Pelshval

Antropologiske betraktninger om pelshvaldrift

Category: Planet Earth (Page 1 of 4)

Coincidences

15.11.2025 /

I am no angel, believe me. Every year I commute, as it were, across Europe, not once, but twice: Four trips in all, by plane. Moreover, I have four computers, bought within the last six years, and three mobile phones, the most recent of which I bought just last week. So my carbon footprint is no better than that of my compatriots, which is worse than that of citizens in any other European country.

Why am I confessing my sins to you? I am not a Catholic and you are probably not a priest. The answer is simple: I know that I am no better than most. We Norwegians buy too many clothes, too many new cars and we refurbish our houses too often. However we look at it, most of us Norwegians throw away too much and buy far too much. Period.

Perhaps you did not know this, but “Nordic countries have among the highest consumption-based CO2 emissions in the world, worse than the rest of Europe…. Gains in domestic renewable energy are wiped out by consumption-based emissions”.

My country is virtually self-sufficient in terms of clean electricity, yet … Well, to be brief, I suggest you listen to this zoom presentation by Jason Hickel.

In much of Europe, the indigenous population is plummeting because young people cannot afford to buy a flat where they can procreate and rear children. So the European countries need to import desperate immigrants who, incidentally, are willing to work for next to nothing. Even in Norway, that is increasingly the case. Why? Why are the prices of ordinary flats prohibitive for hard-working young couples?

Is it a coincidence that while the price of a place to live is exorbitant, outdoor temperatures are starting to kill us? “A searing heatwave that swept across parts of Europe in late June 2025 has been linked to nearly 2,300 excess deaths, …”

The heat wave referred to by the journalist lasted only “ten days”. But for much of Europe, the heat continued to kill people for four months. The murderous temperatures are no longer a “heat wave”; they are the new “normal”.

I ask again: Is it a coincidence that more and more young people have nowhere to live, that much of this continent is becoming uninhabitable from June to September, while deliberate total destruction (AKA war) is being perpetrated all over the planet. Most ongoing wars could have been avoided! I put to you that the reason they are not avoided is that for a handful of powerful people with seriously warped mindsets, war – per se – is a source of enrichment and/or power and therefore a blessing.

Even Forbes admits that

[r]ecent research has found that global militaries are responsible for nearly 5.5% of total global greenhouse gas emissions—a staggering figure that puts military emissions on par with the global cement industry. If it were a country, it would be the fourth biggest emitter in the world.

But the real cost is much greater, cf. Covering Climate Now

because a loophole the US inserted into the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 exempts all militaries from disclosing their emissions – meaning the world’s total emissions are significantly higher than officially recognized.

Now why would the US insert such a loophole, I wonder? Is it a coincidence?

Distrust

05.11.2025 /

I was taught in primary school – we all were – to adore my country, its flag, its king and its government, which represented us and acted on our behalf.

As we grew older, we could not fail to notice that our government often made what we considered mistakes, though we assumed it always did its best. After all, nobody’s perfect.

In high school, more and more of us started taking sides, right wing or left wing. Of course you also had the smug set, the people who maintained they followed a middle course.

We voted, defended the party we voted for, and denigrated the other parties. We read the paper we subscribed to and/or listened to our favourite news channels. Those were the days of innocence! Governments came and governments went; left side, right side (or, as they are now called, “centre left” and “centre right”). We would grumble when our side lost as though the whole business of elections was a sports event, and between elections we would discuss the performance of prominent politicians when they appeared on television.

Did we really think that the lies that led to the war on Iraq were a one off? Yes, I’m afraid we did. As for the lies that led to our war on Libya – well, they were never really exposed, were they. At least they were not loudly exposed, not in the mainstream press.

The outrageous persecution of Julian Assange was a wake-up call for quite a few of us, not least since even the Guardian joined the witch hunt.

For some time now, I have realised that we need to go back and re-assess a great deal of post-WWII history. What really happened when Yugoslavia was dismantled, for instance, and why? What they told us was definitely not true. What is? David Gibbs has spent years studying the matter.: I find his book very unsettling and interesting.: First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia. I also enjoyed the documentary The Weight of Change, which challenges the official record.

Now, many of us “Westerners” – even many of Charlie Kirk’s people – have understood that we have been lied to about Gaza. Actually, we have been lied to for decades about Israel and its treatment of the Palestinian refugees after the Nakba (many of whom settled in Gaza) and about its gradual but methodical ethnic cleansing of the occupied West Bank.

I wonder how Trump voters of median and lower income will feel in the face of the unassailable fact that living conditions will remain as bad or worse under his rule as under Biden. Trump duped his voters.

They all do, of course. It’s a show, after all.

Someone shouted at me the other day during a discussion: “I don’t want to distrust everybody!” No, I certainly understand that.

And it’s not that everybody merits distrust. It’s not the players that need to be replaced, but the rules of the game. That’s what Zohran Mamdani seems to have understood. Who knows, maybe he will prove to be the spark that sets fire to the refuse left by years of mismanagement in Europe, as well as in the USA. If he can inspire the rest of us to demand the Democracy we were promised, that would indeed be great.

Alas, I am not optimistic. Many have tried in various parts of the world, and they have been undercut or killed. Even JFK was killed when he showed indications of leaving the track that had been laid out for him.

And if there is to be real democracy – Ben Norton maintains that Western governments are NOT democracies, they are oligarchies – we must understand that financialization of our countries’ economies is not the way to go.

Another thing we must understand is that “sustainable growth” is a contradiction in terms economically and certainly ecologically. At least in the so-called West. My country talks louder than most about “sustainable growth”, and performs worse than most, according to an assessment of the Nordic countries’ very considerable contribution to the accelerating ecological breakdown .

Finally, let it be clear: War destroys immeasurably. Yes, there are occasions when there is no alternative to armed self-defence. But it must be a last – a really LAST – resort. Imposing “democracy” is not a plausible excuse for violence.

Global Inequality

05.07.2025 /

Do we know about it? Do we even want to know about it? Don’t laugh, because I think the two questions are difficult. I think I have to admit that for many years, I suspected the iniquity you will find carefully documented here. But I liked my life, liked feeling nice and warm, not too warm; liked knowing that a decent meal awaited me at the end of my working day and that I would start my next working day with two pieces of delicious buttered bread and cheese. I liked imagining that I was not exploiting badly paid workers in Bangladesh or anywhere else. I was going about my business, earning my monthly wages doing what I had been taught to do.

And of course I was not actively exploiting anybody. But for the clothes I wore, the coffee and tea I drank, the chocolate and even most of the fruit I ate, the workers that produced those goods were earning next to nothing and living as slaves. I still drink coffee and tea, still eat chocolate and exotic fruit, by the way. The workers’ plight would not improve if I did not. Only system changes will improve their lives.

Now it has become clear to me that my children and grandchildren will probably not be assured the easy life I have enjoyed. I don’t like that at all! More and more of those of us who live in the so-called West will, with increasing frequency, feel cold and wet and hungry (or very much too hot), and more and more of us are even now dying during dramatic climate events. Moreover, there will be worse to come due to future financial events that will dwarf even the one in 2008.

I know a bit more now than I used to, about the economic trends that have been prevalent over the past decades. I know, in short, that we’ve been had. Yes, even we who live in the West are discovering, country by country, that we’ve been had. The spirits of Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman and the Mont Pelerin Society are still with us. The results of the power they wielded are all too evident. Everywhere.

For details, cf. Chapter 2 in The Revolt of the Rich – How the Politics of the 1970s Widened America’s Class Divide, by David Biggs (2024). I have highlighted this book, because it really is – the whole book – a pretty shocking eye-opener and extremely well sourced.

The prevalent economic order is not slowing down the accelerated ecological breakdown and GLOBAL INEQUALITY. On the contrary.

I admit that the information on the linked site is academic stuff, but it is carefully explained, though not exactly in the form of bedtime stories. I, too, tend to want simple messages, the kind so generously offered by demagogues of all political colours. Sometimes, however, we just have to take the time to sit down and really concentrate. To understand the lessons offered on the said website, you do not need an academic background, but you will need to exercise your brain to understand a message which runs so totally contrary to what has been inculcated in us by Milton Friedman and his ilk. Learning that something is the opposite of what we thought it was tends to require mental muscle.

Few if any Norwegian economists will admit, now, to adhering to Milton Friedman’s tenets. Nevertheless, “Neoliberalism” is the system we all are governed by. It is unsustainable in every sense of the word, and most of us suspect that now. That is the good news. (Goodness knows there is plenty of bad news.) The problem is, few of us have any idea of what alternatives are, or might be, sustainable.

I therefore also recommend Jason Hickel’s substack, a far more amenable read, and a very interesting one, indeed. In 2017, Jason Hickel authored the book The Divide – a Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions (2017). He believes – and many with him – that sustainability is possible; not only possible, but also rewarding!

Plenty of economists agree with him, too, would you believe it? However, as Philip Mirowsky explained in his book Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (2013), any economist who wants a job must forget all about that sort of thing. Mirowsky also taught me the word “discombobulate”.

We have been discombobulated into believing that there is “no alternative” to the system – call it capitalism, if you will – to which we are shackled. “No alternative” my foot! Take a look at the links I have listed above and, if possible, also the two books, The Revolt of the Rich and The Divide. You will see that a better world is indeed possible.

Let us listen and learn

30.05.2025 /

I have nothing to add to what this man has to say.

True, the speaker’s English is probably AI-generated.
True, the speech was not delivered in the UN itself although it is addressed to the UN.

The fact remains that Burkina Faso has been one of the very poorest countries in the world, although it has some of the world’s most important gold mines, mines owned by Western companies that pay next to nothing to the workers in the mines, and next-to-nothing for the gold they appropriate.

I am not in the habit of rooting for military leaders. However, “Democracy” has not delivered what it promised to Africa. “Democracy” has not delivered peace. Nor has it delivered human rights, or health care, or retirement pensions, or education. Above all, it has not delivered dignity.

Since the establishment of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) by Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, things are changing for the better.

The economic outlook for AES countries is positive (Burkina 5.494%, Mali 3.751%, and Niger 9.869% GDP growth in 2024, with Niger becoming the 3rd fastest growing economy in the world and the fastest growing economy in Africa in 2024., Wikipedia as at 31 May 2025

So: May all the Gods be with Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali.

Homo

16.04.2025 /

The Australopithecus, our distant forebear (e.g. “Lucy”), lived during a period (the Pliocene) when global temperatures started by rising to 2–3 °C above our current global average before eventually dropping to the point where much of the planet was periodically covered by a thick coat of ice (the Pleistocene) for 2 million years (a scenario possibly resembling what awaits us).

Yet, even during the ice ages, humans were still on the scene, to begin with in the shape of Homo erectus, some of whom left Africa during the Pleistocene, colonised Eurasia and used fire. Resourceful as they obviously were, these vagabonds were probably not our direct forebears, as H. sapiens are believed to have originated on the Horn of Africa between 300,000 and 200,000 years ago.

Fairly recently, we learnt of the migratory wave of H. sapiens via the Middle East to Eurasia and eventually Australia and South America that set off a mere 70.000–50.000 years ago. There had been several previous migratory waves, and there is even “evidence that modern humans had reached China around 80,000 years ago.”

Practically all of these early waves seem to have gone extinct or retreated back, and present-day humans outside Africa descend mainly from a single expansion about 70,000–50,000 years ago.

Since then, we have seen the rise and fall of empires. We have seen massacres, genocides, devastating wars. To be fair, some of us have also been privileged enough to enjoy the arts, sciences, delicious foodstuffs, vacations abroad… Some humans have devoted their lives to others, to the study of chimps, for instance, to the protection of ecosystems, etc.

Moreover, we are now so scientifically advanced that we know that we share nearly 99 % of our DNA with chimpanzees and bonobos.

Now that is not encouraging, because chimps, intelligent as they may be, are a nasty piece of work. To be precise, they are male chauvinist, rapist killers. For some reason, popular culture has refused to focus on these obnoxious traits. And to the extent that people had to admit that there were 21 chimp-on-chimp murders in a single national park in Uganda, they have tended to blame proximity to humans. However, several studies have shown that chimp violence is not a result of contact with humans.

In fact, we found that the site with the least violence had the largest human impact, and the site with the most violence was one of the least impacted.

True, bonobos (who have female leaders, by the way) are not murderous though they too engage in fierce but non-lethal quarrels. We share, I repeat, nearly 99 % of our DNA with them too. Similar to the chimps in appearance, bonobos are not carnivorous. (Moreover, they are on the verge of extinction.)

The reason we share so much DNA with chimps and bonobos is that they and we have a common ancestor. According to Wikipedia:

The split between the human and chimpanzee–bonobo lineages, took place around 8–4 million years ago, in the late Miocene epoch. During this split, chromosome 2 was formed from the joining of two other chromosomes, leaving humans with only 23 pairs of chromosomes, compared to 24 for the other apes.

The famous primatologist Jane Goodall (born 1934), having devoted much of her life to chimps, wrote about chimp violence in her 1990 memoir Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe, quoted by Wikipedia in an article about the Gombe Chimpanzee war:

For several years I struggled to come to terms with this new knowledge. Often when I woke in the night, horrific pictures sprang unbidden to my mind—Satan [one of the apes], cupping his hand below Sniff’s chin to drink the blood that welled from a great wound on his face; old Rodolf, usually so benign, standing upright to hurl a four-pound rock at Godi’s prostrate body; Jomeo tearing a strip of skin from Dé’s thigh; Figan, charging and hitting, again and again, the stricken, quivering body of Goliath, one of his childhood heroes.

Youtube footage of a chimp grieving for a dead relative or performing acts of kindness tends to move us: “So human!” we exclaim. I take a different tack. Hearing the war cries of human alpha males (and “alpha females”!), I exclaim: “So ape-like!”

Alas, today as in the past, the shots are called by ape-like killer-humans. With such leaders, do we even want to be here after WWIII and climate meltdown?

My worry is not that the human species may disappear. My greatest fear is that those of us who are not ape-like, not killer-humans will suffer immeasurably on our route to extinction, just as the Gazans are suffering today.

But I do not believe the species will be entirely extinguished.  Homo has survived in the most uncongenial of circumstances and will as a species survive, even WW III and climate meltdown.

Meanwhile

15.03.2025 /

While we are being dumbed down by a devastating propaganda storm, Oslo, the capital of Norway has had practically no winter this year, the first part of which should have been winter in this hemisphere. No frost, no snow, hardly any precipitation and lots of sun. Much of Andalucia, however, has been very cold and has suffered rain – floods even – as if to compensate for recent years of serious drought.

I just thought I’d mention the matter, although I assume you are not here for a weather update.

So here is the situation: While we, the Europeans are getting ready to go to war against Attila the Hun, or Hitler, as we prefer to call him these days, there has been a rather interesting development: The verdict of the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal. I admit this sounds like some sort of PC gaming event, but it is dead serious. Just as the war games against Attila the Hun are dead serious. “People die”, as the US president keeps saying, and that is normally considered serious, but Keir Starmer and Zelensky are evidently not normal.

I recently sent a book about economics to a friend. He reposted: “The economy for me is not only over my head – I’m just not interested.” I think his view of economics is shared by most people, even by those who deeply care about political issues. Unfortunately, as I see it, politics are not – as most people seem to believe – about “values”, but about money, or rather about who gets it and who keeps it.

So it is with wars. Attempts to weaken or even Balcanize Russia are also about money, certainly not about values. Zionists’ attempts to prohibit free speech are not about values either. Lots of things are about money. Even the weather is about money although we don’t usually think about money when we contemplate the rain outside our window.

Mind you, I don’t mind money. I want a warm bed as much as anybody else, as well as my three meals a day. But I really don’t need a Porsche (not that I have one). I would much rather know that the kids in Gaza have comfortable beds and three meals a day. I don’t see what’s so great about Porsches or, for that matter, “sustainable growth”. I mean considering that growth is not – repeat not – sustainable although consummate liars of Zelensky’s or Keir Starmer’s calibre might smoothly tell us to go on castigating the weather, the elephants, the Russians, the Palestinians, and the 50 % of the UK and US populations who might not be able to afford a comfortable bed and three healthy meals a day. Why on earth do we listen to consummate liars decade after decade?

Has the world improved over the past decade in any way? Any way at all? Will the weather improve over the next decade?

Will there be another decade?

Distraction

18.12.2024 /

I try not to think about the people in Gaza and on the West Bank, but I find it difficult. After all, we have been taught in school about the Holocaust, we have seen more films about WWII and its racism and victims of racism than about any other single historical topic. Films are a powerful medium. I used to be fairly thick-skinned, but in recent years, I can no longer endure scenes of torture at the cinema: I can smell it! It’s true. I can smell it! Smell the blood, the faeces, the urine. I can hear the screams, see the jugulars of the sadists, and I long to …

I will not tell you what I long to …

My friends laugh at me when I need to leave the television on the pretext of getting a cup of coffee – or at least, they used to; I don’t think they are laughing now. They said: “For Pete’s sake, it’s just fiction!” But I always knew it wasn’t fiction. Now I think they know, too. But they will forget. As soon as Palestine is obliterated and Gaza has become a fashionable Israeli tourist destination, the corporate media will help us all forget about all the Palestinian blood in the soil of Gaza’s tourist resorts. Is Gaza’s soil red, I wonder? I shouldn’t be surprised.

But again, as I say, I try not to think about Gaza. I turn to Isabel Allende, to distracting, relatively intelligent light entertainment.

Now I don’t know what you think about Isabel Allende. She is no doubt smart, probably a good business woman, and with great acumen for what her mostly female readers want. She tells a good yarn, full of unexpected twists and turns and acrobatic leaps. She’s very good at describing sexual bliss. So I was not expecting what I got in “La isla bajo el mar”.

For one thing, the book is painfully long! She is not trying to sell us something light and easy. She is furious, and she goes on and on about it, and believe me, I am hanging on to what she writes, sentence by painful sentence.

In brief, it’s about slavery. Not only slavery: racism. And she is not going about her story in an easy way. She is really trying to understand racism! And that is, to my mind, the greatest merit of this very long and painful book about the remarkable and heroic slave rebellion in Haiti against the French army, no less. A remarkable story, but she tells it as though she was there, and that must have cost her no small amount of research.

How can a reasonably decent man actually believe that people of dark skin are so different from us that they can and should be treated badly, she seems to be asking, because surely, not all slave owners were morally inferior? And I find that she does an impressive job of portraying a slave owner in Haiti and explaining why he behaves in such an appalling manner and how plantation ownership gradually turns what initially is a “reasonably decent man” into a cowardly scoundrel.

Mind you, her slaves are not angels either! Far from it. Once they escape, they seek vengeance and are as cruel as their former owners. In view of how slaves were murdered, tortured to death in the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, their vindictiveness is fully understandable, but the reader finds it more painful to learn that they also betray each other. The ghastly tendency of some people to seek power over others – even global hegemony – is not limited to those of white skin.

I had picked up the book thinking I would enjoy light entertainment, a distraction from the ghastly realities being so eagerly aided and abetted by genocide Joe and his ilk. Instead, what I was reading seemed to indicate that this planet would be better off without humans.

But it certainly would be better without the kind of humans that can blithely write and even publish without shame Which Path to Iran (June, 2009). Those are the humans advising the White House.

Look at page 12, for instance, the table of contents that lists, among other things, the options:

Disarming Tehran: The Military Option

  • Chapter 3: Going All the Way: Invasion
  • Chapter 4: The Osiraq Option: Airstrikes
  • Chapter 5: Leave it to Bibi: Allowing or Encouraging an Israeli Military Strike [my emphasis]

Toppling Tehran: Regime Change

  • Chapter 6: The Velvet Revolution: Supporting a Popular Uprising
  • Chapter 7: Inspiring an Insurgency: Supporting Iranian Minority And Opposition Groups
  • Chapter 8: The Coup: Supporting a Military Move Against the Regime

Next, read page 14 in its entirety, under the heading The Trouble with Tehran. Please note, that this is not about women’s rights, not even about justice and democracy. It’s about US interests. Please also note that this was nearly 15 years before 7 October.

Was 7 October the very badly needed excuse Bibi has been waiting for?

Believe me, every time I hear about US interests, I start itching. All over. Abolition of slavery ran contrary to the interests of plantation owners. US interests run contrary to the interests of the vast majority of all humans.

“North–South Divide”

11.12.2024 /

The title to this post was the humble search string I entered in DuckDuckGo a couple of days ago. It returned less than a dozen results, some of them about the UK.

“North South exploitation” yielded more results, it is true, but if you are a student with an open mind preparing a paper about the issue based on what you find by means of search engines, I’m afraid you will be very misguided. For example no. 3 on the result list I got is an article from thegeographyteacher.com: “The North South Divide made SIMPLE”. Simple it is. Obviously many a student will go for it, and boy-or-boy how misinformed they will be. For one thing there will be no mention of modern exploitation. The exploitation referred to will be from colonial times.

It is true that Aljazeera has somehow managed to get on to the first page of my result list with an opinion piece from 2021. Rich countries drained $152tn from the global South since 1960. (Did you notice? That was trillions.)

Most of what you will read in the corporate media will give you the impression that Africa, poor dear, is struggling as a result of past colonialism, and current corruption, and that we, the enlightened and mostly “liberal”, not to mention “humane”, West are doing our darnedest to drag Africa out of the rut. (The corporate media is – I repeat for the umpteenth time – a slut serving the powers that be.) Google and DuckDuckG, I am sorry to say, are part of the corporate media.

True, DuckDuckGo lists a whole bunch of highly academic research papers discussing minute aspects of North South exploitation, but they tend to be arcane. Nevertheless, their existence demonstrates that the issue is known, at least to researchers.

You will find no clear and comprehensible explanation of the basically simple mechanisms of what is often referred to as neo-colonialism. It is not taught in school; it is not highlighted on the internet; and if you google “neo-colonialism”, you will get definitions galore, and a few so-called examples, but little understanding of how it works.

DuckDuckGo will not flag that what we, the enlightened-mostly-liberal-humane West, have done to Africa is to subject the continent to IMF’s neo-liberal dictates and interest rates – usury – so that the countries’ annual incomes are spent mainly on servicing cumulative debts, to be paid in USD, the reserve currency. To obtain USD the countries have to produce what the West demands of them, to be sold to the West at prices determined by the West. And if a country’s government fails to do as ordered by the West, the US will clap sanctions on it and/or organise a regime change operation, as was the case recently in Pakistan (with the coup against Imran Kahn), later in Bangladesh, and most recently in Syria (after more than a decade of crippling sanctions against the near starving Syrian population). You won’t find this stated, far less explained, merely by googling.

We are not supposed to be aware of what’s going on; that’s the point. We, Western consumers don’t want to feel we are cheating workers who cannot afford to send their children to school in far-off countries. We want to feel we are “good people”. Awareness of injustice tends to kindle tensions or, as they say, disrupt “social cohesion”. We feel bad when our governments, voted on by us, actively support a genocide. Distrust grows. And threatens status quo. An example of smouldering tension is the extraordinary reaction to a recent murder in the USA.

In the USA, more and more people feel that they are being cheated. Their jobs have been outsourced. Indebted farmers have had to sell their land for next to nothing to agroindustry. Trump voters, in particular, are angry. They blame China and migration. Nobody is telling them about Bangladesh. Remember the garment factory in Bangladesh that collapsed killing 1134 people injuring 2500? I don’t know about where you live, but where I live it’s very hard, still, to find garments that are not produced, in part or altogether, in Bangladesh. “Bangladesh is today one of the world’s largest garment exporters,” this article jubilantly reported in 2021. Amnesty tells another story.

What has triggered the inordinate immigration to the US and to Europe? There are causes, multiple causes. I put to you that those causes are almost all related to the issue “North–South Divide”.

No matter how many malaria vaccines a charitable organisation sends to Africa, we are e-x-p-l-o-i-t-i-n-g – repeat EXPLOITING not only Africa, but the entire global south in a monumental way. This fact is illustrated by a paper that is not easy reading but all the more shocking.

In general, I find that most people in the West still imagine, on the basis of what they have read and heard from the corporate media, that Africans have themselves to blame for their poverty, China and migration can be blamed for poverty in the USA, whereas our governments in the West are doing the best they can, be they “centre-right” or “centre-left” to defend themselves against forces of evil.

Are they doing the best they can? Behold how, as we speak, Santa Ursula and the EU political elite are cynically celebrating an agreement that will turn European farmers into paupers and benefit a small European elite.

Google and DuckDuckGo are not innocent parties. DuckDuckGo inc. is an independent company. It has stakes, as have all companies. It protects, first of all, its own interests, and so it should. But should we trust it to satify all our needs to know; yours and mine and those of the people in, for instance, Bangladesh? I put to you that we should not. I use DuckDuckGo every day, many times a day, but I know its limitations. So I put to you that we must also seek information about the state of the world actively, not from the corporate media, not using the corporate media’s search engines.

And one of the first things we need to understand are the causes and mechanisms of the North–South Divide. Why must we understand them? I’m afraid the answer to that question is a logical loop. We must understand them in order to understand how important it is to understand them.

I suggest starting with an introduction to third world debt, provided by two economists who are generous enough to devote some of their valuable time to explaining the matter to us – non-economists – in plain English. I listened to the linked “lecture” – for that was what it was – several months ago, but today, I printed the transcript and have been pouring over it for a couple of hours with a marker pen. I also downloaded the UNCTAD report commented on by one of them. I honestly think we owe it to ourselves and not least to the planet and future generations to seek to understand how imbalance of power is beeing abused destructively. I am sure somebody, though I cannot for the life of me remember who, once declared that “knowledge is power”.

(You might also take a look at some of the the other lectures in the series.)

Looking back – far back

16.11.2024 /

In 1911, the composer Gustav Mahler died from a combination of poor heart valves and a streptococcus infection. He was only 50 years old. Never mind whether or not you like or have even heard of Gustav Mahler – for those of us who like music from previous centuries, he is one of the greats, though far from all lovers of classical music are Mahler enthusiasts.

The reason I was reminded of Gustav Mahler (I warn you: This is going to be a magna grada digression), in fact the reason why I am currently listening to his Symphony no. 3, is that I have just finished reading a gigantic novel by Thomas Mann, The Buddenbrooks, published in 1901.

Thomas Mann was heartbroken when Gustav Mahler died, and wrote the novella Death in Venice, upon which the eponymous 1971 film was based. Although Mann’s protagonist was a writer like himself, Visconti who directed the film made the dying Mahler the hero. I believe the film contributed greatly to Mahler’s increased popularity among even young people in the last quarter of the previous century.

Thomas Mann, on the other hand, (1875–1955), lived to stand up to Hitler in a big way and survived to a relatively ripe old age.

The Buddenbrooks for which he won a Nobel prize analyses as only an epic novel can, how a wealthy, respected and God-faring clan can disintegrate. An interesting aspect of the story is that the Buddenbrooks are both truly “good” people and astute businessmen. He is not – I repeat – not ascribing their demise to vice.

“Demise” is the key word here. What causes demise? Thomas Mann needed hundreds of pages to explain the matter, so how could I do so in few words? However, I don’t doubt that most analysts of past empires will agree that the causes of demise include internal cracks and external pressures.

In his novels The Buddenbrooks and Death in Venice, Mann is also obsessed with Death. Listening to Mahler’s music (now the Symphony no. 5) I imagine Mahler was too. After all, people died back then, in a big way, even from common colds! In The Buddenbrooks, the main protagonist dies in unbelievable pain from an infected tooth.

As I hear it, Mahler’s music is all about death, senseless, outrageous death, such as the deaths of the 225 people who were torn out of completely ordinary lives on 9 November 2024 (14 still missing) due to, YES, vice. No, not their own vice, that of the powers that be: Greed.

Greed that for decades has dismissed warnings about climate change.

See the pictures of the flood and its consequences from Elpais.com ( Double-click picture no. 2 to navigate with left/right arrows.)

Listen

12.10.2023 /

There are limits as to how long you can batter a dog, a horse, a man or a woman before he/she or it will rise and attack you with all the ferocity he/she or it had to suppress for months or years.

There are limits as to how long you can abuse a people, a nation, a continent, or a planet, before it will rise and attack you with all the ferocity it had to suppress for years or even decades.

On this cheerful note, allow me to urge you to watch and listen to Professor Jason Hickel. His voice is not often heard in the press – no doubt, he is up against powerful opposition from the owners of corporate media (including Google, Facebook, etc.) – but the voice is making its way, ever so slowly, to more and more people.

To quote him:

“This is not a time for timid responses, tweaking around the edges of a failing, degenerating system.”

Listen! Please, please listen!

(Part 1 of his lecture starts after about 10 minutes of introductory music, speeches etc. Part 2 is mostly critique of his lecture by 3 people. He is allowed to answer at the end.

https://www.sum.uio.no/english/research/networks/arne-naess-programme/videos/

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