Relayed from excellent reporting & analysis elsewhere, the following evidence of human supremacy in its deranged and potentially terminal phase:
No wonder, then, the following survey results from Gallup:
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Promethean Shame
Now comes Nicholas Carr, with a few salient paragraphs from his New Cartographies substack, always worth close consideration:
We find ourselves today, Anders wrote in The Obsolescence of the Human, surrounded by products that don’t appear to us as having been produced by us. We have handed off so much of their design and production to industrial technologies that we can no longer take a shared pride in their invention and manufacture. Indeed, they have come to project an otherness that seems not just separate from us but superior to us. They mock us as outdated masses of meat and bone. Today’s products, Anders observed,
are simply “there.” We encounter them primarily as necessary, desirable, superfluous, affordable, or unaffordable consumer goods that become “mine” only after I have bought them. As such, they are much more likely to be proof of one’s own insufficiency than evidence of one’s power.
This sense of insufficiency transformed “Promethean pride” into “Promethean shame”—the shame contemporary man feels at having been born instead of made, of being a product of natural processes rather than technological ones. “He despises himself,” wrote Anders, “in the same way that things would despise him if they could.” The shame, he went on, becomes particularly sharp when a person first sees a so-called thinking machine:
As for the man who is for the first time confronted with a working computing machine, self-aggrandizement and pride are even more alien to him. An observer who erupts with the exclamation, “My goodness, aren’t we great guys, to be capable of this!” when encountering such a machine is a clown, a figment of the imagination. Quite the contrary! He rather murmurs with a shake of his head, “My god, it’s incredible what it—the machine—can do!” At the same time, he feels highly ill at ease in his creaturely skin, for the machine half gives him the creeps and half puts him to shame.
Though it was written seventy-five years ago, that last sentence strikes me as one of the more perceptive descriptions of man’s confrontation with generative AI: “he feels highly ill at ease in his creaturely skin, for the machine half gives him the creeps and half puts him to shame.”
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So where does Promethean Shame end? As Anders writes elsewhere: in a world without us!
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The Extinction Committee
During times marked by senseless violence of humans against other humans, there is a tendency to forget that we remain in the midst of an extinction event. That makes the endless senseless violence inflicted upon other species by an omnicidal clique all the more abhorrent. Their cynical and ignorant actions must be vigorously opposed, as specified in the below press release from Earthjustice:
On March 31, a panel full of Trump appointees voted to give the oil industry permission to harm and kill imperiled species across the Gulf of Mexico. Earthjustice will see them in court.
The panel is known as the Endangered Species Committee – aka the “God Squad” or the “Extinction Committee,” for its ability to decide the fates of imperiled species. This committee can grant exemptions from Endangered Species Act protections in exceedingly rare cases where they are at odds with “public interest.”
The administration claims this exemption is urgently needed for reasons of “national security,” citing concerns about reliable energy supply. However, this move will not speed up oil production or lower today’s high gas prices. No oil projects in the Gulf have been rejected due to the ESA, nor is the oil industry facing any burdensome requirements under the law that are slowing or halting offshore drilling activities.
We are suing the Trump administration for abusing the concept of a national security exemption. Greenlighting extinction in the Gulf will not make anyone safer, nor will it result in lower prices at the pump for Americans. What it could do is trigger ecological destruction.
Rice’s whales, the only whales that live year-round in the Gulf, have seen populations dwindle to fewer than 100 individuals in the years since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster decimated the species. Scientists have warned that we could see the first human-caused extinction of a large whale species in recorded history if better protections are not implemented.
Because of the committee’s vote, sea turtles, fish, rays, manatees, corals, and birds are also now without protection. Existing regulations already allow the oil industry to harass, harm or kill sea turtles hundreds of thousands of times per year in the course of its operations.
The Endangered Species Act provides the committee with the authority to waive protections only in extreme circumstances when there is no way for an activity to proceed without leading to species extinction. But that’s not the case here: The oil industry could choose to operate in a way that would be less harmful to imperiled wildlife.
This isn’t the Trump administration’s only recent step to weaken safeguards for the Gulf. Earlier this month, the administration recklessly approved “Kaskida,” a new, ultra-deepwater drilling project. The developer is BP, the company responsible for Deepwater Horizon.
Greenlighting oil and gas projects that will span years threatens to lock us into a future of fossil fuel dependence. Right now, we’re seeing how the volatility of oil prices leads to instability for people across the U.S. That’s one of the many reasons we’re fighting for a clean energy transition. Wind and solar prices have been falling steadily for decades, and they don’t depend on an ongoing supply of fuel.
Earthjustice will continue our work to protect this vulnerable region against the harms of fossil fuel development. We have challenged all nine offshore oil-and-gas auctions that the U.S. government has held since 2018 for violating federal environmental laws – and we’ve won every case. We’re ready for this fight too.
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Beneath the Geopolitical Mayhem
Saturated by wave after wave of updates chronicling violence inflicted by humans upon other humans, we tune our attention to all the additional damage inflicted upon the whole of life by the gradually accelerating violence of the Climate Emergency and the Sixth Extinction. Of course, the two levels of violence are deeply linked via human supremacism, and appear to be feeding energy into each other, with no end in sight.
Below, excerpts from today’s press release from the World Meteorological Organization, together with a link to the full report. It makes for sober reading; hence our ongoing focus on the theme of lifeboats!
Geneva, Switzerland (WMO) – The Earth’s climate is more out of balance than at any time in observed history, as greenhouse gas concentrations drive continued warming of the atmosphere and ocean and melting of ice, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). These rapid and large-scale changes have occurred within a few decades but will have harmful repercussions for hundreds – and potentially thousands – of years.
Key messages
- WMO State of Climate report confirms 2015-2025 hottest 11 years on record
- Earth’s energy imbalance is highest in sixty five-year record
- The ocean has been absorbing about eighteen times the annual human energy use each year for the past two decades
- Extreme weather impacts millions and costs billions
- World Meteorological Day: observing today to protect tomorrow
LINK TO THE FULL REPORT
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Rule of Law Under Attack
Now comes Earthjustice, with a recent press release:
The ability to hold wrongdoers accountable in court is foundational to our democracy, environmental protections, and the rule of law. When large corporations release toxic pollution into our air and water, our legal system should empower people to seek justice and fight back against polluters and harmful industries that threaten the health and well-being of our communities.
Under the second Trump administration, that right is under threat. The administration and its allies in Congress have spent the last fourteen months working to dismantle our access to the courts in five key ways:
- Eliminating or undermining judicial review
- Limiting who can sue wrongdoers
- Making it too expensive to sue and harder to win
- Limiting judicial discretion
- Blocking meaningful case settlements
That’s why we released our new report,Access to Justice: Defending the Public’s Right to Seek Justice in Court. It outlines these attacks, provides specific examples of how the Trump administration and Congressional Republicans are working to codify them into law, and details the ways we’re fighting back.
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We also note the death of distinguished philosopher Jürgen Habermas, with whom DP was fortunate to study while an unruly undergraduate.
A thoughtful review of his philosophical legacy accessible via clicking on the below photograph:
A TIRELESS ADVOCATE FOR PEACEFUL NEGOTIATION AND DIALOGUE
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Across All Data Sets
Now comes a press release from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research:
Global warming rate (in °C per decade) from the Berkeley Earth global temperature data: The blue line shows the linear trends for the time before and after 2015 (light blue the uncertainty range). The red line shows the linear trend for 10‐year windows of the data, at 1-year intervals. Figure: PIK
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2025GL118804
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Hungry Mungry
We borrow our title from a poem by Shel Silverstein, in which a boy sits down for a bowl of mushroom soup and proceeds to munch his way though his neighborhood, his town, his state, his country and the rest of the world; and who then decided, for dessert, to eat the universe:
According to Nicholas Carr, who has long understood the severe consequences of our insatiable appetite for technological “innovation”, so it goes with the relentless AI eating machine.
Below, we relay a few paragraphs from a recent post on his excellent New Cartographies.
Until, that is, there is nothing left to eat.
Not only a world without us.
Not only a universe without a world.
Just nothing was,
nothing was,
nothing,
nada,
nicht.
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In Praise of Wirecutters
We are grateful to an esteemed DP correspondent for guiding our attention towards a recent lecture delivered by London Review of Book’s US editor Adam Shatz, author of The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon. A brief excerpt below:
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The entire lecture is worthy of close consideration, and is available here.
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Of Lies & State Terror
Following the most recent Minnesota murder committed in the name of “law enforcement,” we relay the following few paragraphs from Timothy Snyder, truth-speaker and author of On Tyranny:
The lies begin as clichés, memes that are pounded into our heads by the government and by those in the media who repeat them, mindlessly or with malice.
One of these cliches is “law enforcement,” which is uttered over and over like a incantation. “Law enforcement” is not a noun. It is not a thing in the world. It is an action.
And action is something that we have a right to see and judge for ourselves. People enforcing the law do not wear masks. And people wearing masks who trespass, assault, batter, and kill are not enforcing the law.
They are violating it.
It is indeed the job of some local, state, and federal authorities to enforce the law. It is a disservice to them when federal employees carry out public executions. It is a greater disservice to them when such actions are defined as “law enforcement.”
The lies continue as provocative inversions, as what in On Tyranny I called “dangerous words”: these are, precisely, “terrorist” and “extremist.” These two words are known to us from history as those used by tyrants. And these are the words used by the Trump people to defame those killed by their polices.
This is their “messaging,” their banality of evil, as Hannah Arendt called it.
Or the evil of banality, as Václav Havel said. Words turned into reality with the complicity of those who hear them.
Those who actively lie are directly complicit in the deaths that just happen and in any deaths to come. But those in media who choose to treat propaganda as the story, to begin from lies rather than from events, are also complicit. The border is the crack, the lie is the wedge, and the wedge is made up of people — of us.
Words matter, uttered first or repeated. They create an atmosphere, they normalize — or they do not. We can choose to see, to call things by their proper names, to call out people who lie. We have to.
The moral horror of those killings is enough. But there is a political logic as well. And the two are connected. Those who resist the lawlessness and the lies are doing right. And they are giving a second chance to the endangered American republic.
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OUTING THE LIE: EXHIBIT A
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OUTING THE LIE: EXHIBIT B
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OUTING THE LIE: EXHIBIT C
UNARMED VICTIM ON KNEE SHOT IN BACK BY MASKED “LAW ENFORCEMENT”
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VIGIL FOR ALEX PRETTI
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