alanjjohnstone
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The Cuban government said:
“Between February 6 and 10 of 2019, several military transport aircraft have flown to the Rafael Miranda Airport in Puerto Rico, the San Isidro Air Base in the Dominican Republic, and other strategically located Caribbean Islands, most certainly without the knowledge of the governments of those nations. These flights took off from U.S. military facilities where Special Operation Troops and U.S. Marine Corps units operate. These units have been used for covert operations, even against leaders of other countries.Cuba concluded:
“The U.S. intends to fabricate a humanitarian pretext in order to launch a military attack on Venezuela and, by resorting to intimidation, pressure, and force, is seeking to introduce into this sovereign nation’s territory alleged humanitarian aid… It is obvious that the United States is paving the way to forcibly establish a humanitarian corridor under international supervision, invoke the obligation to protect civilians, and take all necessary steps. It is worth recalling that similar behaviors and pretexts were used to by the U.S. during the prelude to wars it launched against Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Libya, which resulted in tremendous human losses and caused enormous suffering.”
Abrams, a convicted perjurer, called the Cuban report a lie.
Francis condemned unfair access to food around the world as “perverse” on Thursday, saying it threatened disaster for humanity if not remedied.
“Few have too much and many have little,” he said.“Many do not have food and are adrift while the few are drowning in the superfluous,” said the pope, “This perverse tendency of inequality is disastrous for the future of humanity.”
In the pope’s home continent Latin America, the number of people in extreme poverty increased in 2017 to the highest in almost a decade despite improvements in social spending policies.
“They live precarious situations: the air is flawed, the natural resources are depleted, the rivers polluted, the soil is acidified,” Francis said of the world’s most disadvantaged. “They do not have enough water for themselves or their crops, their sanitary infrastructures are very deficient, their housing scarce and defective.”
Francis said it was “paradoxical” that many of the more than 820 million people suffering hunger and malnutrition live in rural areas where most food is produced.
The global exodus from rural to urban areas was worrying, he added.
The SOYMB blog first drew attention to the term capitalocene here
https://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2015/11/anthropocene-v-capitalocene.html
and further explained it
https://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2016/01/is-it-anthropocene-or-financialobscene.html
https://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-age-of-capitalocene.html
https://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2016/05/capitalocene-or-age-of-capital.html
Last used on the SOYMB blog
“Within the environmentalists, we find entrenched a hotchpot of misconceptions, myths, and even mystical New Age beliefs. A number hold Malthusian misanthropic anti-human dogmas. Out of a concern about the environment, they draw the mistaken conclusion that it is ourselves, humanity, interfering with “Mother Earth” and not capitalism which is leads to ecological destruction. Thus they call this the Anthropocene period and not the Capitalocene epoch. A number of Greens fail to acknowledge the inevitability of human action in changing nature and consequently fail to demand the rational and democratic organisation of this interaction.” – https://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2018/11/how-to-save-world.html
But isn’t part of the problem is that even those who actively campaign against climate change can be charged with a form of climate change denialism yet another depressing fact and evidence that collapsology has a strong element of reality within it.
However, even when the right-wing accepts climate change, what they come up with is Green New Nationalism, rather than Green New Deal
https://theweek.com/articles/823083/case-green-nationalism
“…What country is the largest contributor to climate change today? It’s not the United States — it’s China…. If they can’t get rich without threatening the Florida coastline, then they’ll have to stay poor… A nationalist approach, by contrast, would mobilize the full weight of America’s economic power to force China to adapt….”
“…If we’re going to prioritize the climate, then, we have to cut back on immigration. We can do that by simply throttling back on both legal and illegal immigration. Or we can take a more market-friendly approach and charge immigrants a carbon “bond” to cover the cost of offsetting the expected increase in their carbon footprint, which would have the effect of shutting most immigrants from poor countries out…”
Good to know I now have a name for my complaint.
Is it the opposite to
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982211011912
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimism_bias
“Standard theories of learning hold that people adjust their expectations when faced with disconfirming information. One puzzle of optimism is thus that people maintain overly positive expectations despite a lifetime of experience with reality.”
😛
But here is yet another rather gloomy report
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-47203344
The IPPR says many scientists believe we have entered a new era of rapid environmental change.
The report warns: “We define this as the ‘age of environmental breakdown’ to better highlight the severity of the scale, pace and implications of environmental destabilisation resulting from aggregate human activity.”
Will society take the solutions on offer?Simon Lewis, Professor of Global Change Science at University College London, told BBC News: “IPPR are right to say that environmental change is happening ever-faster and threatens to destabilise society.
“Future problems with food supplies could cause price spikes that drive civil unrest, while increases in levels of migration can strain societies.
Another report released on the dangers of pesticides.
A broad new scientific analysis of the cancer-causing potential of glyphosate herbicides, the most widely used weed killing products in the world, has found that people with high exposures to the popular pesticides have a 41% increased risk of developing a type of cancer called non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The findings by five US scientists contradict the US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) assurances of safety over the weed killer and come as regulators in several countries consider limiting the use of glyphosate-based products in farming.
The evidence “supports a compelling link” between exposures to glyphosate-based herbicides and increased risk for non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL), the authors concluded.“This paper makes a stronger case than previous meta-analyses that there is evidence of an increased risk of NHL due to glyphosate exposure,” said co-author Lianne Sheppard, a professor in the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences department at the University of Washington. “From a population health point of view there are some real concerns.”… “Is there evidence that it is carcinogenic? The answer is yes.”
“Together, all of the meta-analyses conducted to date, including our own, consistently report the same key finding: exposure to GBHs are associated with an increased risk of NHL,” the scientists concluded.
Just to clarify, Marcos. I am not denying the existence of any embargo on Cuba or Venezuela.
My point is that Cuba was supported and subsidized by the former USSR which accounted for the survival of the Castro regime for many decades. But when that ended, we witnessed the internal changes, gradual and in steps, for sure, but nevertheless, reforms of the economy towards a free market economy rather than a command economy, a process still unfolding.
Can Maduro survive with a similar guarantee from Russia and China? I am doubtful that they would be able to successfully subsidise his regime.
Pesticides that have been associated with increased risk of autism, cancers, autoimmune disorders, infertility, hormone disruption, and Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. Organophosphates, a class of highly neurotoxic pesticides is linked to brain damage in children. Organophosphates are so toxic to children’s developing brains that scientists have recommended a full ban.
A peer-reviewed study published today in the journal Environmental Research found that switching to an organic diet significantly reduced the levels of synthetic pesticides found in all participants – after less than one week. On average, the pesticide and pesticide metabolite levels detected dropped by 60.5% after just six days of eating an all-organic diet.
“This study shows that organic works,” said study co-author Kendra Klein, PhD, senior staff scientist at Friends of the Earth. “We all have the right to food that is free of toxic pesticides. Farmers and farmworkers growing our nation’s food and the rural communities they live in have a right not to be exposed to chemicals linked to cancer, autism and infertility. And the way we grow food should protect, not harm, our environment. We urgently need our elected leaders to support our farmers in making healthy organic food available for all.”
“This important study shows how quickly we can rid our bodies of toxic pesticides by choosing organic,” said Sharyle Patton, Director of the Commonweal Biomonitoring Resources Center and co-author of the study. “Congratulations to the families who participated in the study and their willingness to tell their stories in support of creating a food system where organic is available to all.”
The reason I posted it (as I had already provided the link to the report in another message) was the discussion on how findings and predictions should be communicated to the public.
We have in the past exhibited the different approaches. One of us (I wonder who) is very doom and gloom on the prognosis for the future of humanity and others have been critical of this approach as not being particularly fruitful as too negative with its “end of the world in nigh” undertones.
Although optimism and false hope (as also be highlighted on the thread of the moderate tones of the scientific community despite the occasional scare story) can be ruled out as strategies, so just how is the urgency and seriousness of the vital changes required to even mitigate climate change much less reverse its effects can otherwise be communicated?
Their comments reflected our own interest in how we use language to inspire thoughts but more importantly to stir action for socialism as the remedy and not simply direct protest towards legislative regulations and global treaties – both which will be more observed in their breach.
“That is what they tried to do in Cuba and it did not work.”
Marcos, wasn’t it the fact that the USSR more or less subsidized the Cuban economy that the embargo didn’t succeed but ever since the fall of the Soviet Union’s and the drop of imports from Cuba, it has been on the trajectory hoped for by the USA, a free-market, free-enterprise economy.
Another of Monbiot’s “conspiracy” articles
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/13/dark-money-hard-brexit-targeted-ads-facebook
I suppose the issue is distinguishing between scare-mongering and a timely warning. Is it the case of the boy who cries wolf or the person who presses the alarm bell when s/he spots smoke but has not yet seen the fire.
Lesley Rankin is a researcher at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR). This is a Crisis: Facing up to the age of environmental breakdown,
http://www.ippr.org/research/publications/age-of-environmental-breakdown
She discusses the type of response that should be made to climate change.
“…We must simultaneously resign ourselves to living with what environmental breakdown has already occurred (and which is inevitable in the future because of time lags in natural systems), and fight tooth and nail to prevent the crisis getting rapidly and significantly worse. Instead, we’re largely behaving as if everything is fine, and merrily continue business-as-usual…”
“…Environmental campaigners have historically used urgency and optimism, urging us to ‘act now, while we can still solve the problem’. Those who advocate this approach point to the need to avoid ‘turning people off’ with an ‘apocalyptic’ story, and being accused of ‘doom-mongering’, especially when uncertainties in forecasting appear to ‘disprove’ warnings.
A more honest message, however, both about the situation we’re in, and the emotions it triggers, might be more useful. A catastrophic prognosis and a call to action may feel incompatible (why try to resolve something that is already so disastrous?), but to do so reflects the conflicting emotions which environmental breakdown inspires – despair, followed by grim determination.This framing offers people the opportunity both to face up to and process the bad news, and a sense of agency to address it… ”
“…This is a move from optimism to courage and hope – an understanding of hope not as blind faith, but as a commitment to a cause, without knowing whether it will come to pass. We must be open-eyed that some disaster is inevitable, but that the costs of inaction are also the benefits of action – “wars will break out, the planet will heat up, species will die out, but how many, how hot and what survives depends on whether we act.”…”
FROM
https://www.redpepper.org.uk/the-age-of-environmental-breakdown/
Another contribution to did jesus exist
Anyone who views terrorist propaganda once online can be jailed for up to 15 years under new laws that criminalise viewing “information useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism”, which goes further than much-used laws that made physically collecting, downloading or disseminating the material illegal. Only journalists, academic researchers or people who had “no reason to believe” they were accessing terrorist propaganda are exempt.
The new law was introduced as part of the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Act, which received royal assent this week.
A United Nations inspector accused the government of straying towards “thought crime” with the proposal.
A report by the Joint Committee on Human Rights said the offence “is a breach of the right to receive information and risks criminalising legitimate research and curiosity”.
On the US media, I would be curious to know how much coverage was given to Maduro’s BBC interview.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-47211509
Maduro makes extravagant claims in his defence but his side of the story should be told by a media that claims to be responsible.
As for the interviewer, Orla Guerin, I recall Israel pressed for her replacement when she was the ME correspondent for the BBC, so she is no right-wing hawk.
