Hardly any action by the “Islamic State” (ISIS) escapes the American media’s radar. Yet no one paid attention when the terrorist organization banned rooftop pigeon keeping. The ancient pastime, in which men raise and fly pigeons on roofs, completed ISIS’s swelling list of “blasphemous” practices – which includes wearing skinny jeans or keeping music on mobile phones.
No-no-no more Bill McKibben, please. He is capitalism lite, loving each climate change bubble of CO2, nitrous oxide and toilets a flushing as part of COP 21. Can he stay home and teach? Do we need parading after parading of the usual suspects – Naomi Klein, Billy-boy, Prince Charles, Mark Ruffalo, Björk, David Bowie, Coldplay, Yoko Ono, Iggy Pop, Colin Firth , Emma Thompson Julia Roberts, Cameron Diaz, Gwyneth Paltrow ou encore Nathalie Portman Sean Penn, Leo Dicaprio.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of wolf reintroduction in Yellowstone National Park. From 66 released originally they’ve increased to over 300 and are no longer endangered. That they thrive here is not surprising, for they are creatures of this raw land in a way that we aren’t. Wolves are fitted to this environment, and so to understand them, we have to know the country that nurtures them.
God moves in a mysterious way,
His wonders to perform;
He plants His footsteps in the sea,
And rides upon the storm.
I have been contemplating why the growing struggle by rural residents against the expanding, industrial wine industry in Sonoma and Napa counties, Northern California, has touched my heart and soul so deeply.
An email from Sister Julie DeRossi of the Starcross Monastic Community to the Board of Supervisors, which follows at the end of this article, provided insight. It stimulated a consideration of the environmental, ethical, spiritual, and agricultural costs of the invasive wine industry that consumes and spoils our diverse rural land at an increasingly rapid rate.
As an American born and partially raised in Africa, and as a person who strongly believes in the inalienable rights of non-human animals to live their lives without being molested by humans, I am left with a sense of outrage following the tragic and senseless killing of Cecil, the lion.
They’ll talk about change, about politics, about reform, about corruption, but they will never talk about war unless they mean something happening far away. Because to admit the existence of the war waged against us is to admit that we are combatants, and if we see that we are not fighting back, then we would have to admit that we have surrendered. That we have already been defeated.
— The Arctic Circle Collective
The candidate I’m voting for acknowledges that forgiving and forgetting U.S. war crimes has not worked. They continue to haunt and hamper us. Former administration officials who lied us into war in Afghanistan and Iraq must be brought to justice. We need to know who falsified the intelligence and why. Remember their catchy slogan: “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud”?
Hundreds of thousands have died and many innocents continue to suffer for this cynical deception.
This article accompanies a 2-hour public lecture I gave at the University of Ottawa on March 27, 2015, entitled “The science and geopolitics of climate change”: VIDEO-LINK-Part-1, VIDEO-LINK-Part-2.
Unless you are a new arrival from another planet, you have probably heard or read at least one of the following claims (among other possibilities):
