alanjjohnstone
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The issue could be raised during this discussion item from Lancaster Br at the upcoming ADM
Item 33; Should the Party fund an annual social meeting along the lines of the Yealand weekend?
As reported in the August Standard this weekend was hugely enjoyable to everyone who attended, and added another social highlight to the 2019 socialist calendar. Do members think it’s worth making this a regular annual fixture and if so, how should it be organised?The EU reveals its nationalism
The European Commission earlier this month decided to create a new Commissioner in charge of Protecting Our European Way of Life – and give them responsibility for immigration policy
The bad news – A study in 2016, published in the Royal Society Biology Letters journal, highlighted the risk posed by projected climate change on the world’s ability to grow enough food.A US team of researchers found that forecasted shifts in climate by 2070 would occur too quickly for species of grass crops to adapt to the new conditions.
The species facing an uncertain future included wheat, corn, rice and sorghum, which provided almost half of the calories consumed by humans.The good news – Wild relatives of food crops, such as wheat, host an abundant array of genetic material to help the plants cope with a changing climate. In a study over 28 years showed that populations of wild wheat developed “beneficial mutations” such as a tolerance to temperature increases. Dr Fu also highlighted the work of UK scientists who, reporting in Nature Biotechnology, who were developing ways to clone disease-resistance (R) genes from wild relatives in order to engineer broad-spectrum resistance in domesticated crops. He said that a similar approach could be used to clone climate-resistant genes from the plants’ wild relatives in order to make our food crops more climate resilient.
The geo-engineers put their case
A new effort to rally governments and corporations behind technologies that suck greenhouse gases from the atmosphere to help stave off disastrous global heating will be launched. The Foundation for Climate Restoration, the group behind the forum, has released a manifesto for its goal to “restore” the climate by reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels to those of a century ago. The foundation aims to restore this historical norm by 2050.
The most promising of these options, such as Climeworks, a Swiss company that uses giant machines to pull CO2 from the air and use it in greenhouses to boost plant growth. It has more than a dozen projects under way and has partnered with an Icelandic project that injects CO2 deep underground into basalt formations. A company that turns CO2 into limestone that can be used in building. It recently supplied concrete for a new terminal at San Francisco’s airport. The intentional placing of iron in parts of the ocean to boost its ability to absorb CO2, as well as efforts to seed reflective sand across the Arctic to reduce escalating melting.
People need to survive and so we all need air, food, water, etc. It is human nature to eat when you are hungry, to drink when you are thirsty, and to sleep when you are tired. Nothing can alter this.
We also have sexual and emotional needs. To live happy lives we seek out physical contact, affection and love. All these features of human nature will be met in socialism and be much better than they are now under capitalism.
Our present social system is poorly equipped to grant happiness.
Too often we must do somebody harm in order to do a good deed for another, and vice versa.
Socialism does not require us all to become altruists, putting the interests of others above our own. In fact socialism doesn’t require people to be any more altruistic than they are today. The coming of socialism will not require great changes in the way we behave, essentially only the accentuation of some of the behaviours which people exhibit today (friendliness, helpfulness, co-operation) at the expense of others which capitalism encourages.
We will still be concerned primarily with ourselves, with satisfying our needs, our need to be well considered by others as well as our material and sexual needs. No doubt too, we will want to “possess” personal belongings such as our clothes and other things of personal use, and to feel secure in our physical occupation of the house or flat we live in, but this will be just that – our home and not a financial asset.
The socialist solution to the problem is by making the conditions and circumstances of our daily life humane by re-organising the entire network of economic and social relationships so that the problem itself disappears, so that no-one ever has to choose between the demands of the “conscience” and the dictates of “reason”.
We don’t need to change human nature; it is only human behaviour that needs to change. While our genes can’t be ignored, they only intervene in our behaviours in an indirect way, by programming the development of our brains. Therefore, to understand the complexities of our behaviour, it is to our brains, not directly to our genes, that we have to look. When we do this we find that our brains allow us, as a species, to adopt – a great variety of different behaviours depending on the natural, economic and social environments we have found ourselves in.
https://www.dw.com/en/german-bus-operator-offers-free-trips-to-climate-protests/a-50447239
Over 400 protests are planned in Germany as part of a global days of action on September 20 and 27. Globally more than 2,000 protests are planned.
Germany’s biggest intercity bus network Flixbus has announced they will offer free travel to climate change protestors. Anyone wanting to travel to a protest by Flixbus will need to take a selfie at the strike in order to have the cost of their travel refunded. There is no limit on distance or cost of the journey.
“We want both our customers and our employees to take part in the global strike movement for a sustainable future,” said Flixbus managing director André Schwämmlein. Workers of the corporation are permitted to miss work to attend the protest.
As Petteri Taalas appears to be the voice of reason perhaps we should heed what he has to say.
“Greenhouse gas concentrations are once again at record levels and if the current trend continues we may see temperature increases 3-5 degrees C by the end of the century. If we exploit all known fossil fuel resources, the temperature rise will be considerably higher.”
Taalas said that the lower end of the range, a 3C rise in temperatures, came from a model assuming that countries acted on their pledges to meet the Paris targets. “If all the countries were able to meet their pledges, we would be able to reach 3 degrees, which would mean a growing amount of disasters and difficulties with agriculture.”
However the good news is he added that the economic and technological means already existed to limit the rise to 1.5C.
“[3 degrees] Enough, scientists warn, to destroy civilization as we know it” https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/sep/16/un-climate-summit-2019-why-it-matters
Just what policies those leftists are aligning with in the Brexit Party.
Abolishing inheritance tax is the new top priority announced by the Brexit party.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/16/scrapping-inheritance-tax-wealthy-brexit-party
Let’s Make Friday the Biggest Day of Climate Action in Global History
“Even if we leave climate denial behind us, will we really start to move with the speed we must? The answer to that will lie in how many people truly demand action. We’ll start to find out what the numbers look like on September 20.”
We forget to add that the bus had ignored the speed limits and not heeded the warning signs and has now gone through the scientists red light and the bus-driver is a certifiable lunatic with a history of committing crimes against humanity.
😛
This going to lead to war, imho, and already it involves a widening of the conflict.
Middle East Eye quoted an unnamed senior Iraqi intelligence official as saying that the operation was conducted from inside Iraq in reprisal for suspected Israeli drone attacks against PMF bases. Iraq has denied the drone attack came from there. ,In late June, US officials concluded that an earlier May 14 drone attack on Aramco’s East-West pipeline near the central town of al-Duwadimi – which the Houthis also claimed responsibility for – was launched from Iraq, not Yemen, implicating Tehran-allied Shia militias.
Not just Iran but now Iraq, once more, and probably a newly elected Netanyahu continuing to attack Iran and Hezbollah who will retaliate …a convenient justification for widening the intended annexation of the Jordan Valley
Sorry, I am being the doomsayer once more
I thought you’d like that bit and it’s why I led with it. But isn’t Hartmann’s contribution more our case.
“I prefer to talk about moving on to an economy in harmony with the natural world, but still providing a better life to humans. This is entirely possible.
And isn’t the really scary part is that the majority of scientists contacted by the BBC did not think governments will act upon their evidence.
Just when is it time to stop staying calm and begin to panic.
The bus is hurtling to the cliff’s edge, the foot-pedal brakes have been stomped upon but it is not slowing us down, some like the XR want the hand-brake pulled to see if that works even when we know it makes the bus even more uncontrollable, some in the fossil fuels are still saying if we do go over it will be a soft landing, some in the first class seats are handing out parachutes…Socialists are shouting, change direction, TURN THE FUCKING STEERING WHEEL .
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said it is “very difficult” for China’s economy to grow at a rate of 6% or more because of the high base from which it was starting and the complicated international backdrop. The world’s No.2 economy faced “certain downward pressure” due to slowing global growth as well as the rise of protectionism and unilateralism, Li said.
On Sept. 6 a cut in the reserve requirement ratio (RRR) for the third time this year, releasing 900 billion yuan ($126.35 billion) in liquidity into the economy as stimulus.
Jewish and Muslim religious leaders from some 15 countries will meet in the southern Italian city of Matera to take part in the Jewish European Islamic Summit. The leaders are laying the groundwork that will allow them to speak out together more strongly on the issues affecting them.
https://www.dw.com/en/muslim-jewish-leaders-team-up-in-exemplary-european-initiative/a-50439636
Prominent Republican senator Lindsey Graham, a hawk, suggested that hitting the country’s own refineries would “break the regime’s back”.
He is assuming, of course, that Iran will sit back passively and wont take revenge and won’t retaliate.
