If governments are serious about accepting the risks of escalating emissions...they will find ways to keep emissions within "safe" bounds.-- Richard Black.
If they are not serious, it doesn't matter how you slice up the problem - it won't be solved.
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Mr. Cheney's politics of torture, Mark Danner says, looks, Janus-like, in two directions:back to the past, toward exculpation for what was done under the administration he served, and into the future, toward blame for what might come under the administration that followed.Obama chooses to take this bull by the horns:
I was struck by an article that I was reading the other day talking about the fact that the British, during World War Two, when London was being bombed to smithereens, had 200 or so detainees. And Churchill said 'we don't torture', when all of the British people were being subjected to unimaginable risk and threat. And the reason was that Churchill understood you start taking shortcuts, and over time, that corrodes what's best in a people. It corrodes the character of a country.
we [the United States should ] apologize to them [Cuba, Japan, Iran and Afghanistan] for our own good -- to free ourselves from the accumulated conceits of the American Century and to acknowledge that the United States participated fully in the barbarism, folly, and tragedy that defines our time. For those sins, we must hold ourselves accountable.David Hayes and I would have added Iraq to the list.
To solve our problems requires that we see ourselves as we really are. And that requires shedding, once and for all, the illusions embodied in the American Century.
Chinese aid to the US has been like EU aid to Chad, but on the grand scale: China paid for Iraq.
I have no reason to believe [Tim Geithner] is corrupt. Instead, the simplest explanation ...is that he has internalized a worldview in which Wall Street is the central pillar of the American economy, the health of the economy depends on the health of a few major Wall Street banks, the importance of those banks justifies virtually any measures to protect them in their current form, large taxpayer subsidies to banks (and to bankers) are a necessary cost of those measures - and anyone who doesn’t understand these principles is a simple populist who just doesn’t understand the way the world really works.
[Geithner] got the cultural education that rich people get, except instead of just going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, he was educated in the culture of Wall Street. Just like an education in art history is a marker of class distinction that is used to perpetuate class distinction, an education in modern finance is a marker of distinction that sets off those who understand the true importance of Wall Street for the American economy. As long the powerful people in Washington, including the regulators who oversee the financial industry, share that worldview, Wall Street’s power and ability to make money will be secure.
We came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered was the Earth.-- Barack Obama quotes Bill Anders
The kind of automated, built-in consent [advanced capitalism] seeks from its citizens does not depend all that much on what they believe. As long as they get out of bed, roll into work, consume, pay their taxes, and refrain from beating up police officers, what goes on in their heads and hearts is mostly secondary. Advanced capitalism is not the kind of regime that exacts much spiritual commitment from its subjects. Indeed, zeal is more to be feared than encouraged. That is an advantage in “normal” times, since demanding too much belief from men and women can easily backfire. But it is much less a benefit in times of political tumult.
It's true that we forget these killings easily -- often we don't notice them in the first place -- since they don't seem to impinge on our lives. Perhaps that's one of the benefits of fighting a war on the periphery of empire, halfway across the planet in the backlands of some impoverished country.-- Tom Englehardt
One problem, though: the forgetting doesn't work so well in those backlands. When your child, wife or husband, mother or father is killed, you don't forget.
Suicide bombers presumably would be in for a disappointment if they reached the pearly gates and were presented 72 grapes.-- Nicholas Kristof.
Last year the Heritage Foundation declared Ireland the third freest economy in the world, behind only Hong Kong and Singapore-- Paul Krugman
The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his circumambient universe, at the living moment. As mankind is always struggling in the coils of old relationships, art is always ahead of the 'times', which themselves are always far in the rear of the living moment...[2]Footnotes
Boredom underpins consumerism. It defines leisure (and desire), which collapses into shopping. Boredom invites terror (as its only cure).[2] (added 25 April) I had been looking for the short essay on poetry from which this comes:
This is the momentous crisis for mankind, when we have to get back to chaos. So long as the umbrella serves, and poets make slits in it, and the mass of people can be gradually educated up to the vision in the slit: which means they patch it over with a patch that looks just like the vision in the slit; so long as this process can continue, and mankind can be educated up, and thus built in, so long will a civilization continue more or less happily, completing its own painted prison. It is called completing the consciousness.
[Elke] Weber’s research seems to help establish that we have a “finite pool of worry,” which means we’re unable to maintain our fear of climate change when a different problem — a plunging stock market, a personal emergency — comes along. We simply move one fear into the worry bin and one fear out. And even if we could remain persistently concerned about a warmer world? Weber described what she calls a “single-action bias.” Prompted by a distressing emotional signal, we buy a more efficient furnace or insulate our attic or vote for a green candidate — a single action that effectively diminishes global warming as a motivating factor. And that leaves us where we started.-- from Why Isn’t the Brain Green? by Jon Gertner
John Sauven is right encourage climate campaigners, now released, not to be intimidated.
And so long as there is no significant risk that interrupting operations at coal-fired power stations will jeopardise electricity supplies to vital institutions such as hospitals, peaceful protests should continue.
Such actions could be a little like a strictly non-violent version of John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry. They are needed to shake others into awareness and action. And we need shaking. [1] As Andrew Simms recently put it:
Imagine that every day of your life you have taken a walk in the woods and the worse thing to happen was an acorn or twig falling on your head.Footnotes:Then, one day, you stroll out, look up and there is a threat approaching so large, unexpected and outside your experience that can't quite believe it, like a massive gothic cathedral falling from the sky.
There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them...They hesitate, and they regret, and sometimes they petition; but they do nothing in earnest and with effect. They will wait, well disposed, for other to remedy the evil, that they may no longer have it to regret. At most, they give up only a cheap vote, and a feeble countenance and Godspeed, to the right, as it goes by them.In conversation with Rana Mitter, Slavoj Zizek recently got close. (My faulty transcription):
Terror is for me another name for ethics. The most noble of terror that's how I think of it. Let’s say you’re in a situation where you have a nice life and so on, but you know that you have to do something, you simply must. If you don't do it you will betray yourself. That’s terror for me. Terror for me in the most noble sense. Ethical acting doesn't come easy.
We thought you might be interested in this three-part opinion article, just published on chinadialogue.net about China's climate-change policy -- by leading Chinese economist Hu Angang.P.S. 10 Apr: Evan Osnos reports on cooperation between the U.S. and China on climate change and energy. And here is what Orville Schell wrote in February.
The current classification of nations as either "developed" or "developing", he writes, does not reflect reality and is preventing a fair agreement being reached climate change. Instead, Hu proposes two new principles. First, nations should be assigned to one of four categories according to their Human Development Index (HDI) ranking. Second, major greenhouse-gas emitters should be made to bear greater responsibility for emissions reduction. He then calculates the emissions reductions China should make and proposes a “road map” for use within China.
Read the full article here: A-new-approach-at-Copenhagen 1, 2 & 3
I hope you find it of interest
warm regards
Isabel
With little concern or demurral, we have consigned tens of thousands of our own citizens to conditions that horrified our highest court a century ago. Our willingness to discard these standards for American prisoners made it easy to discard the Geneva Conventions prohibiting similar treatment of foreign prisoners of war, to the detriment of America’s moral stature in the world. In much the same way that a previous generation of Americans countenanced legalized segregation, ours has countenanced legalized torture. And there is no clearer manifestation of this than our routine use of solitary confinement—on our own people, in our own communities, in a supermax prison, for example, that is a thirty-minute drive from my door
In its depth and suddenness, the U.S. economic and financial crisis is shockingly reminiscent of moments we have recently seen in emerging markets (and only in emerging markets): South Korea (1997), Malaysia (1998), Russia and Argentina (time and again). In each of those cases, global investors, afraid that the country or its financial sector wouldn’t be able to pay off mountainous debt, suddenly stopped lending. And in each case, that fear became self-fulfilling, as banks that couldn’t roll over their debt did, in fact, become unable to pay. This is precisely what drove Lehman Brothers into bankruptcy on September 15, causing all sources of funding to the U.S. financial sector to dry up overnight. Just as in emerging-market crises, the weakness in the banking system has quickly rippled out into the rest of the economy, causing a severe economic contraction and hardship for millions of people.--Simon Johnson on becoming a banana republic.
But there’s a deeper and more disturbing similarity: elite business interests—financiers, in the case of the U.S.—played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them.
"I am shocked, truly shocked," says Katey Walter, an ecologist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. "I was in Siberia a few weeks ago, and I am now just back in from the field in Alaska. The permafrost is melting fast all over the Arctic, lakes are forming everywhere and methane is bubbling up out of them."[3] See also CO2 rise continues, but check out methane and
Back in 2006, in a paper in Nature, Walter warned that as the permafrost in Siberia melted, growing methane emissions could accelerate climate change. But even she was not expecting such a rapid change. "Lakes in Siberia are five times bigger than when I measured them in 2006. It's unprecedented. This is a global event now, and the inertia for more permafrost melt is increasing."...
On May 15th Henry Waxman and Edward Markey, the Democratic point-men on climate change in the House of Representatives, unveiled a bill that would give away 85% of carbon permits for nothing, with only 15% being auctioned. The bill’s supporters say this colossal compromise was necessary to win the support of firms that generate dirty energy or use a lot of it, and to satisfy congressmen from states that mine coal or roll steel.[7] Another thought: what if the best scientists are wrong, not because the so-called skeptics (who are fraudsters, fools and criminals) are right but because the science turns out to have been more complex than foreseen, with results that somehow turn out to be more benign, or because there do turn out to be get-out-jail-free cards such as energy-related and/or geo-engineering technologies that deliver much more than they destroy?
What emerges most powerfully as one reads The Road is not a prognosticatory or satirical warning about the future, or a timeless parable of a father's devotion to his son, or yet another McCarthyesque examination of the violent underpinnings of all social intercourse and the indifference of the cosmic jaw to the bloody morsel of humanity. The Road is not a record of fatherly fidelity; it is a testament to the abyss of a parent's greatest fears. The fear of leaving your child alone, of dying before your child has reached adulthood and learned to work the mechanisms and face the dangers of the world, or found a new partner to face them with. The fear of one day being obliged for your child's own good, for his peace and comfort, to do violence to him or even end his life. And, above all, the fear of knowing—as every parent fears—that you have left your children a world more damaged, more poisoned, more base and violent and cheerless and toxic, more doomed, than the one you inherited. It is in the audacity and single-mindedness with which The Road extends the metaphor of a father's guilt and heartbreak over abandoning his son to shift for himself in a ruined, friendless world that The Road finds its great power to move and horrify the reader.[11] See, for example, this from Waterland by Graham Swift:
The Here and Now, which brings both joy and terror, comes but rarely - does not even come when we call it. That’s the way it is: life includes a lot of empty space.
My babe so beautiful ! it thrills my heart-- Coleridge
With tender gladness, thus to look at thee
