I CAN’T HELP BUT NOTICE THAT REUBEN SALSA OF TBI, THE BAD INFLUENCE, CASTS HIMSELF AS A FEVER DREAM. SINCE HE INSPIRED ME, PERHAPS HE WILL PUBLISH MY FEVERED DREAM.
These Are The 3 Raw Stories I’m Trying to Link Together
This story started as a fevered dream, as they sometimes do. But I quickly wrote down the high points before my thoughts went to wherever dreams go when you wake up. At any rate, I am pretty certain that I’ve found a remarkable set of connections. I’m hoping we might find out whether I got this right in the next few weeks . . . but whether it would be for good or bad I have no idea.
Those are the 3 articles that are remarkably, surprisingly, interlinked.
The first one is by Umair Haque, and typically of Haque’s work, is very understandable. He will pound his points and show you the way from various perspectives, using redundancy to reinforce his messages. (I highlighted a couple of his statements that I found highly relevant.)
The second one, an article in The Atlantic about Joe Biden’s past work in Central America, is a lot more work for the reader like you or the researcher like me. It is amazingly parallel to what Haque outlined as the necessary steps Biden would have to take to perhaps save America from collapse. Hint: Haque thinks that the jerks cowering in various federal bureaucracies should be accused, and if guilty convicted of humanitarian crimes. As he said in his article, “something like a Nuremberg Trials process.”
Regarding the Atlantic’s stories about Biden, there have been some crazy times in Latin America. It’s not hard for me to imagine how things went in the past because now I’m a Latin American. There were corrupt leaders, in Guatemala for instance, who ultimately got handed to the Human Rights authorities by Biden . . . Joe seems to be a “do the crime, you’ll do the time” kind of guy. Don’t you think this sounds a lot like Umair’s opinion? Links.
By the way, I’ve gotta say this: the government in Panama is not corrupt. I only know it exists at all because there are police with machine guns around here and some YouTube songs I’m not allowed to watch. Don’t tell anybody, but this place is Paradise Squared! Well, I used to live in Authoritarian America . . . and oh, god. What a difference.
The third story, from the BBC, might seem unrelated to the first two — at first. But it does connect. It frames extractive countries, (the U.S. is an example), contrasted with subsistence countries like Easter Island, or to a degree, Panama. (Easter Island is a a Chilean territory, 3500 km west of Chile itself.) The article touches on, though doesn’t greatly focus on, the level of infrastructure that becomes a burden when the natives try to return to the simpler lifestyles they used to have, before coming to rely on tourism, global economies, and modern conveniences.
What the coronavirus pandemic did, the mayor of Easter Island explained, was change the position of the mask from the eyes to the mouth. Here’s what he had to say:
“It shut our mouths, because we kept eating and consuming and searching for money and building and destroying the nature and our fragile culture, without seeing the jeopardy that we were putting ourselves in,” he said. “Now, our eyes are open, and we are more keen to promote sustainability in words, actions and plans than we ever were before.”
That’s a hell of a quote. So much more eloquent than anything I could have said.
Like I said, this all came from a fevered dream.
But no surprise that the dream was able to link ideas that at first didn’t seem linkable. Like Covid-19 on Easter Island. Then again, aside from the U.S. political collapse, wasn’t the pandemic a huge part of all peoples lives in the year 2020? And beyond that, in the realm of climate disaster, isn’t it true that scientists are actively discussing extractive economies compared to subsistent, lower-impact economies? Links.
