Today’s children to experience two to seven times more extremes than their grandparents

Press release by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) 09/27/2021 Today’s children will be hit much harder by climate extremes than today’s adults, researchers show in the leading journal Science. During their lifetime, a child born in 2021 will experience on average twice as many wildfires, between two and three times more droughts, almost three times more river floods and crop failures, and seven times more heatwaves … Read more Today’s children to experience two to seven times more extremes than their grandparents

Picasso’s Expensive Disappearing Women

Have a last look at this great 1955 Pablo Picasso painting from 1955 called “The Women of Algiers:” The painting was just sold at auction for $ 180 million, & will disappear into the safe vault of the anonymous private owner, where, as Nicola Kuhn writes in the Tagesspiegel “it will serve as a blue chip, as guarantor of value appreciation in times of an overheated market. How great the current greediness … Read more Picasso’s Expensive Disappearing Women

Matt Taibbi: The Vampire Squid Strikes Again

This is a very insightful piece of investigative journalism — in an area unhappily too recondite for the major media to do much about (unless those major media, being all owned by big corporations who are in bed with the banks, purposefully stay away from such matters? A tripartite conspiracy between banks, industrial corporations & media corporations? Call me paranoid — but, as William Burroughs used to say: “A … Read more Matt Taibbi: The Vampire Squid Strikes Again

The Other 9/11 — Forty Years Already!

Last night we went with old friend Jean Cormier (author of several books & videos on the Che, among many other writings) to Ivry (one of the last communist held suburbs of Paris) to catch a play in remembrance of 11 September 1973, the day the democratically elected government of Chili was overthrown by a CIA initiated coup, in which President Salvador Allende died & General Pinochet came to … Read more The Other 9/11 — Forty Years Already!

Food Safety Threatened, Democracy Subverted

Reprinted from current issue of Organic Consumer Association: Consumer Alert: Secret Trade Agreements Threaten Food Safety, Subvert Democracy By Katherine Paul and Ronnie Cummins Organic Consumers Association, June 13, 2013 For related articles and more information, please visit OCA’s Food Safetypage and Politics and Democracy page. If you think the U.S. government is doing a sub-par job of keeping your food safe, brace yourself. You could soon be eating imported seafood, beef … Read more Food Safety Threatened, Democracy Subverted

European Enlightenment Possibilities?

Today the FAZ (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) brings a conversation between Dietmar Dath, Slavoj Žižek and Daniel Cohn-Bendit. The conversation is entitled “We Europeans have the resource of Enlightenment. [Wir Europäer haben die Ressource der Aufklärung”.] I enjoy the possibility of three intellectuals from different fields (Dath is a novelist, essayist & art editor at the FAZ; Žižek the LLBean — i.e. the Leninist-Lacanian-Mr.Bean — of Europe & beyond; & Cohn-Bendit the iconic … Read more European Enlightenment Possibilities?

Drone Economy for NYC?

This forwarded by friend John Maas, from the Beirut-based paper Al Akhbar English: New York to Host Israel’s Top Drone Lab  On December 19, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the establishment of a 2 million square foot engineering and applied sciences university campus in the heart of New York City. The New York-based Cornell University and the Technion, Israel’s Institute of Technology, were chosen to oversee the new institution. … Read more Drone Economy for NYC?

Plutocracy Graph & OWS Interview

  [A US plutocracy graph (1979-2007); a map of occupations worldwide; and the occupation movement seen from the perspective of an independent healthcare union official. IB] ———————————————————— John Borsos is vice president of the new, independent union, the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW). He is a well-known California labor leader, and an advocate of militant, democratic member driven unions; he was an elected vice-president of the 150,000 member … Read more Plutocracy Graph & OWS Interview

Who Runs the World ?

Here the opening paragraphs of an article from Planetsave . You can read the whole thing here. Who Runs the World ? – Network Analysis Reveals ‘Super Entity’ of Global Corporate Control AUGUST 28, 2011 BY MICHAEL RICCIARDI In the first such analysis ever conducted, Swiss economic researchers have conducted a global network analysis of the most powerful transnational corporations (TNCs). Their results have revealed a core of 787 firms with … Read more Who Runs the World ?

“Justice is Not Found Here” (2 of 2)

(continued from yesterday’s post): (…) The government’s memorandum states, “As opposed to preventing this particular defendant from committing further crimes, the sentence should be crafted ‘to afford adequate deterrence to criminal conduct’ by others.”  Their concern is not the danger that I present, but the danger presented by my ideas and words that might lead others to action.  Perhaps Mr Huber is right to be concerned.  He represents the … Read more “Justice is Not Found Here” (2 of 2)