climate refugees
(cross-posted at caucus99percent)
Given that France has cancelled all outdoor public demonstrations near the conference, civil society groups may never be allowed in the conference doors, nor be seen or heard nearby. Some groups have been going to great lengths to get their messages to the Oligarchs. The Deciders. Never mind the plethora of Fossil Fuel Lobbyists. I love this:
Brandalism at COP21 Paris 2015: Press release
“Over 600 artworks critiquing the corporate takeover of the COP21 climatetalks were installed in advertising spaces across Paris this weekend -ahead of the United Nations summit beginning Monday 30 November.
Amidst the French state of emergency banning all public gatherings following the terrorist attacks on 13 November in Paris, the’Brandalism’ project has worked with Parisians to insert unauthorised artworks across the city that aim to highlight the links between advertising, consumerism, fossil fuel dependency and climate change.
The artworks were placed in advertising spaces owned by JC Decaux -one of the world’s largest outdoor advertising firms and an official sponsor to the COP21 climate talks.Other prominent corporate sponsors of the climate talks such as AirFrance, GDF Suez (Engie) and Dow Chemicals are parodied in the posters -whilst heads of state such as Francois Hollande, David Cameron, BarackObama, Angela Merkel and Shinzo Abi also feature.
The artworks were created by over 80 renowned artists from 19 countries across the world including Neta Harari, Jimmy Cauty, Banksy-collaborator Paul Insect,Escif and Kennard Phillips – many of whom featured at Banksy’s Dismalandexhibition in England this summer.
Joe Elan from Brandalism said, “By sponsoring the climate talks, major polluters such as Air France and GDF-Suez-Engie can promote themselves as part of the solution – when actually they are part of the problem.”
Their art gallery.
From IndigenousRising.org: Indigenous Peoples:UN Paris Accord could end up being a Crime against Humanity and Mother Earth’ press release:
“November 30, 2015 (Paris) – Indigenous Peoples from the Americas attending the United Nations World Climate Summit in Paris warn that the Paris climate accord will harm their rights, lands and environment and do nothing to address climate change.
“We are here in Paris to tell the world that not only will the anticipated Paris Accord not address climate change, it will make it worst because it will promote false solutions and not keep fossil fuels from being extracted and burned. The Paris COP21 is not about reaching a legally binding agreement on cutting greenhouse gases. In fact, the Paris Accord may turn out to be a crime against humanity and Mother Earth,” according to Tom Goldtooth, Executive Director of Indigenous Environmental Network based in Minnesota on Turtle Island also known as the United States. Goldtooth recently won the Gandhi Peace Award.” [snip]
(a lot more is here, and their flickr photos are here.)
After railng against all carbon market solutions, this:
“According to the Global Alliance against REDD, “Instead of cutting CO2 and greenhouse gas emissions, the UN, the US, the EU, China, Norway and climate criminals like BP, Total, Shell, Chevron, Air France and BHP Billiton are pushing a false solution to climate change called REDD.”
According to Nnimmo Bassey, co-coordinator of the No REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation), in Africa Network, “REDD may result in the largest land grab in history. It steals your future, lets polluters off the hook and is new form of colonialism. We demand that states and corporations stop privatizing nature!”
Their COP21 solgan is: ‘No War, No Warming – Build an Economy for People and Planet’ (an excerpt)
“Climate justice seeks to address much more than greenhouse gas emissions, but the root systemic causes of climate change itself. Climate justice is about social and economic justice, and how democratic, peaceful and equitable solutions, not military violence, best serve the interests of humanity. The fossil fuel economy is a driver of this multi-faceted crises facing the world: causing resource wars; polluting our air, water and land; creating illness and death to people and of ecosystems; privatization of nature; economically exploiting Indigenous communities, communities of color and the working poor; forcing mass migrations; and, depriving millions of adequate food, access to water, housing, healthcare and healthy and safe employment.
As part of a global climate justice movement, we oppose the bombing of Syria. Over many decades we have witnessed that Western militarism has only increased the instability of the Middle East and other regions. This militarism abroad has also escalated the military complex at home in the United States, where communities resisting the industries causing climate change, have been heavily policed and targeted by police violence”.
Their demands:
- Establish mandatory–not voluntary–emissions cuts at the source
- Leave fossil fuels in the ground
- Reject Fracking, Nuclear Power, Carbon Markets, and other dangerous technologies and false solutions
- Strengthen the inclusion of human rights and particularly the rights of Indigenous Peoples
- Support Community-Rooted Solutions; including regional and local economic structures that support the production of renewable energy
As to #3 and nulclear power, I’d provided a link in part I that claimed renowned climate scientist James Hansen would be at COP21 advocating for an increase of nuclear power plants. Curious to discover the logic of that, given the many inherent dangers, I found this at the website he shares at Columbia in a section toward the end in which he claims to debunk science myths:
“If we care about climate, a “carbon-free portfolio standard” would make more sense than RPS. However, the best approach is a rising carbon fee that allows efficiency, renewables, nuclear power, and carbon capture to compete fairly.
Nuclear waste and nuclear safety: killing nuclear in the U.S. would make a safer world. Conventional nuclear reactors fission only about 0.6% of the mined nuclear fuel. The rest remains as very long-lived radioactive “waste”. In fact this waste can be used as fuel for “fast” reactors, which combined with recycling facilities can raise this figure up to about 99%. Fast reactors have the potential to leave a significantly smaller amount of waste which is dangerous for a few hundred years rather than tens of thousands of years.”
Referencing “beliefs” rather than “evidence, and Helen Caldicott:
“Caldicott’s assertions were nothing more than her belief. George Monbiot, a respected British journalist, explored in detail the sources of Caldicott’s assertions. The resulting article that he wrote begins:
“Over the past fortnight I’ve made a deeply troubling discovery. The anti-nuclear movement to which I once belonged has misled the world about the impacts of radiation on human health. The claims we have made are ungrounded in science, unsupportable when challenged and wildly wrong. We have done other people, and ourselves, a terrible disservice.”
His math on ‘saved lives’, nukes v. smog, is noteworthy as well, but he doesn’t really address ‘quality of life’ so much, and as to the big three nuclear reactor meltdowns notes that ‘Sure, there were some airline accidents while the technology was being perfected’, or close. Apparently birth defects due to radiation poisoning are also ‘just a belief’. Perhaps he and George should study the horrific effects that depleted uranium bombs have had on the babies in Iraq and other theaters of war that ‘belief-based scientists’ say is already proving to be multi-generational.
His carbon-taxing plan confused me, so if this is the same carbon taxing plan, the CBO says while there would be pros and cons, one big con would be that it would hit the low-income Rabble classes the hardest.
As to ‘Climate justice is about social and economic justice, and how democratic, peaceful and equitable solutions, not military violence, best serve the interests of humanity’ above, Kate Aronoff writing at Jacobin gave me the shivers the other day in her ‘The War on Climate Change; Framing climate change as a national security threat risks inviting the conventional response: more militarism.’, including:
“A truly comprehensive agreement to take on climate change at the international level would bring about a more peaceful world — eventually — by greatly diminishing the possibility of massive land loss and a rise in temperatures that is, as climate scientist Kevin Anderson has said, “incompatible with organized global community.” It’s impossible to imagine any peaceful vision for the future without serious mitigation. That so many are now raising the question of the relationship between global warming and national security, rather, begs the question: should a climate strategy also be a counterterrorism strategy?”
She rightly points out that the bombing of Syria continues apace, including the vengeful Hollande’s, outdoor demonstrations and protests have been cancelled, multiple thousands of police are evident, European xenophobia is on the rise, and of course, the Pentagon has been hatching plans since at least 2003 to ‘weather climate change storms’. They cast their role almost as the National Guard ‘helpers keeping civil order’:
“Their 2014 Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap envisioned that, as climate change accelerates, “the Department’s unique capacity to provide logistical, material and security assistance on a massive scale or in rapid fashion may be called upon with increasing frequency.” The roadmap laid out a plan for confronting climate change’s “threat multiplier” as it relates to national and military interests at home and abroad, where rising sea levels put coastal bases at risk, wildfires might disrupt training activities, and drought-induced food shortages could require more boots on the ground to handle the armed insurgencies and mass migrations that appear to follow them.”
There’s loads more, of course, some I agree with, some…not so much. But she’s indeed correct that given the West’s huge panic over Daesh/IS, it’s entirely possible that that subject is being discussed far more than carbon emission targets, especially since the framework had pretty much been agreed on before the first world leaders jetted in to meet, greet, and exhibit maximum bonhomie with one another.
The Guardian wrote ahead of the conference:
What is likely to be agreed in Paris?
We know already what the biggest emitters have committed to. The EU will cut its emissions by 40%, compared with 1990 levels, by 2030. The US will cut its emissions by 26% to 28%, compared with 2005 levels, by 2025. China will agree that its emissions will peak by 2030.
Nations responsible for more than 90% of global emissions have now come up with their targets – known in the UN jargon as Indended Nationally Determined Contributions or INDCs . These include all of the major developed and developing countries, though their contributions vary: in the case of developed countries, actual cuts in emissions, but for developing countries a range of targets including limits on emissions compared to “business as usual”, and pledges to increase low-carbon energy or preserve forests.”
I’ve read different and much longer time frames, so who knows? But Michael Hoexter writing at Naked Capitalism says that no one will think to analyze any changes from the Kyoto protocols among even the signatory nations, and his answer was: Pfffffft.
It was a little bit fun to read that as Barack Obama has been designated as ‘the leader’ of COP21, he has been urging that “…parts of Paris climate deal must carry legal force; President offers apparent compromise over the periodic review of emission reduction targets as Hillary Clinton goes on attack against Republicans back in US’
And of course, he knows that the US Congress will never, ever, approve any treaty that might come out of COP21, as it never did for the Kyoto protocols, as one of the top global ‘leaders’ of greenhouse gas emissions, ha ha.
‘‘Success is just progress’: Naomi Klein’s cautious optimism for COP21’. Klein and a few friends have a manifesto somewhere from their #theLEAP conference in Paris, but I can’t find it.
Well, goddam; I give up. It turns out that Ralph Nader was right: Only the rich can save the world.
And the Elites of the Planet, as well, oh yes indeed.
(link below goes to): ‘Darkening the White Heart of the Climate Movement’
They show their love for the colonized of Turtle Island as well.
Stay tuned for more bread and circuses from COP21 Paris.
…………………………………………………………………………………….
*Bonus material: At the end of oneCOP21 parts I’d mentioned that Edward Bernays was chuckling from his grave. He was, of course, the creator of modern propaganda and ‘public relations’, using the psychoanalytical theories of his uncle Sigmund Freud and others in what he claimed was a necessity given the danger and ‘irrationality’ of the herd instinct in the human sphere. From Nov 11, 2015 ‘Controlling Consciousness’, from the Public Good Project. You don’t have to like it or agree, but considering it is better than never having been introduced to the idea, I think.
“The role of public relations (PR) in producing ‘discursive monoculture’ is currently in vogue with communication scholars. As an instrument of social control, the goal of PR is to dominate discourse, and to keep out alternative views.
Using PR, the donor elites in the US — MacArthur, Ford and Open Society foundations — set the civil society agenda. Human rights indicators — set by governments, NGOs and civil society — thus reflect the interests and bias of ‘the power elite’.
Access to communication technology and services is one obstacle to democratic renewal; overcoming the obstacle of communication gatekeepers requires that they be recognized as such. There are no neutral players in the netwar of ideas about privatization.
Consumers remain largely unaware that investigative journalism in mainstream media is extinct. Corporate and government public relations agents have filled the void with propaganda posing as news.
Wall Street’s vertical integration of controlling consciousness is based on five components: ownership of media, fabrication of news, integration of advertising with state propaganda, financing of foundations and brokerages, and co-option of NGOs and grassroots groups.”
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
i’m about t shut down for the night. if you’re anywhere that you can see the night sky, look east by north-east; castor and pollux the gemini twins are up, with their feet and legs stretching up-sky and a bit to the east. if you can stay up later, cancer is about to rise just north of the twins. exquisite, and gives some major perspective to all of our earthly cares and fears.
it’s gotten brrr-d-brrrr cold here: 16 degrees this mornin’. sleep well, and dream of a better and more just world if you can.
Many of the rich live at 740 Park Ave, NYC. (Recent Frontline or NOVA special on the wealthy) Close to Wall St, so instead of swimming soon, maybe Nader is on to something and they do have a plan?
solar-powered canoes? living in space via richard branson and friends? harnessing theoretical quantum physics and move to a parallel universe?
wendy, i got a hyper-virtuous do gooder brother who’s a bit player in the global NGO racket. gonna send on the ‘Controlling Conscious’ link, which is great. and succinct.
mono-culture: they can’t allow an “outside” to their world to exist, either in thought/art/etc. or in the physical world. they’ll “light pollute” out the stars.
succinct it is, and very pithy. jay taber is an indigenous studies expert, and wrote one piece of many specifically on ‘SyrLibya’ narrating the many ways that media and NGOs were quite at the center of both debacles by way of dubious narratives, if not lies, that led to both putative ‘rescues’ which only served to create massive hell for both.
same for the NGOs like ned, usaid, and the pr firms like avaaz and the H one; damn, i forget the name. but yes, controlling consciousness is like war by other means than just military and finance. the same piece may have had descriptions of their antics in ‘our backyard’ socialist governments. can’t have those prosper, ya know.
a lot of this echoes what i’d brought of kate aranoff’s piece at jacobin: luke osborne’s: ‘Obama’s Cop21 Climate Speech Signals Coming Authoritarian Rule Over Unfolding Climate Disaster’
an excerpt:
“It is for this reason that Obama’s characterization of the continuation of the climate summit in the face of violence as an “act of defiance” must be seen for the Orwellian appropriation of reality that it is. The only act of defiance that occurred were those few people who protested in spite of the French imposition of rights restrictions, but Obama would take hold of that spirit, however limited it may have been, and make it the property of his elite audience. This then raises the obvious question, who exactly was Obama referring to when he said, “What greater rejection of those who would tear down our world than marshaling our best efforts to save it?” Was Obama speaking of the terrorists who were unable to prevent the climate summit from occurring (but who managed to have the French government reactively undermine its own supposedly core Western principles), or was the president speaking of the activist rabble who, out of an elite preserving security-state decision, was unable to show up at their doorstep and interrupt their party? In either case, the “best efforts” that were “marshaled” was Obama’s recognition of the world’s cream of the crop, and was an expression of flattery likely meant to entice world leaders to see themselves as potential members of his club against a backdrop of disempowered people who had been dissuaded from coming out.
If, then, by saving “our” world Obama is in fact tacitly supporting the dissolution of widely understood basic rights enshrined in the very Western civilization he is ostensibly looking to preserve, his call to action is not directed at the majority of people, but fittingly, it is aimed at those high level statesmen in attendance whose views fall in line with elite US interests. His stated goal to “protect* our people* and uphold the enduring values that keep us strong and keep us free,” could just as easily refer to the enduring values that keep the elite classes, *his people*, strong and free, and by free, this would mean free to do as they please without repercussions, in spite of their growing fears of system destabilization and the resulting desire to fortify themselves and weather mass social discontent.”
yeppers. Orwellian +.
the words “our(s), we, us” are the most misused words in language. align yourself with me and what cool kids we’ll be.
it probably doesn’t matter in the end, but at least the geedub crowd didn’t pretend to care.
you remembering dubya’s: i call you (or was it them?) ‘my base’? har har har.
yes, the cool kids, *and* the ‘worthy kids’, no?
second most misused in the Imperium, i reckon: ‘exporting democracy’, then third, ‘nation building’. second is double speak for ‘Democracy for some™’.
man, do we need a song! since this is babylon, how about:
yeah, i’l go imbibe some medical cannabis, try for a siesta. ;-)
For COP21, I-III : Especially when it is actually simple for US to create paradise, instead; by deploying EXISTING solar technology (etc.) to power our homes and vehicles, while recycling EVERYTHING, cleaning ALL contamination and CREATING jobs, Jobs, JOB$ !
– TINA (There Is No Alternative)
would have been so long ago, yes, at least quite doable, if not simple. so many possibilities were out there, bu then OPEC keeping oil prices down, no light rail allowed, few bike paths in cities, hostile takeovers of small alt-energy start-ups, massive subsidies to oil companies, lotsa available coal (excuse me: i meant ‘clean coal’), and on and on.
you all may know far than i about it, but i’m with jason on the battery issue for cars. heh; how many cities were discovered to have been taking all the citizen-recyclables…straight to landfills? how much trash did NYC load on barges and dump into the water? gawd’s blood, humans are idiots. careless idiots, to boot.
Superb coverage. Taken by Brandalism (“This country was not built by men in suits.”) and by the section on Hansen’s critique of Caldicott.
Caldicott is a physician; Hansen is, as I remember, a climate scientist. They have different perspectives on risk. Caldicott thinks in terms of cells; Hansen thinks in terms of societies, climate, and ecosystems. Caldicott’s first ethical principle is “First do no harm”. Hansen is indoctrinated into the art of the possible. The dispute is one of values, not facts, although the attacks on Caldicott show an ignorance of where the issue lies.
Hansen does however make an interesting point about fast reactors and nuclear weapons. As a means of curtailing the use of fossil fuels rapidly, converting nuclear weapons through fast reactors to fuel for electricity generating plants has been proven in the implementation of the US-Russia SALT talks and winds up also reduces the clean-up task of the nuclear toxic waste because of the the end products. And then you decommission those reactors. The use of converted fuel from nuclear weapons also lowers operating costs because the decommissioning of the nuclear weapons and conversion are done by government in government reactors.
An international agreement that ended nuclear weapons and distributed the fuel to electrical generation negotiated this year would be a welcome sign not only for the demonstration of much needed political will and unity but also for the acceleration it would provide to decommissioning coal-fired power plants. China, Eastern Europe, and Russia especially could benefit from this acceleration of the shutdown of coal-fired plants. The US has lost the high-energy industrial plants that could most benefit from using nuclear power. Amory Lovins’s quip about the folly of using nuclear power to cut butter applies to which nuclear plants you keep going or which new plants you build for a short duration. It essentially handles extremely high-heat or high electrical load requirements until renewables are deployed that can replace those loads. The other rule about this application is that uranium mining is shut down, uranium mines are sealed for future use, and then they become the first natural resource to be treated as a long-term legacy of the formation of the earth.
How you end the use of polluting technologies is as important as how fast. It is as important to cleanse all of the coal ash over time from the world’s cities and reclaim all of the mine tailings areas as decommissioning and repurposing the coal-fired generation buildings.
The indigenous peoples demands are on target. I especially agree with the opposition to quasi-market solutions like carbon taxes and carbon markets; that has turned out to be a 20-year distraction. Yes, fracking is loopy and winds up effectively representing a forced transfer of land from the people with the surface rights to the corporations with the mineral rights. The two explicitly political demands — human rights and local community participation — are strikingly on-target.
yes, hansen was a nasa scientist. i take your points about fast reactors reducing nuclear material, although hansen spoke of using the spent rods from conventional plants to fuel fast reactors. he also said that china can build a nuclear energy plant in 3-4 years, as opposed to ten in the US, and envisioned many, many of them across china to lessen dependency on coal. funny, but coverage varies significantly of china’s race and pace for solar installations, and their carbon reductions over the past few years. in a word, many sources are saying ‘they lie’. beats me.
it just seems that his plan would be rife with dangers, and accidents have such long-term effects. as i read what you wrote here, i kept envisioning the hanford nuclear campus, or whatever adorable term they use. leaking tanks up the wazoo, many billions and decades added to the clean up and stabilization plans, and all the while, radioactive waste is leaching into the rivers. my stars. oh, yeah, and i breezed by a headline of a whole new pipeline under construction near seattle.
ooof, wasn’t the brandalism project wonderful? yes, the indigenous know only too well that the solutions from the Lords of Capital have only made things worse. ‘distraction’ is a good way to frame it, but that’s what capitalist funded ‘branding’ is all about. ‘the crisis in syria’ is another one.
holy hell, bush’s poodle is out there yelling that ‘terrorism is deeply inside the muslim community now’ or very close to that.
what wendy said. it all seems so sci fi. we haven’t figured out how the owners of society are not to use various technologies to oppress, control, and destroy, so the technical aspects of nuclear conversion, coal ash clean up, etc., etc., etc., seem pointless.
maybe Anonymous can develop a “virus” to make all nuclear missiles launch toward the sun? instead of futzing around w/Paypal & ISIS twitters.
Jeremy Corbyn was flayed alive, and has since so meekly wilted, for merely suggesting the obvious point that there is no conceivable reason to have nuclear weapons. at all. we are far from worrying about what the anarcho-syndicalist hemp free-love vegan collective does about nuclear conversion.
we can’t even get obama to shut his damn yap.
if your imagination & passion, TDH, coincides w/ nuclear conversion etc., more power to you. be aware of the problems w/that & more importantly be aware we are not close to worrying about those issues on any practical level.
i’d meant to come back straightaway to add more, but got busy over at c99 and home chores.
given hansen’s cavalier attitude about radiation poisoning and human (likely animal, as well), i reckon i wouldn’t believe his ‘few hundred years of danger’ claim much.
but as to stopping up uranium mines, from popular resistance’s ‘Support The Call To Clean Up The Mines’:
“Throughout the United States, but primarily in the Great Plains and the West, a silent polluter is responsible for cancers, birth defects and many diseases including kidney and autoimmune diseases. Yet, most people living in close proximity to these polluters are unaware of the danger.
I am talking about 15,000 abandoned Uranium mines. Most of them are open pits that continue to emit radiation and clouds of radon gas. When it rains, radioactive and toxic heavy metals are washed into the aquifers and rivers. When it is dry, dust carrying radioactive and heavy metals blows across the land. In the heart of the US’ agricultural belt, these radioactive and heavy metals enter our food supply. Animals breathe in the toxic dust or drink contaminated water. Metals are taken up by plants that are harvested for animal feed or human consumption.”
but i also got to remembering the ‘clean-up’ of the hell-hole rocky flats nuclear bomb factory near denver in the early 2000s, and long corruption before and after that, and the specious ‘plans’ that were the clean up. oh, did i say that it’s now a ‘wildlife refuge’?
then at the same time east of here was the tailings removal of durango’s smelter mountain, 5.2 million tons or some such. there were lots of plans and schemes afoot, including pumping it all uphill, and burying it in rip-rap and fill, but they’ve allocated $150 grand and medical expenses to the workers who got cancer from working on the project. safely buried? nah.
and for years the PTB used to for fill dirt and in road construction. i dunno, if there are that many open pits, i reckon most of them will stay as they are for a long, long, time. and look what the EPA did in the gold king mine spill in silverton, co, while ‘cleaning it up’. oy.
yeah! more good news! let’s give it up for open uranium mines!
all seriousness aside, an open uranium mine IIRC is a subplot in Mitt Romney’s favorite book, Battlefield Earth. even L Ron H. could see leaving open uranium mines just lying around all over the place is not such a good idea.
stop it; yer killin; me, amigo. ;-) but read my next entry if ya haven’t.
there needs to be an acronym for ‘how did i not see this coming?’
‘Gates’ Nuclear Folly: the Breakthrough We Really Need is Fast Implementation of Renewables’, by Linda Pentz Gunter of beyondnuclear.org
“The first question that crossed my mind when reading about the latest Bill Gates investment venture was “is this a cover to divert yet more money into nuclear energy?” Gates unveiled his Breakthrough Energy Coalition at the start of the COP21 climate talks in Paris with much fanfare but few details, including the size of the financial commitment.
My suspicions were triggered not only by Gates’ already public commitment to nuclear energy research, but by the name selected for this collection of 28 of the world’s richest people (mainly men.) The Breakthrough Institute, after all, is the name of the pseudo-green nuclear energy front group whose people promoted and starred in the 2013 nuclear power propaganda film, Pandora’s Promise. But so far the Breakthrough Institute is lying low on the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, although I suspect not for long. [snip]
So who are these guys and what are they really up to? A review of Coalition members yields a mixed bag full of red flags proudly flying the radiation symbol. Gates is already squandering part of his wealth on Terra Power LLC, a nuclear design and engineering company seeking an elusive, expensive and futile so-called Generation IV traveling wave reactor that can never deliver electricity in time.
Mukesh Ambani is an investor in Terra Power. Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, is betting his money on the perpetually-40-years-away nuclear fusion dream, which, even if it were ever to work, will be far too expensive to apply to developing countries.
Virgin Group founder, Richard Branson, publicly touts nuclear energy and put his name on Pandora’s Promise as executive producer. “We should continue to develop advanced nuclear power to add to the mix,” he said in promoting the film via the Breakthrough Institute’s website. (See our debunk of the film’s numerous errors of fact and omission.)
and so on. good grief. and here’s the warm fuzzy trailer.
stewart brand????
Stewart Brand turned global corporate consultant in the 1990s and came out for advance nuclear and GMOs in his 2009 book Whole Earth Discipline: an Ecopragmatist Manifesto. The estimates of energy consumption and energy cost to produce the equipment to harness renewables kept coming up short because of low conservation of energy (“freezing in the dark” it was called in the Jimmy Carter era) numbers in the model. People changing their habits voluntarily was the problem. So advanced nuclear became the fudge factor that allowed people to preserve their lifestyles and not overthrow the government that introduced renewables. Typical PTB analysis.
BTW, I voted for Jimmy Carter in 1980. So it’s all my fault that we all are freezing in the dark today. The GOP said, “If you vote for Jimmy Carter, we’ll be freezing in the dark.”
zounds, i hadn’t known that about brand. i voted for carter, too; i liked his mr. rogers sweaters and advice on smaller energy footprints. i liked rosalynn better than jimmah, though, i confess. to read now about what his FP really had amounted to is stunning.
dayum, there’s a buck here now who seems to have a lotta broken tines on his rack; lotta power on display with the jousts and sparring in earnest.
The program that demobilized Russian weapons as a part of START I was nicknamed Megatons to Megawatts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts_Program
It did not require any additional plants. But it did in effect subsidized the nuclear fuel for existing plants. And it processed 500 tonnes over 20 years, which held electric rates from major increases.
There is no “away” with pollution. The concentrated radiation of nuclear fuel, even spent nuclear fuel, and nuclear weapons must go somewhere. Going cold turkey on nuclear reactors does not change that reality, which has huge political components. Those uranium mines are not an urgent problem for government agencies and Congress because they are not in densely populated areas. In an era in which getting contract done and the cash flow recognized, I am not surprised that EPA projects (which are contracted) created a problem in trying to clean up one.
We have a huge cleanup job on our hands from the 20th and 21st century civilization. All of the point-focused and non-point widely dispersed pollution from normal daily activities worldwide. But also the results of catastrophic business judgements. And then all of the spent and dud ordnance and weapons that all armies, but primarily the US one, have spread around the world. Depleted uranium artillery shells, anti-personnel cluster bombs, land mines, spent drone parts, circuit boards, and on and on.
It seems that we engineered the Megatons to Megawatts agreement to provide a little token financial aid during the post-Cold War depression that Dr. Sachs forced on Russia through his capitalist shock treatment. As a result, most of the environmental risk — diluting the weapons grade uranium to low-grade uranium suitable for American generating plants — occurred on Russian soil (quite literally).
Where I come out in this discussion is that the first step is to close the mines forcing the civilian generating industry to pressure for arms reduction to provide fuel or shutting down the civilian nuclear industry. Every nuclear nation now knows the profound paradox of a weapon one dare not use but must make everyone think that you are serious when you say you will. A weapon that proved to be battlefield-useless in World War II and functions not as an operational weapon but as a deterrent to other nations’ actions. Political power with useless monumental force. Every nuclear nation knows this but is trapped in the mutual assured destruction deterrence game. And most non-nuclear nations know it as well (and depend on a “nuclear umbrella’ of nuclear nations). We lack the naive kid to point to nuclear weapons and declare that the emperor has no clothes; the technology cannot win a war, cannot make a peace, but can destroy planetary life. In the 30 years since the “nuclear winter” research put a nail in the coffin of rational use of nuclear weapons, even that realization is weakening with the public.
So the second step is complete nuclear disarmament of all nations with an expansion of the inspection regime of the IAEA–this time including the US. (There is precedent. The US did allow Russian verification of its destruction of its nuclear weapons under START I, which is what allowed agreement on START II. Both countries are aware of the uselessness of their stockpiles but must please their politicians who mistake nuclear weapons as the equalizer.]
The third step is the actual dismantling of nuclear weapons and disposing of their component parts, including the nuclear material. Running the fuel through reactors for domestic energy has the advantage of making it ever again useful for weapons. All of the end-product pollution issues go along with that advantage.
One of the paradoxes of the thinking about the transition to renewables is where the energy to construct all of those solar energy panels and wind turbines and what other technologies is going to come from. Right now a big part of it is coal-fired and natural-gas-fired generators–and nuclear generators. So the tradeoff is between nuclear waste and additional carbon dioxide loading of the atmosphere. There are ways of sequestering carbon dioxide; plants do it all the time. I don’t think plants sequester nuclear waste effectively for nuclear energy to be offset that way. Or are we going to leave all of the nuclear weapons in place and seal the locations at which they are stored to prevent access and use?
Good discussion here as usual wendyedavis.
“…which held electric rates from major increases.” from an enviro-perspective, is this per se a good thing? having a hard time parsing how this matters in a consumer economy. or how it really mattered in the collapsing economies of the former USSR where lifespans plummeted thanks to people like Sachs.
“…where the energy to construct all of those solar energy panels and wind turbines and what other technologies is going to come from.” it’s going to come the same place energy comes from now. too much energy is being consumed anyway. way, way, way too much. machines, people, computers, cars, satellites, etc., all are working way too hard. thus: environmental collapse. mother nature’s tired of being converted into Twinkies and honda prii. we can throw all the solar panels we want at the environment, but if consumption patterns & the energy use required by those consumpation patterns, aka “the economy,” doesn’t radically change, we are screwed.
btw, i’ll try to track this down, but some time ago i ran across a blogpost either at the NYRB or LRB in which a big-thinking historian asserted that some of the founding fathers (vile phrase) proposed building a “consumer” society as an alternative to the slave-ocracy, i.e., inundating people w/goods as a way to avoid the unpleasantness of trading in human flesh but also as a means of controlling the non-propertied classes that would further enrich the propertied classes & assure their continued control. hey, no slave revolts has its advantages.
they hung the Turk that invented work:
cool video; thanks.
you’ve clearly bent your smart brain to this task and position, and i do see where you’re coming from, especially with your decommissioning nuclear bombs for dilute nuclear fuel. and yes, the carbon dioxide costs for many ‘renewables’ is an ingredient often left out of the discussion. for instance, i’ve read that on average, solar panels last a decade, dunno if it’s so, but i’ve read that there are various liquids in the cells that may prolong their lives…or not.
truth to tell, i keep wondering how many definitions of ‘renewables’ as opposed to ‘clean’ and ‘sustainable’ there are among various proponents, and that bothers me a lot.
i’ve been checking the cop 21 coverage for hints of discussions about global agriculture, and found little, but the claim is that ag is responsible for about half the carbon gases. if true, that’s major, and perhaps directly tied to factory animal farming and factory food production. it may take another diary, but i ain’t liking what i’ve found presented there so far (i did grab some links). and water wasn’t on the agenda at all, which is stupefying, if that subject was the ignored Elephant in the room.
maybe more later, it’s tie to toast, and i wanna read jason’s comment, too.
thank you for helping the conversation, amigo.
i will say that we got a second-hand look at the US ‘clean-up’ in iraq; quite horrid on workers and especially iraqi kids who played in, and searched for salvage, in the piles of radioactive and other refuse.
your wiki says: ‘no new plans for a similar program’. it’s almost impossible to think your plan would ever be suggested…out loud, or at least not in our lifetimes, and for a variety of reasons. unless you believe that the stakeholder multi-billionaires of the Breakthrough Energy Coalition could be persuaded to a three-fer: disarmament, fuels dilution, and of course: keep yer profits.
jason pinged my other thought while watch the Pandora trailer: look at the images of cities, my stars. not just bright lights, but humongous message boards with crawls, neon galore, ‘happy shiny people going round’. which kid with serious mojo will say: you can’t have all that shit and a livable planet, too?
a commenter at NC reminded me of this quote, and i used it at NC in a partial answer to ‘everyone is part of capital’ or close…wish i could remember, but:
“This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.”
~ douglas adams
trebly weird given that research shows (or says it shows) that after a certain point of wealth security, more doesn’t bring contentment. of course it’s addictive, and the capitalist system is rigged for money begetting more money and all that jazz, but even so, to watch the Lords of Finance and Capital do their damnedest to acquire all they can…makes one wonder about the interior voids they are seeking to fill, but fail to fill. power, of course, is directly related, and that’s why: the comprador class.
added on edit: one recent cautionary tale: ‘Tokyo 2020 in the Shadow of Godzilla’ (olympic games)
The original START I program was slipped in with an amendment and then implemented with the utilities before the public heard much about it. I was not advocating, just pointing out the practical way that things seem to work when they work in the right direction if not with scrupulously correct implementation.
When did the US clean up in Iraq (except for contractor payments)?
It looks like the COP21 language is so flexible that it says for each nation separately, “We will do what we will do. No commitment.” So there. The politics of the practical is handled. Nice French cuisine. See all of you next year about this time in … where is it?
Yes, i understand now, but when has there ever been ‘scrupulously correct implementation?’ ‘pragmatics on the cheap’ usually rules. oh, just like cop21 non-binding flexibility. next year in…abu dhabi?
it turns out that the guardian carried a piece recently by james hansen and three of his colleagues, which harvey wasserman (solartopia) called out in no uncertain terms. neither he nor hansen did the math, but they were advocating for 114 new nuke plants with ‘closed fuel cycles’ that wasserman claims doesn’t yet exist, until 2050. that equals 1725 if i’d multiplied correctly. but he laughed in derision at there are safe ways to dispose of the resultant nuclear waste’, but also provided a link to a page at eco-watch on ‘renewables storage batteries’. in prime place seemed to be tesla/elon musk thingies, which you have mentioned as impractical or worse once, yes?
oh, i did read some of the comments under their guardian piece, and saw way more agreement than not, although i only read a dozen or so. interesting.
My pessimism is beginning to approach that of John Michael Greer as the march of folly and the parade of clowns continue to entertain our friends, neighbors, family, and co-workers to death.
Meanwhile Pearl Harbor Day, the military-industrial complex’s birthday is today. We mobilized and never looked back. Not paying taxes and not wanting to serve in the military was, according to Thomas Cahill, the reason for the decline of the Roman Empire in the West and its replacement with brigands and warlords who eventually evolved a culture of obedience for protection, a more brutal form of the mentoring and networking system in most large multinational corporations.
i will say that i’m glad that he at least vacated abjuring tech-no-gadgets and gizmos to bring us things like his update on plato’s allegory of the caves. by the by, i was thinking that ‘dream a better world’ might be somehow an inadvertently related to plato’s ‘thought forms come first’, but forget my prattle.
with your mention of the MIC, i wonder if anyone save for the indigenous called for peace and and end to military conquests and the huuuuge carbon footprints the various over-stuffed with toys militaries of the world…entail?
i don’t know cahill, nor his thesis, but he mentioned ‘protection, not ‘conquest’? as used to be “roman citizen could walk safely abroad without fear, because…revenge, swift and sure?” as an aside, have you ever noticed that employees (even low-level ones) speak about their corporations in the first person plural “We”. it chills my bones.
favor? i’d missed yves smith’s cop21 links yesterday, or i would have asked her about this i grabbed from the guardian. i read it quickly once, meant to go back with rested eyes and brain, but hadn’t yet, but then again, maybe i wouldn’t have seen it as not another hedge financial con, either. ‘Innovative finance has a major role to play in tackling climate change; Delegates at the Paris climate talks must heed the success of green bonds, which underlines the boost financial solutions can give to the global warming battle’
BTW @deray is attending a White House reception tonight. Watch the dance begin. I don’t think that @deray will be star-struck; he will bargain on the basis of something. Does he have the backing to be effective? Can he be easily persuaded to be co-opted? Watch how this unfolds and we will know the syndrome.
you really think deray’s not been coopted already? nor star-stuck? i hear blue, but afaik, he and jonetta have been to the WH already, at least once or twice. good luck with that, deray. oh and miz pTFA packnetty. let’s call his brand ‘the blue vest’, as he has already.
as far as you take on nuclear power, i’ll need time to respond later.
but i’ll try to bring blue’s photo.
?ref_src=twsrctfw
haven’t a clue as to who rashad drakeford is, though.
My search engine tells me that Rashad Drakeford is Director of RevoltTV. @deray is a Bowdoin grad; he likely has a very interesting network out of that phase of his life. He has positioned himself relative to the Wall Street media as an explainer (at the least) of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. They, of course, use the word “leader”. I suspect the correct term is “consultant to” local eruptions of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. To me, he seems in the same mold as Kevin Zeese, Will Allen, or Van Jones. But he has not expended effort on an organization yet like Shaun King has. He remains positioned between the movement and the powers-that-be without direct affiliation with anything visible. TFA was before the gig in Minneapolis schools HR department.
As far as co-option, all he does is tweet, meet, do training for local groups, and appear on the media as a face of the movement. I expect that he will eventually endorse an electoral strategy for the movement. I find it interesting to look for the signs of how that relationship develops. Large and powerful movements win their gains through the folks that eventually co-opt them. That even seems to be true of revolutions, in which a first wave of co-optive leaders either succeeds in co-option or is removed subsequently through a radicalizing movement or a counter-revolution. Regardless of the nature of removal, often the original gains of the revolution are not rolled back and not pressed much forward either.
i’m not sure what you mean re: shaun king, save for guessing you mean his new gig at the NYP.
but i need to make a correction to this: “Teach for America is a common stint he had with his two sidekicks several years ago”.:
deray had been highlighting his tfa credentials for quite some time, and iirc (not worth much), i’d even written about his gig with miz pakyetti quite some time ago at my.fdl. granted, once she joined their team, they both ramped it up on twitter. cringe-wothy, imo.
not long after dew franklin’s piece on deray and tfa referencing bruce dixon’s ‘trojan horse’ a year ago, marym had brought us this diplomatic letter: ‘An Open Letter to DeRay Mckesson: Teach For America undermines the fight for racial justice’’, by Caucus of Working Educators‘ (concerning his scheduled appearance in philly representing tfa.)
but deray and miz packyetti got the ‘peter jennings award’ according to tfa in july of this year for ya know, selling out their homies and further crapifying USian education. Orwellian language. no idea how much money came with the ‘award’, of course; the tfa website doesn’t say. but ooops; it looks like they lurve the new bipartisan ESSA law. arne duncan is falling on his sword and lurving it, too. he sent me an email to prove it!
on edit: cripes, drew’s piece had said:
‘For their efforts, the two were rewarded last July with a $10,000 prize from Teach For America, who named them the winners of the 2015 Peter Jennings Award for Civic Leadership. Antonio French got his, too, in the form of a $500,000 grant from the state of Missouri for his St. Louis non-profit.’ so alderman french was the big winner. :-)
dunno which back lives activists might show up for the dinner, or receive, and funds from the ‘democracy alliance’, but quite a bit of money had been distributed, and perhaps went to ‘the not-leaders’, who knows? there have been some dissatisfied rumblings, i do remember that.
but then, ta-nahisi coates got something like $625,000 as one of a dozen or two recipients from the mcarthur foundation. (i’ll pass on jests about financial needs.) ;-)
oh, yes, and drew franklin also brought this tweet:
michelle malkin? zounds; is she still around?
McKesson and the other poseurs like him cannot be coopted because they have been assigned the job of coopting others in the BLM Movement. Their sellout to and for power happened long ago and I doubt they were moved by anything but baser impulses.
Every picture of this tool and fool, you can put Democrat or Corporate before either, shows a smug contrived operator who can’t even lift his wimpy arm to make a proper Black Power salute.
I see TD, and other Democrat loyalists, are still trying to present him as a face/voice of BLM which he is not and I doubt his political endorsement of HRC will carry much weight with the core of the BLM movement that rejects any of this Follow the Leader BS.
McKesson may not be successful in coopting many of BLM followers but his organization is more about undermining BLM in the media with an approved Party persona playing the faux rebel role.
I believe I said that the media made him the face of the #blacklivesmatter movement. And I have not heard him connected to an organization. Teach for America is a common stint he had with his two sidekicks several years ago. As best I can tell he currently has no visible means of support, which is interesting in itself. What is the organization that is paying his upkeep and travel? Has he endorsed Hillary Clinton yet? My forecast is that would come after SuperTuesday.
To say “they have been assigned” posits someone to assign on behalf of some entity. Who is it, in your view, who did the assigning? Did you take my comments about Zeese, Jones, and Allen as complimenting them? (The only one who has something tangible to show for his work is Allen.)
I haven’t been following this clown McKesson closely but I do recall that early in the Ferguson crisis he was paraded by the Liberal media and talk shows and soon had his first meeting with the Boss. If I recall correctly a nice grant was arranged for him and others in his group. His connection to TFA is enough along with easy access to the WH and media to identify him as connected, although the appearance of him leading a grassroots, politically aligned and reasonable reformist faction is what is portrayed. All of this is offered to counter the radical, anti-political movement that is BLM.
I’m surprised you still don’t see what TFA represents and what they producer. I don’t know how many of their trained leaders are still teaching after their initial service they quickly move into management and leadership positions just as McKesson and others in his group did.
Moving the Liberal Technocrat agenda along has been a generational project just as the Powell Memo demonstrated the Conservative agenda’s long term planning. Minions such as McKesson are waiting and prepared to take up leadership positions when opportunities arise and real grassroots movements threaten the status quo.
To view them as being assigned is implicit in their background, training, career paths and especially the work product that ‘Campaign Zero’ produced, a slick eye-catching reform package based on the WH commission report produced by one of their members and delivered just in time for the Democrat candidates ‘Campaigns’ to latch onto.
When BLM demands that the Democrats debate the real issued publicly McKesson and his friends join with the Party to deflect attention from BLM’s demands and push compromise and an easily controlled Town Hall, waste of time. This is organized undermining of a real grassroots movement.
There is a grassroots movement independent of McKesson and Shaun King and other high profile media-attracting figures that so far is persistent in its reaction to each new killing by police. I’m not sure that someone with a Bowdoin education is going to easily co-opt these very local folks into calling a politician-oriented Town Hall a solution.
Movements broaden through coalitions, and coalitions always have the risk of co-option for the movemental just as they have the risk of radicalization for the organizational.
I think that what we have learned from Campaign Zero’s publication of its demands is that the establishment is unwilling to take even the most reasonable and minimal action to stop killings by cops. That sort of clarification establishes the frame now for the “Whose side are you on?” question.
Like with the Occupy Wall Street movement, the evidence that the protests have struck home with a large part of the grassroots is the determination of the establishment to suppress them.
Co-option strategies can backfire even when the relationship remains one of co-option; the best example of this is how Katie Couric’s innocent question of what newspapers do you read took down Sarah Palin in the 2008 election. Others can sap the momentum of movements, as has happened to the environmental movement and slowly to the human rights movement.
I think that @deray’s impact is slowing waning in terms of the #blacklivesmatter movement except to the extent that he honestly represents their concerns to the establishment figures he consults. His most major impact is likely to be on the sales of Patagonia goose-down vests. (That marketing gimmick sort of gives away the type of political process he is engaged in.) Shaun King, by contrast, has positioned himself to reflect the movement through the media to the public. It gives Mort Zuckerman the voice to argue against the reaction to #blacklivesmatters.
Welcome to a revisiting of the 1850s, 1870s, and 1880s — all playing on parallel screens. Drift toward secession and fragmentation; legitimation of political terrorism; further institutionalization of the robber barons.
Does it end in ConCon or chaos? For it seems that the constitutional framework of the US is shaking apart.
Apparently, he’s been to the White House at least three times in the past, before this evening–according to the ‘Washington Post’ when they checked out the WH Visitors’ Logs.
McKesson At White House (Twitter), December 4, 2015.
http://twitchy.com/2015/12/04/deray-mckesson-is-at-a-white-house-christmas-party-tonight-photos/
[Sorry, don’t know how to post photos here. ;-)]
Blue
Any indication of when the earliest meeting occurred?
Seems Michelle Malkin’s group is tracking him rather closely.
TD,
This may be a right-wing source (there is a screenshot–supposedly from the WH visitor’s blog), but it indicates that all three WH visits were in 2011, not counting McKesson’s attendance at a WH Party several days ago.
Here’s the link:
https://pjmedia.com/blog/according-to-wh-visitor-log-deray-mckesson-visited-the-white-house-three-times-in-2011
Blue
And don’t forget about the elephant.
ha. i can’t comment on the weather modification programs designed to create more drought >>> control >>>profiteering, but callin’ that dude down for bein’ a ‘green communist’ made me chuckle. as far as i’m concerned, the eco-socialists have it about right, especially the indigenous ones. i did see an essay recently that tried to demonstrate what marx and engels and murray bookchin (new to me) were positing about working people and the biosphere. it proved 2L2R n the end.
chemtrails, i’d thought, were about dumping toxins above the earth that were hard to dispose of, but i did see a blurb about dumping (ash ?) particles by jet in an attempt to block out some of the sun’s radiant effects.
but the dude was sure right about this emergency crisis trending toward heavy and hideous agricultural ‘solutions’ behind the scenes at cop21. it’s depressing as all giddy-up, nomad. wish he spoke more slowly; i had a hard time deciphering for the first minute or so.
on edit: i did look at noaa, but mainly found their attempts at cloud-seeding to lessen hurricane strength called a failure. the page also went into some impractical, costly, and imo, likely dangerous treatments for the ocean’s surface itself. this website doesn’t seem to bear out what it promises incipiently about geo-engineering, but i gave up reading their last dozen links to the conferences. others may find nuggets inside, of course.
i checked with NCAR, and they are quite frank it seems about their weather experiments and pilot programs, at least as far as listing them and most seem to be about ‘enhancing rainfall’.
“chemtrails, i’d thought, were about dumping toxins above the earth that were hard to dispose of, but i did see a blurb about dumping (ash ?) particles by jet in an attempt to block out some of the sun’s radiant effects.”
its so much worse than that. mitigating solar radiation is a cover story. sure man made clouds will block some of the sun’s rays (at devastating collateral costs) but that is incidental to the true purpose of covert geoengineering. this is weaponized weather. among other things it is used to create record droughts in places we want to invade. like Syria.
Yeah. I chose that video because of the passion this anti-geoengineering activist displayed. That’s the way I feel about it. Here is a video by perhaps the most prominent anti-geo activist. He does a weekly podcast on the subject. A good introduction for those not familiar with the topic.Some things he says I don’t agree with when he goes off on other topics, but on geoengineering he’s great. And you will be able to hear him clearly.
ooof; i don’t come close to have 55 minutes to watch, nomad, but others may. i’m trying get part IV finished, and have a boatload of RL chores nagging me as well.
any idea if any of those folks are in paris making the case? it might even be searchable…
“any idea if any of those folks are in paris making the case?”
I sincerely doubt it. The talks are designed to leave geoengineering ‘off the table’. We who bring it up are mad conspiracy theorists. The talks are a massive misdirection of attention from the real ecological danger, which is geoengineering. Covert, ongoing geoengineering.
Like I say. Dane does a weekly podcast. Watch whenever you have the time.
Better yet heres a 3 minute Dane Wigington.
it’s a bit more rational, nomad, but not ‘the smoking gun’ they claim, imo. i actually did search to see if any were at cop21 given the possible courage of their convictions. what i kicked up accidentally was a pair at alex jones’ ‘prison planet’ claiming geo-engineering, but also that 6000 vaccinations were likely (or stronger) mind control agents, and things like that. it was funny though, that they couldn’t quit referencing ‘chemtrails’ no matter how hard they tried.
i dunno, nomad; srsly. so many dastardly deeds might be possible, but not probable.
yep. thats the normalized consensus
how about that phrase “draining the swamp”? “we’ve got to drain the swamp of terrorism.” it seems to be a bluntly honest phrase in stating that military operations=environmental devastation. “pave over everything,” as Ann Coulter suggested. if they are hiding in the jungle, why not destroy the jungle? i mean, why not? (for that matter, why not kill everything to get to those evil, evil coca or opium plants?)
and what do we do to drain the swamp? carpet bombing, training death squads, shooting DU everywhere, black sites, special ops, etc. Killing everything.
uh, oh, jason. where was ‘drain the swamp’? (asks the memory-challenged one..). but yes, why not ‘turn the desert to glass’? oh, they did.
it’s been tossed around for a while on occasion. jeb bush used it…w/in the last couple of days when he was on Fox News (not the sunday show) w/George “i have a bowtie” Will.
tom englehardt from 2004
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/11/draining-swamp
david cameron in 2013
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/05/woolwich-david-cameron-drain-swamp
the main bad guy also says it in “Avatar”.
thank you, jason; i’d reckoned it was from a link up yonder, and i’d overlooked it. nope, can’t read the tom englehardt piece to the end, or it will bring back nightmares from the time. sorry to go S-o-C, but why the fook does he feature rebecca solnit; such a major disconnect. nick turse i used to applaud Tom featuring for years on end as one of the finest investigative reporters on the true state of the US military, including the hidden budget. now? i saw him on any goodman pulling his punches to beat the band, only to discover that…he’s also at the Intercept, as is formerly fdl, naked capitalism…david dayen, who has gotten quite a bit more rowdy since fdl. ah yes, “pierre”. never mind the hilarious twit war i saw about greenwald, iran, and ‘ISIS’. cynic, i yam.
but aha! the cameron/guardian piece: glorious: “This metaphor, which has been used before in the context of terrorism, serves to push a narrative of bustling resolution.” wot? not quite kinetic, but in the planning stages, yet to be realized”?
on edit: i’d forgotten to say how personally i took it to see on the guardian link sidebar: 10 signs of alzheimers. ;-)
i couldn’t wade all the way thru Tom E. either. ditto what you said on Turse. solnit? i don’t know anything about her, but she’s at the Intercept? flags raised. Have a great day, Wendy!
sorry for the confusion, jason. turse is now at the intercept; solnit gets great msm gigs, but maybe she’ll end up swelling their ranks even further as well. i did keep this post of hers from oct. 2012, though it’s infamous (or famous, depending on your outlook) ;-):
“Dear allies,
Forgive me if I briefly take my eyes off the prize to brush away some flies, but the buzzing has gone on for some time. I have a grand goal, and that is to counter the Republican right with its deep desire to annihilate everything I love and to move toward far more radical goals than the Democrats ever truly support. In the course of pursuing that, however, I’ve come up against the habits of my presumed allies again and again.
O rancid sector of the far left, please stop your grousing! Compared to you, Eeyore sounds like a Teletubby. If I gave you a pony, you would not only be furious that not everyone has a pony, but you would pick on the pony for not being radical enough until it wept big, sad, hot pony tears. Because what we’re talking about here is not an analysis, a strategy, or a cosmology, but an attitude, and one that is poisoning us. Not just me, but you, us, and our possibilities.”
then a thousand words like, ‘sure, obama did some bad things…but…but…’ it’s a real piece of work.
really, it’s why tarzie changed the name of his website.
on edit: and a fine day to you, as well, amigo.
yeah, she sounded familiar. she wrote that in 2012? 1…2…3…4? 4 is it? 4 right? 4 years after 2008? (maff, how does it work, spelling too.). when my little pony didn’t come on Jan 21, 2009, or Nov 4, 2008….sorry, don’t know how to complete that…wendy, do you have something against PONIES?!?!???
nothing against ponies per se my friend but they have to Sparkle like wild. and: shhhhh; ya know one of them danged Telletubbies was GAY, dinna ya? the shoulder bag gave ‘im away; sheesh.
but yeah, solnit makes lemonade out of poisoned roadapples:
“I see the fabric of my country’s rights and justices fraying and I see climate change advancing. There are terrible things about this moment and it’s clear that the consequences of climate change will get worse (though how much worse still depends on us). I also see that we never actually know how things will play out in the end, that the most unlikely events often occur, that we are a very innovative and resilient species, and that far more of us are idealists than is good for business and the status quo to acknowledge.
What I learned first in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina was how calm, how resourceful, and how generous people could be in the worst times: the “Cajun Navy” that came in to rescue people by boat, the stranded themselves who formed communities of mutual aid, the hundreds of thousands of volunteers, from middle-aged Mennonites to young anarchists, who arrived afterward to help salvage a city that could have been left for dead.”
Because: the music there and in Congo square signaled ‘relief will come!’ (or some such) christ in a canoe.