OVERVIEW
Much of what we see now seems to be the successful destruction of the world we struggled to achieve over the last three hundred years. We can identify that world as the globalization of the European Enlightenment defined by humanist rationality, empirical scientific thought, individual human rights, and administration justified by consensus through popularly elected representatives.
Ironically, some of the ideals underlying the Modern World have been blocked by authoritarian military systems, rampant materialism, and colonial conquest. The end product (which may literally be our end) has permanently changed our biosphere and produced societies that have become identical to or prone to takeover by the very hierarchical and exploitive ruling elites that we thought we were eliminating.
The result is a planetary environmental disaster and economic failure, with most planetary assets locked in control by a tiny elite. A radically distorted economic system based solely on greed denies most of our population's well-being.
At the start of the second quarter of the 21st century, the entire civilization struggles to deal with the consequences of these failures. The reaction is anger at the failure to provide what was promised, with a minority ill-consideredly rejecting everything and a desperate desire by the majority to correct the errors but with little hope and failing leadership.
This is the reality of the Weekly Flail attempting to find clues to the reconstruction of our ideals.
Within the deluge of ignorance and idiocy created by the opportunistic manipulators attacking science in the name of tribalism and fascist feudalism, their incompetence and befuddlement consistently trip them up.
The conquest by traditionalist and fundamentally irrational authoritarianism always now falls short of their claims. Traditionalist and authoritarian movements have no rational systems or philosophy. They have only greed and the ancient quest for power.
Our goal is to find the detail that proves that to be true. This is a brutally depressing time of reversals, but most people are becoming open to radical, rational change.
Read on.
MIDDLE EAST WAR (GAZA)
The failure of Western colonialization of all other cultures on this planet is obvious. Science and technology are now available at all levels of society. The American Empire and its agents are failing militarily and economically. That is not creating a new Enlightenment, but it will eliminate what is now failing. Look for positives in what is actually happening.
The recognition of Zionist genocide is chipping away at the existing state of Israel.
Making October 7 About Antisemitism To Hide Israel's Abuses
They keep telling you October 7 happened because Hamas hates Jews because they don’t want you asking questions about Israel’s actions which provoked the attack.
The October 7 attack was unquestionably provoked by Israel’s extensively documented abuses of the Palestinian people, but whenever you say this you get Israel supporters shrieking “How dare you JUSTIFY the actions of Hamas?? Nothing could JUSTIFY such a savage attack!” It’s a good example of how empire apologia in the 2020s largely consists of deliberately conflating the words “provoked” and “justified”.
Whether or not the October 7 attack was justified is a mental judgement; the answer to that question will always necessarily be entirely comprised of subjective opinion. Which means if the empire apologist can drag the debate kicking and screaming into the question of whether it was justified they’ve actually got a leg to stand on, since then they’re only dealing with feelings and opinions. If you keep the focus on the unassailably factual claim that the attack was provoked then they’ve got nothing, because the facts are all squarely against them.
Keeping this distinction conscious clears up a lot of imperial spin, whether you’re talking about the Hamas attack, Russia’s entirely provoked invasion of Ukraine, or the war the empire is trying to provoke with China over Taiwan.
CLIMATE DISASTER
The Summer of 2024 is the Climate Disaster Reality. Things will get worse, and denials will look increasingly absurd.
My concern is that the failure to deal with reality will now cause growing panic as regions deal with deaths from heat, fires, and storms for the second summer.
Surface Air Temperatures: https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/t2_daily/?dm_id=world
Record heat, flooding slams countries amid hot globe
The U.S. is far from the only country seeing record heat, flash flooding and wildfires, among other extreme weather events. In fact, few places have been untouched recently.
Why it matters: Amid record warm global temperatures that have stretched on for at least a year, climate change-related extremes have affected hundreds of millions of people, with all-time heat records falling in parts of Europe, Africa and Asia.
The big picture: First, there's the early-summer heat. In the U.S., all-time heat records have been tied in Maine, where small towns on Wednesday had higher heat indices than Florida.
* For Thursday, extreme heat warnings and advisories are in effect for 100 million people across the country, with record-breaking heat expected to continue into early July in much of the Lower 48 states.
* Outside the U.S., a particularly severe and long-lasting heat wave has gripped much of India, where Delhi saw its hottest night ever recorded on Wednesday, with a low of just 35.2°C (95.4°F).
* Temperatures have reached or exceeded 40°C (104°F) in Delhi for 37 straight days, according to the Hindustan Times, as the heat has turned deadly.
Extreme heat harms health — what is the human body’s limit?
“We really need some drastic action to be taken by European countries to help keep the European population, and also populations across the globe, safe from the health impacts of climate change,” says Lowe, who is at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies in Spain.
The report, published last month in Lancet Public Health1, is the second — after one published in 20222 — from a study called ‘The Lancet Countdown: Health and Climate Change in Europe’.
“The report emphasizes the alarming increase in mortality and morbidity linked to rising temperatures, and the proliferation of climate-sensitive diseases,” says Ana Raquel Nunes, a health and environment researcher at the University of Warwick, UK.
![Smoke and exhaust rise from a large industrial complex surrounding Liuzhou Iron & Steel Co.'s facility in Liuzhou, China. Smoke and exhaust rise from a large industrial complex surrounding Liuzhou Iron & Steel Co.'s facility in Liuzhou, China.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F546f2714-b5cd-4faa-b764-e5fadab08d46_767x576.jpeg)
The climate crisis is solvable, but human rights must trump profits
![Climate change activists with masks and placards gather outside of the Supreme Court in Washington. Climate change activists with masks and placards gather outside of the Supreme Court in Washington.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F470e419b-1959-46a2-a180-d8a238e24095_767x491.jpeg)
Solvable: How We Healed the Earth, and How We Can Do It Again Susan Solomon Univ. Chicago Press (2024)
From lead pollution to the hole in the ozone layer and climate change, Earth is no stranger to human-made — often, man-made — global disasters.
In Solvable, atmospheric chemist Susan Solomon describes how high-income countries, and the United States in particular, have repeatedly inflicted incredible amounts of damage on people and ecosystems. She relates the long and difficult struggles that concerned individuals — often from marginalized groups — faced in trying to convince governments to stop industries from destroying lives and the planet in the pursuit of profit. Solvable is a harrowing read, but Solomon is an engaging writer and there is a lot to learn in this book about the environmental crises of the past century.
Solomon relates the story of US marine biologist Rachel Carson, who rang alarm bells about persistent pesticides such as dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) in her eloquent book Silent Spring (1962). Now that we know just how harmful these pesticides are, it is jarring to read how difficult it was to stop their use.
Carson described how falcons and other birds of prey started to lay eggs with thinner shells, then almost no eggs at all; various other bird populations shrank markedly; DDT in mammals led to the development of tumours and caused sterility. Although the overwhelming evidence for the effect of DDT on animals that Carson presented was independently confirmed by the then US president John F. Kennedy’s own science advisory council, Carson was belittled and portrayed as a hysteric by politicians and the media.
This playbook of deliberate ignorance of the scientific method, disinformation and a hefty dose of misogyny is all too familiar to those advocating for climate justice today.
The Crisis Report - 40 [Richard Crim]
Batagaika Crater in Eastern Russia. The “mouth” of the crater is about 1km or 6/10ths of a mile across. This type of crater is formed by “slumping” permafrost.
We have reached the “end of the beginning”. 2023 was the last “normal” year of our lives. The last year of the 20th Century Climate Optimum.
The Climate Crisis, or more dramatically “Collapse”, has started. It’s kicking into high gear this year. Things are almost certainly going to get a LOT worse over the next few years.
What everyone is expecting/hoping, is that the Sea Surface Temperature (SST) in 2024 will drop below the highs of 2023. This is what normally happens in the second year of an El Nino. At the start of 2015 (blue dot on left) January temperatures were much lower than at the start of 2016 (red dot on left). In December this is flipped. 2016 finished much colder than 2015. Declining SST temperatures in 2016 fell below the climbing SST’s of 2015 in May of 2016 (red circle).
Because.
Warming hasn’t slowed. The amount of ENERGY going into the Climate System this year is actually greater than in 2023 so far.
In 2023 we started at +1.2°C and increased to +1.7°C by December. This year started at +1.7°C and, so far, has just dropped about -0.05°C.
SCIENCE/TECHNOLOGY
Below is a link to a trailer for a new Spanish film; Justicia Artificial
Artificial Justice, a provocative look at how AI may impact our lives [Enriques Dans]
On June 6 I attended a private screening of the Spanish-Portuguese co-production “Artificial Justice”, a political science-fiction thriller that I really enjoyed, directed by Simón Casal, and starring Verónica Echegui, Tamar Novas, Alba Galocha and Alberto Ammann.
The premise of the movie, which opens in Spain on September 13, is that at some point in the near future, a Spanish prime minister proposes a referendum on the use of an algorithm to replace judges, the aim being to clear the country’s huge backlog of court cases, while at the same time guaranteeing a more impartial and less politicized approach to dispensing justice
Set in my hometown of La Coruña, in northwestern Spain, which is captured beautifully by cinematographer Diego Cabezas, the film explores the pros and cons of using algorithms to administer justice, leaving viewers to make their own minds up by allowing the different parties involved: lawyers, academics, the company that has developed the algorithm, etc., to put their respective cases.
"West Asia's Largest Space Station" Opens in Fajr Decade
[Iran’s new space center is scheduled to be completed this year. This link is to an article in Persian but you can select an English translation. You do not see these things in American media. The translation is AI-based, so it is rough.]
From Zahedan, Isa Zarepour today, Thursday, at the opening ceremony of Sistan and Baluchestan civil projects in the field of the Ministry of Communications, stated: On the day we started working in the Thirteenth Government, we committed to developing communication justice, all the villages of the country, especially the villages over 20 households, to the high-speed communication network، National Information Network and High-speed Internet.
He said that at the beginning of the work, 79 percent of villages over 20 households were connected to the high-speed communication network: But in Sistan and Baluchestan, 58 percent of the villages above 20 households were connected, and 20 percent were at odds with the national average.
The Minister of Communications said that "but today this has changed completely and over 96 percent of villages over 20 households have been connected to high-speed communication network, national information network and high-speed Internet."، He said that in terms of population, 98 percent of the population of villages in the country have access to high-speed Internet.
Why “delve” is the most obvious sign of AI writing
Horrible, right? Last year I published a popular (if I do say so myself — it’s had 58K views) Medium guide on how you can spot the telltale signs and linguistic patterns of AI text. By far the top culprit was the word “Delve”.
In fact, a recent study by Jeremy Nguyen PhD found the frequency of the word “delve” in PubMed articles since the end of 2022 has increased by approximately 400 percent — which coincides with the rise of ChatGPT.
The “Delve” Dilemma in AI Generated Text
I’ve worked as a copywriter, editor, proofreader, and an academic grading hundreds of papers a semester, and I’d never seen the word “delve” appear as much as it does now in anodyne, artificially generated content. But here’s the conundrum: if AI text is generated based on human writing, where on earth is it getting such a preponderance of the word “delve”? . . .
Mike for President- ha ha. You're too smart for that job. But in regards to the "leg to stand on" reference to the basal mind game comeback of "so you are a Hamas supporter" that rational thinkers get thrown at them, I just say it's consequences. The consequences of 76 plus years of brutality, murder, and oppression of trying to keep brown and those different from yourself down and exploitable and that I know the difference between apartheid-Zionism and Judaism. It still has no effect though. But every day I meet many more who know what's coming our way on all fronts. How can we possibly fix this?
Facts are good, rationality is useful, but we have noticed that it only works for some people. Most of us, if not all of us when it comes down to it, are led by other forces. These forces are very deep in the unconscious. If we are to bring about meaningful change, we must address this part of our psyche which lies deep in the core. We must master the language of poetry, of mythology, of music, of primitive art, dance…