A country of illiterates

Brazilians cannot find an appropriate distance to exist intelligently.

Porto Alegre is dead

Tenements and slum everywhere.
Noise pollution everywhere. 

Poverty, misery, homeless people

Miseducation, rivers-sewage,
etc.

Wildfire

The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself.

Joan Didion was writing about the fires that had swept through Malibu in 1956, Bel Air in 1961, Santa Barbara in 1964, and Watts in 1965; she updated her list in 1989 with “Fire Season”, in which she described the fires of 1968, 1970, 1975, 1978, 1979, 1980, and 1982: “Since 1919, when the county began keeping records of its fires, some areas have burned eight times”.

Drowning

Every year, the average americans emits enough carbon to melt 10,000 tons of ice in the Antarctic ice sheets - enough to add 10,000 cubic meters of water to the ocean. Every minute, each of us adds five gallons.

Capitalism

There aren’t any more rich countries. Just a whole lot of rich people. People who got rich looting the public wealth and exhausting natural resources around the world.

Aphorism of underdevelopment

Brazil is the second-largest absolute market for cocaine on the planet.

A country of illiterates

Alexandra Kollontai's texts hold no value in the periphery of capitalism. Pornography is more important.

Drowning

In The Water Will Come, Jeff Goodell runs through just a few of the monuments — indeed, in some cases, whole cultures — that will be transformed into underwater relics, like sunken ships, this century: any beach you’ve ever visited; Facebook’s headquarters, the Kennedy Space Center, and the United States’ largest naval base, in Norfolk, Virginia; the entire nations of the Maldives and the Marshall Islands; most of Bangladesh, including all of the mangrove forests that have been the kingdom of Bengal tigers for millennia; all of Miami Beach and much of the South Florida paradise engineered out of marsh and swamp and sandbar by rabid real-estate speculators less than a century ago; Saint Mark’s Basilica in Venice, today nearly a thousand years old; Venice Beach and Santa Monica in Los Angeles; the White House at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, as well as Trump’s “Winter White House” at Mara-Lago, Richard Nixon’s in Key Biscayne, and the original, Harry Truman’s, in Key West. 

Drowning

The sea will become a killer is a given.

That so many feel already acclimated to the prospect of a near-future world with dramatically higher oceans should be as dispiriting and disconcerting as if we’d already come to accept the inevitability of extended nuclear war — because that is the scale of devastation the rising oceans will unleash.

The Union of Concerned Scientists found that nearly 311,000 homes in the United States would be at risk of chronic inundation by 2045 — a timespan, as they pointed out, no longer than a mortgage. By 2100, the number would be more than 2.4 million properties, or $1 trillion worth of American real estate — underwater. Climate change may not only make the miles along the American coast uninsurable, it could render obsolete the very idea of disaster insurance.

Flooding has quadrupled since 1980.

The great nutrient collapse

Since 1950, much of the good stuff in the plants we grow — protein, calcium, iron, vitamin C, to name just four — has declined by as much as one-third. Everything is becoming more like junk food. Even the protein content of bee pollen has dropped by a third.

More carbon dioxide in the air produces nutritional declines across the board — drops in protein content, as well as in iron, zinc, and vitamins B1, B2, B5, and B9.

Climate change promises an empire of hunger erected among the world’s poor.

Voprosy literatury i estetiki

Was Dostoevsky a reactionary and an obscurantist?

Hunger

Over the past fifteen years, the iconoclastic mathematician Irakli Loladze has isolated a dramatic effect of carbon dioxide on human nutrition unanticipated by plant physiologists: it can make plants bigger, but those bigger plants are less nutritious. “Every leaf and every grass blade on earth makes more and more sugars as CO2 levels keep rising”, Loladze told Politico, in a story about his work headlined “The Great Nutrient Collapse”. “We are witnessing the greatest injection of carbohydrates into the biosphere in human history — an injection that dilutes other nutrients in our food supply”.

Today gene modification has been used mostly to make plants more resistant to pesticides, pesticides manufactured and sold by the same companies engineering the crops.

A state of illiterates

The brazilian south lacks the conditions to produce a Carl Sagan.

Hunger

Even with the remarkable gains of the last decades, we do not presently live in a world without hunger. Far from it: most estimates put the number of undernourished at 800 million globally, with as many as 100 million hungry because of climate shocks. What is called “hidden hunger” — micronutrient and dietary deficiencies — is considerably higher, affecting well over 1 billion people.

A country of illiterates

An unimaginable portrait in southern Brazil

Poor education (anti-intellectualism) 

is also a form of fascism.

A city of illiterates

Universal education in Porto Alegre is deteriorating. Worse every day. Education in Porto Alegre serves to perpetuate misery and vulgarization.

Education for the poor: vulgarization, destruction of subjectivity.
Education for the rich: knowledge, development of consciousness.

Listen to the southerner's linguistic experience. It says it all.

Don't even cultivate readers. And it is urgent to privatize schools.

Bibliography

Someday, perhaps not long from now, the inhabitants of a hotter, more dangerous and biologically diminished planet than the one on which I lived may wonder what you and I were thinking, or whether we thought at all. Of course we did it to ourselves; we had always been intellectually lazy, and the less asked of us, the less we had to say. We all livedfor money, and that is what we died for.

The Malthusian tragic

Inability to see any remaining innocence in the quotidian life of the well-to-do West, given the devastation that wealth has imposed on the world of natural wonder it conquered and the suffering of those, elsewhere on the planet, left behind in the race to endless material comforts. And asked, functionally, to pay for them.

A state of half-ignorance and half-indifference is a much more persuasive climate sickness than true denial or true fatalism.

Climate change

Global food production accounts for about a third of all emissions. To avoid dangerous climate change, Greenpeace has estimated that the world needs to cut its meat and dairy consumption in half by 2050.

Hunger

Norman Borlaug with the help of the Rockefeller Foundation, developed a new collection of high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties that are now credited with saving the lives of a billion people worldwide.