A recent article in the New York Timesconfirms Barack Obama's personal involvement in the use of drones to assassinate persons in Pakistan and elsewhere:
"Mr. Obama has placed himself at the helm of a top secret “nominations” process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical. He had vowed to align the fight against Al Qaeda with American values; the chart, introducing people whose deaths he might soon be asked to order, underscored just what a moral and legal conundrum this could be."
I realize that Barack Obama's unrelenting series of drone assassinations is an intensely inconvenient topic for many of the people who voted for him. I understand this reluctance to consider this topic because I too voted for Barack Obama. Back in 2008, I heard Obama repeatedly promise that he would quickly end American involvement in Afghanistan.
This should be an easy first step toward a more sane and sustainable way of life: Stop using bottled drinking water and convert to tap water. Here are a bunch of good reasons in an infographic. These numbers are staggering.
So far we’ve raised the temperature of the earth about one degree Celsius, and two decades ago it was hard to believe this would be enough to cause huge damage. But it was. We’ve clearly come out of the Holocene and into something else. Forty percent of the summer sea ice in the Arctic is gone; the ocean is 30 percent more acidic. There’s nothing theoretical about any of this any more. Since warm air holds more water vapor than cold, the atmosphere is about 4 percent wetter than it used to be, which has loaded the dice for drought and flood. In my home country, 2011 smashed the record for multibillion-dollar weather disasters—and we were hit nowhere near as badly as some. Thailand’s record flooding late in the year did damage equivalent to 18 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP). That’s almost unbelievable. But it’s not just scientists who have been warning us. Insurance companies—the people in our economy who we ask to analyze risk—have been bellowing in their quiet, actuarial way for years. Here’s Munich Re, the world’s largest insurer, in their 2010 annual report: “The reinsurer has built up the world’s most comprehensive natural catastrophe database, which shows a marked increase in the number of weather-related events. For instance, globally, loss-related floods have more than tripled since 1980, and windstorm natural catastrophes more than doubled, with particularly heavy losses from Atlantic hurricanes. This rise cannot be explained without global warming.”
I'm getting really tired of hearing people talk the talk, without walking the walk. All of us do it, me included (what else can you say when I take a long airplane trip to vacation in San Francisco, despite the fact that I often ride a bicycle to work?). In the meantime, we are living in the only industrialized country that is still debating whether burning fossil fuels is heating up the planet. I'm tired of people driving to Earth Day in big SUVs. I'm tired of the fact that most of us who whine about sustainability (including me) live comparable lifestyles to those who downplay the importance of such issues.
And how is THIS for a sobering talk?
The speaker is Dr. Peter Raven who, in a gentle voice, is reading the riot act to the audience (his speech "Saving Ourselves" runs from 5:55 to 29:00). Raven is a courageous speaker who is not afraid to tie the exhaustion of natural resources to the exploding number of human beings on planet Earth. His facts and figures are not in dispute by any thinking person.
[At the 29:00 mark, Raven describes an attempt to reclaim a precious preserve of extremely bio-diverse land in Costa Rica--this video was created at a fundraiser for that effort, titled the "Children's Eternal Rainforest."]
As Bill McKibben says, it's time to severely devalue mere talk and to start making things really happen. The path is going to require some conscious change at the highest levels, because we cannot depend on ourselves to keep making the right decisions--we don't have that kind of willpower. We don't yet know exactly where we are headed, but we do know that we need to steer sharply away from fossil fuels. We also have some reason to believe that this future devoid of fossil fuels could be an opportunity as much as it is a crisis--see this talk by Amory Lovins, who argues that it is time to "Reinvent Fire."
I don't write them; I merely collect them. There's no particular topic. These are some of the quotes I've enjoyed and collected over the past couple of months:
"I like rice. Rice is great if you're hungry and want 2000 of something."
Mitch Hedberg (1968 - 2005)
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it."
Upton Sinclair (1878 - 1968)
“Tell people there’s an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure.”
George Carlin
“First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. Then they build monuments to you.”
— Nicholas Klein
Trade Union Address for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, 1918
"A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking."
Jerry Seinfeld (1954 - )
"There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all."
Peter Drucker (1909 - 2005)
"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."
John Steinbeck
"If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us."
Hermann Hesse (1877 - 1962)
"Be careful who you pick as your enemies as you have a tendency to become like them".
Bill Russell/Boston Celtics
"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them."
Ray Bradbury
“The world is a dangerous place. Not because of the people who are evil; but because of the people who don't do anything about it.”
Albert Einstein
“We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.”
Ben Franklin
"I live on Earth at present, and I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an
evolutionary process — an integral function of the universe."
---Buckminster Fuller
“Religion. It's given people hope in a world torn apart by religion.”
― Jon Stewart
"Freedom isn't free. It shouldn't be a bragging point that "Oh, I don't get involved in politics," as if that makes you somehow cleaner. No, that makes you derelict of duty in a republic. Liar s and panderers The government would have a much harder time of it if so many people didn't insist on their right to remain ignorant and blindly agreeable."
Bill Maher
"We can do nothing of good in the way of regulating and supervising these corporations until we fix clearly in our minds that we are not attacking the corporations, but endeavoring to do away with any evil in them. We are not hostile to them; we are merely determined that they shall be so handled as to subserve the public good. We draw the line against misconduct, not against wealth."
Teddy Roosevelt
"It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake." Frederick Douglass
"Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so."
Gore Vidal (1925 - )
"You probably wouldn't worry about what people think of you if you could know how seldom they do."
Olin Miller
“Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders…and millions have been killed because of this obedience…Our problem is that people are obedient allover the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves… (and) the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.”
― Howard Zinn
"That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."
Christopher Hitchens.
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