Archive | April, 2012

March Heat Broke 15,000 Records; Weather Could Have Deadly Effects – Technology – The Atlantic Wire

10 Apr

March’s warm weather broke a lot of records. Science has confirmed what we all already knew (and feared?), last month was the warmest since 1895, which is as far as the record goes back. “The average temperature of 51.1°F was 8.6 degrees above the 20th century average for March and 0.5°F warmer than the previous warmest March in 1910,” explains the research report. In addition, every single state had at least one day of record breaking temps and over the 31 days, 7,755 daytime records and 7,517 nighttime records were broken across the country. Alaska, on the other hand, not included in this tally because it does not fall in the contiguous U.S., had its 10th coldest on record, contributing to the climate change extreme weather theory.

via March Heat Broke 15,000 Records; Weather Could Have Deadly Effects – Technology – The Atlantic Wire.

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Occupy’s Plans to Take Down Bank of America | The Nation

10 Apr

Alternet’s Sarah Jaffe today posted an article about Occupy’s future plans to protest the bank, ranging from direct actions to Move Your Money efforts, all of which will focus on the need to break up Bank of America.

April 13 will be the “move your money relay,” entailing escorting people from Bank of America branches, where they’ll close their accounts, to community banks and local credit unions.

OWS activist Nelini Stamp told Alternet, “We want to make sure that people feel like that is a direct action unto itself. It’s not just ‘I’m just moving my money from here,’ but actually people are feeling empowered and knowledgeable about the choices that they’re making when they’re making their banking decisions.”

The week of April 16 will feature Occupy activists attempting to disrupt home foreclosure auctions.

via Occupy’s Plans to Take Down Bank of America | The Nation.

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Vertical Gardens in Mexico a Symbol of Progress – NYTimes.com

10 Apr

“The main priority for vertical gardens is to transform the city,” said Fernando Ortiz Monasterio, 30, the architect who designed the sculptures. “It’s a way to intervene in the environment.”

Many cities have green reputations — Portland, Ore., even has its own vertical gardens. But in the developing world, where middle classes are growing along with consumption, waste and energy use, Mexico City is a brave new world. The laughingstock has become the leader as the air has gone from legendarily bad to much improved. Ozone levels and other pollution measures now place it on roughly the same level as the (also cleaner) air above Los Angeles.

“Both L.A. and Mexico City have improved but in Mexico City, the change has been a lot more,” said Luisa Molina, a research scientist with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has done extensive pollution comparisons. Mexico “is very advanced not just in terms of Latin America, but around the world. When I go to China, they all want to hear the story of Mexico.”

via Vertical Gardens in Mexico a Symbol of Progress – NYTimes.com.

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Gary Johnson, the anti-war 2012 candidate – POLITICO.com

10 Apr

Former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson is branding himself as the anti-war candidate of the 2012 campaign, dismissing both President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney as standard-bearers for “interventionism.”

Johnson, who dropped out of the GOP primary and is now seeking the Libertarian Party’s nomination, said opposition to the war in Afghanistan represents a potent force in presidential politics — one that neither major-party candidate is in a position to channel.

“Get out tomorrow,” Johnson said in an interview with POLITICO. “We should have gotten out of Afghanistan 11 years ago. Eleven years ago! Romney is saying we should stay in Afghanistan until the mission is accomplished. What does that mean?”

Obama, on the other hand, has “doubled down” on an unpopular and directionless war, Johnson said. What’s more, he warned that the White House could try to gain electoral points with a strike on Iran before the November election out of a “political calculation … that bombing Iran shows strength.”

If Johnson wins the Libertarian nomination next month, he would become the only general-election candidate with a down-the-line stance against the unpopular war. For a long-shot third-party candidate, who will essentially be campaigning for a place in the fall debates, Afghanistan is conceivably the kind of issue that could draw national attention to an underdog effort.

via Gary Johnson, the anti-war 2012 candidate – POLITICO.com.

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Jill Stein for President

10 Apr

Jill Stein is running for the Presidency under the Green Party. Here’s the opening of her bio:

About Jill Stein

Dr. Jill Stein is a mother, housewife, physician, longtime teacher of internal medicine, and pioneering environmental-health advocate.

She is the co-author of two widely-praised reports, In Harm’s Way: Toxic Threats to Child Development, published in 2000, andEnvironmental Threats to Healthy Aging, published in 2009. The first of these has been translated into four languages and is used worldwide. The reports promote green local economies, sustainable agriculture, clean power, and freedom from toxic threats.

Her “Healthy People, Healthy Planet” teaching program reveals the links between human health, climate security, and green economic revitalization. This body of work has been presented at government, public health and medical conferences, and has been used to improve public policy.

Jill began to advocate for the environment as a human health issue in 1998 when she realized that politicians were simply not acting to protect children from the toxic threats emerging from current science. She offered her services to parents, teachers, community groups and a native Americans group seeking to protect their communities from toxic exposure.

via Bio of Dr. Jill Stein.

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Water-Ready Map: Impacts of Climate Change on Water Resources | NRDC

10 Apr

Ready or Not: How Water-Ready is Your State?

As climate change affects communities across the U.S., some states are leading the way in preparing for the impacts on water resources. These states are reducing carbon pollution and planning for climate change impacts. Yet many states are not acting and remain woefully unprepared.

Click on a state to find out what risks communities there may face and what the state is doing to prepare.

via Water-Ready Map: Impacts of Climate Change on Water Resources | NRDC.

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Obama Shouldn’t have Bypassed Congress on Libya

9 Apr

Robert Farley and Michael Cohen argue that it was destructive for Obama to go to war in Libya without consulting Congress: three-minute clip from bloggingheads.tv

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Protecting Face-to-Face Protest – NYTimes.com

9 Apr

Another tradition endangered by the corpstate:

Although virtually ignored today, a right to petition is part of the First Amendment, and the Constitution does not leave it to the government to decide who should have access to it.

The historical model of petitioning, going back to medieval England, literally involved laying a petition at the foot of the throne — while the king was sitting on it. The presentation of petitions has deep roots in American political culture. Quaker abolitionists used mass petitioning campaigns to advocate an end to the slave trade in the 1790s and the American Anti-Slavery Society renewed such efforts with similar campaigns in the 1830s and ’40s. Female suffragists embraced petitioning — as did Native Americans and veterans in later decades.

The 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, organized by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, included a petition seeking protection of political and civil rights for Alabama’s black citizens. It was to be delivered to Gov. George C. Wallace after a rally at the State Capitol. (Although Mr. Wallace declined to receive the petition then, he did so about a week later, after meeting with a delegation of S.C.L.C. representatives.)

What would have happened if Alabama, invoking “security concerns,” had banished the Selma march and rally to a fairgrounds miles away from downtown Montgomery? The answer should be obvious.

via Protecting Face-to-Face Protest – NYTimes.com.

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Cultural Liberalism Is Not Enough – NYTimes.com

8 Apr

Caught in the crosswinds of so many simultaneous crises — I have not even mentioned Vietnam — many liberals chose to focus, rather perversely, on a “rights” agenda and the internecine fights it engendered within their increasingly fractured coalition. They lost sight of the essential element that had made the coalition possible in the first place: the sense that liberalism stood with the common man and woman in their struggle against economic forces too large and powerful to be faced by individuals on their own.

Liberals must find a way to combine their cultural successes with new approaches to achieving economic equality. But they must do so unambiguously and unequivocally.

via Cultural Liberalism Is Not Enough – NYTimes.com.

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Is ‘Gross National Happiness’ Is a Better Measurement than GDP? – Andrew Billo – International – The Atlantic

8 Apr

Happiness, what a concept. Fracking doesn’t bring happiness, and war certainly doesn’t bring it.

On Monday, in Manhattan’s bustling midtown, senior level officials came together at the United Nations to discuss a new economic paradigm at the High Level Meeting on Well-Being and Happiness, an event organized by Bhutan, a country that knows a little bit about happiness.

Meanwhile in Phnom Penh, at the sleepy confluence of the Mekong and Tonle Sap Rivers, heads of governments from the 10 member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) deliberated on regional security and enhanced economic cooperation.

These two very different meetings actually have strong implications for one another. The ASEAN meeting was sidetracked by the South China Sea row, a conflict over resources. And leaders at the U.N. meeting recognized that the present rate of resource extraction is no longer viable.

The new economic paradigm laid out by Bhutan Prime Minister Jigmi Y. Thinley uses “natural and social capital values to assess the true costs and gains of economic activity” and may hold the answer for avoiding conflict in the world’s fastest developing region. Wellbeing can only be achieved by avoiding resource depletion, which in turn improves overall regional security.

via Is ‘Gross National Happiness’ Is a Better Measurement than GDP? – Andrew Billo – International – The Atlantic.

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