“Vietnamese authorities teamed up with TRAFFIC to tackle destructive illegal trade of African timber species
To safeguard the sustainability of supply in African tropical timber species, TRAFFIC and Vietnam Administration of Forestry (VNFOREST) provided Viet Nam’s Customs and Forest Protection officials with the most up-to-date information and identification skills through a series of training sessions and a comprehensive guidance manual.”
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And so it begins:
“Iraq's extreme heat and water shortages - BBC News”
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“Boy sure is infuriating watching the most powerful people in the world pretend they can do nothing about anything”
[The people they gave all the money to are actually the most powerful and they do whatever they want]
2017-08-01 152aaa
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“There are so many reasons this is a major disaster.
The loss of an enormous area of albedo guarantees more warming.
Entire down stream cultures lived on the melt waters from these glaciers. Think about those new refugees and remember we will all be those people sooner than much later.”
“World's highest ski resort a Bolivian memory”
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“Excerpt from "It's Really Weird How Little We Talk About Humanity's Imminent Doom":
People bicker and argue about global warming and what should be done about it and if it even exists, but climate change is only one of the many ways our biosphere is moving toward death. There's also been a shocking loss of two-thirds of Earth's wildlife in the last 50 years, ecosystems dying off, forests disappearing, soil becoming rapidly less fertile, mass extinctions, oceans gasping for oxygen and becoming lifeless deserts while continents of plastic form in their waters, and the aforementioned insect apocalypse. The way the debate fixates solely on temperature and carbon levels is like if someone had stage four cancer throughout their body and they were in a coma and their vital signs were dropping and the doctor said death is imminent, and everyone was stuck on arguing over whether or not low blood pressure is necessarily a bad thing.
And nothing's being done about global warming anyway. Conspiracy types have been claiming for decades that it's a hoax designed to advance this or that agenda, and during that time the only thing that's advanced is the temperature of the planet and the ecocidal capitalist systems responsible for it. The 2021 UN Climate Change Conference has seen world leaders issue a non-binding pledge to achieve carbon neutrality “by or around mid-century” while taking naps and tossing coins into Rome's Trevi Fountain for "luck" in addressing the issue they could all solve quickly if they actually wanted to. "Carbon neutrality" is itself a highly misleading and potentially completely worthless neoliberal sham designed to allow the continuation of carbon output but attempting to fix it with more consumption.
Meanwhile methane—a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon in the short term—has started hemorrhaging into the atmosphere from thawing arctic permafrost, and no one really knows what to do about it. This, like the albedo effect of polar ice loss and numerous other self-reinforcing warming effects that have been unlocking in recent years, can potentially cause the Earth to continue warming all on its own regardless of future human behavior.
That's all on top of the western empire ramping up world-threatening aggressions against both nuclear-armed Russia and nuclear-armed China simultaneously, a multi-front cold war the likes of which we've never seen before and which is only just barely getting started. And if we don't wipe ourselves out by climate collapse or nuclear war, we could still easily do it fairly soon with weaponized AI.
So our species is facing existential threats on myriad fronts which could easily lead to horrifying extinction-level events that we could easily see unfold in our own lifetimes.
And it's just so very strange how we don't talk about that more.”
[ps I haven’t “given up” I combat invasive plants to help restore ecosystems]
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“I think the defining moment will come at the end of the COP26 conference. When the world sees how badly our governments have failed us. And more people understand there is no cavalry riding to our rescue. This will be a historic moment for us all.
When more of the world’s citizens wake up to the fact that the unprecedented floods, fires and crop failures are only going to get worse. That the increasingly dangerous weather patterns are only going to spiral. Only then will people rise up, take charge and make.”
Rupert Read is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, an author, a blogger and a climate and environmental campaigner. He is a renowned Wittgensteinian scholar, with major research interests in political and environmental philosophy.
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New Book: “Publicly Speak Ecology”
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“Vapor Storms Are Threatening People and Property
More moisture in a warmer atmosphere is fueling intense hurricanes and flooding rains”
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“Stop funding Israeli War Crimes, No $ for the Iron Dome”
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“An arrogant person considers himself perfect. This is the chief harm of arrogance. It interferes with a person’s main task in life – becoming a better person.” Leo Tolstoy
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Wall Street won the Virginia Governors Race regardless of who won:
“The Republican who just won in Virginia was an executive at the Carlyle Group – a private equity firm that has laid off thousands of unionized workers at the firms it acquires. But the Democrats couldn’t attack him on it. Because the Democratic nominee was a Carlyle investor.”
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“To the financial sector,
the most important privatization is that of money creation. The aim is for economies to become dependent on bank credit rather than government spending to provide the money and credit needed to grow. This dream was realized during Bill Clinton’s administration, which ended the 1990s by running a budget surplus – that is, by taxing more out of the than spending into it. The money supply grew solely by expanding the economy’s debt overhead, not by government money creation.”
Excerpt From: Michael Hudson. “Killing the Host.”
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Heresy:
“If I was the Democratic Party I would simply pass the bills that are wildly popular and will improve folks lives and then run on them the next election.”
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“Hanford nuclear site’s contamination, growing risks to entire Northwest region detailed in new journal article”
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“Sir David Attenborough: Climate change 'our greatest threat'”
"Right now, we are facing a man-made disaster of global scale," said Sir David Attenborough. "Our greatest threat in thousands of years. Climate change. If we don't take action, the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon."
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“Sea ice loss forces polar bears to inbreed”
"Sea ice reduction in the Arctic caused by global warming diminishes the genetic diversity of polar bears according to a new study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. By isolating polar bear groups from one another sea ice melting forces the bears to inbreed."
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Democrats:
“When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called “The People’s Stick”. Mikhail Bakunin
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“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: if we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. The bamboozle has capture us. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” Carl Sagan
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“Why public banking is a step toward revolutionizing our economy”
“The public banking movement is creating an opening wedge for the transfer of our financial system from private to public control.”
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Bulgarian Citizens are being roasted alive:
“Incredible heat today in Bulgaria. With an astonishing temperature of at 32.4C Veliko Tarnovo,the country had its hottest November day on records,beating the 32.1C of Gorna Orahovitsa set on 1 Nov 1926. Warm also in the capital Sofia (586m) with 25.8C.”
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Ron Lester Whyte
“This twitter interaction perfectly captures my problems with Michael Mann...”
Budda TheHun:
“Ask Michael Mann about the Arctic Methane “Bomb”. It won’t happen if we do something serious now. Doomism is as bad as denialism.”
Neil Salter:
“Doomism is very different to applying the precautionary principle, and wanting the serious action that may actually be vital. At the moment all tat is being offered is incrementalism, assumptions of linear change, and delay. Delay’ism’ is enabling dangerous business as usual.”
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“Republicans are not afraid of critical race theory. They don’t even know what it is. They’re afraid of theories critical of racists. They know who they are.”
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$6,472,200,000,000 – That’s how much we can seize from the billionaire class…without even reducing the number of billionaires.
That could entirely eradicate world hunger for 216 years.
1/20th of it would halt climate change by 2030.
Oh, and remember, this doesn’t even take a PENNY from people with ‘only’ 1B.
Just spent a while with a spreadsheet and the Forbes 2019 rich list, thought I’d share.”
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House Ways & Means Committee supported the Tax Exempt Securities Loop Hole for the Rich
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“In the Preamble of the United States’ Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson states that our Rights to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness can not be taken or given away. The arrangement of these words, as expressed, were not written haphazardly. They represent our natural human rights in perfect prioritized order. Life comes before Liberty and Liberty before our Pursuit of Happiness. This deliberate thoughtful sequence of words clearly describes that the right to be free from unnecessary and avoidable harmful exploitation is a higher moral principle than another’s freedom to exploit for personal gain.
When we earnestly strive to learn what is truly important in life, when we understand the difference between what is essential to life and what merely makes us happy, our intuition tells us that personal growth and fulfillment are more essential to a meaningful life than the addictive and often exploitative pursuit of excessive wealth and luxury.
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“Wall Street has turned the economy into a giant asset-stripping scheme, one whose purpose is to suck the last bits of meat from the carcass of the middle class.” Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
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“'Very difficult' to hit climate goals - UN chief”
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“Of all the meetings that could’ve been zoom meetings, you’d think a climate conference would be first on the list”
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“Methane and other Ticking Time-Bombs in the Arctic: Official COP26 Glasgow Scotland Press Conference”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPkb4GxetvY
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