THE HEADLINES
Map of the Ottoman Empire
THE “ARAB SPRING” OF 2011: NOTHING NEW TO SEE HERE.
Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, who spent harrowing days of reporting from Libya during the NATO siege of Tripoli, writes now of the “geo-political chessboard” being prepared in “revolts” in Arab countries like Libya, Tunisia and Egypt. He sees these events as but a continuation of a situation, dating back a century ago: the fall of the Ottoman Empire with Arab revolt being manipulated by France, Britain and the United States in the interest of their own domination of the area, this trio of powers being joined by Israel after the post-WW II achievement of its independence. The Yinon plan for Israeli strategic dominaton of the Middle East follows an earlier Sykes-Picot Agreement between London and Paris to carve up spheres of influence in the area, joined as well by the work of neo-conservatives like Richard Perle in the second Bush administration. For over a century, then, the “game” has been the same: to prepare for the “clash of civilizations” between the Muslim and Christian worlds by a divide and rule policy of carving up the Middle East into many small and weak countries.
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BURN MY BRA, HELL! I’M GONNA BURN MY SALLIE MAE STUDENT LOAN BILL.
This seems to be the sentiment among many student participants in the Occupy Wall Street movement. The $31,000 limit on student loans is not enough even to pay the tuition for a year at many U.S. colleges, but is plenty to keep students in a state of debt peonage for many years after they leave school. This is an apt issue of OWS concern as several of the “usual suspects” of protest targets like Bank of America and CitiGroup have found in student loans a new “bubble” of excessive profits to inflate as the housing bubble has gone bust for them.
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CONGRESS IS TOO BUSY GETTING PIZZA CLASSIFIED AS A VEGETABLE FOR SCHOOL LUNCHES TO WORRY ABOUT A LITTLE THING LIKE A GLOBAL CLIMATE CATASTROPHE.
This is Chris Williams’ observation, as he notes the lack of urgency of American lawmakers about the upcoming Durban Conference on global warming. Given a new research report in which even global warming “skeptics” are now alarmed, one might have thought that the leaders of all the world’s countries would rush to Durban with emergency plans to deal with the situation. Not so with the U.S., there are more urgent matters like responding to pizza manufacturers and tomato processors.
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COMING TO A SKY NEAR YOU: 5 POUND DRONE AIRCRAFT.
The technology is in place for the production of a variety of drones designed for civilian use the likes of police surveillance, crop dusting and water leak location operations. The element that needs to be in place before these plans can be become actualized is a matter for the FAA of establishing systems of traffic control to keep air space safe as the drones are used.
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TAMPA AREA FOOD BANKS HAVE VERY LITTLE PEANUT BUTTER TO SPREAD AROUND.
This “low cost” staple of food banks, along with such other foods as cereals and potatoes, are becoming increasingly expensive as crop failures from drought in Texas and Georgia are inflating their prices and reducing the the quantity of donation of these items. One Lakeland food bank says it has less than a months’ supply of peanut butter to take it through the winter season.
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Quote of the day...
It hasn’t been brought to my attention…I’m too busy here.
Senate Environment and Public Works Chair Barbara Boxer (D-Calif) when asked whether she would attend a critical international climate change conference in Durban, South Africa.
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Do you receive the daily headlines in the form of an early-morning e-mail? If you don’t and you would like to receive them, just send a note to sunstateactivist2@yahoo.com and you’ll be enrolled in the “Progressive breakfast club.”
The Jordan and Saudi dictators have asked Assad to step down in Syria for killing demonstrators. Of course, they are also doing the same (at least the Saudis). Except that no one is accusing them for their crimes. France and the Obama administration criticize selectively regimes that are not friendly, but support others, even if they kill their citizens like the Saudis and the Egyptian dictators do.
Regarding the nutty alarmist Global Warming screed in Counterpunch:
Check out a more informed viewpoint by one of the editors of Counterpunch:
Anthropogenic Global Warming is a Farce
By Alexander Cockburn
The global warming jamboree in Copenhagen was surely the most outlandish foray into intellectual fantasizing since the fourth-century Christian bishops assembled in 325 AD for the Council of Nicaea to debate whether God the Father was supreme or had to share equal status in the pecking order of eternity with his Son and the Holy Ghost.
Shortly before the Copenhagen summit, the proponents of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) were embarrassed by a whistleblower who put on the Web more than a thousand e-mails either sent from or received at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, headed by Dr. Phil Jones. The CRU was founded in 1971 with funding from sources including Shell and British Petroleum. It became one of the climate-modeling grant mills supplying tainted data from which the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has concocted its reports.
Deceitful manipulation of data, concealment or straightforward destruction of inconvenient evidence, vindictive conspiracies to silence critics, are par for the course in all scientific debate. But in displaying all these characteristics, the CRU e-mails graphically undermine the claim of the Warmers that they command the moral as well as scientific high ground. It has been a standard ploy of the Warmers to revile the skeptics as whores of the energy industry, swaddled in munificent grants and with large personal stakes in discrediting AGW. Actually, the precise opposite is true. Billions in funding and research grants sluice into the big climate-modeling enterprises and a vast archipelago of research departments and “institutes of climate change” across academia. It’s where the money is. Skepticism, particularly for a young climatologist or atmospheric physicist, can be a career breaker.
Many of the landmines in the CRU e-mails tend to buttress longstanding charges by skeptics (yours truly included) that statistical chicanery by professor Michael Mann and others occluded the highly inconvenient Medieval Warm Period, running from 800 to 1300 AD, with temperatures in excess of the highest we saw in the 20th century, a historical fact that makes nonsense of the thesis that global warming could be attributed to the auto-industrial civilization of the 20th century. Here’s Keith Briffa, of the CRU, letting his hair down in an e-mail Sept. 22, 1999: “I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple. … I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1000 years ago.”
Now, in the fall of 1999, the IPCC was squaring up to its all-important “Summary for Policymakers” – essentially a press release, one that eventually featured the notorious graph flatlining into nonexistence the Medieval Warm Period and displaying a terrifying, supposedly unprecedented surge in 20th-century temperatures.
Briffa’s reconstruction of temperature changes, one showing a mid- to late-20th-century decline, was regarded by Mann, in a Sept. 22, 1999, e-mail to the CRU, as a “problem and a potential distraction/detraction.” So Mann, a lead author on this chapter of the IPCC report, simply deleted the embarrassing post-1960 portion of Briffa’s reconstruction. The CRU’s Jones happily applauded Mann’s deceptions in an e-mail in which he crowed over “Mike’s Nature trick.”
Other landmines include e-mails from Kevin Trenberth, the head of the Climate Analysis Section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. On Oct. 14, he wrote to the CRU’s Tom Wigley: “How come you do not agree with a statement that says we are no where close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter. We are not close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we can not account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geo-engineering quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not! It is a travesty!”
Only a few weeks before Copenhagen, here is a scientist in the inner AGW circle disclosing that “we are no where close to knowing” how the supposedly proven AGW warming model might actually work, and that therefore geoengineering – such as carbon mitigation – is “hopeless.”
This admission edges close to acknowledgment of a huge core problem: that “greenhouse” theory violates the second law of thermodynamics, which says that a cooler body cannot warm a hotter body without compensation. Greenhouse gases in the cold upper atmosphere cannot possibly transfer heat to the warmer earth, and in fact radiate their absorbed heat into outer space. (Readers interested in the science can read Gerhard Gerlich and Ralf Tscheuschner’s “Falsification of the Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within the Frame of Physics,” updated in January 2009.)
Recent data from many monitors including the CRU, available on climate4you.com, show that the average temperature of the atmosphere and the oceans near the surface of the earth has decreased significantly across the past eight years or so. CO2 is a benign gas essential to life, occurring in past eras at five times present levels. Changes in atmospheric CO2 do not correlate with human emissions of CO2, the latter being entirely trivial in the global balance.
The battles in Nicaea in 325 were faith based, with no relation to science or reason. So were the premises of the Copenhagen summit, that the planet faces catastrophic warming caused by manmade CO2 buildup, and that human intervention – geoengineering – could avert the coming disaster. Properly speaking, it’s a farce. In terms of distraction from cleaning up the pollutants that are actually killing people, it’s a terrible tragedy.
Copyright 2009 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
The fear of hardline Islamic governments coming to power prevented me from enthusiastically cheering on the Arab Spring. Tunisia, for instance, has a significant Westernized, secular professional elite. But it’s still a developing country with a lot of poor people living traditional pre-Industrial lifestyles. What kind of government will they choose in the long term?
It’s interesting to note that when one points out that the Earth’s climate is obviously changing and droughts, heat, cold, rain and storms are becoming more and more intense by the year, the deniers just say it’s all chalked up to “bad science” and hysteria on the part of a bunch of contemptable “tree huggers”.
When faced with the undeniable scientific data, the same deniers will then say there’s nothing that can be done about it because it’s part of some kind of natural cycle. This despite still more scientific data to the contrary.
They then accuse the scientific community of “bad science” or of not being part of the “real world”. To those who are in the “real world” but who have the age and experience gardening and observing weather their whole lives, they will say they’re not being “scientific”.
Ok, do we get the picture here? There’s no way that climate change deniers are going to be convinced no matter what the evidence. Why? Politics, profit, contrarianism, conspiratorialism, ideology, fear all come together in a perfect storm of denial. In the meantime the droughts, storms, rain, cold, heat all get more intense and humanity is going to suffer for it.
Your premise is nonsense, Lou. There is no “undeniable scientific data” whatsoever that proves the Earth’s climate is changing any more or less than it has always been changing.
What caused our planet’s multiple Ice Ages?
What caused the warming that ended our planet’s multiple Ice Ages?
And in the last 2000 years or so:
What caused the Medieval Warm Period?
What caused the Little Ice Age?
What caused the Dust Bowl?