It’s high time for a new, multipolar world order

Source: It’s high time fora new, multipolar world order | Environment | Al Jazeera

http://www.aljazeera.com

By Lorenzo Marsili

Lorenzo Marsili is a writer, politic activist, and the founder of international NGO European Alternatives.

June 16, 2017

Pax Americana is over, but empowered cities and a reformed EU can take the lead for a better global governance model.

We have the opportunity of taking a step towards renewed, more enlightened global cooperation, writes Marsili [AP]

 

While the new US administration was busy reining in support for international trade and freedom of movement, China’s president, speaking at the annual Davos forum in the Swiss Alps, performed a stunning defence of globalisation. While Donald Trump was withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate agreement, France’s newly elected President Emmanuel Macron was trolling him by demanding to “make the planet great again” – now an official website – and China’s leadership, meeting with the EU institutions, was reaffirming its commitment to leading the fight against climate change.

While we should take China’s new global role with a pinch of salt, one thing should be clear to all: global governance is in shambles. The recent failure of the G7 meeting in Taormina, Sicily, with the lack of agreement on measures to tackle climate change and the refugee crisis, is only the latest event to signal a breakdown of international cooperation. The unipolar world order of American hegemony is over.

This is not necessarily bad news: the so-called Pax Americana has been anything but peaceful, ushering in an endless string of wars that have inflamed the Middle East. But the risk of moving from a unipolar to an anarchic world system is real. A system where powers vie for influence – in Eastern Europe or in the South China Sea – in a zero-sum game of opposed national interests always one step away from catastrophe.

This is worrying, because today’s world requires cooperative global governance as never before. The list of new global challenges goes well beyond fighting climate change, as if that were not already enough: just take wealth distribution and economic globalisation. Brando Milanovic’s “elephant graph” (pdf) may be the reference chart for the decline of Western middle classes, but it also shows something else: the stunning rise of the wealthiest one percent globally. Excessive concentration of wealth creates distortions and inefficiencies, as even the International Monetary Fund now admits. Short of expropriation, the solution is progressive taxation – and here is the problem.

Multinational corporations are increasingly able to play one state against the other to drive a fiscal bargain all but unimaginable for small and medium enterprises. Well beyond Apple’s infamous 0.005 percent Irish tax rate, the scandal stretches to a majority of the largest corporations – from the furniture of Ikea to the toothpaste of Procter&Gamble. Only international cooperation can put a break to such practice. Yet, progress is stalling, at both European Union and global level, with the G7 failing spectacularly to take a position on the issue despite pressure from the Italian hosts.

The cooperative, transnational experiment of the European Union represents a powerful blueprint for a new multipolar world order, one where proud nations are no longer pitted one against the other but work through consensus and the rule of law to reach mutually beneficial solutions.

The list of crises that go well beyond the remit and reach of any nation-state keeps on growing. The refugee crisis is here to stay, fuelled by ongoing warfare and the nefarious effects of global warming, such as droughts, increasing in intensity in the most vulnerable African economies. Or, again, the need to regulate internet surveillance and data privacy, something Angela Merkel is hoping to raise at the upcoming Hamburg G20 summit in July. The list could be extended at length.

We need to reconstruct a global governance for this century or risk letting go of our capacity to govern some of the most important challenges of our time. 

One part of the answer comes from cities. Cities are taking an increasingly central role all across the world. Often, as the in the US experience of the sanctuary cities that offer protection to undocumented migrants, they go directly against central government policy. And cities are now creating elaborate networks that could turn into effective agents of transnational governance.

On June 10, Barcelona hosted a global summit, fearless cities, bringing together mayors from across the world to commit to joint initiatives to tackle precisely the global challenges that national leadership seems increasingly unable to address.

Actions on climate, for instance, with reinforced cooperation over the implementation of ambitious environmental standards are more than just rhetoric: New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has just signed an executive order committing the city to the Paris agreement. Actions on refugees, with initiatives such as Solidarity Cities creating a pan-European network of municipal governments for the integration of migrants and refugees, are also taking place. Such initiatives need to be fostered, for cities matter enormously: More than half the world’s population and over 70 percent of Europeans live in urban areas, while the top 100 cities produce just under half the world’s GDP. They deserve political and economic recognition from national governments, constructing a space for global cooperation below the level of the nation state.

And then there is the level above. And here the cooperative, transnational experiment of the European Union represents a powerful blueprint for a new multipolar world order, one where proud nations are no longer pitted one against the other, but work through consensus and the rule of law to reach mutually beneficial solutions.

Emmanuel Macron has just won a landslide victory in France’s legislative elections. He has a clear mandate to be in the driving seat of a comprehensive reform of the European Union – something he has repeatedly advocated. After the upcoming German elections in September, there are signs that the traditional Franco-German engine will gear up for further integration of of the Eurozone, the EU’s core.There is a risk. We should not forget that the policy mix supported by Angela Merkel’s Germany over the long years of European crisis – rebranded “austerity” – has brought Europe to the brink of collapse. Nor should we be fooled by Macron’s youthful personality, when he seems to be supporting the same market-friendly economic policies that have led to the crisis in the first place.

Without a serious policy rethink – such as a comprehensive New Deal to put the continent back to work and a profound democratisation of EU institutions – Europe’s path towards greater integration risks becoming a fast-track to disintegration. This would be a shame for Europe as much as for the world.

Yes, we run the risk of stumbling towards a chaotic world of nationalism and conflict. But today’s crisis of global governance also offers the chance to move beyond a system that never truly worked in the first place. Crafting a new global role for cities and reforming Europe are the heart of this challenge.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.

Twelve Blasphemous Thoughts: Some Summer Sacrilege

Source: Twelve Blasphemous Thoughts: Some Summer Sacrilege

With permission from

counterpunch.org

by Paul Street

June 13, 2017

Photo by Thomas sauzedde | CC BY 2.0

Summer’s here and the time is right for sacrilege in the streets.  Here are twelve blasphemous thoughts for the current Russo-phobic season, likely to be a real carbon- and (see below) capital-cooked scorcher.

Wouldn’t That Have Been Russia’s Job?

Forget for now the question of whether the Kremlin intervened to any significant degree against Hillary Clinton in “our great democratic process and elections” last year. I’ve been consistently skeptical about the claim, which continues to be made in the absence of any smoking gun. At the same time, I’ve always harbored the following question in the back of my mind: if the Russian did do what they are accused of, wouldn’t that have been the Russian foreign policy intelligence apparatus doing its very basic job of patriotic national self-defense? Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and the broader Russo-phobic U.S.-imperial foreign policy establishment she represented seemed Hellbent on provoking a potentially deadly conflict with Russia over Ukraine, Crimea, and/or Syria. Hello?

What Democratic Process and Elections?  

The Big Money-run United States is a damn near openly plutocratic oligarchy where the wealthy Few get what they want again and again regardless of majority working class sentiment.  There’s a strong body of solid academic research demonstrating what Joe and Jane Six Pack already know about U.S. politics and policy: “money talks, bullshit walks.” You can’t have meaningful “democracy” in a nation where the top tenth of the upper 1 Percent owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent.

Eighty-six years ago, the great American philosopher John Dewey observed that “politics is the shadow cast on society by big business.” Dewey rightly prophesized that U.S. politics would stay that way for as long as power resided in “business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by command of the press, press agents, and other means of publicity and propaganda.” Ten years later, the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis made the very basic and elementary observation that Americans “must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” Why all this nonsensical talk about “American democracy”? It’s a childish fantasy.

Uncle Sam Interferes Abroad Like Crazy

Who on Earth is the United States to get enraged about Russia or anyone else’s real or possible interference in other nation’s political processes and elections? Uncle Sam has long and regularly undertaken such interference across the planet. It still does. Just for starters, ask the people of Latin America about U.S. political interference past and present. “We” interfered like crazy in Russian politics during the 1990s and certainly continue to conduct covert political operations there as in countless other sovereign nations.  “We” have acted to topple and overthrow dozens of foreign governments since World War Two.

Why shouldn’t other nations try to impact U.S. politics by any means possible? Washington and Wall Street exercise powerful influence on life and politics in other nations whose people never have a say in U.S. policy. The United States’ outsized and deadly Superpower role (responsible for many millions of deaths around the world since 1945) means that other nations (Russia is certainly no exception) have a vested interest in the U.S. political process.

Hello Mike Pence?

But let’s ask another unpleasant question.  If it were ever shown that the Orange-Tinted Beast treasonously colluded with Russia, do we really want Mike Pence in the White House? Impeachment and removal would put a vicious right-wing Christian white-nationalist zealot (Pence) in the Oval Office and probably speed the passage of the full right wing Republican agenda through Washington.  That’s what the Constitution says.  It lets Trump use Pence as a kind of deadly insurance policy against removal.

What’s so Great About the Holy Constitution?

This suggests another and truly sacrilegious question: what’s so damn great about the widely fetishized and damn-near deified U.S. Constitution?  I won’t elaborate on this as I have recently published a Truthdig report on why we should hold a Constituent Assembly to go beyond that absurdly glorified and hideously anti-democratic charter, which was crafted with expressly classist intent and consequences by the early republic’s propertied masters near the end of the 18^th century.  Read that essay, titled “Impeach the Constitution,” here. Certainly, it’s absurd to think that a document crafted by wealthy slave-owners, opulent merchants, and other vast property-holders with the explicit purpose of keeping the “wicked” popular majority and its “secret sigh for a more equal distribution” of wealth (James Madison’s lovely phrase) at bay (see my essay if you think I’m lying) can function in meaningful service to popular self-rule in the 21st (or any other) century.

Questions Not Posed to Comey

Speaking of class rule, notice how none of James Comey’s examiners during the nationally televised hearings of the Senate Intelligence Committee last Thursday asked the former FBI Director any of the following questions suggested by Amy Goodman and Dennis Moynihan:

“How far-reaching is the FBI’s surveillance of journalists?…Why did the FBI label nonviolent water protectors at Standing Rock, North Dakota, possible domestic terrorists? What about the FBI’s similar infiltration of Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter?…Regarding the FBI’s illegal COINTELPRO suppression of dissent in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, how many of those targeted who are still incarcerated, such as American Indian Movement activist Leonard Peltier, and the many imprisoned former Black Panthers, were imprisoned based on FBI misconduct?….Finally, where do you think we would be, as a country, if the FBI hadn’t targeted Martin Luther King Jr., with its unrelenting campaign of surveillance, intimidation and harassment, which very likely contributed to the climate of hate that led to his assassination?”

Of course these queries were not posed. Russiagate is following in the footsteps of the Watergate hearings, which focused on Richard Nixon’s cover-up of an amateurish break-in of the headquarters of one of the nation’s leading capitalist parties but ignored the Nixon White House and FBI’s egregious violation of basic civil liberties in the domestic police state war on the New Left and the Black Freedom struggle.  The small potatoes Watergate investigation also steered clear of Nixon’s arch-criminal invasion and bombing of Cambodia. See Noam Chomsky

Weapons of Mass Distraction: The Biggest Issue of Our or Any Time is Not a News Story

Here’s a scandalous observation: the news is a constant maddening distraction from the issues and problems that matter most, especially the deepening environmental crisis generated by the profits system. Nothing that Anderson Cooper and the rest of his Trump- and Comey- and Russia-obsessed panels have been jabbering about on CNN these days is remotely significant compared to the chilling (no irony originally intended) fact that atmospheric carbon parts per million (ppm) is now at a shocking 409.21,  nearly full 10 points above just four years ago. We are now heading to 500 ppm by 2050. As Steven Newton wrote on Huffington Post almost one year ago:

“That’s only 35 years away. A child born today will barely have moved out of Mom’s basement (at least, judging by some millennials) by the time CO2 reaches 500 ppm. The hundred-point rise between 300 to 400 ppm took about a century; the rise between 400 to 500 ppm will take only about 35 years, and with accelerating rates, the rise to 600 ppm will happen even faster.”

Newton left something out: that is not survivable for the species. As the Australian Earth and paleoclimate scientist, Andrew Gliskon explained seven years ago:

“The consequences of open ended rise in atmospheric CO2 are manifest in the geological record (Frontispiece). The world is in a lag period, when increasing atmospheric energy is expressed by intense hurricanes, increased pressure at mid-latitude high pressure zones and shift of climate zones toward the poles. With ensuing desertification of temperate zones, i.e. southern Europe , southern Australia , southern Africa , the desiccated forests become prey to firestorms….There is nowhere the 6.5 billion of contemporary humans can go, not even the barren planets into the study of which space agencies have been pouring more funding than governments allocate for environmental mitigation to date. At 460 ppm CO2-equivalent, the climate is tracking close to the upper stability limit of the Antarctic ice sheet, defined at approximately 500 ppm [5,7]. Once transcended, mitigation measures would hardly be able to re-form the cryosphere. According to Joachim Schellnhuber, Director of the Potsdam Climate Impacts Institute and advisor to the German government: ‘We’re simply talking about the very life support system of this planet.’”

“Humans can not argue with the physics and chemistry of the atmosphere. What is needed are urgent measures including: Deep cuts in carbon emissions; Parallel Fast track transformation to non-polluting energy utilities – solar, solar-thermal, wind, tide, geothermal, hot rocks; Global reforestation and re-vegetation campaigns, including application of biochar. The alternative does not bear contemplation.”

As the left philosopher John Sanbonmatsu told me years ago, global warming “is the biggest issue of our or any time.”  (Though correspondent Richard Matthews recently reminded me to worry about “the 400 nuke power plants that will melt down as industrial civilization collapses if nuke war doesn’t come first.”).

Please note the deafening silence in the reigning media and politics culture on “the biggest issue of our or any time.”  Of all the maddening and insane things about the malignant narcissist Donald Trump, the most dangerous of all and is his climate change-denialist promise to “deregulate energy” – a pledge that amounts to what Noam Chomsky considers a potential “death-knell for the species.”

The corporate media-politics system is deadening the citizenry to the most significant existential threats the species has ever faced. It’s insane.

BDS the USA?

Now that Trump has pulled the world’s top cumulative carbon contributor (USA, USA! being far in the historical lead)  out of even the painfully modest and inadequate Paris Climate Accord, I am moved to ask another sacrilegious and not-entirely tongue-in-cheek question:  Given U.S. leadership of geocidal climate destruction, the unparalleled and racist U.S. incarceration rate, the mass-murderous U.S. military Empire (which accounts for more than 40 percent of world military spending, eats up more than half of U.S. federal discretionary spending, maintains more than 1000 military installation across more than 100 “sovereign” nations, and has the largest carbon footprint of any institution on Earth), and the extreme inequality and plutocracy prevalent in the U.S….given all these and other problems (including rampant hedonistic idiocy and indifference), should we now issue a call to the international community for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) targeting the United States and its institutions engaged in the destruction of the common good?

Think Capitalogenic, not Anthropogenic Climate Change

Now for some sacrilege on our holy “free market” profits system. We should follow the lead of the brilliant Marxist environmental historian and sociologist Jason Moore and replace the term “anthropogenic global warming” with “capitalogenic global warming.” The currently popular scientific concept of “the Anthropocene” – an era in which Earth systems are now for the first time decisively influenced by human activity – has rich geological validity and holds welcome political relevance in countering the carbon-industrial complex’s denial of humanity’s responsibility for contemporary climate change. Still, we must guard against lapsing into the historically unspecific and class-blind uses of “anthros,” projecting the currently and historically recent age of capital onto the broad 100,000-year swath of human activity on and in nature. As Moore told the left interviewer Sasha Lilley two years ago,  “It was not humanity as whole that created …large-scale industry and the massive textile factories of Manchester in the 19th century or Detroit in the last century or Shenzen today. It was capital.” Read those two sentences again and commit them to memory. It is only during a relatively small slice of human history – roughly the last half-millennium giveor take a century or so – that humanity has been socially and institutionally wired from the top down to wreck livable ecology. Moore and other left analysts argue with good reason that it is more appropriate to understand humanity’s Earth-altering assault on livable ecology as “Capitalocene.” After all, it is only during the relatively brief period of history when capitalism has existed and ruled the world system (since 1600 or thereabouts by some academic calculations, earlier and later by others) that human social organization has developed the capacity and inner accumulation- and commodification – and “productivity” – and growth-mad compulsion to transform Earth systems – with profitability and “productivity” dependent upon on the relentless appropriation of  “cheap nature” (cheap food, cheap energy, cheap raw materials and cheap human labor power or cheap human nature).  Moore maintains that human destruction of livable ecology is best explained by changes that capitalism’s addictive and interrelated pursuits of profit and empire imposed on humanity’s relationships with “the web of life” since “the long sixteenth century” starting in 1450.

One of the great and tragic consequences of contemporary class (capitalist) rule and mass consent manufacture is that most U.S. Americans can now more readily imagine the end of life itself than they can envision the end of the relatively recent and very specific historical phenomenon known as capitalism.

No More Children Until We Fix This

Now for some real blasphemy. I really cannot recommend anyone having children at this juncture. I know that’s a terrible thing to say but we are currently on track for 500 ppm, by 2050 (that’s 33 years away) and 500 ppm is the dissolution of the cryosphere. Antarctica is gone at that level. That’s game over. The “very life support of the system of this planet” is now in epic crisis and the most powerful nation on earth and in history (the U.S.) is also the leading cumulative carbon emission contributor by far and is ruled by a soulless, socio-pathological capitalist class that is shockingly ready to lead the world over the cliff. Talk about “The End of History.” Fukuyama may have been right but not in quite the way he thought. The only thing that can save chances for a decent future worthy of new life is a massive popular upheaval leading to a full conversion from fossil fuels to renewable energy along with giant programs of global re-forestation and re-vegetation.

I see young adults with 1-2-year old babies and toddlers in strollers and car seats and I have three blasphemous thoughts these days: (1) are they aware that those strollers and car seats (posture nightmares) are destroying the structure and development of their child’s backs and necks? (2) did they look at the Earth science before they brought new life into this world? (3) They’d better figure out how to focus their lives on bringing about an eco-socialist revolution if they want their kids to have any shot at a decent life.

Bernie is Who We Said He Was

Let me re-state some especially irritating sacrilege to my “progressive” friends: we “perfectionist” radicals told you so and not just about Obama, but also about Bernie F-35 Sanders. It’s considered rude to gloat about having gotten things right while others didn’t. But I don’t really mean to gloat.  I wish instead to instead to suggest that the progressive and liberal left (think The Nation, AlterNet, In These Times and the like) might want to pay more attention to its more serious “hard radical” voices (think Black Agenda Report, Counterpunch, John Pilger) when we issue serious and deeply considered warnings about Democratic Party politicos posing as populist champions of peace, equality, and the common good. I won’t belabor the point about Obama, who Dr. Adolph Reed, Jr. all too easily and accurately identified as a “vacuous to repressive neoliberal” as early as January of 1996. That’s old news though now with the added proof of the Dollar Obomber’s great and highly distasteful post-presidential cash-in (since nothing says “show me the money” like POTUS on your resume).

With Bernie of late, we have gotten yet more evidence that he is in fact the imperialist and sheep-dogging fake-socialist Democratic Party company man that some of us the “hard radical” Left said he was. “Bomber Bernie” (as he was quite properly nicknamed by Vermont peace activists when he jumped on board Bill Clinton’s criminal attack on Serbia in 1999) let his imperialist colors fly regarding Donald Trump’s ridiculous, dog-wagging missile-launch into Syria this last spring.  Behold this reflection from Young Turk Michael Tracy last April 11^th:

“Sanders’ initial statement on the strikes contained nothing that could be reasonably construed as a declaration of opposition…misleadingly, the statement was then excerpted into individual tweets, which falsely gave the impression that Sanders opposed the strikes, when all he had done was signal his “deep concern” as to the potential ramifications of the strikes. That’s a crucial distinction….’Raising concerns’ is not tantamount to an expression of clear, articulable opposition. One can support the Syria strikes, and yet be ‘concerned’ about the second-order effect of them, and the escalated conflict that might result. (See Schumer, Chuck, who rushed to endorse Trump’s attack within hours, only to then follow-up later with expressions of “worry” as to the long-term consequences).”

“Similarly, Sanders expressed ‘concern’ about the potential consequences of Trump’s attack, but not opposition to the act itself. Unlike Schatz, Paul, and Gabbard, he has not rejected on principle the utility of American military force in this circumstance. He merely wants Trump to ‘explain to the American people’ what is to be achieved by the strikes, and to put forward a plan for a ‘political solution.’ Neither of these demands constitutes first-order opposition to the strikes: They are second-order worries. Even Sanders’ procedural complaints don’t signify opposition — unlike [even] Kaine, he doesn’t declare the strikes ‘unlawful,’ he merely says that ‘Congress has a responsibility to weigh in,’ which virtually no one in that body would disagree with.”

“Then, on Meet the Press this past Sunday, Sanders went further: ‘We eventually have got to get rid of Assad,’ he told Chuck Todd, thereby endorsing the underlying logic of regime change. His only apparent recommendation is that this particular regime change be effectuated multi-laterally, i.e, the US should enlist some Middle Eastern autocrats to help out.” (emphasis added).

How’s was that for Left Resistance, Bernie-style? That’s war socialism for you, as in Kautsky, Karl (who was, however, actually a Marxist and socialist, unlike the New Deal liberal Sanders). One is not a “perfectionist” just because they can’t get behind a politician who claims to a social democrat – even a democratic socialist – but who can’t seem to grasp the elementary moral and practical (fiscal and programmatic) contradiction between (a) calling for progressive policy and (b) backing the giant Pentagon System and the historically unmatched global empire it equips and staffs. If one is a left “perfectionist” because they expect post-Vietnam era progressives to honor the basic anti-imperial wisdom of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s April 4^th 1967 “A Time to Break the Silence” speech, then I plead guilty.

It’s true that Bernie recently gave a rousing Chicago speech in which he properly bellowed that “Trump didn’t win the election, the [neoliberal Clinton-Obama – P.S.] Democratic Party lost the election” and that “the current model and the current strategy of the Democratic Party is an absolute failure.” Sanders’ criticism of the Democratic party as out-of-touch and elitist resonated with activists at the People’s Summit. Audience members roared their approval when Sanders said that “the Democratic Party needs fundamental change [and to] understand what side it is on. And that cannot be the side of Wall Street, or the fossil fuel industry, or the drug companies.”

I won’t bother to criticize the notion that significant revolutionary change will or even can take place within and through the Democratic Party (it can’t and won’t). That’s an ancient, never-ending progressive fantasy. The main things that struck me were (a) that Sanders’ oration indicated no movement left (Dr. King-ward) on U.S. foreign policy (imperialism) and (b) that he repeated the establishment claim that Vladimir Putin has been trying to “destabilize democracy” (listen the speech hyperlinked above from 38:45 to 39:10) in the U.S. What democracy, Bernie?

(There was also this strange and repellent line in Sanders speech: “Even a very conservative Republican president like George W. Bush understood that one of the important functions of a leader in a democratic society is to bring people together, not separate them.”  That statement, which must be some kind of reference to Dubya rallying the nation [in nationalistic hatred] after the 9/11 jetliner attacks [the hatred was then exploited for the arch-criminal U.S. invasion of Iraq], is so stupid and reactionary it almost defies belief.)

Something Rotten in the State of Independent Left Media

My final blasphemy: there’s something wrong with what passes for independent “left” media in the U.S. today.  In an interview concerning David J. Garrow’s recent epic biography of Barack Obama on Dr. Jared Ball’s show imixwhatilike last week, I told the host the story of my last-minute cancellation at Democracy Now! (DN) in December of 2008.  I had been scheduled to discuss my all-too sadly predictive book Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Paradigm, June 2008). I was in New York, flown out there with assistance from my publisher to try to warn folks about the fake-progressive and arch-corporatist, Goldman Sachs-staffed, and imperialist Obama presidency to come.  The then the call came to my cell phone on the morning of my scheduled interview as I walked out of midtown Manhattan’s Port Authority and started heading down to DN’s headquarters.  The spot was off, cancelled.  I had trekked out to the Big Apple for…nothing. Amy and Juan had other matters to which to attend. There was no hint of rescheduling or revisiting prior to the Inauguration. A very basic calculation took hold: nice middle-class DN viewers and contributors would have been put off by my all-too subsequently validated evidence- and history-based projections on the Obamanistic betrayals to come.

Ball then related how having “perfectionist” me on to speak candidly and seriously about the limits of candidate Sanders from a left perspective was a factor in his recent dismissal from another leading left media outlet.

DN’s Goodman  has given some credence to the dismal dollar-drenched Dems’ cynical and distracting Russiagate narrative.  So now has The Intercept, founded by the E-Bay and Pay Pal billionaire Pierre Omidyar, who pays the journal’s top and brilliant civil-libertarian writer Glenn Greenwald between $250K and $1 million per year.  To his credit, the Rolling Stone’s also brilliant and left-liberal, Trump presidency-predicting writer Matt Taibbi ran away from Omidyar’s “independent journalism” scheme  after a brief fling three years ago.  But now comes depressing news from the left Canadian writer Joe Emersberger:

“In an op-ed for Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi called Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro ‘the infamous left-wing dictator of Venezuela.’ To back up his case, Taibbi cited Julio Borges, president of the National Assembly and a leading opposition figure and Henrique Capriles, the opposition governor of the state of Miranda. Didn’t Taibbi notice a huge contradiction in his piece right there? How does the opposition win major elections in a dictatorship?…It gets worse. Julio Borges, as Taibbi also alludes to in his piece, has been using his position as head to the National Assembly to try to get economic sanctions implemented against Maduro’s government. Borges’ predecessor as president of the National Assembly, another opposition leader (Henry Ramos), boasted about having a lot of success scaring away investors – again by using his position as head of the National Assembly which the opposition won control over in December of 2015.”

Good grief.  I like Matt Taibbi and have learned a lot about Goldman Sachs and Wall Street’s perversion of America from him, but now even he has lined up with the vicious U.S.-sponsored right-wing assault on Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela.

Is nothing sacred?

More articles by:Paul Street

Paul Street’s latest book is They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm, 2014)

Exposing the Silent War — Mankind is Under Attack from All Angles

Nothing makes sense anymore. No wonder many of us retreat to conspiracy theories and evil entities. How else can we explain the evil that humanity does to other species and to itself?

Source: Exposing the Silent War — Mankind is Under Attack from All Angles | Humans Are Free

With permission from

HumansAreFree.com

By Julie Alexander

May 23, 2017

We are being attacked from all angles, each and every one of us, every single day of our lives.

Humanity is at war with the Anunnaki, the Reptilians, the Greys and the Archons, although most of humanity is not even aware of the onslaught.

How clever the powers that shouldn’t be are, they have brainwashed us completely. We cannot even see that we are being culled.

People have strong feelings about many things; they may have thoughts in the back of their minds, thoughts that won’t go away.

 

Things just don’t seem right but they can’t quite put their fingers on what is actually wrong, they can’t quite grasp it.

Then the thought fades as everyday life takes over.

They may feel that governments aren’t doing anything to help them and whoever is in power nothing ever seems to change. Why is that?

They may see religion as a control system that is fundamentally flawed and causes more harm than good.

They do not believe in war and yet there are wars going on all the time.

They may feel climate change is a normal cyclical event that is not caused by humanity.

They may not really understand why fluoride is added to water.

They may feel chemtrails are normal, aren’t they?

They may see that vaccination regulations are getting out of hand and people are being brainwashed to vaccinate at every opportunity for every little thing and that mandatory vaccinations can’t be right.

They may see that our children are growing up too fast and are exposed to sexuality far too soon and that education is becoming a control system.

They may feel GMO crops are not good for us and the chemicals used on these crops are toxic.

They may think healthcare has become far too expensive and that it is being controlled by large pharmaceutical companies and there should be a better way.

They may believe we are now in a nanny state with too many rules and regulations that are not really beneficial to humanity.

They may see too many legal controls in place that do not benefit the general population they seem to benefit large corporations instead.

They may feel banks are ripping us all off, not really helping us. Banks seem to want us to get deeper in debt.

They may see the breakdown of family traditions and wonder why?

They realize work has become too important and is gradually taking attention away from their loved ones.

They may feel the world has gone mad and chaos is all around.

They may see injustice all around them, the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.

They may see health services failing; they may see family and friends succumb to drugs and alcohol addictions.

They see people becoming more and more stressed and miserable with their daily lives.

They see homeless people living on the streets and they try to avoid them.

They see nature slowly being destroyed and manipulated.

They keep losing more and more freedom every day and there always seems to be a logical explanation for it, it’s for our safety after all.

All this new technology is for our benefit it’s all to make our lives much easier isn’t it?
They see all these things and more, day in day out.

Slowly these ideas seep into their subconscious minds.

Somehow they cannot gather all of their feelings together, they see them as disconnected events all engineered by different sections of society.

They feel that they must be wrong, if all these areas of concern are opposed to their internal intuition and feelings. They get a sick feeling in their stomach and they try not to think about it all.

They feel that it must be them that are on the wrong track, so they slowly and silently forget about their feelings. Push them to the back of their minds.

They lack trust in themselves, they have been conditioned, manipulated, controlled into being obedient, they are frightened to speak up, no one else seems to be concerned, why should they be?

If something was really wrong wouldn’t someone be doing something about it, wouldn’t someone be telling everyone?

They continue watching these events unfold before their eyes. They do nothing.

They feel as if they are in a movie and everything is out of control.

They cannot seem to connect the dots.

The truth is too unbearable to imagine.

Could something be out there trying to destroy mankind as we know it? Could we really be in danger? Could all these events be controlled by the same source?

Denial takes over it is all too ridiculous to believe. No, this can’t possibly be happening. Can it?

They switch on the television and slowly fall back to sleep.

By Julie Alexander, HumansAreFree.com

About the author: I realized what was really going on in the world in 2013. Since then I have been trying to make sense of it all and help others along the way. I am still learning more each day. You can visit my Facebook here and my website here.

The Penis Causes Global Warming? Peer-reviewed science journal gets HOAXED by fake science paper that claims PENISES cause climate change

 I am a social scientist and I have always been appalled at the pseudo language used in social sciences. This fake obfuscation of the truth rattles me. If you cannot write or say something that the reasonably educated person cannot comprehend, you are pissing in the wind.

Source: Peer-reviewed science journal gets HOAXED by fake science paper that claims PENISES cause climate change – NaturalNews.com

With permission from

http://www.naturalnews.com

by: Mike Adams

May 20, 2017

 (Natural News) Remember when I said recently that the entire left-wing scientific establishment has become convinced that everything causes climate change? My assertion has now been confirmed beyond any doubt.

A peer-reviewed science journal has just been caught publishing a hilariously fake science paper — written in leftish-sounding “sciency gibberish” — that literally claims penises cause climate change.

Because this junk science assertion fits into the lunatic narrative of the totalitarian Left, it was reviewed by multiple scientists and accepted for publication, even though the entire paper was deliberately written to consist of indecipherable nonsense pretending to sound like elitist left-wing “science.” (Find more news about fake science at FakeScience.news.)

James Delingpole at Breitbart.com covers this hilarious development as follows:

Gender studies is a fake academic industry populated by charlatans, deranged activists and gullible idiots.

Now, a pair of enterprising hoaxers has proved it scientifically by persuading an academic journal to peer-review and publish their paper claiming that the penis is not really a male genital organ but a social construct.

The paper, published by Cogent Social Sciences – “a multidisciplinary open access journal offering high quality peer review across the social sciences” – also claims that penises are responsible for causing climate change.

The two hoaxers are Peter Boghossian, a full-time faculty member in the Philosophy department at Portland State University, and James Lindsay, who has a doctorate in math and a background in physics.

They were hoping to emulate probably the most famous academic hoax in recent years: the Sokal Hoax – named after NYU and UCL physics professor Alan Sokal – who in 1996 persuaded an academic journal called Social Text to accept a paper titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”.

Sokal’s paper – comprising pages of impressive-sounding but meaningless pseudo-academic jargon – was written in part to demonstrate that humanities journals will publish pretty much anything so long as it sounds like “proper leftist thought;” and partly in order to send up the absurdity of so much post-modernist social science.

So, for this new spoof, Boghossian and Lindsay were careful to throw in lots of signifier phrases to indicate fashionable anti-male bias:

We intended to test the hypothesis that flattery of the academic Left’s moral architecture in general, and of the moral orthodoxy in gender studies in particular, is the overwhelming determiner of publication in an academic journal in the field. That is, we sought to demonstrate that a desire for a certain moral view of the world to be validated could overcome the critical assessment required for legitimate scholarship. Particularly, we suspected that gender studies is crippled academically by an overriding almost-religious belief that maleness is the root of all evil. On the evidence, our suspicion was justified.

They also took care to make it completely incomprehensible.

We didn’t try to make the paper coherent; instead, we stuffed it full of jargon (like “discursive” and “isomorphism”), nonsense (like arguing that hypermasculine men are both inside and outside of certain discourses at the same time), red-flag phrases (like “pre-post-patriarchal society”), lewd references to slang terms for the penis, insulting phrasing regarding men (including referring to some men who choose not to have children as being “unable to coerce a mate”), and allusions to rape (we stated that “manspreading,” a complaint levied against men for sitting with their legs spread wide, is “akin to raping the empty space around him”). After completing the paper, we read it carefully to ensure it didn’t say anything meaningful, and as neither one of us could determine what it is actually about, we deemed it a success.

Some of it was written with the help of the Postmodern Generator – “a website coded in the 1990s by Andrew Bulhak featuring an algorithm, based on NYU physicist Alan Sokal’s method of hoaxing a cultural studies journal called Social Text, that returns a different fake postmodern ‘paper’ every time the page is reloaded.”

… None of it should have survived more than a moment’s scrutiny by serious academics. But it was peer-reviewed by two experts in the field who, after suggesting only a few changes, passed it for publication:

Cogent Social Sciences eventually accepted “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct.” The reviewers were amazingly encouraging, giving us very high marks in nearly every category. For example, one reviewer graded our thesis statement “sound” and praised it thusly, “It capturs [sic] the issue of hypermasculinity through a multi-dimensional and nonlinear process” (which we take to mean that it wanders aimlessly through many layers of jargon and nonsense). The other reviewer marked the thesis, along with the entire paper, “outstanding” in every applicable category.

They didn’t accept the paper outright, however. Cogent Social Sciences’ Reviewer #2 offered us a few relatively easy fixes to make our paper “better.” We effortlessly completed them in about two hours, putting in a little more nonsense about “manspreading” (which we alleged to be a cause of climate change) and “dick-measuring contests.”

No claim made in the paper was considered too ludicrous by the peer-reviewers: not even the one claiming that the penis is “the universal performative source of rape, and is the conceptual driver behind much of climate change.”

Early-Stage Antarctica Death Rattle Sparks NY Times Journalists Trip

Source: Early-Stage Antarctica Death Rattle Sparks NY Times Journalists Trip

With permission from

http://www.counterpunch.org

by Robert Hunziker

May 19, 2017As NY Times journalists fly to Antarctica with scientists to examine cascading ice sheets, it’s worth looking into their level of curiosity because that’s not a normal occurrence. After all, who can possibly be interested in ice sheets a couple of miles thick where it’s cold and icy 9,000 miles away?

Here’s why the high level of interest: Antarctica is equivalent to 200’ of seawater rise, and it appears to be coming apart at the seams in some very vulnerable areas. The NY journalists, after all, are from a city that will be under water in the worse case scenario, and telltale signs of big trouble are already way too evident, certainly evident enough to move NY journalists off their butts to travel 9,000 miles to visit the massive ice sheet.

It’s Global Warming at work!

Upfront, the conclusion to this article: When it comes to Global Warming, the USA has the wrong people in the White House and Congress, which may be the understatement of the decade… rather of the century, assuming we all make it that far, which is looking more and more doubtful.

The NY Times’ article Miles of Ice Collapsing into the Sea d/d May 18, 2017 actually shows the ice flow, which is extremely intriguing: written by Justin Gillis with maps and graphics by Derek Watkins and Jeremy White and photographs by Jonathan Corum and video by Evan Grothjan and Graham Roberts and additional production by Larry Buchanan and Rumsey Taylor. Add an email address at the foot of the NY Times article to receive their in-depth journalism about climate change around the world. It’s a wonderful fulfilling experience.

As stated by the journalists, they traveled to Antarctica to see how the vast ice sheet might affect the world. Without hesitation, the answer to their query is as follows: It will change life horribly forevermore.

Daydreaming… If only America took the lead against CO2 emissions at Kyoto Protocol (1997) and insisted upon conversion to renewables, similar to how Congress authorized 100% solar power on the International Space Station (yr. 2000) for our astronauts (but no such effort for the country at large), as well as taking other remedial steps like whitening commercial rooftops, and consciously cutting back CO2 emissions at utility power sources, etc., the world might not be in such a dangerous pickle today. As it happens, too many US politicians reject the science, deniers of climate change. They are many, too many.

Hopefully, it is not too late at this late date because climate change/global warming is on a virtual rip-snorting stretch turbocharged and bloody dangerous beyond anyone’s imagination! It’s happening so fast that it’s ahead of science by miles and miles.

Here’s living proof as witnessed by NY Times journalists: “The acceleration is making some scientists fear that Antarctica’s ice sheet may have entered the early stages of an unstoppable disintegration,” Ibid.

According to the scientists on the trip, here’s the danger: If greenhouses gases (GHG) like CO2 emitted by burning fossil fuels, like oil and coal, continue at today’s high levels, parts of Antarctica could break up rapidly with a resultant 6’ of sea level rise by the end of this century, which is double the maximum increase projected by the international panel only four years ago.

But wait, there is more: Those forecasts of four years ago are described “as crude” even by the researchers who created them. “We could be decades too fast, or decades too slow,’ said one of them, Robert M. DeConto of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst,” Ibid.

What if they are decades too slow or too fast?

Whichever, the bad case means all hell is going to break lose any time now within decades, or roughly, 2025-to-2075 as a guess. Whoops, that seems to put present day generations smack dab in line of fire, or rather in way too much water overflowing city levees.

“Remote as Antarctica may seem, every person in the world… is contributing to the emissions that put the frozen continent at risk. If those emissions continue unchecked and the world is allowed to heat up enough, scientists have no doubt that large parts of Antarctica will melt into the sea,” Ibid.

“No doubt that large parts of Antarctica will melt into the sea” is the curse of global warming, and it does not take a brain surgeon to figure out that it results in the end of civilization, as we know it.

Based upon not only the Ross Ice Shelf that the journalists visited, but also Pine Island Glacier, which scientists have already determined is irreversibly cascading, it really appears the worst case may be under way now. It’s only too obvious that’s why the NY journalists traveled there in the first place. After all, they didn’t travel 9,000 miles to see stable ice!

Congratulations climate denial politicians in America, like Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK), Senator Sullivan (R-AK), Rep Duncan Hunter (R-CA), Rep Darrell Issa (R-CA), Rep Devin Nunes (R-CA), Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA-48) who claims: “Just so you’ll know, global warming is a total fraud…” Blah, blah, blah, the list goes on and on endlessly, mostly Republicans.

Send them on a field trip to Alaska to inspect this:

Disastrous breaking news out of Alaska: The following is a synopsis (quotation) of a horrifying scientific release d/d May 11, 2017:
“The study, based on aircraft measurements of carbon dioxide and methane and tower measurements from Barrow, Alaska, found that from 2012 through 2014, the state emitted the equivalent of 220 million tons of carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere from biological sources (the figure excludes fossil fuel burning and wildfires). That’s an amount comparable to all the emissions from the US commercial sector in a single year.”

“The chief reason for the greater CO2 release was that as Alaska has warmed up, emissions from once frozen tundra in winter are increasing – presumably because the ground is not refreezing as quickly. Now what? Sit in a circle and hold hands, or get to work to find what (if any) options we’ve got?”
That’s Global Warming!

That is horrific news. It now appears that nature is cooperating in a positive feedback loop (which is extremely negative, as it is nature operating hands-free on auto pilot) in harmony with humans, overflowing the atmosphere with heat-trapping greenhouse gases. That’s a perfect script for an end of the world apocalypse film project.

And, it is happening right now!

Not tomorrow or in another decade. It’s happening now, as of today. And, how about Siberia, which is much more vast and riddled with wildly out of control methane (CH4) release, the deadly twin sister to CO2?

“Russian scientists recently discovered 7,000 earthen knobs erupting from the Siberian Arctic, each the size of a small hill. It was as though the permafrost had broken out into giant grass-covered mounds. What’s more, an unknown number of these bubbles could contain methane and explode, forming craters, the Siberian Times reported… It’s definitely related to warming, Romanovsky said. If these solid chunks warm up and decompose — and the Arctic region is heating up at a rate double the rest of the planet” (Ben Guarino, Russian Scientists Find 7,000 Siberian Hills Possibly Filled with Explosive Gas, The Washington Post, March 27, 2017.

Global warming is up to its dirty work in Siberia, where enough methane is stored in permafrost over millennia to toss the world into a massive self-feeding global warming super cycle that literally scorches world agriculture to a standstill. What then?

Maybe Senator Dan Sullivan (R-AK) would be willing to take a field trip, since it’s also happening in his state of Alaska, to give a personal assessment to the American people and to the US Senate. Here’s his quote about global warming: “With 7 billion humans on earth, there is likely some impact on nature. The last few years clearly show, though, that there is no concrete scientific consensus on the extent to which humans contribute to climate change.”

Oops, he’s the wrong guy.

Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and can be reached at roberthunziker@icloud.com

 

More articles by:Robert Hunziker

The Great Acceleration and Obliteration

“Never before in US history has the welfare of the upper crust of society taken so much precedence over the health of everything, including the 99% middle/poor class as well as the only inhabitable planet in the solar system. It’s the only one!”

Source: The Great Acceleration and Obliteration

With permission from

http://www.counterpunch.org

by Robert Hunziker

May 16, 2017

Homo Sapiens live in an epoch unlike anything throughout history, figuratively speaking, as far back as Adam and Eve, especially since 1950 “the times they are a changin’” with headlong speed. In fact, ever since 1950, The Great Acceleration has taken off like a spaceship destined to hit warp speed, accelerating faster and faster. As this evolves, humanity risks becoming “a bug looking for a windshield.”

Here’s the issue with The Great Acceleration: “Only after 1945 did human actions become genuine driving forces behind crucial Earth systems” (J.R.McNeill/Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, London, 2014, pg. 208).

Still, Earth spins within the solar system at the same rate as it has for eons, whereas in stark contrast to that steady timeless global spin, humanity’s anthropogenic spin turbocharges the entire planetary ecosystem. This has never happened before, and thus, people need to brace themselves for a major jarring to the ecosystem. In fact, it’s already started!

Silently unreported by mass media, The Great Acceleration inadvertently destroys life systems. It happens right before our eyes. Not only that but regrettably, Trumpeters will assuredly accelerate that destructive capacity. That’s guaranteed, a “done deal” for sure. The “bug looking for a windshield” has never looked more certain than when world leaders (ahem), like Trump, look away from and ignore and downplay and denigrate everything about the ecosystem, which is referred to as “home” by pretty much everybody.

Curiously, overcrowding the planet has turned the planet small, as electronics and air travel shrink the world: “In the span of one human lifetime, 1945 to 2015, global population tripled from about 2.3 billion to 7.2 billion. This bizarre interlude, with sustained population growth of more than 1 percent per annum, is of course what almost everyone on Earth now regards as normal. It is anything but normal,” Ibid, pg. 41.

The tripling of population “within only one lifetime” is remarkable, sobering, breathtaking. Woefully, that is only the beginning of a process that may run out of control because unpredictably the repercussions of The Great Acceleration are like a drunken driver on the Italian Amalfi Coastline dangerously close to going over cliff’s edge at each and every turn.

In fact, death traps already exist, as for example, from 1950 to 2015 one of the principal byproducts of The Great Acceleration, air pollution, killed 30-to-40 million people, mostly Chinese as of late, which is roughly equal to the death toll from all wars throughout the world since 1950 (source: Ibid, pg. 24).

Furthermore, industrialization is on a tear, goosing up The Great Acceleration. Since WWII, motor vehicles increased from 40 million to 850 million and plastics production increased from one million tons to 300 million tons. Those numbers are not only signals of acceleration but off the charts! Still, everybody assumes it’s normal, except for climate scientists.

Normality is belied by the conditions of the biosphere itself as human activity shifts carbon stored over millennia from the lithosphere (Earth’s upper mantle and crust) into the upper atmosphere at unsustainable rates running from 1,200 million tons per annum in 1945 to 9,500 million tons in 2015, 8xs faster within only 70 years. Eight times anything is a big number, e.g., if everyone’s wages multiplied 8xs, everyone would be rich.

Even at the unsustainable rate of 8xs, carbon emissions continue accelerating, pre-Trump, post-Trump, forever-Trump, getting a huge boost ever faster during Trump days. For example, CO2 emissions during the 2000s have been running at a 3.3% annual rate of increase versus a rate of 1.3% during the 1990s. That’s a 150% increase within only one decade. Meanwhile, the atmosphere is already filling up with CO2, the primary cause of global warming. It can only take so much before the thermostat gets stuck wide-open… relentless heat scorching agriculture.

As such, humanity has become a vast experiment; nobody’s been here before, nobody. Meanwhile, the United States, under the direction of Trumpeters, cut public links to information about the crucial carbon cycle by cutting NOAA’s budget “to the bone.” Either that’s an honest mistake or it’s a mean-spirited mistake; chose your poison. Regardless, scientists are out of favor: According to a USA Today headline: “Trump’s Proposed NOAA Budget Cuts Rattle Scientists” d/d March 6, 2017.

Meanwhile, at the core of The Great Acceleration, capitalism works… at the top! Proof: Everything is accelerating as if there are no limits to growth and more growth. That’s capitalism par excellence. But cautionary flags are ubiquitous, e.g., according to certain academic circles, there is another side to the story: “The Great Acceleration in its present form cannot last for long,” Ibid, pg. 5. Expanding balloons eventually pop.

One major risk within the context of The Great Acceleration is human behavior itself because people have a tendency to dither away precious time when it comes to life-threatening issues that appear too big to tackle and too difficult to wrap arms around, like the planet: “Whilst the US and China fiddled for 20 years from 1995-2015, arguing about terms and conditions of the Kyoto agreement, the total tonnage of global carbon emissions from the energy sector nearly equaled that of all human history prior to 1995,” Ibid, pg. 78. That’s big league acceleration!

How does it end? Regrettably, not very well with Trumpeters at the helm. They’ve publicly denounced any and all concerns about the health of the planet and/or its inhabitants, as for example, the American Health Care Act, an oxymoronic title after reading its contents, makes deep cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, by $800 billion. “Donald Trump is attacking low- and middle-income families, children, seniors and people with disabilities in order to hand a $6 trillion tax break to his wealthy friends―the largest tax break in U.S. history” (Source: socialsecurityworks.org).

Never before in US history has the welfare of the upper crust of society taken so much precedence over the health of everything, including the 99% middle/poor class as well as the only inhabitable planet in the solar system. It’s the only one!

Still, as it happens, within the context of The Great Acceleration, Trump’s 1% have opted to go out in flaming glory, as they are the primary beneficiaries of all that floats to the top, but then again, some of the 1% are attempting to “get out of Dodge” by escaping to planets far, far away, leaving the hordes behind to fight over tillable land.

Evidence of The Great Acceleration is far and wide. After all, it was only one generation ago in 1986 when the eminent biologist E. O. Wilson (Harvard) presciently sounded the alarm in a book titled Biodiversity (The National Academies Press): “It carries the urgent warning that we are rapidly altering and destroying the environments that have fostered the diversity of life forms for more than a billion years,” Ibid, pg. 84.

Alas, there’s no way E. O. Wilson could have foreseen Trump would come along to “seal the deal” for his prognostications and in the process actually speed up the negative aspects of The Great Acceleration, as America becomes great again, maybe/probably not, but if so, for very, very short duration.

Withal, don’t stand underneath national monuments. Those are subject to severe budget cuts, poor maintenance, and unexpectedly crashing down forevermore as the nation loses its soul.

Postscript: Disastrous breaking news out of Alaska: The following is a synopsis (quotation) of a horrifying scientific release d/d May 11, 2017 that is extraordinarily relevant to The Great Acceleration:

“The study, based on aircraft measurements of carbon dioxide and methane and tower measurements from Barrow, Alaska, found that from 2012 through 2014, the state emitted the equivalent of 220 million tons of carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere from biological sources (the figure excludes fossil fuel burning and wildfires). That’s an amount comparable to all the emissions from the US commercial sector in a single year.”

“The chief reason for the greater CO2 release was that as Alaska has warmed up, emissions from once frozen tundra in winter are increasing – presumably because the ground is not refreezing as quickly. Now what? Sit in a circle and hold hands, or get to work to find what (if any) options we’ve got?”

That’s Global Warming!

That is horrific news, almost as bad as it gets especially this early in the repercussions cycle of The Great Acceleration. It now appears that nature is competing head-to-head with humans, overflowing the atmosphere with heat-trapping greenhouse gases. That’s a perfect script for an apocalypse film project.

Looking ahead, one option scientists cannot rely upon is help from the anti-science Trump administration. Ipso facto, The Great Acceleration fallout is about to leap forward like never before. Batten down the hatches!
And, Trump thinks health care is tough…

Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and can be reached at roberthunziker@icloud.com

Forest Man (17 min)

Since the 1970’s Majuli islander Jadav Payeng has been planting trees in order to save his island. To date he has single handedly planted a forest larger than Central Park NYC. His forest has transformed what was once a barren wasteland, into a lush oasis.