How to Fix the Climate Crisis is a multifaceted affair; a National Geographic November 2023 article, “The Race to Save the Planet, Can Technology Help Fix the Climate Crisis?” that this two-part series is based upon focuses on the nexus of trouble, which is excessive levels of greenhouse gases, specifically CO2. Technologies to fix excessive CO2 in the atmosphere, as mentioned in the National Geographic article, are described herein:
The scope of the CO2 problem is very difficult to comprehend. The planet is big, and any solution involves the entire planet, or it is no solution …
One night in 1997, as Americans were parked on the couch in front of an episode of Touched by an Angel, they were touched by something else unexpected: an ad for a prescription allergy pill called Claritin®, promoted directly to the consumer!
Prescription drugs had never been sold directly to the public before, because, without a doctor’s recommendation, how could people know if the medication was appropriate or safe? Soon, ads for Xenical®, Meridia®, Propecia®, Paxil®, Prozac®, Vioxx, Viagra®, Singulair®, Nasonex®, Allegra®, Flonase®, Pravachol®, Zyrtec®, Zocor®, Flovent®, and Lipitor® followed. By 2006, …
The Biden Administration must demand a full ceasefire, not a temporary pause, to stop the violence.
by Kathy Kelly / November 9th, 2023
Operation Cast Lead, an Israeli aerial assault and massacre of Gazans begun on December 27, 2008, lasted for 22 days. The Israeli military deployed its navy, air force and army against the people living in Gaza, using U.S.-supplied weapons and killing 1,383 Palestinians, of whom 333 were children.
I remember a doctor at the Al Shifa hospital, after a ceasefire was declared, shaking with anger and remorse as he told me that for 22 days the world watched while the incalculable affliction of Gaza went on and on. Most of his patients, he said, were women, children, grandparents.
“The nightmare in Gaza is more than a humanitarian crisis. It is a crisis of humanity,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres told reporters in New York, adding that the need for a ceasefire is becoming “more urgent with every passing hour.”
Hundreds of thousands of people are demonstrating across the planet in opposition to the outrage of being forced to witness the barbaric state terror and collective punishment of the occupied and oppressed people of Palestine by the illegitimate settler-colonial state of Israel.
The flood of images of dead Palestinian children and even the audio of Palestinian women screaming in between the sounds of …
An authentic democracy cannot be psychopathic because most people are not psychopaths.
Most people would not vote to kill, wound and displace hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians for power, profit or territorial gain. Most people do not accept the great lie of ‘pragmatism’: that ‘the anarchical society’ of international relations mandates psychopathic violence: If ‘we’ don’t behave as psychopaths, somebody else will.
Most people don’t believe the world can be divided between Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ‘children of light’ and ‘children of darkness’. …
Rachid Koraichi (Algeria), One Plate, from A Nation in Exile, c. 1981.
More than 10,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli armed forces in Gaza since 7 October, nearly half of them children, according to the most recent report by spokesperson for the Gaza Ministry of Health Dr Ashraf Al-Qudra. Over 25,000 others have been injured, with thousands still buried under the rubble. Meanwhile, Israeli tanks have begun to encircle Gaza City, whose population was 600,000 a month ago but whose neighbourhoods …
It may be time to reconsider the use of such words as “humanitarian” and “humanitarianism”. There has been little of that sort evidenced in the Israel-Hamas War, marked by industrial-mechanised atrocities, enforced deprivation and starvation, orders to evacuate (read expulsion and banishment), preceded by massacres most haunting and visceral. Its constant evocation by various sides of the conflict have given it a diminishing quality, leaving international relations stirring with cant.
Mind you, the term humanitarian had already been pipped and emptied of any solid meaning in the aftermath of the Cold War. Humanitarian intervention became a vicious, evangelised concept, enchanting such …
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / November 7th, 2023
We are one year out from the 2024 presidential election and as usual, the American people remain eager to be persuaded that a new president in the White House can solve the problems that plague us.
Yet what is being staged is not an election.
It’s a con game, a scam, a grift, a hustle, a bunko, a swindle, a flimflam, a gaffle, and a bamboozle, and “we the people” are nothing more than marks, suckers, stooges, mugs, rubes, or gulls.
We’re being duped into believing that this mockery of a choice between two candidates who are equally unfit for office actually translates …
As a long-time leader in higher ed unionism, I was recently asked to comment on the transformative changes taking place in American higher education. To answer, I reflected on my nearly sixty years in higher education. I was a working-class kid from New York City who went to CCNY, where tuition was free. Yes, free. Free or low-cost tuition was the norm in American public colleges and universities in the 1960s. My expectations of college were probably typical of my generation. I expected to get a good job when I graduated, but college was also an intellectual adventure, a new …
Banished Prime Ministers are an irritation. They clog the airwaves of punditry with their views about how things were and how things should be. But even there, degrees of severity and competence should be observed. The more noble sorts would pursue the goals of peace, even as they bag large wads of cash in stating the obvious. With former Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, and his disgraced counterpart from the UK, Boris Johnson, the cash is being forked out for war.
That Israeli authorities thought it suitable to invite these two men to bolster their war against Hamas shows a degree …
As horrible as Zionist atrocities against Palestinians are, we must not forget the fact that they reflect events that have happened for decades and that will continue to happen. They are the current chapter in repeated parades of mass extermination which have characterize capitalism since its birth.
A recurring theme in the campaigns has been landgrabs, or the seizure of land occupied by people who have been living there for centuries or millennia. With this in mind, the Green Party of St. Louis (GP StL) decided to point to the strong …
At the United Nations this week, the world community has overwhelmingly spoken out against the relentless U.S. embargo on Cuba. Yet President Biden remains unmoved, stubbornly clinging to the anachronic policies that are deliberately and systematically causing harm to the well-being of more than 11 million Cubans. Despite the world’s condemnation of the blockade every year since 1992, the U.S. government continues to act in complete isolation from the international community.
In this solitary corner, the United States was joined only by Israel, a country that relies on the United States for billions of dollars, money that is now set to …
Tens of thousands rallied in San Francisco on October 28 to call for a ceasefire in Gaza and then marched to disrupt traffic on the freeway to get the attention of an otherwise inattentive press. That demonstration joined multitudes globally protesting the on-going genocide.
Signs read, “You can’t hide genocide.” “Genocide Joe” placards connected the dots to the White House’s complicity with the collective punishment of civilians.
“Free Palestine!” signs proliferated. Another sign said, “America’s 9/11 is Palestine’s 24/7.”
There are many reasons why Australian foreign policy can be viewed from the wrong end of a municipal drainpipe. For one, it is largely dictated, in terms of security, by the competitive, acquisitive urgings of the United States. Fictional reassurances are offered to supposedly calm nerves in Canberra against phantom threats: extended nuclear deterrence, the furnishing of nuclear-powered submarines, the need for a satellite intelligence base. In return Uncle demands cash, blood and loyalty; and Uncle shall receive.
The other perspective is economic. Here, Australia relies on China’s voracious appetite for such commodities as iron ore. We dislike you and your …
Beasts of a Nation
Sure, it is overreach, I know, with such a heavy title to this quasi-frivolous and oh-so-cogent piece. Taken apart, well, you can see a hundred articles spun from each thematic:
Albeit, this society has always been PT Barnum histrionics, and marketing psychiatrics, and the mythology of twisted and fantasy history, right in your face, turning the entire 50 states into one delusional collective. All of that — fear, duck and cover (remember those …
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak looks as much a deep fake projection as a thin, superficial representation of reality. His robotic, risible awkwardness makes a previous occupant of his office, Theresa May, look soppily human in comparison. But at the AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park, the nervous system of code breaking during the Second World War dominated by such troubled geniuses as Alan Turing, delegates had gathered to chat about the implications of Artificial Intelligence.
The guest list was characterised by a hot shot list of Big Tech and political panjandrums, part of an attempt by the UK to, as …
National Geographic’s November 2023 cover story is entitled “The Race to Save the Planet. Can Technology Help Fix the Climate Crisis?” by Sam Howe Verhovek. This headline puts climate change squarely in crisis mode, and by implication “the race to save the planet” signals the onset of a mad scramble to work our way out of the biggest jam in human history.
It’s hard to find a climate scientist who does not agree with that sentiment. According to the renowned climate scientist Bill McGuire, emeritus professor of geophysical and climate hazards, University College London:
Presumably, if Israeli Jews were not occupying the majority of historical Palestine, laying siege to Gaza, oppressing, humiliating, dehumanizing, liquidating, and refusing statehood to the Palestinian people that Hamas, a Palestinian resistance, would not have been driven to launch an attack on Israelis.
Placing the Palestinians under oppression, occupation, and siege was an undeniable denial of security for Palestinians.
Thus, by denying the security of Palestinians, Israeli Jews were putting their own security at risk by fomenting a justifiable resistance. The Ukrainians and NATO are aware of this as …
An occupier does not have the right to use arms in “self-defence.”
by Kieran Kelly / November 2nd, 2023
Is the mass slaughter of civilians self-defence? Every person has the right to life and to self-defence, but Israel’s “right to self-defence” is constantly being used to obfuscate the non-defensive nature of its military violence in Palestinian territory. Israel’s self-defence is a lie, not just because their actions are not defensive but because Israel cannot legally use its military in self-defence against Palestinians. Let me repeat that, Israel cannot legally use its military against Palestinians in self-defence. That is the big lie at the heart of the current horrors
There are four reasons why Israel cannot cite a legal right to …
Following the spectacular “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation launched by the Palestinian resistance in Gaza, the army of occupation has inflicted an unprecedented level of massacre and destruction on its defenseless civilian population, trapped in the world’s largest concentration camp. While Israel’s official stated aim is the annihilation of the Palestinian resistance, its unofficial objective seems to be the ethnic cleansing of the entire Gaza Strip, where everything is being done to make life impossible, paving the way for the definitive liquidation of the Palestinian cause.
Since the beginning of this crucial phase in the Arab-Israeli struggle, where the stakes seem existential on …
Sangho Lee (South Korea), Long for Korean Reunification, 2014.
It is impossible to look away from what the Israeli government is doing to Palestinians not only in Gaza, but also in the West Bank. Waves of Israeli aircraft pummel Gaza, destroying communications networks and thereby preventing families from reaching each other, journalists from reporting on the destruction, and Palestinian authorities and United Nations agencies from providing humanitarian assistance. This violence has spurred on protests across the world, with the planet’s billions outraged by the asymmetrical destruction of the Palestinian people. …
It is journalistic malpractice for the media to still be repeating so credulously the Israeli military’s account of that day
by Jonathan Cook / November 2nd, 2023
The BBC’s Lucy Williamson was taken once again this week to view the terrible destruction at a kibbutz community just outside Gaza attacked on October 7. As we have been shown so many times before, the Israeli homes were riddled with automatic fire, both inside and out. Sections of concrete wall had holes in them, or had collapsed entirely. And parts of the buildings that were still standing were deeply charred. It looked like a small snapshot of the current horrors in Gaza.
There is a possible reason for those similarities – one that the BBC is studiously failing …
On October 28, Craig Mokhiber, the Director of the New York Office of the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, wrote to the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) in Geneva (and I here, in boldface, add a few links for documentation of some of his assertions):
This will be my last official communication to you. …
Dear Congressional Leaders Sen. Schumer, Rep. Johnson, Sen. McConnell and Rep. Jeffries:
We strongly urge Congress to hold public hearings, with testimony from a broad range of witnesses, before voting on President Biden’s request for an additional $14.3 billion in military funding to further subsidize Israel’s overwhelming military superiority over Hamas in the war that erupted on October 7, 2023.
We believe these questions, among others, should be examined:
1. Why should American taxpayers pay for Israeli military spending incurred because of its stupendous intelligence failure and ongoing genocidal war?
2. Does Israel need the additional aid since the United States already provides Israel …
On October 9, 2023, a complete human skeleton was found in the 12,000th block of Camp Bowie Blvd. West, near the western-most edge of Tarrant County. As the crow flies, about a mile from my home, just outside of Fort Worth, Texas.
Initially thought to be fake or maybe even a Halloween prank, the skeleton was confirmed to be human origin, and the Sheriff’s Department stated that the deceased’s remains went unnoticed for so long because it lay in “an area not visible to business patrons or passing drivers.”
There is always a responsibility of citizens to demand evidence from people and governments making claims — especially claims that can affect the health of oneself and one’s family.
Dramatic new video has emerged showing members of an uncontacted Indigenous tribe in Indonesia warning outsiders to stay away, just a few meters from bulldozers destroying their forest.
Campaigners have warned that it shows a human rights catastrophe is unfolding on Halmahera island, where logging and nickel mining operations are now penetrating the rainforest of uncontacted Hongana Manyawa people, risking their genocide.
For years, John J. Mearsheimer, that seemingly ageless, if somewhat chilly presence at the University of Chicago, has been a thorn of irritation to certain establishment ideas. With his pugnacious sense of realist politics, he has little time for the sentimentality that accompanies what he calls the “liberal delusions” of power. It’s all good to feel anguish and worry at the predations of power, but why encourage them when there is no need to?
This somewhat crude summation only does some justice to JJM’s thought process. But it does provide an interesting backdrop to the recent revelations regarding the Ukraine conflict, …
