Israel is the beachhead of the invasion of the Middle East, a military outpost on the frontiers of the empire. Religion, when spoken of by the powerful, is a distraction, just one of the ways they play the masses off against each other. Zionism is a political construct used to achieve such an effect. The only religion of the global predatory class is power.

We won't pull back because there is no-one in control.

Imagine a group of paleolithic hunters has caused a herd of mammoth to stampede toward a cliff. The predators may be able to veer the herd a few degrees this way or that, but they can't halt the stampede. A few mammoths nearer the cliff may realise what is about to happen and attempt to pull back, but the momentum of mammoth flesh behind them will push them over anyway. This is a done deed. Moreover, the predators intended for this to happen, and feel no need to prevent it.

To bring the analogy back home, the human species has created, in corporations, giant killer-robots which have gotten away from us. Massive artificially-intelligent reaping machines designed to do just one thing - extract profit and make others pay the cost. But in a global economy, there are no externalities.

An individual CEO, say, might decide to change their behaviour, but this will simply be regarded by the Beast as a defective part, and replaced. The global predatory class is in control of nothing but the parasitisation of our production, and in any case, they see no reason to stop - they don't believe they'll be pulled over the cliff with the rest of us. They're perfectly willing to sacrifice the bulk of the human species in an unsustainable race to possibly reach nanotech, and if they don't take that gamble, someone else will - the tragedy of the enclosure of the commons.

So, we'll actually reduce carbon emissions at about the rate that the production of fossil fuels is slated to decline. What we need to do is prepare to survive what we've already unleashed. No change of leadership or new legislation or international treaty will suffice. No top-down directive will work - the top-down approach is the cause of this problem. We need to change our society at its cultural roots. Before we can do anything about our effect on the biosphere, we need to do something about our method of energy capture. Before we can do that, we need to deal with the economic structures which lock us into our current habits. The economy is the manifestation of our value systems. The Beast arises from our individual selfishness. Laws and governments and boards of directors do not create it, they are symptoms of it.

The way to kill a corporation is to stop buying its products and to stop working for it. We need to regain our own production and recreate the commons. This effort will need to be non-hierarchic, decentralised, participatory and so on, in order to avoid repeating our earlier mistakes. We need to learn how to defend against gangsters without becoming gangsters. We need to stop looking for someone to follow.

Now, even if this does happen, it won't mean that it's possible to save our current standard of living, or even preserve our current population. We've already destroyed our "civilisation". Let me be clear - our choice is to prevent only our complete extinction. Life on Earth will survive ten or even twenty degrees of warming, like it's survived the other mass extinctions. The question is, will we?

We won't pull back because there is no-one in control.

Imagine a group of paleolithic hunters has caused a herd of mammoth to stampede toward a cliff. The predators may be able to veer the herd a few degrees this way or that, but they can't halt the stampede. A few mammoths nearer the cliff may realise what is about to happen and attempt to pull back, but the momentum of mammoth flesh behind them will push them over anyway. This is a done deed. Moreover, the predators intended for this to happen, and feel no need to prevent it.

To bring the analogy back home, the human species has created, in corporations, giant killer-robots which have gotten away from us. Massive artificially-intelligent reaping machines designed to do just one thing - extract profit and make others pay the cost. But in a global economy, there are no externalities.

An individual CEO, say, might decide to change their behaviour, but this will simply be regarded by the Beast as a defective part, and replaced. The global predatory class is in control of nothing but the parasitisation of our production, and in any case, they see no reason to stop - they don't believe they'll be pulled over the cliff with the rest of us. They're perfectly willing to sacrifice the bulk of the human species to reach nanotech, and if they don't take that gamble, someone else will - the tragedy of the enclosure of the commons.

So, we'll actually reduce carbon emissions at about the rate that the production of fossil fuels is predicted to decline. What we need to do is prepare to survive what we've already unleashed. No change of leadership or new legislation or international treaty will suffice. No top-down directive will work - the top-down approach is the cause of this problem. We need to change our society at its cultural roots. Before we can do anything about our effect on the biosphere, we need to do something about our method of energy capture. Before we can do that, we need to deal with the economic structures which lock us into our current habits. The economy is the manifestation of our value systems. The Beast arises from our individual selfishness. Laws and governments and boards of directors do not create it, they are symptoms of it.

The way to kill a corporation is to stop buying its products and to stop working for it. We need to regain our own production and recreate the commons. This effort will need to be non-hierarchic, decentralised, participatory and so on, in order to avoid repeating our earlier mistakes. We need to learn how to defend against gangsters without becoming gangsters. We need to stop looking for someone to follow.

Now, even if this does happen, it won't mean that it's possible to save our current standard of living, or even preserve our current population. We've already destroyed our "civilisation". Let me be clear - our choice is to prevent only our complete extinction. Life on Earth will survive ten or even twenty degrees of warming, like it's survived the other mass extinctions. The question is, will we?

I agree. Slavery was never abolished, just re-defined. Privatised prisons are just one example of the new business models. But if you're docile enough and lock yourself in at night, then they'll give you a few trinkets from the money they saved on guards and call your prison a "gated enclave" instead. What we have is a spectrum of slavery, varying in brutality according to the compliance of the slaves. If the various slave classes can be persuaded to blame each other, the masters will continue to be safe.

The USA will not exist by 2075 - it will be disunited and stateless, although the region may still be referred to as "America" out of habit. It will have become a patchwork of corporate jurisdictions. Nearly all former US citizens who remain there will be either slaves, mercenaries or refugees.

Our planet is being taken over by a small global predatory class, who can use our belief in things like nationality, religion, race, gender to have us fear and fight each other, and prevent us from organising to resist.

The suggestion that anyone be "made to work 48 hrs a day" demonstrates the level of intelligence of this commenter.

When you instantly get a message saying your comment's been deleted, I believe that is an Intense Debate bug. I usually wait a few hours, reload the page, and try again. Removing the HTML tag part of the URL (ie: everything after the # symbol) seems to help as well.

In any case, ICH regularly puts up articles describing the maltreatment of the Palestinians, so I don't see why they'd delete comment about it.

The Greeks are facing a more serious decision than many readers seem to realise. Older Greeks well remember the martial law of the seventies, and very old Greeks will remember that after the Second World War, the Allies supported the very fascists that the Greek resistance had successfully fought during the war. Greek tendencies toward participatory, decentralised self-rule have been repeatedly and brutally crushed over the last century. If the Greeks do finally repudiate these odious debts, this financial war will become a shooting war. The oligarchs will bring on a coup. Just ask Africa and South America.

I agree, but why call it "default"? That might be construed as failing to pay a legitimate debt. How about "repudiation of odious debt"?

While we continue to look for someone to lead us, we'll always be under the yoke.