As strange as it seems given the whole, you know, this, the United States is only a small part of the world.

Little Donald ordering closed coal plants to reopen like a Captain Planet villain is only going to impact a relatively small number of power plants - and those coal plants are going to close back down as soon as they're legally allowed to, for the same reason they closed in the first place, because they don't make economic sense anymore.

Meanwhile, the people buying solar because they can't trust oil and gas supplies, and the governments investing in renewables because they don't want to be held hostage the next time the United States gets a bug up its ass about Iran, will still have those solar and renewables long after Little Donald has retired to his private massage parlor in Mar-A-Lago.

Only a fraction has a balanced, protein-rich vegetarian diet as the norm.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's not because of bad dietary choices, but because of poverty? I mean, the problem isn't the vegetarian diet, but that people can't afford enough food in general?

Sure. And fair. There are tons of people out there practicing anarchism-style community organization and mutual aid who get mightily offended at being called anarchists - e.g. the Zapatistas.

That's the cool thing about anarchism. It's focused on building community, so its ideas work to build community, whether you're an anarchist or not.

When the 10% who have savings and stock market investments and 401Ks are getting richer and richer, seeing their personal net worth rise, and feeling pretty good about it.

And the 90% who don't have savings and investments and are working paycheck to paycheck are seeing mass unemployment and salary cuts and hyperinflated rents and grocery prices and are struggling harder and harder and just getting further and further behind.

And then the 10% tell the 90% "I don't see any problem, the economy is great".

I don't think we're there yet. Hopefully the American economy pulls back from the brink. I don't want to live in a country where being upper middle class means living in walled compounds and having armed bodyguards escort your kids to private schools to keep them from being kidnapped for ransom. But frankly, I think that's where we're going - a United States where the people lucky enough to own stock see those stock prices go up, and up, and up, while the wealth of the people goes down, and down, and down, enjoying their enclaves of wealth while surrounded by more and more of the desperate poor.

Because, I mean, you may not have helped the hyperbillionaires screw over 90% of America to pad their stock prices, you may not have orchestrated the biggest wealth transfer in history from the poor to the rich, but you sure as fuck didn't try to stop them.

What, I wondered, did people do on these islands? The answer was surprisingly banal. These were partly debate societies, where members could gather and talk about local issues, such as a factory that was polluting the countryside, or whether the village medical center was well stocked. The groups also organized litter pickups and painted bus benches. There was talk of movie nights.

Under one subreddit query from nine months ago that asked, “What are the Tisza islands doing?” the responses mostly showed people coming together and being neighborly. “Things we’ve done,” began one post: “Water distribution in the heat, we collected school supplies and clothes for the family support center.” Also, “we organized a cooking competition.” This was a perfect illustration of Robert Putnam’s idea in Bowling Alone, his book about growing atomization in America—that civil society depends on people simply doing things together.

Mutual aid groups. Prefigurative politics. Starting local with boots on the ground, finding little ways to make your community better, actually pays off.

(Nobody tell the MLs.)

The K-shaped economy in action.

The rich get richer, the poor get poorer.

And when young Americans finally lose their fucking temper - when we get "Occupy the Suburbs" instead of "Occupy Wall Street", when the rhetoric is turned against the 10%, whose stocks and bonds and 401Ks ballooned in value as a side effect of the hyperbillionaires looting and pillaging the American working class in the greatest wealth transfer in history - those old fucks aren't going to have the slightest idea why most of America hates them.

And the hyperbillionaires who maintain their power by dividing Americans against one another are going to laugh all the way to the bank.

Lol. Let's call it a "positive" externality. Pretty much everybody who's employed, or who wants to be employed, or who wants to stay in contact with friends or family, needs to have a cell phone and Internet access. And if you have to pay for that stuff anyway, you may as well doomscroll on it.

not intended for direct human consumption

Certainly. But it's still edible. Dent corn, for instance, can be and is used for cornmeal, masa, tortillas, and so on. The industrial monoculture varieties of dent corn are optimized for animal feed, ethanol, or whatever, but nothing's stopping us from eating them (except, in theory, the ridiculous amount of herbicide and pesticide that gets dumped on them).

The reason why we're growing so much corn that's not intended for direct human consumption is because of a whole shitload of broken incentives and megacorporation subsidies and America's meat addiction and the nagging worry that if we don't keep the land in use we can't justify stealing it from the natives however many generations ago.

Which is part of what the article goes into.

And it's why the idea that ethanol opposes Big Oil is so ridiculous. Ethanol and Big Oil go hand in hand. Their interests are aligned and Trump loves them both.

Pretty much, yeah.

Fascism, at its core, is Us versus Them. Under all the complexities and layers is one simple idea: Our problems are because They have Our resources, and we need a strong leader to go to war (figuratively or literally) against Them and take Our stuff.

And I think this is incredibly seductive because it triggers our old hominid instincts, from back when we lived in small tribes on the African savannah, and when our territory was hit by drought, or fire, or natural disaster, and we didn't have enough resources, the solution really was to go into another tribe's territory, drive them out, and take their stuff.

Lebensraum is as old as stone knives and bearskins.

And the more desperate people are, the more frightened and hungry and angry they are, the stronger those old animal instincts become.

But, you know, a good leader can simplify complicated issues. A good leader can identify problems, articulate actual solutions, and direct people's angry monkey brains towards fighting for those solutions instead of persecuting scapegoats. Not Us versus Them, but All of Us, together, fighting poverty and climate change and economic hardship and building a better future.

Unfortunately, in the United States and the "free world" as a whole, we have a handful of extraordinarily wealthy people who benefit from all the economic and social failures that are causing the problems we suffer from. And they want people to believe in a simple violent solution that blames the wrong people and doesn't actually fix anything, because they don't want the problems fixed.

And you don't get elected unless these extraordinarily wealthy people give you enough money to win an election.

So we don't get any good leaders. We get a choice between fascism and the status quo, which is also fascism.

Yay, democracy.

If that was true (it's not) why are we wasting so much land growing inedible corn? Maybe we could, you know, like the article says, use the land for better purposes?

Field corn is edible for humans. It makes perfectly fine cornmeal, grits, hominy, etc. And of course it's processed into corn syrup, which is technically edible for humans.

It just doesn't have as much sugar as sweet corn does, so it doesn't taste good when eaten as a vegetable.

You don't need to feel ashamed. The system is so broken that just surviving each day is a victory on its own. If that's all you can do - if every day is a recovery day from the last day - it's still worth celebrating because you're still fucking alive.