Welcome! "The Evening Blues - Weekend Edition" is a casual community diary (published Saturday & Sunday, 8:00 PM Eastern) where we hang out, share and talk about news, music, photography and other things of interest to the community.
Just about anything goes, but attacks and pie fights are not welcome here. This is a community diary and a friendly, peaceful, supportive place for people to interact.
Everyone who wants to join in peaceful interaction is very welcome here.
|
Hey! Good Evening!
This evening's music is brought to you by guest VJ NCTim and features the blues band The Mannish Boys. Enjoy!
The Mannish Boys - I've Got My Eyes on You ; These Kind of Blues
We know that the white man does not understand our ways. One portion of the land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes on the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. The earth is not his brother, but his enemy - and when he has conquered it, he moves on. He leaves his fathers' graves, and his children's birthright is forgotten.
Chief Seattle - Suqwamish & Duwamish
News and Opinion
The Evening Blues
We dig up what the MSM buries.
Contributors:
Funkygal
Greece crisis deepens as banks close for a week after weekend that shook euro
Greece’s government says banks will stay closed until after snap referendum, while stock exchange shut on Monday and cash machine withdrawals limited
Greeks will on Monday morning find their savings blocked and their banks closed for a week following a fateful weekend that has shaken Europe’s single currency.
The Greek government decided on Sunday night it had no option but to close the nation’s banks on Monday after the European Central Bank (ECB) raised the stakes by freezing the liquidity lifeline that has kept Greek banks afloat during a six-month run on deposits.
The Athens Stock Exchange will not reopen on Monday either. The dramatic move, after 48 hours of sensational developments in Greece’s long-running battles with creditors, was sparked by the country’s prime minister, Alexis Tsipras’s Friday night call for a referendum on the demands of its creditors. That prompted finance ministers of the eurozone to effectively put an end to his country’s five-year bailout by the International Monetary Fund, the ECB and the European commission.
In a brief, televised address to the nation, Tsipras threw the blame onto the leaders of the eurozone. But he did not say how long the banks would remain shut, nor did he give details of how much individuals and companies would be allowed to withdraw once they reopened.
Greek Crisis Moving Fast as Emergency Measures Considered
European Central Bank discusses extending emergency support as Greek parliament approves referendum
The European Central Bank (ECB) began discussions on Sunday to extend emergency financial support for Greece as the country moves forward with a referendum on a proposed bailout, at the same time as its current bailout speeds to a June 30 expiration.
In a conference call, the ECB considered whether to extend or scrap Emergency Liquidity Assistance (ELA), which would keep Greek banks running long enough for the country to hold a popular vote on the bailout deal proposed by foreign creditors. Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras called for the referendum on Saturday after high-stakes negotiations over the financial aid package with creditors, known as the Troika—the ECB, the European Commission, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)—fell apart in Brussels, Belgium.
Meanwhile, Greece's Financial Stability Council announced plans to meet in the afternoon to discuss the country's banking situation. The council consists of Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, his deputy Dimitris Mardas, Central Bank Governor Yiannis Stournaras, and the heads of several financial commissions.
On Sunday, the Guardian's John Hooper saidthe ECB was facing "one of the most momentous decisions in its brief history" in the ELA discussions.
IMF and Germany Are Hell-Bent on Finishing Off Even a Moderate Left in Greece
Negotiations between Greece and its official creditors - the European Commission, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and European Central Bank - are currently in renewed deadlock.
Yet, only a few days ago, in the Euro summit on Monday, June 22, all indications were that Europe’s political beasts and the "criminal IMF" were ready to accept the latest capitulation on the part of the Greek leftist government,which, since coming to power in late January, has spent a lot of time doing nothing more than "yelling, kicking and screaming" against austerity and the bailout program (and treating senior-level EU officials with disdain in public as part of its well-orchestrated populist theatrics) while at the same time seeking to assure Greece’s euro partners that it is committed to keeping the country in the euro area and that it would fulfill all its obligations to the creditors.
If there has ever been a more lame strategy of negotiations and a greater self-defeating course of public diplomacy in recent history is really quite hard to say, but the incompetence of the Syriza-led government is beyond questioning.
The apparent contradiction of the political and diplomatic posture chosen by the Syriza-led government toward the architects of Greece’s economic and social catastrophe was motivated by two things: satisfying public opinion at home, which had grown quite restless with the obsequious stance of the previous Greek governments toward Europe’s political elite and Germany in particular; and presupposing, quite erroneously, that the Grexit scenario was an unthinkable possibility for Europe and the US. (Incidentally, as further evidence of the amateurism and dangerous political opportunism of the Syriza-led government, it seems to have reached the absurd conclusion that the US under the Obama administration was an actual ally in its struggle to challenge austerity and neoliberalism in Europe!).
Finessing the Iran-Sanction Issue
Despite discouraging headlines about last-minute troubles facing the nuclear deal with Iran, negotiators have devised a clever way of sidestepping the touchy issue of when Iran would get sanctions relief — by delaying the actual signing until initial steps have been taken, reports Trita Parsi.
Contrary to public posturing on the timing and pace of sanctions relief, a framework for handling this critical matter of the nuclear deal has been resolved, according to Iranian sources.
Iranian officials have on numerous occasions insisted that sanctions relief must come immediately upon the signing of an agreement. This has been at direct odds with the position of the U.S. government and its allies, who insist that relief only can come after Iran has taken numerous steps limiting its nuclear activities
As oftentimes is the case in diplomacy, the solution was found in a combination of a play with words and practical measures. This is exactly what the diplomats did to reconcile the Iranian insistence on front-loaded sanctions relief and the Western position of relief being provided only after the International Atomic Energy Agency has verified Iranian steps to curtail its nuclear program.
According to Iranian sources, the agreement is divided into three phases. The initial phase – called “adoption of agreement” – takes place as the two sides agree on a final deal. This phase will kick in over the next few days – if a deal is reached.
How Our Press and Politicians Are Being Played by Islamic State
I saw a lot of headlines on Friday trying to link violent attacks by radical Muslims in France, Tunisia and Kuwait, but I just don’t think there is a connection. Even the concerted attempt to find a pattern here is probably misguided. Worse, it plays into the hands of Daesh (ISIS, ISIL), which wants us to think it more powerful and widespread than it is. In fact, its capital is under siege by leftist Kurds and it hasn’t done well in the past week.
The murder in Lyons was committed by an employee against his boss, though the murderer used Daesh (ISIS, ISIL) symbols. It was probably just a murder committed by a disturbed individual, and likely had to do with workplace resentments. French police at the moment don’t see it as the act of an organization. If it was a murder, well, something like 45 of those take place every day in the US. Our looney murderers prefer Batman suits or Ninja outfits to the black Salafi flag, but then they are haunted by different paranoid fears.
Just as with Lyons, the attack in Sousse in Tunisia was carried out by a lone individual. He was a deadly lone individual, killing over two dozen with his Kalashnikov semi-automatic. His attack was aimed at keeping the tourists from coming this year. Tourism is 7 percent of the Tunisian GDP, and the government gets a cut of that through taxes. The radical vigilantes used to do those things in Egypt in the 1990s, too. The secularists of Tunisia Call won parliament last October, and the fringe of far right have gone crazy because of this outcome. They are a fringe. Remember, the majority of Tunisians voted secular last fall.
The bomber in Kuwait who detonated his payload in the midst of a Shiite mosque pretty obviously knew what he was doing. Kuwait is a small country of 3.3 million, of which only 1.2 million are citizens. Some 30 percent of the population is Shiite. The bomber was baiting them. As with Iraq and Syria, Daesh wants a civil war in Kuwait, in the midst of which it could hope to make a coup and come to power.
AFL-CIO: 2016 endorsement doesn't hinge on fast track
Link Submitted by: Funkygal
AFL-CIO leaders said Tuesday that the group won’t require a candidate to oppose fast track to win the trade federation’s endorsement.
But asked whether Hillary Clinton could win the group’s support without taking a firm stand, Political Director Mike Podhorzer balked: “That’s a hypothetical.”
The AFL-CIO’s tightrope walk underscores its difficult position: In the middle of a massive fight on trade, it can’t get a clear signal of support from the 2016 Democratic front-runner.
At a briefing for a small group of reporters, Podhorzer and Communications Director Eric Hauser said there hadn’t — to their knowledge — been any recent meetings between AFL-CIO leaders and the Clinton campaign, despite the ongoing trade battle in Congress. They also said the federation had no plans to meet with Clinton’s team in the future.
Roof, Dolezal and the Violence of White Appropriation
Link Submitted by: Funkygal
Dr. Baruti Kopano continues his discussion with us of Soul Thieves: The Appropriation and Misrepresentation of African American Popular Culture
Video Here.
For Media Factcheckers, It’s ‘Mostly False’ to Say Mass Violence Is More Frequent in US
Link Submitted by: Funkygal
In theory, factchecking is one of the most important functions of journalism. In practice, systematic efforts by corporate media to “factcheck” political statements are often worse than useless.
Take PolitiFact, a project of the Tampa Bay Tribune, and its recent offering “Is Barack Obama Correct That Mass Killings Don’t Happen in Other Countries?” (6/22/15).
The first thing to note is that isn’t what Obama said. The statement that PoltiFact‘s Keely Herring and Louis Jacobson “factchecked” was this:
Now is the time for mourning and for healing. But let’s be clear: At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency. And it is in our power to do something about it.
Admire US Declaration of Independence? Then LIVE those ideals; they require YOU to exist
Matt Damon reads five minutes of Howard Zinn on the necessity of civil disobedience in the face of obvious government crimes (Dr. Zinn, a history professor and author, was a leader in protest of US obvious unlawful war on Vietnam):
With informed consent, the 99.99% would freely choose to live the self-evident ideals of the Declaration of Independence:
- All humans are created equal under God, with unalienable rights that include our lives, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.
- Government exists to secure our inalienable rights from God.
- Government’s only powers are from the consent of the people, and only for justice.
College Is Wildly Exploitative: Why Aren't Students Raising Hell?
Why aren't American students out on the streets?
Link Submitted by: Funkygal
Higher education wears the cloak of liberalism, but in policy and practice, it can be a corrupt and cutthroat system of power and exploitation. It benefits immensely from right-wing McCarthy wannabes, who in an effort to restrict academic freedom and silence political dissent, depict universities as left-wing indoctrination centers.
But the reality is that while college administrators might affix “down with the man” stickers on their office doors, many prop up a system that is severely unfair to American students and professors, a shocking number of whom struggle to make ends meet. Even the most elementary level of political science instructs that politics is about power. Power, in America, is about money: who has it? Who does not have it? Who is accumulating it? Who is losing it? Where is it going?
Four hundred faculty members at New York University, one of the nation’s most expensive schools, recently released a report on how their own place of employment, legally a nonprofit institution, has become a predatory business, hardly any different in ethical practice or economic procedure than a sleazy storefront payday loan operator. Its title succinctly summarizes the new intellectual discipline deans and regents have learned to master: "The Art of The Gouge."
The result of their investigation reads as if Charles Dickens and Franz Kafka collaborated on notes for a novel. Administrators not only continue to raise tuition at staggering rates, but they burden their students with inexplicable fees, high cost burdens and expensive requirements like mandatory study abroad programs. When students question the basis of their charges, much of them hidden during the enrollment and registration phases, they find themselves lost in a tornadic swirl of forms, automated answering services and other bureaucratic debris.
88-yo Woman Defends Home from Cops Who Went to Wrong House, So She Was Assaulted & Arrested
88-yo Woman Defends Home from Cops Who Went to Wrong House, So She Was Assaulted & Arrested
Police say she was holding a knife at "waist level".
Police in Massachusetts mistakenly attempted to barge into the wrong home Thursday afternoon. During their blunder, police offended the homeowner, 88-year Phyllis Stankiewicz.
Police were responding to a report of a disturbance involving someone with a baseball bat at the address of 57 Wilson Street, Stankiewicz’s home. However, the actual disturbance was called in at 57 Memorial Drive, a block away from Wilson.
According to the police report, when Stankiewicz opened the door she was holding a knife in an apparent attempt to defend her home from the would-be intruders.
Police said that Stankiewicz was holding the knife at “waste level” and that she appeared “angry and confused.” She was yelling, “There’s no crime here! Get out of my house!” according to a police report.
Same-sex marriage isn't equality for all LGBT people. Our movement can't end
Who in our community will be left to push for full equality for all transgender and queer people, now that this one fight has been won?
Chelsea E Manning
It wasn’t that long ago – 4 November 2008 – that the US had an election that galvanized a generation of activists to change policies in this country that would have enshrined into law the continued marginalization of a large group of people. I’m not talking about who was elected president, or which political party took the most seats in Congress: rather, a ballot initiative in the state of California, called Proposition 8, passed by a four-point margin that night and successfully amended the state’s constitution by adding language that defined marriage as being between “one man and one woman”.
Now, not fully eight years later, the US supreme court ruled in favor of full marriage equality across America. And while on that night back in 2008, as I considered the long term consequences of California’s newly enshrined discrimination against same-sex couples – including the possibility that the thousands of couples who married in the months prior might have effectively been “divorced” by a voting majority of their neighbors, coworkers and families – I felt faint and ran to the bathroom to throw up, today I am happy for that part of my LGBT community which has gained a well-deserved measure of equality.
But I worry that, with full marriage equality, much of the queer community will be left wondering how else to engage with a society that still wants to define who we are – and who in our community will be left to push for full equality for all transgender and queer people, now that this one fight has been won. I fear that our precious movements for social justice and all the remarkable advancements we have made are now vulnerable to being taken over by monied people and institutions, and that those of us for whom same-sex marriage rights brings no equality will be slowly erased from our movement and our history.
The unexpected shock of a marriage equality loss in California in 2008 – a state that I, like many others, ignorantly deemed “too liberal” to actually pass such a measure – brought millions of people together to focus on marriage equality – crystallizing a previously fractured LGBT rights movement that had seemed to have lost its way politically. The purpose of the movement was to educate and promote the equality of all people.
Lawmakers Are Using Trade Rules to Blacklist Critics of Israel
In 1952, Abner Green — leader of a civil rights group called the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born — served six months in prison for refusing to cooperate with federal investigators who were spying on progressive civil rights organizations.
A longtime anti-racist activist and advocate for the rights of immigrants, Green was sentenced under the McCarran Act of 1950, which created a “Subversive Activities Control Board” to scrutinize the activities of organizations and individuals suspected of association with communism.
When Green was released from jail, he found the supporting membership of the ACPFB greatly reduced. Many other civil rights organizations were forced to close their doors amid the chilling effects of McCarthyism.
In her acclaimed book, Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955, Carol Anderson traces the ways that anti-communists cast opponents of segregation as subversive. In order to survive in this climate, rights advocacy organizations were forced to adopt a civil rights, rather than human rights, framework. Anderson argues that the consequences of this shift ultimately undermined the impact of civil rights victories, allowing for the persistence of profound racial inequality long after the high water mark of the movement.
FBI, Homeland Security issue Independence Day terror threat warning
US federal authorities have issued a terror threat warning to local law enforcement officials nationwide for the July 4 holiday, according to an anonymous US official cited by local media.
No specific or credible threat has yet been indicated, but intel gathered by the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI told local law enforcement authorities about threats from Islamic State and other terrorist groups, USA Today reported.
The warning comes days after three deadly attacks in Tunisia, France, and Kuwait, in which scores of civilians were killed. Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) has claimed responsibility for the three attacks.
What has been dubbed “a day of terror” in the media followed IS calls for war on infidels. The terrorist group has urged attacks by “Muslims everywhere” during the holy month of Ramadan.
New York prison escapee David Sweat shot and in custody after long manhunt
- Fugitive shot twice; photograph shows him wearing camouflage gear
- Fellow escapee Richard Matt was shot in head three times on Friday
- David Sweat, one of two inmates who escaped from a high-security jail more than three weeks ago, has been shot and captured in upstate New York.
Franklin County sheriff Kevin Mulverhill first confirmed that Sweat was shot on Sunday afternoon in Constable. He said Sweat was transported to a medical centre but had no further information on his condition.
In a press statement released later on Sunday afternoon, New York state police said: “At approximately 3.20pm … Sergeant Jay Cook of the New York state police spotted a suspicious man walking down a roadway in the town of Constable.
“Sergeant Cook shot and injured Clinton Correctional Facility escapee David Sweat. Sweat was taken into police custody alive, then taken to a local hospital for treatment of his injuries.
US a surveillance superpower spying on foes & allies alike – Assange
The United States has unparalleled surveillance capabilities that it uses to spy on the entire world, including its allies, to boost its competitiveness, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told a Russian TV channel.
“The US is a surveillance superpower,” he told Rossiya-1 in an interview, slated to be broadcast later on Sunday.
“This country spends on surveillance 60 percent of what the entire world spends on espionage,” he said. “They spy on everyone, including their allies. And use the information for their political and economic goals.”
Earlier, WikiLeaks released classified NSA document apparently proving the intelligence agency had been spying on top French officials, including three consecutive presidents. US President Barack Obama and State Secretary Kerry assured that no such activities had taken place.
Hellraiser Preview
Sherman, set the time machine for tomorrow's Hellraisers Journal, which will feature a report on day two of the founding convention of the Industrial Workers of the World.
Tune in at 2pm!
|
Big business declares war on science: The secret story of the Chamber of Commerce’s battle against the environment, global warming action
Driven by a fervor for profit and an anti-government frenzy, the Chamber is a fighting force for the 1 percent
When the Data Quality Act turned out not to be the magic bullet they’d hoped for—-it only crippled but did not kill the role of disinterested scientific research in formulating policy—-the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its sponsoring industries had to move up the food chain of federal power. Rather than merely slowing or preventing the enactment of new regulations through the courts, their new strategy moved to block unwanted laws from taking hold in the first place. This approach was well suited to their battle to conquer the forces massing to take on the defining science-versus-business battle of the dawning century: action to rein in global warning. The Chamber’s passion for transparency and truth would soon dwindle as strongly as it had flared during the salt fight.
Alarm bells had burbled for years through the scientific community, but in 1988 they clanged loudly in Washington, when NASA climate scientist James Hansen told a Senate committee that the so-called greenhouse effect was real, man-made, and destined to put life on earth into a state of upheaval.
Thereafter the heat intensified. In 1990 the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that global warming existed. By 1995 the 2,500 scientists who made up the panel warned that the burning of fossil fuels—-primarily coal and oil—-had moved the earth into an era of climate instability, one that was likely to provoke environmental, economic, and social upheaval.
As the devastating findings kept coming from a steady stream of scientific papers, the Chamber joined an angry chorus of industry groups that made strenuous efforts to shout them down. The Burson-Marsteller public relations firm coordinated a campaign dedicated to sowing continued doubt over the existence of global warming. As part of that effort, headquartered out of the rival National Association of Manufacturers, the Chamber lobbied members of Congress against bills, amendments, and U.S. ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, which would have signed the United States up for a rollback to 1990 levels of carbon emissions.
Orwell’s Triumph: How Novels Tell the Truth of Surveillance
When government agencies and private companies access and synthesize our data, they take on the power to novelize our lives. Their profiles of our behavior are semi-fictional stories, pieced together from the digital traces we leave as we go about our days. No matter how many articles we read about this process, grasping its significance is no easy thing. It turns out that to understand the weird experience of being the target of all this surveillance — how we are characters in semi-true narratives constructed by algorithms and data analysts — an actual novel can be the best medium.
Book of Numbers, released earlier this month, is the latest exhibit. Written by Joshua Cohen, the book has received enthusiastic notices from the New York Times and other outlets as an ambitious “Internet novel,” embedding the history of Silicon Valley in a dense narrative about a search engine called Tetration. Book of Numbers was written mostly in the wake of the emergence of WikiLeaks and was finished as a trove of NSA documents from Edward Snowden was coming to light. Cohen even adjusted last-minute details to better match XKeyscore, a secret NSA computer system that collects massive amounts of email and web data; in Book of Numbers, Tetration has a function secreted within it that automatically reports searches to the government. As Tetration’s founder puts it, “All who read us are read.”
Ben Wizner of the ACLU, who is Cohen’s friend and Snowden’s lawyer, has praised the novel’s depiction of the “surveillance economy,” as he puts it. “There’s a frustration on the law and advocacy side about how abstract some of these issues can seem to the public,” Wizner told the Times. “For some people, the novelist’s eye can show the power and the danger of these systems in ways that we can’t.”
I am also a friend of Cohen’s, but I’m not sure this novel will radicalize the masses. Here’s a line from the book listing some of its vocabulary: “orthogony, heuristics, traverse vertices, exocortex, autonomia, transclusion.” This is not an especially difficult novel, but its ideal reader would already know a good deal about technology and surveillance, enough to enjoy seeing the details treated like playthings. Yet there are wonderful passages that capture the give-and-take at the heart of the information economy: “Each time each user typed out a word and searched and clicked for what to find, the algy would be educated. We let the algy let its users educate themselves. So it would learn, so its users would be taught. … The more a thing was clicked, the more perfect that thing would be.”
Scientists Detect Mysterious Warming in U.S. Coastal Waters
LONDON—Oceanographers are puzzled by an accelerated burst of warming sea that threatens the fisheries of the American Atlantic coast.
Meanwhile, off the US West coast, scientists report that they have been baffled by a mysterious “blob” of water up to 4°C warmer than the surrounding Pacific, linked to weird weather across the entire country.
Jacob Forsyth and research colleagues from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Massachusetts report in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans that the ocean off the US north-east continental shelf has been warming at unprecedented levels for 13 years.
Their findings came after analysis of data from sensors—called bathythermographs—dropped 14 times a year from the container ship Oleander, which for 37 years has travelled between New Jersey and Bermuda. Each detector takes the temperature of the water column as it sinks up to 700 metres.
Another Industry-Backed Effort to Delay Crucial Safeguards and Undermine the Regulatory Process
Effective public safeguards protect all of us from toxic chemicals, air pollution, water contamination, and unsafe food. Streamlining the process of strengthening and updating these standards would help us fight new and emerging dangers. But earlier this year, Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) quietly introduced a resolution that would inject Congress into the federal regulatory review process and slam the brakes on a rulemaking system that is already fraught with delays that put people's lives and health at risk.
Rounds and his co-sponsors claim that the measure, the Regulation Sensibility Through Oversight Restoration (RESTORE) Resolution, would address issues raised in an industry-backed report on the cost of regulations. But that publication and its findings ignore the immense benefits of public protections and were debunked by the Washington Post Fact Checker as "misleading" and having "serious methodological problems."
Rounds' proposal would create a temporary Joint Select Committee that would "conduct a systematic review of rules enacted by federal agencies" and would hold potentially wide-ranging hearings on these rules. The committee would submit recommendations to Congress to sunset rules it doesn't like and would impose a process for federal agencies to submit rules to Congress for review before they are enacted.
Solar Impulse begins second bid to cross Pacific Ocean
A solar-powered plane has started its second bid at a record-breaking flight across the Pacific Ocean.
Solar Impulse took off from Nagoya Airfield in Japan at 18:03 GMT and is scheduled to land in Hawaii in approximately 120 hours.
The team has spent nearly two months waiting for a clear weather window to cross the Pacific.
The first attempt to fly over the ocean was cut short after a change in the forecast forced an unscheduled landing.
The Evening Greens
Rome March Celebrate Pope's Call for Urgent Climate Action
People of faith, civil society groups, and communities affected by climate change marched together in Rome Sunday Jun. 28 to express gratitude to Pope Francis for the release of his Laudato Si encyclical on the environment, and call for bolder climate action by world leaders.
Under the banner of ‘One Earth One Family’, the march brought together Catholics and other Christians, followers of non-Christian faiths, environmentalists and people of goodwill. The march ended in St. Peter’s Square in time for the Pope’s weekly Angelus and blessing.
The celebratory march was animated by a musical band, a climate choir and colourful public artwork designed by artists from Italy and other countries, whose work played a major role in the People’s Climate March in New York City in September last year.
“As we stand at this critical juncture in addressing the climate crisis, we are particularly grateful to the Pope for releasing this encyclical as an awakening for the world to understand how climate change impacts people across all regions,” said Arianne Kassman, a climate activist from Papua New Guinea who took part in march to speak about the reality of climate change in the Pacific
Rise in Carbon Dioxide Could Restrict Growing Days for Crops
Link Submitted by: Funkygal
London - The positive consequences of climate change may not be so positive. Although plants in the colder regions are expected to thrive as average global temperatures rise, even this benefit could be limited.
Some tropical regions could lose up to 200 growing days a year, and more than two billion rural people could see their hopes wither on the vine or in the field. Even in temperate zones, there will be limits to extra growth.
Plants quicken, blossom and ripen as a response to moisture, warmth and the length of daylight. Global warming will clearly change the temperatures and influence the patterns of precipitation, but it won’t make any difference to the available hours of sunlight at any point on the globe.
Scientists at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa report in the Public Library of Science journal PLOS Biology that they looked at the big picture of complex change. Higher concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide – the greenhouse gas from car exhausts, forest fires and factory chimneys – are expected overall to aid crop and forest growth.
Human Survival in the Sixth Extinction
New study finds human population growth behind extinction acceleration. Study co-author Professor Gerardo Ceballos explains our future.
4 minutes of video: metaphor of human metamorphosis: becoming something unimaginably beautiful
The 1-minute video provides a metaphor for the human condition by evolution biologist, Dr. Elisabet Sahtouris: a caterpillar becomes so consumptive that an observer unfamiliar with the species might conclude its behavior is self-destructive. Nearing death, the caterpillar ends-up literally upside-down (as our world appears today). Inside the caterpillar, “imaginal cells” emerge with resonance of a foreign frequency for a new future. These new cells are attacked by the existing immune system. However, the emergence of imaginal cells outpaces the immune system’s capacity, with the evolutionary process supporting the emerging cells and causing old cells to die off.
A caterpillar can eat up to three hundred times its own weight in a day, devastating many plants in the process, continuing to eat until it’s so bloated that it hangs itself up and goes to sleep, its skin hardening into a chrysalis. Then, within the chrysalis, within the body of the dormant caterpillar, a new and very different kind of creature, the butterfly, starts to form. This confused biologists for a long time. How could a different genome plan exist within the caterpillar to form a different creature? They knew that metamorphosis occurs in a number of insect species, but it was not known until quite recently that nature did a lot of mixing and matching of very different genome/protein configurations in early evolutionary times. Cells with the butterfly genome were held as disclike aggregates of stem cells that biologists call ‘imaginal cells’, hidden away inside the caterpillar’ all its life, remaining undeveloped until the crisis of overeating, fatigue and breakdown allows them to develop, gradually replacing the caterpillar with a butterfly!
Such metamorphosis makes a good metaphor for the great changes globalisation, in the sense of world transformation, is bringing about., as Norie Huddle first used it in her beautiful book Butterfly. Our bloated old system is rapidly becoming defunct while the vision of a new and very different society, long held by many ‘imaginal cell’ humans who dreamt of a better world, is now emerging like a butterfly, representing our solutions to the crises of predation, overconsumption and breakdown in a new way of living lightly on Earth, and of seeing our human society not in the metaphors and models of mechanism as well-oiled social machinery, but in those of evolving, self-organizing and intelligent living organism.
If you want a butterfly world, don’t step on the caterpillar, but join forces with other imaginal cells to build a better future for all! – Dr. Elisabet Sahtouris, evolution biologist
Developmental biologist, Dr. Bruce Lipton on this metaphor in a 3-minute video:
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
Greece: Banks and stock market will not open on Monday
Debt Default Tuesday: It's not just a Greek Tragedy
Hellraisers Journal: "Fellow Workers: This is the Continental Congress of the working class."
Ask the nearest hippie
Outraged
A Little Night Music
The Mannish Boys - Last Night
The Mannish Boys - Mary Jane
The Mannish Boys - Everything's Alright
Mannish Boys - These Kind of Blues
The Mannish Boys - Something For Nothing
The Mannish Boys - Kirk's Blues
The Mannish Boys - Blues For Michael Bloomfield
The Mannish Boys - Black Nights
The Mannish Boys - I Can't Stay Here
The Mannish Boys feat. Ana Popovic & Big Pete - Baby Please
The Mannish Boys - Rude Groove
The Mannish Boys - You've Got Bad Intentions
The Mannish Boys - Drivin' Wheel ; Bordertown Blues
The Mannish Boys - As The Years Go Passing By
The Mannish Boys - I Was Fooled
The Mannish Boys - Champagne & Reefer
The Mannish Boys - My Baby's A Good 'Un
The Mannish Boys - Hey Now
The Mannish Boys - Born Under A Bad Sign, Cold Sweat & Death Letter
The Mannish Boys - Reet, Petite and Gone