It’s the most radical book I’ve ever written. It may be the most radical book you’ll ever read. And now you can pre-order it through Amazon.
Publication date is currently scheduled for September 1, 2010.
Pre-orders are good for authors because they indicate to Amazon and other booksellers that there’s interest in a title. So if you’re a die-hard fan, or just an American ready to read the current case for getting rid of a political system that simply doesn’t work, please consider pre-ordering.
3 Comments.
As I have said before, Ted, I cannot in good conscience give you money.
Right ON, A-Dud! By the way, YOUR tax dollars (unless you don’t pay taxes, either) have sent many American soldiers to their deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan. Conscience? Conscience?! We don’ need no stinking conscience!
I’ll have to wait for detailed reviews of specific content because Ted Rall has shown a tragic penchant for embracing the myth of infinite growth on a finite planet (which includes but is by no means limited to the unsustainable-by-definition, imported-carrying-capacity (1) of cheap, undocumented, migrant labor).
Unless and until Mr. Rall starts hammering our reality home:
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We are living at the end of empire, during the century of contraction, in a culture of make believe.
We are not going to grow, consume, indebt and complicate our way out of the problems of growth, consumption, debt and complexity.
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There simply is nothing radical about his writing or manifesto.
It is, unfortunately, more of the same from the Left-in-name-only.
I hasten to add I’m a recovering, repentant, Left-in-name-only regressive-gliberal-phlegmocrat..
The party is over: Left-in-name-only, real-Right, or vacuous Middle (you can’t be neutral on a moving train).
The Automatic Earth (theautomaticearth.blogspot.com: be sure to read the “TAE Primers, Must Reads & More” section running down the right-hand-side of the site) is one of the best sites for understanding our present and future reality (and it’s “radical” because it deals in reality and truth). It is infinitely better than the Left-in-name-only store fronts which endlessly peddle a finite list of stale beliefs and impossible dreams.
If fuzzy-memory serves, Mr. Rall loathes The New Yorker but it recently ran a piece he would do well to digest, The Inventor’s Dilemma. The article examines the work and mind of the iconic, idealist inventor, Saul Griffith.
Mr. Griffith closes the story with these words of enlightenment:
“I know very few environmentalists whose heads aren’t firmly up their ass. They are bold-facedly hypocritical, and I don’t think the environmentalism movement as we’ve known it is tenable or will survive. Al Gore has done a huge amount to help this cause but he is the No. 1 environmental hypocrite. His house alone uses more energy than an average person in all aspects of life and he flies prodigiously. I don’t think we can buy the argument that you get special dispensation just because what you’re doing is worthwhile.”
But the “average” north-east-coast (for example) “middle class” regressive-gliberal-phlegmocrat is no better than Gore.
By way of example I cite a femmenist (1) in my family who has told me, in typical gliberal fashion, that she has never been interested in money or materialism. Yet she and her family have recently built an urban McMansion using liberal amounts of imported carrying capacity (cheap-undocumented-labor, water, energy, materials/resources-in-general, etcetera).
This cognitive dissonance is the nightmare of the amerikan dream.
The dream is over and the nightmare has begun in earnest.
If you want to know your future, look no farther than Greece:
“We have entered a new, a next, phase, of our lives. It’s defined by volatility, chaos, and eventually mayhem; it will get worse than what you know or imagine, and make you much poorer than you are today. You may not realize it yet, but what you can do is ask if that next giant HDTV is really worth the credit you’ll owe for it.
“Here’s a guarantee: 9 out of 10 of us will soon have less wealth than we have today (it’ll all have been transferred to banks trying to hide behemoth losses). Not those of us who work on Wall Street, or the City of London, or Frankfurt, or Washington or Brussels, but those of us who are real living people. We need to allow our hopes and desires to slide down to a level where what we want meets what we can have. If we don’t, which is my bet will happen, we’re in for a world of pain.
“We’re being suckered by our own governments into believing we are fine, but we’re lost instead. It’s just that we don’t like that idea, being lost. So we keep on believing we’re fine. Until we can’t. Until we’re dead broke.
“And then what? Then we’ll storm our parliaments? Here’s thinking it’ll be too late by then.
“We’re like a bunch of happily oinking piglets set to be roasted over the biggest campfire ever. And all we really need to know is who wins American Idol.”
– How to profit from volatility, chaos and misery, The Automatic Earth, 5/12/2010
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(1) See: Dependence on Phantom Carrying Capacity
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/6069
Also: UK’s ‘virtual water’ reliance leaves international footprint
http://tinyurl.com/2cptvne
For a practical, illustrative example of unsustainable, imported carrying capacity
(2) If women rule the world, nothing would be different, Lisa Jervis, LipMagazine.org, 5/15/2005