Topic: WE'RE STUFFED!!!

[Nichi]

[Builder]

Interesting, how simple the world looks through the thought that the die has been cast and some things have become irreversible and inevitable. Things such as accelerating extinction of species, environmental disasters, etc. As this thread says: we're stuffed. Irreversibly.

The story below - how the discourse has shifted from 'we've got a problem, let's solve it' to 'we may have a problem that is interesting to discuss and comment upon'.

Sounds familiar?:

11:1  And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.

11:2  And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.

11:3  And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar.

11:4  And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.

11:5  And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.

11:6  And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.

11:7  Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.

11:8  So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.

11:9  Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

Eternal story of mankind. Many speak, only a few understand. Lots of movement, little progress. Disaster approaches: well, how exciting is that. So much room for dramatic emotions and exciting drama.

The year climate science was redefined

The 12 months since the leaking of emails written by climate change scientists have seen major shifts in environmental debate

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/nov/15/year-climate-science-was-redefined


Storm of controversy: The politics of climate change can be even more volatile than the Earth's weather. Photograph: Douglas Van Reeth/AP

One year ago tomorrow more than a thousand emails between scientists in the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and their international colleagues were uploaded, unauthorised, on to a Russian FTP server. The story immediately went viral online, with lurid accusations of deception and illegality, and was soon picked up by the mainstream media.

How has the climate change story changed since then? And how important was "climategate" in catalysing this change? I believe there have been major shifts in how climate science is conducted, how the climate debate is framed and how climate policy is being formed. And I believe "climategate" played a role in all three.

It is difficult to re-capture – or even quite believe – the cultural and political mood around climate change in the autumn of 2009. There was a rising wave of expectation that the world leaders gathering for the climate change summit in Copenhagen in December would change the world – and the climate – for ever.

People were fasting for climate justice, Gordon Brown was saying that Copenhagen was the last chance to reach a climate deal and there were calls for Obama to play decisively his climate card. No one 12 months ago was calling for a review of the practices of the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations' main climate science assessment panel. Contrarian voices, while loud, were not really being listened to. This inflated optimism had to burst and "climategate" proved to be the pin.

So, 12 months later, I suggest three things of particular significance have altered.

First, there has been a discernible change in some of the practices of climate science. Most obvious has been an opening up and re-analysis of some of the core observational datasets which underpin the detection of climate change trends. The Met Office is leading a thorough international re-analysis of 150 years of land and marine temperature data. Calls for greater transparency around scientific analysis have boosted the embryonic project of the Climate Code Foundation and its efforts to make all climate computer code open-source.

The Inter-Academy Council review has recommended some significance changes in the way the IPCC assesses knowledge, in particular how it documents areas of both agreement and disagreement in the underlying science. And the Royal Society, reflecting this new mood, has issued a new guide to climate change science which separates "aspects of wide agreement", "aspects of continuing debate" and "aspects not well understood". The objective of these reflexive responses in science has been to demonstrate transparency and rebuild trust.

Second, there has been a re-framing of climate change. The simple linear frame of "here's the consensus science, now let's make climate policy" has lost out to the more ambiguous frame: "What combination of contested political values, diverse human ideals and emergent scientific evidence can drive climate policy?" The events of the past year have finally buried the notion that scientific predictions about future climate change can be certain or precise enough to force global policy-making.

The meta-framing of climate change has therefore moved from being bi-polar – that either the scientific evidence is strong enough for action or else it is too weak for action – to being multi-polar – that narratives of climate change mobilise widely differing values which can't be homogenised through appeals to science. Those actors who have long favoured a linear connection between climate science and climate policy – spanning environmentalists, contrarians and some scientists and politicians – have been forced to rethink. It is clearer today that the battle lines around climate change have to be drawn using the language of politics, values and ethics rather than the one-dimensional language of scientific consensus or lack thereof.

Third, and perhaps most dramatically, has been the fragmentation of climate policy-making. It has been remarkable how quickly faith has evaporated in the multilateral process of the UNFCCC. Its new head, Christiana Figueres, concedes that "there won't be a final agreement on climate change in my lifetime". The post-mortem of COP15 showed how implausible the FAB deal wanted by NGOs – Fair, Ambitious and Binding – really was. The US Senate screwed Obama's cap-and-trade bill. And no one believes that COP16 in Cancun later this month will be any different.

Instead, there is a new pragmatism in the air. This pragmatism has many colours and shades, but at the heart of it are three principles:

• an emphasis on the climate co-benefits of other policy innovations, such as those on health and poverty

• a necessity to drive forward new publicly-funded investments in low-carbon energy technology

• the cultivation of multi-level polycentric institutions and partnerships through which policy innovation may occur, rather than relying exclusively on the UN process

These three changes are reflective of much larger cultural and political struggles regarding knowledge and power in the contemporary world which will become more salient during the next decade: the challenges to the norms of science coming from deep social and digital connectivity; the struggle to establish the appropriate cultural authority for science; and the struggles to bring democratic accountability to emergent international and global forms of governance. The shifts we are seeing around climate change are therefore symptomic of these wider struggles.

The 12 months since 17 November 2009 have shown brutally that the social, political and cultural dynamics at work around the idea of climate change are more volatile than the slowly changing and causally entangled climate dynamics of the Earth's biogeophysical systems. Furthermore, supercomputers may mean climate science can attempt century-long predictions but that does not mean political, cultural and other unpredictable changes will not be as important.

Another IPCC assessment of scientific knowledge in four years' time is not going to make policy-making around climate change any easier. Indeed, the chances are that with scientific uncertainties and complexities about the future proliferating, and with new policy strategies such as climate geo-engineering entering the fray, further policy fragmentation around climate change is inevitable. But if such fragmentation reflects the plural, partial and provisional knowledge humans possess about the future then climate policy-making will better reflect reality. And that, I think, may be no bad thing.

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The inventiveness of Indonesians is awe-inspiring. 'Give me 1 bn climate aid to cut down forests.' These people have a spohisticated sense of humour and pragmatism!

Indonesia eyeing $1bn climate aid to cut down forests, says Greenpeace

Vague legal definitions may allow Indonesia to class forests as 'degraded' and 'rehabilitate' the land with palm trees and biofuel crops

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/nov/23/indonesia-climate-aid-forests-greenpeace

Indonesia plans to class large areas of its remaining natural forests as "degraded" land in order to cut them down and receive nearly $1bn of climate aid for replanting them with palm trees and biofuel crops, according to Greenpeace International.

According to internal government documents from the forestry, agriculture and energy departments in Jakarta, the areas of land earmarked for industrial plantation expansion in the next 20 years include 37m ha of existing natural forest – 50% of the country's orangutan habitat and 80% of its carbon-rich peatland. More than 60m ha – an area nearly five times the size of England – could be converted to palm oil and biofuel production in the next 20 years, say the papers.

"The land is roughly equivalent to all the currently undeveloped land in Indonesia," says the report. "The government plans for a trebling of pulp and paper production by 2015 and a doubling of palm oil production by 2020."

The result, says the environmental group in a report released in Jakarta today, would be to massively expand Indonesia's palm, paper and biofuel industries in the name of "rehabilitating" land, while at the same time allowing its powerful forestry industry to carry on business as usual and to collect international carbon funds.

"[Money] earmarked for forest protection may actually be used to subsidise their destruction with significant climate, wildlife and social costs," said the report.

The report comes at a critical time in global climate talks, due to resume next week in Cancun, Mexico. Forestry and peatland contribute nearly 18% of all global carbon emissions and Indonesia is negotiating a model $1bn forestry deal with Norway and the US. This could save millions of tonnes of climate emissions in return for Indonesia agreeing to a moratorium on future forest and peatland clearances.

But weak legal definitions of "forest" and "degraded land", have allowed the global logging industry and officials in some governments to take advantage of an ambitious UN forest-reform scheme known as Redd (Reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation). This would pay countries to replant trees and restore land. Indonesia has pledged drastic action to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 26% on its own and 42% with international climate aid. If it agrees to a binding deal to limit deforestation, says Greenpeace, this would send a powerful message to other forested countries.

"A strong deal to prevent the destruction of natural forests and peatlands would put the troubled climate talks back on track. But if international money intended to support the protection of forests and peatland is allowed to enable their destruction, any confidence in the UN talks is expected to dissolve," said a Greenpeace spokeswoman.

The Indonesian and Norwegian governments last night declined to respond until they had seen the report.

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Al-Qaeda (and why not Pak intelligence) could be playing a clever game there:

Germans Query Terror Warning

By DAVID CRAWFORD

BERLIN—Some German intelligence officials say they believe the country's recent warning of a possible imminent terrorist attack, and its stepped-up security effort to prevent one, were based on faulty intelligence.

The officials say the warning, issued by the interior minister on Nov. 17 and still in effect, was prompted by a detailed tip from an informant in Pakistan who told Germany's top police investigative agency about alleged plans for suicide attacks at crowded urban sites in Germany.

Police and intelligence officials said they are investigating the credibility of the informant and are concerned that al Qaeda operatives may be mounting a disinformation campaign to divert and weaken European counterterrorism efforts.

Before the informant's tip, German officials had played down similar tips supplied by two men arrested this year in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Those reports led the U.S. and others in October to issue warnings of possible attacks in some European cities—to the frustration of German officials, who declined to change their own security posture, arguing the intelligence was inadequate.

A spokesman for the German Interior Ministry declined to comment on details of the investigation, and said nothing has changed since Germany warned of a possible terrorist attack in mid-November. The warning was based on a recommendation made jointly by all of Germany's security services, the spokesman said.

Questions about the credibility of the intelligence has led to interagency tensions between German police and intelligence officials on how to respond to informants' statements and whether Germany should have followed the lead of the U.S. and other European countries in warning of possible attacks.

A spokeswoman for Germany's domestic intelligence service, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, confirmed her agency is investigating the credibility of the jihadist informants, but cautioned that no conclusions should be drawn. "We always have to investigate informants," the spokeswoman said.

A spokesman for the police investigative agency, the BKA, said the agency is aware of the danger of informants providing disinformation and defended the security action, saying that police are required by law to act when it has evidence that lives may be threatened by a terrorist attack.

"We are not gullible; we check the plausibility of witness statements," he said. Ultimately, however, the reliability of individual pieces of evidence may not be known until an investigation is complete, the spokesman said.

Some German intelligence officials argue that Germany's massive security effort, which has included deploying thousands of extra police to train stations and airports and closing public access to the Reichstag parliament building in Berlin, could cost millions of euros without providing real protection if terrorists simply shift attacks to venues that are less protected.

Added one official: "The terrorists gain public attention without even staging an attack."

Intelligence officials say the BKA informant isn't in custody and has telephoned German police several times from Pakistan since October.

But some officials say his intelligence is based on secondhand information, and he has yet to provide names of terrorists or Muslim extremists that are unfamiliar to German intelligence services.

Klaus Eichner, a former East German intelligence officer who once recruited U.S. intelligence officers to betray their country as Stasi spies, said an informant's loyalty must be "tested continuously at every step."

Ultimately the most reliable proof of loyalty, Mr. Eichner said, is when the informant provides "damaging information" that can be verified. "A good informant should be able to provide names," Mr. Eichner said. "Otherwise he isn't credible," he added.A U.S. official said, "There was enough credible information" to lead the U.S. goverment in October to issue a terrorism-related warning for travellers in Europe. "That assessment is constantly updated" as new information becomes available, the official said.

Neither of the two other informants, one in U.S. custody and the other awaiting trial in Germany, claim to have met members of the hit teams they say are in Europe waiting to launch attacks, intelligence officials say.

But information provided by the men played an important role in a CIA campaign to attack foreign jihadist fighters using drone-fired missiles. Several of the two men's comrades have been killed in the drone missile attacks, intelligence officials say.

[Jahn]

Richard Severin "Dick" Fuld, Jr. (born April 26, 1946) is an American banker and executive best known as the final Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Lehman Brothers. Fuld had held this position since the firm's 1994 spinoff from American Express until 2008. Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11[3] on September 15, 2008, and subsequently announced a sale of major operations to parties including Barclays Bank and Nomura Securities.

Fuld was nicknamed the "Gorilla" on Wall Street for his competitiveness.[4]


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_S._Fuld,_Jr.

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Stockholm suicide bomber confronted by Luton mosque leaders

Taimour Abdulwahab al-Abdaly had been challenged by leaders of Luton Islamic centre over extremist views

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/13/stockholm-suicide-bomber-luton-mosque

The suicide bomber who struck in Stockholm on Saturday stormed out of a British mosque where he worshipped after being confronted over his extremism, it emerged today


Taimour al-Abdaly, the Stockholm suicide bombings suspect, stormed out of a Luton mosque after leaders expressed concern about his radical views.

Taimour Abdulwahab al-Abdaly, who set off a car bomb in the Swedish capital before killing himself with a second device strapped to his body, attended the Luton Islamic centre where the mosque's leaders expressed concern about his views.

Abdaly was a student at the University of Bedfordshire in Luton between 2001 and 2004 and continued to live in the town after graduating. Qadeer Baksh, chairman of Luton Islamic centre, said Abdaly showed up at the mosque during Ramadan in 2006 or 2007 and made an instant impression with his "very bubbly character" but they soon clashed over his views.

"We were challenging his philosophical attitude to jihad," said Baksh. "He got so angry that he left. He was just supporting and propagating these incorrect foundations [of Islam], so I stepped in."

He said Abdaly believed scholars of Islam were "in the pocket of the government" and proposed a "physical jihad".

Baksh said he thought he had talked Abdaly round to a more moderate position but the Iraqi-born Swede then came back with more arguments. "I had no idea it would escalate to where it escalated," said Abdaly. "I thought that when he stormed off he was just angry at me. I heard afterwards that he was criticising the mosque in general and me in particular at the university. He said we were working for the British government and that we were in the pocket of Saudi Arabia. He was trying to defame our honour."

Despite the clashes, Baksh said it was not for him to report Abdaly to the police or security services. "It's the police's job, the intelligence service's job to follow these people up, not ours," he said. "You can't just inform on any Muslim having extreme views. In the past many Muslims have had extreme views but have become good balance Muslims."

The Islamic centre's secretary, Farasat Latif, said if they feared a person could be a potential tefforist "any Muslim in his right mind" would report him.

Police continued to search a terraced house in Luton today as part of the investigation. Abdaly's wife and three children reportedly live in Luton, and neighbours said they last saw him two and a half weeks ago.

Police obtained access to the property yesterday with a warrant issued under the Terrorism Act 2000. Whitehall officials have confirmed the bomber's identity; Swedish police say they are 98% certain Abdaly was the culprit.

The Swedish newspaper Expressen reported that the country's security service believe the bomb went off accidentally and Abdaly had planned to detonate three devices, including one at the main railway station and another at a large department store. It said he had planned to blow up his car but also had 12 pipe bombs strapped to his body, and a bomb in a rucksack.

Abdaly has been hailed as a martyr on the Islamist website al-Hanin. A photomontage on the site suggests he was a member of an al-Qaida-linked organisation, the Islamic State of Iraq.

In 2007, the group's leader, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, called for reprisals in Sweden for the cartoons of the prophet Muhammad by the Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks. In an email apparently written by Abdaly and sent to Swedish the news agency TT shortly before the explosions he condemned Sweden's' "stupid support for the pig Vilks".

Abdaly's father was quoted by Expressen as saying he had lost contact with his son. "He did not say where he was going," he told the newspaper. "The whole family is in shock, and wants to find out what happened."

Tahir Hussain, 33, a taxi driver who lives near to the Luton house being searched, said he used to exchange greetings with Abdaly. "He had only been here about a year. I used to chat to him a bit: say good morning, good afternoon," said Hussain. "He seemed like a very nice person. I never thought he'd be like this."

He said he would see Abdaly with his three children in the garden. "His wife used to cover her face, and he wore a djellaba," Hussain said. "You could tell he was religious."

Faisal Ahmed, 24, a restauranteur who lives on the same street as Abdaly, said: "The [Abdaly] family is very gentle; the news is a big shock. I hope it's not true, it's really unbelievable."

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'Prepare for all-out cyber war'

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/online/prepare-for-allout-cyber-war-2159567.html

Whitehall is preparing for a crippling attack on government websites as evidence mounts that the backlash against the arrest of the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is rapidly growing into a mass movement that aims to cause widespread disruption on the internet.

Extra security measures have been added to a host of government web services, in particular those used to claim benefits or provide tax information, after Sir Peter Ricketts, the national security adviser, warned permanent secretaries across all departments that "hacktivists" who last week targeted the sites of companies such as MasterCard and PayPal could switch their focus to Britain.

Downing Street officials confirmed they are preparing for a court appearance today by Mr Assange, who remains in custody following his arrest on sex allegations at the request of the Swedish authorities, to be used by hackers as an excuse to switch their focus to key cyber infrastructure such as the website of HM Revenue and Customs. Members of the online collective Anonymous have already signalled their willingness to attack UK targets if Mr Assange – who denies the claims and whose lawyers will today apply for bail – is extradited to Sweden.

The ability of amorphous groups such as Anonymous to disrupt and paralyse websites was displayed again yesterday when hackers obtained the passwords of 1.3 million users of the gossip website Gawker and posted them online. The motivation for the attack, claimed by a group calling itself Gnosis, was unclear, but Gawker has previously published blogs criticising Mr Assange and 4chan, the messaging board that spawned Anonymous. In the wake of the attack, Gawker's Twitter accounts were hijacked to publish messages supporting WikiLeaks.

Amazon, the world's biggest online retailer, insisted yesterday that the disappearance of its European websites for about 30 minutes on Sunday was due to a "hardware failure". The company is one of those which had been threatened as part of Operation Payback, the attempt by Anonymous to mount attacks against companies which withdrew services from WikiLeaks in the wake of its publication of US diplomatic cables.

The anger of Mr Assange's supporters is likely to be increased by a claim from his British lawyer yesterday that a grand jury has been secretly empanelled in Virginia to consider charges against the Australian over the diplomatic telegrams.

In an online posting yesterday, one Anonymous hacker confirmed plans to attack Amazon (although others have said attacking the site when users are trying to buy Christmas presents would be counter-productive) and said the organisation was ready to attack governments: "It is definitely an information war. The core principle behind it is: information is free, governments keep information to themselves, WikiLeaks releases it to the general public and the war occurs."

Internet activists have already targeted the website of the Swedish judicial authorities bringing the rape allegations against Mr Assange and it is understood Whitehall officials have been warned an attack is likely to take the form of an attempt to hack into databases or a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), where thousands of "zombie" computers are used to bombard a web service with requests and thus bring it to a halt.

IT experts have warned that Whitehall is particularly vulnerable to cyber attacks because many computers still run on an outdated version of Internet Explorer which is known to be at particular risk to hackers. The Coalition has ruled out an upgrade on the grounds of cost.

Downing Street said last night that the focus of preparations for a WikiLeaks-linked attack was on protecting information held about private citizens on sites such as those operated by the Department of Work and Pensions. A spokesman for David Cameron said: "The priority would be websites where we are dealing with information that belongs to members of the public."

The alert at Whitehall is just the latest sign that the world wide web, which marks its 20th birthday this month, is coming of age as a target for dissent as well as a potent means of expressing it. Thousands of people have downloaded the tool, known as LOIC or Low Orbit Ion Cannon, offered by Operation Payback to aid attacks on the websites of MasterCard, Visa and PayPal. Experts said the arrival of LOIC represented a disturbing evolution which makes DDoS attacks, hitherto the domain of cyber criminals seeking to extort money from companies, a tool of mass protest.

Rik Ferguson, a security researcher with Trend Micro, said: "These types of attack are still very difficult to defend against and now we are seeing an exponential increase in those prepared to hand over their computers for such a use. Electronic attacks are no different to attacks on physical infrastructure. They are designed to inconvenience and to disrupt, to have a financial impact to the victim and to anyone relying on that victim's services."

IS ANYWHERE SAFE ONLINE?

* The attacks on Visa, MasterCard and Amazon prompted by the WikiLeaks affair have grabbed the headlines – but the hackers who have tried to bring those sites down have merely inconvenienced users. The latest attack on Gawker is part of a more frightening phenomenon where users registered with certain websites find that their personal information is vulnerable to determined experts with malicious intent.

There are many other examples besides Gawker, some of them based on technical vulnerabilities, others on users' carelessness. The online social world Second Life has had customer accounts hacked, revealing personal information. Scammers have successfully drained PayPal accounts through iTunes by hoaxing people into giving up passwords. And any email account is at risk if a hacker decides to target you and you either have an obvious password or an easily bypassed password reset system – if, for instance, your password can be obtained via a secondary email account that you have allowed to expire and that a hacker can re-register.

Those risks are made greater when companies do not deploy adequate security. But experts say that many apparently secure sites can be ripped open by sufficiently sophisticated hackers. To minimise the risks, it makes sense to only give sensitive personal information to websites you trust.

[Michael]

it is a curious turn of events

in fact it is more than curious - we seem to be witnessing a transformation, which has already happened, but it just hadn't become so obvious till now.

It first raised its head with the music downloads, then the movie pirating. Then Murdoch and his son spat the dummy recently, trying to claw back the status-quo. We all praised the Iranian freedom fight via IT, and condemned the Chinese attempts to crush internet dissent.

But it would appear that not only have the horses bolted, they bolted long ago. There is only the droppings left to tread in by the landlord.

What is it though? What is this new world of stateless empowerment?

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The arrogance of Cancún

The lesson of this feeble climate deal? Governments have played God and failed. It is up to the activists now

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2010/dec/15/cancun-governments-play-god

In the efforts to protect our planet from ourselves, the high level talks at Cancún were our last chance … and they failed. But we can learn from this sad episode: we must stop asking governments and international organisations for solutions that they don't want to – and can't – implement. And we must stop pretending to be God, thinking we can "fix" the planet.

Eighteen years ago pressure from the environmental movement forced the UN to convene the Earth summit: 120 heads of state, 8,000 officials and innumerable environmentalists gathered in Rio; an image of the orchestra playing while the Titanic sank comes to mind.

The conference, as the Ecologist reported at the time, merely reinforced predominant mythology and highlighted the powerful vested interests working against a solution. In effect, the lambs were put under the care of the wolves. "After reaching the summit, every path goes down," observed the leading Mexican environmentalist Juan José Consejo. He warned environmentalists that their cause had been co-opted and that policies and actions taken in the name of ecology were in fact very damaging for the environment.

But we did not learn enough. We continued looking to the powerful to solve things. The Kyoto summit in 1997 was a timid step in the right direction, but it never fulfilled its promise. This year, at the People's summit in Cochabamba, Bolivia, interesting proposals were presented; but Cancún did not take them into consideration, and the feeble deal it eventually cobbled together could not overcome last year's failure at Copenhagen. As Vía Campesina, the International Peasant Movement, observed: no agreement would have been better than such a poor one.

Meanwhile, the International Forum for Climate Justice, convened by hundreds of organisations from many countries, made an alternative and more valuable Cancún declaration. Under the slogan "Let's change the system, not the planet", the declaration revealed the true counter-productive nature of the official proposals, which are trapped in "market environmentalism". It argues that we should abandon developmentalism, establish limits, concentrate in local spaces, and reclaim valid traditions. All this, however, falls into the intellectual and political trap of the dominant mentality by still hanging on to institutions and their abstract slogans.

To affirm or to deny climate change supposes that we understand our planet well, that we know how it reacts – both now and for the next hundred years – and that we have the appropriate technological fix. This is plain and simple nonsense, and intolerably arrogant.

To continue putting our trust and hope in institutions to put things right goes against all our experience and focuses our energy in the wrong place. Yes, we still need to fight some institutional battles. For example, we can celebrate the agreement just signed in Nagoya, where 193 UN member states created a de facto moratorium on geoengineering projects, condemning any attempt to manipulate the "planet thermostat". But we must do that without surrendering our will to the government administrators of capital, who will continue protecting the major players in environmental destruction.

All governments, even the most majestic, are composed of ordinary mortals, trapped in bureaucratic labyrinths and fighting vested interests that tie their hands, heads and wills. Even if Evo Morales governed the entire planet we would not be able to "fix" the current environmental problems.

We must look down and to the left, as the Zapatistas of Mexico say: to the people, and what we can do ourselves. For example, stop producing waste, rather than recycling it. This requires a lot of things, from rejecting plastic bags and packaging to radically abandoning the flush toilet – one of the world's most destructive habits, absorbing 40% of water available for domestic consumption and contaminating everything in its way. And instead of overusing polluting vehicles, let's reclaim auto-mobility, on foot or bikes. Just as we strive to eat and drink sensibly, let us live our whole lives in a different way.

If we define the issues in those terms, dealing with them will be in our own hands, not in those of global institutional creatures that will never do what is needed. They cannot play God, no matter how much they pretend to.

The time has come to change the system, not the planet. That depends on us, not on those who gain status and income from the system. As the Brazilian writer Leonard Boff observed, activists leaving Cancún were very disappointed with the outcome; but they are determined to finally take control of the whole issue and to live their lives their own way, not in the way dictated by the market or the state.

[Michael]

I've just finished watching this fascinating interview with Julian Assange by Robert Frost.
Julian does come across as a very intelligent person, and the Swedish system is under pressure about this whole thing.

Jahn, is there much debate going on in Sweden about this?


http://www.youtube.com/v/U6mcSXge4Qo

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I've just finished watching this fascinating interview with Julian Assange by Robert Frost.
Julian does come across as a very intelligent person, and the Swedish system is under pressure about this whole thing.

Jahn, is there much debate going on in Sweden about this?


http://www.youtube.com/v/U6mcSXge4Qo

There were rumours that the US administration has put an enormous pressure on Sweden just to get hold of Assange. Simultaneously, the US is trying to put together a case against Assange on the charge of espionage (illegal gathering of state secrets).

[Builder]

It seems that things are boiling in the UK... This stuff brings to my mind famous words about another kingdom in Europe.

'Christmas is evil': Muslim group launches poster campaign against festive period
'Christmas is evil': Muslim group launches poster campaign against festive period

[Jahn]

I've just finished watching this fascinating interview with Julian Assange by Robert Frost.
Julian does come across as a very intelligent person, and the Swedish system is under pressure about this whole thing.

Jahn, is there much debate going on in Sweden about this?


http://www.youtube.com/v/U6mcSXge4Qo

Yes, quite a lot. The newspaper follow every step in this case. And the discussions are pro and con.

Heh, that Mr assange is a macho bull from down under could be one reason why these women made a report. 
Joke aside, it seems that the charges are very weak and in at least in one case in the area between sex with consent and a broken condom (no consent).

[Michael]

From the little I can glean, it appears to have a lot to do with local Swedish politics, and some suspect character called Claes Borgstrom.

[Michael]

This woman is onto something quite amazing and equally disturbing.

I'm neither interested nor attracted to the world of crime and terror, but I have always thought it was a powerful force and influence on our side of the fence. I didn't realise how powerful it was.

Loretta Napoleoni describes how the dark side of finance has been propping up the US, but since 9/11 and the war on terror, all this money now floods into the EU. She estimated it to be worth $1.5 trillion, before 9/11.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXl-mKZ7aSc