Category: Future Trends
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.
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.
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.
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.
Steve Jobs has decided his new mission in life is to invent things he doesn’t really know the use for. So get used to more Apple junk polluting the world, soon to fill up more landfills than the original Lisa.
With the most unfortunate of names, the iPad has super-excited geeky collectors all around the world. Don’t get me wrong, I have a Mac and two iPods and I totally love them, but that’s because they are useful and help me do things. This is the first time I have ever written anything critical about an Apple product, and that’s only because this one is so darned useless. You can’t even expand it, or plug anything into it, or open two applications at the same time. What’s the point? My biggest iPod has more memory than this thing, at a fraction of the price. I can’t imagine any thing I would need an iPad for. I’m not the only one. This is from TechCrunch.
I pick the rock, because it’s heavy enough to hold something down, like a tablecloth, on a windy day. That’s twice as useful as an iPad.