Showing posts with label Sun. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sun. Show all posts

Sunday, 26 January 2014

"The Internet's Own Boy"/"The Rocket" (film)

Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly; Amy Goodman at Sundance (DemocracyNow.org)
 
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Amy Goodman
PARK CITY, Utah - A year after Internet freedom activist Aaron Swartz’s suicide at the age of 26, a film about this remarkable young man has premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.
 
The film, titled “The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz,” directed by Brian Knappenberger, follows the sadly short arc of Swartz’s life. A coalition of Internet activists, technologists, and policy experts are joining together on Feb. 11, 2014 for “The Day We Fight Back.”
 
As they say on their Website, reflecting on the victory against SOPA, “Today we face a different threat, one that undermines the Internet and the notion that any of us live in a genuinely free society: mass surveillance. If Aaron were alive, he’d be on the front lines." Listen
 
(EK) Harvard student downloads academic JSTOR articles and bam!
 
"The Rocket" (Laos) directed by Kim Mordaunt and starring Sitthiphon
Disamoe, Loungnam Kaosainam, Suthep Po-ngam (from Australia)
 
THE ROCKET: A boy who is believed to bring bad luck to everyone around him leads his family and two new friends through Buddhist Laos to find a new home. After a calamity-filled journey through a land scarred by the legacy of American war, to prove he's not bad luck, he builds a rocket to enter the most exciting and dangerous competition of the year: the Rocket Festival.

Wednesday, 13 November 2013

Did climate change cause typhoon? (video)

Ashley Wells, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; Amy Goodman, DemocracyNow.org, 11-13-13
Eye of Typhoon Haiyan (a.k.a. Super Typhoon Yolanda) travels over islands (wiki)
"Listen to the people, not polluters" (DN at the UN Climate Summits)

What would the devas say?
It's 90+ degrees in sunny SoCal as Thanksgiving (a rare Thanksgivukkah) approaches. But the temperature is about to drop and rain is looming by the weekend. My petty chores need doing to contribute greenhouse gases to the global warming problem. Meanwhile, people are dying crushed under flimsy houses demolished by the super storm in the Philippines. Better send a check. More importantly, better address climate chaos and think of a better solution than the "magic of the marketplace" after captitalizing on the sale of "carbon credits" as major polluters, multi-millionaires like Al Gore, and Wall Street dream. We can all go vegetarian, waste less, bike more, plant trees, pre-cycle (buy in a way that minimizes post-consumer waste) and recycle, stop war, promote peace, turn toward sustainable power sources (like free energy), conserve water, collect rainwater, boycott multinational corporations, thwart the NSA and CIA, share, love, meditate, care, go green, vote green, occupy...
 
Science on climate change
Desperate survivors of Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines are struggling to receive aid in the aftermath of the worst storm in recorded history. In Tacloban, a city flattened by the typhoon, survivors marched in a contingent three miles long to seek water and food at the local airport. Eight people died in the province of Leyte when a crowd of thousands stormed a government rice warehouse in search of food. The victims died under a collapsed wall. On Tuesday, Philippines Pres. Benigno Aquino cited a lower death toll for Typhoon Haiyan, saying he believes around 2,500 people were killed. Initial estimates put the toll at around 10,000. More than 670,000 people have been displaced. The United Nations, meanwhile, has launched a $300 million appeal for relief aid. Speaking in Manila, U.N. humanitarian chief Valerie Amos said the Philippines is facing its worst-ever crisis:
"This is such a major calamity for the Philippines, a country which over this year has already seen so many crises, but by all accounts, this one is the most deadly and destructive. While it’s still too early to tell the full scale of the destruction, it’s clear that the needs are huge."
Typhoon a "manifestation of climate change"
Haiyan/Yolanda's eye (wiki)
Appearing with U.N. humanitarian chief Valerie Amos, Philippine Foreign Secretary Albert del Rosario thanked international donors for providing aid [after Yeb Saño declared he would respectfully be going on hunger strike until action is taken by this body of world officials at the U.N. Climate Change Summit]. But he also issued an appeal for action on global warming, saying climate change worsened the typhoon’s scale and strength:
"From the devastation, it is clear, though, that much more aid and assistance will be needed. And we thank the international community for its continued generosity and support. The unprecedented scale and strength of Yolanda [known as Haiyan in the US], a typhoon that occurred at a very late time of the year, is a clear demonstration of the changing weather pattern. Whether the world faces up to it or not, this is a manifestation of climate change." More
Yeb01
An emotional Yeb Saño at U.N. Summit
"Stop this madness!" - Filipino Climate Chief Yeb Saño begins hunger strike fast to protest global inaction on global warming and climate chaos.
"Get it done!": After stirring Durban speech, student Anjali Appadurai initially banned by U.N. in Doha.
A Carbon Tsunami in Doha (Nov. 12, 2013) On the opening day of the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Doha, Poland, the chief climate negotiator from the Philippines gave an emotional appeal to the world to address the climate crisis following...

Climate change denial after typhoon Haiyan

Ashley Wells, Pfc. Sandoval, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; Mitch Jeserich (L&P, KPFA.org)
The most powerful storm in recorded history over the Philippines and Vietnam (wiki)
NAFCON is a national multi-issue alliance of Filipino organizations in the U.S.
 
Aid the Philippines (nafconusa.org)
Some climate deniers have a point. Not all global warming is due to human activity. But some is. We can hardly stand by as the Koch brothers and other corporate elites profit from the status quo.
One famous climate denier, Coast to Coast's host George Noory, recently explained that no one wants to see the environment polluted, but that is different from the climate chaos we are experiencing. No, Noory, it is not.

Is anyone coming to the rescue this time?
Our pollution is exactly the problem: This is how human activity (cars, grossly inefficient gas combustion engines, oil drilling and spilling, military imperialism, nuclear power and accidents, deforestation, coal mining, tailings, mountain top removal, fires, chemical manufacturing...) is adversely affecting climate or general weather patterns. It is making the planet inhospitable. As creatures die off, ecosystems are disrupted (and as ecosystems are disrupted, creatures die off). We are creatures, earthlings. We are doing more to damage the planet and make the climate chaotic and deadly than any other group of inhabitants.

Ordinary sun spots and flares emanate on a cyclical basis, and Earth's atmosphere used to protect earthlings until the corporate complex found it more profitable to deplete.

 
One-on-One with Jane Goodall
Dr. Jane Goodall asks us all to go veg (VT)
Lesser of two evils Al Gore brought attention to the issue with "An Inconvenient Truth."  Sadly, Gore is a billionaire whose family originally made its money from  ranching. Ranching (raising animals for slaughter and human  consumption) is one of the most polluting industries, second only to  automobiles. Gore conveniently left that out of the movie. As Dr. Jane Goodall, famous for her work with primates, has said: Go vegetarian,  and go a long way to saving our environment. That is one thing we can  all do to save the world, while climate deniers keep getting rich by  polluting it more.
Yoigc Sun Salutation (worldiniowa.com)
They fear losing money, no matter what the cost to the rest of us, the 99%. But Gore and the so-called "liberals," who continue Bush-era policies and plans, have a scheme in mind. Climate deniers are right to say that "carbon credits" and creating a magical marketplace for polluters is a joke and a crime. Carbon is not the problem. It is natural and increasing. Let's check methane, which contributes much more to warming and ozone depleting. We ignore real pollutants (cow exhaust, monocrop farming, permafrost thawing, Fukushima spills, fracking, tar sands, deforestation to make way to raise and slaughter cows, pig farming and slurry ponds...) to focus on distractions. Climate deniers falsely claim volcanoes are to blame, so let's just keep running over a billion gas combustion engines daily (in factory machinery, generators, cars, and so on). Help save the world and the animals on it.
(nafconusa.org)