Monday, January 22, 2007

We're on thin ice and it's melting

We are on Earth to learn and try and do something positive with what we've learned. That means there is something between denial of climate change and passive acceptance of it.

Who would have imagined that we could affect the weather? We've recently - with so many dramatic stories of droughts, unusual freezes, and other record-breaking weather events - been rudely forced out of our denial. It took all of us a long time to change the weather, and it won't be easy restabilizing it. But it's not time to get depressed. Like 6 billion and counting ants on on a boat adrift, it's hard to imagine we'll figure out how to work together to steer the thing. But, humans being like ants in that a lot of us are hardwired to work together for the whole, we're bound to try - even if there's a good chance it's too late for ourselves as individuals. We don't have the right to give up.

The interaction between changes going on in the world, at this time in history, in my opinion, will result in the near future in enormous challenges for all of us. The price of food and everything else may skyrocket, so we should among other things be making serious community efforts to gear up to grow some of our own food. Increasingly unstable weather and violent international competition over fossil fuels mean we can no longer assume steady energy supplies and electricity, so businesses should be starting which can enable "distributed micro-power" - locally produced and distributed electricity like wind, solar and biofuels. Just as cell phones show their value when the power lines go down, local energy will be life saving when the big industrial power sources go on the fritz.

The Vietnam war was going on about the time laser technology came out. I recognized it's ability to be used as a weapon, but who would have imagined there'd be millions of them in grocery stores? We who grew up in the nuclear age have developed nuclear weapons to their logical absurdity, with weapons so powerful no one in their right mind would use them. Now we've a whole quantum leap forward of new technologies to use or misuse at our disgression. Laser and other technologies have been so advanced by military developers that the next [last?] world war would resemble Star Wars. If we can't see all life as one family, we as a species may be slated for extinction.

It's possible to see disaster looming and not become paralyzed by fear. This is called grace under pressure. We can see ourselves as bigger than we are - that we are a part of a much bigger picture. There is reason we are in this terribly challenging time. Acting for the whole community, in service of life though we can't see the future, is the only way to go. Otherwise, the nightmare will deepen. Things can always get better or worse.

One of the causes of my recently more frequent nightmares is that I read that some reputable scientists are discussing the possibility that both melting of ice and falling into the sea of the ice shelves could raise sea levels many feet. It was not too long ago when the discussion was in centimeters, hard to imagine making much of a difference. But now, with evidence of dramatic weather changes daily smacking us in the face, it makes sense to take seriously those who entertain the possibility that some of the world's major coastal cities could find their street levels underwater soon. Climate change is turning out to be much more abrupt than most would have seriously considered possible not long ago. Now that we're out of denial, let's stay out of it. Some of the worst predictions have come true. We must use all our resources - human, financial, technological - to save the Earth's ecosystem. After all, we're part of it.

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

the changes are changing the changes

e.g. global warming resulting in less need for heating fuel use, and many other feedbacks...

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http://newdemocracyworld.org
http://laboreducator.org
http://wbai.org
http://trueblueliberal.com/links
http://defendiran.org
http://2politicaljunkies.blogspot.com
http://guerillawomentn.blogspot.com
http://labornet.net
http://pittsburghfairhousing.org/#links
http://sites.state.pa.us/PA_Exec/PHRC/commsvc/commsvc_links.html
http://labourstart.org
http://library.cmu.edu/Research/Environment/index.html

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East Timor and Indonesia Action Network
http://etan.org/resource/websites.htm

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Botanic Gardens Conservation International
http://bgci.org
http://plantfortheplanet.org
http://plantconservationday.org

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From:

Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence
by Rev. Martin Luther King

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/058.html

...connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor - both black and white - through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population...
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Sunday, January 14, 2007

He's gonna get us killed

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http://doctorswithoutborders.org
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President Gerald Ford Dies at 93; Supported Indonesian Invasion of East Timor that Killed 1/3 of Population
12/27/6
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/27/1638254
...gave a speech saying that never again should the United States allow another nation to strike in the middle of the night, to attack another defenseless nation. This was Pearl Harbor Day...Realizing full well that another day of infamy was unfolding in Dili, East Timor. As thousands of Indonesian paratroopers, trained by the United States, using US supplied weapons, indeed jumping from United States supplied airplanes, were descending upon the capital city of Dili and massacring literally thousands of people in the hours and days after December 7, 1975.
...the United States had been an accomplice in an international act of aggression... the United States played the crucial role in enabling the Indonesian invasion of East Timor....National Security Archive nsarchive.org...
...asked Ford whether he did in fact authorize the invasion of East Timor, he said, “Frankly, I don't recall.”...there were many topics on the agenda that day with Suharto. Timor was not very high on the agenda. ...couldn't remember whether he had authorized this invasion, which ended up killing 1/3 of the Timorese population...when, like the United States, you're a global power with regimes everywhere dependant on your weapons, you can start wars, authorize wars, take actions that result in mass deaths in a fairly casual way.
In this case, the US didn't have a great interest in East Timor. All the evidence suggests that they didn’t particularly care one way or the other whether Timor became independent. But as a favor to Suharto, who was close to Washington, who was their protégée, they decided to let him go ahead with the invasion. So, for just a marginal, fleeting gain – or, out of doing a favor for a buddy - they ended up causing a mass murder that proportionally was the most intensive killing since the Nazis, a third of the population killed...Kissinger and Ford that gave the go ahead for the invasion when they visited Suharto, the long-reigning dictator...
ALLAN NAIRN: : Well, Kissinger, and Ford, they, one of the points they made to Suharto, was that you have to try to get this invasion over with quickly...they wanted them to go in intensively, presumably kill as many Timorese as they could quickly. So that it wouldn't get international attention, and also, apparently they were worried that it could get attention in Congress. Because Ford and Kissinger knew that by authorizing this invasion, they were technically violating US law. Because the US weapons laws at the time stated US weapons given to foreign clients could not be used for purposes of aggression...about 90% of the Indonesian weapons were coming from the US and they needed spare parts, they needed ammunition, they needed a re-supply...So Kissinger, in his internal discussions within the state department, was pressing his people to make sure that all information about Timor be kept under wraps. They didn’t want the US Congress paying too much attention to it...
...anywhere from 400,000 to perhaps more than a million Indonesians were massacred as the Suharto regime gained power. And they did this, the military did this with US weaponry. And in fact, the US CIA station even gave a list of 5,000 names of people who they had identified as communists and potential opponents of the army, and they turned this list over to Suharto and his military intelligence people and many of those people were subsequently assassinated...
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http://monthlyreview.org/hungerandprofit.htm
...seek to understand the economic and social mechanisms that generate poverty, although the scientific and technological means to eradicate it are now available...
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http://davidrovics.com
http://members.aol.com/drovics/links.htm
http://www.soundclick.com/pro/view/01/default.cfm?BandID=111310
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Citizens for Truth About the Kennedy Assassination
http://ctka.net/links.html
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The Assassinations: Probe Magazine on JFK, MLK, RFK, and Malcolm X
excerpts
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0922915822/realhistoryarchi
http://www.webcom.com/lpease/index.htm
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http://treehugger.com
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Los Angeles Organic Vegetable Express
http://lovedelivery.com
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Monday, January 08, 2007

We're all good at bottom.

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From:
Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy
by Noam Chomsky 2006
http://chomsky.info

page 6
...extradition of leading terrorists...Posada...Orlando Bosch...Bush I pardoned Orlando Bosch...Bosch resides safely in the United States, perhaps to be joined by Posada, in communities that continue to serve as the base for international terrorism.

No one would...suggest that the United States should be subject to bombing and invasion in accord with the Bush II doctrine that "those who harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves," announced when the government in Afghanistan asked for evidence before handing over people the United States accused of terrorism (without credible grounds, as Robert Mueller later acknowledged)...

...US military expenditures approximate those of the rest of the world combined, while arms sales by thirty-eight North American companies...account for more than 60 percent of the world total. Furthermore, for the world's dominant power, the means of destruction have few limits...Israeli military analyst Reuven Pedatzur writes that "...in the era of a single, ruthless superpower, whose leadership intends to shape the world according to its own forceful world view, nuclear weapons have become an attractive instrument for waging wars, even against enemies that do not possess nuclear arms."...

page8
...RISKING ULTIMATE DOOM
...We have already come close to the brink of nuclear war. The best-known case is the Cuban missile crisis...when our escape from "nuclear oblivion" was nothing short of "miraculous" two prominent researchers conclude...Arthur Schlesinger described the crisis as "the most dangerous moment in human history...the dangers were even more severe than they had believed...the world was "one word away"...referring to the intervention of a Russian submarine commander, Vasily Arkhipov, who countermanded an order to fire nuclear-armed torpedoes when his vessels were under attack by US destroyers...Robert McNamara..warning of "apocalypse soon," describing "current US nuclear policy as immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary, and dreadfully dangerous." ...

page 10
...The militarization of space did not originate in the Bush administration...

page 27
...The plan for "spikes of activity" against Iraq to try to concoct a pretext for an invasion - described in a July 23, 2002...Downing Street Memos...It is possible that current US military actions across Syria's borders are likewise designed to provoke some pretext for attack on the one Arab state that is currently defying Washington's orders...

...There were stores of equipment for developing WMD's in Iraq after the invasion: those produced in the 1980s, thanks to aid by the United States and Britain, among others, aid that continued well after Saddam's worst atrocities and the end of the war with Iran. The aid included means for developing missiles and nuclear weapons as well as virulent strains of anthrax and other biotoxins, the later in apparent violation of the Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention...

These sites had been secured by UN inspectors, but the invaders dismissed them, leaving the sites unguarded. The immediate consequence was sophisticated and massive looting of these installations...biotoxins...materials usable for chemical and biological weapons, and high-precision equipment capable of making parts for nuclear and chemical weapons and missiles...radioactive materials were detected in one of every eight trucks crossing into Jordan, destination unknown...

page62
..allowing billions of dollars of oil to flow illegally "to the benefit of the economies of American allies, including Jordan and Turkey, had a compromising effect of the Security Council's willingness to step in and stop the practice."...The United States...was "compromised" by its crucial role in illegal support for Saddam and was not in a position to "blow a whistle" about far smaller sums, which implicated many US companies.

Most of the energy corporations involved in "illicit oil surcharges" covered their tracks by resort to intermediaries...but not all:..."...Texaco, part of Chevron"...In the late 1930s, Texaco, then run by an open pro-Nazi, diverted oil shipments from the Spanish republic to Franco - in violation of contract, as well as of official US government orders - while the State Department pretended "not to see" that the fascist forces invading Spain were receiving from the United States the on ecritical commodity that Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy could not provide...When Clinton was undermining the embargo against Haiti's vicious terrorist junta, it was Texaco that was authorized to violate the presidential directive against shipping oil, the crucial commodity needed to maintain the terror...
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thebigideapgh.org
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Unsafe At Any Altitude:
Failed Terrorism Investigations, Scapegoating 9/11, and the Shocking Truth about Aviation Security Today
http://unsafeatanyaltitude.com
http://randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9781586421281
...partnership the United States made in the 1980s with Iran and Hezbollah...
...the great lengths that U.S. carriers and their lobbyists have gone in order to make certain that serious airline security has not been instituted...
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http://workers.org
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Alliance for a New Humanity
http://anhglobal.org
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coal debate
http://www.healthpolitics.org/home.asp?op=coal_debate&sky=hgy|email-coreg4-list|
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http://macyapper.blogspot.com
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Thursday, January 04, 2007

The U.S. government and organized crime

http://novozymes.com/en/MainStructure/Sustainability/Sustainability+News/CSR+Europe+Award.htm 7/10/6
At...annual European...conference on corporate social responsibility...anti-corruption measures...employee booklet titled “Bribery – no thanks!”...
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From:
Dabhol - Enron Timeline
by Ron Callari 2/21/2
http://monitor.net/monitor/0202a/enrontimeline.html
...December 27, 2001: Bush Administration repealed a Clinton-era rule that prevents the government from awarding federal contracts to businesses that have broken environmental, labor, tax, civil rights or other laws...
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Corporate Social Responsibility Europe
http://csreurope.org
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Monday, January 01, 2007

It IS a wonderful life.

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"We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee."
- Marian Wright Edelman
http://brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/marian_wright_edelman.html
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"A strict law bids us dance."
- Kwakiutl teaching
From Chapter 12
Pulse: The Coming Age of Systems and Machines Inspired by Living Things
by Robert Frenay 2006

http://pulsethebook.com/index.php/feedback-culture/310-feedback-culture-intro-part-one
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http://www.pulsethebook.com/index.php/index.php?tag=biowar
...“Technology that turns out miniature computers could also be used to create miniature weapons,”...And that will give rise to threats we are only beginning to comprehend. If we can program invisible nanobots to scrub plaque from arteries, for instance, they can also be programmed to kill. One expert worries that nano-computers that can lodge inside our brains could make us all love Big Brother. (This is not out of the question. For example, there are parasites that lodge in fish brains with similar effect: they cause the fish to behave in ways that make them vulnerable to a predator crucial to the parasites’ life cycle. Other research has shown that nanoparticles placed in a human nose soon find their way into the brain.)...
...a University of Liverpool pathologist whose work suggests that how small a particle is will play a much greater role than the material it’s made of in determining whether it’s hazardous. Says Pat Roy Mooney, executive director of ETC, [Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration http://etcgroup.org]
a technology watchdog group,
“Particles of that size can go anywhere they please. They pass the entire immune system. They can pass the blood-brain barrier; they can go into the spinal cord.” Real concern is warranted, if so far largely unaddressed. Of the roughly $1 billion spent on nanotech R&D in 2003, less than 1 percent went for the study of toxic side effects...
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Both Wordsworth and Thoreau knew that when the light of common day seemed no more than common it was because of something lacking in them, not because of something lacking in it, and what they asked for was eyes to see a universe they knew was worth seeing. For that reason theirs are the best of all attempts to describe what real awareness consists of…that the rare moment is not the moment when there is something worth looking at but the moment when we are capable of seeing it.
- Joseph Wood Krutch
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/j/joseph_wood_krutch.html
http://www.pulsethebook.com/index.php/feedback-culture/361-moving-toward-the-light/
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The nuclear industry status quo seems to have quashed a progressive competitor:
http://alternativescience.com/cold_fusion.htm
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"9/11 was an inside job."
http://rossini.ro.funpic.de/links.html
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Climate change is NOW
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Australia launches climate plans
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6075992.stm
...worst drought in a century...
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From:
Australia ponders climate future
by Phil Mercer
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6204141.stm
...The drought in Australia has lasted for more than five years...
...dwindling water supplies...
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Drought slows Australia's economy 12/6/6
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6212608.stm
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"...buying time...is much better than doing nothing, in the absence of a massive sustainable drive to tackle the true causes of both climate change and the hunger fast growing across Africa..."
- Dr Menghestab Haile, UN World Food Programme
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From:
Do they care it's Christmas time? 12/21/6
by Dr Menghestab Haile menghestab.haile@wfp.org
meteorologist responsible for integrating climate and weather analysis into food security monitoring for the UN World Food Programme
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6198601.stm
...droughts are hitting faster across East Africa and the Horn...
In its annual report on the state of food insecurity, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said the number of undernourished people in the world was rising by four million a year.
The situation is worst in sub-Saharan Africa...
...drought was fast followed by the worst floods in the Horn of Africa in years.
If we cannot help people survive today's extreme weather, there's little point worrying about future climate change...
In emergencies, local and regional food prices often skyrocket...
...World Food Programme is piloting humanitarian drought insurance in Ethiopia as one of several tools to help people hit by climate change...
...the first time in history that humanitarian risk was transferred from a developing country to developed countries using such market mechanisms.
Other public-private partnerships are now being built to use creative financial instruments to benefit developing countries where climate change is likely to hit hardest. For instance, microfinance institutions in India, working with a Swiss re-insurer, are assisting farmers in Andhra Pradesh to use "weather hedges" against lower than expected monsoon rains.
People who depend on the land need all our efforts to build livelihoods that are less vulnerable to bad weather...
...buying time definitely isn't a solution.
But...it is much better than doing nothing, in the absence of a massive sustainable drive to tackle the true causes of both climate change and the hunger fast growing across Africa.
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From:
Severe Drought Crisis in Rajasthan Province, And Failure of the Indian Monsoon Seasons, Following Underground Nuclear Bomb Tests in India and Pakistan, May 1998.
http://orgonelab.org/oranur.htm
Photo of "Glowing Mountain" Following Underground Nuclear Tests in Pakistan, 28 May 1998...
...suggest the concept of the "living earth" is more than metaphor, and that the Earth's life-energy field could be highly disturbed...
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The end of the world (one scenario)
http://albinoblacksheep.com/flash/end.php
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http://wilhelmreichmuseum.org
http://reichianinstitute.com
http://orgonomy.org
http://angelikahealingmusic.com/music.html
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http://katrinanomore.org/noaastudies.php
...Based on an analysis of hurricanes in the past 50 years, Kerry Emanuel of MIT concludes in an August 2005 study that wind speeds and duration...
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http://headlesschicken.ca/cyborgblog
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Against the Beast: A documentary history of American opposition to empire
edited by John Nichols 2004
http://hnn.us/blogs/archives/4/2005/2/
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http://dissidentvoice.org
http://democracycellproject.net
http://scroogle.org
http://dahrjamailiraq.com/links
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