Katie Porter highlights the benefits of a Civilian Climate Corps

The Hill

Published on Jul 24, 2021

Rep. Katie Porter spoke about the benefits of a Civilian Climate Corps during a House hearing on the proposed program.

Life & Work of Susan Sontag

RT America

Published on Jul 24, 2021

On the show this week, Chris Hedges discusses the writer and intellectual Susan Sontag with her biographer Benjamin Moser.

Susan Sontag, who wrote on art, feminism, politics, celebrity, style, homosexuality, illness, fascism and even war, was that rare species in American society—an intellectual celebrity. She traveled to Cuba as a naïve political pilgrim, North Vietnam during the war, now older and more skeptical, and was in in Germany when the Berlin Wall was breached and eradicated as a barrier between East and West Germany. She was in Sarajevo when the city was being hit with hundreds of shells a day and under constant sniper fire by the besieging Bosnian Serbs. An average of ten people were killed in Sarajevo every day. She achieved international notoriety. She lived an outward life of glamor and even, at the end, opulence. But she was tortured by insecurity, plagued by a series of failed love affairs, and struggles with her own sexuality that at once animated and undermined her honesty and power as a writer. She could be cruel and vicious to her closest friends, was endowed with a haughty and suffocating arrogance, which she wielded with acerbic precision, and, despite her undeniable intellectual prowess, never achieved the depth and erudition of one of the few intellectuals she admired, Hannah Arendt.

Sontag, in many ways, embodies an age now lost, one where ideas still mattered. She understood the vital importance of culture, especially in a county descending into banality and unbridled consumerism, and she fought with unmatched ferocity to protect it. She understood that a love of books, which impart the ideas, wisdom, pathos, regrets, tragedies and glories of the past, keeps us moored and rooted in a world that is swiftly forgetting where it came from, how it got here and where it is going. Benjamin Moser’s majestic biography of Sontag does what all great biographies do, it captures not only the life of an individual in unsparing honesty, but sets this life in a social, historical and culture context, illuminating one of the crucial turning points in American history

Benjamin Moser’s new biography is Sontag: Her Life and Work.

Watch Full Episode on Portable.TV https://www.portable.tv/series/oncontact

America’s Book Of Secrets: Scientists Discover the Cause of the Deadly Spanish Flu (S4) | History –

HISTORY

Published on Jul 24, 2021

In 1997 Dr.Johan Hultin excavated an indigenous village graveyard in hopes to find the cause of the Spanish flu but found much more, in this clip from Season 4, “Deadly Pandemics.”

Tlaib: Climate Corps would connect environmental justice with economic and racial justice

The Hill

Published on Jul 24, 2021

Rep. Rashida Tlaib spoke about the Civilian Climate Corps during a House hearing on the program.

See related:

• The Next Frontier of Environmental Justice: Place-Making for Black History
• Harvard Extension School: Welcome from the Deans – Virtual Open House 2022

Rhodes Scholar Climate Workshop, 23 April 2017 – the obvious question we are all avoiding concerning Carbon Capture & Storage (CCS)

Rhodes Trust – May 12, 2017

Climate experts now affirm that as a human community we need to devise means to sequester carbon from the atmosphere and fix it permanently in terrestrial forms. At the same time they acknowledge that they do not know how we — as a human community — are going to accomplish this, and we are beginning risky and costly experimentation with various hi-technology approaches to address carbon capture and storage (CCS).

In honor of “Earth Day” in 2017 Rhodes Scholars held a 2-day workshop (April 22 and 23rd) at Rhodes House in Oxford to address some of these issues.  On Sunday, April 23rd — during the concluding panel of the workshop that was considering possible solutions to the climate crisis — one workshop participant stood up to raise the obvious question about what the CCS discussion continues to ignore — at the peril of the survival of future human society.

He emphasized that the tragedy is we are choosing, effectively, to ignore the only proven system for CCS that has stood the test of time over the entire history of Earth’s ecosystem.  Biosequestration has proved itself to be the most reliable, replicable, cost-effective and enduring system of CCS on the face of the Earth.

Yet, instead of embracing, enhancing and expanding this approach to effective CCS the human community is squandering its last remaining stores of captured terrestrial carbon in warfare, extraction and accelerated combustion of stored carbon in a futile attempt to fuel imaginary trajectories of “continuous growth” economics.

At the same time billionaires who have accumulated their unprecedented wealth in ever more desperate strategies to monopolize remaining stores of fossilized carbon are engaged in competitive struggles to leave the Earth system entirely while they fantasize about finding “topsoil” and establishing agriculture in extra-terrestrial experiments of one kind or another.  (See, for example: The Fatal Consequences of a Misplaced Metaphor: The “Agricultural Industry” & The Delusion of Infinite Growth in A Finite Ecosystem )

See The Rhodes Trust record of conference proceedings:

• Climate Change Workshop 2017

and related:

• “Just take the case of agriculture…
• ”The Tragedy is that “We treat soil like dirt” — Topsoil, Climate Change and the Collapse of Civilizations
• No Planet B. Only One Earth. Only One Chance: “Shelter in Place” Gives New Urgency to Sustainability
• Soils, Agriculture, Carbon Sequestration and Human Survival
  and
• The Future of Food, Food Systems and the Human Prospect in a Post-COVID World
• Part 1 – Got a Carbon Problem? Fix it ! Part 1 – Some Prophetic & Enduring Testimony
• Part 2 – Got a Carbon Problem? Fix it ! Part 2 – Global Crisis & Localized Responses
• Part 3 – Got a Carbon Problem? Fix it ! Growing Soil to Save the Human Prospect
• Restorative Development: Sustainable Agriculture and the Climate Crisis
• The Man With A Plan… (…and his enduring challenge to Rhodes Scholars and world leaders today)
• Got a Carbon Problem? Fix it ! Part 1 – Some Prophetic & Enduring Testimony

Rethinking CCS with the only reliably proven technology available in the history of the Earth system – biosequestration

Rhodes Trust – May 12, 2017

See related:

and:

• “Just take the case of agriculture…”

Pegasus: the spyware technology that threatens democracy

The Guardian– Jul 19, 2021

Pegasus spyware is capable of bypassing your phone’s security and gaining complete access to your device – including emails, messages, GPS location, photos, video, and your phone’s microphone. A Guardian investigation can now reveal widespread abuse of the Pegasus technology by government clients around the world who purchased the spyware from its Israeli manufacturer — the NSO Group. People who were selected as possible targets include journalists, lawyers and human rights defenders.

Taliban recaptures lands as US leaves | Will Vietnam fate repeat?

RT– Jul 10, 2021

4.35M subscribers

The Taliban has been making further territorial gains in Afghanistan as America pulls all its troops out of the country prompting echoes of an earlier conflict in which they were involved

Abrupt Climate System Change Mayhem | Climate Change

Paul Beckwith– Jul 18, 2021

Abrupt Climate System Change Mayhem

Temperatures in Lytton, BC set new consecutive records recently on a Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and then on Thursday wildfires burned the town to the ground. Torrential rains leading to swollen rivers and flooding just devastated many towns in Europe. Weather extremes are wreaking havoc around the planet. No place is spared. Why?

Two Basic Facts:
1) For each 1 degree C rise in temperature, the air can hold 7% more water vapour. This results in the supercharging of storm intensities.

2) The Jet Streams which guide weather patterns are slowing as the Arctic warms, making them wavier in the North-South direction. This increases the intensity, duration, and frequency of extreme weather events around the planet. It also causes them to occur where they never did before.

What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic. It’s not like Las Vegas. Polar changes have rewired the behaviour of the jet streams.

Weather wilding, weirding, and whiplashing is wreaking havoc on our society and imperilling our ability to grow food.

It won’t end well; it is getting uglier and uglier at an accelerated pace.

What can we do??

Part 2:

The 10-day international effort to save monarch butterflies

CBC News: The National – Jul 23, 2021

Monarch butterfly populations have declined over the decades, so a 10-day international effort is underway to monitor the pollinators in their habitat at every stage of life to determine what areas need protection. Watch The National live on YouTube Sunday-Friday at 9 p.m. ET