It’s interesting how we hear hear little from the very virtuatous celebrity mob who have plagued us with sanctimony in the last decade of social media and it’s been the obscure few who stand up and said something in the face of hardened persecution. Weirdly seems to be a lot of 80s/90s crew that do speak up.
It’s just a plague that we stuck in the ground because the whole world are victims of capitalism.
It is normal to get sick once a year and, in fact, healthy because it helps train your immune system. This is bullshit on many levels. First, people tend to get sick more than once per year. There are already the flu and common cold and people often get both once per year. Second, the “once per year” logic is also reminiscent of “seasonality” logic, logic that COVID doesn’t really follow. Generally speaking, the common cold, the flu, etc follow cycles where for a given country, there is a surge once per year. This does not apply to COVID, which has had at least two waves per year, often 3 or 4. You can get also COVID 2-3 times per year, as immunity for wanes on the order of 3-6 months (due to its fast evolution, something facilitated by high infection rates). Third, the idea that getting sick is good for your immune system as an adult is a myth. Pure myth. It has zero scientific support. You should get vaccinations and take reasonable precautions, not aim for getting sick. It is good for kids to be exposed to various things, including some that may be infectious, buy exactly which ones is pretty murky. When we are little, our immune systems are still figuring out the difference between “self” and “other”. If the immune system is inaccurate in this, you may develop an autoimmune disorder, where your immune system attacks “self” because it recognizes it as “other”. There is evidence that very young kids playing outside helps avoid this - and similarly, allergies - but it’s not a simple thing to disentangle. Either way, it does not apply to your situation. Covid doesn’t cause an impact on your immue system either. This is a lie. It is well-established that COVID infection causes immune deregulation, and particularly T cell exhaustion. There is more to it, but it effectively “ages” that part of your immune system. This is a very likely contributing factor in why there are so many infectious diseases currently on the uptick. The population, having, on average, been infected by COVID multiple times, has likely taken on a decent amount of immune system damage. Sometimes you can be In a bit of a state of inflammation which happens in many viral infections. The main danger of acute COVID infection is massive levels of inflammation mediated by what is known as a cytokine cascade (or storm). It’s not “a bit”, it’s enough to possibly kill you, and the amount more or less makes or breaks how you will fare during the acute phase. This is one of the things that vaccines help with, they help your immune system respond early and keep this modulated. COVID is also unique in that it infects basically all of your organs and can stay there, causing increased inflammation for months to years. This is not what other viruses do, generally speaking. And long covid is a topic in itself. It has never been quantified by any and all testing except subjective A lie. There are many, many studies on Long COVID that quantify it and study it and its etiology. Hete is a recent one that also describes immune dysregulagulation associated with it. It states that at least 10% of acute COVID infections result in Long COVID. Long COVID is persistent symptoms after acute COVID infection and appears to be, in reality, a continued infection by COVID that just isn’t going away and is instead hanging out in various organs, constantly challenging your immune system. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41590-023-01724-6 maybe he would be more receptive with super libbed up sources or something, i dunno what he would respect I would not treat him as the primary audience. He is already arrogant enough to spread bullshit despite not understanding the basics of this topic that any medical professional should be expected to know. I would instead present an unassailable case to a wider audience that includes him but is not only him so that peer pressure does its thing and he feels he cannot continue pushing back without looking foolish. Focus on the disease itself and the science. Memorize the numbers. 10% develop long COVIF. Memorize the facts. Long COVIF is medical symptoms that persist after acute COVID infection and there is strong evidence that they come from a continued lower-level infection. T-cell dysregulation and exhaustion is even more common than long COVID. In addition, these numbers represent people’s experiences after having COVID and you can be reinfected every 3-6 months, so it’s not like only 10% of the population will be impacted. Every infection is rolling the dice. If they were fully independent (which they probably aren’t, it’s probably somewhere in between), then there is a 10% chance of developing long COVID over your lifetime if you are infected once, 19% if you get it twice, 27% if you get it thrice, 35% if you get it 4 times, etc. The equation to calculate this is 100% * (1 - (0.9^n)), where n is the number of infections. Without precautions, you will likely get COVID 1-3 times per year. The main risk of doing this in a larger group is that you will need to understand this stuff pretty well, as otherwise he will probably try to appeal to his own authority and various correct-soundkng factoids like he already has. You’ll need papers ready to go and cite. You’ll have to ask him if he read papers from the Roan or Iwasaki labs. He definitely hasn’t lol. If you think he can really change his tune based on a personal conversation, this is better because it gives him a chance to save face. Buy I would be surprised given that he is already happy to spread bullshit like this.
This isn’t new or American, it’s just yt in general Shibasaburo was denied naming rights for the bubonic plague (which he discovered first) and also denied a Nobel prize for curing diphtheria Bose also faced enormous racism (I haven’t read much about him) Kikunae Ikeda discovered and characterized the Umami taste and its responsible Glutamate component back in 1907. It took over 100 years for that to even become vaguely known in the west, and mayos still removed about the word “umami” entire genuses native to China or India, and known since 3000 BC as medicine there, are named *Xylospongium ursabackenphylloxiphodae" with a common name of “Smith’s dildo” because John Smith “discovered” the dildo in the year 1927. Alternatively, you’ll have common names like “long apple” vs. “short apple” vs. “China apple” vs. “Himalayan apple”, even though actual, much older Indigenous names exist Wikipedia and literal renaming of landmarks, IE: Ram Setu. Imagine unironically calling the Eiffel Tower “Shiva’s tower”, this is literally what mayos do right now Also half of the “American” researchers are Chinese or Indian or elsewhere from the Global South TGotFW, 1 billion Mount Denalis
Europe, especially the imperial powers in the 19th and early 20th centuries, were and are a community of vampires, ghouls, jackals, demons, serial killers, and thieves. The most telling part of the conflict was that despite Austria-Hungary initiating the conflict, Germany took most of the “blame” and was maid to payout reparations and had its colonies and industrial sectors and provinces swallowed up by the other European powers. The causes stated by Lenin, in Imperialism: Highest Stage of Capitalism were: Imperial expansion & imperial competition - a need to acquire new markets, materials, colonies, and growth. These empires were driven by monopolies and capital accumulation/centralization created existential rivalries among the European powers. Especially between Germany and Great Britain. These two powers considered themselves existential enemies since Germany had quickly industrialized and become on par with British industry in a short time, creating fierce competition in the market. These competitions justified and necessitated the need for new territories, raw materials, etc. I can’t remember much about Lenin’s understanding of how finance capital’s contribution to WW1, just that it was fuel to the fire of the overwhelming tinder that the need for new markets and resources made. WWI as viewed by Lenin was an inevitability of crisis that capitalism produces. There needed to be periodic wars or catastrophic events that opened up new markets and populations open for domination, labor and resource extraction, and dominance of capital. I think the last great event like this was the dissolution of the USSR and the shock and awe policies that plagued Russia in the 90s that saw its industrial sectors siphoned and sold off. WW1 is shocking in its cataclysmic damage and depraved indifference to the huge loss of life, but such a conflict was all but inevitable given that these were conflicts that capital needed to accomplish to break through to acquire new wealth and profits. The modes of imperialism that Europe had practiced were on this trajectory. Ultimately the war weakened European powers, set itself up for WW2, and let the US readapt and manage the way these powers extract wealth and capital from its former colonial subjects and other states in the developing world. Something by Rosa Luxemburg: The Imperialism of all countries knows no “understanding,” it knows only one right – capital’s profits: it knows only one language – the sword: it knows only one method – violence. And if it is now talking in all countries, in yours as well ours, about the “League of Nations,” “disarmament,” “rights of small nations,” “self-determination of the peoples,” it is merely using the customary lying phrases of the rulers for the purpose of lulling to sleep the watchfulness of the proletariat.
Its not the black death but the special “native american plague” which happens when europeans arrive in the new world and kills 90%+ of your population. AKA: The White Death
Being curious about what the liberal doxa was about their claim that the USSR just invaded Ukraine, I checked wikipedia An attempt to create an independent state, the left-leaning Ukrainian People’s Republic (UNR), was first announced by Mykhailo Hrushevsky, but the period was plagued by an extremely unstable political and military environment. It was first deposed in a coup d’état led by Pavlo Skoropadskyi, which yielded the Ukrainian State under the German protectorate, and the attempt to restore the UNR under the Directorate ultimately failed as the Ukrainian army was regularly overrun by other forces. The short-lived West Ukrainian People’s Republic and Hutsul Republic also failed to join the rest of Ukraine.[82] The result of the conflict was a partial victory for the Second Polish Republic, which annexed the Western Ukrainian provinces, as well as a larger-scale victory for the pro-Soviet forces, which succeeded in dislodging the remaining factions and eventually established the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (Soviet Ukraine). Sooooo, sympathy with the nazi coup I guess… I mean, it looks like the slavaukrani libs are deep in that direction I also found this gem : Meanwhile, the recently constituted Soviet Ukraine became one of the founding republics of the Soviet Union. During the 1920s,[90] under the Ukrainisation policy pursued by the national Communist leadership of Mykola Skrypnyk, Soviet leadership at first encouraged a national renaissance in Ukrainian culture and language. Ukrainisation was part of the Soviet-wide policy of Korenisation (literally indigenisation), which was intended to promote the advancement of native peoples, their language and culture into the governance of their respective republics Literally genocide I guess So yeah if they don’t bother reading the fucking Wikipedia articles before speaking I call that proof that unity between Marxists must not be mixed with unity with radlibs
A group of women who were borrowers with the Grameen Bank Mallika, a villager from Jobra explained the problems with the weekly repayments. She said, “I bought land with the money. But, then I found that I couldn’t earn that much money. I had spent the money. So I had to take a new loan to repay the old one.” Another villager Yasmeen said that the weekly payments forced her to take other loan. Eventually, she was indebted to five organizations. Other women who took loans, had to return to their local loan sharks in order to keep up with the weekly payments. The group payments of these loans puts intense pressure on the borrowers to make their weekly payments because if one member of the group defaults, the other group members, who are in an equally precarious position, have to cover the defaulters loans. Therefore, the social pressure forces borrowers to use any means necessary, even local loan sharks, to find the necessary money to make these repayments, defeating the purpose of the Grameen Bank. Since the Grameen Bank was created to help borrowers not use usurious loan sharks. This is no wonder, according to research done by QK Ahmed, 1189 of 2501 borrowers surveyed could not repay their loans on time. 72.3% of them had to take out other loans to make their payments. 10% had to sell assets that gave them productivity, like goats, in order to make their repayment. Another study sampled 1489 families from 15 villages. Only, 5-9% of the borrowers said they were better off after using micro-credit. On top of the failures in helping their borrowers, Grameen Bank has also had serious issues with its corporate governance. Mohammed Yunus, the founder has been at the center of many scandals at the heart of his Grameen institutions, which forced him to resign in 2011. When Grameen Bank lost its tax exempt status, in 1998, he moved $100 million to another shell organization called Grameen Kalyan, and then loaned that money from Grameen Kalyan to Grameen Bank, in order to avoid paying taxes. His Grameen Yogurt business was found using adulterated milk in 2011. Shortly before occupying his position as chief of Bangladesh, Mohammed Yunus was convicted of violating Bangladeshi labor laws with his other subsidiary Grameen Telecom. Bangladeshi law requires a company to pay five percent of its net profit to a welfare fund that could later be used for pensions. It seems that Grameen Telecom, in its haste to make profits, failed to create such a fund. Despite, being disgraced and scandal plagued, he continued to be the object of praise and adulation in the West. He has been praised by the likes of Larry Summers and Bill Clinton simply because the Grameen Bank model perfectly fits in with the neoliberal consensus that the West hopes to impose upon the world. Poverty in the third world is caused by underdevelopment and lack of societal infrastructure. Alleviating this poverty, which has been done successfully in China and Vietnam (to name a few), requires massive government intervention and government programs to change the situation. People in villages in Bangladesh are poor because there are no places for the masses to find decent paying jobs. That requires government investment to set up large scale industries that can employ thousands of semi-skilled workers to give them decent wages. In order to set up these industries, there needs to be large scale infrastructure investments in public roads and trains that will allow these goods to be moved efficiently. The government also needs to invest in high-quality public schools to create a more skilled labor force for the next generation. On top of it, there needs to be social programs in healthcare and retirement such that one medical emergency doesn’t force a villager to sell her house. Another Borrower from Grameen Bank in Jobra But, since the 1970s, the Washington consensus managed by the dual institutions of the IMF and World Bank have been forcing third world countries, including Bangladesh to do the opposite. Since its independence, Bangladesh has been forced to: [Dismantle big public enterprises.] Large mills were replaced by export processing zones, shopping malls, and real estate. Export-oriented garment factories became the mainstay of manufacturing. Incidents like the Rana Plaza collapse in April 2013 showed the extent of cruelty and greed in these death traps. Permanent jobs in factories were replaced by a system of temporary, part-time, outsourced, and insecure work. The biggest source of foreign exchange has been remittances; existing side by side with a huge outflow of resources through the transfer pricing and profit outflow by foreign companies, and transfer of accumulated wealth by local business groups, legally and illegally. The number of workers abroad is now more than the number of workers working in the country’s factories, who took this risky option because of job scarcity. The feminization of the working class is another recent phenomenon, which happened because of a reduction of purchasing power and increase of job insecurity. That has kept pressure on the families to work longer and to join the workforce with more than one family member, including children. Energy resources and power have been systematically privatized. Power became a costly commodity and costs for the productive sector have increased, while energy security for the majority was threatened. All of this hurt the peasants; many had to join the labor market at home and abroad. Land grabbing, occupying public spaces by private business, and deforestation have uprooted many. Rural branches of state-owned banks have closed down, squeezing the access to cheaper finance for rural people, and forcing them to go to microcredit, which has higher interest rates. However, the philosophy of neoliberalism requires the government to keep a hands-off approach on all the infrastructure projects and social programs required for mass poverty eradication. The Grameen philosophy perfectly dovetails into the dastardly Washington Consensus. If poor people can be given enough loans and high interest rates, they can remove themselves from poverty. Anyone who fails this uphill battle, is at fault for not working hard enough to pull themselves up from their bootstraps. As the new leader of Bangladesh, given his philosophy and closeness to the neoliberal institutions, it is unlikely that he will involve Bangladesh in large-scale projects with the Belt and Road initiative, which has been instrumental in developing much needed infrastructure in the most underdeveloped areas of the world. Instead, he is likely to follow Bangladesh into bigger and bigger macro-debt traps created by IMF and World Bank. Mohammed Yunus at a Global Summit to spread his brand of propaganda He will sweet talk on the importance of social responsibility while allowing big manufacturers to set up less than safe garment factories in Bangladesh, such as the one that collapsed in 2013. Most importantly, he will allow status quo to continue. This will allow him to be praised in the West as the new face of democracy in Bangladesh, regardless of the situation of the people within. 1 Yunus, Muhammad. 2003. Banker to the Poor: The Story of the Grameen Bank, p 69 2 Ibid, p 70
The Imperium is the EU: a mostly loose federation of varied individual states that exists to enshrine a few very specific rules or principles in its members, and despite the brutal, racist, authoritarian, and inequitable structures of its component states it’s continuously threatened by outbreaks of even worse and even more Fascist movements internally. That’s right, the Imperium are libs. The difference is the Imperium comes down extremely hard on those even-more-Fascist movements since they do things like intentionally spread virulent plagues or turn societies into autocannibalistic bloodbaths and it makes literal daemons manifest to wreck shit up, instead of just clutching pearls while working with the little uwu smol bean nazis and antivaxxers. It really is a funny consequence of the setting’s creators really pulling their punches and not understanding scale that the Imperium comes across as less evil than real institutions they’re supposed to be satirizing and it’s “there is only war” setting is much more peaceful than the real world. Like their literal death cult religion has nothing on Evangelicals, and their whole paranoia and brutal suppression shit is targeted at and done in response to these arch-reactionary might-makes-right cultists that line up exactly with real-world reactionary movements whether that’s the RFK style anti-vaxxer nurglites, silicon valley libertines, the segment of vulgar fascists who are just out to self-actualize through random acts of violence to feel like big strong manly warriors, and the entire political consultant class as a whole. Like it’s barely a joke to say the Imperium is more moderate on how to deal with those sorts of destructive reactionaries than a lot of people here are, because the Imperium are still fucking libs. To put it another way, the Imperium are cartoon villains who formed in the crucible of the darker-and-edgier pop culture movement of the 80s and 90s, as written by people who don’t really get that real world powers are even bigger and more awful cartoon villains underneath their human masks. So they do the silly bad guy stuff but it’s all too sterile, and it lacks the real anger and fear and depravity of real world reactionaries who also do all the silly cartoon bad guy stuff but even more so.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), darling DSA Socialist in Office (SIO), has received her fifth consecutive endorsement from NYC-DSA. She is sailing towards what is almost assuredly a safe re-election and will start her fifth term as a representative in Congress in 2027. NYC-DSA’s endorsement has opened the door to yet another round of conversation on AOC, what she stands for, and what she means for DSA. AOC’s primary victory in 2018 was a transformative moment for DSA, leading to an explosion of membership as her underdog story spread across the country. Since then, DSA has evolved substantially. AOC’s victory in 2018 brought a newly-resurgent DSA to 40,000 members; this past February we surpassed 100,000. AOC has the most storied career of any modern-era DSA SIO. Her celebrity and public profile has made her one of the most popular politicians in the country and a very early front-runner for the 2028 Democratic presidential primary. Over her seven years in Congress, she has far eclipsed her association with DSA and has moved her closer and closer to the Democratic Party. We’ve discussed this before. Red Star, alongside many others in DSA (e.g. in Democratic Left, DSA San Francisco, Partisan, and Marxist Unity Group) , stood firmly against her re-endorsement in 2024 on the grounds of her weak commitments to Palestine and our organization. Two years later, her positions have only gotten worse. AOC’s awkward, arms-length maneuvering around Palestine and the demand for an arms embargo is demonstrative of the contradiction between our fight against empire and the Democratic Party’s mission to uphold it. [Endorsing AOC is a Bridge to Nowhere Over the past several weeks, DSA has been rife with discussions about the National Political Committee (NPC) considering re-endorsement of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), the congresswoman for NY-14. The question arose suddenly; after receiving her endorsement request, the National Electoral Committee (NEC) declined to follow the normal process of having a Red StarGrayson L. ](https://redstarcaucus.org/endorsing-aoc-is-a-bridge-to-nowhere/) The NYC-DSA endorsement forum On March 31st, the congresswoman attended a virtual forum where she delivered her case for re-endorsement to members across NYC-DSA. Members were invited to participate in the chapter’s endorsement process via an online meeting which featured Q&A and closed deliberation. Members could submit questions before and during the meeting. Both sets of questions were subject to filtering by facilitators. The questions chosen explored AOC’s and DSA’s shared goals in Congress, how she would take on the affordability crisis, and the escalation in Iran. She opened with a review of her political history: outlining her support for legislation such as the Green New Deal and Medicare for All. AOC also asserted her role in popularizing controversial positions like Abolish ICE and reaffirmed her goal to “reimagine the public landscape” by shifting the Overton window towards progressive politics. AOC’s responses were less those of a fellow DSA member navigating the politics of the moment and felt more like a mainstream politician walking us through her resume. Aside from the flattery of calling DSA her “political home", NYC-DSA members heard little self-reflection from AOC on her role as SIO and her orientation towards DSA. This was evident in her response to a question about her endorsement process and whether she would endorse the current NYC-DSA electoral slate. In her meandering answer, AOC did not commit to endorsing the slate and instead treated the NYC-DSA-backed candidates as if they were any other candidates requesting her endorsement. The headline-grabbing moment of the forum was when a DSA member asked AOC about whether she supported an arms embargo. AOC responded with a resounding affirmation that the U.S. must stop providing military funding to Israel. At the same time, her remarks also repeatedly affirmed that Israel can “buy their own weapons” without the U.S.’ help. When asked a follow-up on whether she opposed “defensive” aid explicitly, including the Iron Dome, she hastily responded with a “yes” and moved the forum along. AOC’s evolving stance on Palestine Many members were looking forward to the discussion on Palestine because it has been the most contested aspect of AOC’s relationship to DSA’s evolving politics. When she emerged on the scene in 2018, AOC initially seemed to be a strong counter to the Democratic positions on Palestine. Maybe she could be a strong advocate in a hostile environment. Maybe she could break the mold of “progressive except for Palestine.” In 2021, the first fissure appeared through her “present” vote on funding the Iron Dome. This moment showed her to be susceptible to pressure from Zionists in the Democratic Party. These cracks grew further after Israel’s genocide began after October 7th. In 2024, the NPC considered her re-endorsement, which Red Star opposed. That process ended with the NPC ending her national endorsement. Later that year, AOC fiercely advocated for the Biden and Harris presidential campaigns, despite their unwavering support of Israel’s genocide. NYC-DSA members were eager to hear their fellow DSA member clarify her stance at the forum. Unfortunately, AOC failed to openly reflect on her loud support of Biden and Harris campaigns. Instead, she came across as defensive, failing to acknowledge the legitimate criticism of her track record and public profile. The forum became the space to announce her new position: she will oppose all military aid to Israel because “the Israeli government should be able to finance their own weapons.” In attempting to put forward a new line, AOC is trying to bridge the widening political gap between DSA and the Democratic Party, as she has before. She wants to peddle moderating language and retain her position as a socialist. However, these roles are completely at odds with each other. There is no common ground. [Sectarians, Sheepdogs, and the Center By Nate W. Something is changing in this country. Millions of Americans, for the first time, have found themselves drawn away from the liberal mainstream ideologies that dominate the Republican and Democratic parties and are looking towards socialism for answers to the problems that plague the United States. From online Red StarRed Star ](https://redstarcaucus.org/sectarians-sheepdogs-and-the-center/) In practice, every statement of support for the Palestinian people is followed by a condemnation of the actually existing Palestinian resistance. Every narrowly targeted criticism of Netanyahu and the Israeli government is carefully calculated to obscure the fascism inherent in both Zionist project and the American state. And she’s doing it for free: not because she’s receiving support from Zionist lobby groups—she clearly is not. It is because the maintenance of empire requires a political capitulation to the American and Israeli settler projects. The economic necessity of imperialism AOC’s stance is a result of Israel’s position in the world system. Regardless of intent, AOC is unable to offer complete and unqualified support to the demands for an arms embargo on Israel. She makes an effort to echo the popular demands of the Democratic base from Congress. However, her role as a leading face of the Democratic Party depends on her ability to metabolize these demands into a palatable message that doesn’t confront the root of capitalism and imperialism. Her willingness to toe the party line on Palestine puts her in contrast with other DSA-endorsed electeds who were less equivocal, some of whom paid a heavy price. As elected officials ascend the political ranks, they face ever-increasing demands of U.S. imperial interests to fall in line. For them, the decision is straightforward. If the political benefit of standing up to empire is small, the “savvy” choice is to follow the lead of the political establishment, who are acting in the interest of empire. To the electoral sphere, “foreign affairs” is treated as one policy area among many. It becomes a platform plank that can be negotiated around. This mode of thinking neatly avoids deeper questions around internationalism and leaves unchallenged how imperialism underpins the capitalist system. Israel is a core part of the U.S.-led global economic system. Israel has intimate economic and political ties with the U.S., particularly in the military and technology sectors. Like any other Global North country, Israel parasitically appropriates wealth from the Global South. Israeli-occupied Palestine sits at a critical chokepoint at the crossroads of Asia, Africa, and Europe. Its close proximity to the Suez Canal and to many of the world’s major oil and natural gas fields make Israel an ideal launching pad for imperialist interests in West Asia and North Africa. Zionism is intrinsically tied to imperialism. Imperialism is the economic base behind the superstructural phenomena that uphold the Zionist project. This was true under British imperialism, when the Zionist settler-colonial project in Palestine began, and is still true under U.S. imperialism today. Understanding Israel’s utility to U.S. empire is critical to correctly understanding Zionism. This means religious, academic, and political Zionism all serve and are mutually reinforced by the imperialist system. Imperialist violence is a systemic requirement of the U.S… It is not simply a series of uncouth foreign policy decisions. It is the core, ironclad logic of capitalist development. The political economy of the U.S. depends heavily on both the wealth extracted from the Global South and the violence required to enforce this extractive dynamic. In Israel’s case, the settler-colonial foundation of the state is a product of this system. This means anyone who is invested in upholding U.S.-led economic order will seek to justify and expand that violence. Political institutions will remain supportive of Zionism, so long as Zionism is useful for upholding U.S. empire. Democratic Party politics justify empire Even staunch imperialists have disagreements on how to best serve empire. Despite their differences, both Democrats and Republicans uphold U.S. imperial interests first and foremost. The two-party system has always served as a framework for different factions of the ruling class to compete for political power, from this country’s origins as a slavery-fueled settler colony to the superprofits-fueled capitalist empire of today. The Democratic Party is closely tied with the imperialist system. These connections are fostered through the Democratic Party apparatus: the politicians themselves, party structures such as the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, as well as the web of issue-specific non-profits, think tanks, labor unions, and media institutions. Political advancement through the Democratic Party means working through that superstructure: backroom deals, quid pro quo, coordinated media–whatever it may take to uphold the party’s interests. AOC has put forward new messaging for this apparatus. She is trying to balance the push of the anti-Zionist left and the pull of Zionist Democratic Party mandates. This is where AOC’s new line comes from: support for cutting all military aid to Israel, but qualifying that stance by asserting that Israel can buy their own weapons. She is attempting to reconcile a pro-Palestinian position with a genocidal worldview. Liberal Zionists such as J Street can get behind this messaging in exactly the same words as AOC. Even Netanyahu can advance messaging focused on U.S. “military funding”, seeking to end direct subsidies while increasing the flow of weapons to Israel. This new messaging strategy glosses over the fact that Israel is a genocidal settler-colonial project. It should not have weapons. It should not even exist. In her recent public statement, AOC spread the lie that the Iron Dome “has proven critical to keeping innocent civilians safe”. We would never tolerate a DSA-endorsed socialist in office justifying the self-defense of a genocidal state such as Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, or Apartheid South Africa. Why would we tolerate it for Israel? Popular anti-Zionist pressure is forcing American politicians to contend with the U.S.-Israeli relationship. Lacking a correct anti-imperialist analysis on Palestine, AOC would rather find a “workable solution” to this contradiction, which flattens it altogether and leaves the imperialist relationship structurally unchallenged. This logic led her to become a champion for the Biden and Harris campaigns at the same time that the Biden administration was directly enabling Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The decision exemplified her instinct for capitulation to the Democratic Party establishment. It secured her position in the party, a necessary sacrifice she needed in order to advance her platform. She also believed the move was necessary to defeat Trump. This did not work. Biden and Harris’ position around Palestine has proven to be one of the key contributors to their loss. AOC conceded on Palestine, and in doing so failed to turn out the progressive base that mobilized for Palestine. There was immense public pressure on the Biden administration to end the genocide in Gaza. AOC could have championed the sentiment by withholding her endorsement; she could have used her leverage to push the Biden administration. Instead, she lent Biden and Harris her credibility when their popularity was at its lowest. She peddled the lie that the administration was “working tirelessly” for a ceasefire. Without any clear reflection or self-criticism, we can only expect that she would make the same mistakes again. AOC’s failures extend to other questions of anti-imperialism as well. Our comrades in the 21st Century Socialism caucus have detailed this extensively in their recent dossier. Palestine is a canary in the coal mine for an electoral approach that prioritizes popularity and political careerism over anti-imperialism and party-building. Partisan Democrats cannot put forward anti-imperialist politics. The Democratic Party remains a party of capital which seeks to uphold U.S. interests across the world. At their core, they are aligned with Republicans, fossil capital, and the military-industrial complex in leveraging Israel’s critical economic and geopolitical role in West Asia. No anti-imperialist line can be drawn through that party. AOC tethers us to the Democratic Party DSA has not yet solved the contradiction of our relationship with the Democratic Party. There is broad consensus across tendencies in DSA that we must detach ourselves from the Democratic Party apparatus. At the same time, AOC has risen to a level of stardom and celebrity that has put her among the front runners for the 2028 Democratic presidential ticket. This is not an opportunity for DSA—it is a trap. DSA needs to build a counter to the Democratic Party superstructure, not be an extension of it. Cori Bush and Rashida Tlaib demonstrate that our SIOs in Congress do not need to move closer to the Democratic Party. Cori and Rashida did not uphold Israel’s right to defend itself, as AOC has. Both through their voting records and public statements, Cori and Rashida consistently showed a stronger willingness to push against the Democratic Party than AOC. While Rashida spoke at the People’s Conference for Palestine and the DSA Convention, AOC spoke at a Biden campaign rally and the Democratic National Convention. Any step forward for DSA in Congress must come with a political analysis that opposes the present state and the fortitude to resist the lure of the ruling class. AOC played a stepping stone in our organization’s growth as one of our first high-profile campaigns. Yet, since her election, AOC has shown herself to be more attuned to the interests of the Democratic Party than she is with the interests of our organization. It is apparent that she is a cunning political figure who would sooner compromise with our class enemies than uphold the just and necessary cause of defeating U.S. empire. Accountability should be the foundation of our electoral project, not a lofty goal. We undermine our own political power and do the working class a disservice when we settle for uncritical processes that perpetuate superficial relationships instead of constructively engaging in struggle with one another. Especially in our electoral program, politics should come first and foremost, not celebrity and status. We must understand electoral politics as an opportunity to build DSA, independent of the Democrats. Elections are a means to a revolutionary party, and not an end in and of themself. [Elections, not electoralism: A tactic in a revolutionary movement [T]he working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes. - Marx [R]evolutionaries who are incapable of combining illegal forms of struggle with every form of legal struggle are poor revolutionaries indeed. - Lenin For Marxists in the U. Red StarBob M ](https://redstarcaucus.org/elections-not-electoralism/) Imperialism is a structural imperative and the economic base of capitalism. Being in the heart of empire means benefiting from the mountains of wealth extracted from the Global South. Whatever a socialist member of Congress does, it should never be at the expense of oppressed nations. Redistributing wealth that the U.S. has stolen is not socialism’s horizon. We need to fight to dismantle that extractive relationship, not beg for a larger share of its crumbs. [Race, Class, and Empire: Reading J. Sakai’s ‘Settlers’ The primarily white character of DSA is shaped by the contradictions within the class position of its base, being both wage-earning proletarians and beneficiaries of imperialist superprofits. We must reckon with the historical attachment to reformism created by this struggle. Red StarChristina W ](https://redstarcaucus.org/zenith4-race-class-empire/) As our organization continues to grow, we must emphasize anti-imperialism and not reduce it to one issue area among many. Staunchly anti-imperialist politics should be a prerequisite to any DSA campaign, especially at the federal level. We must not make the mistake of tailing popular elected officials’ reformist messaging as a way to grow the socialist movement. Compromising in advance with the structural imperatives of capitalism is a failure of working-class leadership that makes revolutionary transformation impossible. Nasser and Jairo are members of NYC-DSA From Red Star via This RSS Feed.
Screenshot April 25, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. A full-day conference filled with camaraderie and learning All sessions held at the Philadelphia Ethical Society, 1906 Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia Registration link HERE! Capitalism is in deep crisis. Since Donald Trump’s return to the White House, working-class and oppressed peoples have faced a relentless attack in the U.S. and around the globe. The advent of the second Trump regime has seen an unprecedented attack on workers, immigrants, women’s rights, civil rights, education, and democratic rights. Now Trump is waging another war overseas. Working-class living standards have been degraded by almost 50 years of one-sided class war waged by Wall Street. Working people are plagued by low wages, high rents and high food prices. Work is more precarious and workers are likely to be stuck working more than one part-time job in order to merely survive. The high cost of student debt is a shackle around the throats of an entire generation. These topics will be addressed at the Socialism is the Solution educational conference in Philadelphia on April 25. Join us for a day of discussion and education. The post April 25 in Philadelphia: THE SOLUTION IS SOCIALISM conference first appeared on Workers’ Voice/La Voz de los Trabajadores. From Workers’ Voice/La Voz de los Trabajadores via This RSS Feed.
Susan Montoya Bryan Associated Press ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — There are faster ways to get from Chicago to Los Angeles, but none have the allure or cultural cachet of Route 66. To John Steinbeck, it was the Mother Road that led poor farmers from Dust Bowl desperation to sunny California. To Native Americans along the route, it was an economic boon that also left scars. To Black travelers, it offered sanctuary during segregation. And to music fans, it was the place to get their kicks. Route 66 marks its 100th anniversary this year. Despite losing its status decades ago as one of the nation’s main arteries, people from around the world still flock to it to take perhaps the quintessential American road trip and soak in its neon lights, kitschy motels and attractions, and culinary offerings. Each town has its own history and magic, said Sebastiaan de Boorder, a Dutch entrepreneur who, with his wife, breathed new life into The Aztec Motel in Seligman, Arizona. “It’s an essential part of American culture and history,” he said of the highway. “The historical aspect is just a very big important part of American culture, with its influence and its character.” The dream Route 66, which runs for roughly 2,400 miles (3,860 kilometers) from Chicago through Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona before ending in Santa Monica, California, was stitched together a century ago from a collection of Native American trading routes and old dirt roads with the goal of linking the industrial Midwest to the Pacific coast. Oklahoma businessman Cyrus Avery, known as the Father of Route 66, saw it as more than just a way to cross the country efficiently. It was a chance to connect rural America and create new pockets of commerce. Avery knew the number 66 would be ripe for marketing and could be seared into drivers’ minds, and he was right: Route 66 has been immortalized in movies, books, including Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” and Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” and songs such as Bobby Troup’s “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66,” which served as an anthem for post-World War II optimism and mobility. Waves of migration Since its November 1926 designation as one of the nation’s original numbered highways, the onetime Main Street of America has embodied the promise of prosperity. It became a literal path of hope for migrants escaping drought-ravaged farms and poverty during the 1930s Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. And during World War II, it was used to move troops, equipment and workers out West. The postwar boom of the 1940s and 1950s were Route 66’s heyday, as it became a popular vacation route. Cars became more affordable, disposable income increased, and people began chasing freedom on the open road. “People generally have a sense of adventure, a sense curiosity. And you can find that on Route 66. This is the road of dreams,” author and historian Jim Hinckley said. Going mainstream Roadside diners and motels thrived, as crafty entrepreneurs dreamed up ways to part motorists from their money. There were rattlesnake pits, totem poles, trading posts, caverns where Old West outlaws purportedly hung out, and modern engineering marvels like St. Louis’ gleaming steel arch. Barns were painted with larger-than-life ads, billboards teased local attractions, and neon was everywhere. The cherry on top? The food. There were places to grab and go, but also to sit down and relish a slice of home. The Cozy Dog Drive In — famous for its breaded hot dogs on a stick — has fit both bills since 1949. Inside the dining room in Springfield, Illinois, travelers tell tales of life on the highway. “The road wouldn’t be alive without the stories of all the places along it that kept it going from town to town,” third-generation owner Josh Waldmire said. “We just survive off each other. The road feeds us, and as long as we put our feelings and love back into the road, it will reverberate with the travelers and the stories of the people.” A divided highway Route 66 was an economic boon to the Native American tribes along the way. But although it brought tourists, it also left scars of eminent domain across tribal land and perpetuated stereotypes. More than half of the highway crossed through Indian Country, and vendor signs often made casual references to tipis and feathered headdresses — symbols easily appropriated for marketing but not always representative of the distinct cultures found along the route. At Laguna Pueblo west of Albuquerque, restaurants and service stations sprang up, some operated by military veterans from the pueblo who were masters at fixing everything from flat tires to busted radiators. Pueblo women adapted too, turning utilitarian pottery vessels into works of art coveted by tourists. Homemade bread and pies sealed the deal. Laguna leaders have long considered the road — or he-ya-nhee’ in the tribe’s language of Keres — as “the corridor of commerce,” said businessman and tribal member Ron Solimon. Capitalizing on that potential, the tribe has built a multimillion-dollar empire of casinos, burger stands and other businesses. There were also dangers along the route, particularly during the Jim Crow era, when Black travelers had to rely on guides like the Green Book to find safe lodging and services. “Especially for long-distance travel, segregation was a fact of life,” said Matthew Pearce, state historian for the Oklahoma Historical Society. “And so Black motorists needed to know a safe place to go.” The Threatt Filling Station near the central Oklahoma community of Luther wasn’t listed in the Green Book, but it did serve as a safe haven between two sundown towns, where people who weren’t white needed to leave by sunset. The station offered barbecue and even baseball. Edward Threatt, whose grandparents opened the station around 1933, recalled a TV program about travelers getting their kicks on 66. “By and large, the Black traveler didn’t get a lot of kicks on Route 66,” he said. “And if they got some kicks, it wasn’t the kind you would think of.” A new direction President Dwight Eisenhower’s vision for a modern interstate highway system eventually led to Route 66 being decommissioned as a federal highway in 1985. Some towns along the route died, and it fell to local governments, state historical societies, and private businesses to preserve their sections of the famed road. A driving force was Angel Delgadillo, a barber who lobbied the Arizona Legislature to designate the road as a historic highway. He saved Seligman from turning into a ghost town and set the bar for preservation elsewhere. In New Mexico, original sketches for neon signs have been preserved, Route 66-themed murals abound and developers in Albuquerque have restored motor lodges along the longest urban stretch of the road still intact. More than 90% of the road is still drivable in California. Cadillac Ranch in the Texas Panhandle offers the chance to spray-paint half-buried cars. And at the Mississippi River, travelers can walk or bike across the old Chain of Rocks Bridge. More than 250 of the route’s buildings, districts and road segments are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. But it’s more than bricks and asphalt that fuel the fascination. “Some of the most interesting and fun things that happen to people when they travel the route is running into somebody they know or some happenstance thing that comes totally unexpected,” said author and historian Jim Ross. “And that’s a great part of the Route 66 experience.” Associated Press writers John O’Connor in Springfield, Illinois, and Sean Murphy in Oklahoma City contributed to this report. The post Route 66, a quintessential American road trip heavy on kitsch and history, turns 100 appeared first on ICT. From ICT via This RSS Feed.
1. 🖼️ If. I. Fits… (direct link) (👍870 👎4) from cats ([email protected]) Posted by ickplant 2. 🖼️ I see a lot of AI generated stuff getting upvoted so here is my real dog, taken by me. It’s not great. (direct link) (👍861 👎19) from aww ([email protected]) Posted by Crackhappy 3. 🖼️ A ceramic fox left to me by my Babushka (grandma) (direct link) (👍470 👎2) from Foxes ([email protected]) Posted by ickplant 4. 🖼️ You are safe with Jessie! (direct link) (👍396 👎3) from Animals with Jobs ([email protected]) Posted by ickplant 5. 🖼️ Wait, who am I again?! (direct link) (👍392 👎4) from Opossums ([email protected]) Posted by PopcornPrincess 6. 🖼️ My Zeusy left to wait at the rainbow bridge this morning 💔 (direct link) (👍371 👎7) from Dogs ([email protected]) Zeus, rescued from a shelter during COVID, quickly became our sweet, gentle companion. He loved cuddles at home, park walks, and even snuggling my belly during pregnancy. When tumors plagued him and he stopped eating, we chose euthanasia at home. He spent last days with family, stories, and hugs. Rest in peace, best boy and big brother. 🖍🤖 Posted by AcidiclyBasicGlitch 7. 🖼️ coins (direct link) (👍350 👎1) from Superbowl ([email protected]) cross-posted from: https://quokk.au/c/historymemes/p/806332/coins Posted by homesweethomeMrL 8. 🖼️ Pocket bats (direct link) (👍340 👎0) from Bats ([email protected]) Posted by ickplant 9. 🖼️ Finally some statistics (direct link) (👍186 👎1) from bunnies ([email protected]) Also here’s a picture of two bunnies: Posted by RmDebArc_5 10. 🖼️ Kingfisher fishing for his mate (direct link) (👍161 👎0) from birding ([email protected]) Two breeding pairs today, both males fishing for their mates who are on eggs Posted by tankplanker 11. 🖼️ Not a care in the world (direct link) (👍142 👎2) from Squirrels ([email protected]) Posted by ickplant 12. 🖼️ Currently trying to save this butt by feeding it sugar water (direct link) (👍121 👎0) from BeeButts ([email protected]) Posted by ickplant 13. 🖼️ Cute lil’ Conch (direct link) (👍122 👎2) from cute dogs, cats, and other animals ([email protected]) Maybe not conventionally cute I guess, but still a charmer with those wonky eyes! Found on the north coast of Cozumel Mexico. Posted by CopeCola 14. 🖼️ A masterpiece (direct link) (👍93 👎0) from Raccoons ([email protected]) Posted by ickplant 15. 🖼️ A hairy little loaf. (direct link) (👍87 👎3) from Tan Eggs ([email protected]) cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/c/aww/p/1952385/a-hairy-little-loaf Intelligent, but not artificial. Posted by dabster291 16. 🖼️ Jerusalem cricket was crossing the road as I was driving home. Pulled over for glamour shots. (direct link) (👍57 👎0) from Awwnverts ([email protected]) Posted by I_Fart_Glitter 17. 🖼️ Brain cell loading: 2% (direct link) (👍43 👎0) from guinea pigs ([email protected]) Posted by DeLorean12 18. 🖼️ Beautiful Roommate (direct link) (👍38 👎0) from Spiders ([email protected]) Unknown species. Lives in unused coat-closet. Hallway light is magenta for dramatic effect. Posted by brem 19. 🖼️ Compton Tortoiseshell (Nymphalis vaualbum) (direct link) (👍11 👎0) from Entomology ([email protected]) cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/45412282 Great Lakes region, USA. April 2026. Finally a decent day in the 50°F range. A ton of birds are back and the insects are out. My first butterfly of the year is a beautiful Compton Tortoiseshell perfectly matching its environment. I’m so stoked for spring! 🖍🤖 Posted by Tempus_Fugit 20. 📰 This is my favorite crow book. What is yours? (direct link) (👍10 👎0) from Crows ([email protected]) Posted by notsosure 21. 📰 Fat rat :) (direct link) (👍12 👎3) from Pet Rats ([email protected]) - YouTube Posted by Jagget 22. 🎦 Video abstract of “Flexible use of a multi-purpose tool by a cow” (2026) (direct link) (👍1 👎0) from Animals ([email protected]) cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/45077014 Author: Antonio J. Osuna-Mascaró, Alice M. I. Auersperg Source CC BY-SA 4.0 Posted by Innerworld Inactive communities 👻 These communities have had no posts in the last month: Animals@stad Pictures of animals, art incorporating animals, or anything fun. IllegallySmolCats Straight to jail. MEOW_IRL Memes for “cats of the soul”. Post relatable, weird, funny cats. All Orange Cats Share One Brain Cell Pictures of orange boys and girls, with and without the cell. Cats Post pictures of cute cats! Also feel free to ask questions about cats. DogTraining Welcome! This forum is about dog training and behavior. Here you’ll find content that will help you train your dogs. This community is geared towards modern, force-free, science based methods and recommendations. ducks place to post cute ducks, gooses allowed too 🦆🦆 Squirrel Spotting Society RULES: Bun Alert System A place to alert others/be alerted of bun sightings. Rabbits No description Lagoloaf Got a bunny? Does it loaf? Take a pic, share it here. What’s this Bug? A community for insect, arachnid, myriapod and general bug identification! bugs A casual place for Arthropoda. Elephants Post your favorite elephant pics and memes here. Anything goes as long as it’s elephant-related. Here is a popular post from one of the inactive communities. 🪦♻️ 🖼️ hair_irl (direct link), posted in MEOW_IRL (👍457 👎4) Posted by flipflop97 The main links are using lemmyverse.link which should redirect to the post on your own instance. If you have not used this before, you may need to go direct to https://lemmyverse.link/ and click on ‘configure instance’. Some apps will open posts correctly when using the direct link. ️🤖 indicates a summary generated using AI - 🖋️ TLDR This, 🖊️ news3k, 🖍 Deepseek. It is possible that the summary does not accurately convey the meaning of the original article, refer to the source material if in any doubt. Multicommunity: animals.json
Housing minister Matthew Pennycook has told parliament that the Starmer government does not support rent controls. The reason was that doing so would “make life more difficult for renters”. Since then, Pennycook has received the praise of – you guessed it – not renters: Labour’s housing minister’s opposition to rent controls welcomed by the country’s largest private landlord. Who’s side are Labour on? Renters or landlords. The answer is here. pic.twitter.com/olVzEIVTki — Zack Polanski (@ZackPolanski) April 15, 2026 Land of the landlords Pennycook told parliament: The government does not support the introduction of rent controls, which we believe could make life more difficult for renters. There is sufficient international evidence from countries such as Sweden and Germany, and from individual cities such as San Francisco, as well as the recent Scottish experience, to attest to the potential detrimental impacts of rent controls on tenants. There are reasons why rent controls can make things worse. Mostly the issue is they make it harder for landlords to make obscene profits from renters, which forces them to throw their toys out of the pram. In a nutshell, this is why something as essential as shelter shouldn’t be in the hands of money grubbers. Pennycook also said: I have looked at a wealth of evidence, particularly international evidence, of what the impact of first and second-generation rent controls are, as well as more subtle forms of rent control, which can have differential impacts on different groups. Such controls typically benefit settled and better-off tenants more than those looking for a home or needing to move. As Polanski noted, Pennycook’s inaction plan has gone down well with landlords: Pennycook’s opposition to rent controls was welcomed by Kurt Mueller, director of corporate affairs and executive committee member at Grainger, Britain’s largest listed private landlord. Mueller, highlighting the housing minister’s comments on the LinkedIn social media platform, said: “It’s good to see continued support from the UK Government for common sense with their steadfast commitment against rent controls and the damaging impact they would have for renters and the market generally.” Not everyone agrees, though. Living Rent Living Rent have sought to dispel myths on this topic. They go into further detail on their site, but in a nutshell: 1) Isn’t the only problem supply? Not really. Firstly, supply isn’t really as big of an issue as it’s made out to be – for instance, there is a higher proportion of empty bedrooms in the UK than at any time since the Great Plague (!). The ratio of rooms to people has never been higher in modern history. We’re not against new builds, especially not new social housing, but the supply question is kind of a red herring. … 2) All landlords would leave the sector and tenants would have nowhere to live. Landlords threaten to leave the sector if regulation is increased, but a quick glance across Europe is enough to dismiss this: the most heavily regulated private rented sectors are consistently the biggest. Germany, with the biggest PRS in Europe, is easily one of the most heavily regulated. … Lest we forget, we don’t actually need landlords to have houses. These unnecessary middlemen offer nothing and take everything. People claim that capitalism eliminates inefficiencies, but these people are waste personified. Failures Living Rent also noted: 3) Didn’t they fail when we had them last time? Landlords insist that the various rent controls which existed in the UK between 1915 and 1988 were disastrous for tenants. They point out that, over those 70 years, we went from almost nine in ten people renting privately to fewer than one in ten. They claim this is proof that rent controls devastate the private rented sector (PRS). Oh no, not the private rented sector – won’t somebody think of the landlords? Living rent continued: This argument, in fact, was a favourite of David Cameron, who told the House of Commons in 2013: “I do not support the idea of mass rent controls because I think we would see a massive decline in the private rented sector, which is what happened the last time we had such rent controls.” But that change, by absolutely any measure, was an enormous success of public policy. The reduction in the private rented sector can be explained in three obvious – and positive – ways: Millions of council homes were built to give people a secure, safe, affordable place to stay outside the PRS. Millions of people were able to buy their own homes through real-terms increases in wages and the expansion of mortgage availability. Millions of the properties that landlords were renting out were demolished in slum clearances because they were, well, slums. Without rent controls, it seems, slum-like conditions have once more returned. As writer Bob Lynn notes: In 21st century Britain, a shocking reality lurks behind closed doors. Families are living in conditions that harken back to the squalor of Victorian slums — damp walls, mould-infested rooms, and overcrowded spaces unfit for human habitation. … The word ‘slum’ conjures images of Dickensian London, with its overcrowded tenements and disease-ridden streets. Yet, for many low-income families today, this grim picture is not far from their daily reality. In 2022, around 3.8 million people in the UK experienced destitution, unable to afford basic necessities like food, warmth, and shelter. This figure has more than doubled since 2017, pointing to a rapidly worsening crisis. But yes, the real crime would be if rent didn’t leap up by obscene amounts every year. Do something Living Rent finished: 4) All economists agree that rent controls are bad You’ll often hear comments bandied around claiming that all economists agree rent controls are unambiguously bad. There is a grain of truth to this – a poll from 1992 showed a surprising degree of consensus that rent controls would have negative effects. But here’s the hitch. Nobody is proposing the type of rent controls that this supposed unanimous opposition is directed at. During the first world war, what are now called ‘first generation rent controls’ were brought in across most countries involved in the conflict – these were blunt caps or freezes on rent, and are rightly criticised for having negative side effects. But now we have 70 years of evidence from across the world about how to implement rent controls without unintended consequences. Now, as Housing Today have reported: The Green Party said its members elected in May will “use their voice to pressure the Labour government to give local authorities the power to introduce rent controls to curb overheating rents in their area.” The party has also pledged to “totally” abolish leasehold and introduce rent controls nationally if it gets into government. Leasehold (and the truth) is another sensitive area for Pennycook, as we reported: Oh… right. https://t.co/orvrBLe28D pic.twitter.com/lYnHBtjJmV — cladtrap (@cladtrap) March 27, 2026 Systems Sometimes well-meaning ideas can have unintended consequences. The solution isn’t to give up on fixing things; the solution, like Polanski argued, is to adapt until you get the right results. Labour’s solution to most issues is to bury their heads in the sand. The problem is that while they ignore the world and its problems, the world is moving on without them. Featured image via Parliament By Willem Moore From Canary via This RSS Feed.
On 15 April, social media was host to a great revelation – namely that swarms of bees had beset the tiny nation of Israel. Given Israel’s warmongering activities over the past few years, many have interpreted the great plague as God asking the Israelis to put a lid on it: WATCH: Chaos in Israel as hundreds of thousands of bees swarm across the country! Authorities are warning residents nationwide to shut their windows and stay off the streets! In the Old Testament, swarms of bees are seen as a sign of divine wrath or looming danger. pic.twitter.com/dfjCPDGAW0 — Mario ZNA (@MarioBojic) April 15, 2026 Israel and the Old Testament According to y-net Global, the swarm of bees is located in the southern Israeli city of Netivot. The swarm was localised to a shopping complex at the time, but footage has shown them settling on residents’ vehicles and balconies too. GB News reported: Residents were advised not to approach the bees – under any circumstances. The guidance came as the swarm occupied streets and public spaces across the commercial area. We should note that the above doesn’t apply if you’re part of the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF). If you’re a soldier, please feel free to approach the bees as you like. These insects are here to support you, and they like it when you dance about and make as much noise as possible. GB Newsalso reported: One social media user quoted a passage from the Bible, from Isaiah 7:18. “And it shall come to pass in that day, that the Lord shall hiss for the fly that is in the uttermost part of the rivers of Egypt, and for the bee that is in the land of Assyria,” they quote. The passage refers to God calling on foreign armies to invade Israel and judge Judah, one of Jacob’s sons. It’s worth bearing in mind that Israel’s neighbours have shown no interest in invading the Zionist nation – something which cannot be said in reverse. Additionally, as Pope Leo recently said: God does not bless any conflict. Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs. Military action will not create space for freedom or times of #Peace, which comes only from the patient promotion of coexistence and dialogue among peoples. The Isaiah passage above is from the Old Testament, whereas the Pope is talking that modern New Testament stuff. It’s certainly the case that Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu is heavily inspired by the Old Testament. This is particularly notable when he brands his opponents “Amalek” – the Biblical enemies of the Israelites: Netanyahu will NEVER accept peace. He sees Iran as the biblical Amalek that must be totally destroyed.The computer does not show this ending. “We are ready to resume the fighting at any moment.” “Our finger is on the trigger.” pic.twitter.com/RzU7Toc8Xe — Martin A. Armstrong (@ArmstrongEcon) April 8, 2026 As Mother Jonesreported: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israelis were united in their fight against Hamas, whom he described as an enemy of incomparable cruelty. “They are committed to completely eliminating this evil from the world,” Netanyahu said in Hebrew. He then added: “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember.” There are more than 23,000 verses in the Old Testament. The ones Netanyahu turned to, as Israeli forces launched their ground invasion in Gaza, are among its most violent—and have a long history of being used by Jews on the far right to justify killing Palestinians. As others quickly pointed out, God commands King Saul in the first Book of Samuel to kill every person in Amalek, a rival nation to ancient Israel. “This is what the Lord Almighty says,” the prophet Samuel tells Saul. “‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’” You can see how this passage would justify genocide in the eyes of certain true-believers. Unfortunately, some people use faith as cover for their own worst urges. Buzzed Footage online supposedly shows that the bees have swarmed a fighter plane: Israeli military planes are experiencing serious issues, with many unable to fly, after the largest swarm of bees in recorded history descended on Israel pic.twitter.com/DHcAjOfesc — The AI Robot Guy on X (@Housebots) April 15, 2026 We can’t confirm that ‘many fighter planes are unable to fly’ or that the swarm is the ‘largest in recorded history’, but the Daily Express US is reporting the following: The horde of winged insects, the largest ever recorded in the nation’s history, prevented a military plane from taking off when it overtook the engine. A massive swarm was also seen hanging from the aircraft’s wing. Relevant teams are anticipated to respond to the situation. One death machine out of action is still a result, so well done the bees. As the Proud Socialist account said on X/Twitter: The bees are doing more to stop Israel than the entire Democratic party. The Rational National YouTube is among those who have collated videos of the bees: Bee-lief Of course, the swarms are almost certainly just a seasonal thing. It is interesting, though, that a nation which acts with Old Testament intent has now experienced something like an Old Testament plague. If we believed in old school Biblical retribution, we’d possibly be worried right now. Featured image via X/Twitter By Willem Moore From Canary via This RSS Feed.
Jem Bendell had postponed his personal crisis long enough. For years, he’d been setting aside the worrying news about climate change he came across in a folder on his computer, waiting until he had the time (and emotional capacity) to look at it. In 2017, he took leave from his job as a professor of sustainability leadership at the University of Cumbria, in the United Kingdom, to finally dive in. He read that melting permafrost was releasing methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that speeds up warming — which in turn, melts more permafrost. It was a dangerous feedback loop that he had learned about as a student at Cambridge in the 1990s and had been told would likely start in 2050, if climate change went unchecked. Unfortunately, it arrived early. Bendell read more and more about unprecedented floods, devastating forest fires, and vanishing Arctic sea ice. It was all happening too fast. He became convinced that the rich world’s way of life — year-round strawberries, next-day delivery, flights across oceans — was nearing its end. That meant his life’s work had been, in his words, “all a bit deluded.” He’d just spent two decades arguing that businesses could help fix environmental problems and heal the flaws of capitalism, writing books, organizing international conferences, and teaching MBA courses on corporate sustainability. That had left little time for his family, his health, and, you know, having fun. All those sacrifices, and for what? “I felt raw, cracked open by all of this,” Bendell said, “and I had lost my previous sense of identity and purpose.” So he tried to fill the cracks with something else, searching for meaning in a world that felt like it was coming apart. Bendell channeled his thoughts into a paper he self-published online in July 2018, titled “Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy.” Normally, when people talked about adapting to climate change, they’d been looking for solutions that would allow their current way of life to continue. Bendell, instead, started from the premise that people will have to give up a lot, posing the question, “What do we value most that we want to keep, and how?” Bendell says he began questioning his life’s work when he realized the havoc climate change was wreaking on the planet. Tito Bagaskoro Deep Adaptation warned that a near-term collapse was coming, and that people needed to get ready to learn to accept it — emotionally, socially, and practically. (An academic journal had rejected it for being too strong in its conclusions.) Though climate change had long been talked about as a challenge for future generations, Bendell saw it as an impending catastrophe. He defined “collapse” as “an uneven ending of our normal modes of sustenance, shelter, security, pleasure, identity, and meaning.” The paper — which he described to me as a “howl of pain” — painted a picture of a bleak world, devoid of the comforts of modern life. “With the power down, soon you wouldn’t have water coming out of your tap,” he wrote. “You will depend on your neighbours for food and some warmth. You will become malnourished. You won’t know whether to stay or go. You will fear being violently killed before starving to death.” The paper was largely Bendell’s way of explaining why he was quitting the field of corporate sustainability after so many years. But it went far beyond its intended audience. Over the next year and half, it was downloaded more than a million times, he said, after which he stopped keeping track. Bendell wasn’t the first to suggest that climate change could tear modern life apart, but he helped popularize the idea. “I think he is the modern-day forefather of collapse understanding and awareness,” said Maya Frost, who lives in the Netherlands and is the founder of the consultancy Collapse Forward, which helps women turn their grief and despair about the state of the world into creative energy. A subset of people who are deeply alarmed about climate change have come to believe that it won’t just disrupt our lives; it will end life as we know it. Some call them “doomers”; they might consider themselves realists, preppers, or truth-tellers. The surge of interest in Bendell’s paper showed that people were craving answers about just how bad things will get, and how soon. Some were so shaken after reading it, they made major life decisions: to quit their jobs, to join a radical protest group, to move somewhere they felt would be safer to ride out the chaos. But Deep Adaptation also sparked a debate over whether Bendell went too far in his conclusions about climate science and what it meant for society, spreading a sense of defeat. Today, Bendell’s ominous predictions feel simultaneously dated and prescient. Climate change has slipped out of the public conversation amid wars in Gaza and Iran, and seemingly endless political chaos. It’s become just one of many contenders in scientists’ discussions over the possible drivers of doomsday, eclipsed by nuclear war and artificial intelligence. But the general mood has shifted toward the fate he imagined: Surveys show that the public’s optimism about the future is fading, hitting the lowest level since pollsters at Gallup started asking. A recent study found that one in three Americans now think the world will end in their lifetime. As a sense of dread creeps into more people’s lives, the specific threat may matter less than the ability to carry on in the dark. What happens when you accept the possibility of societal collapse — and then have to live with that conviction, day after day, year after year? As Bendell found out, you can’t stay in panic mode forever. Especially if the crisis you’re confronting is not a sudden shock, but a slow unraveling. The first thing to understand about the collapse of society is that the Hollywood version is wrong. Unlike the post-apocalyptic nightmare you’ve seen in movies, where everyone turns on each other in a moment of chaos and panic, civilizations don’t usually come to quick ends. Their falls happen gradually, over the course of decades or centuries, and might not have even been recognizable as a “collapse” to the people who lived through it. We could even be living through it now. “To a historian, the fall of Rome may look like an obvious event in global history,” Luke Kemp writes in his recent book Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse. “To a peasant in Spain, it may have barely been perceptible.” Kemp, who researches existential risk, writes that civilizations (aka “Goliaths”) contain “the seeds of their own demise.” They are hierarchies, with those in power extracting more and more wealth and power until inequality threatens to topple the whole thing over. “We’re not dealing with golden ages of empires that helped a flourishing population grow healthier and better,” Kemp said. “We tend to more or less be dealing with protection rackets.” In their fragile state, near the end, they become so vulnerable that they can be tipped into oblivion by a threat like a changing climate, disease, or invaders. For instance, the Roman Republic, with its senate and popular assemblies, gave way to dictatorships and eventually the tyrannical Roman Empire. As its territory expanded, economic inequality and corruption deepened, and its institutions became overstretched as it struggled to support the far-flung military operations it relied on for loot. As Kemp tells it, that fragility made Rome vulnerable to shocks that accelerated its long decline: rebelling Germanic troops, plague, and climate disruptions, such as volcanic eruptions that disrupted food supplies. But after the end of the empire, life went on. In fact, after the fall of Rome, archaeological evidence shows that people in the Mediterranean got taller, with fewer bone lesions and cavities in their teeth, signs that they were healthier. That’s not to say that the disintegration of society today would be all fine and dandy; it could even resemble the dire portrait Bendell painted. Kemp warns the risks now are uniquely dangerous: “Our world is scarred by a pandemic, beset by unprecedented global heating, riven by inequality, dizzied by rapid technological change, and living under the shadow of around 10,000 stockpiled nuclear warheads,” he writes. There’s a long tradition of people prophesying the end is near, from Nostradamus to Y2K survivalists, and their stories borrow from the fears of their day — plagues, famine, or modern technology gone wrong. Climate change burst into the apocalypse conversation in the late 2010s, when scary scientific predictions about climate change were in vogue. In 2017, the journalist David Wallace-Wells wrote a viral article in New York Magazine titled “The Uninhabitable Earth” (subhead: “Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak — sooner than you think”). Scientists worried about climate “tipping points” — points of no return in critical Earth systems — and called on governments to do something about rising emissions. So when Bendell’s paper landed, people were already primed to expect the worst. And once Deep Adaptation was out in the world, it took on a life of its own. A month after Bendell had released the paper, with no publicity whatsoever, he’d gotten 300 emails from strangers around the world. “There were people who were just waking up to this and emotionally troubled by it,” he said. Bendell didn’t want to be in charge of some new movement, but he wanted the newly alarmed to have a way to find each other and get support. He set up the Deep Adaptation Forum online and then left, letting volunteers run it. Deep Adaptation groups sprung up around the globe, in places as distant as India, Hungary, and Chile. In the United Kingdom, where Bendell lived, people read his paper and quit their jobs to join a new activist group called Extinction Rebellion. Members blocked roads and occupied museums in brightly colored, theatrical protests meant to force people to pay attention to the climate crisis. Environmental activists carry a coffin with “our future” written on it to the gates of Buckingham Palace in central London in 2018 during a demonstration organized by Extinction Rebellion. Niklas Halle’n / AFP via Getty Images “This was all very surprising to me, because I didn’t think going out there to try and get arrested, to disrupt normal life, to put this on the front pages, to try to get bold action from the government on carbon cuts, would be the most obvious response to the paper,” Bendell said. The problem was, a lot of climate advocates still needed hope to confront what felt like an existential crisis, and they thought his paper did a pretty good job of destroying it. “Experts got annoyed,” Bendell said with a laugh. “Some of them very annoyed.” Online critics of the fear-forward approach of writers like Bendell and Wallace-Wells called it “doomism”; they thought laying out worst-case scenarios was just as dangerous as denial since it could spur resignation instead of resistance. They pointed to social science research showing that all this talk of doom could overwhelm people, leading them to check out emotionally. Climate scientists, meanwhile, raised a narrower critique: that Bendell’s conclusion — the end of modern life was inevitable — went beyond what the scientific consensus could support. They challenged Bendell’s portrayal of climate “tipping points,” saying that his claims about melting Arctic sea ice and methane escaping from permafrost were exaggerated or cherry-picked. In response, Bendell acknowledged a few corrections in 2020 and updated his paper, adding a caveat that he couldn’t prove the collapse of society was certain. His conviction wasn’t based solely on climate science, after all, but his instincts about how society would respond to environmental chaos. Bendell delivers a keynote at a United Nations conference in 2018. Tony Wilkinson By mid-2020, according to Bendell, there was a widespread effort to paint Deep Adaptation as unhelpful doomism, debunk the paper, and smear him. He described it as a shocking and painful experience, and he coped by reading the book The Courage to Be Disliked, by the Japanese writers Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga. When he responded to criticism, often coming from young people, he admits he often came across as an arrogant, older professor. “It was all a bit awkward,” he said. But he felt compelled to defend the Deep Adaptation community, because they were trying to do something good: not just prepare for the worst, but to face it with honesty and compassion. Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, a scholar of societal transformation, has also experienced blowback from talking about how modern society might break down. In her books, she’s argued that the oppressive, unsustainable mindset underpinning the status quo is reaching its limits, and we need to learn to let it go. (“What if you know — in your bones, not just in your mind — that major social and ecological collapse is on the horizon?” she wrote in her book that came out last year, Outgrowing Modernity.) People would argue with her that airing these ideas was irresponsible, because it opens up a range of dangerous reactions. But she says it’s irresponsible not to talk about what the future holds. “If you haven’t really processed the feelings that you have around loss and grief in a very different way, when you are face-to-face with it, you won’t be able to coordinate — you will be stunned, right?” Machado de Oliveira said. She describes a handful of common ways people respond when they’re confronted with the idea of collapse. The first is avoidance: a coping strategy where, even though you can sense the danger, you don’t let it change your worldview or behavior. The second is the typical prepper response: “Let me just protect what I can protect, and arm myself to the teeth,” Machado de Oliveira said. Then there’s the party hard approach, the idea that if everything’s going to come crashing down, you might as well enjoy life while you can. The fourth is the impulse to exit, which Machado de Oliveira struggled with herself — “Like, if everything that is beautiful is being destroyed, why would I want to stay here?” And the fifth approach is misanthropy: deciding that humans themselves are the problem. At first, Bendell went toward the exit. He yearned to stop arguing and immerse himself in nature instead, exploring spirituality and his interest in music. He’d spent some time in Bali, where it was warm and cheaper to live, and ended up staying there through the COVID-19 pandemic, when he was working remotely and part-time at his university job. “I remember agreeing with friends that the worst way to spend my last years of modern convenience would be arguing with people about the evidence base for societal collapse,” he later wrote. Bendell teaches deep adaptation at a school in Bali in late 2018. Courtesy of Jem Bendell But it wasn’t long before the siren call of societal collapse beckoned again. He knew it wasn’t just him; lots of people were worried: A survey in 2021 showed that half of young people in several countries around the world believed humanity was doomed. One day, he was strolling along the beach and listening to a message from Clare Farrell, one of the founders of Extinction Rebellion, when he heard her say, “It’s time you got on the front foot.” As he looked out at the waves crashing ashore, he felt a mix of emotions, even a strange sort of joy. Because he knew it was time to dive back into what he called “the most annoying and uninspiring topic there is — the collapse of modern societies.” When Bendell wrote the Deep Adaptation paper in 2018, the question of when modern society would disintegrate felt urgent. “Should you drop everything now and move somewhere more suitable for self-sufficiency?” he wrote. “Should you be spending time reading the rest of this article? Should I even finish writing it?” But three years later, as he dove deeper into research for a new book, he came to understand that collapse was often not as quick, or as obvious, as he had assumed. Not an asteroid that wipes out billions of people overnight, but a series of tragedies that unfold gradually and unevenly. Bendell published his book Breaking Together in 2023, taking a more thorough look at how modern life might crumble, from the economy to modern agriculture. The process was actually already underway, he argued, after starting sometime before 2016 — a point at which measurements of people’s quality of life around the world began to plateau or decline, after years of steadily rising. Once he’d reached that conclusion, it became a lens to make sense of what was happening in the world: rising food prices, weird misinformation spreading online, the steady drumbeat of disasters on the news. Instead of taking everything in isolation, Bendell saw signs we were living in a rapidly declining industrial society. People in the Deep Adaptation movement, which expanded on its own without Bendell’s help, have been uniquely attuned to the signs of turmoil around them. When COVID-19 hit, the Deep Adaptation group in Auroville, India, mobilized quickly to help migrant construction workers who were stranded nearby because of the lockdowns, Bendell said. “For the people who showed up at the Deep Adaptation group, it was very natural to them,” he said. “They’d been sort of ready for disasters and disruption to strike.” In recent years, there have been efforts to reframe the prepper stereotype, characterizing disaster preparedness as a form of mutual aid and neighborly support, bucking the image of a scared man hiding in a bunker piled with canned food and ammunition. More in this series Prepping for a disaster? You’ll probably want to pack a little treat. Frida Garza Hungary’s Deep Adaptation branch, the largest in the world, has more than 25,000 members on Facebook, and in-person meetups in 16 places around the country, according to Krisztina Csapo, a mental health professional who specializes in grief and climate psychology and also moderates the group’s Facebook page. “I always emphasize that this is a support group for those brave people who have the courage to face reality,” she said. Hungary is feeling the effects of global warming faster than the rest of Europe, with intense heat waves, drought, and other extremes threatening the viability of growing food in the country’s main agricultural region. In addition to emotional support, the Deep Adaptation group has provided practical guidance on how to prepare for disaster, including self-defense classes and training in permaculture (a way of growing food that imitates natural ecosystems). There’s also a program in development to help parents, teachers, and young people navigate the fraying of systems, with resources grounded in psychology. Groups like Deep Adaptation play a role in helping people understand that they aren’t alone, said Frost, who helps “collapse-aware” people work through their emotions. But she says they can sometimes be counterproductive. “You get in that pattern of, every week, talking about how bad things are,” she said. She works with people who were just starting to feel better about things, only to have another conversation about collapse that left them devastated again. “It’s like ripping off the scab every week,” Frost said. Others argue that the word “collapse,” with its slippery definition, might be a problem in itself. Dagomar Degroot, an environmental history professor at Georgetown University, said that there’s little evidence, at the moment, that we’re living through a collapse in the way most people think of it — that is, a massive and abrupt drop in population, which is quite rare in history. The clearest examples of that, he said, were the Black Death in the 14th century, or the catastrophic disintegration of Indigenous societies in the Americas following European conquest. “If you’re focused on climate, I think, from my perspective at least, there are no signs that this is imminent,” Degroot said. Yet Degroot acknowledges that big, society-shaping changes are coming, no matter what you call them. “If you look at coastal areas around the United States, there’s a very good chance that in one, two centuries, there will be a massive migration,” he said. “At what point is that a collapse of the coast of the United States versus an example of resilient adaptation?” For Bendell, the question of whether society is collapsing comes down to how comprehensive those shifts are, and how hard they are to reverse — with hitting ecological limits being especially tough to recover from. In Breaking Together, he predicts that the industrial, consumer lifestyles some people enjoy now will have vanished in most countries by the end of this decade. It’s a strong claim. But the years since Bendell’s Deep Adaptation paper came out have reinforced the sense that modern life is brittle, maybe on the edge of breaking. A pandemic, economic shocks, and rising political violence have played out against a backdrop of worsening drought, fires, and floods. In some ways, the outlook for global warming is less dire than it looked a decade ago, with the worst-case scenario for emissions now looking unlikely as countries have accelerated the adoption of clean energy. In other ways, it looks worse: Activists had tried to rally the world around limiting temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius — a threat to the existence of low-lying nations as sea levels rise, and a point of no return for coral reefs — but that goal is now out of reach. The planet appears to have crossed the 1.5-degree threshold. On top of that, the warming that’s already here is having much more widespread and severe effects than many scientists had anticipated, including melting permafrost, forests ravaged by wildfires and pests, and supercharged droughts and heat waves that damage food production. The broader dynamic has changed the way many people think about the collapse of society; it’s less of a fringe conviction, and more of just another way of making sense of what’s already happening. “‘Polite society’ now feels that collapse is a reputable topic to muse upon,” Bendell wrote to me. The implicit message, he said, “is that smart people are right to be worried but not alarmed, and can feel safer and more confident by having ways to talk about it.” It’s no longer taboo to talk about the breakdown of society. But most people resist truly letting the idea in, and letting it change them the way it changed Bendell. There’s still an instinct to hide the most terrifying revelations. Earlier this year, the news came out that the United Kingdom had suppressed a report looking at the connections between global biodiversity loss, ecosystem degradation, and national security for being too negative. An abridged version the government was forced to release found a “realistic possibility” of a “global competition for food” starting in the early 2030s, due to the decline of forests and rivers fed by melting glaciers. The full report, viewed by the British newspaper The Times, warned of much worse: that ecosystems around the world could soon pass tipping points that would be virtually impossible to come back from, and that this could motivate eco-terrorism, drive migration that leads to yet more polarized politics, and cause conflicts between countries over what remained. You can see why Bendell, clued in to these kinds of national security reports, started his own organic farm in Bali in 2023. “In some ways, having your own garden, though, is not much better than having your own bunker,” he said. Sure, you can feed yourself, but what about the hundreds of other people nearby? He hoped to teach the locals in Bali how to farm more resiliently and lessen their dependence on synthetic pesticides and fertilizers, and offered free courses. But farmers had limited time, and there wasn’t as much interest in his classes — or as much of a market for his organic products — as he’d hoped. Jem Bendell poses for a photo at Bekandze Farm in 2023. Courtesy of Jem Bendell These days, Bendell doesn’t do many interviews or give lots of talks, as he’s trying to preserve time for what makes his life richer: music, meditation retreats, and spending time with friends. He launched a monthly dialogue discussing how to “live well” at a time when society is fracturing and the world faces an overlapping “metacrisis,” which paying subscribers to his blog can join. But there’s always the background awareness that a dramatic rupture might be around the corner. In one breath, he told me he was trying to protect his emotional and mental well-being and enjoy being alive; in the next, he mused about whether “multi-breadbasket failure” of major crop harvests could happen any year now. As time passed, his feelings have changed, too. “You can’t stay in an emotion of panic or shock or grief or despair, where those are sort of dominating emotions,” he said. Even though the sense of panic sometimes returns, it’s like greeting a familiar companion: “‘Oh, there’s panic, hello panic’ — rather than it consuming me.” His partner is also an environmentalist worried about the fragility of modern life — she took up archery a decade ago for that reason. She’s also ready to start a family, while he’s not sure about having kids, imagining what they might say to him one day about the decision to bring them into a world on the brink. Bendell wonders if his partner’s way of looking at things is better, and he’s trying to warm up to the idea of having a family. “It might be a deeper integration of collapse awareness, where you don’t let the sense of dread or foreboding limit what you do now,” he said. As Bendell ponders what to do next, he’s thinking about how to help his loved ones through a “lesser collapse,” rather than a single, catastrophic conclusion. “Things don’t end, just because life as we knew it is ending.” This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What to expect when you’re expecting the end of the world on Apr 8, 2026. From Grist via This RSS Feed.
This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center. Goat meat goes down like big shards of glass when the symptoms set in. The local livestock, the main source of available nutrients, becomes nearly impossible to swallow. It feels, the sufferers say, like deep wounds have been sliced into their throats. In Kargi, a remote desert village in the far north of Kenya, cancers of the digestive tract plague the population at unusually high rates. The disease most often attacks the esophagus, though stomach cancer is also common. Some patients think it’s a punishment from God. The evidence on the ground suggests it’s more likely from a multinational oil company. In the 1980s, foreign work crews dressed like astronauts descended on the village of Kargi and the surrounding Chalbi Desert to drill for oil. They spent five unsuccessful years boring nearly a dozen wells thousands of feet into the ground. The men were from Amoco, an American oil company now owned by BP. The crews then drove off their bulldozers, packed up their protective equipment, and vanished. One of the only traces to mark their presence was a dry white substance scattered on the ground, close to the water wells used by residents and their livestock. An Intercept investigation drawn from on-the-ground interviews with dozens of Kargi residents, government and corporate reports spanning decades, court filings, and public hearings traces Amoco’s failure to clean up its waste to the ongoing pollution of Kargi. The substance the company left behind contained heavy metals and known carcinogens, but because of a lack of testing and thorough scientific study, it isn’t clear if the waste directly caused cancer in the community. What is clear is that residents ate it. Kargi has one of the highest poverty and malnutrition rates in Kenya, and when locals discovered the flaky substance around the wells, many believed it was natural salt and started using it to cook their food. The water was contaminated. High levels of carcinogenic toxic chemicals, namely nitrates, had seeped into surrounding boreholes and wells — the only water supply in the desert. Animals began dying in the thousands. And people started getting cancer. By the early 2000s, the cancer rate in the community was three times the national average. The area’s state representative asked the government to investigate the correlation between the disease plaguing his constituents and the drilling waste that had been left behind. Now, across the manyattas — communities of traditional homes constructed from sticks and patchworks of old clothing — in Kargi and surrounding villages, everybody claims to know someone afflicted by the disease. The “salt” still remains scattered where Amoco, now part of British Petroleum, once searched for oil. What’s clear now, from court records and environmental tests, is that the white clayey substance collected adjacent to Amoco’s wells was a tool the company used to help drill for oil, that it contained a variety of heavy metals, and that the wells were not properly sealed. The pollution and disease inspired the first-ever lawsuit filed on the basis of Kenya’s constitutional right to a safe and healthy environment in 2020, when residents of Kargi and other communities in the Chalbi Desert sued the Kenyan national and county governments. They demanded a supply of clean water for people and animals, and they blamed Kenya for failing to police Amoco’s damage to the environment. Six years later, it’s still crawling through the court system. The Amoco case was the start of a pattern of identifying environmental destruction across the East African country. In the last few years, similar cases have been popping up nationwide, accusing the local and national governments of failing to clean up the waste that other multinational oil companies have left behind, subjecting residents to drink contaminated water. A lack of adequate testing and general neglect of Kargi and its surrounding areas makes it difficult to directly correlate cancer to the waste Amoco left behind. But high levels of carcinogenic toxins, including nitrates and arsenic — both commonly used in drilling wells — have been found in the area’s drinking water over the years, in sporadic tests conducted by the Kenyan government and nonprofit organizations. No official cleanup has ever been done. Neither BP nor the Kenyan government responded to repeated requests for comment. “We were just told to take her back home and wait for her time.” In Kargi, residents told The Intercept that Amoco’s footprint has left them in a state of constant despair. Gumathi Galnahgalle, a village elder in his mid-40s, said the community began to notice people falling ill in the years after Amoco left. When his mother stopped being able to swallow food, he took her to the hospital multiple times. “There was no treatment; we were just told to take her back home and wait for her time,” he said, standing in front of her grave. “There is no manyatta that has not been affected by this disease.” Gumathi Galnahgalle points out his mother’s grave. “There is no manyatta that has not been affected by this disease.” Photo: Georgia Gee Amoco’s African Expansion Amoco’s arrival in the 1980s was met with intrigue and excitement. As helicopters flew over Kargi, foreign crews came into the community to join traditional dances at night. The company employed locals to cook for their crews. In such a remote area, with few educational opportunities and literacy rates around 25 percent, the work was well-received. Lebeku Mirgichan, now in his early 70s, worked as a cook for Amoco for three years — earning 3,000 Kenyan shillings a month (equivalent to roughly $23 today). “At the time, that was a lot of money,” he told The Intercept. [ Related How the Environmental Lawyer Who Won a Massive Judgment Against Chevron Lost Everything](https://theintercept.com/2020/01/29/chevron-ecuador-lawsuit-steven-donziger/) Oil exploration was a “welcome development for many communities because it came with a lot of promise and opportunity for development,” said Omolade Adunbi, director of the African Studies Center at the University of Michigan. And it wasn’t just Amoco — Chevron and Total had also explored for oil in other parts of Marsabit, the more than 40,000-square-mile county that contains Kargi. Then-Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi, who commissioned the Amoco project, reportedly visited Kargi to watch the drilling. Amoco’s managing director told Moi that “the rock formation made the prospects for striking oil very encouraging and exciting.” Moi said “he had hope that economically viable oil deposits would be found.” Amoco, then a Midwest-based company, felt that it was on the cusp of becoming one of the world’s leading explorers and developers of oil — acquiring drilling rights in Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, and Burundi. Alfred O. Munk, Amoco’s manager of foreign affairs, told The Chicago Tribune, “Heads of state and competitors alike are coming to the sudden, belated conclusion that Amoco is a major international player.” With Moi’s blessing, Amoco drilled at least 10 oil wells that reached 10,000 feet deep. But in 1990, after five years and no real sign of oil, the project in Kargi was decommissioned. Amoco’s vehicles, guards, and land rovers abruptly left. In court records and interviews with the community, dozens said they were never officially informed of the project’s end. And no one came to clean it up. A scrap of metal found in the Chalbi Desert labeled “AMOCO KENYA,” seen in August 2024. Photo: Georgia Gee Mass Extinction The failure didn’t seem to affect Amoco’s business. In 1998, British Petroleum bought it in a $48 billion deal, the largest takeover of an American company by a foreign firm at the time. It changed its name to BP Amoco, then just BP in 2001. Most Amoco stations in the U.S. were converted to BP’s brand. But in Kargi and its surrounding villages, animals were dying. Across the Chalbi Desert — where over 90 percent of the population of 30,000 is considered impoverished — most people survive off their livestock, eating only the meat and milk of goats, sheep, and camels. Due to the area’s aridity, there is no piped water, and communities rely on groundwater from boreholes and shallow wells. In the 1990s, after drinking water from a borehole next to an abandoned well that Amoco had drilled, a flock of sheep and goats died in the neighboring village of Balesa, court records allege. Then, in the early 2000s, 7,000 sheep and goats died under similar circumstances, residents told The Intercept. According to court records, a water quality report conducted by the government immediately after the mass death confirmed that over 600 animals died within two hours of taking the water. The water was found to contain high levels of nitrates, a type of salt and chemical compound that gets dissolved into drilling material for a variety of purposes: as powerful explosives to locate oil, to stop bacteria from growing in wells, and as an additive to drilling mud to strengthen the walls of a well. When consumed in high amounts, nitrates can be extremely toxic and stop mammals’ blood from carrying oxygen. A government team was sent to the area on a fact-finding mission in 2003, according to court documents. They recommended that the community should not give the water to infants and that the veterinary department should carry out toxicology tests in Kargi. It also found that the wells had not been properly sealed. A 2004 government report concluded that “the claims of the presence of esophagus cancer in the region were everywhere the team visited and concern is overwhelmingly evident as reported by medical personnel and local community.” Subsequent tests commissioned by a local nonprofit organization found that levels of nitrates and arsenic were high in Kargi waters. Five years later, a prospective report by a Swedish oil company, Lundin, which was planning to look for oil and other mining materials, confirmed that a “white clayey substance used to cool drill bits by Amoco while drilling was collected adjacent to the well.” Lundin tested it and found extremely high alkaline levels — which can cause chemicals to be corrosive and destroy skin when spilled. The former Amoco cook, Mirgichan, alongside two other community members who also worked for Amoco, told The Intercept that they remember watching workers’ skin start to peel off when they worked with drilling materials. In its report, Lundin found the substance to be “extremely saline and sodic” and that it was related to “abundant” claims about related health issues by the local communities, including dying livestock and cancer cases. Between 2007 and 2009, multiple tests on the water found that it was not meeting the World Health Organization recommended standards, according to court records. The Kenyan water resources authority declared that it was not safe for human consumption. A local nonprofit found that high levels of nitrates and arsenic were in the water, and they were the probable cause of the livestock deaths. By then, people were dying. People and animals at the local livestock market in August 2024. Photo: Georgia Gee In Search of Nutrients In Kargi, where food is scarce, community members kept finding the white substance that Amoco left behind and decided to put it to use, packing it up and using it to cook. The area, littered with salt-like mounds, became so popular with residents that it was named kwa chuvmi, loosely translated to “where there is salt.” There are conflicting reports over what exactly the “salt” was. According to Kenyan court documents, the salt-like substance was actually two heavy drilling chemicals: barite and bentonite. Barite is a mineral used in large quantities to increase the density of drilling fluids, and bentonite, a clay-like substance often referred to as drilling mud, helps in carrying cuttings to the surface and stabilizing boreholes. The chemicals can have “catastrophic effects,” on the environment and people, said James Njuguna, an engineering professor at Robert Gordon University. According to tests undertaken by Lundin, Amoco used “a white material that could pass for salt like substance,” but was “essentially a special clay material used to cool the drill bits.” It contained high levels of calcium, magnesium, sodium, and electrical conductivity. Between 2006 and 2009, records from the only health center in Kargi, a village area with only 10,000 residents, registered 65 cancer-related deaths — which health workers said was largely throat cancer — or a rate nearly three times higher than the national average, according to government reports. “There are many orphans here. And yet, we still do not understand this disease.” In 2008, Safi Mirkalkona’s sister died from stomach cancer just after giving birth, leaving behind the baby and four other small children. There was no medicine or treatment available, and she was advised to stay at home. “There are many orphans here,” Mirkalkona told The Intercept. “And yet, we still do not understand this disease.” The same year, Joseph Lemasolai Lekuton, who represented Kargi and the surrounding area in Kenya’s national assembly, brought the issue to the Parliament. “Strange diseases started occurring in the specific areas where oil was drilled,” he said. “I do not know how we can possibly explain the sudden emergence of cancer cases.” “It is really embarrassing that we sit here and … years later people are still dying,” Lekuton continued in his speech. “We have a survey that has revealed shocking statistics of men and women who are ailing from throat cancer and many have died.” But leaders, including in the energy ministry, were dismissive and said no connection had been found between oil exploration and cancer cases. By 2009, a community member was dying of cancer every month, according to a local news report. The symptoms and deterioration of residents were similar. The first was an inability to swallow meat. The patients were then referred for a biopsy, “but the majority prefer to go back home and wait to die,” the report said. Some tested positive for esophageal cancer. Safi Mirkalkona in her manyatta in August 2024. In 2008, Mirkalkona’s sister died from stomach cancer, leaving behind five children. Photo: Georgia Gee Desert of Death Years went by with no answers. In 2013, a documentary titled “Desert of Death” aired on Kenyan national television on throat and stomach cancer patients in the county, suggesting that waste left behind after failed oil prospecting had a connection to the disease. The youngest cancer patient featured was 3 years old. The documentary drew countrywide attention, prompting further discussions in the government. “I come from Kargi Village, and I have about 150 names of those who have died as a result of that disease,” Godana Hargura, senator of Marsabit, said in a government hearing in 2015. “The situation is so desperate.” In Kargi, there is only one health center serving the 10,000 residents. There is no doctor — just a clinical officer, a nurse, and a nutritionist. “People normally come too late. Most of the people are sick, but they don’t even know that they are sick,” said Abraham Situma, the clinical officer. “We really need more human resources.” Situma often refers the cases to Marsabit county hospital, a two-hour drive from Kargi. Following that, many patients are then referred to a hospital in Meru, over 300 miles away. But, Situma said, most prefer to just stay in Kargi and pass away at home. So many people have died in their homes that they became labeled the “manyattas of death.” In July 2024, separate from the court case, the community petitioned Kenya’s National Assembly to order a comprehensive and independent probe into cancer cases in the region. The community said they had documented close to 1,000 cancer-related fatalities in the last decade, all attributed to the consumption of contaminated water. The fatalities were reported in Kargi and other surrounding areas, but only 100 families had the victims’ health records, because their culture dictated that the dead be buried with documents. [ Related How Exxon Captured a Country Without Firing a Shot](https://theintercept.com/2023/06/18/guyana-exxon-mobil-oil-drilling/) “I call it the social death of the environment,” said Adunbi, the University of Michigan professor. “The practice of extraction in many communities is literally sentencing people to a form of death, and there is no oversight on how many of these corporations have conducted their activities in these spaces.” “The practice of extraction in many communities is literally sentencing people to a form of death.” Meanwhile, the case filed in 2020 by the Kargi residents remains ongoing and continuously delayed. The petition detailed accusations against nine Kenyan and county governments — including the attorney general; ministries of environment, water, and sanitation; as well as the National Oil Corporation of Kenya — of being accountable for failing to ensure that Amoco caused little damage to the environment; disposed of waste oil, salt water, and refuse; and did not cause fluids or substance to escape to the environment. “The untold pain, suffering and hopelessness is exemplified by the rampant deaths that take place in the manyattas without the residents of Marsabit County having access to medical care, the long distance the resident have to travel seeking medical care and lack of financial capacity to carry the burden of the cancer scourge,” the petition reads. There were also plans to sue BP, but it has proved to be too legally complex, according to John Mwariri, acting executive director of Kituo Cha Sheria, the Kenyan legal aid group leading the case. The company had also long diverted its interest away from the Marsabit region into more fruitful areas in countries like Angola, Egypt, and Algeria. In Kargi, the community has lost hope in getting answers. In his manyatta, Galnahgalle, the village elder, awaits the same fate as his mother. “I keep being told to go home as there is no treatment,” he said. “Amoco should come and explain what they did here.” The post An American Company Drilled for Oil in Kenya — and Left Behind Soaring Cancer Rates appeared first on The Intercept. From The Intercept via This RSS Feed.
This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center. Goat meat goes down like big shards of glass when the symptoms set in. The local livestock, the main source of available nutrients, becomes nearly impossible to swallow. It feels, the sufferers say, like deep wounds have been sliced into their throats. In Kargi, a remote desert village in the far north of Kenya, cancers of the digestive tract plague the population at unusually high rates. The disease most often attacks the esophagus, though stomach cancer is also common. Some patients think it’s a punishment from God. The evidence on the ground suggests it’s more likely from a multinational oil company. In the 1980s, foreign work crews dressed like astronauts descended on the village of Kargi and the surrounding Chalbi Desert to drill for oil. They spent five unsuccessful years boring nearly a dozen wells thousands of feet into the ground. The men were from Amoco, an American oil company now owned by BP. The crews then drove off their bulldozers, packed up their protective equipment, and vanished. One of the only traces to mark their presence was a dry white substance scattered on the ground, close to the water wells used by residents and their livestock. An Intercept investigation drawn from on-the-ground interviews with dozens of Kargi residents, government and corporate reports spanning decades, court filings, and public hearings traces Amoco’s failure to clean up its waste to the ongoing pollution of Kargi. The substance the company left behind contained heavy metals and known carcinogens, but because of a lack of testing and thorough scientific study, it isn’t clear if the waste directly caused cancer in the community. What is clear is that residents ate it. Kargi has one of the highest poverty and malnutrition rates in Kenya, and when locals discovered the flaky substance around the wells, many believed it was natural salt and started using it to cook their food. The water was contaminated. High levels of carcinogenic toxic chemicals, namely nitrates, had seeped into surrounding boreholes and wells — the only water supply in the desert. Animals began dying in the thousands. And people started getting cancer. By the early 2000s, the cancer rate in the community was three times the national average. The area’s state representative asked the government to investigate the correlation between the disease plaguing his constituents and the drilling waste that had been left behind. Now, across the manyattas — communities of traditional homes constructed from sticks and patchworks of old clothing — in Kargi and surrounding villages, everybody claims to know someone afflicted by the disease. The “salt” still remains scattered where Amoco, now part of British Petroleum, once searched for oil. What’s clear now, from court records and environmental tests, is that the white clayey substance collected adjacent to Amoco’s wells was a tool the company used to help drill for oil, that it contained a variety of heavy metals, and that the wells were not properly sealed. The pollution and disease inspired the first-ever lawsuit filed on the basis of Kenya’s constitutional right to a safe and healthy environment in 2020, when residents of Kargi and other communities in the Chalbi Desert sued the Kenyan national and county governments. They demanded a supply of clean water for people and animals, and they blamed Kenya for failing to police Amoco’s damage to the environment. Six years later, it’s still crawling through the court system. The Amoco case was the start of a pattern of identifying environmental destruction across the East African country. In the last few years, similar cases have been popping up nationwide, accusing the local and national governments of failing to clean up the waste that other multinational oil companies have left behind, subjecting residents to drink contaminated water. A lack of adequate testing and general neglect of Kargi and its surrounding areas makes it difficult to directly correlate cancer to the waste Amoco left behind. But high levels of carcinogenic toxins, including nitrates and arsenic — both commonly used in drilling wells — have been found in the area’s drinking water over the years, in sporadic tests conducted by the Kenyan government and nonprofit organizations. No official cleanup has ever been done. Neither BP nor the Kenyan government responded to repeated requests for comment. “We were just told to take her back home and wait for her time.” In Kargi, residents told The Intercept that Amoco’s footprint has left them in a state of constant despair. Gumathi Galnahgalle, a village elder in his mid-40s, said the community began to notice people falling ill in the years after Amoco left. When his mother stopped being able to swallow food, he took her to the hospital multiple times. “There was no treatment; we were just told to take her back home and wait for her time,” he said, standing in front of her grave. “There is no manyatta that has not been affected by this disease.” Gumathi Galnahgalle points out his mother’s grave. “There is no manyatta that has not been affected by this disease.” Photo: Georgia Gee Amoco’s African Expansion Amoco’s arrival in the 1980s was met with intrigue and excitement. As helicopters flew over Kargi, foreign crews came into the community to join traditional dances at night. The company employed locals to cook for their crews. In such a remote area, with few educational opportunities and literacy rates around 25 percent, the work was well-received. Lebeku Mirgichan, now in his early 70s, worked as a cook for Amoco for three years — earning 3,000 Kenyan shillings a month (equivalent to roughly $23 today). “At the time, that was a lot of money,” he told The Intercept. [ Related How the Environmental Lawyer Who Won a Massive Judgment Against Chevron Lost Everything](https://theintercept.com/2020/01/29/chevron-ecuador-lawsuit-steven-donziger/) Oil exploration was a “welcome development for many communities because it came with a lot of promise and opportunity for development,” said Omolade Adunbi, director of the African Studies Center at the University of Michigan. And it wasn’t just Amoco — Chevron and Total had also explored for oil in other parts of Marsabit, the more than 40,000-square-mile county that contains Kargi. Then-Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi, who commissioned the Amoco project, reportedly visited Kargi to watch the drilling. Amoco’s managing director told Moi that “the rock formation made the prospects for striking oil very encouraging and exciting.” Moi said “he had hope that economically viable oil deposits would be found.” Amoco, then a Midwest-based company, felt that it was on the cusp of becoming one of the world’s leading explorers and developers of oil — acquiring drilling rights in Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, and Burundi. Alfred O. Munk, Amoco’s manager of foreign affairs, told The Chicago Tribune, “Heads of state and competitors alike are coming to the sudden, belated conclusion that Amoco is a major international player.” With Moi’s blessing, Amoco drilled at least 10 oil wells that reached 10,000 feet deep. But in 1990, after five years and no real sign of oil, the project in Kargi was decommissioned. Amoco’s vehicles, guards, and land rovers abruptly left. In court records and interviews with the community, dozens said they were never officially informed of the project’s end. And no one came to clean it up. A scrap of metal found in the Chalbi Desert labeled “AMOCO KENYA,” seen in August 2024. Photo: Georgia Gee Mass Extinction The failure didn’t seem to affect Amoco’s business. In 1998, British Petroleum bought it in a $48 billion deal, the largest takeover of an American company by a foreign firm at the time. It changed its name to BP Amoco, then just BP in 2001. Most Amoco stations in the U.S. were converted to BP’s brand. But in Kargi and its surrounding villages, animals were dying. Across the Chalbi Desert — where over 90 percent of the population of 30,000 is considered impoverished — most people survive off their livestock, eating only the meat and milk of goats, sheep, and camels. Due to the area’s aridity, there is no piped water, and communities rely on groundwater from boreholes and shallow wells. In the 1990s, after drinking water from a borehole next to an abandoned well that Amoco had drilled, a flock of sheep and goats died in the neighboring village of Balesa, court records allege. Then, in the early 2000s, 7,000 sheep and goats died under similar circumstances, residents told The Intercept. According to court records, a water quality report conducted by the government immediately after the mass death confirmed that over 600 animals died within two hours of taking the water. The water was found to contain high levels of nitrates, a type of salt and chemical compound that gets dissolved into drilling material for a variety of purposes: as powerful explosives to locate oil, to stop bacteria from growing in wells, and as an additive to drilling mud to strengthen the walls of a well. When consumed in high amounts, nitrates can be extremely toxic and stop mammals’ blood from carrying oxygen. A government team was sent to the area on a fact-finding mission in 2003, according to court documents. They recommended that the community should not give the water to infants and that the veterinary department should carry out toxicology tests in Kargi. It also found that the wells had not been properly sealed. A 2004 government report concluded that “the claims of the presence of esophagus cancer in the region were everywhere the team visited and concern is overwhelmingly evident as reported by medical personnel and local community.” Subsequent tests commissioned by a local nonprofit organization found that levels of nitrates and arsenic were high in Kargi waters. Five years later, a prospective report by a Swedish oil company, Lundin, which was planning to look for oil and other mining materials, confirmed that a “white clayey substance used to cool drill bits by Amoco while drilling was collected adjacent to the well.” Lundin tested it and found extremely high alkaline levels — which can cause chemicals to be corrosive and destroy skin when spilled. The former Amoco cook, Mirgichan, alongside two other community members who also worked for Amoco, told The Intercept that they remember watching workers’ skin start to peel off when they worked with drilling materials. In its report, Lundin found the substance to be “extremely saline and sodic” and that it was related to “abundant” claims about related health issues by the local communities, including dying livestock and cancer cases. Between 2007 and 2009, multiple tests on the water found that it was not meeting the World Health Organization recommended standards, according to court records. The Kenyan water resources authority declared that it was not safe for human consumption. A local nonprofit found that high levels of nitrates and arsenic were in the water, and they were the probable cause of the livestock deaths. By then, people were dying. People and animals at the local livestock market in August 2024. Photo: Georgia Gee In Search of Nutrients In Kargi, where food is scarce, community members kept finding the white substance that Amoco left behind and decided to put it to use, packing it up and using it to cook. The area, littered with salt-like mounds, became so popular with residents that it was named kwa chuvmi, loosely translated to “where there is salt.” There are conflicting reports over what exactly the “salt” was. According to Kenyan court documents, the salt-like substance was actually two heavy drilling chemicals: barite and bentonite. Barite is a mineral used in large quantities to increase the density of drilling fluids, and bentonite, a clay-like substance often referred to as drilling mud, helps in carrying cuttings to the surface and stabilizing boreholes. The chemicals can have “catastrophic effects,” on the environment and people, said James Njuguna, an engineering professor at Robert Gordon University. According to tests undertaken by Lundin, Amoco used “a white material that could pass for salt like substance,” but was “essentially a special clay material used to cool the drill bits.” It contained high levels of calcium, magnesium, sodium, and electrical conductivity. Between 2006 and 2009, records from the only health center in Kargi, a village area with only 10,000 residents, registered 65 cancer-related deaths — which health workers said was largely throat cancer — or a rate nearly three times higher than the national average, according to government reports. “There are many orphans here. And yet, we still do not understand this disease.” In 2008, Safi Mirkalkona’s sister died from stomach cancer just after giving birth, leaving behind the baby and four other small children. There was no medicine or treatment available, and she was advised to stay at home. “There are many orphans here,” Mirkalkona told The Intercept. “And yet, we still do not understand this disease.” The same year, Joseph Lemasolai Lekuton, who represented Kargi and the surrounding area in Kenya’s national assembly, brought the issue to the Parliament. “Strange diseases started occurring in the specific areas where oil was drilled,” he said. “I do not know how we can possibly explain the sudden emergence of cancer cases.” “It is really embarrassing that we sit here and … years later people are still dying,” Lekuton continued in his speech. “We have a survey that has revealed shocking statistics of men and women who are ailing from throat cancer and many have died.” But leaders, including in the energy ministry, were dismissive and said no connection had been found between oil exploration and cancer cases. By 2009, a community member was dying of cancer every month, according to a local news report. The symptoms and deterioration of residents were similar. The first was an inability to swallow meat. The patients were then referred for a biopsy, “but the majority prefer to go back home and wait to die,” the report said. Some tested positive for esophageal cancer. Safi Mirkalkona in her manyatta in August 2024. In 2008, Mirkalkona’s sister died from stomach cancer, leaving behind five children. Photo: Georgia Gee Desert of Death Years went by with no answers. In 2013, a documentary titled “Desert of Death” aired on Kenyan national television on throat and stomach cancer patients in the county, suggesting that waste left behind after failed oil prospecting had a connection to the disease. The youngest cancer patient featured was 3 years old. The documentary drew countrywide attention, prompting further discussions in the government. “I come from Kargi Village, and I have about 150 names of those who have died as a result of that disease,” Godana Hargura, senator of Marsabit, said in a government hearing in 2015. “The situation is so desperate.” In Kargi, there is only one health center serving the 10,000 residents. There is no doctor — just a clinical officer, a nurse, and a nutritionist. “People normally come too late. Most of the people are sick, but they don’t even know that they are sick,” said Abraham Situma, the clinical officer. “We really need more human resources.” Situma often refers the cases to Marsabit county hospital, a two-hour drive from Kargi. Following that, many patients are then referred to a hospital in Meru, over 300 miles away. But, Situma said, most prefer to just stay in Kargi and pass away at home. So many people have died in their homes that they became labeled the “manyattas of death.” In July 2024, separate from the court case, the community petitioned Kenya’s National Assembly to order a comprehensive and independent probe into cancer cases in the region. The community said they had documented close to 1,000 cancer-related fatalities in the last decade, all attributed to the consumption of contaminated water. The fatalities were reported in Kargi and other surrounding areas, but only 100 families had the victims’ health records, because their culture dictated that the dead be buried with documents. [ Related How Exxon Captured a Country Without Firing a Shot](https://theintercept.com/2023/06/18/guyana-exxon-mobil-oil-drilling/) “I call it the social death of the environment,” said Adunbi, the University of Michigan professor. “The practice of extraction in many communities is literally sentencing people to a form of death, and there is no oversight on how many of these corporations have conducted their activities in these spaces.” “The practice of extraction in many communities is literally sentencing people to a form of death.” Meanwhile, the case filed in 2020 by the Kargi residents remains ongoing and continuously delayed. The petition detailed accusations against nine Kenyan and county governments — including the attorney general; ministries of environment, water, and sanitation; as well as the National Oil Corporation of Kenya — of being accountable for failing to ensure that Amoco caused little damage to the environment; disposed of waste oil, salt water, and refuse; and did not cause fluids or substance to escape to the environment. “The untold pain, suffering and hopelessness is exemplified by the rampant deaths that take place in the manyattas without the residents of Marsabit County having access to medical care, the long distance the resident have to travel seeking medical care and lack of financial capacity to carry the burden of the cancer scourge,” the petition reads. There were also plans to sue BP, but it has proved to be too legally complex, according to John Mwariri, acting executive director of Kituo Cha Sheria, the Kenyan legal aid group leading the case. The company had also long diverted its interest away from the Marsabit region into more fruitful areas in countries like Angola, Egypt, and Algeria. In Kargi, the community has lost hope in getting answers. In his manyatta, Galnahgalle, the village elder, awaits the same fate as his mother. “I keep being told to go home as there is no treatment,” he said. “Amoco should come and explain what they did here.” The post An American Company Drilled for Oil in Kenya — and Left Behind Soaring Cancer Rates appeared first on The Intercept. From The Intercept via this RSS feed
Write many small programs as often as you can. That is, write new programs often, and make them small so you learn the full cycle of beginning, middle and end, over and over. This is the best way to learn. Learning programming consists of 3 main things (imo): 1) The problem: Learning to break a problem down and solve it in individual steps. eg. Fill Car With Gas: Turn Engine off Open fuel cap Get out of car walk to fuel pump etc etc This is fundamentally what you will end up telling the computer to do when you write code, breaking a big problem into smaller problems, and smaller problems into individual steps. Sometimes before writing a program, we will do the steps manually ourselves first to understand them. Then you write the code. Its like when telling your friend how to do something its much simpler when you’ve done it yourself before. 2) The Machine: When you’re first learning its not required to worry about the actual machine the computer is doing. Just to note a few quick things. The computer can really only do a few very simple things, almost everything the computer does is literally just combinations of the following very simple things: INPUT - Read a number from somewhere (from memory, from disk, from network, from a previous step) OPERATION - Do something with the number (add, subtract, multiply, compare etc) OUTPUT - Write a number somewhere (to the display, to memory, disk, network, to a subsequent step) Do combinations of any of the above IF some thing is true (eg. number is bigger than 10) 3) The Language(s): To tell our computer friend the steps we want it to do, we need to use a language it understands. Don’t get hung up on languages, in the end most of them have alot of similarities, and learning the core concepts is more important than memorising specific syntax. To say this another way, while syntax is important to USE a language, it doesn’t always have a huge bearing on the core concepts underneath. A classic beginner mistake is muddling the language vs the core computing concepts. In the end, almost whatever code you write, no matter the language, it ends up doing a combination of those simple steps from #2. The job of the language is to make it easy and efficient for a human to tell the computer which combinations of those steps from #2 we want the computer to do to achieve our task. And if the language has done its job, it will hide many of those tiny steps from us, so we can worry about the main steps which relate to our problem. Re. first language choice, python is probably a good starting point, since if you use it properly it’s often almost like writing in english to the computer. In the end it doesn’t matter so much as sticking with it, practicing and slowly learning the core concepts. In general any user friendly high level language will have an easy learning curve, Python, Javascript etc. General Tips: Learn some basic debugging & troubleshooting methods, at first this might just be displaying numbers during calculation steps to check the computer is doing what it should be doing, and then slowly move to more sophisticated methods. Along with basic commenting etiquette etc. Avoid stackoverflow like the plague. There is some good discussion there, but if you want to actually learn, you need understanding. And copy/pasting someone else’s code will not give you this. Same goes for chatgpt coding, autopilot etc. When googling deliberately search for the official manual/documentation, or even a tutorial is fine if it’s unfamiliar or the official docs aren’t easy for you to understand, but absolutely avoid pre-cooked answers on stackoverflow etc as google will also push them on you when googling programming stuff. The only exception is if you’re absolutely stuck, when doing learning exercises it’s ok to view someone else’s answer as a ‘solution’, but IMPORTANTLY, do not move forward until you have understood at least 90% of how and WHY they did it. Without that understanding you’re wasting your time, and sometimes you will even find mistakes in those answers, so blindly copying is only hurting you. Get onto IRC (or matrix, discord whatever), and TALK with other programmers. Don’t go running to someone every time you stumble, but you can learn ALOT from others when you put in the right amount of groundwork and sometimes you will learn just by seeing other people solving their own problems.
cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/39567 María Pérez lost power for about three months after Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico in September 2017. Her home in Salinas, on the island’s southern coast, sits near a river. As the hurricane knocked out the island’s grid and sent rainwaters surging down from the mountains, Perez’s house flooded with a swirling mix of muddy water and animal feces, rising 3 feet high and warping the hallways. For the next three months, she went without power as she cleaned out the home and began the long process of rebuilding. Five years later, when Pérez got word that Hurricane Fiona was expected to make landfall, she was prepared. This time, she and her family boarded up the doors and windows, sealed every opening with silicone, and evacuated to her daughter’s home, which lost power as the storm hit the island. Pérez has a heart condition that makes heat dangerous for her. She relies on air conditioning to stay cool, especially during the long summer months when temperatures can top 90 degrees Fahrenheit and the air is thick with humidity. With no power after Fiona, her health was once again at risk. The experiences cemented something in her: She needed electricity she could count on, independent of a grid that not only collapsed during storms but also carries the highest rate of outages in the country. Read Next Puerto Ricans are devising the food system of tomorrow Ayurella Horn-Muller So when she learned more than a year after Fiona that the U.S. federal government would make solar panels and battery storage available to low-income Puerto Ricans and people with medical conditions, she jumped at the chance. Over the next couple of years, she gathered documents proving she owned her home, submitted financial records showing she and her husband lived on $900 a month in Social Security payments, and hosted multiple visits from solar company representatives who measured the property, inspected the electrical setup, and assessed the feasibility of installation. She cleared every hurdle. Then in January, the Trump administration announced it was terminating the program’s funding. Overnight, the prospect of a dozen solar panels and a battery system to safeguard her health — a future she had spent more than a year working toward — vanished. “My turn was next,” Pérez told Grist. “It’s done in shifts, and I was next. Why did this happen?” A man in a wheelchair looks at a flooded road after the passage of Hurricane Fiona in Salinas, Puerto Rico, in September 2022. Jose Rodriguez / AFP via Getty Images Pérez was one of up to 40,000 low-income or medically vulnerable Puerto Ricans who were expected to receive solar panels and battery systems through the Energy Resilience Fund, a $1 billion program established by Congress in 2022. President Donald Trump and his administration — with the help of the Puerto Rican governor — have chipped away at the effort since reentering office, initially pausing funding before permanently rescinding the payments over the course of the year. Just 6,000 solar and battery systems were installed before the money disappeared. The Department of Energy has since redirected more than a third of the intended solar funding to the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, or PREPA, a government-owned utility with a checkered reputation on the island. The utility has for decades been plagued by chronic corruption and serial mismanagement, and for the last roughly nine years, it has been navigating bankruptcy proceedings, one of the longest utility bankruptcies in the country. PREPA also has a poor track record in effectively carrying out major improvement initiatives. After Hurricane Maria made landfall, Congress allocated more than $17 billion to modernize the island’s grid. But more than a decade later, PREPA has completed just 16 projects, spending less than $100 million of those funds. (Spokespeople for PREPA did not respond to a request for comment.) The Energy Department earmarked its latest infusion of cash for “key emergency activities designed to address critical vulnerabilities across generation, transmission, and distribution systems.” It also arranged for the grant to be “noncompetitive” — meaning it didn’t solicit bids before reallocating the solar funding to the utility. “Why would you cancel something that is working as intended and being executed, to give it to someone that has a bad history?” said one former Energy Department official, referencing PREPA. “Why are we risking these funds?” Puerto Rico’s grid has long been fragile and unreliable. The island depends largely on imported oil, gas, and coal for generating electricity. Although its population centers are clustered in the north around San Juan, most of the power plants are located on its southern coast. A network of transmission and distribution lines crisscrosses through mountainous terrain to move electricity across the island. When Hurricane Maria made landfall as a Category 4 storm, this network collapsed. High-speed winds twisted and flattened transmission towers. Substations flooded. Power lines snapped or toppled over, leading to the longest blackout in the country’s history. Every Puerto Rican on the island lost power. In fact, some residents in remote parts of the island went without it for nearly a year. Most of the roughly 3,000 people who died as a result of Maria were not felled by the hurricane itself, but by the collapse of the grid and health care infrastructure. Diabetics who needed insulin didn’t have a way to refrigerate their medicine. Dialysis patients couldn’t get the routine treatment they needed. And those who depended on oxygen machines and ventilators lost access. Estimates for repairing the island’s power lines topped $100 billion. Congress stepped in to provide funding, earmarking more than $15 billion to PREPA to rebuild its grid. The funding came at an opportune time for the utility. Just two months prior to Maria, saddled with $9 billion in bond debt and no clear path to paying it off, PREPA had filed for bankruptcy. With the infusion of federal cash, the utility now seemed to have the resources to both right its financial ship and rebuild a stronger grid in Maria’s wake. A worker repairs power lines about two weeks after Hurricane Maria swept through the island. Mario Tama / Getty Images Four years later, that optimistic outcome was longer on the horizon. Outages continued to be common, the cost of electricity on the island was double the national average, and communities faced long lead times to restore service after storms and flooding. These problems continued even after PREPA contracted out the job of generating electricity to Genera, a subsidiary of the natural gas company New Fortress Energy, and the job of moving that power across the island to Luma Energy. Privatizing these efforts was pitched as a solution to the island’s grid woes, but in practice, neither company substantially improved reliability or affordability for Puerto Ricans. In response, a cadre of nonprofits, private solar companies, and wealthy Puerto Ricans began installing rooftop solar and battery systems. Within a year of Hurricane Maria, more than 10,000 new solar and battery systems were installed by private parties — nearly double the uptake in all the years prior combined. By early 2022, some 42,000 rooftop solar systems were enrolled in the island’s net-metering program. When Hurricane Fiona hit, it put those solar systems to the test. By and large, those who had installed panels kept their lights on after the storm. Sunnova Energy, one of the major solar installers on the island, reported that 97 percent of its 30,000 customers had access to power in the days after the storm. That included fishermen who required electricity to refrigerate their catch, hospitals and fire stations that had set up solar for backup power, residents in remote parts of the island, and those who relied on power to operate medical equipment or refrigerate prescriptions. Aerial view of a solar microgrid in Adjuntas, Puerto Rico, in July 2025. Ricardo Arduengo / AFP via Getty Images The lessons from Fiona spurred lawmakers in Washington, D.C., to once again act. This time, with clear evidence of the resilience of a distributed energy system, new funding was specifically set aside for solar and battery systems for low-income Puerto Ricans and those who depended on electrical medical equipment. Led by the late Representative Raúl Grijalva, Congress eventually allocated $1 billion as part of an appropriations package “to carry out activities to improve the resilience of the Puerto Rican electric grid.” Jenniffer González-Colón, the governor of Puerto Rico, was then the resident commissioner for Puerto Rico, the island’s one non-voting member in the U.S. House of Representatives, and championed the effort alongside other congressional members. The task of interpreting the language in the appropriations package and disbursing the new funds fell to the Energy Department, which was helmed at the time by Jennifer Granholm, a Democrat appointed by then-President Joe Biden. Although Congress had said the money could be spent to assist low-income households with purchasing solar and battery systems, it did not mandate that this be the only use. To clarify, Energy Department officials began discussions with the lawmakers who had championed the funding and made clear the money was intended to be used for distributed solar systems, according to people involved in those conversations, who requested anonymity for fear of jeopardizing their current employment. As the agency was weighing important questions about the implementation of the program, Grijalva and other lawmakers sent a letter to Secretary Granholm in April 2023, emphasizing the role solar and battery systems had played in keeping lights on during Hurricane Fiona. “Residential solar and storage systems are critical lifelines when Puerto Rico’s power grid fails during natural disasters,” the letter said. It encouraged the department to consider “solar power and storage for individual households” and to “prioritize low-income people with disabilities.” Congress’ intent was not to duplicate existing federal efforts to repair the grid and strengthen the island’s energy systems, which were already funded to the tune of $20 billion thanks to the aid made available post-Maria. Instead, it wanted the agency to use the new $1 billion to “ensure that the most vulnerable households have access to localized power and backup battery storage,” said one of the Energy Department officials who attended the meetings with Grijalva and other lawmakers, including Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ritchie Torres, and Nydia Velázquez. The goal was to ensure that “if something else happens, another storm, another long-term outage happens while the long-term reconstruction is taking place, we don’t see what happened after Maria,” they added. The Energy Department immediately began designing programs to distribute the funds, identify local partners, and issue awards. It set up three main initiatives: About $490 million was directed to Sunnova Energy and Generac to install solar and battery systems for low-income households, especially residents reliant on powered medical devices or those living in areas prone to outages. Another $48 million was awarded to four nonprofits — Barrio Eléctrico, Environmental Defense Fund, Let’s Share the Sun Foundation, and Solar United Neighbors — to deploy up to 2,000 residential solar and storage systems for low-income Puerto Ricans with health issues. Another $365 million was awarded to solar companies and nonprofit groups to install solar and battery systems at community health care facilities and community centers. It took the better part of 2023 and 2024 to establish all three programs and begin disbursing funds. Just as some of the funding began flowing, Trump won his second term as president, vowing to undo Biden’s climate programs. Within a year, all three Puerto Rican solar initiatives were gone. Governor González-Colón’s position had shifted by then, too. In a separate press release the same day announcing the reallocation of funds to PREPA, she said that the Trump administration had prioritized the energy needs of Puerto Rico, and that the island could not rely “on piecemeal approaches with limited results.” (A spokesperson for the governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment.) Governor Jenniffer González-Colón welcomes then-Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to discuss security in March 2025, in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Edgardo Medina / NurPhoto via Getty Images The final nail in the coffin came in January when the Department of Energy announced in an email that it was cancelling $350 million in grants to set up systems for low-income households. “The electric system of Puerto Rico cannot afford to operate with more distributed solar,” the agency said. The funds haven’t officially been redirected to PREPA, but former DOE officials said the money will likely also end up in the utility’s coffers. A spokesperson for the Energy Department shared a link to a webpage with answers to frequently asked questions about the fund. The page, which was created six days after Grist first inquired about the funds, states that the department’s goal is to provide reliable power “for the greatest number of Puerto Ricans and provide a quicker end to the energy emergency.” By repairing existing fossil fuel power plants and modernizing the grid, “all 3.2 million residents, including low-income and medically vulnerable households, experience more reliable power,” the website notes. The page also states that it did not make the decision to cancel the solar programs lightly and said continuing to fund rooftop solar would “exacerbate reliability issues with the distribution grid and only cover a very small segment of the population.” While high levels of distributed solar can create grid management challenges, there’s little evidence that the uptick in rooftop solar installations has worsened the island’s grid reliability. When Wanda Ríos first learned about the $1 billion program, she knew it would benefit her neighbors in Salinas — and specifically the La Margarita community, where a majority of the residents are elderly and face significant health challenges. More than 80 percent of the homes in La Margarita, like that of María Pérez’s, are in a FEMA-designated floodplain. Every time the water levels rose, the power went out. At the time, just five houses out of around 300 in the neighborhood had battery and solar systems. “Because we have the river, everything gets shut down,” she said. “And that’s why it was important that everybody produce their own energy in their own house.” Ríos, who is a community organizer and leads the AbeynoCoop, an energy cooperative that has been trying to improve access to solar and battery systems in Salinas, began work securing federal funds in 2023. She got in touch with David Ortiz, a senior program director for Puerto Rico at Solar United Neighbors, a solar advocacy group. Together with other partners, they applied for a $6 million grant from the Energy Department’s pool. The funding would be sufficient to install about 150 solar systems in Salinas. Read Next An invisible, toxic chemical has been poisoning residents in Puerto Rico for decades Lylla Younes, Naveena Sadasivam, & Joaquín A. Rosado Lebrón By the winter of 2023, they learned the agency was awarding them the grant, but the work that followed to finalize it was immense. Ortiz, Rios, and their partners in the work had to identify community members who needed the systems and develop budgets estimating the cost of work. That meant knocking on doors and convincing residents that the systems could help them, and that they should take the time to collect the various financial and medical documents needed to qualify. It took more than a year to get everyone on board. But over the course of last year, the program came to a standstill. Ortiz needed a final green light or sign-off on a new budget and updated program costs, but he couldn’t get the agency to set up a meeting — let alone begin installing panels. “In our case, and in another grantee’s case, we both hadn’t started installing because we had been waiting for a very long time to try to get the meeting for definitization to happen,” said Ortiz, referring to one of the last steps in the project approval process. Then, out of the blue, a letter arrived in January informing Solar United Neighbors that their grant was being terminated. The news was devastating. Ríos had to announce the termination on Facebook. “People were pretty sad,” she said. “We were wasting their time for two years.” Ríos had turned away from other opportunities to pursue grants, she said, because federal rules prevented her from applying to different sources of funding for the same project. The residents who signed up with Solar United Neighbors, too, hadn’t known they should be looking into other options to secure their energy systems. “They probably have another opportunity to get a system, but they didn’t because they trust me, they trust Abeyno Coop,” Ríos said. Solar United Neighbors is being represented by Lawyers for Good Government, a nonprofit advocating for organizations that have lost federal funding over the past year under the Trump administration, and Earthjustice, an environmental group. For her part, Pérez isn’t giving up. She’s determined to finance the system herself with the help of grants from nonprofits and other private entities. She has been calling solar companies to estimate what it might cost and working with Ríos’ cooperative to find alternatives. “I’ll find a way, because I’ve always been a salesperson,” she said. Benton Graham contributed reporting to this story. This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Solar was poised to help Puerto Ricans survive blackouts — until Trump axed nearly $1B in funding on Apr 2, 2026. From Grist via This RSS Feed.