a collapsing system together, for a while, using the example of how a small, dedicated international group of scientists delayed the infestation of deadly screwworms into US cattle for decades:
We tend to imagine civilization as a collection of things, when in reality, it is a collection of ongoing processes, and most of those processes are about maintaining the things we build. This has important implications for those of us who think seriously about ecological overshoot and the future of industrial society.
When I read about collapse, most of the discussion focuses on the obvious losses to come: electricity, transportation, food production, or communication. Those will certainly matter. Equally significant will be the gradual disappearance of thousands of specialized maintenance systems that most people never knew existed. We will not simply lose conveniences; we’ll lose the continuous interventions that currently stabilize infrastructure, suppress natural processes that threaten that infrastructure (water, dandelions, screwworms, what-have-you), contain pollutants, preserve knowledge, and compensate for the ecological consequences of previous generations of industrial development.
The consequences will unfold slowly and unevenly.
LIVING BETTER
Banksy’s latest pop-up installation in London is a life-size sculpture of a man whose face is blinded by the flag he’s carrying, about to step unknowingly off the edge of a cliff. Photo by Vincent Ni for NPR.
Six things to know about heat illness: Excellent deep dive from the YLE crew into the symptoms, precautions and treatments for various types of heat-caused illnesses.
A contemplation on ambition, expectation, and the self: Lovely nuanced video from Rebecca Watson on the folly of thinking your attitudes and expectations have anything to do with what you will actually do and achieve.
POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL
painting on the cover of the July 2026 Harper’s magazine, under the caption Twilight’s Last Gleaming: An Exhausted America Turns 250; this extraordinary painting is by Steve Brodner, who explains step by step how he made it.
The Problem of Platner: Yet another case of leftists fighting leftists: Patrick Lawrence calls it a political assassination. Curiously, the leftists defending the women alleging Graham Platner’s misbehaviour are almost all women: Jessica Valenti, Michelle Goldberg, Rebecca Watson, Lyz Lenz, and Briahna Joy Gray for example. I’m not quite sure what the truth is, but Platner’s rabidly enthusiastic mercenary youth was always a red flag, and I gave up believing in heroes and learned to listen to women long ago.
Imperialism, Militarism & Fascism: Short takes:
- Trump tries again to block voting by mail and tamper with voter rolls
- Hegseth again threatens to stop US military support for Europe if they don’t support his wars
- More performative Trump/Vance ‘scoldings’ of Israel, while they continue to support the genocide
- Mamdani shows he has some political clout, at least for now (yes I still read Aaron Maté despite his support for leftist Epstein Class members like Noam Chomsky)
- US Supreme Court Roundup: Blocking asylum seekers at the border is legal; Expelling 350,000 temporary refugees from “shithole” countries like Haiti without a hearing is legal; requiring gun-owners to get permission to bring their guns onto others’ private property is illegal; charging Bayer Monsanto for deaths and diseases caused by Roundup is illegal; restricting how much money political parties can give candidates is illegal; presidents firing any government and ‘independent’ regulatory agency employees they don’t like without cause is legal; notice a trend here?
- But they did at least temporarily block his bid to end “birthright citizenship”
- Texas protesters at ICE facility get decades-long prison sentences, and the media are mostly not reporting it
- Israel ramps up West Bank “ethnic cleansing” (see also Cara Marianna’s post linked at top of this post)
- In her new book, courageous UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese talks about Gaza, media silence about Israel’s atrocities, and the massive US ‘sanctioning’ campaign to silence her
- Anti-immigrant protests turn violent in South Africa
- I have nothing to say about Trump’s attempt to rig the World Cup
- US ambassador invites convicted Canadian ‘truck convoy’ blockade organizer who shut down Ottawa for weeks to July 4 party
- In a backfired publicity stunt, right-wing Brexit leader Nigel Farage, facing charges of corruption and tax evasion, resigned his seat and said he would run for re-election in a by-election. But the other parties are sitting it out, leaving his only declared opposition the garbage-can avatar of a leading British comedian (you can’t make this shit up)
Propaganda, Censorship, Misinformation and Disinformation: Short takes:
- Attacks on synagogues in Canada and elsewhere now believed to be the work of “gun-for-hire” criminals paid for with cryptocurrency online by a “foreign entity”, possibly as false-flag operations by Israel to blame them on “anti-semitism”
- The Silicon Valley tech bros, outcompeted by vastly superior Chinese technology and innovation at much lower cost, are fanning anti-Chinese sentiment by inventing Chinese “threats”
- “Today in Dystopia” Caitlin Johnstone lists some of the massive dis- and misinformation, and surveillance campaigns underway worldwide to keep us all off balance
Corpocracy, Enshittification, and Unregulated Capitalism: Short takes:
- Sarah Wynn-Williams wrote a bestselling memoir Careless People, which “details the criminality she witnessed during her years as the head of Facebook’s international relations team.” As Cory explains, Zuckerberg didn’t like it, of course, and has pulled out all the stops to ban the book and stop her speaking about it, with truly absurd results, such as the irony of the British Book Awards being legally forced to ‘blur’ the image of her book when she received their Freedom to Publish award!
- The Organized Money team interview Julia Angwin about her op-ed, “Meta Is Dying. It’s About Time,” about how Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp, Meta’s only successes among a host of colossally expensive failures, are on their last legs.
- Cory on the importance of “digital sovereignty” to avoid the clutches of US tech oligopolies, but why we don’t need it when it comes to AI
- Anil Dash on how ‘open source’ and the ‘open web’ are dying a slow death by a thousand cuts
- A new US act in Congress would permanently remove just about all remaining regulation of factory farming (CAFO) and commercial animal cruelty; Big Meat has gone all in on their bid for institutionalized, unregulated animal abuse and the unlimited toxification of the US food supply for profit
- As overheated prices finally fall, Canadian governments are giving new multi-billion-dollar subsidies and bailouts to the corrupt private ‘development’ industry to bribe them to keep building
Administrative Mismanagement & Incompetence: Short takes:
- The consequences of Trump’s destroying a century’s mutual trust with Canada (thanks to Bill Rees for the link); sadly Carney has quickly destroyed all his own political capital by supporting massive tar sands development and supporting Trump’s war on Iran, and now has fallen under the sway of the US tech ‘broligarchs’
- As Europe militarizes, Putin warns
- The morons in the Trump administration keep blowing opportunities for detente and collaboration with the Chinese government, opting instead for sermonizing and confrontation
Power Abuse (the Patriciate/Epstein Class/Misogyny): Short takes:
- Great essay on the pervasive scourge of misogyny, by Lyz Lenz
- Cory explains how the Epstein Class recruits new members: By charging for membership!
- Barry Ferns explains the psychology that allows Trump, Farage and other right-wingers to turn all attacks on them to their advantage
- Rebecca Watson on Peter Thiel’s “secret society”, the Dialog Club, of 222 invitation-only members; no, sorry, no baby sacrifices or lizard people, just obscenely rich people doing favours for each other
- From the Dutch collective MacGuffin, a profile of the Epstein Class and their power, along with a warning about how they are dealing with collapse: “We are living through the most dangerous phase of modernity, when those in power will do anything they can to preserve an increasingly fragile status quo. It is especially worrying when the ultra-rich are so divorced from reality, so cocooned and entombed in their wealth that they barely perceive the violence they commit against the world as such.” (Thanks to Jan Bloxham for the link)
Department of Health Prevention: Short takes:
- The one thing that’s so dangerous it’s only legal in two countries (spoiler — it’s direct-to-consumer marketing of prescription medicines, in the US and NZ)
- Rebecca Watson provides another nuanced take, this time on whether the recent US ‘Supreme’ Court decision indemnifying Bayer Monsanto from lawsuits related to Roundup, is actually not an entirely unreasonable decision
FUN AND INSPIRATION
lots of writers and artists are having fun (“blame it on ALGAE-BTQ+ people, or ALGAE-Zeera”) with Trump’s hissy fits over the ghastly green algae that appeared on the capitol’s reflecting pool right after he gave a no-bid $20M contract to his crony to ‘repaint’ it; these spoofing images via Lyz Lenz.
Lessons from a gym in France: Lyle Fass explains what a modest gym he visited in his travels taught him about the problems with our modern cult of self-obsession.
Why don’t we just call it what the locals call it? Fun riff by Hank Green on how we change and mispronounce other countries’ place names.
Mr Jevons would be proud: Also from Hank, an explanation of what the Jevons Paradox is, and is not. And why it’s important. And why it isn’t a paradox, just a consequence of natural human behaviour.
Fun with Bruno Mars: A live performance of his and Lady Gaga’s deserved smash hit Die With a Smile (much better than their weird cowboy music video). And his Carpool Karaoke with James Corden, perhaps the funniest of the genre ever. As good as the one with Michelle Obama.
The world needs more scary moms: Lyz Lenz writes about the late famed ‘mommy blogger’ Jill Smokler and her (and Lyz’s) “legacy of honesty and bravery” about motherhood.
Lessons from Downton Abbey: Barry Ferns explains why believing the system is fair makes you happier and more obedient, even when it actually isn’t fair at all.
The problem with social media: There is a global movement, supported across the political spectrum, to limit or ban under-18 access to and use of social media. Tim Requarth argues that social media addiction is a symptom of what’s ailing our young people, not its cause.
Space is not cold: 5 space misconceptions most people still believe.
THOUGHTS OF THE MONTH
my own chart, based on latest 2024 data from Statistics Canada, via The Tyee; as with other statistics on inequality, the divergence is growing rapidly; the data for “Vancouver North Centre” principally reflects the Downtown East Side, Vancouver’s poorest community with disproportionate numbers of homeless and addicted residents
From Cory Doctorow, on the very real and important historical difference between ‘left’ and ‘right’:
I collect definitions of “right” and “left.” There’s Corey Robin’s definition from The Reactionary Mind, that conservatism is the belief that some people were born to rule, and others to be ruled over, and that any attempt to elevate the latter group to positions of power (through civil rights movements, affirmative action, etc) will result in dire misrule and disaster… Another important definition is Wilhoit’s Law: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
The definition I turn to most often comes from science fiction writer Steven Brust, who once told me: “Left and right have had the same meaning since the French Revolution. If you want to know if someone is on the left or the right, ask them, ‘What is more important: human rights or property rights?’ If they say ‘Property rights are a human right,’ then they are on the right.
From Caitlin Johnstone, on US congress’ approval of merging the military and technology infrastructure of Israel into the US’:
If you’re already living together, you might as well get married.
From Blythe Baird, spoken word poems:
Theories About the Universe
I am trying to see things in perspective.
My dog wants a bite of my peanut butter
chocolate chip bagel. I know she cannot
have this, because chocolate makes dogs
very sick. My dog does not understand this.
She pouts and wraps herself around my leg
like a scarf and purrs and tries to convince me
to give her just a tiny bit. When I do not give in,
she eventually gives up and lays in the corner,
under the piano, drooping and sad. I hope the
universe has my best interest in mind like I have
my dogs. When I want something with my whole
being, and the universe withholds it from me,
I hope the universe thinks to herself: “Silly girl.
She thinks this is what she wants, but she
does not understand how it will hurt.”
From Marie Howe, New York Poet Laureate, from her 2025 Pulitzer Prize winning collection What The Earth Seemed To Say:
Hurry
We stop at the dry cleaners and the grocery store
and the gas station and the green market and
Hurry up honey, I say, hurry,
as she runs along two or three steps behind me
her blue jacket unzipped and her socks rolled down.
Where do I want her to hurry to? To her grave?
To mine? Where one day she might stand all grown?
Today, when all the errands are finally done, I say to her,
Honey I’m sorry I keep saying Hurry —
you walk ahead of me. You be the mother.
And, Hurry up, she says, over her shoulder, looking
back at me, laughing. Hurry up now darling, she says,
hurry, hurry, taking the house keys from my hands.
