Friday, May 31, 2019

Chief Seattle: The Earth Does Not Belong to Man


The Earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the Earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family. Whatever befalls the Earth befalls the sons of Earth. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a stand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.

Chief Seattle


'Blatant Attempt to Politicize the Science': Trump Reportedly Moving to End Long-Term Studies of Climate Crisis

There is no act of greater evil than this. It is pure brutal insanity to refuse to proceed with immediate and radical action to do everything possible to transition off fossil fuels onto renewables NOW and address human caused climate disruption with the urgency of a crisis which is endangering our nation and life on Earth - because that is exactly what is happening. I just cannot even begin to express my outrage at this assault, not just on science, but on all of life. There has never been a president and administration as dangerous and just insane as this one. Never. — Molly

A firefighter walks near a pool as a neighboring home burns in the Napa wine region in California.
 "The Trump gang is attacking the scientific process itself in an attempt to prop up fossil fuel industries, delay inevitable action, and run the carbon bubble as long as it will last."
In what environmental experts warned could be President Donald Trump's most dangerous assault on science yet, the White House is reportedly moving to end long-term assessments of the impacts of the climate crisis while pushing a polluter-friendly agenda that is making the planetary emergency worse.

As the New York Times reported late Monday, "the White House-appointed director of the United States Geological Survey, James Reilly, a former astronaut and petroleum geologist, has ordered that scientific assessments produced by that office use only computer-generated climate models that project the impact of climate change through 2040, rather than through the end of the century, as had been done previously."

As a result," according to the Times, "parts of the federal government will no longer fulfill what scientists say is one of the most urgent jobs of climate science studies: reporting on the future effects of a rapidly warming planet and presenting a picture of what the earth could look like by the end of the century if the global economy continues to emit heat-trapping carbon dioxide pollution from burning fossil fuels."

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—the United Nations' leading climate body—warned in a landmark report last October that if carbon emissions are not dramatically and rapidly reduced, catastrophic effects of the climate crisis could be felt across the world as early as 2040.

But, as the Times reported, scientists say that Trump administration's attempt to cut off government climate projections at that year "would give a misleading picture because the biggest effects of current emissions will be felt after 2040."

"Models show that the planet will most likely warm at about the same rate through about 2050," according to the Times. "From that point until the end of the century, however, the rate of warming differs significantly with an increase or decrease in carbon emissions."

Philip Duffy, the president of the Woods Hole Research Center, told the Times that the White House's move to restrict government climate predictions "is a pretty blatant attempt to politicize the science—to push the science in a direction that's consistent with their politics."

Critics also expressed alarm on social media.

"The Trump gang is attacking the scientific process itself," tweeted environmentalist Alex Steffen, "in an attempt to prop up fossil fuel industries, delay inevitable action, and run the carbon bubble as long as it will last."
In addition to attempting to severely limit the government's climate science methodology, the Times reported, the Trump administration is also working "to question its conclusions by creating a new climate review panel" led by physicist William Happer, who once said the "demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler."

Norman Solomon: Will Biden’s Dog Whistles for Racism Catch Up with Him?

An excellent piece by Norman Solomon. This is absolutely the truth of the larger picture that we all need to get. It is essential that we put principles before personalities and refuse to be complicit in electing anyone who compromises our values. First we must see, know, and understand the truth. Otherwise we will vote our ignorance rather than the highest good for us all. Molly


Apt to be a big political liability among voters who normally vote Democratic in large numbers, the presumed frontrunner's troubling past on these issues is an incontrovertible reality
In a party that officially condemns dog-whistle appeals to racism, Joe Biden is running on Orwellian eggshells. Whether he can win the Democratic presidential nomination may largely depend on the extent of “doublethink” that George Orwell described in 1984 as the willingness “to forget any fact that has become inconvenient.”
It is an inconvenient fact that Biden has a political history of blowing into dog whistles for racism. More than ever, the Democratic electorate is repelled by that kind of pitch. If his dog-whistling past becomes a major issue, the former vice president and his defenders will face the challenge of twisting themselves into rhetorical pretzels to deny what is apparent from the video record of Biden oratory on the Senate floor that spanned into the last decade of the 20th century.
Biden is eager to deflect any prospective attention from his own history of trafficking in white malice and racial division. When he tweeted this week that “our politics today has become so mean and petty—it traffics in division and our president is the divider in chief,” Biden was executing a high jump over the despicably low standards set by Donald Trump.
A key question remains: Does it matter that Biden was a shrill purveyor of tropes, racist stereotypes and legislation aimed at African Americans? During pivotal moments in the history of race relations in this country, from the 1970s to the 1990s, Biden’s hot air manifested as pitches to white racism. From the outset of his career on Capitol Hill, he even stooped to reaching out to some of the worst segregationist senators from the South to advance his legislative agenda against busing.
As Adolph Reed and Cornel West noted this month in the Guardian, Biden began his racially laced approach to lawmaking soon after arrival in the Senate, when he “earned sharp criticism from both the NAACP and ACLU in the 1970s for his aggressive opposition to school busing as a tool for achieving school desegregation.”
That was no fluke. “In 1984,” Reed and West recount, Biden “joined with South Carolina’s arch-racist Strom Thurmond to sponsor the Comprehensive Crime Control Act, which eliminated parole for federal prisoners and limited the amount of time sentences could be reduced for good behavior. He and Thurmond joined hands to push 1986 and 1988 drug enforcement legislation that created the nefarious sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine as well as other draconian measures that implicate him as one of the initiators of what became mass incarceration.”
It's likely that no lawmaker did more to bring about the mass incarceration of black people during recent decades than Joe Biden. In an understated account last week, The Hill newspaper reported that Senator Biden “was instrumental in pushing for the [1994] crime bill, which critics have said led to a spike in incarceration, particularly among African Americans.”


A US Foreign Policy in Three Simple Words: Do No Harm

“I think the key in this presidential campaign should be a focus on how we prevent war, not how we wage war,” vanden Heuvel said. “There should be new institutions that appear in this period of ferment that speak to a social democratic, demilitarized, deescalating kind of foreign policy…. One thing that has been a throughline in the nation’s history is that you cannot have democracy or sustain freedom at home if the global context is shaped by militarism, racism and corporate power. ....in this age of worldwide disruption and dangers to democracy, any progressive American foreign policy should come down to the three simple words of medicine’s Hippocratic Oath:
Do No Harm."


When it comes to the worldwide destruction of democracy, 
Trump is the enabler supreme.
“The global trend is sour.” So says Larry Diamond, senior fellow at Stanford University’s conservative Hoover Institution.

That’s putting it mildly. In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, Diamond writes, “Democracy faces a global crisis. We have seen 12 consecutive years of erosion in global levels of political rights and civil liberties, with many more countries declining than gaining each year, according to the nonprofit group Freedom House. Over the past decade, one in six democracies has failed. Today only a bare majority of the world’s larger states remain democracies.

“Nor do the numbers capture the full extent of the danger. Behind the statistics is a steady, palpable corrosion of democratic institutions and norms in a range of countries. China, Russia and their admirers are making headway with a new global narrative, hailing strongman rule—not government by the people—as the way forward in difficult times.”

When it comes to hastening this disastrous worldwide decay, Donald Trump, is, of course, an enabler supreme, patting on the back despots like Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, welcoming Hungary’s far right prime minister Viktor Orban to the White House (and calling him successful and “highly respected, respected all over Europe”), singing the praises of the Philippines’ Duterte and Brazil’s Bolsinaro, etc. And all the while yearning to yield that same kind of anti-democratic dictatorial power over his own United States.

That’s why the president’s shambolic foreign policy can be both a curse and a sort of blessing. On the one hand, his inchoate fumbling and lack of coherent doctrine has us upending the planet and could at any moment walk us right off a cliff and down into major fresh hell. On the other, this same haplessness and uncertainty has kept some truly gruesome ideas from being implemented. Inertia often reigns because no one in this administration ever seems to know what the boss wants; his mind changes from moment to moment and he has the attention span of a toddler in the ball pit at Chuck E. Cheese.

A few days ago, Gabriel Sherman of Vanity Fair reported, “The White House’s chaotic policymaking process can best be viewed as a series of collisions between Donald Trump’s I-alone-can-fix-it campaign boasts and reality. So far, damage from these crashes with the real world has been contained to domestic issues. But with Venezuela collapsing, North Korea launching new missiles, an escalating trade war with China, and possible real war with Iran, chances are increasing that Trump could stoke an international crisis that will spiral out of his control.”

PLEASE WATCH and SHARE: Greta Thunberg, Austrian World Summit Speech in Vienna


Please watch this. Please share this. Please inform yourself diving deeply into the research and the voices of the science community, Indigenous peoples and Elders, and those such as Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein, Dahr Jamail, and others and share what you are learning. There is an imperative that we adults end our deadly denial, ignorance, inaction, silence, and collusion in that which is imperiling our children and all of life on Earth. The words and actions of Greta Thunberg and the millions of children who are rising up worldwide demanding that we act NOW on the climate crisis are a terrible and chilling indictment on the extraordinary nature of how we have utterly failed to protect the lives and the very futures of our children and all of Earth's inhabitants. We have literally squandered decades. And now the climate crisis is here. We've hit 415ppm of CO2 in our atmosphere. We are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction and millions of species are at risk of extinction — including ours. What we are experiencing today in America and across the planet 500 tornadoes in 30 days, massive floods and droughts and wildfires and hurricanes, unbearable heat and crippling frigid winter storms, millions of climate refugees worldwide, catastrophic losses and suffering and death, and more are all only the tipping edge of much worse to come. This is a CRISIS! Let us all choose to be part of the solution NOW. The eyes of the children are watching. Molly

"This is above all an emergency, and not just any emergency. This is the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced. This is not something you can like on facebook." Greta Thunberg