{"id":16432,"date":"2025-05-30T21:14:55","date_gmt":"2025-05-31T04:14:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=16432"},"modified":"2025-11-15T22:57:05","modified_gmt":"2025-11-16T06:57:05","slug":"issue-of-the-week-human-rights-hunger-disease-economic-opportunity-population-war-environment-personal-growth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=16432","title":{"rendered":"Issue of the Week: Human Rights, Hunger, Disease, Economic Opportunity, Population, War, Environment, Personal Growth"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Back to News<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The Techno-Futuristic Philosophy Behind Elon Musk\u2019s Mania<\/em>, The New York Times, May 30, 2025, Credit…Photo illustration by Pablo Delcan<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The End Of Civilization As We Knew It, Part Twenty-Eight<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Update, June 5: So the “explosion” between Trump and Musk has come today. Changing nothing about the damage they have caused to the country and the world before this. Make no assumptions on where this will go. We will be back with further comment shortly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

. . .<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elon Musk has purportedly left the White House and his orbit around Trump has changed back to around other planets of various sorts. Behind the scenes, in the front scene, he’ll be around and is always around everything that concerns money and power and obsession and addiction and whatever he feels like next. He’s the richest person in history with all the power that by definition is attached to this, no matter how detached from reality or concern for others he may be. He was the perfect pick for Trump to carry out his government destruction cum savings plan as the past and prospective donor and the co-gangster with Trump (as David Brooks has described him and his entourage) who appears to deliver in return with government contracts (although Musk had already positioned himself as the only real option in many such situations–more on that to come).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is it possible that anyone listens to and repeats in media as if it is anything but peformative for someone at the bottom of the public opinion heap, that Elon Musk would suddenly become fiscally concerned about the irresponsible spending bill he helped set up and suddenly discover what’s wrong with it, including the things he wants for himself–directly and indirectly? He and Trump could go to war and it would be meaningless and performative as well because their interests are alligned in the end. They are by definition competitors for the most powerful person on earth, so by definition the relationship has explosiveness built in, plus personal issues that make everything unpredictable. But in the end, no matter what happens, its all a game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They’ve already done more damage to the world, to human beings, than could ever have been imagined even the day before Trump was innaugurated<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The rules say Trump owns the damage. Reality says they both do. And every enabler around them, really most of humanity (yes, including many liberals who voted against him, all part of the larger context of the increasingly narcissistic, nihilistic, dumbed-down context of inequality and corroded morality we’ve been writing about for many years) that has brought us to this. And again, this is not <\/em>a political statement. It is the reality that any decent human is required to speak and act on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The man who beat Obama in the election and tonight posted a conspiracy theory beyond lunacy that Biden had been executed in 2020 and replaced by a robotic clone (he said he beat Obama and many other mentally intergalactic things before the vote, but it was crowded out by the speculated cognitive decline about the man who actually knows history still, but had physically slowed down a lot and clearly couldn’t successfully run after the debate) after being disgraced by two impeachments in his first term, felony convictions, civilly held liable for sexual abuse and so on, again was the leader of the most powerful nation on earth, but with a plan to be unrestrained by a democratic constitution. Everyone knew when Biden beat Trump in 2020 that Harris might need to succeed him at any time. She was vetted by the country for that in 2020. Old news. But the hill to beat Trump was probably too steep for anyone when a president stops running and is replaced as a candidate 14 weeks before the election for the first time in history. And the economy and inflation and the migrant issue and perceptions of such and sexism and racism, etc. Still, as we noted before, The Wall Street Journal pointed out the day after the election that the stay-at-home Democrats turning out would have completely reversed the results of an election that was still close. The reasons for that are many and have been covered, but at the core, there is something that hasn’t been focussed on nearly enough and we are going to do that here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everything has changed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everything since God created us or we crawled out of the ocean or a spark lit up the universe or whatever you believe began existence as we have understood it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was previously impossible for anyone much less leaders in the spotlight to speak or act as we have seen happen now. That was true in 2016 and before increasingly, but nothing close to like now. We would have dropped everything and risen up in absolute outrage that our children would see and hear anything like this, and the consequences would have been swift and absolute. The dynamics of voting for or buying from anyone who acted in such a way would have stopped it and the about-facers of all times would have about-faced again before you could blink.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The damage in weeks to democracy and human rights and to the basic needs of everyone (those who haven’t felt it yet, will) has been unspeakable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One example will suffice. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We’ve focussed over the years on our efforts to end hunger as the origin of our work. That work along with many others had changed history in the trajectory of millions of deaths from hunger and disease, millions more physically and cognitively harmed from birth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a day, the American policy since the end of World War Two (and before) of helping those around the world who suffered from hunger, disease, poverty, the innocents from the desruction of war, who barely survived through no fault of their own (and children never do), was ended. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the most powerful and richest country in the history of the world, America was the number one provider, the glue that held civilization together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then, programs to feed the hungry, treat disease and other maladies of the impoverished were just stopped.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since then, at least 300,000 human beings have died from starvation and disease, mostly children, and countless others having diseases like AIDS not treated, as it re-emerges to become perhaps one of the angels of death to revisit and bring consequence to the rest of us. Other diseases not being checked will for certain. Covid will look like a picnic. But before all this happens, the conflicts in various ways caused by America the stabilizer gone in an instant, will engulf the world. The one that has thermonuclear weapons in it as per the last issue of the week. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But that’s not even the point. The trajectory for tens to hundreds of millions to die from hunger and disease is set. Brought to you by the red, white and blue. A global<\/em> slaughter of humans. History will record this as a unique atrocity. Not based on racial or gender or ethnic or national targeting per se, (although Africa will be most impacted at first, but it is in Asia, Latin America–and in terms of national programs gutted–in the US as well). Based on being purely anti-human.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the sake of saving a pittance, in the name of the biggest lie ever told about saving money, while the next biggest tax cut of trillions for billionaires and millionaires is being prepared, which will all but destroy America financially.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Something different than ever before is happening. This is not the hell of butchery at many other times in history. There has never been a time in history when the globe was one as now with weapons of mass destruction and mass destraction in hand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trump gave the orders, but Musk, the richest person in history, is the architect and the trigger-puller. So we start here by focussing on him. Two lengthy, far beyond riveting articles that are really too incomprehensible to quickly absorb in some ways from the cover story in the Sunday New York Times to maybe the most mind-blowing piece imaginable in the business section bring the architect and the content of new unreality into the light. Then an opinion piece on the cost written about above.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the end, however, our situation as humans is not the making of any one person or group of people, although as with all people in history, they should be held to account, and ultimately will be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our situation is the corrosive virus of anti-empathy infecting us and projected out of us and the entire social, moral, physical rot that has come to define us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In some ways we are already a dead species, with technology at the core of course (the advances didn’t have to come at this cost, but that’s part of the point), as it subsumes us all while we hover between being willing consumers and a species of addicts on a new level.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the past several years, we have watched the internet used as a tool to sexually abuse and torture hundreds of millions of children and babies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is no world where that ever could have happened or we would ever have allowed it to happen before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How is there ever any coming back as sentient beings from that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everything has changed. Completely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After the following reflection on a recent journey that bears on all this in our experience of next level epiphany about it, the articles from The New York Times are posted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

. . .<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ten weeks ago, the author of this post was in Ireland, accompanied by the primary camera person and co-producer in documentary film production for Planet Earth Foundation. We arrived in Dublin on the Ides of March. On reflection this was a prophetic day to arrive. The day Julius Caesar was assasinated in the Roman senate, the Roman republic ended, the Roman empire began, lasting more than a millennium in its various iterations, and the world was utterly changed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Arriving that day in Ireland, foreshadowed epiphany to come shortly about how the world has changed utterly now, and how it will continue to in unthinkable ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This trip to Ireland was long hoped for but somehow missed, for one reason or another, in many years of global travel and work. It had taken on a mystical sense of reason for not happening until then that was not yet revealed. It was the land of the author’s ancestors and beyond that a primary part of the author’s historical soul and compulsion to activism to change the world, because of the history and soul of the place itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From unspeakable oppression by the English for centuries, by hunger and deprivation for the great majority of people–mainly landless farmers–long before the Great Famine, by the resistance culminating in the Easter Rising and following War of Independence, then the Troubles in Northern Ireland culminating in the Good Friday agreement, the child sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church first being confronted there, the majority of Irish, mostly Catholic, voting for the right to divorce, abortion and marriage equality, and policies providing a signifcant degree of economic security, with political rights and civil liberties respected and defended, Ireland has evolved into a remarkable nation as a liberal democracy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first place the author went to in Dublin was Glasnevin, Ireland’s national cemetary, where many of Ireland’s most prominent historical figures are buried. Most prominent among them is Michael Collins, commander of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) who led the Irish in the War of Indepedence from the British with strategic brilliance and extraordinary courage, then negotiated the treaty that the majority of represenatives of the Irish people ratified creating Ireland as a free state in 1922, supported by the great majority of the Irish public. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The six northern counties constituting Northen Ireland were not included (26 counties in the rest of Ireland were included) because they were predominantly Protestant at the time and the British government (and the local power dynamics) would never agree to a free state including these six counties (16.75% of the land and 27% of the population). The fierce fighting decades later between the oppressed minority (at the time) Catholics and majority Protestants known as the “Troubles” was inevitable, but there was no other way to a free Ireland without far more bloodshed for years to come with no clear outcome. (Although ironically as head of the Irish Free State, Michael Collins, who strategicaly accepted partition only as a temporary measure, secretly started an effort by the IRA to liberate the north, which with the greatest twist of tragic irony was hobbled when the anti-Treaty forces started the civil war in large part because the north had been excluded, and doomed the effort with the assasination of Collins).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nonetheless, the great majority of the Irish people understood the essential fact that no treaty meant no Independent Ireland at all and endless violence throughout all of Ireland instead of a free state for the first time in Irish history as a foundation to build on. A very small minority still appear not to, the remnant of seeing first through the eyes of the politics of the anti-Treaty perspective at the time, then later the Troubles, rather than the irrefutable reality on the ground.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eamon de Valera, the leader of Sinn Fein, the political arm of the Irish Republican Army, who had asked Michael Collins (who dutifully served under de Valera) to negotiate the Treaty, broke with him over the result. A short civil war followed the creation of Ireland as a free state, with the pro-Treaty forces led by Michael Collins winning decisively.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, during this conflict, Michael Collins was shot and killed in an ambush by anti-Treaty forces on August 22, 1922.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He is the most beloved hero in Ireland. The man who defeated the British after centuries of longing for it through immeasurable suffering, then attempted to end centuries of violence, and delivered a free Ireland, sought for nearly a millennium. He was 31 years old when he died. Half a million people came to his funeral in Dublin, more than the entire populatuon of the city.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His grave is by far the most visited in all of Ireland to this day, in a cemetary fillled with luminaries, including de Valera, who after independence served a number of terms as head of government and head of state, and said of Collins:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 \u201cIt\u2019s my considered opinion that in the fullness of time history will record the greatness of Collins and it will be recorded at my expense.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Michael Collins’ grave is set apart from the rest of the cemetery, adjacent to the vistor center, within feet along the side of it, making it the central focus in many ways. The fact of its simplicity, a relatively tall stone cross with a small rectangular garden not much longer than the height of the man (he was very tall, but as a gravesite, it seemed small) always filled with fresh flowers, made it all the more moving. It only has his name and the date he was killed at the base of the cross, in Gaelic and English. There is a story behind that (for another time of a more in depth focus, or look it up yourself), and the fact that when the tombstone was erected in 1939, there was no ceremony or public knowledge of the event. But any attempt to make his memory less visible was delusional. Every moment since he passed into history has just made him bigger. The ceremony has happened every day since, as noted, with far more visitors honoring his site wih their presence than any other in Ireland. It is surrounded by memorials with the names of other of his fellow freedom fighters buried there as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For a sense of the man and the times, Neil Jordan’s 1996 film, Michael Collins<\/em> (played by Liam Neeson, best actor, Golden Globes, Evening Standard British Film Award and Venice Film Festival, the latter giving it’s top film award to Jordan, and winning many other awards, including Oscars for cinematography and score, and Bafta for Alan Rickman as best supporting actor), does a good job of taking you there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back to Glasnevin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n