"Let no one deceive you in any way. For that day will not come, unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of destruction, who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God. Do you not remember that when I was still with you I told you these things? And you know what is restraining him now so that he may be revealed in his time. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work...The coming of the lawless one is by the activity of Satan with all power and false signs and wonders, and with all wicked deception for those who are perishing, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved."
—2 Thessalonians 2:3–10
"The struggle to rein in global carbon emissions and keep the planet from melting down has the feel of Kafka’s fiction. The goal has been clear for thirty years, and despite earnest efforts we’ve made essentially no progress toward reaching it. Today, the scientific evidence verges on irrefutable. If you’re younger than sixty, you have a good chance of witnessing the radical destabilization of life on earth—massive crop failures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or permanent drought. If you’re under thirty, you’re all but guaranteed to witness it.
If you care about the planet, and about the people and animals who live on it, there are two ways to think about this. You can keep on hoping that catastrophe is preventable, and feel ever more frustrated or enraged by the world’s inaction. Or you can accept that disaster is coming, and begin to rethink what it means to have hope." (Jonathan Franzer 2019 The New Yorker)
FACT: Climate change/Global Warming is caused by human activity climate change cannot be stopped, it can be slowed. To avoid the worst consequences of climate change, we would need to reach “net zero” carbon emissions by 2030 that is not going to happen in fact it won't even happen by 2060. Net zero means that, on balance, no more carbon is dumped into the atmosphere than is taken out. So we need to face the facts and prepare ourselves to survive and understand life will be more difficult for everyone on the planet because we were bad stewards of the planet. (Global warming then leads to other changes like droughts, water scarcity, severe fires, rising sea levels, flooding, melting polar ice, intense storms and declining biodiversity.)
If you are still to slow to understand let us put it as simply as possible. Global warming is real! Anyone who says different is either ignorant of the facts or intentionally telling lies. Scientific consensus is overwhelming: The planet is getting warmer, and humans are behind it. Corporate greed culture using dogma, political manipulation, ethnic cleansing and religion to justify destruction of the environment are trading long term damage and social unrest for short term profits the world will pay the price for.
The truth simply hurts, not your feelings but global profits. We view certain truths as inconvenient because it means we have to change to adapt to them, and simply put it is easier to put off than to accept these. Nations see the truth of climate as affecting those in power. Half of the world's coral reefs have died in the last 30 years, and two thirds of the Great Barrier Reef have been damaged by coral bleaching – this happens when the sea temperature is too high. Whales, dolphins, porpoises and sea lions all suffer from bycatch from global fishing. According to the United Nations, more than one billion people globally depend on coral reefs for their food and livelihoods. The disappearance would be catastrophic; resulting in hundreds of millions of human deaths around the world from losing their main source of food and income.
But that is just the start before the end of the century it is almost certain we will see a 3-degree Celsius rise in global temperature. A 3-degree Celsius warming scenario would unleash a cascade of catastrophic consequences, including the displacement of over 2 billion people, the collapse of ice caps leading to uncontrollable sea level rise and flooding of Europe and flooding every coastal city on the planet. The global sea level would rise approximately 70 meters (approximately 230 feet), causing widespread biodiversity loss, frequent and devastating extreme weather events, and the endangerment of the Amazon and Congo Basin rainforests which are currently being destroyed by greedy multinationals.
The Congo Basin is the target of several land grabbing international industrial-scale agriculture developers — including palm oil and rubber — who are looking to cash in on new operations in Africa by exploitation and funding wars that wipe out indigenous populations similar to how the Amazon is attacked. These plantations, fuel wide-scale deforestation and spark social conflict while enriching lawless corporations and foreign nationals. The Congo Basin hosts the world’s second largest tropical forest, which spans six countries: Gabon, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Republic of the Congo, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, and Equatorial Guinea. This tropical forest is home to 10,000 species of tropical plants, including valuable timber species like okoume, rosewood, mukula, sapelli, and African teak.
This makes the Democratic Republic of Congo is one of the richest countries on earth, but European, Chinese and American colonialism, slavery and corruption have turned it into one of the poorest, according to historian Dan Snow. The world's bloodiest conflict since World War II is still rumbling on today. China owns most of the industrial mines in the DRC and is just as responsible for child labor, horrific working and living conditions as the west is as well as systematic evictions of residents who live on its vast concessions. The five tech giants -- Apple; Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google; Dell; Microsoft; and Tesla -- all have "knowingly benefiting from the cruel and brutal use of young children in the Democratic Republic of Congo to mine cobalt"
Because these children are black they don't feel any responsibility to curtail their profits from their exploitation. This is in line with the histories of China, Europe and American cultures. In fact very few Americans thought there was anything wrong with child labor before the Civil War. In the US children under age 15 worked up to 14 hours a day, either alongside their parents or for an employer – unless they were rich. In that case, other children worked for their families. Enslaved children typically began working alongside their mothers in the fields at a very young age. They also did housework, hauled water and took care of animals. Not only were these enslaved people unpaid “child laborers”; the law cast them as property subject to the threat of sale.
Ironically the same people who did this to the enslaved Natives and Africans in America were subject to the same injustices in Europe! By 1900, a quarter of the South’s nearly 100,000 textile workers were Caucasian and under 16 the cotton industry refused to hire many of the newly freed slaves for the same jobs they were enslaved for. Northern reformers were calling for change. They objected not because they considered child labor a form of child abuse but rather because a majority of these little workers were white.
The image of pale, shrunken-faced, debilitated poor white boys and girls in Southern textile mills was sensationalized in the North as “white child slavery.” Once the issue became a national obsession, activists formed the National Child Labor Committee in 1904 to “change the public conscience” on this issue. The committee first pushed to outlaw child labor in 1906 on the grounds that it weakened the image of the white race and, therefore, interfered with U.S. plans for global dominance.
Newspapers that championed white supremacy throughout the pre-civil rights South paved the way for lynching by declaring African Americans nonpersons. They embraced the language once used at slave auctions by denying Black citizens the courtesy titles Mr. and Mrs. and referring to them in news stories as “the negro,” “the negress” or “the nigger.”
Cobalt is used in almost every lithium-ion rechargeable battery on the planet, ending up in supply chains of smartphones, tablets, laptops, electric vehicles and other major consumer electronic products. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) sits on the world’s largest cobalt deposits, representing more than 70% of global supply, and approximately one-third of this cobalt is extracted from artisanal miners, through a hidden economy where children and adults toil as slaves. For their backbreaking efforts, toxic exposure, immense suffering, and risk of death, artisanal miners typically earn between $0.75 and $2.50 per day. Fortunately, the oceans contain about 70 times more cobalt than on land and can be harvested sustainably with passive adsorption technologies; and a symbiotic system using existing offshore structures to harvest cobalt could enhance the economic feasibility of seawater cobalt harvesting. So the only reason companies focus on the DRC is there is no one there to insist they pay the market rate for the cobalt! The people in the DRC are warring against the wrong people.
Rwanda is currently at war with the DRC and Rwanda has historically been a nation used as a tool by the west. In the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), South African, Burundian and Tanzanian troops are fighting against the Rwandan army, which has deployed in support of the rebellion by the March 23 Movement, or M23. Rwanda's President is quickly getting the reputation as a tool of the West. Like many African leaders before him who are used enriched and then deposed or assassinated when they have done their Master's bidding he may be trapped in his role. Paul Kagame his detractors say is not a Pan-African; he is a murderer, a war criminal, and a puppet of the West, killing millions of innocent people! Time will tell if this is the case. If he has to eventually flee his country we will know the truth.
Rwanda is a tiny landlocked state with virtually no resources; 60% of the population lives in abject poverty and 70% survives by subsistence farming. Yet the country is a major exporter of critical minerals for the electronics industry. Rwanda hosts a major military base at Musanze where British and US military forces train African armies. It is the third largest troop contributor to UN ‘peacekeeping’ missions, currently troops in west Sudan (Darfur), South Sudan, Mozambique, Central African Republic (CAR) and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Belgians had played a mindgame (Psyop) on the Rwandan people by elevating one ethnic group over another while they were under European control creating a caste system. President Emmanuel Macron recognized France’s responsibility for the Rwandan genocide in 1994. But intercommunal hatred grew during decades of Belgian rule.
France provided arms and military training to Habyarimana's militias, the Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi, which were among the government's primary means of operationalizing the genocide following the assassination of Juvénal Habyarimana and Cyprien Ntaryamira on April 6, 1994. This is part of the Neo colonialist playbook to pretend to help but supply a nations disgruntled with weapons to form a terrorist group similar to how Israel created Hamas! The Belgian government was unwilling to spend time and effort on running territories far poorer than neighbouring Congo — present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which King Leopold II had owned and ruled directly between 1885 and 1908 — and enlisted the help of the (Roman Catholic) Missionaries of Africa or White Fathers, hoping that evangelization would become a tool for both colonial domination and development. Especially since it had worked so well in Haiti.
The Belgians were influenced by anthropometry, they obsessed with the classification and differentiation of ‘races’. They decided that the Tutsis’ facial traits showed they were of Hamitic or Nilotic origin (Dark Brown and Blacks), and were descended from a cattle-herding people who had come to central Africa in search of pasture and imposed themselves on the local Hutus (Bantu farmers).Generally Bantu people are brownish black or brownish dark-skinned. Sefaria (Mishnah Negaim) defines them as of boxwood color — not black.) and Twa (a pygmy people who were the original occupants of the land and have lighter skin and what are called Asian features as they were the genetic source of the common Asian phenotype). So they played that old Antebellum Dark Skin VS Light Skin Game and got a nation to attempt to genocide each other white supremacist dogma!
The Tutsi notables, who had come to believe in the superiority the Belgians attributed to them, became tools of the colonial administration, responsible for assigning forced labor and punishments. They inspired growing hatred among the Hutus, whose chiefs had all been deposed by the Belgians. Over time, the Hutus were given increasingly onerous forced labour assignments, which led to several famines. Only Tutsi children had access to education, for example at the secondary school in Astrida (now Butare, in Rwanda’s southeast), where future employees of the colonial administration were trained.
At this point the church was brought in again. The vicar-apostolic of Rwanda, André Perraudin, encouraged his secretary Grégoire Kayibanda to publish a ‘Bahutu Manifesto’ in 1957, and to found the Hutu Social Movement (later the Party of the Hutu Emancipation Movement, Parmehutu), which advocated racial ‘confrontation with the ‘Tutsi invaders’. Canon Eugène Ernotte encouraged Parmehutu to build an organization based on local cells, like the Legion of Mary , while the Tutsis joined the Rwandese National Union (, which called for a quick transition to independence and a constitutional monarchy. In1959 with a revolt began by smallholder farmers, was directed not against the Belgian colonial administration but against Tutsi notables and officials.
This ‘social revolution’ was supported by Belgium’s special military resident Colonel Guillaume Logiest (the colonial regime’s top-ranking official), a tough man educated in South Africa and openly sympathized with Parmehutu and with Kayibanda, who later became the country’s first president.
Independence, declared in 1962, was presented as a victory for ordinary people. The Tutsis’ huts were burned, and 300,000 fled into exile, many to Uganda. Until 1990 the Belgians supported the Hutus, in the belief that the ethnic majority was also the political majority. President Juvénal Habyarimana — seen as a moderate next to his predecessor Kayibanda, who made no secret of his hatred of the Tutsis — was a regular guest of Belgium’s King Baudouin, taking part in prayer meetings at the royal palace.
The Catholic Church is the largest church in the DRC. Since the creation of the Belgian Congo, the Church has been the main partner of the colonial state, especially in the field of education because of he legacy of Beatriz Kimpa Vita, also referred to as Beatrice of Congo, who was born near Mount Kibangu in Angola, ancient Kongo Kingdom, around 1684. Born 1684 in the Kingdom of Kongo, a baptized catholic, She told the people that they had been lied to, and that the European-looking images of Jesus and Mary and the saints that adorned the Catholic churches were false and that these people of the bible were all born in Kongo and were in fact Kongolese.
She destroyed "idols", the various Kongo Nkisi or charms inhabited by spiritual entities, as well as Christian paraphernalia. She was captured and taken to the mountaintop court of Pedro IV. With persuasion by the Capuchins (a catholic religious order), she was convicted of heresy and burned at the stake in July 1706 at age 22. Then they ground her body to dust. In 1710, the perpetrators sent a report of their “mission” to the pope, after having organized the persecution of her followers. Her followers were sold into slavery, and taken across the Atlantic.
This legacy is visible: Even today, the state subcontracts educationservices to the Catholic Church. The Church remains one of the main landowners in the DRC The Protestants and the Anglicans are organized in the Church of Christ in Congo, which is composed of 62 churches called "Communities". The DRC is the home of the Kimbanguist Church, one of the largest African Instituted Churches.
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