Friday, September 13, 2019
Thursday, September 12, 2019
Who should not run a government? Psychopaths, Narcissists, Machiavellians (among others)
The Ancient Greeks believed that democracy would be impossible on too large a scale. For a small city-state, democracy can work.
Knowing the people involved is crucial for democracy.
If we know that someone tortured animals as a child, and has been in legal trouble several times since age 15, then we know that person should not be in a position of political responsibility.
But how can democracy work in a huge empire with millions of people? We need to know if a politician has "Dark Triad" characteristics: psychopathy, narcissism, or Machiavellianism.
James Fallon (himself a psychopath) has scanned the brains of dozens of people believed to be psychopaths using a PET scanner, a machine that uses a small amount of radioactive substance to measure brain activity.
James Fallon (himself a psychopath) has scanned the brains of dozens of people believed to be psychopaths using a PET scanner, a machine that uses a small amount of radioactive substance to measure brain activity.
'If Environment Were a Bank,' Says Bernie Sanders, 'It Would Have Been Saved Already'
Published on
Friday, August 30, 2019
Sanders has introduced a $16.3
trillion Green New Deal plan to avert climate catastrophe and create 20 million
jobs in the process
The U.S. government took
decisive action and spent trillions
of dollars to bail out Wall Street banks in the midst of the 2008
financial crisis, but it has refused to do the same to rescue the planet from
climate catastrophe—a fact Sen. Bernie Sanders highlighted in a pithy tweet on
Friday.
"If the environment were
a bank," wrote the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, "it would
have been saved already."
Estimates of the size of the
Wall Street bailout vary widely. When Federal Reserve loans are included in the
bailout figures, some estimates put the total number as
high as $29 trillion.
Sanders' Green New Deal plan,
which the senator released last
week, would aim to invest $16.3 trillion in a decade-long effort to transition
the U.S. economy to 100 percent renewable energy and create 20 million
well-paying union jobs.
According to the Sanders
campaign, the proposal would "pay for itself over 15 years" by hiking
taxes on the rich and large corporations, slashing military spending, and
boosting economic activity with massive public investment.
On top of the human costs of
climate inaction, the economic toll would be "unacceptable," the
Sanders campaign notes in
its Green New Deal platform.
"Economists estimate that
if we do not take action, we will lose $34.5 trillion in economic activity by
the end of the century," the platform states. "And the benefits are
enormous: by taking bold and decisive action, we will save $2.9 trillion over
10 years, $21 trillion over 30 years, and $70.4 trillion over 80 years."
Activists Follow the Money Fueling Amazon Fires
Published on Tuesday,
September 10, 2019
Protesters around the world
are singling out the bad actors profiting off deforestation.
While the world watches in
horror as fires rage on in the Amazon, activists are shining a light on the big
businesses destroying what’s popularly known as the “lungs of the Earth.” On
September 5, people around the globe stood in solidarity with the rainforest’s
indigenous communities by partaking in the Global Day of Action for the Amazon,
staging protests and singling out the bad actors profiting off
deforestation.
In Washington, D.C. protesters
chanted “Put out the flames, we name your names—politicians, corporate
vultures, you’re the ones we blame,” as they marched from the White House to
the Brazilian Consulate. Activists around the world have been protesting Brazilian
President Jair Bolsonaro, who has steadily rolled
back indigenous land rights and environmental protections from his
very first hours in office. A coalition — which includes Amazon Watch and
Friends of the Earth, among others—is also putting pressure on the
multinational corporations turning a profit off the destruction of the
Amazon.
Amazon Watch, a
California-based organization that works in concert with indigenous and
environmental groups, issued a report earlier
this year documenting the dozens of companies that stand to make money as
Bolsonaro strips regulations in Brazil. The report, titled Complicity
in Destruction, highlights the main drivers of deforestation—from soy and
beef commodity traders like Cargill and JBS, to their financiers in North
America and Europe, like BlackRock, Santander, and JP Morgan Chase. And
research from Mighty Earth has documented the retailers most
associated with those traders, like Costco, Walmart, and Ahold Delhaize—which
owns Stop & Shop, Giant, and Food Lion.
Protesters in D.C. took aim at
the U.S.-based companies highlighted in the campaign to defund deforestation.
“There are many, many large corporations in the United States — including
Cargill, ADM and BlackRock — who all have a hand in the destruction of the
Amazon and we encourage all Americans to use their economic power to put
pressure on these companies to do the right thing,” Todd Larsen, the Executive
Co-Director for Consumer & Corporate Engagement at Green America told Inequality.org.
Green America is encouraging Americans to use their investments to put economic
pressure on the companies profiting off deforestation.
“The only reason these
companies are able to keep burning down the forest year after year is because
their customers keep paying them to do so,” Bárbara Amaral of Brazilians
for Democracy and Social Justice told the crowd in D.C. “It’s time for
supermarket giants like Costco, Walmart, Ahold, to immediately suspend contacts
with Cargill and JBS, and for the public to show up at the front doors of
Cargill headquarters and yell that it’s time to protect the Amazon.”
Protecting the environment
must include structural changes to the economy that keep companies from making
a quick buck off climate disaster, protesters said. “I came out today because I
am in support of changing the climate debate into a debate that is critical
about the current economic system that exists in the world that is perpetuating
climate change,” Gabby Rosazza, a campaigner with the International Labor
Rights Forum told Inequality.org. “In particular, I’m tired of
hearing about how individual actions can address climate change such as buying
metal straws versus plastic straws. I’m more interested in learning about who
is profiting from climate change.”
One of the companies profiting
the most? BlackRock — the largest asset manager in the world. A report released
last month by Amazon Watch and Friends of the Earth found BlackRock to be among
the top three shareholders in 25 of the largest publicly-traded
deforestation-risk companies. And the asset manager’s deforestation presence
grew by more than $500 million between 2014 and 2018. Activists in London,
Stockholm, San Francisco, Boston and Hong Kong targeted BlackRock
during Thursday’s Global Day of Action, holding protests and die-ins outside
the asset manager’s offices.
The recent report and protests
are the latest addition to a pressure campaign mounting
on BlackRock for continuously profiting off climate destruction, from the
Amazon to the Alberta tar sands to Arctic oil reserves. Indigenous and environmental
activists held protests at BlackRock’s annual general meeting earlier this
year. Luiz Eloy Terena, legal counsel for the National Indigenous Organization
of Brazil (also known as APIB) and a member of Brazil’s indigenous Terena
community, expressed her criticism to BlackRock CEO Larry Fink directly during
the meeting and demanded an audit of BlackRock investees operating on Brazilian
indigenous territories.
"Brazilian indigenous
peoples and lands are under immense threat from the beef and soy industries
working hand in glove with the Bolsonaro regime to undermine protections that
keep our forests standing and our climate stable," Terena said in a statement released
after her conversation with Fink.
“When BlackRock funnels
investments to these bad actors in Brazil, it is complicit in the destruction
of tropical forests and violation of human rights. BlackRock must use its
significant influence over these companies to signal that it will not tolerate
policies that violate indigenous rights and damage the climate.”
Plan to Release Radioactive Fukushima Wastewater Into Pacific Ocean Panned by Critics
Published on Tuesday,
September 10, 2019
"Another reason to not
build nuclear power plants."
The far-reaching dangers of
nuclear power were on full display Tuesday as Japan's environmental minister
recommended releasing more than one million tons of radioactive wastewater from
the Fukushima Daiichi plant into the Pacific Ocean nearly a decade after a
tsunami caused a meltdown at the coastal facility.
"There are no other
options" other than dumping the water into the ocean and diluting it,
Yoshiaki Harada said at
a news conference in Tokyo.
Chief cabinet secretary
Yoshihide Suga disputed Harada's claim, saying the government has not settled
on a method of disposing of the wastewater. Other options include vaporizing
the water and storing it on land.
But critics on social media
said the suggestion of pouring contaminated water into the Pacific is more than
enough evidence that the risks associated with nuclear power are too great to
continue running plants like Fukushima.
The wastewater has been stored
in tanks at Fukushima since the 2011 tsunami, when a meltdown at the plant
forced the evacuation of tens of thousands of people.
For
years since the disaster, the plant has pumped tens of thousands of
tons of water to help cool its damaged reactor cores and keep them from
melting. After the water is used and contaminated with radionuclides and radioactive
isotopes, it is stored in the tanks, but the plant expects to run out of room
in 2022.
The Atomic Energy Society of
Japan said recently
that it could take 17 years for water to meet safety standards after it is
diluted.
Greenpeace, which has long
called on the Japanese government to invest in technology to remove
radioactivity from the water, said the environmental minister's proposal is
unacceptable.
"The government must
commit to the only environmentally acceptable option for managing this water
crisis which is long-term storage and processing to remove radioactivity,
including tritium," Shaun Burnie, a senior nuclear specialist the group's
German office, told France
24.
The government of neighboring
South Korea expressed grave concerns over the potential plan to dump the water
into the Pacific, saying it planned to work closely with Japan to come up with
an alternative.
"The South Korean
government is well aware of the impact of the treatment of the contaminated
water from the Fukushima nuclear power plant on the health and safety of the
people of both countries, and to the entire nation," the government said.
"Exactly What I've Hoped For": 100+ Education Leaders Voice Support for Sanders K-12 Plan
Tuesday, September 10, 2019
"No president or
presidential candidate has offered a proposal so bold and sweeping."
More than 100 national
education leaders are publicly backing 2020 Democratic presidential primary
candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders' plan to reform the American school system, his
campaign announced Tuesday.
Unveiled in
May, the Thurgood Marshall Plan for Public Education calls for "a
transformative investment in our children, our teachers, and our schools, and a
fundamental re-thinking of the unjust and inequitable funding of our public
education system."
"No president or
presidential candidate has offered a proposal so bold and sweeping, which
directly addresses the fiscal starving of American public education at the same
time that the federal government got into the business of regulating,
mandating, and controlling the nation's schools and classrooms," declared
Diane Ravitch, former U.S. assistant secretary of education and research
professor at New York University.
Sanders aims to address
"the serious crisis in our education system by reducing racial and
economic segregation in our public school system, attracting the best and the
brightest educational professionals to teach in our classrooms, and
reestablishing a positive learning environment for students in our K-12
schools," according to his campaign.
"Bernie's strong and
ethical education platform is exactly what I've hoped for," Jonathan
Kozol, a National Book Award recipient and activist for public schools and
racial equality, said Tuesday. "His courageous and unqualified support for
racial integration of our public schools sets him apart from the timid and
equivocating centrists who have put unprincipled consensus ahead of social
justice in the primary campaigns."
The White House hopeful's
public education proposal has 10 key goals:
-Combating Racial
Discrimination and School Segregation
-End the Unaccountable
Profit-Motive of Charter Schools
-Equitable Funding for Public
Schools
-Strengthen the Individuals
with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)
-Give Teachers a Much-Deserved
Raise and Empower them to Teach
-Expand After-School/Summer
Education Programs
-Universal School Meals
-Community Schools
-School Infrastructure
-Make Schools a Safe and
Inclusive Place for All
Part of Sanders' education plan
includes banning new for-profit charter schools. As Common Dreams reported earlier
this year, he was the first candidate in the Democratic primary race to take
that position.
"Ninety percent of
parents in this country send their kids to public schools, and they want those
public schools to be a top priority," Randi Weingarten, president of
American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and another backer of Sanders' plan, said
Tuesday. "That's why Sen. Sanders' plan to invest in public schools and
provide real accountability over private alternatives is vitally
important."
Weingarten, Ravitch, and Kozol
were joined by dozens of other education leaders, union organizers, school
reform groups, and college professors who endorsed Sanders' platform—as
students and educators across the country kick off a new school year.
Other supporters of the plan
included Noam Chomsky, professor emeritus of linguistics at MIT; Abdul
El-Sayed, former executive director of the Detroit Health Department; Adolph
Reed Jr., professor emeritus of political science the University of
Pennsylvania; Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy
Research; and Cornel West, professor of the practice of public philosophy at
Harvard University and professor emeritus at Princeton University.
What It Will Take to Actually Fight Climate Change
Published on
Wednesday, September 11, 2019
The technology is very largely
there. All that is missing is the energy, commitment, and INTERNATIONAL
COOPERATION [this last is the difficult part].
Ponder the onrushing disaster
of climate change, and the towering task of getting greenhouse gas emissions
down in time to avoid existential calamity, and one can be led very easily to
an enervating political despair. The battle is basically lost, or so says the
famed novelist Jonathan Franzen in a New
Yorker essay this week. While we should try to reduce emissions,
he writes, "All-out war on climate change made sense only as long as it
was winnable."
Just like his similar
effort from four years ago, Franzen's argument is sloppy, muddled, and
premised on elementary factual errors. But it makes a good reason to consider
some historical occasions in which human societies have faced and overcome
similarly-long odds in the past—like the French Revolution, when ordinary
people, pulsing with furious revolutionary energy, flung themselves at
seemingly-invulnerable adversaries and won.
First, let's examine Franzen's
case. He says that "consensus among scientists and policy-makers is that
we'll pass this point of no return if the global mean temperature rises by more
than two degrees Celsius" which we will almost certainly blow past, and
hence the game is basically up. He then reasons that climate policy should not
now be too aggressive, because there is often an inherent trade-off between
green developments and environmental preservation. "Our resources aren't
infinite. Even if we invest much of them in a longest-shot gamble, reducing
carbon emissions in the hope that it will save us, it's unwise to invest all of
them," he writes, saying some should be saved for humanitarian aid and
that renewable mega-projects that threaten ecosystems should not be built.
There is just one problem:
Neither premise is true. The science on tipping points is very unsettled, but
as the University of Exeter's Timothy Lenton (perhaps the top climate
researcher on this particular point) explains in a Climatic
Change paper, there are lots of potential tipping points, some are a
lot more sinister than others, they will be reached at different temperatures,
and, while we can't rule out tripping some at under 2 degrees, the likeliest
early tripwire is between 2-4 degrees. Now, that is not at all comforting, but
it means there is no certain climate doomsday point—every tenth of a degree of
warming means worse direct impacts and a greater likelihood of extreme
disaster.
Second, it is simply false to
say there is a trade-off between climate policy and environmental preservation,
because unchecked climate change will obliterate the biosphere. One should
avoid wrecking key ecosystems, but if the energy payoff is sufficiently high,
it still might be worth doing, because if climate change is not stopped the
ecosystem will be wrecked anyway. High levels of warming will do orders of
magnitude more damage to Franzen's beloved bird population than all the
windmills in the world. Climate writer David Roberts carefully
explained this to Franzen back in 2015, but apparently it didn't sink
in. Under the onrushing disaster of climate change, and the towering task of
getting greenhouse gas emissions down in time to avoid existential calamity,
and one can be led very easily to an enervating political despair. The battle
is basically lost, or so says the famed novelist Jonathan Franzen in a New
Yorker essay this week. While we should try to reduce emissions,
he writes, "All-out war on climate change made sense only as long as it
was winnable."
Read full article here.
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