Global climate talks are aimed at keeping the temperature rise below 3.6 degrees F compared with pre-industrial levels. The IEA found the world is on track for an increase of from 6.5-9.5 degrees F.
“Climate change has quite frankly slipped to the back burner of policy priorities. But the problem is not going away – quite the opposite,” said IEA Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven.
As Bradley Manning Trial Begins, Press Predictably Misses the Point [Rolling Stone]
Yes, Manning went beyond even that. One can definitely quibble about the volume of the material he released and the manner in which he released it. And I get that military secrets should, in a properly functioning society, be kept secret.
But when military secrets cross the line into atrocities, the act of keeping these secrets secret ceases to have much meaning.
The issues to be debated at this trial are massive in scope. They’re about the character of the society we’ve all created, not the state of mind of one troubled Army private. If anyone tries to tell you anything else, he’s selling you something.
How to destroy the future [Chomsky] Predictably wandering off-topic to the evils of US foreign policy
Breed insects to improve human food security: UN report [The Guardian]
The best way to feed the 9 billion people expected to be alive by 2050 could be to rear billions of common houseflies on a diet of human faeces and abattoir blood and grind them up to use as animal feed, a UN report published on Monday suggests.
Why hierarchy creates a destructive force within the human psyche (by dr. Robert Sapolsky)
Edward Snowden: A libertarian hero [Salon] Doom because apparently the only people willing to stand up for freedom are those that have a worldview so completely fucked that they would ultimately make things worse. Snowden believed the capitalist fairy tale that Hong Kong is a near utopia, and then failed to note that it has an extradition agreement with the US; it will be interesting to see how that turns out for him. He also employs that typically Randian definition of “self-interest” which is supposed to be free of empathy (if we look to Rand herself to define it) yet seems to mean exactly empathy the way it is employed by most libertarians. He blames the government solely for the violations of our privacy and yet fails to note that the work is being carried out by private subcontractors like the one he works for, and apparently he has no problem with the private corporations that collected the information in the first place. If only he had included a 70-page speech on the ultimate triumph of the “ideal man”. In short, if this guy represents the heroes that have come to save us, we will be descending into a libertarian utopia that will make Orwell’s 1984 look merciful. Still, its nice that someone did something.
Edit: Now it turns out he’s discovered that he may be better off in Iceland. Hopefully, the ideological significance of that will sift through the layers of propaganda in his head and he can start down the road of being a better person.
Why The NSA’s Secret Online Surveillance Should Scare You [ThinkProgress] …and why corporate online surveillance should scare you, too. The government ultimately serves the corporations and the rich, not the other way around. Furthermore, certain people presume that — without directly employing the tools of violence — a corporation cannot punish you. I can only suggest that you consider that the corporations are using the tools of violence against you, but do so by proxy so as to appear blameless. If you privatize everything, they’ll keep doing the same shit, just blame their “security” contractor instead of the government.
Orwell vs Huxley [recombinantrecords.net] Why not both?
