alanjjohnstone
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“about a quarter of Americans (23%) said they couldn’t answer the question.”
Should they be our target audience?
Turn facts into what you want them to be and not what they really are.
Can’t resist this to show what amount of shit Brexit has put us in.
One of the UK’s major toilet paper importers has been stockpiling 3.5m rolls or 600 tonnes in warehouses.
On the stump with Warren
“…I believe we need a constitutional amendment that protects the right to vote for every American citizen and to make sure that vote gets counted. We need to put some federal muscle behind that, and we need to repeal every one of the voter suppression laws that are out there right now. We need to make sure that every vote counts….Come a general election, presidential candidates don’t come to places like Mississippi. My view is that every vote matters, and the way we can make that happen is that we can have national voting and that means get rid of the Electoral College, and every vote counts…”
On the stump with Gabi
“…Our family, our friends, our neighbors are dealing with things that we shouldn’t have to be dealing with in this country. We’re in a place where we have a government that is not of the people, by the people and for the people, but rather a government that is controlled and influenced by self serving politicians, greedy corporations and those special interests who can afford to buy their seat at the table as laws are being made.Who pays the price? We do. Who suffers as a result? We do. Who is left behind? We are…We must change our foreign policy, the way we are relating to different countries and build those relationships based on cooperation, not conflict and work towards this future where we are getting rid of nuclear weapons rather than building more of them. To build this future we need to take those trillions of dollars being spent on wasteful regime change wars and a nuclear arms race. We need to take those dollars and bring them to serve the needs of people here at home, to make sure that we have health-care for everyone, to make sure our kids have a great education and a great future, to invest in a green, renewable energy based economy that serves us today and for generations to come…”
As Bernie begins to lose ground in the polls, others step up delivering his message which is perhaps the reason he is not as popular as before. He is now just one voice among many.
The elephant in the room is Joe Biden.
He is cleverly “biden” his time.
Wall St is still to declare their preferential candidate, someone who will be as generous to it as Trump but in their view not as difficult to keep under rein as Trump is proving to be, (to continue Marcos horse and rider analogy.)
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/19/universal-basic-income-free-public-services
New Economics Foundation Vs Compass’s proposals
Free services Vs UBI
A useful read
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/18/ending-climate-change-end-capitalism
“The need to keep the wheels of capitalism well-oiled takes precedence even against a backdrop of fires, floods and hurricanes….Any meaningful policy has to upset the established power base and the political donor class. Any policy that doesn’t upset these people will be useless. To pretend that we can compromise our way through this while we wait for a magical, technological bullet that will keep temperatures down without costing us anything is beyond wilful ignorance now…”
The Commission of Inquiry said Israel should investigate the shooting of more than 6,000 people, far beyond the criminal inquiries it has announced into 11 killings.
“The most important thing for the government of Israel is to review the rules of engagement immediately and to ensure that the rules of engagement are according to accepted international law standards,” the commission’s chairman Santiago Canton told the Human Rights Council.U.S. ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell told the crowd of Israel supporters gathered outside the UN in Geneva.
“Applying one standard to the state of Israel and not applying the same standard to others is anti-Semitic,” he said.Its difficult and disconcerting to accept that the experts can be very baffled, Dave.
“I don’t want to run around and cry wolf all the time, but it is something that is very, very worrying,” said Euan Nisbet, an Earth scientist at Royal Holloway, University of London, and lead author of a recent study reporting that the growth of atmospheric methane is accelerating.
“The hope was that methane would be starting on its trajectory downwards now,” said Matt Rigby, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Bristol in England. “But we’ve seen quite the opposite: It’s been growing steadily for over a decade.”
That growth accelerated in 2014, pushing methane levels up beyond 1,850 ppb. Experts have no idea why. “It’s just such a confusing picture,” Rigby said. “Everyone’s puzzled. We’re just puzzled.”Debra Wunch, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Toronto said “We could actually reduce the amount of methane in the atmosphere on timescales that are relevant to the problem we are facing right now.”
But the big question is as always – will that actually happen, will resources be mobilized. It is not a scientific question but an economic-political one. As we have seen too often reassuring statements are made and politicians tell us not to worry, not to panic. The striking school students I think are right…it has become an emergency and it is time to make it a top priority.
The United States and Saudi Arabia have hamstrung global efforts to scrutinise climate geoengineering in order to benefit their fossil fuel industries.
“It is regrettable that efforts to strengthen existing UN governance on geoengineering met with resistance from a handful of high-emitting oil-producing countries,” said Lili Fuhr of the Heinrich Böll Foundation. “This task is now more important than ever as we see real-world experiments and public support for these technologies growing in exactly those countries, like the USA and Saudi Arabia, that were blocking progress on this issue this week in Nairobi.”
The petrochemical industry sees it as a way to justify further expansion of fossil fuel industries. Chevron, BHP and other high-emitting companies have invested in companies that are pushing ahead with experiments to pull CO2 out of the air.
The Trump administration diplomats were also accused of undermining efforts to ensure strong environmental governance. “They are trying to remove all targets and timelines,” said one senior delegate.
A Norwegian proposal to build an effective global strategy for dealing with plastics that enter the oceans has also met with resistance from the US. “They want to postpone measures so they can protect their industry,” said an ambassador from a large developing country.
The media and Israel and Palestine – from the horses mouth
The Western media narrative has been dominated by Israel during the entire 70-year conflict, according to Ilan Baruch, the former Israeli ambassador to South Africa.
“Israel was brilliantly successful in offering a narrative to the western hemisphere that was embraced with little or no objective judgement,” said Baruch, who resigned from the foreign service in 2011 because he felt he could no longer represent the Israeli government’s policies…critics of Israeli government policy find themselves accused of anti-Jewish racism, Baruch, the former Israeli ambassador to South Africa, said the debate needed to move past conflating these two notions.
“Even criticising Zionism as the inspirational movement that created Israel is not anti-Semitism,” he said. “[The anti-Semitism charge] is just a ploy to pull down criticism of Israel.”In Britain, we expect food to be cheap. We spend an average of 8% of household expenditure on food to eat at home. That’s lower than any country except for the US and Singapore, go back 60 years and Britons spent twice as much on food, in relative terms, as we do now… Already, lower-income households in Britain spend more on food, as a percentage of their income, than the better off: 14% of their annual spend.
Vegans make up 2% of the population, vegetarians are 7% and flexitarians – those choosing not to eat meat for one or more meals a week – hover around 20%. Still, nine out of 10 British households regularly buy red meat.
A report from 2017 found there were at least 789 megafarms in the UK, many of them owned by foreign multinationals. (A megafarm, by the US definition, houses at least 125,000 broiler chickens, 82,000 laying hens, 2,500 pigs, 700 dairy or 1,000 beef cattle; in the UK, a farm is described as “intensive” if it has at least 40,000 poultry birds or 2,000 pigs grown for meat or 750 breeding sows.) Two of the biggest operators in the UK are the US-owned Cargill, with more than 100 farms, and Moy Park, based in Northern Ireland but backed by a Brazilian company. Another investigation last year discovered that American-style intensive cattle farms, where livestock have restricted or no access to pasture, were becoming more common in the UK. The largest farms fatten up to 6,000 cattle a year on “feedlots”.
Simon Fairlie has spent much of the past three decades thinking about our consumption of meat and asking whether it can ever be ethical and sustainable. He was a co-editor of the Ecologist and now edits a magazine called The Land; he’s also the author of a book, Meat: A Benign Extravagance, a thoughtful and rigorous trawl through the evidence. For Fairlie, it’s inarguable that we should all eat less meat: it’s not a great cornerstone for a diet and it’s harming the planet. But none? He doesn’t think so.
“The main problem we face is climate change and over two-thirds of global warming is caused by fossil fuels and industrial processes,” says Fairlie, citing US Environmental Protection Agency figures from 2014. “If the whole world went vegan it wouldn’t stop global warming. To do that, we have to stop using fossil fuels; and when we do we almost certainly won’t be able to produce as much meat as we do now, because of a lack of artificial fertilisers and the need to use land for biofuels, and diets will change accordingly.”
“Technically, a vegan diet probably is sustainable, but it is not sensible,” says Fairlie. “A diet with modest amounts of dairy, fish and meat requires less land than a completely vegan diet because a substantial proportion of livestock are fed on waste products. We also keep grazing animals for maintaining biodiversity, preventing forest fires, and keeping land clear for amenity use or renewable energy generation. Their populations have to be controlled, and if we are to cull them, we might as well eat them. A vegan diet is wasteful because it cannot use this valuable source of protein; whereas a high-meat diet is wasteful because it relies on feeding livestock inefficiently with grain that humans could eat.”
“…if you look at history, the biggest changes in our diet have come through things like war or natural disasters,” says Glencross. “It’s interesting to think: ‘Unless something really big happens, are we drastically going to change?’” She shakes her head and sighs, “Which is slightly worrying.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/16/peak-beef-ethical-food-climate-change
Mussolini of course was a leftist. Mosley a Labourite. I am sure you can add to the leftists who shifted right-wards.
Equally, we know many on the right who moved to the left and one or two who even joined us. But did they stay or was their trajectory fleeting?
Not so sure if the thread is disturbing, but the fact that his political lineage of being an ex-communist, ex-anarchist led to him being a self-styled eco-fascist via libertarianism (i’m guessing right wing American version) does disturb me. What was it in anarchism and communism he rejected?
I recall we had some sort of “national”-anarchist on this forum a while ago who was not a racist but a racialist. TBH, I still don’t know the difference.
