From my friend on FB, Kate Bush, co-founder of Just Collapse (the subject of an item a couple of editions ago), on some startling new numbers regarding climate chaos.
There’s no turning this ship around, but there is more to do than ever before - to ease the inevitable descent through #InsurgentPlanning and a #JustCollapse.
OMG! 1.6C global yearly average has been reached. This means that the Earth’s temperature over the last 12 months, on average, is 1.6C above human recorded 1850-1900 pre-industrial baseline. There’s no turning this ship around. Don’t just collapse, #JustCollapse!
Graph compiled by Professor Eliot Jacobson.
And, opposition on US campuses to Israel genocide continues to grow and spread, as are official acts of repression against it.
Students fight escalating repression on US campuses, Electronic Intifada, 4/19/24, an hour and 16 minutes.
My comments. Nora Barrows-Friedman talks with 4 students, from Harvard, MIT, the U of Pennsylvania and Columbia U, reporting on repression they and their comrades have been facing in response to protests about the Israeli genocide in Palestine and the respective university’s ties to the Israeli state and Israeli companies which participate in the genocide. The universities are all business and research enterprises (as well as real estate speculators) more than institutions of education. The reports were all depressingly similar. Students are being harassed by the administration and other students as well as off campus people, facing disciplinary actions. Faculty facing disciplinary actions for speaking out. The general student body facing increasing restrictions as to what can be discussed on campus, even in public plazas, eating spaces,…. As of this moment, there are major police attacks across the US on student actions regarding this matter, including at Columbia, NYU, USC and Yale, with mass arrests, being reported on at CNN, Fox,…. And Biden just signed a $95 billion military supplementary, $65B for Ukraine and $20 billion for Israel (replenishing shrinking supplies of weapons, vehicles, planes).
This is going on … because most people don’t give a crap, and don’t constantly raise a fuss about this to everyone they know. This includes “freedom” activists, like the ones who support and even work for RFK Jr’s presidential campaign. As if his all-out support for the Israeli state, even more zealously than Biden, and his support of censorship of protests against it at Harvard, is just “an issue i disagree with him on” vs a red line. By the way, Junior also pushes the “free market” ideology i discussed in today’s edition, sent out a couple of hours ago.
Ending this edition, the latest edition of Electronic Intifada’s weekly news show.
Breaking news and analysis on day 201 of Gaza's Al-Aqsa Flood | The Electronic Intifada Podcast, 4/24/24, two hours and 56 minutes.
00:00 Introduction
01:18 News report with Nora Barrows-Friedman
19:46 Abubaker Abed live from Deir al-Balah, Gaza
45:28 Professor Mohamed Abdou on Columbia University and expanding protests across US campuses
01:27:06 Jon Elmer shows latest videos from the resistance in Gaza and the West Bank as well as a series of operations from southern Lebanon by Hizballah
02:11:25 Group discussion
My comments. I’m about half way through the Jon Elmer segment. Abed report very touching. Abdou has a book out titled “Islam and Anarchism.” He sounded more post-modernist than anarchist, but this does not remotely excuse what Columbia’s administration is doing to him. During a congressional hearing on the campus protests (senators and representatives have pretty uniformly libeled the protests as “antisemitic”), the president of Columbia threw Abdou and 2 other faculty members under the bus, and attacked the entire protest movement. But then, i didn’t see Electronic Intifada do anything when NYU in 2020 and onward cracked down on Prof Mark Crispin Miller for daring to suggest the US government used propaganda techniques in selling the “Pandemic” PsyOp., and defamed him.