#ai

A Berlin, le prix de l’immobilier ancien a plus que triplé depuis 2010
▻https://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2025/06/21/a-berlin-le-prix-de-l-immobilier-ancien-a-plus-que-triple-depuis-2010_661508

« Immobilier, une crise européenne ». La capitale allemande attire une population croissante depuis vingt ans. Mais la construction ne suit pas, si bien que les prix des logements et des loyers flambent désormais.

[...]

Plusieurs facteurs expliquent ce phénomène : le fort développement économique de la ville depuis 2012, porté par l’essor du tourisme et de l’économie numérique, la spéculation immobilière, mais surtout l’immigration nette, qui n’a pas été compensée par un effort suffisant de construction. Longtemps vue comme une cité périphérique, la ville de Berlin est devenue très attractive pour les nouveaux venus, arrivés d’Allemagne ou de l’étranger. Avec 3,9 millions d’habitants en 2024, contre 3,4 millions en 2000, la population ne cesse de croître. Elle pourrait atteindre 4 millions en 2040.
Les nouveaux arrivants pénalisés
Dépassée par ce succès, la mairie de Berlin se retrouve dans une situation paradoxale. Après avoir massivement cédé à des compagnies immobilières son immense parc locatif municipal hérité du régime communiste d’Allemagne de l’Est, elle doit désormais gérer une dramatique pénurie de logements abordables.

▻https://archive.ph/uUoHC

(rationalisation. voilà comment on en vient à théoriser l’abandon de la ville, y compris au nom d’une « autonomie » faite d’autosubsistance le plus souvent fondamentalement imaginaire. misère des « arts de faire » ?)

#villes_interdites

Today on the program in the first segment: Marketing Mars. Zara Zimbardo deconstructs the mythologies of American #Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny as they apply to settler #colonialism in space, and the billionaire tech bro infatuation with our closest planetary neighbor, Mars. Looking through several analytical frames, Zimbardo debunks any notion that there is a Planet B to escape to, remarking “we’re encouraged to believe that human ingenuity and industry can turn uninhabitable #Mars into a habitable Earth. This fantasy is a distraction from the reality that #Earth is being rapidly turned into Mars.”

In the second segment today (34:20) , we are rejoined by investigative journalist Peter Byrne. We look at his latest installments for Military #AI Watch. We’ll look at the Stargate Fiasco, World War 3 will be fought inside data centers, and his most recent, AI Battle Space: Weaponizing the 5G Internet of Things.

Notes:

Zara Zimbardo coined the neologism Marsification in collaboration with the Bureau of Linguistical Reality, and co-created the concept album audio artwork Marsification: A Tale of Planetary Grief. She is an Interdisciplinary Studies faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Zara is a member of the curriculum design and facilitation team of Partners for Collaborative Change, with a focus on the interdependence of social justice and the environment, and community-driven climate resilience planning.

Peter Byrne is an award-winning investigative reporter and science writer, author of the ongoing series for Project Censored, Military AI Watch.

▻https://2023projectcensoredshows.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/Project+Censored+zara+peter+byrne_ONLINE.mp3

(1 h)

Below is a Rough Transcript of the Interview with Zara Zimbardo

Mickey Huff: Welcome to the Project Censored Show on Pacifica Radio. I’m Mickey Huff with Eleanor Goldfield. Today we have a great treat for you all. We welcome back to the program Zara Zimbardo, to talk about a recent dispatch she wrote for us at Project Censored, Marketing, Mars. If Mars is the answer, what was the question? We’re going to find out in this segment.

And I must remark as well that this is a rare occasion when both Eleanor and I are co-hosting at the same time. And we are both again honored to welcome Zara Zimbardo back to the program. Zimbardo coined the neologism Marsification in collaboration with the Bureau of Linguistical Reality and co-created the concept album audio artwork, Marsification: a Tale of Planetary Grief.

She is an interdisciplinary studies faculty at the California Institute of Studies in California. Zara is a member of the curriculum design and facilitation team of Partners for Collaborative Change with a focus on the interdependence of social justice and the environment and community driven climate resilience planning.

Zara also contributed to Censored 2015. Hard to believe that that was a decade ago, but she wrote a stellar chapter for us called, It’s Easier to Imagine the Zombie Apocalypse Than to Imagine the End of Capitalism. Zara Zimbardo, welcome back to the Project Censored Show. Here we are at the imagining the end of capitalism as it’s manifest through Marsification.

So let’s talk about your new piece, up at projectcensored.org: Marketing Mars. Impetus and what’s the thesis?

Zara Zimbardo: Thank you both for having me on. So Marketing Mars is a piece that, you know, in our time right now where there is accelerating an intensification of messaging saying that humanity’s future is in space and that human humans can and should expand to Mars.

And the 2030s are being heavily hyped as the decade of human landing and initial settlement both on the moon and on Mars, as well as luxury space tourism and the untold riches of asteroid mining, right? So we’re at this so-called dawn of the age of space colonization. And so it’s important to slow down and look at the ways that we are being sold certain fantasies and dreams of our relationship with the red planet, and to unpack and kind of like break the spell of some of these frames and messages that contain different worldviews and ideologies that are really nothing new.

And so in this piece, I look at five dominant frames in the US context, right, that are selling the Mars pitch: species survival, seeing Mars as a backup planet, as Planet B, Mars as Wild West frontier, right, the new rugged horizon, next evolutionary step, the space race, of course, exploration and discovery, and then transcendence. And freedom. And so looking at some of the roots and some of the ideologies within these different messages that you see in all kinds of ways coming from all different kinds of actors, notably from tech billionaires who are selling science fiction fantasies to distract from nonfiction on earth, that it’s valuable to unpack, right, and have public discussion.

Mickey Huff: Zara, many of these people too are say, maybe taking the wrong messages from dystopic science, science fiction warnings. And you mentioned, you know, the billionaire Tech bros, led at least in public by Elon Musk, although I think it’s more Curtis Jarvin and Peter Thiel pulling the strings behind the scenes that we ought be more concerned about. Not that there aren’t plenty of people to be concerned about for various reasons.

But Musk has certainly popularized the Occupy Mars slogan and shirt, which I think is a horrible take on Occupy Wall Street. He’s not gonna occupy Mars to improve it in any real way. But that certainly has, as you’ve mentioned, that’s really entered the lexicon, entered the public imagination.

And of course it’s often cloaked in the species survival, as you mentioned. Maybe you can talk a little bit about this. Somehow we figured that if we’ve done soiled this planet, maybe the next one will be better. I mean, I don’t follow the logic there, but maybe you can walk us through.

Zara Zimbardo: Yeah. So Musk is obviously one of the most visible and influential evangelists for Making Mars Great Again. And that is very much sold as essential for the guarantee of the human species into the future, that there are all kinds of calamities that could befall us on earth, right? Extinction level events. He likes to bring up asteroid strikes quite a bit.

And so that, saying that this is imperative for humans to cease being a single planetary civilization, and this is not his original idea. This has been around for decades, coming from a number of different people, but saying that this is our guarantee for species survival. And so his plans, I’m using quotes here, right, is to beginning next decade to start ferrying people to Mars. And over the course of decades, to have a city of a million people on Mars, which will preserve the light of consciousness and you know, create a new society where we’ll be able to do all the things, overcome all the problems we weren’t able to here.

So that there would be, I mean it’s laughable in terms of, you know, he says there’ll be direct democracy, right? As he’s taking a wrecking ball to democracy here, that there’ll be different egalitarianism, right? And that Mars is also very much looms in the libertarian imagination that this would be freedom from pesky regulations, from constraints, from limitations.

The frontier thesis. And actually, Robert Zubrin, who has been one of the strongest Mars colonization cheerleaders for a long time, who’s the head of Mars Society, he directly cites Frederick Turner’s Frontier thesis saying that humanity needs this space frontier to show us a tougher, better, freer way, and that that will be the catalyst for the next evolutionary step.

And, you know, Musk as well as a number of others, you know, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson. There’s a number of these billionauts who have been, who are raised on different science fiction, beloved visions and a number of these science fiction authors are calling them out directly. Cory Doctorow saying, I feel some personal responsibility with people like Musk who have read our dystopias and mistaken them for business plans.

A couple years ago, Kim Stanley Robinsonr who was very much a zeitgeist shaper of with his Mars Trilogy, Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars, which really laid out this foundational template for terraforming Mars, you know, recently was saying this is a moral hazard, right, these sci-fi dreams right now. Only if we were all flourishing on Earth, then and only then would undertaking some kind of grand adventure like this make sense. But given the state of our world, you know, he said, which I think was probably a shock to many people, Mars is irrelevant and worse than useless to us, right? It’s distracting us from building a better society on earth.

Mickey Huff: Interestingly, just real quick, ’cause you mentioned a couple things that got me thinking. One was Frederick Jackson Turner. The historiographic flip side is that Turner was also calling the Frontier of the West closed, which spurred an interesting period in the early 20th century that did spark conservation for better or worse, with Teddy Roosevelt. Maybe there’s an underside there that we’re not seeing, that could be played out as you were just indicating.

It’s time to, in fact, not look at Mars. But what can we fix here? And the terraformation business. I know we’ll get into William Shatner and Captain Kirk later, but apparently these folks haven’t seen Star Trek 3, the Search for Spock, with the Genesis project, because that ended very terribly with the planet being rebirthed and dissolved and destroyed all within the period of a day or something. So in other words, another example of how big tech blows up in our faces.

Zara Zimbardo: Yeah. What could go wrong? And I mean, throughout the Marketing Mars piece, it’s really looking at these, tracing these deep colonial roots that keep replaying, and that we’re gonna, you know, reboot civilization on the blank red slate of this new planet. And so, so much of this mythology of this space cowboy, I mean, it’s no accident that, you know, Branson, Bezos Musk, all wear cowboy hats as they’re popping champagne in low earth orbit.

But that Mars, you know, it’s talking about as the language of, you know, pristine wilderness, untrammeled, and exporting a toxic worldview, which is really talking about how we treat earth, right? And so it’s this worldview of seeing the world as dead, which enables it to be ruthlessly and relentlessly extracted from, right?

And so it’s exporting these ideologies unaltered into space, you know, along with these romanticized notions of the settler, frontier, and some kind of, you know, simpler time as we’re living underground in Mars to not get cancer from radiation on the surface, right? I mean, we’re talking about toxic skies, poisonous landscape, amazingly inhospitable to say the least, to humans.

But the fact that this mythology gains so much uncritical traction, like just unselfconscious ideologies, as if the history of settler colonialism has not been and is not today marked by tremendous violence dispossession, theft and subjugation.

Eleanor Goldfield: Well, and I think there’s something there too ’cause when I was reading your piece, these concept of dystopia and distraction were kind of these buzzwords that kept buzzing at me. And I think there’s something about this where there’s this idea, well, we didn’t quite get it right here, you know, Manifest Destiny didn’t work out exactly the way we wanted it to, but, like Musk says, we’ll create this Utopia Mars, so we’ll get it right there. And it’s just like you have people that think the earth is flat or that climate change is not caused by humans. It’s this desperate need to unload all of these facts into a myth that will make everything okay again.

And we are myth makers, as human beings. We’ve been making myths since we started creating stories and we’re recreating them, as you said, on Mars. And I’m also curious where you think then that this role of imagination, because we’ve also created myths that don’t involve settler colonialism. And we’ve also created realities, not we personally, but we, the humans have created realities that are more egalitarian, that don’t speak to these oppressive hierarchies.

And so I’m curious, is there another space that you think, no pun intended, is there another space that you think that we, where there’s room for these kind of imaginative ways of thinking? Not really about Mars necessarily, but also just about our space here and how that could then translate into how we view not just Mars, but indeed maybe Earth.

Zara Zimbardo: Yeah. I love that question. One of the questions that I ask in this piece is like, whose imaginations are we inhabiting, right? And so by focusing on these dominant narrative frames in a US context, it’s not saying, oh, these are the only ones, but these are the funded ones. These are the ones that are really trying to make this happen imminently. Right?

And it’s so important, as you say, like with regards to our sibling planet, humans have been imagining and projecting and ascribing meanings onto Mars for millennia, right? In all kinds of different cultures, right? There are so many different sky traditions, different relationships with the cosmos as ancestral global commons. And so there’s so many voices, and within fields of astrophysics and cosmology that are saying like, we need space for different imaginations to imagine ourselves, our relationship with the cosmos, relationship with other planets, and notably with ours, right?

And so, something that is compelling to me is to think that, you know, to say like, let’s go to Mars without leaving the planet. We all have images of the surface, courtesy of rovers and flybys. Like let’s go to Mars in our imaginations. Or in literature, in media, using VR headsets, you know, whatever. So that we can keep returning to and landing on earth, right? And really imagining what that first human colony would be like, how desperately lonely it would be to be a single species without all of our outrageous, more than human kin.

What it would be like to not feel the breeze on your face while you’re experiencing all kinds of transcendent quote, freedom, right? You know, all of this to keep coming back home, right? To see, renew our sense of wonder and fierce commitment to keep open a livable, habitable window right here on earth.

Probably some listeners are familiar with the phenomenon of the overview effect, which was coined by Frank White, space philosopher, to name experiences of transformative awe when astronauts have left the earth, and then look back and see our home planet in the context of space, and often just feeling overcome with emotion, appreciation, longing, sorrow, beauty, which happens for William Shatner, Captain Kirk, when he went up with Blue Origin in 2021, and wrote so powerfully saying, you know, my trip to space was supposed to be a celebration. Instead, it felt like a funeral, that it was among the deepest, most intense feelings of grief he’d ever, ever experienced.

To see our earth in its fragile, miraculous life containing atmosphere, species that took billions of years to evolve, that we are destroying, you know, and to see this warm nurturing oasis within the vicious coldness of space. And so that’s an example. It’s like we don’t need to hop on a rocket to get that perspective, right? This perspective from here below has always offered transcendent awareness of our reality as earthlings in the wonder of this place.

Eleanor Goldfield: I think, I mean, something that you’re talking about is something that we talk about often on the show, which is framing, and you’re very literally talking about it, like looking out of a window and seeing the planet earth. Like what must that do? But again, as you pointed out, that’s something that we can imagine. And we just have to shift our framing. We just have to be aware of the framing that we have, which again, you know, the fish is not the one to recognize the water. We have been steeped in this kind of manifest destiny, this frontier, wild west, White supremacist colonialist paradigm. So we don’t see the frame around everything that we’re looking at. So this just seems like the natural way to approach Mars because that’s how we approach Earth.

And I think the other facet here that I think is really important to highlight, which also connects to something that we talk about frequently, is this rise of anti-intellectualism that sees it as a point of pride to be anti-intellectual and to not care about other species, to not even acknowledge the fact that climate change is a thing, to not acknowledge the destruction of our paradigms, of our framing. And so I see that as another thread in your piece about that, that framing and this rise of anti-intellectualism and this pride in anti-intellectualism is really problematic for the way that we look at everything, whether that be down at our feet or indeed up, up to space.

Zara Zimbardo: I so appreciate everything you just said and want to note, with Manifest Destiny in the neologism that we created, Marsification, right, which is about naming this time that we’re in of the drive to make Mars habitable while the Earth is becoming being rendered increasingly uninhabitable.

And it’s the expansion of colonial fantasy beyond the atmosphere of the earth, manifest destiny to the stars. So to hear, and I’m sorry to go back there, to inauguration day where Trump said in his speech, vowing to pursue our manifest destiny into the stars. I nearly fell out of my chair.

Mickey Huff: Yeah.

Zara Zimbardo: The, how explicit that is, right. And then saying we are going to plant the stars and stripes on Mars, right? And to name like, my piece is US focused, but this is a global enterprise, right? Pouring money into Mars and moon missions, and just to say, NASA has its new Artemis program, the Artemis Generation, which is the Moon to Mars program.

And so this is to return to the moon after five decades and to create a base in the South Pole with continuous human presence. And a big part of that is to then be a stepping stone to get to Mars. This is also China’s plan to have a base in the South Pole of the moon. And so as we’re also thinking about imagination and all of our diverse relationships with looking up at the night sky, right? Seeing something as familiar as the moon, sometimes I look at the full moon and I’m like, wow, what would that be like to know that there’s humans there or open pit mines?

You know? And so, it’s so important to both, as you’re saying, keep the imaginative space open, hear from very different voices who are holding up very different visions for our future as well as to, you know, unpack and look critically at some of the toxic world views in these dominant frames that are, you know, constantly bombarding us with these messages.

Mickey Huff: This is an old message, American exceptionalism. I mean, it’s essentially projecting into space, onto Mars, wherever. And as you point out in the article, it’s as if we wanna forget all about. You said here, you were quoting Linda Billings from NASA called this frontier pioneering continual progress, manifest destiny, free enterprise, rugged individualism, and a right to life without limits.

You know, again, it’s the United States of Amnesia, Gore Vidal style. We like to conveniently pretend and forget how catastrophic the American exceptionalist ideology has been for a majority of people and species around the world. The idea that we’re gonna transplant that somewhere else is hardly celebratory, unless it was to mean we were purging it. Right? And rebirthing ourselves here.

Eleanor Goldfield: I just have to quote Gil Scott Heron here: I can’t pay my doctor bills, but whitey’s on the moon.

Mickey Huff: Yeah. Which you quote, you cite in here, Zara.

Zara Zimbardo: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, from Gil Scott Heron’s Whitey on the Moon right, is as relevant today as it was then.

Mickey Huff: Yeah. 50 years later, 55 years later.

Zara Zimbardo: Yeah. Which, which brings up just some of the moral questions of funding these fantasies, but indeed, as you say, right, Musk and others talk about bringing millions of tons of cargo to Mars, right? So that may be less weighty than the cultural baggage that we would be transporting with us, and something as spectacular and difficult, a feat of planetary engineering, right? The vision of terraforming, right, which would be transforming Mars with orbital reflectors to heat up the surface to nuke the ice caps, which Musk is fond of talking about, to seed the surface with photosynthetic plants and genetically engineered microbes to try to, you know, build an atmosphere, right?

That it is a much harder task for us to confront and really reckon with our past right, and our presence and to imagine different futures. And so for all of the imagination, right within this, the sci-fi is becoming science nonfiction, there is a real impoverishment of worldview because it is Mars as a mirror or as a Rorschach test, right?

It’s all about how we view Earth, right? And so some of these dominant corporate colonial capitalist views that, see again, yeah, earth as just an inert resource or that look at somewhat barren areas of the earth as worthless and needing to be geo-engineered into productivity such as our deserts, which are lush compared to Mars.

Or Antarctica or the deep ocean, right? We are profoundly entangled with all of these places, right? And so a worldview of these places as both as worthless and seeing it as inhospitable. Those are all places that are, like deep ocean and Antarctica, they’re far more hospitable than Mars and no one lives there.

Mickey Huff: Yeah, and the ocean is mostly unexplored. I mean, Kennedy was saying that year, eight decades ago.

Zara Zimbardo: Yeah. More people have been to the moon than to the deep paddle zone of the ocean, which is astounding to consider.

Mickey Huff: The historian in me has a hard time getting off of how cheaply these narratives are recycled, without much analysis. But, you know, for all the talk of Trump channeling William McKinley, the right wing business leader, Republican of the late 19th century, who was adopting many of the imperialist strategies of Alfred Mahan, you know, at the time about building canals and moving out into the ocean instead of space, right? Again, riffing again later in the sixties with Gene Roddenberry, the final frontier, et cetera. Right?

Interestingly, in many ways, Trump’s channeling James K. Polk and the Continentalists of the Mexican American war. That’s where the phrase Manifest Destiny came from, from the journalist John O’Sullivan, that it was our manifest destiny by divine providence, our right to occupy, which meant improve, which meant eradicate, which meant commit genocide against Indigenous peoples and the environment at any cost, at all cost.

And you know, to suggest that we’ve been marginally victorious. I say the royal, it’s not we, you and I and us here, but to suggest that that was victorious, I think really helps blind us to exactly the cost of our ignorance, and that fuels our anti-intellectualism in a vicious cycle such that we can’t even fathom what we are not appreciating about what we’re losing about the only planet we have.

Back to your planet B. Right? I think it’s really pretty riveting and I think that when you get through your piece further, you talk about, we mentioned already China, the space race, the new space race. You also have narratives of exploration and discovery and transcendence, and maybe we can spend a few minutes shifting into those, into some of those realms, even though I was just guilty of keeping this in the past. So anyway, Zara.

Zara Zimbardo: Yeah, absolutely. You know, and just to say that space race is of course not only nation states, but is a privatized space race, right. Different billionaires.

Mickey Huff: Yeah. And chauvinism and the next red state, right. Mars is the 51st red state.

Zara Zimbardo: Yeah, absolutely. And, just to name when we talk about Planet B, that has been a slogan at climate protests around the world for a long time, saying there is no Planet B to drive attention, urgency, and to act like this is our only planet because it is, right? And so to say that there is a planet B, what does that do in terms of priority with planet A?

And thank you for naming the religious dimension around manifest destiny, that this is divinely ordained. And so when we look at the ways of different, the transcendence narrative frame, this very much functions as secularized version of the Christian rapture. That a select few will ascend and leave this world seen as doomed, or as a death trap or undesirable. So that’s very much functioning, which is something that Naomi Klein draws a lot of attention to.

And there’s this messianic language and fervor coming from Silicon Valley right, about Mars and space colonization, as well about transhumanism. Long-termism. All of these different ideologies that are, that technology will save us. These are techno salvationist ideologies.

And the Mars will save us narrative is part of that, that it will enable freedom from the constraints and suffering of the human body, from our biology, from mortality of disrupting death. Right. Immortality. From immortality and crowd preservation startups, right? All of this, and to get free from the biological limits and of the planet itself. And so it’s really important to question these visions of freedom.

Mickey Huff: Which with Oregon Trail on Mars, you’re gonna have more than dysentery to worry about.

Zara Zimbardo: Indeed. And that’ll, you know, when I think about the dazzling vastness of space, I often think about pooing in space. It is challenging. Right? In zero gravity. It is. I encourage people to check it out and just to consider what daily life may be like for our human physiology that’s co-evolved with this planet. Being off of it, all activities of daily life and functioning are challenging.

But so this vision that we would get free from, we, that some people would get free and cut the tether from really so much of what has the potential to make us wise, right? Of learning from this planet and its cycles, learning from what it means to inhabit a human body with all of its experience, the preciousness and finiteness of life reflected in the mirror of death, right? They’re wanting an escape hatch out of all of this. And so it may be easier to imagine something like terraforming Mars, right, than to imagine what it would take, and to direct every possible resource to our one and only home.

Eleanor Goldfield: I mean, it’s interesting because, and Mickey, you already mentioned that they clearly haven’t seen Star Trek, but I guess they haven’t seen Nosferatu either, because the whole point there is like, you should pity this being for having to live forever. So actually death is a good thing, and it’s important because you don’t wanna be this blood sucker. But then of course, there’s another metaphor there with the blood suckers. I mean, it’s really, it does sometimes feel like we’re living in, as comedian Lee Camp put it, a remedial matrix where I just feel like this can’t be happening.

But it’s also interesting because, Mickey mentioned Peter Byrne. There’s also this kind of creationist with the AI, making it in its own image, and of course, we’re going to Marsificate in our, in the image of these, quote unquote the gods, the creators, these billionauts, they’re making it in their image. Of course, again, not in our image, not in the image of the people, but in the image of what they perceive as themselves as these demigods who, you know, pull from Lord of the Rings. And it’s all very, very creepy, very techno fascist.

Mickey Huff: Well, and it’s this billionaire class that’s been, you know, they’re the ones that are at late stage capitalism that are treating the planet as a garbage can, and it’s the exact same thing they’ve already done to space.

Good luck getting to Mars and not wrecking into the garbage that’s surrounding the planet right now. Right. And I don’t just mean satellites. I mean, they’re using space as the next dumping ground.

You know, I mean, and that’s something that gets very little attention, unless something just happens to fall from space and gee, we hope it falls in the ocean because we don’t care about the ocean either, even though without it, we’re doomed.

I mean, I hate to say that, you know, get into the doom loop cycle here, but this billionaire class, they’re just projecting the same flawed kind of programs wherever they are, whether it’s on here on earth, on space. They could be in any paradigm, and they’d have the same sort a really myopic, narcissistic and self-destructive kind of ethos. That just, it seems like a non-starter from a humanist perspective.

Zara Zimbardo: Yeah, absolutely. And I mean creating, you know, gilded bunkers to survive a world whose demise they’re hastening, right? Yeah. It’s the apocalyptic vision more invested in there, whether that is bunkers, whether that is in space, whether that is on Mars, whether that is more concern with long, the ideology of long-termism that humans will become, upload digital consciousness or however you know, or colonize space or live in the immense rotating cylinders that Jeff Bezos wants to create off world, keep the earth as a nature preserve for the elite to visit, right? But that this would ensure us to live for billions and billions of years. And so that is obviously so dangerous in terms of directing concern to abstract human flourishing elsewhere and in the far future than in the here and now.

Mickey Huff: More messianic tendencies. I mean, we were just mentioning with Providence and Religion behind the Manifest Destiny and. I don’t know.

Eleanor Goldfield: Also this aspect that Gods don’t ever have to clean up after themselves. Like all of the stories, whether it’s Zeus or Christianity. No one, no God ever has to clean up their mess. And so it’s that same paradigm that we are just going to keep messing things up and then we can just go to a different planet and we’ll be fine and we don’t care about you because we’ll get out of it and we don’t ever have to clean up our own mess. It’s this very, very twisted deification of this like capitalist colonialist paradigm.

Zara Zimbardo: Yeah, absolutely. And the extreme wealth that enables that God-like detached view of themselves. And now folks are talking about that space industry will create the first trillionaires.

Mickey Huff: Mm-hmm. Wow. Can’t wait.

Zara Zimbardo: Yeah. It’s very much, Eleanor with what you’re bringing up. There really is a huge battle of the imagination and of different mythologies. And so it’s more important than ever to be like, we have a lot of mythological warnings, you know, and stories to wake us up and think about just unrestrained hubris and arrogance and ignorance and narcissism and where that gets us as these mythologies are being wielded so heavily today, backed by incredible capital.

Mickey Huff: Yeah. Battlestar Apocalyptica.

Anyway, you end the piece, we have a few minutes left, and you end your piece, you have a great quote from Carl Sagan: “what shall we do with Mars? There are so many examples of human misuse of the earth that even phrasing this question chills me.”

And then you have another, you go into a segment that you call touch grass. And you have a really wonderful quote that says “humanity needed a moon landing to realize that the much more exciting thing is the earth itself, but landing on it is not so easy.”

Zara Zimbardo: Yeah. I love that quote from Bruno Letour. Yeah. And the recent public spectacle of the Blue Origin, all female space trip of folks being in space for 11 minutes. And when they came back, pop star Katie Perry knelt down and kissed the ground. You don’t need to leave the planet to kiss the ground. We don’t need to leave the planet to kiss the ground and to be overcome with awe and reverence and also just heartbreaking devastation of what is going on right on our world here.

And so that, I am curious about the ways that the image of Mars, that Mars itself can aid us in coming home in different ways and shifting our perception, in terms of how we view, like literal worldview, planet view, and how we treat the earth.

Mickey Huff: Yeah, pretty extraordinary. And, you know, Zara, the conclusion, something that Eleanor riffed on earlier and one of the images in the piece, when you’re talking about us being distracted from this fantasy about how human ingenuity and industry can turn uninhabitable Mars into a habitable Earth. And you finish by saying, this fantasy is a distraction from the reality that Earth is being rapidly turned into Mars.

Well that’s a dour place to end on, but I think that the warning is pretty clear. I think that it’s a very clear conclusion that we have enough in front of us and we should be really spending time appreciating more of what we have and what we’re losing and trying to preserve it for future generations of people that we are all in some small way, some of us bigger than others, contributing to the unfortunate reality that future generations won’t even get to experience that, which we now are.

So, Zara, thanks so much for joining us on the program today. Do you have anything you’d like to share with the audience? Places they can get in touch with you or follow your work or see other things? They can read your article that we just discussed right now, Marketing Mars at projectcensored.org under our dispatches. But anything else, Zara?

Zara Zimbardo: Yeah, certainly. I would suggest that folks check out the website, marsification.com, which has not just our concept album, but has all kinds of fascinating resources that we have curated, that are looking at different discourses and perspectives on space, as well as like decolonial and feminist and queer and Afro futurists and Indigenous futurist views of space, as well as critiques. And so there’s a treasure trove there of resources to check out, and folks can find me on social media.

Mickey Huff: Great. Well, Zara Zimbardo, thanks so much for joining us.

Your piece is called Marketing Mars. It’s available at projectcensored.org. We look forward to having you back on the program sometime in the future on Earth, not in Mars.

Zara Zimbardo: Thanks so much.

voir aussi : ▻https://seenthis.net/messages/1121146

« C’est l’incinérateur qui doit fermer, pas les écoles » : profs et parents veulent des réponses sur la pollution de l’usine
▻https://www.leparisien.fr/val-de-marne-94/ivry-sur-seine-94200/cest-lincinerateur-qui-doit-fermer-pas-les-ecoles-profs-et-parents-veulen

Aucun lien, pour le moment, n’est fait entre ces cas et l’incinérateur. Mais pour les représentants syndicaux, il y aurait un nombre anormal de cas de cancers dans cet établissement [lycée Romain-Rolland d’Ivry-sur-Seine]. La FSU exige également une plus grande transparence sur les prélèvements réalisés au sein du lycée et de la zone proche de l’incinérateur.

Sans accès à ces demandes, le syndicaliste assure que les personnels pourraient, à la rentrée, faire valoir leur droit de retrait et qu’une "grève est tout à fait possible. Mais l’idéal serait d’éviter le conflit en informant sur l’état des contaminations, en envisageant de déplacer les écoles, de végétaliser, de mettre en place des purificateurs d’air ou autres solutions. »

Au-delà des profs, c’est toute la communauté éducative qui n’en peut plus du flou concernant ce qu’elle estime être un manque de communication des autorités autour de cette fameuse pollution aux dioxines. Près de 72 conseils locaux de parents d’élèves d’Ivry mais aussi des XIIe et XIIIe arrondissements de Paris exigent même « l’arrêt immédiat de l’incinération de déchets à Ivry-sur-Seine ».

« On espérait être rassurés de la part des pouvoirs publics lors de la dernière réunion mais on est ressorti alarmés. On était choqué du manque de réponse, on a presque vécu ça comme un manque de respect ou de sérieux », souffle Tomas Ibarlucia, papa d’un jeune garçon scolarisé dans l’école élémentaire l’Orme au Chat et représentant des parents d’élèves.

« Quand j’entends qu’on pourrait déplacer les écoles, je trouve ça inacceptable. C’est l’incinérateur qui doit fermer ! ». Selon lui, des habitants envisageraient de déménager face à cette situation. « Soit les autorités publiques nous démontrent que ces pollutions sont sans risque ou alors ils prennent toutes les mesures nécessaires. Parce que si les enfants tombent malades ce sera de leur responsabilité. »

Mortalité par cancer en Île-de-France : évolutions et disparités infradépartementales
▻https://www.ors-idf.org/nos-travaux/publications/mortalite-par-cancer-en-ile-de-france-evolutions-et-disparites-infradeparte
Au passage je découvre que le taux de mortalité par cancer dans le 13e arrondissement est le plus élevé de Paris+petite couronne. Aucune idée si ça a un lien avec l’incinérateur.

De Tunis à Gaza, de Montréal à Rafah : briser le siège, refuser le silence

Il est des gestes qui ne relèvent ni du secours humanitaire ni du #symbole abstrait, mais bien de l’#histoire. La #Marche_mondiale_vers_Gaza en fait partie. Plus qu’un simple rassemblement international, c’est un #soulèvement moral et politique. Un refus collectif de l’#indifférence. Une réponse populaire, transnationale, résolue et indocile à la mise à mort programmée d’un peuple.

Le 15 juin 2025, des milliers de personnes venues de plus de trente pays convergeront vers la frontière de Rafah. De Tunis à Vancouver, de Dakar à Santiago, une génération dispersée mais insoumise a choisi d’écrire une autre page de notre histoire. Elle incarnera une conviction profonde  : la #solidarité n’est pas une option morale, c’est un impératif politique.

Cette initiative n’est ni charitable, ni symbolique. Elle est une riposte, une #dénonciation vivante de l’ordre mondial qui laisse mourir de faim un peuple entier dans un silence organisé. C’est le #cri de celles et ceux qui refusent de normaliser le génocide, de réduire Gaza à une parenthèse humanitaire dans un monde saturé de #cynisme.

Née dans l’urgence d’un monde anesthésié, la Marche mondiale pour Gaza est le fruit d’un #refus : celui de détourner les yeux alors qu’un des pires génocides du XXIe siècle s’accomplit sur nos écrans, en toute impunité. Depuis octobre 2023, plus de 55 000 Palestinien·nes ont été martyrisé·es, soit environ 2,4 % de la population de Gaza. Et ce chiffre, déjà insoutenable, reste sous-estimé. Selon The Lancet, revue scientifique de référence, le nombre réel de martyrs pourrait avoir atteint 186.000 dès juin 2024. Imaginons ce qu’il en est aujourd’hui.

Face à cette barbarie orchestrée, la Marche est une insurrection morale. Une coordination citoyenne mondiale rassemblant plusieurs réseaux :

la #Freedom_Flotilla_Coalition, qui tente de briser le blocus par la mer ;

la Marche Mondiale vers Gaza, mobilisée par voie aérienne ;

* et la #Coordination_de_l’action_commune_pour_la_Palestine, partie de Tunisie, qui emprunte la voie terrestre.

Et c’est justement de Tunis, ma ville natale, que le #convoi_Al-Soumoud, la #caravane_terrestre_de_la_ténacité a choisi de faire ses premiers pas. Tunis, témoin d’une solidarité enracinée avec la cause palestinienne, terre d’accueil de l’Organisation de Libération Palestinienne (OLP) après les massacres de Sabra et Chatila en 1982, terre d’exil des résistant·es jusqu’au retour à Gaza en 1994, et terre frappée par les bombes israéliennes lors de l’attaque aérienne du 1e octobre 1985 contre le quartier général de l’OLP à Hammam Chott. Ici, Gaza n’est pas une abstraction, mais une mémoire vivante. Une mémoire populaire, que ni la répression ni les renoncements gouvernementaux n’ont pu effacer. Une ville qui continue de dire non, même bâillonnée.

Je suis aussi Canadienne, de cette terre qui m’a accueillie, et c’est depuis Montréal que je m’engage au sein de la coordination nationale de la Marche mondiale pour Gaza. Cette double appartenance n’est pas une contradiction, mais une richesse : celle de pouvoir tisser des ponts entre les rives, relier les récits, faire dialoguer les mémoires, et assumer les responsabilités qui découlent de chaque côté de l’océan.

Car le Canada n’est pas neutre. Il continue d’exporter des armes, de signer des contrats militaires, de soutenir Israël diplomatiquement, et de voter contre les droits des Palestinien·nes dans les instances internationales. Marcher depuis ici, c’est refuser cette complicité active. C’est agir depuis le cœur même de l’Empire. Car ce génocide est commis avec notre argent, nos lois, nos impôts, et surtout nos silences.

La délégation canadienne, dont je fais partie, composée de militant·es, de syndicalistes, de professionnel·les de la santé, de jeunes et d’artistes engagé·es s’inscrit pleinement dans cette dynamique. Nous marchons parce que ce faux lointain, cette illusion de distance, expose crûment notre participation, passive ou structurelle, au système qui rend le massacre possible. Nous marchons pour dire que nous refusons d’être complices. Que nos passeports ne nous protègent pas de la honte. Que nous aurons des comptes à rendre à nos enfants, et aux leurs.

Depuis le 2 mars 2025, Israël impose une fermeture totale des points de passage vers Gaza, empêchant toute entrée de nourriture, médicaments et aide humanitaire. Le blocus de Rafah a provoqué famine, effondrement sanitaire, déplacements forcés à grandes échelle. Face à cette situation, la Marche mondiale pour Gaza porte trois revendications claires : la levée immédiate du blocus de Gaza, l’ouverture inconditionnelle du passage de Rafah, l’entrée de l’aide humanitaire et la fin des complicités internationales qui rendent ce génocide possible et durable.

Nous ne sommes pas naïfs. Nous savons que les États ne plient pas sous la seule pression morale. Mais nous savons aussi que l’histoire avance par accumulation : de cris, de pas, de ruptures. Sans cette marche, nous serions plus seul·es et sans doute plus honteux·euses. Elle est un acte de mémoire, mais aussi un pari sur l’avenir. Elle affirme que la Palestine vit encore : dans chaque slogan, chaque keffieh, chaque regard levé.

Nous ne marchons pas pour nous donner bonne conscience. Nous marchons pour ouvrir une brèche dans le mur de l’indifférence. Pour rappeler à nos peuples que la lutte palestinienne est aussi la nôtre : une lutte contre le colonialisme, pour la justice globale, pour le droit à la vie, à la dignité, à la terre et au rêve.

Je marcherai pour Gaza, oui. Mais aussi pour mes enfants et pour les enfants de Tunis, ceux que j’ai vus écrire encore sur les murs : « القدس لنا / À nous Jérusalem ». Je marcherai pour les jeunes de Montréal qui ne comprennent pas pourquoi les bombes reçoivent plus de soutien que les vies. Pour toutes celles et ceux qui croient encore que marcher, c’est résister ; que résister, c’est espérer ; et qu’espérer, c’est déjà se battre.

Cette marche, enfin, est une #promesse. Celle de ne pas céder. Car tant qu’il y aura des peuples qui marchent, il y aura des peuples qui résistent. Et tant qu’il y aura des résistances, le projet colonial ne dormira jamais tranquille. Palestine vaincra !

▻https://www.ababord.org/De-Tunis-a-Gaza-de-Montreal-a-Rafah-marcher-pour-briser-le-siege-marcher-po

Et pourtant, ce genre d’information ne calme pas #journullistes et blogueurs sur l’avénement miraculeux de l’IA comme sauveur du capitalisme.

The Washington Post Is Secretly Planning to Start Publishing Articles Created Using AI
▻https://futurism.com/washington-post-ai-articles

https://wordpress-assets.futurism.com/2025/06/washington-post-ai-articles-1.jpg

Along with partnerships with established writers, the new program will employ an “AI writing coach” called “Ember” designed to guide “nonprofessionals” through the article-writing process.
That tool will, per early prototypes described to the NYT, hand-hold aspiring columnists through every aspect of the writing process from start to finish. Its sidebar will instruct writers to devise an “early thesis,” list out “supporting points,” and provide a “memorable ending” — all while a live AI chatbot weighs in and a “story strength” tracker evaluates their progress.

#IA #AI

(Y compris en France) ... Mais quelle surprise !
▻https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2025/06/02/la-confederation-syndicale-internationale-denonce-un-effondrement-des-droits

À Palavas, ça grouille de précaires saisonniers qui sont Auto-Exploités en gestion des locations courtes durées.
Ça ne sent pas la prospérité économique.

#aide_humanitaire (privatisation de l’)

Muhammad Shehada
@muhammadshehad2
▻https://x.com/muhammadshehad2/status/1927372391644074036

🚨Thousands of starved Gazans storm the dystopian Israeli-American aid complex in Rafah after being forced to stand in endless queues & bake in the sun in a fenced concentration camp while being subjected to biometric surveillance

US mercenaries & Israeli troops are opening fire

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Gr9miAAWIAA6PMy.jpg

2\ Israel’s Kan reports the US mercenaries were likely the ones opening fire at the starved crowds, while reports from Gaza indicate Israeli troops also fired at the crowds

People were told to stand in queue all day while mercenaries pick & choose who gets aid & who starves

3\ Israel’s channel 12 highlights reports that an Israeli helicopter began firing at the starved crowed, while the American mercenaries ran away

Sources:
▻https://kan.org.il/content/kan-news/defense/912681

▻https://mako.co.il/news-military

4\ More footage of starved Gazans overrunning the Israeli-American “aid” concentration camp in Rafah after being crowded for hours under the baking sun in what can only be described as fenced animal cages.
▻https://video.twimg.com/amplify_video/1927378703798923264/vid/avc1/480x596/rEdmstyZfIi2Qsd4.mp4

5\ If this doesn’t scream CONCENTRATION CAMP, then what does?

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Gr-PpClWYAAgZ5R.jpg