CITIZEN SANE

Organizing Ecosocialists

A farmer stands on her dried rice field in Thanh Hoa province, 200 km (124 miles) south of Hanoi July 8, 2010. Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung has urged provincial authorities in central Vietnam to fight the worst drought in nearly two decades.

From Climate and Capitalism. I’m republishing the whole thing because it’s so important for future generations that people start thinking about this now, and those involved in organizing this want it spread around as much as possible. This movement is not yet big in America like it is in other countries.

Joel Kovel: Organizing the Ecosocialist International Network

Since its formation in 2007, Joel Kovel has been a leading figure in the Ecosocialist International Network. In this letter, Joel discusses where the EIN is going, including plans for forming chapters in the United States and Canada.

Joel’s comments were posted on July 5 in the EIN’s egroup. We encourage readers to join in the discussion of  these issues there: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EI-Network/

I am sorry to take so long in getting this out to you following my return from Detroit and the USSF; and I have appreciated the postings that a number of you have made in the interim. Richard Greeman, who was active in Detroit, has been the latest to do so. I am placing a copy of his letter at the end of this, along with a thread spun off by other members of that list.

Essentially Richard says that the founders of the Ecosocialist International Network and its steering committee have done basically nothing to further the organization, and asks that we do not leave the members of the EI list and the ecosocialist movement in general in the lurch.

I am totally sympathetic to what Richard says and hope to rectify this with the present communication. Here are some thoughts and observations on the matter, all subject to debate and development:

1. There is nothing that has happened over the last decade that has disabused me of the conviction that ecosocialism is the most important idea before humanity and will remain so whether it succeeds or fails in being realized. However if it fails, so do we as a species. There is no need to rehearse once more the reasoning behind this, which I can assume that everyone who reads this shares.

2. Nobody should be thickheaded enough to think that the principles of ecosocialism are transparently known. Indeed, aside from the core principles that capitalism must be overcome and that whatever overcomes it must include an ecocentric ethic, there are, as I see it, only two axiomatic rules for ecosocialism—that it needs to be planetary in scope (ie, the notion of “ecosocialism in one country” is even more absurd than that of socialism in one country); and that it must be created, indeed, at this stage the main task for ecosocialists must be to provide the conditions so that ecosocialism can be built as a freely developing and nonhierarchical international collective.

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Coffee Party USA: Watered Down, Caffeinated Nothingness

I found another one! This one is very long and was meant to be a post for another website, but I thought it was a little too mean in tone, so I deemed it not fit to publish. Well, it’s fit enough for Citizen Sane, so this is its world-wide debut. This article is from some time in March 2010, shortly after the Coffee Party USA organization came out with their “civility pledge” which I thought was just beyond ridiculous. We’re talking about politics here, not Zen.

Dear Coffee Party, USA, there is no point in agreeing just for the sake of agreeing, especially in politics.

My philosophy is that people should fight for what they believe in, especially on the state and local levels, not what someone else tells them to believe in. That’s the reason why I don’t belong to a political party and very rarely join groups. Politics exist for debate and argument.

Sure, some people have to do it. The purpose of agreeing and finding common ground on the federal level is to reach agreements in the Senate and House only for the purpose of getting bills passed. Before that happens, they debate and argue strongly on many issues. (See Congressman Alan Grayson in the video — he is presenting an idea he believes in and wants others to support as is. He is not asking people to water it down and change it so it’s more right-wing). Congressmen and women don’t agree just for the sake of agreeing; they have to do it to get legislation passed, or the country would be at a standstill. That is the theory, at least. In fact, this misguided seeking out of bipartisanship is why the U.S. government has nearly been at a standstill for over a year.

I have heard tea baggers and now Coffee Party USA members complain that our government doesn’t listen to us. Yes, they do listen to us. They run their lives by poll numbers and focus groups. They are aware of protests and phone calls. Their staff tallies them. But it’s like that old saying about praying, (the idea that God always answers prayer, but sometimes he says “no”.) Our government does hear us, and they just often say “No”. That’s not the same as not hearing us. It’s unrealistic to believe that our government in a country with 300 million people should always do exactly what we want. There are 300 million different opinions on things, and that’s how it should be. We do not want to be a country of lemmings, we want to be individuals. That’s the only way political progress is ever made.

Yeah, and . . . . . . ?

For five years, I have been asking people to get so mad they get out in the streets and protest an unjust war. We need millions of people to protest the killing in the Middle East still being done in our names. We still have an unjust war going on, but Americans would rather do this ———— >

Look at how watered down and nearly meaningless the final agreement was at the Coffee Party in San Francisco. What is that sign supposed to mean? That could be a Tea Party sign.

Where politics should really be passionate and full of argument and debate is on the state and local levels, yet this is what the Coffee Party USA seems to want to stop. They want people to reach consensus just to prove how civilized we all are. State and local political organizations are where politics should not be middle of the road, watered-down generalized nothingness. State and local politics should be passionate enough to move people to hold rallies and demonstrate.

Why would anyone want to identify and empathize with the Tea Baggers? Yet, that is exactly what the Coffee Party USA people want us to do. Listen to their Blog Talk Radio show where they point out what we all have in common with [racist homophobic] people who want limited government. It’s downright chilling to hear.

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Blast from the Past on Atheists

Cleaning off my external hard drive tonight, I found the following. I used to get pissed off and write things and not post them anywhere but keep them, just to blow off steam. I have no idea what set me off to write this, but it must have been something I read somewhere online. It’s dated September 6, 2007. Two months later I was in Valladolid and Akumal Bay, Mexico having a great time, so apparently it had no lasting effects . . . . (I really can’t explain why loud, aggressive atheists piss me off so much, but they do. I’m not a religious person myself. I think it’s just the arrogant intolerance, which falls over the cliff into snobbish superiority, which many of the more militant atheists display.)

Maybe I’ll post more things like this as I find them. I have a feeling there are a lot of them discarded on that particular hard drive.

This is just as I wrote it, with only 3 words corrected for spelling!

Dear Militant (liberal) Atheist,

Don’t believe in God? We don’t care. Anymore than we expect you to care if we do. In fact, we do wish you would stop caring.

You militant, obsessive atheists are finally getting on my nerves. I’ve spent the last 3 years online watching your aggressive anti-religion, intolerant movement grow and I’ve have enough of it. I don’t want to hear yet another question, “Why are atheists such jerks lately?” followed by the “terrible childhood” explanation. Or the “it’s our way of fighting back” explanation. Please don’t insult my intelligence. Your complete and utter overreaction to a tiny fraction of the fundamentalist population is mystifying and insulting, if that’s indeed what drove you over the edge. Then again, no one cares how you got this way: bitter, full of rage against religion, obsessed, accusatory, paranoid, angry and intolerant. No one cares how any asshole got that way, they just care that you’re an intolerant asshole and will avoid you. Maybe all the avoidance of you by others “not atheists’ drove you online where you obsess about your atheism hour after hour, day after day, week after week. Really, don’t you have anything else to do? You’re giving liberals a bad name, and that name is BIGOT.

Atheists are always trying to explain their positions in painful, tedious detail. Yawn. Have some self-respect and stop explaining. I don’t care why your psyche is as it is. Most of us just try to do no harm to others after the end result of years of garbage being dumped in our craniums, but we don’t make a religion out of misery and hopelessness and expect everyone else to fall in line.

You say you are for reason and logic, as though you and you alone, as an atheist, are the possessors of reason and logic. What a joke! How reasonable is it of you to spend so much time caring what others think about anything to the degree you do, when it doesn’t affect you one bit? How logical is it of you to spend so much time worrying about what others think when you can’t do anything to change it? Other people, people who believe in something, (whether it be spirits or magic or God or nature or unicorns), don’t care about your self-professed corner on the knowledge market and we really are surprised that you even notice what we’re busy believing in. We’re also nearly too busy actually reading and studying science, philosophy and politics to notice your professions of expertise on our so-called ‘mental problems’.

I’m sorry that you are so lonely and ostracized that you have to join and network with atheist clubs that primarily wallow in their own imagined mental superiority and discuss, ad nauseum, atheists books and websites. Really now, don’t you have better things to do other than to obsess over someone else’s private thoughts? People have a legal and moral right to believe what they want to believe, free of slander, insults and harassment from you.

Get on with your life and stop whining about everyone else. And stop being a bigot. No one cares what you believe or don’t believe. Your obsession about not believing in something is turning you into a big bore. Grow up and try to live among people with diverse thoughts other than those you agree with!

Freediving

The last time I was in Belize we met a freediver, but his limit was about 120 feet. This guy is in another category entirely. There is also a giant sink hole in Belize called The Blue Hole. This is a similar one near the Bahamas. Try not to hold your breath as you watch this.

Guillaume Nery is one of the foremost freedivers in the world. Freediving is the practice of diving into water without an oxygen tank — just holding your breath. Well, Nery decided it would be a splendid idea to do some freediving into Dean’s Blue Hole, west of The Bahamas. It seems Dean’s Blue Hole is the deepest underwater sinkhole in the world, dropping to a depth of 663 feet.

With his girlfriend working the camera, Nery plunged into the sinkhole, then climbed his way out. Nery told The Huffington Post in an email that he never actually reached the bottom — it would be impossible to go that far down without oxygen. But over the course of four afternoons, he and his girlfriend captured these mesmerizing pictures. Nery said, “This movie is an artistic project, a fiction.”

From Opposing Views.

P.S. . . . . .

The Gulf is a Crime Scene

Why aren’t the heads of BP, Transocean and Halliburton on trial for manslaughter or negligent homicide in the deaths of  11 oil rig workers in the Gulf of Mexico in April?  Instead, BP is  threatening journalists via their directives to the  United States Coast Guard with criminal action if they dare to film the oil spill coming ashore.  A foreign oil company telling our Coast Guard what to do?  Yeah…. Only in the Corporate Fossil Fuel States of America.

video from NationalWildlife — May 20, 2010 — National Wildlife Federation’s President and CEO Larry Schweiger testified before the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee May 19, 2010 on what he witnessed while on the front lines of the oil spill response effort.

Avatar Director Helps NASA With Mars Cameras

Science and entertainment are blending again, as James Cameron, director of Avatar, is now working with NASA. He’s been everywhere lately, spreading his message of stopping the rainforest destruction and environmental degradation.  We loved Avatar, and it’s great that he is following it up with lots of interviews explaining the message of the movie and he even knows quite a bit about climate change. (Sigourney Weaver has also done some interviews on the rainforest and ocean.)

Cameron was at last week’s climate rally in Washington, he was on Democracy Now, on other radio and TV talk shows, and now he’s even helping out NASA. They are in development sessions for the new Mars rover, Curiosity, and Cameron will be helping them design the 3D camera.  Here’s the story from Information Week.

James Cameron is working with the space agency to outfit the next-generation rover, Curiosity, with 3D cameras.

NASA is getting help from Hollywood director James Cameron to build 3D cameras for the next Mars rover, Curiosity.The space agency abandoned plans to build cameras with the capability for the rover in 2007 due to budgetary concerns.

That prompted the director ” known for blockbuster films Avatar and Titanic– to step in and personally petitioned the agency to build the cameras, according to NASA. The agency this month said it has delivered the last two of four science cameras — called Mastcams — for the rover without 3D capability.

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Debunking a Non-Scientist Denier Part I & II

From the excellent video series, “Climate Denier Crock of the Week”.

Peter Sinclair writes,

“He’s everywhere on the climate denial circuit.

He’s not a scientist. He’s a classics major and journalist.

How is it that he’s been able to sell himself to climate deniers as their number one spokesman?

First, like any good salesman, Lord Monckton knows his customer.”

There are many others, and most of them are not scientists, they are salesmen, and they work for big energy companies or the GOP, or both.

Here is Part II

Protected: Band of Bastard Brothers

NASA’s New Solar Dynamics Observatory

To announce the new NASA solar dynamics observatory, they released a brand new video of the sun last week.  It’s amazing, but it’s also large and takes quite a while to load, even with a fast connection.

NASA writes:

April 21, 2010: Warning, the images you are about to see could take your breath away.

At a press conference today in Washington DC, researchers unveiled “First Light” images from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, a space telescope designed to study the sun.

“SDO is working beautifully,” reports project scientist Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center. “This is even better than we could have dreamed.”

Launched on February 11th from Cape Canaveral, the observatory has spent the past two months moving into a geosynchronous orbit and activating its instruments. As soon as SDO’s telescope doors opened, the spacecraft began beaming back scenes so beautiful and puzzlingly complex that even seasoned observers were stunned.

For instance, here is one of the first things SDO saw:

“We’ve seen solar prominences before—but never quite like this,” says Alan Title of Lockheed Martin, principal investigator of the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA), the observatory’s main telescope array. “Some of my colleagues say they’ve learned new things about prominences just by watching this one movie.”

SDO is the first mission of NASA’s Living with a Star (LWS) program. The goal of LWS is to understand the sun as a magnetic variable star and to measure its impact on life and society on Earth. Program scientist Lika Guhathakurta of NASA headquarters envisions big things for the new observatory:

“SDO is our ‘Hubble for the sun’,” she says. “It promises to transform solar physics in the same way the Hubble Space Telescope has transformed astronomy and cosmology.”

“No solar telescope has ever come close to the combined spatial, temporal and spectral resolution of SDO,” adds Title. “This is possible because of the combination of 4096 x 4096-pixel CCDs with huge dynamic range and a geosynchronous orbit which allows SDO to observe the sun and communicate with the ground around the clock.”

Read more here.

A complete gallery of SDO’s First Light images and data may be found at http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/Gallery/ SDOFirstLight.html.

Notes from Cochabamba World Climate Summit

“The main enemy of Mother Earth is capitalism.” — Evo Morales

Mining Protests Overshadow World People’s Summit on Climate Change

3-Day Conference Draws Thousands

By Claudia Lopez Pardo, from Solveclimate.com

See live coverage of Cochabamba here–until it’s over on Earth Day, April 22nd

Bolivian President Evo Morales launched the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth on Tuesday, welcoming over 10,000 people from 135 countries and dozens of social organizations to what he declared to be an alternative to the United Nations climate talks.

Something Strange in the Neighborhood

An unknown object in the galaxy M82 has started sending out radio waves.  The emission does not look like anything seen anywhere in the universe before.   It does not fit the pattern of radio emissions from a supernova, according to the Coast to Coast radio show.  Those usually get brighter over a few weeks and then fade away over months, the spectrum of the waves changing all the while, which this one doesn’t do.  So this is something completely unknown and as yet a mystery.

“The co-discoverer of these radio waves  Tom Muxlow of Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics www.jodrellbank.manchester.ac.uk/ in the UK exclaims ”We don’t know what it is,”   The interesting aspect of this story is the radio waves seem to be a very dense object that does not fit the typical criteria for a black hole , or a micro-quasar . The radio waves were somewhat found accidentally  using the MERLIN network of radio telescopes in the UK. The possibilities are endless it may turn out to be a galactic echo or it may turn out to be a massive thriving civilization that finally found us and sent a virtual space text message we found unintentionally.”

NowPublic.com

Flameout & Obama at the Kennedy Space Center

Aren’t you glad we have an atmosphere?

This meteorite was seen in Wisconsin on April 14th, 2010. This video was taken by a dashcam on a police car.

Today, President Obama announced the end to the space program as we know it, and the beginning of a “new one”. I’d prefer new shuttles with bigger windows, but that is not to be. Obama spoke at Kennedy Space Center in Florida to “discuss the Administration’s goal to seek new frontiers for human space flight. The President declared that he is “100 percent committed to the mission of NASA and its future,” and laid out steps and investments that the Administration is making towards space exploration.” Older astronauts were none too happy with Obama prior to this speech. They thought he was giving up on the space program, and it sounds like he’s not going to do that at all. But landing on an asteroid is a priority? We should be building a base on the moon and going from there. I’m not sure what throwing a few billion $$$ on an asteroid landing is going to accomplish. I also don’t think that leaving spacecraft building and flying up to private corporations is a great idea.

This is from WhiteHouse.gov:

[President Obama] announced a $6 billion increase in NASA’s budget over the next five years, focusing on making cuts elsewhere as the government instituted a freeze on discretionary spending. The President said that this investment will increase exploration of the solar system and also Earth-based observations that will increase our understanding of the world and its climate in order to protect the environment for future generations.

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Regarding Mister Haubrich

How ironic that the Big Hypocrite doesn’t like the truth, when it was he that initially wrote “opinion” and lies about me, and I then decided to defend myself. Fortunately I have the truth on my side.

Originally, the Big Hypocrite told his friends to go after me, and they did. Now he’s continuing to have others try to shut down my freedom of speech. That’s what this is — freedom of speech. The defense of my writing is the truth. The First Amendment applies to me and my blogs, all of them. The following are facts. Since he lied about me on two blogs (that I’m aware of — probably more), it’s perfectly within my legal and moral rights to set the record straight via my own blogs. (Mister Haubrich, on the other hand, was writing lies.)

I have no motivation to invent things or make things up. The truth is what the Big Hypocrite, the militant Minnesota atheist (who wrote he wanted to convert people to atheism), mister iwannabeawriter, does NOT have. If a person attacks me online or anywhere with lies, I WILL SET THE RECORD STRAIGHT. That’s what this is, and what all my communications about Mister Haubrich have been to date. The following is 100% the truth. I write it to set the record straight, defend myself, and make sure people know the facts, for the sole purpose of negating the lies written about me by Mister Haubrich and his gang of Minnesota Atheist friends. Got it?

1) Mister Haubrich (of Minneapolis) sexually molested his own sister, starting when she was 11 years old. He told me this during our relationship as fact.

2) The sexual abuse lasted until he left home for college, or for several years. He told me this during our relationship as fact.

3) Mister Haubrich told me as fact that he would have liked to have had a sexual relationship with his other sisters too, had they been willing, because he had “no taboos”. He told me he had shared this information with his brothers, who he said agreed with him that incest was perfectly acceptable. In his mind, this justified it.

(That is exactly what he told me.)

HAARP on Coast to Coast

I heard this interview on Coast to Coast radio a few nights ago and now that it’s on Youtube everyone can hear it.  The government program HAARP  is truly a frightening concept,  and hardly anyone is aware of what our government is really doing with this technology. Listen to this interview with Dr. Nick Begich, a very sane man, and find out.

“Appearing for the full 4 hour show, lecturer on new technologies, health and earth science-related issues, Dr. Nick Begich, discussed the latest updates on HAARP technology, as well as the rapid advances in mind effects and enhancing ESP potentials. The HAARP facility in Alaska, covering many acres of land, has 180 72 ft.-tall steel antennas that are fed radio frequency energy that is concentrated and manipulated to “literally couple with the ionosphere or magnetic field lines surrounding the Earth,” he explained.”

Part 3

There are several more installments.  You can find all the rest of it here.

To Whom it Concerns

tick . . . tick . . . tick . . . tick . . . tick. . . .

“If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.”

– Kahlil Gibran

More to come . . . .