Photo from the anarchist bloc in today’s protest of teachers in Athens, Greece.
Scientists are warning the planet has now reached a grim climate milestone not seen for two or three million years. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says the amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has topped 400 parts per million. The 400 ppm threshold has been an important marker in U.N. climate change negotiations, widely recognized as a dangerous level that could drastically worsen human-caused global warming. We speak to leading climate scientist Michael Mann, distinguished professor of meteorology at Penn State University and author of the recent book, “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines.” Mann warns that, “We have to go several million years back in time to find a point in Earth’s history where CO2 was as high as it is now. … If we continue to burn fossil fuels at accelerating rates, if we continue with business as usual we will cross the 450 parts per million limit in a matter of maybe a couple of decades. With that amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, we commit to what could truly be described as dangerous and irreversible changes in our climate.”
What does economic growth actually mean? It means more consumption – and consumption of a specific kind: more consumption of goods and services that are exchanged for money. That means that if people stop caring for their own children and instead pay for childcare, the economy grows. The same if people stop cooking for themselves and purchase restaurant takeaways instead.
Economists say this is a good thing. After all, you wouldn’t pay for childcare or takeaway food if it weren’t of benefit to you, right? So, the more things people are paying for, the more benefits are being had. Besides, it is more efficient for one daycare centre to handle 30 children than for each family to do it themselves. That’s why we are all so much richer, happier and less busy than we were a generation ago. Right?
— Charles Eisenstein (via ieatsacredcows)
Iceland may just have given WikiLeaks & Julian Assange a much needed and overdue boost.
The supreme court of Iceland passed a ruling on April 24, 2013 ordering Valitor – a.k.a Visa Iceland – to resume processing online donations to WikiLeaks within two weeks. And if they don’t follow through, the judge will hold them to it by charging Valitor a nice daily fine of $6,830 until it complies.
It’s time to send money and rejuvenate the spirit of transparency that so captivated us all when WikiLeaks first brought all the dirty secret-dealing to light. And by the end of 2013, let’s raise again a unified and unstoppable global rallying cry for full-transparency and freedom of expression … this dream must not die!
Three quarters of all the acts which are brought before our courts every year have their origin, either directly or indirectly in the present disorganized state of society with regard to the production and distribution of wealth, not in perversity of human nature. As to the relatively few anti-social deeds which result from anti-social inclinations of separate individuals, it is not by the prisons, nor even by the resorting to the hangmen, that we can diminish their numbers. By our prisons, we merely multiply them, render them worse. By our detectives, our “price of blood,” our executions, and our jails, we spread in society such a terrible flow of basest passions and habits, that he who should realize the effects of these institutions to their fullest extent would be frightened by what society is doing under the pretext of morality. We must search for other remedies, and the remedies have been indicated long since.
— Peter Kropotkin, Anarchist Communism: It’s basis and principles (via radicalproblems)
(via antidelusions)
© Heinrich Hoffmann, late 1920s, Hitler posing to a recording of one of his speeches
Adolf Hitler (1889–1945), leader of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), strikes a pose for photographer Heinrich Hoffmann whilst listening to a recording of his own speeches. These photographs taken reveal how Adolf Hitler rehearsed his hand gestures for his public speeches. He used to ask Hoffmann to take pictures of these so he could see what he would look like to the German people, as one of Hitler’s greatest and most well-known skills was his public speaking, which he used to his advantage to emphasise his notion of a “great national revival” of Germany.
Once he saw them, he would vet the pictures and decide whether to incorporate the various animated movements in his engagements. Hitler later banned them from being published for being “beneath one’s dignity”. But the photos, which were never intended to be seen, survived the war. The vetoed photos were stored in Hoffmann’s studio until his arrest at the end of the war, whereupon they disappeared into various archives.
They were later published in his little-known memoir, “Hitler Was My Friend”, in the 1950s and have now been released in English to be seen by the general public. They capture the meticulous training Hitler undertook to perfect his famous speeches, and give a rare insight into his vanity and controlling personality. (more photos and info here: +, +, +)
(via Reuters’ Photographers Blog)
“Atika, 10, woke up early one morning in August 2008 and was sent by her mother to buy a few items from a nearby shop. She returned and told her mother she would prepare tea for her father before quickly going to use a communal toilet close to her house. She never returned.
Ambika was a feisty 15-year-old high school student who took wrestling classes. Her mother returned home from work late in the night on October 10, 2010. She woke up the next morning and found her daughter missing.
Atika and Ambika are among the thousands of children who go missing from India’s streets, schools and homes every year.
Following the case of a 5-year-old girl in Delhi who went missing and was then allegedly raped by a neighbor, I chose to find out what happens to girls who go missing and the struggles their parents go through to find them.
According to a report by Delhi-based child rights NGO Bachpan Bachao Andolan, from January 1, 2013-April 20, 2013 there has been approximately 680 cases of missing children in Delhi, 65 percent of whom are girls. In most cases girls are either forced into the sex trade or trafficked to placement agencies to work as domestic workers.
For four days, I met parents of girls who had gone missing. Every story was different, every story was equally sad. I spent hours with them, listening to their harrowing tales, understanding the grief and misery these families were going through. Only then did I turn my camera on to take pictures. Despite retelling their stories again and again over many years to hundreds of people, the mothers I met still cried their eyes out for their missing daughters when they spoke to me.
For four days, I met parents of girls who had gone missing. Every story was different, every story was equally sad. I spent hours with them, listening to their harrowing tales, understanding the grief and misery these families were going through. Only then did I turn my camera on to take pictures. Despite retelling their stories again and again over many years to hundreds of people, the mothers I met still cried their eyes out for their missing daughters when they spoke to me.
The family of Tyaba, who went missing in Delhi at the age of three in 2009, have searched across the country, visiting adoption homes, red light districts and orphanages in all of India’s major cities.
Other families, however, simply don’t have the means to actively look for their missing daughters, like Mamta’s family from Bihar, India’s poorest state, who work in Delhi as laborers. They lost their seven-year-old daughter Bharti in April this year. Living on a construction site where they work, they earn around $4 a day and have to rely on the police, who have a reputation for being inactive and corrupt when handling such cases.
I found that parents were keeping memories of their missing daughters alive through the objects left behind. The mother of Atika, the 10-year-old who went missing in 2008, continues to stitch embroidery for her daughter’s “bistra” – a bedsheet gifted to Muslim brides on their wedding day – hoping that one day she’ll return.
Nothing can surpass the agony and desperation that has become their lives. The haunted looks on their faces speak of pain which is beyond all comprehension. I’m not sure if my pictures will bring these missing daughters back to their parents, but maybe they’ll make people stop and think about the next time they see a girl begging on the side of the street or a young maid working inside a home.
It’s time to stop being silent spectators and take steps in the right direction or else who knows if the nightmare might come knocking on our doors…”
(via hunnaaaa)
adbusters: fashion
